22/7/07

When all urban, or architectural, space becomes 'ideologised' - that is, consciously made the product and expression of a specific ideology - then everything within it becomes metaphor. Thus at VDNKH today the occupation by small, tawdry, privately-owned shops of the Stalinst pavilions lining its boulevards was metaphor made concrete, and in what is perhaps the crudest and most obvious of ways: the impression of a new, dysfunctional market economy camping out in the ruins of a defunct empire is palpable. Perhaps most remarkable - 'expressive' - of this are two things: the exhibition of the 'economic achievements of the peoples of the Russian Federation' held in the central exhibition hall, which was clearly an attempted revival of the great shows of the past, but which really amounted to a tawdry collection tourist trinkets and a lot of rather self-congratulatory photographs of official committees and receptions; and an exhibition of waxworks, whose real focus of interest was not, as its 'official' publicity claimed, figures of Hitler or Brezhnev, but people with severe congenital defects - parasitic twins, extra eyes, no legs, etc: in other words, it was a collection of sideshow freaks in wax. There was something highly fitting about the fact that this show should be in the central pavilion of the park of economic achievements, surrounded by friezes and statues of workers, collective farm girls and scientists. For both are, in their respective senses, popular forms of art: only the libidinal shift that became expressible with the fall of Communism couldn't be clearer. And indeed what was undeniable was that VDNKH remains as popular a weekend destination for families as it probably was in Soviet times; the crowds were numerous and seemed to throng the shops selling cheap electric goods, the cafes playing their cacophony of tinny music, and even photographed themselves climbing all over the architecture - which remains eminently photographable, not only despite but because of the changes that have taken place. To place wax simulacra of freaks in the centre of this complex somehow makes perfect sense - you now only need to work out why (is it merely a return of the architecture-ideology's repressed?). This tradition of public architecture was always, it seems, popular in the sense of being accessible, immediately comprehensible and applicable (in theory) to all: it was both 'inclusive' and asserted a norm, an ideal. It is, peculiarly, in its festive atmosphere - the atmosphere aimed at at VDNKH - that this norm seems most false, most forced. VDNKH is a place of eternal celebration, although the objects of the celebration have long since disappeared. It is another instance of the aesthetic of the facade: no surprise that Bulatov used it in his work. What is the significance of the literal text in his paintings, which superimposes itself upon the visual one of the ideologised environment? Is it perhaps that the ideology has now become so undermined and weakened t requires 'support' in this textual form? Is it that it has petrified now to pure image (= photograph), whose 'affectlessness' and redundancy requires a caption? These buildings, like certain scenes from a Werner Herzog film, have become materialised dreams:

Heaven smiles, and states and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

What aura, what charge is it that these ruins or fragments have retained - or indeed acquired?
Consider the ideological materialisation (or the materialisation of ideology), the pavilion building and the dream, and the affinities among these.
Note how VDNKH, with its variously themed pavilions representing different branches of industry and different Soviet nationalities provides a kind of ideological model or map of the Soviet Union.

21/7/07

You cannot afford to miss another entry, not merely for reasons of consistency or practice, but because you need to set down certain impressions and thoughts while still fresh in your mind. Which, though? For the whole experience of the journey to Sochi was strangely affectless, an effort, or exercise, of plodding through dead time, of filling - enduring - the period between departure and arrival. The series of discoveries you half expected to make did not manifest themselves; instead there was a recognition, an encounter with the same. The Tseretelis proved merely to be the kind of people you talked about with S., only writ large - or rather, one might say, with a lot of money. and was it precisely then for this that you expended so much time, effort and money - for yet another exercise in contemplating and measuring another nothingness, another void? If so, the time has come to determine whether this contemplation constitutes pure escapism - pure avoidance of what needs to be done - or whether on the contrary it can be put to genuine use. At present you incline very much towards the former opinion (although when have you not?). It does need to be kept in mind, though, that anything you do here is in an important sense without consequence (for you personally that is; in so far as you can always leave, nothing will have an adverse effect on your 'career', job prospects, personal life, etc). And your interest, if such it can be called, in art is impure in so far as it originated in art's conditions of production, in its social determinants, than in the work itself. As you yourself said, the provenance of any artwork, its 'nationality', should in an obvious and most important sense be of no interest. Thus your involvement in the former Soviet Union becomes an extended exercise in 'sociological analysis', in engagement without the commitment and responsibilities - and without the sacrifice (in your case, of certain 'ambitions'). The inevitable outcome of this is, at some point along the way, dishonesty - dishonesty at various levels, but all of it essentially amounting to a pretence of work (let us say, in the Marxist sense) and consequently the pretence of self-realisation, where there is none. It is as if, as you have so often done, you were standing apart from yourself and watching yourself do things, and approving or disapproving (as you arguably are now). This dishonesty you most acutely feel in your articles (the product of that work), but it is surely elsewhere as well - perhaps notably in the state of constant distractedness you have now got so used to that you are ever less aware of it. Your ability to think productively and constructively seems ever more to be a thing of the past: this need not be a permanent state of affairs, but it is undeniable that every day that goes past in this way is one lost for ever. The danger is that this exercise, which was aimed at resisting this process, will actually become another means of its progression, in so far as it might constitute a palliative, or a distraction, from it. Perhaps the best thing to do at this point is to turn your attention outwards rather than inwards: this means that your next entry must be about what you experience here, rather than what you subjectively feel - if time and exhaustion will permit it.

19/7/07

As is so often the case with Russian art, it is precisely the similarities with western art that can be misleading.
Consider Conceptualism in relation to to the avant-garde as an outcome of the latter's manifest failure.
But there is another, sneaking suspicion a westerner feels before Moscow Conceptualism as well: the sense this is the continuation of another, older tradition in Russian art, one that goes back to icon painting: the image as the mere visual prop for contemplation, combined with indifference to its formal and material qualities, of its manner of making. It could be this, I think, that lies behind a certain amount of irritation one can feel towards Russian art: this privileging of the what over the how, this approaching of a visual object as a text.
Could it be this that lies behind the disappointment one feels on discovering that the post-Soviet art of the Left is in fact indistinguishable from its 'apolitical' counterparts? It is only in their content that they differ - or rather, in the position that this content implies.

"... more often than not the western left wing art community, while subjecting capitalist society to criticism, leave the notion of bourgeois consciousness as a vector for the development of society as something that is inviolable.
"[In our memories of the Soviet Union] we often forget that we had a real experience of being in a space that was impossible to privatise. Albeit at times unsightly and uncultivated ... it was nevertheless cleared of the barest possible representation of class or proprietorial priorities."
(Keti Chukhrov)

This reproduces Kagarlitsky's view of Soviet society of being, strictly speaking, classless (though shot through with social inequalities). It insists on the significance and value of the Soviet experience all the way through its existence, rather than discounting anything that happened after, say, 1928. This seems to revive a crucial difference between the eastern and western Left: and connected with it is Chukhrov's point about bourgeois consciousness and culture. In the west it seems to many increasingly meaningless to speak of 'bourgeois' culture, since the culture that was bourgeois is now in a sense everyone's, having infiltrated the common mode of thinking - and what is more seems ever more the product and outcome of a mode of production rather than a specific 'ruling class' (as in a a distinctly identifiable social group).
"The Soviet inheritance as the absence of bourgeois consciousness": its nature thus defined negatively.
The Soviet space lies in this zone of material dereliction (between the intellectual and the 'common person'). Isn't this what Boris Mikhailov's work is about? Isn't here still trying to put himself in a common space with those around him.

18/7/07

The Tretyakov not as you remembered it (but then, why should it be?), and what you found there you still probably see too completely through Berger's account of it - that is, of an art that concerned itself wholly with subject matter, rather than with form or means - which is probably a simplification, or at least an approximation, of the reality. And certainly there are other terms in which it could be understood. What comes across most forcefully is an unrelieved tradition of academic easel painting which, even in its 'non-conformist' form, conforms wholly to the academic canon, including, or perhaps especially, in its strict division into genres: portraits, history paintings, landscapes, religious (= Biblical historical) works, genre painting (which is essentially what the Wanderers' works can be classified as, perhaps by default). The result are a series of works, or painters, reminiscent of the 'official' works of other European countries: Ivanov as a Russian Pre-Raphaelite, Bruillov as a cod history painter, Vereschagin as the tradition's Orientalist - and chronicler of the Russian empire's conquest of Central Asia - Vasnetsov as representing official art, Repin as the figurehead of the semi-official loyal opposition, with his looser brushwork and 'socially committed' themes, Serov and his rather charming soft-focus pieces as a gentle gesture of Impressionism, followed by some truly dreadful limp-wristed Art Nouveau, and concluded finally by Serebriakova, whose self-portrait before her mirror is extremely likeable, but the rest of whose work is of no account. But the rule is a more or less overt sentimentalism, which when it is effective is so with a rather direct, artless charm that sometimes demands a certain suspension of critical faculties. Subtlety, allusiveness, compositional inventiveness, conscious experimentation are all largely absent. This, it must be said, seems to include psychological complexity: Repin's Ivan Grozny and his Son amounts to the most ludicrous historical ham acting (and compare his expression with that of the German soldier in the Stalingrad diorama: this tradition evidently had its consequences and repercussions). There are other examples, all of which turn around the reduction of personality to 'types' (as in Repin's Boyara Morozova), or the use of the most crude and hackneyed symbolism or visual motifs (as in Young Oaks). Indeed it may well be the case that Vereschagin is the most interesting of the lot, with his imperialist Orientalism, which insists on rendering every feature of 'barbaric' Islamic architecture, and his obsession with decapitated Russian soldiers (a fear of castration in the face of the Asiatic 'other'?). That, and his effective rendering of the fierce southern light in these countries.
Rublev, as before, left little or no effect upon you, though you still are not sure whether you saw more than a fraction of his work at the museum.

Later conversations with V.T. and A. Sh. were painful (though each for different reasons) and revealed yourself to yourself in ways you did not like: the conversation with T because you involved yourself in an unnecessary lie (meaning that at some point you fully accept 'his' logic (or rather, the logic you ascribe him) and want to be accepted on 'his' terms) - namely that you had forgotten the name of the road your hotel is in. With Sh. because it became evident in the course of the conversation that he was pretty crudely trying to 'sell' you his art - with forced friendliness, with empty conversational padding; and you, of course, were happy to play along with this, out of, supposedly, 'politeness'. It was only later when you took your time to look carefully, or fairly carefully, at his catalogue that you realised the extent of your mistake: behind the wittiness of some of the work is something unpleasantly ingratiating in its idiocy, even slightly ugly: the 'themes' reveal this most. You need to remember how things get lost in translation in both directions, and signs and symbols that have one meaning here will have another in the west, even though they appear to be identical. There are also some unintentional effects that become less interesting by virtue of being revealed as unintentional. Perhaps Zizek was only too right, and the appeal to human 'warmth', human 'feeling' is to be identified as the most ideological of moves. Contrast this with R. and M., who wait to see what you have to offer rather than expecting or trying to elicit anything from you. Perhaps what defines, or ought to define, the Left is that they are in some sense those who want precisely nothing from you. There may be a parallel to be drawn here with Proust's account of the allegorical figures in Giotto's fresco: the virtues, including Charity, are stern-faced and unsmiling: it is their symbols, what they represent, and not what they themselves are, that determine their meaning. Proust is almost certainly right to identify this as a quality of those virtues, which require a certain self-sufficiency, a certain strength.
But try to remember exactly what it is Sh. said. Note that he at no point really criticised Tsereteli: he relayed other people's criticisms of him. And perhaps he sees himself as having something in common with him as an outsider. But all my questions about the influence exercised by any 'context' Tsereteli has created were answered in the negative, in so far as they were answered at all: he did not find them interesting. What he had to say about Guelman and political consulting was interesting, but only in so far as it told you something you did not already know, and revealed unexpected links between contemporary art and politics.

17/7/07

It is now 10.10pm, and you fear you are too tired to write anything of significance now, since the effect of your stay here has been one of gradual bu cumulative exhaustion: your days are spent walking around the city as the hostel offers no space - or at least no quiet space, away from backpacker idiocies and banalities - in which to relax or think. One, perhaps paradoxical (but why?), effect of the meetings today was to remind you who you are, as it were; or rather what you have become, the common world of intellectual judgement and discussion offering you a definition, as it were, of this -: not a flattering one, but a useful one perhaps, nevertheless. The damage inflicted by your decision, if that is what it could be called, not to pursue an intellectual career, at least a PhD, could hardly be clearer, and the profound holes and gaps in your reading, especially regarding political position and the aesthetics it implies, undoubtedly influence your reception here, which might have been more enthusiastic, but more importantly what you might have done here, which might have been more useful. As it is, by trying to fit all into the Procrustean bed of 'being a writer', you have come away with nothing, or very little, and perhaps deservedly so. It raises the old question of whether to study first before coming here; but time now is so short, your room for manoeuvre ever more limited. In a sense you have allowed money to subsidise time: so that you could consume as cheap and plentiful a commodity that was in fact scarce and precious. There is, of course, no discovery involved in this realisation: you knew it all along. Perhaps the best that could be said of it is that it was a decision against a career decision, against the logic of success - but that is little enough as it is. And there is an obvious sense in which rejecting 'success' - or fearing it - is the most total of capitulations to the 'system'. R. had in many ways more, and better, ideas about the interview than you did: but why should this surprise you, since he knows the situation so much better? And how useful N. would have been here, for the purpose of posing technical questions (the folds indeed are one thing, but how many others might there be?). You have little doubt the interview is likely to work: it is the wider questions its - possible - success leaves unanswered that you will have to face. What can you usefully achieve in a year here, apart from learn Russian and read a few books? How could anything you hope to achieve amount to anything other than a kind of dilettanteism, the inevitable consequence of your initial decision to write? And isn't Russia, after all, in reality another means for you to avoid engagement (since you will always be an outsider here) than to commit to it? Isn't it the case that art is always attendant upon life, always the outcome and expression of it, never the other way round (notice here that your question merely implies the conclusion of turning the life into the artwork, it is the whole way it is proposed that it perpetuates the error)? But isn't it also the case that art requires the dedication, even sacrifice, of life to it, not the other way round? Otherwise you are in danger of trying to make life conform to art, to how you think it ought to be, or rather, to how you think it ought to be in order to be worthy of being written about. Since when did writing demand such stringent criteria for noteworthiness? But they are not stringent, merely normal. You have to make your way towards normality before you can hope to write. And this is because you cannot accept any other fate for yourself than 'normality' (which itself is... ? Precisely the fulfilment of a norm; the norm constituting, not only some narcissistic ego-ideal, but also some minimal demand of existence, of life, that you cannot relinquish (at least, not unless it is at some in the present circumstances unimaginable cost)). It isn't useful, or even interesting, to ask at this point whether it is too late to attain it, whether you have already become someone you are destined to loathe, or at least hold in contempt. You have no choice (because there is no choice, it is not a question of choice; choice does not belong to this domain) but to try.

Note that on the way back to the metro you found that the extremely proficient blues band you had passed several hours before was still playing in the underpass by the Arbat metro station, having attracted an if anything larger, and certainly drunker and more raucous, crowd. This instance of public street music and communal street dancing in which the bar and pub crowds, as well as the local drunks, participated, surprised you: a survival of some kind of common space, inconceivable really in London, where the stratifications within society have been more deeply laid. How much longer is it likely to last?
it seems, judging from the couples you have noticed (and not noticed) on the metro that open expressions of female sexuality are socially acceptable, while male homosexuality is not. 'Discuss'.

16/7/07

Today went better, though not in the sense of getting anything done, but of at least making contacts and setting up meetings; I had expected that everything would get done in the last few days of my stay here and that expectation is turning out to be correct. Tomorrow I have a meeting with R. and then M., and the day after that probably with Mi. and Sh. (for whatever that's worth). What will come of the latter two is hard to say, and it probably isn't worth worrying about. Other than that, though, the day was pretty much wasted (as so many have been up until now); it being a Monday, all museums were closed (except, of course, Zurab), and there was little to do but wander about the city, getting hungry and tired and overspending you budget on food. The metro gives an interesting, and alternative, experience of the city, offering a sort of underground variant of it, all the more memorable as the stations here are consciously designed to convey a sense of place, of a sort. Thus Arbatskaya, for example, has a quite different atmosphere to what lies above it, yet both possess their own reality and both are in a peculiar sense connected - though the underground world changes at a much slower rate to the one above, if it changes at all. Perhaps this is why you find it comforting: below the streets, the built environment bequeathed by the Soviet system remains largely intact. The metro, on its endlessly long, almost dreamlike escalator rides (reminding you of angels ascending the dark tunnel towards the shining light of heaven in that Bosch triptych) allows one to study the faces of the passengers coming the other way fairly carefully. Here, unlike Georgia, it is not so much a case of establishing a new taxonomy as of measuring differences between here and the west. For it appears as if people's features are more pronounced here in comparison with there: high cheekbones are higher, oval faces are more oval, long noses are longer, with the result that they are capable of being both strikingly beautiful and strikingly unbeautiful (and sometimes in some strange, indefinable way, both at once). The fashions - I mean the women's fashions - seem to echo this: more overt, upfront, 'extrovert' than in the west. This is one big change upon eleven years ago, when most people's clothes remained largely Soviet.
This afternoon you visited Novospassky Monastery, saw the cathedral with its much-damaged and somewhat repainted sixteenth century (?) frescoes, and attended part of a service. An atmosphere of tranquility still pervaded, but within the walls of the complex the space felt confined and claustrophobic: one needed fields and woods around it to breathe, which, no doubt, it once had. As usual, you found the atmosphere of obscurantist mysticism repellent, and you left after a short while, though not without noting of the whitewashed walls, with their trees and hollyhocks planted outside, that the monks probably had a very pleasant life there. Note how different the spatial arrangements are to any western church: all is laid out concentrically around the central point of the dome, both the cathedral itself and the monastery walls that enclose it, whereas in a western church the focus of attention is always at an altar at the far end opposite the entrance, and the building presents you with a visual narrative, of sorts, as you approach it: hence the soaring columns and vaults of Gothic. In a Russian cathedral you encircle the point of focus, rather than approach it. In this sense western churches are more theatrical in that they introduce something of the effect of a proscenium arch (columns flanking the altar), while eastern churches, if theatrical at all, are so as theatres in the round and their wall paintings emphasise this, being 'free flowing', covering every available space almost indiscriminately, so that they are evident everywhere you look. The monastery reminded you ultimately of something else as well: the Russian practice, present into Soviet times and even, or especially, today, of building self-enclosed complexes that operate as virtually independent units: a symptom, perhaps, of the tendency for the (political and economic) 'systems' connecting them here to fall apart at short notice. Thus Novospassky and Mosfilm are linked - have, indeed, a surprising amount in common. And consider also what kind of films Tarkovsky made at Mosfilm, with scenes including the island house floating in a shapeless sea (Solaris), the half-ruined complex housing the printing press (Mirror), the Zone (Stalker), and later, of course, after he'd left Russia, the 'crude but effective' shot of the Russian house within the Italian cathedral (Nostalgia). None of this seems coincidental: it comes from an experience of space, and an understanding of the semiotics and symbolism of that space. And note too how the space between these complexes - these 'homesteads' or 'settlements' - with its uneven, arbitrary and shapeless quality, is equally revealing. It expresses something of the social arrangements involved in establishing societies in vast, empty and limitless spaces.

15/7/07

Museum of Modern Art, Petrovka
Suprematism collection: note the homology between the (apparently flying, or at least moving) rods and blocks of Suprematist compositions, and abstract film animation, specifically the visual sequence of the Pearl & Dean advertisement at the cinema. In other words, we are now obliged (in some sense) to look at these 'transcendental' works through the visual filter - or point of reference, or visual imagination - of commercial visual culture, advertising and animation in particular. Does this mean that advertising becomes the 'truth' of these works, perhaps in part by means of the Australian artist who made animated abstract advertisement for the GPO back in the thirties? Or is it rather that advertising is the mere dialectical antithesis of these, itself to be succeeded by some kind of synthesis that will restore the 'transcendental' element? (See Ilya Tchasnik, Composition, 1920s). Malevich's faceless peasants: are you coming round to (at least) some of them? Note unexpected connection here with Dali.

Benjamin, at least, shared his hotel room with only one other person when he wrote his Moscow Diary; I must be sharing mine with at least six. It is both this, the lack of any personal (private) space, and the exhaustion from constant walking, that makes writing difficult - or that, at least, is my excuse. Mathews' exercise was a morning one, preparatory to actual work: yours - have you mentioned this already? - has no such function: it has become a mere end in itself, a duty to be fulfilled before the day passes. In this sense it begins and ends with itself, leading nowhere (but only, that is, since you let it do so). The day, with its predictable frustrations, and its recurring memories of Moscow of eleven years ago where you spent many an unhappy hour wandering around alone, as you are today, and as you will be for the next week or so, ended acceptably enough, and with the encouraging and unexpected news that M. will be in town tomorrow. The hostel was again so crowded - and you found its guests so objectionable - that you decided to take refuge, once again, in a cafe where you are writing this. It is open twenty-four hours a day and the staff seem to work incredibly long hours; as, indeed, it seems many of the service personnel do here, the people working in bars, restaurants and kiosks. The industry here seems to draw on a vast pool of un-unionised and young labour. Indeed youth seems to be much in evidence walking around the city, and you can't tell whether it is the summer or your own thoughts on the few months of your own youth you spent here that has drawn your attention to to this fact. Other, related (but how?) observations include: that people are better dressed (which does not necessarily mean, more successfully), appear better fed (that is, somewhat healthier, and perhaps 'cleaner'), and the number of people carting bags and trolleys of saleable goods - mainly foodstuffs - around the metro has declined dramatically, as has the number of kiosks and small street traders. All this is surely a sign of both rising prosperity - at least in the city - and a greater degree of control of the streets by the authorities, who have obviously at some point forcibly moved a good deal of petty traders off the main thoroughfares and into a few designated areas down certain sidestreets. Thus poverty and hand to mouth livelihoods persist, but their existence has been repressed as best the city authorities can manage (or get away with). This particular area of Moscow, just east of Pushkinskaya, seems particularly to have been gentrified, and the streets near here with the old, aristocratic houses make Moscow appear far more attractive than you ever remember it looking. Correlative with this process is the fate of certain pieces of Soviet-era architecture. The famous Constructivist Izvestia building on Pushkin Square, a rare survival from the twenties, has an advertising hoarding on its roof now, which lights up at night. It remains the offices of the paper, now a pro-business financial daily (apparently). Ten years ago you remembered thinking that Muscovites were mocked by their revolutionary monuments (notably the 'caryatids' in Ploschad' Revolutsii metro). Today it is the monuments that are mocked. Their 'ideological' significance has wholly evaporated; but they have yet to acquire a 'historical' one (in so far as 'history' isn't mere ideology itself). This exposes them, and makes them appear vulnerable and frail.