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.