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.