Russia Miami 2007: It Could Have Been a Flying Bicycle.
For the second time in two years, an exhibition attempted to attract the art world’s attention to contemporary Russian art as its representatives flocked to Art Basel Miami Beach. Initiated and organized by the company RI Group and Nic Iljine, director of corporate development for Europe and the Middle East at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Russia Miami 2007 was curated by Julie Sylvester. Hopes were high for a successful show – as an associate curator of the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Sylvester had put together monographs of major figures like Louise Bourgeois, Cy Twombly and Willem de Koonig. But she stumbled over the challenge of a group show. Russia Miami 2007 lacked the conceptual glue that would hold the pieces together, or an exposition design that made the show legible as a whole. The noncommercial exhibition would have done well to include an intellectual edge to differentiate it from the 24 fairs clamoring for viewers’ attentions, but it came of more like a fair stand expanded to fill an entire building.
The strength of the Russian show was that – like any good fair stand – it had fine works that stood on their own merits. Perhaps the strongest impression was made by an installation by Sergei Bugayev, better known by his pseudonym, Afrika. He outfitted a rustic sleigh with a mast upholstered in rabbit fur, and hung it with embroidered Soviet propaganda flags. On a wall behind this “ship†hung Afrika’s painting from the early 90s, Antilissitsky, which took El Lissitsky’s agitprop Civil War poster “Strike the whites with a red wedge†and switched both colors to black. Afrika’s installation was a good fit for a show introducing Russian culture to a new audience: a mishmash of Russian clichés – from avant-garde aesthetics to communist propaganda to souvenir-style folk art –with an ambivalent overlay of images and colors that made serious chapters of Russian history seem quixotic.
While far from a household name in Miami, Afrika is prominent figure in the Russian art world, as are most of the artists selected for the show. Painting dominates. There is a melancholy underwater painting by the duo of Alexander Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubossarsky, whose works are among the most expensive on the Russian contemporary market; a lush and surreal work by the late but loved primitivist Oleg Golosy; and the instantly recognizable Natalya Struchkova, a virtuoso who simulates pixels with acrylic paints to create the illusion of a digital print. Aidan, a single-named artist and dealer and a darling of Moscow’s jet set, offered the multimedia installation Tatyana, where videos of a woman applying and removing make-up are projected on prints of her bare face. Sergei Bratkov, a Kharkov-born, Moscow-based photographer in demand on the international exhibition circuit, was represented by a new series of photographs that are brighter and glossier and brighter than his usual grim narratives, as well as a 2005 film called Spa, an amusing stylization of Soviet popular science films that documented tourists at a bare-bones Black Sea resort bathing in silvery mud.
Sylvester also offered a few surprises that tickled the curiosity even of the jaded Moscow critics who had been flown in for the opening. Nikolai Bakharev, an amateur photographer from the Siberian mining town of Novokuznetsk, has spent years shooting half-dressed loving couples of all ages and sizes lounging in parks. The collage artist Gennady Ustryugov, who reportedly lives on the floor of Afrika’s St. Petersburg studio, glues newspaper clippings and supermarket packaging on discarded cardboard. His chaotic works look rather awkward framed; Sylvester said this exhibition marked the first time they had been hung on a wall rather than left in stacks on the studio floor. Also on view were two obscure paintings by Timur Novikov, the guru of the Leningrad underground better known for his homemade flags.
Such a surprising selection of appealing works could well have yielded a compelling exhibition. But the artists and their works were done a disservice by the curator and the organizers. One major problem is the amateurish installation. Everything is agonizingly linear and symmetrical. The Collins Building – the site of the exhibition – is a bright and airy space with floor-to-ceiling windows, like the furniture stores that surround it in Miami’s Design District. This set-up may be perfect for a boutique or a home-furnishings showroom, but it is far from ideal for an art exhibition. The space behind the temporary walls in the middle of the floor lacks proper lighting, and the paintings hung there blanch in natural daylight. Aidan’s installation is hidden next to the bathroom, and a book that Pyotr Denisenko scribbled over a la Kippenberg, tucked in a horizontal glass case in a corner, is easy to miss.
Perhaps a skillful exhibition designer could have not only rectified these wrongs, but also make the show read as a coherent statement. But even that is doubtful, given the lack of a curatorial concept or other uniting factor. Each piece seems tactile: the abundance of skin and flesh in photographs and videos appeals to the sense of touch, while the painters are all highly concerned with the brush’s caress of the canvas, from Dmitry Gutov’s palimpsests to Vasily Tsagolov’s feathery mounds of paint. It is all very sensual art. But this likeness is probably a result of the curator’s personal tastes rather than a conceptual decision.
Speaking of matters of taste, it would be worth mentioning the advertising banner strung across the facade of the Collins Building, with the name of the exhibition writ across a naked woman reclining on a park bench. Yes, it is a photograph by Bratkov, and not a bad one, but it communicates to visitors that a sexually available woman is just as stereotypical an image of Russia as the wooden bears of Leonid Sokov, pictured on other advertising material, or the decorative khokhloma patterns from souvenir wooden flatware that appear in the catalogue’s frontispiece in a venomously pink rendition by the hip designer Denis Simachev. In light of the sex industry’s exploitation, even slavery, of Russian women, the banner can easily be construed as offensive, not to mention the cheapest way imaginable to attract viewers.
It is tempting to compare “Russia Miami 2007†with its predecessor, Modus-R. Note that the title was not “Russia Miami 2006,†but an expression of the well-considered concept of curators Olesya Turkina and Evgenia Kikodze. The hi-tech neologism dovetailed with the curators’ exclusion of painting in favor of new media, their preference of modestly sized, often drab objects over lush painting. And the subtitle, “Russian Formalism Today†was meant to appeal to Western art experts’ university knowledge of Russia’s contribution to modernist thought, and in doing so define the justification for the existence of full-fledged contemporary art in Russia now. “Modus-R†gave the impression of cutting-edge Russian art as cold and intellectual, with ties to a major tradition. A significant boon was the participation of Russia’s best exhibition designer, Sergei Mironenko, who transformed the second floor of the Newton Building (across the street from the Collins) into a dynamic, geometric space.
One could argue that “Modus-R,†with its historic underpinning and accompanying academic essays, was too high-concept for a week-long exhibition in sunny Miami or, as Sylvester said, too narrowly specialized to introduce Russian art to a new audience. But it is precisely a lack of knowledge that leads a public to expect the curator to give a conceptual framework, an idea to hang their perception on. And without a message, a show can easily look like a store.
It is strange that Sylvester, with many essays and monographs behind her, declined to write anything for the catalogue for “Russia Miami 2007.†Instead, she chose to include a short story by the popular writer Viktor Pelevin, “The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII.†As one could probably guess by now, there is no particular link between the story and the exhibition, and the curator even said that she originally selected another story for publication, but was told her choice was too long.
But hindsight shows this tale – a typical piece of Pelevin’s surreal fantasy rendered in bland, trudging prose – offers an apt metaphor for “Russia Miami 2007.†Its protagonist, Shed XII, is a dreamy hutch inclined to metaphysical contemplation; he tells the adjacent garage that he feels more like a bicycle than a shed. An explosion in the rural Russian village where these edifices are located wipes XII (along with 13 and 14) off the face of the earth. But the director of a nearby grocery sees a bicycle cobbled of old boards soar from the ashes – the liberation of Shed XII, reborn from its parts into what it always wanted to be.
Likewise, the works of the artists presented at Russia Miami 2007 could have yielded something as light and uncanny as a flying bicycle. But instead we got a shed.
Brian Droitcour is a writer, translator and expert on Russian art. He recently relocated from Moscow to New York.
The original version of this article appeared in Russian in Artchronika magazine
Alexandra Lerman is ScribeMedia.Org's Arts and Culture editor. She is also a video artist, VJ and the founder of the Ambitious Outsiders Collective.
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