Art Institutions in Russia
Art Institutions in Russia
A conflict-free hypermarket
The art world in Russia is modernizing itself according to the capitalist model, while leaving the old power structures intact. Good art is especially art that sells well. So far so good, but the question is, for how long? It is customary to explain the social turmoil in Russia over the past twenty years as follows: Defeated in the Cold War by the Western democracies, Soviet communism rejected totalitarian utopia and swore allegiance to democratic values and the market economy. However, the past decade (the Putin years) has been marked by a curtailment of democratic reforms, a return to authoritarianism, and nostalgia for erstwhile imperial greatness.Yet another view of things is possible. The post-communist transformations were a strategic choice on the part of the Soviet ruling class, which implemented a new stage of modernization – not, moreover, by retreating from communist ideology but by embracing its canons. The rejection of communism in favour of capitalism was a direct realization of dialectical materialism, to wit: the transformation of matter (including the material of social life) is effected via the negation of the negation, in which thesis generates its antithesis [read: socialism generates capitalism – ed.].[1]From this viewpoint, setting course (after the construction of so-called developed socialism) to build a hypermodern form of capitalism by switching the socioeconomic system literally overnight would appear incomparably more consistent than the revisionist notions of ‘market socialism’ or ‘socialism with a human face’ that were once all the rage amongst Western leftists. This version of events is borne out by the fact that the three phases of capitalist development that Russia has gone through during these years resemble a staged reprisal of the three phases of constructing socialism. The chaos of the nineties, which was so essential for the successful implementation of the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’, recalls the chaos of the twenties, which was necessary in order to successfully nationalize private property and make it the common property of the new society. The Putin stabilization of the noughties harkens back to the collectivization and industrialization implemented by Stalin (who in his lifetime was called the ‘father of the peoples’, but is now described in neoliberal terms as an ‘effective manager’). Finally, President Medvedev’s current campaign to modernize the country has not been dubbed a ‘thaw’ for nothing, insofar as it paraphrases the de-Stalinization and liberalization of the fifties and sixties. However, as one of the pillars of Marxism-Leninism famously put it, history repeats itself, ‘the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’.By virtue of the fact that the current social dynamic in Russia is evolving according to the law of the negation of the negation, it is natural that Russian capitalism has engaged in the realization of its most radical, near-farcical variety. Whereas in Soviet times it was said that ‘hard cash calls the shots in the world of capital’, nowadays every effort is made to make this metaphor come true.
Culture Must Pay Its Own Way
In the realm of culture, the main obstacle on the road to realizing the law of dialectics was the Soviet intelligentsia with its claims to the status of an all-knowing expert and its penchant for state paternalism. That is why a new thinking class was expeditiously assembled: intellectuals and scholars were to be replaced by managers, dealers, impresarios, producers, etc. It was declared that culture must pay its own way.Unlike in Eastern Europe, the transformations that took place in Russian contemporary art thus did not in any way involve modernizing the developed and well-equipped infrastructure that had been established in Soviet times, such as research and educational institutions, academic museums and exhibition centres. The desire of the Russian artistic community to enter hypermodernity was incarnated in the creation of completely new structures, and as befits the ‘correct’ capitalism the country has been building, these structures are market-oriented. The two leading exhibition venues in Moscow – the Central House of the Artist and the Manege Central Exhibition Hall – have thus been transformed into trade fair centres. The only thing that recalls their former artistic and cultural function is the fact that, along with pharmaceuticals conventions, auto shows, honey fairs, and fur markets, each of these venues also holds a contemporary art fair once a year.That this corresponds to the social climate is borne out by the fact that both times the so-called Public Chamber (a body created by Putin to represent civil society) has been formed, it was not curators, artists, museum directors or art historians who were recruited to speak for the art world, but gallery owners Aidan Salakhova and Marat Guelman. Moreover, the trend toward the dismantling of public space has not been disturbed by the ‘strengthening of the power vertical’ declared by Putin. As the experts assure us, high-level Russian bureaucrats and politicians – from ministers and governors to Federation Council senators and State Duma deputies – in fact buy their state appointments and political offices from the presidential administration. A politician or bureaucrat is required to organize a pool of investors willing to finance his appointment or ‘election’ in return for his steering state financial flows into the right hands in the future. We might call this systemic corruption, but we also might see it as a market-based optimization of the way the Soviet nomenklatura once functioned.The same goes for the realm of cultural policy. Russian culture bureaucrats are hardly busy with the development of culturally innovative programs and the maintenance of fixed infrastructure. Rather, they are engaged as producers of their own large-scale, primarily commercial projects. Public funds are invested in blockbusters, festivals, fairs, prizes, and so forth. Moreover, each of these projects generates the creation of legal entities in which public funds are mixed with private capital, which renders all these undertakings utterly non-transparent and not amenable to public oversight. And because since Adorno’s time it has been an axiom that culture under capitalism takes on the guise of the culture industry, the bureaucrats-cum-businessmen have been generously financing production of the national product. For, as Putin once said, ‘Cultural expansion is the only form of expansion available to Russia.’By identifying cultural policy with business strategy, this cultural equivalent of Gazprom has introduced the logic of commerce into the realm of decision-making on cultural content. Olga Sviblova, the curator of the Russian Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, thus saw it as her task to ‘raise the prices of the artists she invited to participate in the pavilion’. Moreover, a spot in the pavilion could be bought with a sponsorship donation. That was precisely how debut artist Julia Milner – who had recently given up modelling and was now the life companion of a generous patron of beauty – wound up in the biennale.
Crisscrossing Interests
The modernization campaign of the past few years has not provided a counterpoint to this situation. Our modernizing president’s favourite plaything – the planned science and technology park in the Moscow suburb of Skolkovo – is controlled by the well-known oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. As it turns out, it is Vekselberg who owns all the land on which the scientific centre is being built, properties that shot up in value as soon as billions were invested in this project. In other words, ‘modernization’ is simply a commercial development project.A whole series of private initiatives that have recently made a name for themselves – initiatives that are sometimes impressively ambitious – might be seen as Skolkovo’s analogues in the art world. However, they are also subject to the crisscrossing of business and nomenklatura interests typical of the corporate state. Thus, the mandate to run the exhibitions in the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale until 2015 was just recently conferred on the private Stella Art Foundation. Founded in 2003 as a commercial gallery by Stella Kesaeva, the wife of a major oligarch, it was refashioned as a foundation. So whereas Stella Art Gallery was previously the commercial representative of Moscow conceptualist Andrei Monastyrsky, now the Stella Art Foundation will present him in the Giardini.The Russian state thus likes private initiatives that are willing to shoulder the heavy burdens it once bore itself. Failing that, the state itself will foist these initiatives on private business. For example, it is believed that the idea that Dasha Zhukova, oligarch Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend, should create the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture was strongly suggested to the couple by the presidential administration, just as it was the president’s team that had foisted on Abramovich himself the governorship of the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug, a loss-making transpolar region. In both cases, we see the overall political logic at work: instead of creating public institutions and social programs, the powers that be use their authority to persuade oligarchs (the same people they had appointed billionaires during the previous decade) to engage in patronage and social responsibility.Liberal critics both inside and outside Russia criticize it for the authoritarian suppression of democracy. However, the democratic process in Russia bogged down not because (or rather, not only because) the powers that be did not want it, but also because people did not demand democracy. This was in great part due to the fact that when, in the name of democratic values, socialism was rejected and a return to capitalism declared, democracy was identified with private ownership of the means of production and personal rights – that is, by opposing antithesis to thesis, Russians confused democracy with liberal values. The idea of popular rule or people power (narodovlastie) – which, strictly speaking, is what democracy is – did not jibe with the new project for society because it had undergirded the socialist principles that the country had just decided to reject.In keeping with this society-wide conceptual error, the art milieu began to identify democracy with the market-based art system. It came to imagine that it could contribute to society’s modernization by creating a high-quality product and to see its mission as serving the ruling class. There is nothing contradictory in this stance insofar as a high-quality product is exactly what the ruling class for its part demands from artists. As Putin has said, ‘Our only ideology is the growth of our product’s competitive edge.’However, unlike enlightenment, which can be imposed by force, you cannot force someone to buy your product. That is why the art world’s corporate task has come to be defined as the transformation of art into an object of desire. Hence, the notions that the art system’s quantitative growth is the same thing as its qualitative maturity, that PR techniques are the same thing as artistic policy, and that an artist’s prices and media fame are the same thing as his competence and credibility have become indisputable truths.Just as indisputable is the corporate ban on public criticism of the institution of contemporary art, since this is viewed as individualistic self-promotion that is detrimental to the corporate task of generating an auspicious image for contemporary art and the art world. ‘Don’t curse the First Moscow Biennale! Otherwise, there won’t be a second!’ was how Mikhail Shvydkoi, Russia’s chief culture bureaucrat, aware of the fact that his brainchild had not been a success, blackmailed the art public at a press conference in 2005. In a programmatic article he entitled ‘Everyone Shut Up!’ a Moscow critic demanded that his colleagues refrain from criticism of the Second Moscow Biennale, which proved even more hideous than the first. He added, ‘We’re not going to chew out the biennale. We’re going to be glad that we have one.’The most curious thing is that this PR image of a conflict-free art community (just like the glamorized product it puts out) is meant not only for the country’s ruling class, but also for export, for the international scene – that is, for the West. For this is precisely how the Western art world is seen from Moscow, by people who know the Western art world only through a superficial view of the exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, Frieze or the Turner Prize. And it was this notion that was affirmed by the Third Moscow Biennale (programmatically entitled Against Exclusion), which the public enthusiastically accepted this time round.The rare specimens of political art that emerge in the epicentre of ‘Putin’s triumph’ are therefore regarded on the local scene as fulfilling a certain Western demand for a negative image of Russia. Consequently, like the art of the Soviet era, political art is the product of ideological demand, unlike genuinely democratic art, which is produced for the market. Hence, fidelity to the West’s democratic values dictates that faultfinding artists should be ousted from the art scene. For example, the political art group Chto Delat, bereft of support and opportunities to work in Russia, now operates primarily in the West. And so, however paradoxical it might sound, nonconformist artists are driven out of Russia and sent to the West in the name of true Western values.How justifiable is it, however, to view this art system that has established itself over the past twenty, post-Soviet years as something outrageous and excessive? Personal observations confirm that many actors from the Western art system feel quite natural in Russia: they accept the local norms, things that would be regarded in the West as corruption, and do this with an ease that testifies to the degree to which they find outmoded Western conventions burdensome. It would appear that Russia, which historically has adhered irrevocably to the ‘catch-up modernization’ model, has realized slightly belatedly the project of hypermodernity, but in a more radical and purer form.There is only one consideration that should darken the optimism that now reigns in how the state of affairs in today’s Russia is perceived. If the observation is correct that Russia, as it now builds a developed capitalist system, is reprising the stages of its preceding construction of socialism, and that it has already reached the ‘thaw’ stage, then it is hard not to recall that, after the Khrushchevian thaw, socialism succumbed to the ‘stagnation’ of the Brezhnev period. And then, in the fifth stage of its evolution, it embarked on perestroika and suffered total collapse. Viktor Misiano is an art critic and curator, Moscow
Viktor Misiano