Innovation and сonservation

Text: Sergey Khachaturov
Photo: Alan Vouba

The deceptive cuteness of the toy world conceals genuine passion and drive of the Primorsky Territory underground art, presented in the Rebels Territory exhibition

The 11th exhibition of the finalists of the Innovation contest, the all-Russian contemporary visual artists competition, opened recently at the National Center for Contemporary Arts in Moscow. In my particular case, the event is especially interesting to review, since I can resort to double optics: that of a casual observer and that of an insider. In fact, being a member of the Expert Board of the competition, I took part in the first stage of the nominees’ selection, the online voting. However, I was not responsible for the final shortlist, as I stepped down from the Expert Board during the discussion, due to an ideological disagreement with the Organizing Committee.

The resulting insider/outsider position has its privileges. You note all the highs and lows of the project clearly and in more detail. At the same time, corporate loyalty does not limit your critical stance.

To the subject at hand. The prize has now seen its eleventh edition and is awarded in five nominations: Work of Visual Art, Curatorial Project, Art Theory and Criticism, New Generation, and Regional Project. One must admit that, after more than ten years, even the titles of the nominations need some corrections. Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, it seems anachronistic to name the main nomination Work of Visual Art.

Two years ago, there was a huge exhibition entitled Art or Sound at Fondazione Prada in Venice. It was curated by the legendary Germano Celant, who had initiated the Arte Povera movement back in the day.

The majority of exhibits in Art or Sound were created by key representatives of the sound art movement, which by definition breaks the genre and media barriers within traditional arts, fusing together music and visual culture, performative practices and scholarly research. Often, works by Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller, and Susan Philipsz cannot be seen at all – they belong to the realm of intellectual perception. They are sound sculptures. Meanwhile, in 2010 Susan Philipsz received the Turner Prize, the main British award in contemporary art, for her sound sculptures. So the notion of ‘work of visual art’ by its very definition dulls the landscape of the contemporary art process by excluding from it powerful trends and methods of communication with the world. It seems symbolic that there is no winner in this nomination this year.

The Regional Project nomination raises questions of aesthetic and ethical nature alike. A few years ago, Arseniy Sergeyev, curator from Yekaterinburg and member of the Expert Board, suggested terminating the Regional Project nomination. He explained the reasons as follows: “It is disgraceful and puts shame on the entire art community, especially the more numerous and irresponsible Moscow part of it.” What did he mean? Perhaps, he meant that today it would be unethical to intentionally divide art into arbitrary sectors such as metropolitan and provincial. What would this divide lead us to? To the acknowledgment of the fact that the capital city is the reference point and the province is inferior by definition?

Otherwise, if the objective is to take into consideration the whole diversity of tendencies across the territory of Russia, perhaps, special nominations should be introduced for collective research projects or international festivals. This year, thanks to similar logic, a huge program entitled Observations of the Open Space, which brought together many participants from different towns and countries, made it to the finals in the Regional Project nomination. It was a three-week artistic research expedition to the Divnogorye Reserve, organized by Yana Malinovskaya and Mikhail Lylov. The expedition was aimed at studying the ‘collective memory’ of museums and natural territory. Other nominees in this category aren’t attempting to ride the regional status horse either, but rather explore the possibilities for collaboration within the framework of a large-scale festival. The 13th St. Petersburg festival Contemporary Art in the Traditional Museum curated by Elena Kolovskaya, the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennale of Contemporary Art curated by Alisa Prudnikova, and High Hopes Museum exhibition organized by Alisa Savitskaya and Vladislav Efimov at the Arsenal in Nizhny Novgorod are all projects of this kind. Perhaps, there is just one project with a specifically regional character – Rebels Territory, covering contemporary art of the Russian Far East from the underground of the 1960s–1980s to the present. Still, judging by the presentation of the project, it focuses on research rather than on establishing ill-interpreted independence and isolationism.

The Curatorial Project nomination is less controversial. There are five finalists, including Metageography, a remarkable investigation into a popular subject curated by Kirill Svetlyakov and Nikolai Smirnov at the State Tretyakov Gallery. Why do I set this one out? Because here, in contrast to other projects, the authors had to almost literally fight for the audience. Metageography was on display next to the exhibition of Valentin Serov, which broke all possible records in visitor numbers. In historical perspective, the project by Svetlyakov and Smirnov proved to be a decent counterpart for Serov. It is fitting and fair that works by very young curators made it to the shortlist as well: The Caucasus Pavilion (an entertaining anthropology of the Caucasus as a part of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art) and The Center Red, an artist-run contemporary art space at the Red October factory. These projects raise hopes about the future of curatorship.

The Art Theory and Criticism nomination also seems problematic to me: each work seems to be marching to a different drummer. You can’t put in the same category the media blog of the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Gleb Ershov’s fundamental research on the artist Pavel Filonov, Olga Shishko’s catalogue of Projections of the Avant-Garde exhibition, Alexander Shaburov’s original book project dedicated to B.U.Kashkin, a ‘punk harlequin’ from the Urals, and Viktor Misiano’s fundamental three-volume anthology The Impossible Community, which might not always be interesting to readers not involved in curatorial practice. It is evident that currently the Innovation Prize needs a more versatile toolkit to work with the contemporary art life.

Perhaps, to avoid multiplying entities and extending the list of nominations and formulas, a more radical approach would make sense. For instance, the New Generation nomination could work as a grant fund rather than a single-winner prize, so that all finalists would receive parts of the sum allotted to this category. This might also serve well toward building a healthier environment for the competition and help leave behind such relics of the past as jealousy and intrigues within the art community.

I suppose that the undisputed winner of this year’s Innovation is Boris Orlov, a living classic of the USSR underground art and the laureate in the non-competitive nomination For the Creative Contribution to the Development of Contemporary Art. In the other non-competitive nomination, For the Support of Russian Contemporary Art, the award goes to Leonid Mikhelson, founder and president of V-A-C Foundation (Victoria – The Art of Being Contemporary).

3 May 2016

Mikhail Muginshtein: Opera is a passionate lady

Opera is like a women. Full of life, restive, she always has to be accompanied by her counterpart, the stage play. This is the opinion of the musicologist, opera historian, critic, and and Merited Worker of Arts of Russia Mikhail Muginshtein. In April he presented the third volume of the encyclopedia “World opera Chronicles”, which was published with the support of the cultural charity fund U-Art.

15 December 2015

CELLO. 3−DIMENSION

The VII Vivacello festival, organised by Boris Andrianov and the U-Art foundation, according to long standing tradition has brilliantly revealed the potential of this noble instrument to communicate in different areas of the artistic world

26 April 2015

The X Ceremony of Awarding the Winners of the INNOVATION, All-Russian Competition. Moscow. Gostiny Dvor, 2015

AN ANNIVERSARY AWARD IN THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS IS GRANTED IN MOSCOW The X ceremony of awarding the prize of the State Centre for Contemporary Arts Innovation took place in Gostiny Dvor. The environment in which winners were awarded became a work of art itself.

12 March 2015

Anniversary exhibition of Valentin Serov

An exhibition dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Valentin Serov opened in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. More than two hundred and fifty paintings, graphics and sculptures selected for the exhibit named “Serov, other than a portrait painter”, make the audience take a fresh look at the artist’s creative development. The exhibition is hosted under the

6 March 2015

Anniversary exhibition of Valentin Serov

An exhibition dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the birth of Valentin Serov opened in the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg. More than two hundred and fifty paintings, graphics and sculptures selected for the exhibit named “Serov, other than a portrait painter”, make the audience take a fresh look at the artist’s creative development. The exhibition is hosted under the auspices of UNIDENT group of companies and “U-Art: You and Art” fund.