that time “times” from the future. In the sixties, the astronomer Alexander Kozyrev, working at the Pulkovo Observatory, elaborated a new theory of time in which he reevaluated the linear nature of time, the concept of entropy, and chains of cause-and-effect. The new revision of utopia in art that is taking place before our very eyes would have been impossible without the experience of the twenties and sixties. Ilya Kabakov has graphically described the difference between the two decades as that between “rising” and “falling” hopes.
(10) After the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982 (he had ruled the country since 1964), state funerals almost became the main news event in the USSR. In 1984 his successor Yuri Andropov died after serving for almost two years as the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. He was followed by Konstantin Chernenko, who was in power for little over a year. Retrospectively, this series of funerals can be imagined as rehearsals for the death of the Soviet empire. (11) That is, if we accept Boris Groys’s argument, in The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton Univ. Press 1992), that Socialist Realism was in a way a continuation of modernism. (12) Ilya Kabakov, The Sixties and Seventies: Notes on Unofficial Life in Moscow (in Russian). Wiener Slawistescher Almanach, Sonderband 47, translated by Thomas Campbell, Vienna, 1999, p. 227
The sixties were a movement toward chaos. This involves a rather faint recollection of rising currents, of rising vectors of being, but it is a movement of dying, of collapse. In contrast, the twenties were a movement toward new worlds. It was a purified movement: it is not for nothing that the new tendencies— Suprematism, Constructivism—were ascetic movements, lean and stripped-down to the essential. They cast aside all that was superfluous and revealed the essence, certain perennial architectonic structures (12).
Dr. Olesya Turkina is a critic, curator of numerous exhibitions, including the Russian Pavilion at the 48th Venice Biennial (1999) and Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Contemporary Art in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg. She has written articles for the Moscow Art Journal, Paradoxa (London), Cultural Studies, Kabinet (St.Petersurg), Siksi (Nordic Art Review) and numerous catalogues (Europe, Kunst. Hannover, 1991; Manifesta 2, 1998; After the Wall, Stockholm, 1999; Manifesta 3, 2000, Berlin; Moskau. Kunst. 1950-2000, Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2003). She is also the St. Petersburg correspondent for Flash Art International. Since 2003 she edits an online journal on Contemporary Russian Art http://www.newsletter.net.ru. In 2006 she was awarded the first National Innovation Prize in contemporary art theory and criticism for 2005. Recently she contributed as one of 10 curators to the publication ICE CREAM. Contemporary Art in Culture. 10 curators. 100 contemporary artists. 10 source artist, Phaidon Press Limited, 2007. She teaches contemporary art at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University. She has been a Member of the Russian Space Federation since 1999. For several years she has been working on the films series The Chain of Flowers in collaboration with The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles).
In their installation An Alternative History of Art, presented this fall at the newly opened Garage Contemporary Cultural Centre in Moscow, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov exhibited the story of three generations of fictitious artists—Charles Rosenthal, Ilya Kabakov, and Igor Spivak, inhabitants of utopia. Rosenthal allegedly studied with Malevich in Vitebsk, but he was unable to give up realism and immigrated to Paris, where he attempted to unite two mutually exclusive tendencies, abstraction and figurative art. He lived and worked there until 1933 (the year of Kabakov’s birth), when he tragically died after being hit by car. Ilya Kabakov (that is, the show’s fictional version of the artist) saw the works of Rosenthal, whom he considers his teacher and whose work is poised between two poles, abstraction and realism as well. Igor Spivak supposedly lives in Kiev; his works, which are part of the installation, were produced in the nineties. An Alternative History of Art, an enormous installation housed in a constructivist building designed in the twenties by Konstantin Melnikov, asks the fundamental question—the question of utopia’s fate. To answer the question, the Kabakovs created three fictitious artists who produced an endless series of works. Via their efforts we might try to rewrite the history of art the same way that the literary text rewrites life.
RES MAY 2009
NOTES (1) The Russian avant-garde focused precisely on the reject of figurativism and the production of “nonfigurative” art, not abstraction. (2) The rejection of previous art forms, the industrialization of the artistic gesture, and the transition from individualism to collectivism, from easel painting to a merging of art and production, was incarnated in Productionism, one of the major tendencies of the 1920s. (3) The division between official and unofficial art emerged after the Khrushchev Thaw, when the easing of the political climate made the partial emergence of alternative culture possible. “Official” art followed the doctrine of Socialist Realism that was declared in 1932 and continued to exist until Perestroika. “Unofficial” art refused to recognize the primacy of the only politically permitted style. (4) The discussion of the balance between the global and the local has not let up since the nineties. It began with the notion of the glocal, proposed by Klaus Biesenbach, and has continued up to the last Documenta, which exhibited the “migration of forms” in local modernisms. (5) Yevgeny Kovtun, a leading specialist on the Russian avant-garde, coined this phrase in reference to the repression of the avant-garde during the Stalinist period. (6) This is the title of Shklovsky’s landmark 1917 essay. On formalism in contemporary Russian art, see the catalogue Modus R. Russian Formalism Today. 20 Russian Artists. Newton Building, Miami Design District , 04-12 December 2006, in conjunction with Art Basel Miami Beach. WAM Publishing House. (7) Consider, for example, a recent exhibition at the MUMOK in Vienna, Bad Painting Good Art. (8) This situation was inverted by the Sots Arts movement, in particular by its founders Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who began in the seventies to represent this narrative as a device. (9) In 1921, Rodchenko painted three monochromatic canvases, Pure Red, Pure Yellow, and Pure Blue, and declared, “It is all over. The primary colors. Every surface is a surface and there should be no images.”
Alyona Kirtsova, Landscape #23 from the series Color Guide, 2006 Oil on canvas, 23.6 x 31.5 in / 60 x 80 cm Courtesy the artist
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