Moscow, said Gogol, “doesn’t like to do anything halfway. If the aristocracy
decide to party, they will party until they drop and won’t worry if it costs
more than they have in their pockets.” Replace the 19th-century novelist’s
nobility with today’s nouveaux riches and the spirit of Russia’s capital
seems pretty much the same. There is nothing halfway about the petro-dollar
tycoons with their gas-guzzling Hummers, gilten-crusted nightclubs and
haute-couture girlfriends. So, when it comes to the art biennale that opens
this week, you can’t expect Moscow to behave like some bashful newcomer —
even if it is one. A team of eight international curators — fronted by the
“commissioner” Josef Backshtein — have been hired. Together they stage a
sprawling, multifaceted event. Footnotes on Geopolitics, Markets and
Amnesia is the theme — and if you don’t know what that means, the
catalogue offers no illumination. Gabble about “macro-economic battles” and
“neo-liberal reality” meet all the currently acceptable standards of
artistic impenetrability. Besides, Backshtein has been far too busy battling
hydra-headed problems.
“The amazing thing about this biennale,” as one astonished Muscovite told me,
“is not that they have put it on, but that they thought they could put it on
when they knew that the bureaucracy would be a complete and utter mess.” The
principle exhibition, for instance, was originally going to be staged in the
city’s glitzy central shopping mall TsUM. But at the last moment, for some
reason, the greater part of it was shifted to a construction site on the
outskirts of the city, to the uppermost floors of an unfinished skyscraper
from whose windows the spectator gazes giddily down over sprawling wastes
that will soon become the new Moskva-City business district.
So forget about health and safety hazards. Just have your next vodka and
prepare for the chaos. This is the Challenge Anneka of biennales, as
an exhausted but still enthusiastic British Council posse rather aptly put
it. Apart from the main programme, some 30 special projects are scattered in
sites of varying accessibility throughout the city. Whether suffocating in
the lifts of a half-built skyscraper, stuck in a taxi amid the Moscow
grid-lock, broaching the undeniably grand but not obviously fathomable Metro
system, or trying to match the Cyrillic script of street signs with the
lettering on your map, you will eventually end up as battered as you are
exuberant.
But you are bound to have fun. Brands may have been chosen to lend cultural
cachet (the names of Mathew Barney, Yoko Ono, Jeff Wall or Pipilotti Rist
are all touted like designer labels) and too many stock pieces have been put
on display for the liking of regulars on the biennale circuit.
Still there are plenty of surprises from the lesser known Eastern Europeans.
There are Aidan Salakhova’s enchantingly lyrical living portraits (at the
Ekaterina foundation), and the playful absurdity of Nedko Solakov’s
conceptual performance in which a pair of decorators, one with a white
brush, one with a black, pursue each other perpetually around an enclosed
room (in the Federation Tower). Impudently parked in the river alongside the
Kremlin is a decommissioned military submarine, vibrantly painted by
Alexander Ponomarev.
Art has certainly come into fashion in Russia. “Russian women used only to
like diamonds,” Olga Sviblova, a Moscow gallery director, tells me as she
leans over a table in the Philippe Starck-designed restaurant, where the
waitresses seem to wear little except lip-gloss and diamante dog-collars.
“But a lot of these women were too intelligent just to sit at home in their
jewels.
“In the Eighties, every oligarch who wanted to occupy his wife bought her a
beauty salon. In the Nineties he got her a shop. But now art has replaced
the diamonds. What every 21st-century Russian woman wants is a gallery and a
foundation.”
What does this mean for Russian art? It was almost 30 years ago that
Sotheby’s staged a landmark auction devoted to the contemporary Russian
scene. Fresh from perestroika, it all seemed so fascinating. Attracted by
novelty and cheapness, dealers were snapping up canvases by the dozen. But a
couple of years later the whole thing had crashed. And it was not only
because international markets took a tumble, a gallerist tells me. “After
the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia didn’t seem so fascinating to the
West any more.”
Will this boom-and-bust pattern repeat? Russians are certainly a heavy
presence in the art market. Oligarchs can be found slogging it out in the
sale rooms when other bidders have lost their puff. Only last month
Sotheby’s had its second auction devoted entirely to contemporary Russian
art. Eighty per cent of the lots sold. And, whereas in 1988 it was Western
collectors who were buying, this time they were mostly Russians.
In the Eighties art was just a convenient way to transfer roubles to dollars,
a gallerist tells me, but now there are 20 or so serious collectors in
Russia. And they are not just looking at foreign names.
“On the production line Russian art still comes last,” says Len Blavatnik,
the Russian-born American collector who has popped back to Moscow to look at
the biennale. “But it will catch up. And the quality of the exhibits has
definitely gone up since the first Moscow Biennale two years ago.”
“Russian art is very important to us Russians,” says Igor Markin, a
flamboyant businessman who made his fortune from double-glazing and is about
to open his collection to the public. It will be the first private museum to
open in Moscow. “I can’t really speak for the quality of the work,” he tells
me. “But I can tell you about the price. I can tell you that the price of
some of my artists went up by five times last year.”
Price is important, as the biennale director, Backshtein, knows. “A biennale
is not for profit,” he says, “but soon we have the Moscow art fair, and they
are like two wings of the same bird.”
Still, it’s hard not to feel that money plays far too powerful a role. The
market calls the shots and the artists respond by following financially
remunerative international fashions. Instead of speaking in their own voice
Russian artists seem to be producing copies of the sort of fashionable works
that everybody else wants. Andrei Bartenev, about the best-known Russian
artist still working in the country, contributed an appealing but hardly
challenging sound installation to the biennale.
Where is the distinctive voice? It is all very well to play about with the
old Soviet symbols, to put the hammer and sickle in the hands of Mickey
Mouse. But where, in a country in which political opposition is still
suffocated, in which the KGB still thrives, albeit under another name, and
the police still ride roughshod over the rights of ordinary people, is the
voice of the rebel, for instance?
“It’s here,” says a sad-eyed art critic whom I meet standing around in the
slush of this year’s premature thaw. “It’s here like the unofficial art
movements of the Old Soviet were here. There is a small avant garde that
shows its work to each other and has no aesthetic standard imposed on it
from the outside — mainly because it has no market. But you won’t see it in
this biennale. This biennale is there for the tourists.”
Still, many young people do have hopes. In a country of highly traditional
art training, a biennale presents exciting alternatives and, says Viktor, an
art student, “it might lead to the growth of the sort of small galleries
that support young people. There are almost none of those at the moment.”
“I don’t think I’ll regret buying Russian work,” says one pragmatic
collector. “I mean, it’s better to have a picture than a few stock
certficates on your wall.”
But still, the cautious can’t help feeling a little troubled by the party
spirit. Moscow, true to form, is splashing out the cash without first
checking its pockets. The oligarchs can probably afford it. But can the art
scene?
The Moscow biennale until April 1; www.2nd.moscowbiennale.ru/en/ news/
