utopia and loneliness

To the Guggenheim's show Russia! this afternoon, by way of a brisk walk down from Morningside Heights and across Central Park, clearing away any residual effects from last night's New Year's Eve indulgence.

The museum was packed, so we decided to take the exhibition in reverse order, starting at the top with the Soviet and post-Soviet era, and winding our way down to the medieval icons with which the show opens. We were glad we did this, as it's the Stalinist and post-Stalinist era pieces here that are on the whole the most interesting. We were also able to track back the show's genealogical impulses, its attempt to explain and justify the Putin-sanctioned present by means of this investigation of 900 years of artistic creation.

Russian art, that is, not Soviet (or even Georgian or whatever...).

For, as my friend Jean Franco noted, what's most remarkable about this show is the way in which it occludes Soviet revolutionary impulses. Socialist Realism is shown as an extension of nineteenth-century Russian Romanticism. The avant-garde (Kandinsky, Chagall) is literally side-lined, placed in side galleries that have more to do with the Guggenheim itself and the history of its collection policies. And, partly as a result of the show's overwhelming concentration on painting (and total exclusion of photography, poster art, architecture, film...), the enthusiasm generated by the Revolution in the late 1910s and 1920s is for all intents and purposes absent.

It's as though there were no utopian dimensions to art, or rather no utopia imaginable outside the tradition of icon painting inaugurated by the medieval Orthodox church. The show wants to criticize Socialist Realism, but implicitly for the most part it constitutes a defence of (Non-Socialist) Realism, leavened only by the vestiges of religious faith.

I don't think Vadim Zakhorov would endorse this disenchanted justification of a non-utopian present, but it's significant that in his installation The History of Russian Art--From the Avant-Garde to the Moscow School of Conceptualists (above, which is also the image with which the show's catalogue ends), the file folder "Russian Avant-Garde: Utopia" is inaccessible, barred by a locked door.

Utopia's place within the archive is noted, but finally irrecuperable.

And so where Viktor Pivovarov's Projects for a Lonely Man were originally a critique of planning and alienation under the Soviet state, now they are equally attuned to the atomization of the post-Soviet free market. But in them inheres some nostalgia for a time when loneliness might have been the object of public concern.

Comments

[Jodi]

Thanks for this analysis of the exhibit. It's a shame, really, because there are ways to allow for the real revolutionary impulses and still do justice to socialist realism. In fact, it seems to me that this is the only way to do justice to socialist realism. So, they could have some comparative overlap with large murals in Mexico and the US as well as depression era art. Even better, to present the rebuilt men and women of socialist realism in the space opened up by Malevich and Lissitsky. And then the ironic reappropriaton of the same imagery in the work (fomr the 70s and 80s?) of the two painters who work together names I can't recall.

[Keith]

Komar and Melamid are the two artist that I believe Jodi is thinking of there. Thanks for this post, I had no idea this exhibit was even taking place.

[Jon]

Via 3 Quarks Daily, here's Jenny Gambrell's "An Affair of State" (from the NYRB), which briefly mentions the rather strange way in which the show treats Komar and Melamid.

[Robin]

Relatedly, a friend of mine, while at Austen-Riggs, the open, psychiatric hosiptal in Stockbridge Massachusetts, was asked to show some Hungarian colleagues of his parents around the area. He took them to the Norman Rockwell museum. They were silent for a long time before someone finally said, "You know, in our country people were once forced to paint this way."

I mention the story because the sort of defence of (non-Socialist) realism-cum-utopianism wasn't quite restricted to the East. Nor was the alienation and isolation associated with it.

Odder is that the sort of non-isolating utopianism--say, of the 1927? first production of Mayakovsky's Bedbug by Meyerhold (with the set design by Malevich)--is all but forgotten these days, as you mention.

[Jon]

Ha! Nice story, Robin.