Letter from the artistic front-2

The decoration of the photobiennale was a retrospective of the American photo star Annie Leibovitz, who honored the vernissage with her presence (right). (Photo: Alexander Sorin )

No, there is no way for a sedate weekly magazine to keep up with the insane pace of a broken artistic life. We have to again turn to the summary-review genre that we tried last summer and compose another “letter from the artistic front.” But we will not “summarize” the entire season, but the shock events of just one month of May. After all, it was in May that the third international month of photography in Moscow “Photobiennale-2000”, which has now reached its apogee, opened simultaneously, the 4th international fair of contemporary art “Art-Moscow-2000”, which lasted a week and has already successfully ended, and the second part exhibition "Art of the 20th Century" at the State Tretyakov Gallery.
The unexpectedly emerging internal plot is that the aforementioned events on the “art front” took place in the same place - a mournfully Soviet-looking building on Krymsky Val, which is divided between the Central House of Artists and the new Tretyakov Gallery. The third floor of the Central House of Artists is temporarily occupied by several main exhibitions of the photobiennale, on the second floor Art Moscow was selling, and across the wall - in another part of the building - there is a Tretyakov exhibition. Why the artistic world has converged like a wedge on Krymsky is understandable - in the absence of, as they now say, “developed infrastructure,” art in Moscow is huddled in small bridgeheads and depends purely on the will and ideas of the people who have occupied these bridgeheads.

For the hundredth time about Olga Lvovna
In fact, the photobiennale, which according to the press dossier consists of 115 exhibitions (there are even more in the vernissage program), takes place not only in the Central House of Artists, but throughout Moscow - in museums, galleries, cultural centers and exhibition halls. But, firstly, most of the so-called exhibitions are small series of photographs by Russian and foreign authors, with which the halls of the Central House of Artists are densely filled. Secondly, this year’s biennale has three themes: “Dedication,” dedicated to the 55th anniversary of the end of World War II (a separate project at the New Manege, already reviewed by Itogi, see # 20, 2000), “ Youth meets the 3rd millennium" and "Russia. 20th century in photographs." The latter two are overrepresented in the Central House of Artists. So, if you want to get an idea of ​​the entire photobiennale and at the same time do not want to wander around the capital, you can limit yourself to a visit to Krymsky Val.

The themes sound Soviet-style and repulsively “serious.” (This was one of the main complaints against the art director of the photobiennale, Olga Sviblova, a complaint that was voiced long before the opening of the festival and scared away many potential participants.) It would seem, what a “Second World War,” what “youth,” what “Russia”?! What is this, official service? An attempt to please Luzhkov? What does art have to do with it? It turned out that it had something to do with it.

“Yes, it may seem that they come up with the topics, but I implement the projects,” Olga Lvovna fumed, and she was right. Because in the selection of exhibits for the most seemingly odious projects, she is still guided by her own artistic and extravagant logic. Well, can Yuri Mikhailovich appreciate the photograph from the exhibition “Dedication” entitled “The severed head of a Japanese soldier killed by napalm, held by the gun turret of a mangled Japanese tank”? And Olga Lvovna is delighted with it and its necrophile author Ralph Morse. “What pictorialism,” she admires a photograph of a village burned by the Germans (“pictorial,” that is, picturesque, photography is a movement at the turn of the century that tried to abandon documentary and clarity of images in favor of softness, vagueness and other qualities of impressionistic painting). “It’s like in the film “The Thin Red Line,” Sviblova reflects, looking at the huge panorama of a column of captured soldiers, filmed by Dmitry Baltermants.

If Sviblova’s youth “meets the 3rd millennium,” it will be together with the famous Frenchman Bernand Faucon and his “The Happiest Day of My Youth” - a project about the essence of photography and at the same time anti-photographic. Tired of fame and prizes, Faucon (who in general was always inclined to artistic provocation) abandoned his own creativity, full of “fatigue of beautiful images.” He travels around the world, giving disposable cameras to teenagers, asking them to take simple pictures, then selecting the best ones and making an exhibition out of them. For naive children - joy, and the sophisticated Faucon thus studies the problems of “artificial / natural”, “professional / amateur”, “expected / unpredictable”. The Central House of Artists has hung 120 small photographs taken at the Gorky Central Park of Culture and Culture, which will travel around the world after the biennale closes.


Portrait of Jessie Norman by Annie Leibovitz

If you need to show "Russia. 20th Century", then, among others, it will be the spectacular exhibition "USSR: 50s - 80s" by Henri Cartier-Bresson, brought from Paris by the legendary Magnum photo agency (the exhibition is open in the Manege). Bresson's witty and keen-sighted narrator is accompanied (on the same floor of the Manege) by familiar works by Russian photographers of the Thaw and Stagnation period, which you also cannot pass by.

I also draw the attention of the photobiennale visitor to the stellar retrospective of Annie Leibovitz, all in the same Manege - artsy and sweet art, intended for the covers of imported glossy magazines and capturing unexpected images of their favorite characters like Schwarzenegger or Navratilova, but super professional. (Leibovitz is equally loved by the president's insulted wife Hillary Clinton and the dour intellectual essayist Susan Sontag.)

I don’t want to over-praise the current photobiennale: it was more intimate than the previous ones, showed little photography as contemporary art, and was left without a catalog, which was stuck in print. But still, the House of Photography pulled out a project that threatened to remain an official bravado and brought it to fruition. I repeat - everything, in essence, depends on the desires of people.

The art of trading art
Other people - from the Expo Park. Exhibition Projects company - are trying to civilize the Moscow art market for the fourth time by organizing the Art Moscow fair. And they do this based on Western standards of contemporary art fairs. “Expopark members” have created a strict expert council for the selection of participating galleries, they are guided by the principle “less is better”, they do not chase any foreign colleague, but focus on several Austro-German galleries, the owners of which are included in the expert council. (Last year, the organizers even decided to cancel the fair, so as not to reduce quality in a market crippled by the August crisis.) As a result, the current “Art Moscow”, without becoming worse, expanded to include one Berlin, one Dagestan, one Vladivostok, one Alma -Ata, one Tbilisi and four Moscow galleries.

The fair has also expanded due to the abundant non-profit (or “parallel”, as the Expopark people say) program, organized for the first time. These are exhibitions of English artists (“Results” were written about in # 19, 2000), German artists (including world stars like Rosemary Trockel and Martin Kippenberger) and Russian artists associated in the late 80s with the so-called Avant-Garde Club (KLAVA ) - one of the first official associations of representatives of “unofficial” art. (That’s why the exhibition, touchingly sloppy, full of internal hints and references to stories known only to the authors, is called “Lovers of KLAVA.”) The parallel program also included a four-day colloquium, held in a glass cube right in the middle of the fair: art was not only traded, but also talked about learned speeches about him. Everything turned out neatly, in a European way, just like at the main international art fairs in Cologne or Basel.

But the fair is still not an exhibition, and it should be reviewed in accounting terms, not art criticism. 132 thousand. That is, net profit for Cologne and Basel is a ridiculous figure, but for Expo Park it is fantastic. The result is more than two times higher than the result of the previous fair. The version already published by almost all the media that a decent amount of sales was greatly contributed by Zurab Tsereteli, who acquired works for his mysterious “Museum of Modern Art” at almost every Russian stand (including the non-profit “Lovers of KLAVA”), is rather encouraging.

However, we will have to talk about Tsereteli in the last - and main - topic of our letter.

A taste of privacy
Preparations for the opening of the second part of the permanent exhibition of the Tretyakov Gallery were accompanied by serious battles, secret and overt. After all, they opened “50s - 80s,” that is, a section made up of works by authors, most of them living and well. (But the main commandment of a museum worker is known: “A good artist is a dead artist.”) There is still no written history of modern Russian art, nor are there any structures or hierarchies.

So, about Tsereteli. Two of his canvases (a still life and a portrait) appeared on the wall literally two days before the opening day, as they say, after a call from the president of the Academy of Arts to the director of the museum. Tsereteli’s call to the director of the State Tretyakov Gallery, Rodionov, and his attitude towards the main museum of the country as his own patrimony is a manifestation of the same Russian voluntarism and evidence of the inexorable importance of one individual personality in modern Russian art history, already familiar to us from Sviblova and Expo Park. . Only in culturally dangerous forms. Formally, the Luzhkov-Sviblova tandem is not much more beautiful than the Rodionov-Tsereteli tandem, although the difference is obvious. This very “tandemity” and smack of privacy in cultural policy (as in big politics) is absurd.

Sometimes it seems that there is no cultural policy in Russia at all. And the new Tretyakov exhibition demonstrates this with charming clarity - both the history of its construction and its very appearance.

During its creation (read - during the creation of some semblance of the history of modern Russian art), there were scandals not only with the “newcomer” Tsereteli, but also between the researchers themselves. Between "archaists" and "innovators". For example, from the sculpture department and the painting department. Some desperately need to put up a Chernobyl-sized bronze butterfly and a scarlet ceramic fox with a blue bird in its teeth. Another is to build a social art hall and make an installation from Ilya Kabakov’s albums. And the departments are not allowed to meet. As a result, the fox was installed, the installation was not made, but one painting by a “non-Russian artist” (as First Deputy General Director Lidiya Iovleva puts it) by Kabakov, miraculously obtained from the Ministry of Culture’s storerooms, was still hung. But if the department of Soviet painting worked not with young pretty girls reading foreign books and magazines, but with serious ladies brought up on this very painting, then perhaps the Tretyakov Gallery would look exactly the same as 15 years ago in the old building in Lavrushinsky, where the main decoration of the Soviet department was the smooth painting of Zhilinsky and Korzhev.

True, they still exist. Huge halls of boring Soviet painting (“pochvenniki”, “severe style”, leftist Moscow Union of Artists) are adjacent to the pens of the Lianozov group, abstractionists, minimalists, Russian pop artists and conceptualists. And the first - no matter what the well-wishers say - kill the second. Because an attempt to combine incompatible things is an indicator of cultural insanity. The Ministry of Culture’s purchase of a tiny object by the guru of Moscow conceptualism Andrei Monastyrsky is immediately neutralized by the fact that it is not Monastyrsky, but the same Zhilinsky, who is invited to the board at the Ministry to discuss the exhibition in the State Tretyakov Gallery, who reads from the podium excerpts from Seneca and Balzac about the mighty power of high art.

However, let's not talk about sad things. Zvezdochetov, Monastyrsky, Komar with Melamid, Kabakov hang on the Tretyakov walls. The Expo Park company begins preparing the Art Moscow 2001 fair. On the third floor of the Central House of Artists you can see the project of Bernard Faucon. The bridgehead has been taken.


The first visitor to the new Tretyakov Gallery exhibition was Yuri Luzhkov. The guide was the artist-academician Tair Salakhov. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )