Andrey Kovalev. Monument to the nineties

Monument to the nineties
Andrey Kovalev

Publication date: February 7, 2003

At at Avdey Ter-Oganyan's exhibition the Marat Gelman Gallery, everything was as usual - a professional and artistic get-together, stuffiness, crowds and sour wine. Only a few policemen and confused television crews testified to the significance of the event. Their confusion was understandable - they were promised a scandal that did not happen. The day before, a message appeared on lenta.ru that the M. Gelman Gallery again began to receive calls threatening a pogrom if the exhibition opened. But well-wishers who called the gallery and said kind words about Marat Gelman and what a wonderful artist Avdey Ter-Oganyan were, never came. One can hope that not only because Gelman called the police in advance and promised to immediately go to court if something happened.

So some part of the public was disappointed, especially the information workers, who had the goal of capturing footage of the destruction by the Orthodox public of the exhibition of the artist-koshyun, who “cut down icons.” But the routine bustle in the gallery is a very good sign. Assumptions were confirmed that Avdey Ter-Oganyan did not at all turn sour in the Czech emigration, where he retired for fear of prosecution. This time he abused the “icons of modernism” - from Kazimir Malevich to Roman Opalka. In his previous style of sophisticated simplicity, Ter-Oganyan once again recalled that all art of the 20th century strived for “non-normativity”, and therefore included Russian curses in the very authentically executed replicas of the opuses of the museum classics of the 20th century. The intention of his project is similar to the action of Alexander Brener at the Sdijdelik Museum in Amsterdam. Dollar sign inscribed on a painting by Kazimir Malevich , was a gesture of “farewell to modernism,” as simple-minded and decisive as Ter-Oganyan’s. That is, everything is the same: Avdey remained who he was - a very good artist. Even for a second I thought that it would be nice if the performance pogromists showed up, as promised, with their sprays - and even put their curses on top of the “obscene painting.”

But something has indeed changed. One, apparently educated, young art critic asked me at the vernissage about Avdey Ter-Oganyan’s action: “What was that, another joke from the nineties?” I had to agree that the entire turbulent history of art in the nineties is indeed described as a series of jokes - “they wrote a three-letter word with their bodies in front of the Mausoleum,” “they cut up a pig,” and so on. If you think about it, it turns out that the Yeltsin era itself is best described by good stories - “B.N. on a tank”, “B.N. floats down the river in a sack”, “B.N. conducts an orchestra”... Merry there were times!

But the “cutting of icons” in 1998 turned out to be the last joke of the era. The last one, because it's no longer funny. Every joke, as we know, must contain some humor. What kind of humor is there if the prosecutor’s office is chasing an artist all over the world? The era is over. But there were several skeletons left of her in the closet. Two artists are still under investigation for their artistic actions and are in some kind of ambiguous exile - Avdey Ter-Oganyan and Oleg Mavromati.

Let us recall that the first organized the “Young Atheist” action in 1998, during which he cut up paper icons purchased in the Sofrino shop. The second crucified himself on Bersenevka, in the courtyard of the Scientific Research Institute of Cultural Studies. The words "I am not the son of God" were scrawled on his back. A case was opened against both of them under the article “inciting ethnic and religious hatred”; both fled abroad - Ter-Oganyan to the Czech Republic, Mavromati to Bulgaria.

However, to the credit of our society it should be said that we nevertheless avoided the Nights of St. Bartholomew and wars for faith. Despite threats of physical harm, none of the artists were harmed; the offended public filed a lawsuit. In a normal country, if a person doesn’t like something, he goes to the prosecutor’s office. On the other hand, it was precisely in these legal incidents that dangerous and even terrible trends emerged. The fascist public showed up at the preliminary hearings in the Ter-Oganyan case in all its splendor - and smashed the camera in front of law enforcement officials, shouting: “Get out of here, you Jewish fascist!”

Moreover, pressure was exerted on the court not only from below, but also from above. There is unconfirmed evidence that the Moscow City Prosecutor's Office began taking active steps against Avdey Ter-Oganyan after a call from Yuri Luzhkov . (Recall that the Manege exhibition hall belongs to the city of Moscow.) In the case of Oleg Mavromati, everything happened much more openly - the Zamoskvoretsk intermunicipal prosecutor’s office did not find grounds to initiate a criminal case under the article “inciting ethnic and religious hatred.” However, after some time, Yuri Adamov, head of the department for supervision of the implementation of laws on federal security and interethnic relations of the Moscow prosecutor's office, reversed this decision and the case was nevertheless opened.

Jurisprudence for art historians and artists

I’m not a specialist in criminal cases, but it seems to me that this division of the Moscow City Prosecutor’s Office has never shown itself to be anything other than caring about the moral state of individual artists. However, the situation has developed in such a way that not only artists, gallery owners and curators, but also art critics have to shelve sweet debates about discourses and constellations and delve into the abyss of the Criminal Code. So, serious legal scholars, for example Anatoly Pchelintsev, believed that “the actions of citizens who committed this sacrilege fall under Article 130 “Insult” or 206 – “Hooliganism.” And, as lawyer and human rights activist Yuri Levinson correctly points out, Article 282, according to which artists Avdey Ter-Oganyan and Oleg Mavromati were subject to, was not included in the amnesty in 2000. Thus, a universal scheme was worked out on the artists - public indignation, a statement to the prosecutor's office, an investigation, a trial court... "Walking Together" used that the same technology, but so far we have trained “on cats" - that is, on the esthete Vladimir Sorokin and the low-power publishing house "Ad marginem". But in principle, anyone can fall under this skating rink - the result depends solely on the social weight of the object of "criticism" and the lawyers whom he will be able to attract for his defense.The courts, as we see, accept such cases easily, but counterclaims - for example, for hooliganism, damage or copyright infringement - somehow stall.

Therefore, you can at least immediately sue Gelman and Ter-Oganyan under the “Law on the Protection of the Russian Language” just adopted by the Duma - a public outrage has occurred against the Russian language. However, even his direct ill-wishers cannot doubt the seriousness of Marat Gelman’s intentions. In another art historical and legal incident - that is, about the attack of vandals on sacrilege in the Sakharov Center - the matter also looks quite optimistic. Counterclaims were filed (“Incitement” and “Hooliganism”). But the Sakharov Center is a place around which human rights activists, that is, people who can defend themselves, concentrate. Therefore, the matter here may end in a compromise and mutual withdrawal of claims. So there is hope that another two dozen artists will not go to prison or end up in forced emigration.

This is a serious matter - in the stories that happened to Ter-Oganyan and Mavromati, the myth of “support from the world community”, which had successfully existed since the times of nonconformism, quietly evaporated. So, the artists did not receive any support either from international human rights organizations or from the international artistic community, and Ter-Oganyan received a residence permit, which does not allow him to immediately begin the extradition procedure.

There is only one problem - ideas about freedom of speech that have been established since Soviet times are in the way. Lev Levinson writes about this: “The bad thing is that as soon as a conversation with experts who professionally defend our freedom of conscience reaches the atheist artist Avdey Ter-Oganyan, they immediately become bored. Meanwhile, the formula for freedom of conscience today in Russia is simple: it is freedom a person who allowed himself the freedom of ungodly speech and was subjected to criminal prosecution for it.” The favorite argument of people who call for justice for artists who dare to work in taboo areas is: “Would you do something like that in Saudi Arabia?” Of course, in Saudi Arabia no one would think of doing such things. But I would still like to live not there, but in the UK, where the Turner Prize was awarded to the artist Chris Olifi, the same one who makes images of the Madonna from elephant dung and whom the former New York mayor Giuliani so disliked.

So, as a result of the current situation, Avdey Ter-Oganyan spent several years hanging around in a refugee camp in the Czech Republic. Oleg Mavromati moved to Bulgaria in connection with his marriage - and disappeared into obscurity. There is not much interest in his fate in Russia either. For some reason, Mavromati positioned himself as a complete outcast and renegade, in contrast to Ter-Oganyan, whom many in Moscow love and respect. The situation in which artists find themselves is the answer to the widespread accusations of the organizers of art scandals that they are engaged in primitive auto-PR. Undoubtedly, a highly effective technology has been developed, as a result of which its author has to sit on a refugee soup and without money even for cigarettes.

Information occasion

Nevertheless, the actions of Ter-Oganyan and Mavromati, extended over time, actually had something like PR in their ideological basis. When Oleg Mavromati was taken down from the cross after the “Man X” action in M. Gelman’s gallery, he answered the question why he did it: “So that there was an informational occasion.” The nineties are a period of sancta simplisiti. The whole unspeakable beauty of this time is that artists sacredly and naively believed in the possibility of making real art only by following all standards. The copybook also included Andy Warhol's statement that everyone has the right to fifteen minutes of fame. Everyone enthusiastically accepted the idea of ​​Boris Groys, according to which the times of the Van Goghs are over forever, a good artist is a successful and popular artist. And it was precisely for the sake of becoming, in full agreement with these instructions, a “good artist” that Oleg Kulik ran on the cold ground, pretending to be a dog, and Alexander Brener went to Execution Ground in boxing gloves, challenging Boris Yeltsin to a fair fight.

Note that after the initiation of a case against Avdey Ter-Oganyan, some orthodox contemporary art advocates suggested that he surrender to the authorities - only in order to complete the action he had begun. But in the mythological nineties, representatives of law enforcement agencies that our diligent artists encountered somehow mystically realized the importance of the work that the performance artist was doing - and invariably let him go on all fours. It should be recalled here that Avdey Ter-Oganyan did not take part in these fantastic stories of public performance - the action in Manege was only his third public action. On one occasion, he went out with a group of comrades to the Kuznetsky Bridge in black suits and with wooden spoons in their buttonholes in honor of the first Russian performance, which was staged in 1914 by Kazimir Malevich. In the second case, he tried to hang on the scaffolding surrounding the American Embassy a replica of Jasper Johns' painting "The American Flag" made on rough plywood. In both cases, everything ended without any incident, although the embassy did not understand the joke and did not allow the flag to be hung.

Generally speaking, it now turns out that it was Ter-Oganyan who was the most sophisticated artist of the nineties, since he carefully and consistently explored the situation into which the Russian artist invariably finds himself, always forced to catch up with someone and obey other people’s regulations. This is exactly what he did, acting as a master mentor for a company of young artists gathered in a squat on Trekhprudny, where weekly exhibitions and performances were held. He continued the same activity in another squat, where he opened the “School of Contemporary Art”, where he taught very young people various tactics that every real artist should master. For example, I was once used as a teaching object in a lesson on “Subverting Authority.” And the most innocent of all the accusations dumped on my head was pedophilia. It was with these nice young people who were supposed to perform in the ridiculous guise of “young atheists” and “avant-garde experimenters” that Avdey Ter-Oganyan showed up at the Manege.

And as a result he ended up in exile in Prague. But, if everything goes well, the ridiculous case is closed, then he will still have to return to a completely different country. Where people who once believed in art no longer look like heroes, but some kind of strange and inadequate eccentrics.