Andrey Kovalev. New Carthage

Dear Anatoly!

I finally came across a book of your memories, also published by my friends from the Art Store. I really love reading memoirs, and especially memoirs of sixties artists. Who better than you can write about what a great party animal Eddie Limonov was, or call Ilya Kabakov a typical tzaddik. Or he’ll tell you how Costakis offered to buy a jar of shit. True, he proposed it as a joke, not knowing the name Manzoni and believing that this was all “conceptualism”.

In general, reading the memoirs of sixties artists is always intoxicating; you always regret that you were born too late and did not end up in this company, which so famously fought off the KGB, bravely made friends with important diplomats and spent their free time speculating over a bottle. I envy how much you love your time: “ But we were happy with life then, we were terribly interested, the circumstances were difficult, but they trained us, forced us to work ” (from an interview with Radio Liberty).

And envy gnaws at me because I will never write memoirs in the style in which stories about the stormy and romantic sixties are written. “My time,” the nineties, is completely devoid of attractiveness, mystery, and self-satisfaction; you can read my depressing memoir about the nineties in the Art Journal. At the same time, I am undoubtedly close to the “Apology of Stagnation”, so vividly described by you. And I have a very tender attitude towards the sixties and am going to someday write “Memories of Memories”, remembering everyone who remembered: Glezer, Neizvestny, Seva Nekrasov, Kabakov, Grobman and Glezer again.

In general, I absolutely agree with Katya Degot, who expressed confidence that “this book will someday acquire the status that the best memoirs of the Silver Age now have, because it is fun reading for everyone and a source of information for historians.” Katya is a smart and responsible critic, so I decided that it was ridiculous to write just a review, especially six months after the book was published.

But while reading your book, I discovered, not without embarrassment, that the text referred to my humble person as the personification of demonically cheeky criticism. And I decided that it would be right to write you something like an open letter. The genre of memoirs precisely implies this kind of purely personal answers. I hope that such personification and “suffering of a personal position” will allow us to establish some kind of dialogue. Let's call it jokes for the sake of dialogue between generations . Moreover, when we met in person, it turned out that we have more in common than you thought in absentia. It seems that you were somewhat surprised at some banquet that Kovalev, who writes such disgusting articles, turned out to be a moderately drunk and moderately cheerful aging bearded fat man. And not at all a vile, anemic and bilious journalist with the habits of a Komsomol worker, as you initially believed.

I'll start with a pretty big quote. “Of course, there was something surreal in the friendship that arose between Spaso-House and the artists of the country of victorious socialist realism. It would be easier to explain that the agents of imperialism bribed with handouts people unstable in political education and used them for their dirty games. And so it was. the Soviet press tried, and to this day, lively journalists (unknown to whom, employees, or rather servants), dubbed it “deep art” A certain A. Kovalev (wow! isn’t he a Gogol major who has lost his nose, and with it his sense of smell, for! if his nose had been in place, he would have immediately smelled the sickening smell of the KGB “disinformation”, because this is exactly how the representatives of the “office” wanted to present us thirty years ago. And then our “major” would have had time to go to the potty.”

I am always extremely pleased by the Gogolian allusions that arise in connection with my last name. I recognize the indisputability of the maxim “A decent person’s nose will not be torn off”; I don’t even need to turn to the authority of Tsvetan Todorov (“Introduction to Fantastic Literature”, M.: 1997) in order to interpret the disappearance of the nose as a psychoanalytic analogue of castration or to trace the connection between the idiom “poking one’s nose” none of your business" and "leave it with your nose."

So, I personally think that we are all left with nothing . Although times were fun, however. But the question is how did it happen that such great guys got into such shit. (By “excellent guys” I mean you and your heroes-contemporaries. And, I hope, myself.) By the way, my peers at Lubyanka probably rose to at least the rank of colonel, and even general. I hope that all your allusions to my close family ties with “plainclothes art critics” are just a metaphor: “All of them (critics), with their shamanism, with their narrowed horizons, are as far from the love of art as their “spiritual brothers” , party art critics in civilian clothes. After all, the poles are sure to converge." Therefore, Kovalev the critic is destined to forever remain with his nose , that is, a major.

Although I completely understand your irritation. Mutual misunderstanding on this issue can be very easily resolved: your era did not give rise to a referent-critic, so finding yourself in the position of being “criticized” is unusual and uncomfortable for you. The closeness of artistic life in the sixties and seventies led to the fact that you were increasingly stroked on the fur (you can’t consider pogrom articles in newspapers as criticism). Only in such hothouse conditions can a certain artist imagine that “God himself moves his hand” (as you write about the artist Shvartsman). And in the very work of an art critic, especially a newspaper critic, there is inevitably a certain swagger and familiarity. Therefore, it is completely understandable why for you today’s critics look like direct successors of the work of those frantic pogromists. (I note that artists generally have no special need for external criticism, except when it is necessary to write an article for a catalogue.)

But the absence of an adequate critic creates almost insurmountable obstacles for the art historian, who has to be content with apocrypha and tales. Therefore, I am very concerned about understanding the art of that period, which began with you and ended before my eyes. (That is, the period of the 1950s - 1990s. You and I still lived in the same geological era.) In the West, this period is called Art after WW II, in our country it is modestly called “The Art of the Second Half of the 20th Century.” Our difficulty is that we also turned out to be contemporaries - and to a significant extent participants in what is pathetically called the third world war (WW III). And art, in the strangest way, turned out to be an indispensable and active participant in these grandiose events.

So someday the chapter about this period in the history of Russian art will be called “The Art of the Cold War.” True, it will take some courage to admit this fact and realize that our laments are similar to the discord that began in the fifth column at the moment when Carthage was already destroyed. In order to somehow document and clarify for the uninitiated the specifics of the current situation, I decided to attach to this rather incoherent and purely personal letter the texts that caused such disgust and irritation in you. This is the article Dip-art: Deep Art of the Cold War ; I compiled it at the request of a Hungarian magazine from my various reviews and scribbles - mostly written for the newspaper Segodnya. It would be interesting for you to know that after I presented the main provisions of this article at a conference in Budapest, I forever lost the favor of the Soros Foundation, which organized that conference. After that, they stopped shaking hands and giving me grants. The article was never even published. So, I’ll tell you, it’s a rather dangerous business to bring up the old and remind you of who won the Cold War.

I’ll say right away that I have never tried to claim that all nonconformism was inspired by the CIA. Firstly, we can say that he was inspired to the same extent by the KGB. Particular indignation at the conference in Budapest, where the famous collector Norton Dodge, who looked like the old Indiana Jones, was sitting, was caused by my assumptions that there was a big spy game going on around the artists. The whole point is that, in my opinion, it is almost impossible to explain otherwise how it turned out that you communicated quite freely with foreigners and went to Spaso. And no one touched you. Therefore, I had every reason to assume that the “artists” were taken into the care of intelligence, and not punitive authorities. (In simple terms, Seventeen Moments are the broad-minded Abwehr intellectuals, not Müller's chiropractors.)

The most interesting thing that can be extracted from the memoirs of the nonconformists of the sixties is the figure of the Foreigner. This literary trope may someday be explored in a German dissertation. Here you write about people you love and like: “Of course, diplomats are not art historians. Their knowledge was at the level of the society that they represented. But this level was quite high, university level, educated, experienced. And - these were people of a free society No one imposed tastes or ideologies on them." However, you have been living in Germany for quite some time and must understand that there are all kinds of foreigners, and the West, as something united and indivisible, exists only as a historical aberration and the antithesis of Russia in the dual pair “Russia and the West.” I personally prefer to associate myself with those who painted the walls of Paris and fought with the cops on American campuses. Aristocrats from the Washington Post or polished State Department employees are as alien to me as security officers in herring ties. But it was they - diplomats and journalists - who represented this very “West” in Moscow at that time. It is easy to imagine that by the sixties these guys had gradually lost the art that served their aesthetic tastes. Their own nonconformism, which entered the mainstream - pop art, minimalism, etc. - began to cause them mortal boredom and gnashing of teeth.

And here are the Soviet artistic dissidents - meek, soft, funny. Therefore, when you write that “the works corresponded to the level of world - European and American art,” I would like to ask, what do you mean? And where is this “level”?

Post-war modernism around the world actively deconstructed market strategies, getting people to buy what could not be bought - the preserved jar of Manzoni's feces that you mention. In Russia, the modernists, on the contrary, strived with all their hearts to be bought. This is very understandable: the purchase at that moment was the only proof of recognition or simply proof of one’s own existence. Ideological pressure was countered by a quasi-market mechanism, while in this very West all energy was aimed at destroying the canon, and not at achieving it, as in Russia. In such a situation, strictly speaking, there is nothing new: Malevich dreamed of learning to write like Cezanne, and Tatlin dreamed of making “material selections” like Picasso. Although it is easier to violate the canon of socialist realism than to cross the dynamic boundary established by modernism, many of our people - often without realizing it themselves - like Tatlin and Malevich, quite by accident found themselves in the mainstream itself.

This is why the brilliant era of Russian artistic nonconformism, about which so many excellent memories have been written, looks so depressing and traumatic. And this trauma, which has become hereditary, does not come from the KGB. It is no coincidence that your memories, so sincere and honest, end precisely at the moment of emigration. It seems that exactly where you ended up was the most repressive reality. By the way, most of the memoirs of sixties emigrants also stop at this point.

You write about your father: “He understood everything about his time, he realized that he accidentally fell into a fold of time, a phenomenon, a mutation, when everything was wrong.” So in today's history it is almost unimportant who snitched on the KGB and who was fed by the CIA. The point is not that both activities are quite immoral - although to varying degrees. As long as we continue to passionately discuss these problems instead of realizing what really happened to us, we will not understand anything either about our time or about ourselves. If I sat down to write A History of Cold War Art, I would have to write the story of a great loss. I really don't want to do this! But I probably should.

Yours Andrey Kovalev

PS The surname "Groys", by the way, is spelled with one "s".

PPS It is with great regret that I must relinquish my copyright on the term “deep art”. I heard it - along with the amazing words “incorruptible” and “oven” - back in the late seventies.