Andrey Kovalev. Swedish Exhibition #11

Alexandra Shatskikh. Vitebsk. Life of art. 1917-1922. - M.: Languages of Russian Culture, 2001. - 256 p.; circulation 2000 copies; ISBN 5-7859-0117-X.

I repeat once again : Alexandra Semyonovna Shatskikh should have a monument erected during her lifetime. However, the outlines of this delightful monument are already being outlined. Having reached the middle - that is, the third volume - the great five-volume collection of Malevich is suitable as a pedestal. And the characters of “Vitebsk” form a magnificent multi-figure composition.

Such books do not lose their strength even after decades, so one can only marvel at the myopia of the publishers who printed this fundamental text in a pointlessly small edition. The peculiarity of the Shatskys’ scientific products is that in the places they combed (archives around the world, scattered newspaper files and other wilds, the existence of which an ordinary person does not even suspect) there is no point in trying to find anything else interesting. In addition, under her pen, archival extracts, boring by their genre nature, somehow themselves turn into an intriguing adventure novel. In essence, Shatskikh leaves followers with only one right: to reread and write expositions on a given topic.

As far as I know, Shatskikh has been writing “Vitebsk” for almost the last ten years. Every more or less scientific person is familiar with the fatal impossibility of completing such books of life . But no: now we finally know everything about this amazing place - Vitebsk in the twenties. It’s as if we see with our own eyes how Malevich expels Chagall from there, and then he and Bakhtin look at the starry sky and find in it total cosmos of total aesthetics, each with their own.

Commentary on the protocol of the discussion in UNOVIS: The comical nature of this situation - not felt, however, by the honest chronicler - only aggravates the dramatic background of the conflict: it is too well known at the end of the twentieth century where the noble rage of pure and bright enthusiasts of “unity” who despised common sense led.

Alexandra Shatskikh (biographical information)
Vitebsk Art School
Alexandra Shatskikh. Yackerson: Artist from Vitebsk ("Object of Art" #1)
Annotation from "Ex libris "NG"
Ekaterina Degot. After geometry (“Results”). “Malevich’s students were his works, and therefore their exhibition is his exhibition. If Malevich shows us the tools of influencing the subconscious, then his students are the fruits of this influence, the result of peering into the “Black Square.” And it is not surprising that, peering at it, they discovered "secret images" and made the transition to a new icon simultaneously with the teacher... But now this does not sound at all like an accusation of Suprematism. On the contrary, one can breathe a sigh of relief: it turns out that all Soviet art passes under the sign of Malevich, was generated by him. This means , it is grain and not chaff"
Yuri Arpishkin. Reconciliation with the explosive thesis (“Time MN”). “Malevich - of course, the main character of the book - appears here as the true creator of not only Soviet art as such, but also the author of many forms of the artist’s way of life in a totalitarian environment. The authorities, as is typical for them, turned out to be an ungrateful creature and, having accepted most of Malevich’s life-building lessons , he himself was left behind. As if the popular thesis of protective publicists is actually confirmed, which states that totalitarian culture originated from the avant-garde. But Alexandra Shatskikh’s judicious and far from journalistic presentation reconciles with this explosive thesis. Let it come from wherever it wants, as long as it has surnames "The textbooks were written correctly and the dates were not distorted. This is the result of rampant futuristic practice."

Amazon vanguard / Pod ed. John E. Boult and Matthew Dratt. - New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; M.: State Tretyakov Gallery, "Galart" publishing house, 2000. 368 p.; circulation not specified; ISBN 0-82207-231-8.

There are exhibitions that are made solely for the sake of the catalog - thick, fundamental, majestic. This is, in fact, how science moves forward. You won’t find good money for a good collection of articles, but a catalog, especially an exhibition catalog with good promotion - everyone is happy. And “Amazons” - a Guggenheim project - was promoted to the first category. They say that the Russian version of the catalog, and the exhibition itself, ended up in Moscow entirely by the grace of our president, who, having arrived in New York for the Millennium Summit, discovered great potential in art of a purely political nature.

The product is very worthy: with intellectual essays, personal articles, publications, bibliography. Something to keep on hand. I admit, I didn’t expect this from John Boult. Usually, like any American Russianist, he considers it his duty to skim the surface of phenomena. And here everything worked out well.

Although the topic chosen was extremely pop (feminism and gender of all kinds), almost all the authors of the catalog managed to somehow get out of this rather ridiculous situation. This is especially true for Ekaterina Degot (“Creative couples and paradigms of creativity in the Russian avant-garde”), who found a rather non-trivial approach to the lingering problem of male-female. The tar has recently moved to the left, however, it also had to somewhat retouch a simple and striking fact: the pronounced ideological orientation of the project.

Upon closer examination, it turns out that the main goal of the organizers of the exhibition was to drown out any memories that the avant-garde was related not only to the revolution in art, but also to the social revolution. The emphasis on “women of the avant-garde” is an unusually clever move. Of all our avant-garde grand dames, only Varvara Stepanova switched to the camp of constructivists and production workers and completely abandoned painting. Goncharova and Ekster emigrated, Popova and Rozanova died too early to participate in Lef’s madness. Quite a quirky concept to say the least; Only in this situation there is nothing left of the avant-garde: after all, the fundamental gesture carried out by the Russians of the twentieth century was the creation of a Great Utopia, for the sake of which it was necessary to abandon the smearing of wet paints on the canvas. And this gesture was made by men - Tatlin, Rodchenko. This is gender, gentlemen of the jury.

So I must warn you: the annotated catalog contains a lot of fraud and monstrous revisionism. There will be no more revolution, and there will be no Utopia either. There will be only sweet and pleasant painting, and the Revolution will be reduced to a sentimental women's novel. Critics all over the planet fell for the setup: they talked endlessly about gender, having difficulty remembering that women were also involved in some kind of “decorative and applied arts,” that is, a low genre. And really, who needs them now, Bolsheviks from art? You can't make a good market for them. But from the catalog our president may have learned what gender is. And what is avant-garde?

Ekaterina Degot: Studying the history of art from a gender perspective should hardly turn into persecution of those responsible for the fact that women have been socially disadvantaged for a long time. As for the aesthetic disadvantage, should the concept of modernism really be “revised in favor of figures like Sonia Delaunay” (more modest, less philosophizing, less radical and not disdainful of applied art), as some feminist critics demand? In conservative criticism, women artists are praised for their "emotionality" (i.e., rejection of the avant-garde as an intellectual project), "subtlety" (i.e., inability to radically innovate), and "the wise desire to overcome destructive extremes" ... Thus, the woman becomes the banner of anti-modernism revenge, which should make us think about the limits of rejection of the dominant paradigm, which is called for by the revision of the history of art of the twentieth century “in favor of women.”

Amazons . “Strabo was the first to tell about the fears of the Greeks in connection with the appearance of the Amazons: “Who will believe that an army, or a city, or a whole nation of women could live in an organized way without men? That they are not only organized, but also capable of attacking a foreign state, subjugating their neighbors who occupied no less than modern Ionia? This is tantamount to saying that men in those days were women, and women were men."... The union of the Amazons was an ethnos gynaikokratoumenoil, "a nation where women rule." It was argued that in order to procreate, they lived every year for two months with "
Varvara Slonik. Amazons in Moscow: Thanks to the feminists of New York (Polit.ru). “According to John Boult, “even in our time, in spite of everything, it is the painting that remains the main thing by which we judge the artist.” According to Boult, the difference between the artists of the Russian avant-garde and their male colleagues is also that art “ Amazons" is not so closely connected with the revolution (the connection between the Russian avant-garde and communist ideology seems stable in the West). At the same time, it involuntarily comes to mind that perhaps it was the communist ideology that the Western intelligentsia of the 20s imagined quite (to use the modern term) "politically correct" - exactly like feminism is now"
Yuri Arpishkin. Six in one boat (“MN Time”). “In the fine arts, they carried out, so to speak, a velvet revolution. At the same time, the artistic strategy of the “Amazons” looks so organic today that one can really wonder why it was once perceived almost as a slap in the face to public taste. That’s it, however. , the problematic, figuratively and in Russian, now called “intergender relations,” seems to be exhausted in the activities of Russian futurists. In the catalog, which, as follows from all that has been said, is the main exhibit of the exhibition, an extremely informative and unusually "For this topic, a sensible article by Ekaterina Degot. It says, in essence, precisely that this seemingly obvious problem in the context of the Russian avant-garde simply did not exist. Because there was no reason for artists to fight for their specific rights"
Olga Kabanova. Avant-garde women: “Amazons of the avant-garde” arrived in Moscow (Izvestia). “It’s easy to write an exciting novel about each of the six heroines of the exhibition, compiled according to the following plot scheme: childhood in a wealthy family, early quite bourgeois marriage, great creative and personal ambitions, study abroad, passion for innovative art, brilliant debut, new creative and love union with a fashionable artist or poet, active participation in artistic life, everyone has a different, but invariably tragic ending"
Nina Boevaya. Amazons against feminists : The Russian curator of the exhibition Zelfira Tregulova ("News Time") tells. "I wanted to make a bright, spectacular exhibition that would demonstrate the artistic potential and endless variety of avant-garde ideas"
Vitaly Orlov. Women's Day at the Guggenheim Museum . “With the exception of Stepanova, all of them were not too politicized, at least before the October Revolution. None of them thought about what the Bolsheviks wanted - to overthrow the tsar. Most of them, with the exception of Stepanova, were wealthy people, and their revolutionary spirit did not extend beyond radicalism in art"
Maria Mikhailova. Female stars (Vesti.ru). “The curators deliberately avoided another important point - the attitude of the avant-garde artists to the revolution - trying to overcome the stereotype widespread in the West, which automatically links these two phenomena. However, objective facts indicate that the avant-garde accepted the revolution and, from an artistic point of view, participated in it . Subsequently, the metaphor of a “revolution devouring its children" was convincingly embodied in the fates of those who remained in Russia. Very soon socialist realism became the main and only direction in art, and the rest were left out of work and died in obscurity. If we talk about women in Soviet art, then artistic matriarchy was replaced by patriarchy, and the Amazons simply disappeared without a trace"
Velimir Moist. Amazons were imported to their homeland (Gazeta.ru). “As you know, you can’t spoil the porridge with butter, but the porridge turned out to be quite a lot... Cubism, futurism, Rayonism, Suprematism, constructivism - these are not just -isms, but, first of all, systems of views, varieties of attitudes towards work. In the “Amazons” the tourist approach prevails: look left, look right. These are the kind of glorious avant-garde artists we (in the Western version - they) had, this is how they knew how - this way and that. The logic of formation and search has been violated, the atmosphere of creative burning has disappeared, which is especially It's a shame, because there was no shortage of necessary material. What's more upsetting is that artists have become "Amazons", the avant-garde has been turned into a shallow myth, and the canonization of individual characters occurs in isolation from the historical context. It turns out that Russia is vodka, Sputnik, perestroika, Malevich and six desperate suffragettes who fought for women's equality with a brush in their hand"

Art Magazine #34-35: Digest 1993-2000. - M.: Art magazine, 2001. - 152 p.; circulation not specified; ISBN 0896-4397.

You can feel legitimate pride in your colleagues and party comrades. If the number 35 is divided by seven, it turns out that we have a Real (that is, Regular) magazine. A pure paradise of intellectual splendor. The regularity of discharge indicates the onset of maturity, although it does not promise the birth of something new.

And what kind of people wrote in “KhuZhu” - Georgiy Osmolovsky and Litichevsky, Nikita Alekseev, Dmitry Sanych Prigov, Oleg Kulik, Ekaterina Degot, Pavel Pepperstein and, of course, Andrei Kovalev himself, the storm of spell checkers, the fate of rewriters, the dream of proofreaders. The editor-in-chief, dottore Victor Misiano, is one of our few intellectuals of the European type, with a full set of problems that are inherent in this strange and already endangered order of warm-blooded creatures. At the same time, Misiano has surprisingly good breathing for long-distance running - which is not at all small.

The sad thing is that this “digest of the nineties” cannot be recommended to future generations of art masters and their critics as instructions on how to make a living from someone. For fragile souls, all this can really scare away. So Kovalev (whose intellectualism is often even frightening), re-reading his “KhuZhu”, a source of grace, fell into a deep depression about the nineties, spent in deep depression. Everything has evaporated somewhere, maybe I’m just tired of it. Or is it individual Kovalev who is exhausted and will not stand another race? However, depression now looks like an old-fashioned old man's idea, like the powdered boobs in Pushkin's era. It's time to jog, go to a psychoanalyst. Well, that's all.

22 number more English
Nikolai Molok. Farewell to the nineties (“News Time”). “The digest sums up a double result - not only of the magazine’s activities over seven years, but also of the era in which “HZ” and its editor-in-chief Viktor Misiano played almost the main role. The magazine created an illusion, simulated a normal artistic process: although there it was written that contemporary art lives without and outside the system (the Soviet system was destroyed, and the new institutions are still weak), but it itself was the institution that organized the process. The history of "KhZh" is the history of the art of the 90s. The magazine arose in situation of total euphoria that gripped the artistic community. Now the magazine began to more closely resemble a Western university publication, which publishes not manifestos, but strict academic texts removed from the current process. Thus, Misiano became il professore, "KhZh" - an academic publication, and art 90 -x - the past, with which it’s time to say goodbye. And - to sum up the results"
Victor Misiano. Answer to the survey “Ex libris “NG” (scroll almost to the very bottom). “As a publisher, I will say this: purely as a human being, I am certainly interested in reviews in the press about our publications, but as the head of a publishing project, no. And the point here is not a personal position, but the absence in modern Russia of a stable intellectual space that can clearly respond to certain initiatives and, in turn, influence them... As the editor of a publication that also claims to be intellectual, I understand perfectly well , how difficult it is in the absence of a responsive intellectual environment to construct something bright and generally significant... The gradual crystallization of professional groups and new intellectual communities begins, which do not pretend to global pathos, but which sooner or later will begin to express their interests, interact and influence each other. Our project, in any case, is already trying to present one of these focus groups. A publication like yours could become a meeting place for these emerging communities."
Victor Misiano. Russia and Europe: Utopia versus deconstruction . “At the same time, I deny one of the ideologies that are experiencing triumph in Russia today! I deny cynicism! Nowadays, cynicism is incredibly widespread in the intellectual space. I am afraid that, unfortunately, this is the dominant type of thinking!.. Without fear of apparent contradiction, I assert that there can be no talk of any dynamics in the intellectual and artistic space without the affirmation of a positive ideal - on the one hand, and without the deconstruction of all kinds of romantic nonsense. But any organism is able to live normally only by developing! And so, entering into contradictions with myself, I nevertheless declare my will to utopia!”

Leonid Pasternak in Russia and Germany: From museums and private collections in Moscow, Weimar, Marbach and Oxford / Executive editor Ya.V. Bruk. - M.: State Tretyakov Gallery, Pinakothek, 2001. - 160 p.; circulation not specified; ISBN 5-8959-011-4.

Regarding what the artist Leonid Pasternak is like, Vasilisa Solovyova wrote the best (see below) in “Vremya MN” (by the way, I recommend: a completely sensible and reasonable young critic, unlike many. People interested in the artistic process have not yet once they hear this ringing name). Vasilisa correctly writes that the intelligent international salon was exactly like Pasternak. Russia was a little unlucky, and this salon, which worshiped True Values, managed to convince the Bolsheviks of its necessity and usefulness. Germany was luckier - there the ideological style was created by people who were completely mediocre (in painting; in architecture and cinema everything was different). So Nazi art did not result in the Great Style, and from it did not result in democratic officialdom, like ours. Leonid Pasternak is directly related to socialist realism, although he retired abroad in 1921 from futuristic outrages. However, his students - for example Isaac Brodsky - waited in the wings. Then it turned out that in fact these were extremely intelligent and sensitive people... That is, it turns out that the distinct blurriness of Pasternak’s painting is the absolute embodiment of the ideology of the serving intelligentsia, who almost do not care who they serve.

Well, that's true, by the way. I am convinced that our task is to preserve and protect our own cultural heroes, no matter how strange they may seem: to organize exhibitions, publish well-prepared catalogs. And the catalog produced by the publishing house of the Pinakothek magazine is very good, solid and looks very attractive: all sorts of materials, memories and documents. The only depressing thing is that Mr. Ya. Bruk, the head of the Tretyakov branch on Krymskaya, for some unknown reason, considers it possible to write art criticism texts. Although, in fact, it would be better if he only wrote articles, otherwise when he begins to engage in museum activities, the results that are fatal in their incorrigibility are like the exhibition “Art of the 20th Century.” It's his job. But, I repeat, this did not affect the quality of the catalogue. The genre is like this - the book must have a boss.

Ya. Brook. Art equal to life: the 1910-1920s reveal new trends in his work. It becomes monumentalized, the features of neoclassicism clearly appear in it, and especially elevated, if not hymnic, intonations appear. Pasternak is increasingly possessed by the feeling of life as a kind of celebration, given by grace, and for this he is ready to thank the Creator every minute.

Vasilisa Solovyova. Classic, father of the classic ("Time MN"). “It is possible that it was precisely against him and his pedagogical principles that young rebels rebelled in the 10s, soon calling themselves futurists. It’s funny that among the young radicals the master had his own person, namely his son Boris, who first joined the futurists and then "Lef" movement... Like Isaac Brodsky and other classics of Soviet art, who adopted the classical school before the revolution, Pasternak could have made an invaluable contribution to socialist realism. This is further evidence that socialist realism as a great style grows out of salon aesthetics. And what else more funny, this is where current masters of the brush like Ilya Glazunov draw inspiration from - just remember his reverent illustrations for the works of Dostoevsky"
Velimir Moist. Parsnips are not a vegetable (Gazeta.ru). “The work of Leonid Pasternak has not been hidden from the public in the last thirty years; another thing is that he has never been put on a par with the work of Repin or Serov. And rightly so. Nevertheless, he is an interesting and worthy artist, and his exhibition, especially with additions from museum storerooms, private collections and from the Oxford “Pasternak Foundation”, is an absolute highlight. In his portraits (take, for example, “Portrait of Levina”), even fatal, decadent beauties remain completely earthly creatures, daughters of long-time friends or sisters of fellow teachers. Endless interiors , piano lessons, drinking tea with a samovar - all “Russia, which we lost”
Maya Bass. Happy fate of Leonid Pasternak
Second Pasternak: He remained in the shadow of his great son (“Culture”)
Anzhelika Sineok, Eduard Pshenichny. Kafka and Pasternak: Letter to Father as a Genre