| Most of all at the pompous opening day Z.K. Tsereteli in the Big Manege was impressed by the number of visitors - participants in the so-called “current” art process. Who did you meet at the noisy celebration: members of the AES group, which was included in the most stellar team of Russian contemporary art, and the editor of the excellent GIF.ru website supported by Marat Gelman, Nikolai Palazhchenko, and the Krokin Gallery with its entire leadership team, and the editorial staff of the magazine “ArtChronika” , and the curator-coordinator of the First Moscow Biennale Joseph Backstein, and many, many others... And I was there. I drank honey beer. And I even felt very emotional. For I realized that Zurab Konstantinovich is really the only one capable of rallying everyone around him: the left, and the right, and liberals, and pochvenniks, and Luzhkov and Putin, and Backstein, and Vanslov, and Govorukhin, and Gergiev. And this coincides with the artist’s personal ambitions. But not only that. Life in the art of Zurab Tsereteli most fully embodies the characteristics of Russian artistic consciousness at all its levels.
This consciousness is the conciliarity secularized in Soviet times. The symbol of which in artistic life is the art complex. In the 60s, such associations, subordinate to the Union of Artists, aestheticized the life of Soviet citizens and cultivated their artistic taste. In particular, the Applied Arts Combine, founded in 1958 at the Moscow Union of Artists, designed more than one and a half thousand objects: theaters, concert halls, cultural centers (not only in Russia, but also in the countries that were part of the CMEA). And after all, these guilds, bound by mutual responsibility, did a good deed on the sly: they disseminated everywhere the aesthetics of the “left MOSH” style, which was then progressive in comparison with the officialdom, the apogee of which (as can be seen in the exhibition) is the work of Zurab Tsereteli. The very abbreviation “Left MOSH” contains the drama of this movement: the guild ideology, no matter how leftist it may be, does not give the artist a chance to be completely free. Therefore, the best achievement of this movement was “combinatorial aesthetics”, otherwise desperate eclecticism, when almost everything was borrowed (from Falk, from the “Jack of Diamonds”, from Picasso, from the masters of the Middle Ages) and, by definition, was secondary. It is this “combinatorial aesthetics” that defines the entire enormous exhibition of the President of the Russian Academy of Arts. Sometimes it seems that this is a report on the work of an entire union: the method and style of the works in different genres, techniques and formats vary so much. Realistic monumental sculptures on religious and socio-political themes are the most unconvincing. Faceless. Mosaic panels imitate the Byzantine tradition. Many, many flower still lifes using the Post-Impressionist and Fauvist method. There is a cubo-futuristic panel. The most charming are works of recent years on the topics: townspeople of a Georgian city, Jerusalem Jews and Charlie Chaplin. They perfectly inherit the aesthetics of the Paris School with its eccentric plasticity of life and a special, tart, dense color. Marc Chagall himself would envy other Jerusalem types with violins and cellos. And the sculptural round dances of the big-eyed Georgian residents are reminiscent of the heroes of the films of Georgy Danelia, who was present at the opening day. The same angular, charming klutzes, seemingly embarrassed and at a loss in the company of such imposing bronze heroes of our days: from Vladimir Putin in a kimono to Valery Gergiev conducting with his “fingers like a fan”.
The post-Soviet “combinatorial consciousness” revealed at Zurab Tsereteli’s largest exhibition is in fact a repressed complex of most of the main figures of today’s Russian contemporary art. Artists want to put into production and turn into an industry their once found eclectic brand (Sotsartist painting or photography or comics with stencils). The artistic directors of the art process think only in the form of gigantic biennales, each of which again turns into an art complex, where individuality is leveled out in the general wave of art production, overwhelming in scale and budget figure. At the same time, everyone somehow doesn’t get around to solving the subtle conceptual problems of the development of art and its communication with society. So the exhibition of the President of the Academy of Arts that opened in the Big Manege can be called exemplary for the current “contemporary” art of Russia. Sergei Khachaturov
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