"Art about art" at the Russian Museum

The Russian Museum has opened an exhibition “Art about Art”, dedicated to the adventures of classics and the classical avant-garde in the art of the second half of the twentieth century. According to MIKHAIL TROFIMENKOV, it could be called an “Exhibition about an exhibition”: its concept, which equates Robert Rauschenberg and Andrei Mylnikov, Geliy Korzhev and Africa, is so different from the exhibition practice of the State Russian Museum.

The title feigningly humbly fits the exhibition into a series of exhibitions mechanically accumulating works on a given topic: the color red or, for that matter, the road in Russian art. Here the topic is expanded to infinity. After all, in principle, any art is, first of all, about art, like any cinema, according to the formula of Jean-Luc Godard, about cinema.

Naturally, the building materials of the exhibition are, first of all, domestic reflective movements. Sots art, creating a new brand from a mixture of socialist realism and avant-garde, as in “The Country of Malevich” (1986) by Alexander Kosolapov, marking the Kremlin walk of Stalin and Voroshilov with the Malevich brand, typed in a “Marlbor” font. Mitki, imitating the Wanderers, like Alexander Florensky, who turned Repin’s portrait of Modest Mussorgsky into an anti-alcohol propaganda piece in the “they are disgracing the collective” genre. Neo-academics of Timur Novikov. But they are mixed, subordinated to the dramaturgy of the exhibition, divided into six “acts”: from “Forward and back to the classics” to “Attack of concepts”.

The works, which are often perceived even by the professional consciousness as a play on the past, are set aside by several striking accents. The epigraph to the exhibition is a huge and somehow orgiastically insane “Dispute about Art” (1946) by Vladimir Yakovlev. A crowd of academicians gesticulates furiously, surrounding Rubens's nude. According to art critic Ekaterina Andreeva, they resemble elders lusting after Susanna. An almost sadistic aspect of passeism emerges. The artist always “rapes” the classics: it’s not for nothing that the hero of “Brush Strike” (1982) by the “wild” Oleg Kotelnikov looks like a maniac with a knife.

At the same time, the picture of the Soviet classic is reminiscent of the carnival compositions of the neo-academics, for whom the classical masquerade was just as suitable as the Stalinist academicians. Another unexpected counterpoint to the work of yesterday’s punks, who declared themselves fans of the canon at the end of the 1980s, is “Homer (Working Studio)” (1960) by Geliy Korzhev. A front-line soldier in a commissar's jacket copies a bust of Homer: his jaw is cramping from tension. Although, logically, he should have joined the Suprematists.

Such comparisons free many of the exhibits from the additional ideological element. “Vladimirka I” (1993-2007) by Leonid Lerman, where Kazimir Malevich’s peasants float above the convict road of Isaac Levitan, is most easily read as a poster metaphor for collectivization. Yes, of course, this too, but as a metaphor for the dynamics of Russian painting - first of all. So the victory of socialist realism in the early 1930s, according to the logic of the exhibition, is an aesthetic, albeit strong-willed, resolution of the “dispute about art” of the 1920s.

Finally, the most important accent is the comic book “Ruins” (1965) by pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, which rhymes with the ruins of Valery Koshlyakov, who liberates Stalinist architecture from earthly gravity. After all, in the end, what is artistic heritage if not the ruins, albeit well-preserved, of world culture, for which one can, following the St. Petersburg tradition, only experience acmeistic melancholy.

The vanguard was led through the stage