Remember everything

The artist Roman Minaev wonders what makes post -Soviet cultural figures perform conservative maneuvers. And it's not about Alexander Dugin.

The worst thing that can happen to the contemporary artist is when he suddenly becomes a convinced supporter of the conservative values ​​that once called in him an uncompromising protest and prompted either to join progressive like-minded people, or formulate his own alternative. And the brighter the personality turning onto the path of conformism, the louder the author’s statement about himself once sounded, the more logical to present him the question of the sincerity of his previous intentions. What made him doubt the general conventions at one time? Frivolity? Or calculation?

Alexander Brener is a faithful guardian of the radical ideals of “real art”. With his texts and actions, he persistently turns the conformist inside out of the artists: you just need to listen well what they say, what they believe in, what they dream about, what art they do. Following his method, we can assume that a conservative turn will still happen to everyone-someone before, someone later. And someone had already occurred, only no one attached importance to this, believing in the dexterous ornecks of the artistic strategy. Economic independence, power, influence - the desire for easy existence or even survival, according to Brener, leads the artist from the most important thing in life and forces to obey the will of the constantly reproducing machine of oppression.

Rousseau believed that in the vices of a person it was not he who was to blame, but the circumstances in which he is formed as a person. In this regard, I recall a report that recently, who recently on the network about former Pankovs, who staged their old pictures, taking pictures in the same poses twenty to thirty years later. The transformation turned out to be a colossal comparison: one became a banker, the other became a seller of cars, and someone remained Panku, only now some kind of clean and impressive. After all, once the smoke should disperse and terrible giants will turn out to be windmills. This is the power of the cultural industry: its product gives rise to its own kind.

Timur Novikov was the first to comprehend his conservative turn as a conscious aesthetic gesture.

In the latest Russian history of art, the first figure to radically change his views, Timur Petrovich Novikov was radically. Its significance is measured not only by artistic achievements that were a breakthrough in the borrowing of the international artistic language, but also by its influence on the faithful followers of the new academy of elegant arts. The avant-garde ardor of Novikov times the “zero object” and the dizzying success of the art of perestroika were replaced by neo-academic revengeism-the phenomenon of barely represented obscurantism from the point of view of the Western European tradition of modern art, which again began the countdown from the exhibition “Degenerative Art” in 1937 in Munich. It was there that the fatal feature was drawn between the art of avant-garde depicts and the “true” art of the Aryan race, focused on classical samples. Therefore, in post -war European and American art, further development was understood as the impossibility of returning to any form, even indirectly chanting the superiority of physical strength over intelligence or aesthetizing inhibition and suppression of individual will. The appeal to figurativeness became possible only at the cost of colossal efforts to rethink.

But over the age of Timur Novikov, there was already postmodern unprincipled, which allowed to flirt with previously taboo topics and turn to an open kitsch. Novikov had two reasons for promoting a rather bold idea of ​​neo-academicism: on the one hand, the inability to correspond to the high level of the Western art production, which involves huge capital in cultural production, on the other hand, painful competition with Moscow artists. All this demanded to find its original strategy and drove the Leningrad art into a corner, where it was not by chance that the easel with canvas and paints turned out to be by chance.

What cannot be denied Novikov is in the conservative championship, in the fact that he was the first in post -Soviet Russia to comprehend his conservative turn as a conscious aesthetic gesture. Novikov tried different things, managed to understand that the desired and actual is at the same time far and close to each other, like Achilles and Turtle, and that there should be something else in life, “something elusive”, speaking the language of Andrei Monastorsky. Estete followers, to their misfortune, accepted Novikov’s gambling for a pure coin. But these are the realities surrounding media personalities. There comes a moment when they have to reckon with them, because it is no longer possible to ignore them.

Vladimir Medinsky

“Why do contemporary art we understand exclusively something incomprehensible, clumsy, up to a pile of brick, which is the installation funded from the state budget? <...> I would pay attention to the fact that contemporary art is all that is done today. If classical music is composed, it is also contemporary art, if cinema is shot - these are also contemporary art, the performances of Dodin, Ephmann is also contemporary art. ”

( From speech at a meeting of the Federation Council )

Olga Sviblova

“The curatorial project does not go from discourse, I do not believe in this. I can no longer meet in art history texts quotes from Deleuz, Bart, I feel sick. It is much more interesting for me to quote the gospel, because, in the end, everything comes from there. ”

(From an interview with Ekaterina Grandvot on OpenSpace.ru)

Oleg Vorotnikov (art group "War")

“Putin correctly entered by betting on cops and priests, and not on a lion of Rubinstein.”

(According to Dmitry Volchek - in the "Diary" for "Radio Liberty")

Avdey Ter-Oganyan

“In painting and in art as a whole now, it seems to me, a dead end and crisis. Conceptual strategies that actively promote and teach both in Russia and in Europe, in fact have exhausted themselves. Everyone has the same understandable methods. Once it was an innovation, but now to engage in primitive verbal paradoxes, in my opinion, is extremely uninteresting and secondary. The only taboo sphere of contemporary art is painting from nature. ”

(From an interview with Alexander Kolesnikov on colta.ru )

Oleg Kulik

“Today is June 21, 2006, the sun goes into fish. This is a very important day - the day of the summer solstice. And this symbolic sign seems to be accompanied by our historical meeting. At 16:27 the solstice begins (?). Here is the information from the astrological reference book - the Sun passes as a sign of fish until December 2007, i.e. For a year and a half. At this time, the main direction of the development of the individual and society is oriented to solve problems related to the unity of the individual and the Universe, a deep study of the subconscious, inspiration and intuition. The support during this period is made on the ability to work meticulously and pedantically, subordinating its interests to the interests of the matter.

<...> I spoke not about religiosity, but about religion. I think that there will be no vulgar criticism of the institution <...> I have no goal to cause cheap scandals ...

<...> This will be a superposition. People expect that they will again insult, drink, puke, fart, etc., they already understood this, they are used to it, but you come to the cattle yard, you will clamp your nose out of habit, and angelic singing is heard from there. ”

(From conversations as part of the preparation of the exhibition "Believe")

Ekaterina G.

“However, I definitely want to protect my right to write a sad literary text about Bulgarian wine, about the complexity of life and the imperfection of its agents, in fact - a story, and not a petition in defense or a sentence. I already foresee the reproaches that this cannot be written when a person may be threatened by a prison. But the future results of our and other people's actions and texts are unknown to us, and this should be treated with proper humility. I also predict the reproaches that the literary approach here acts as a “right”, a similar position of the “pure artist”. To this I will say that this will be a metaphor, and the tendency to political metaphors in the modern art world of Russia is connected solely with the fact that the possibilities of expressing real political will are negligible. ”

(About the "Vanguard Zoo" on OpenSpace.ru)

Anatoly Osmolovsky

“The attempts of art to become socially important in the political sense, his desire for direct political influence on society in most cases is miserable or comical in nature. <...> There can be only one answer - silence. The silence of art is the creation of such works that do not say anything themselves, which are equal to themselves, which ultimately do not give any reason for leisure conversations. <...> It is worth finally recalling that of all types of arts, it is fine art that is directly related to its carrier - a unique, author’s thing. <...> Is it worth a fight to capitalism on its territory - the territory of private possession, the symbol of which is the work of fine art? "

( From the catalog of the exhibition "Art without excuses" )

Konstantin Starsdotov

“<...> I, as an old fart, are a supporter not of a revolution, but evolution - gradual mutations. Our life must be aligned gradually, maybe for decades, but in no case to shave, what too many of my colleagues are doing today. ”

( On the comfort of censorship and the joys of repression on Arthid )

Arseny Zhilyaev

“We must stop spraying the paint in the canvas in a hysterical dance, manifesting your spontaneous freedom here and now, and plunge into the dusty archives of the future.”

( From an interview with Valentin Dyakonov on Arthid )

Arseniy Steiner

“While Western art developed in the logic of raising a fragmented subject, which led to the dictate of the mass culture of narcissism and narcissism, Russian artists, on the contrary, constantly appealed to the neighbor. <...> It is possible to create a new world and a new habitat only by ceasing to divide it into strangers and their own, into themselves and “another”. As an instrument of knowledge, it is possible to use only love and compassion, including the whole boundless world in the orbit of your “I”.

(From explication to the exhibition "Actual Russia")

The position of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors of "Disagreements"