Where Are We?
Ieva Kulakova
27/06/2011
My conversation with Viktor Misiano (1957) – a well-known Russian art theorist and curator – was one of life's chance happenings which I duly accepted as providence. In the barely two hours between Arterritory.com's request for an interview and the time allotted for our interview, I saw irony in the fact that I didn't have questions at the ready, just in case I happened to meet him. I adapted to the situation – Misiano was in Riga for the conference “Revealing the Invisible Past. Current Approaches to the Study of the Art History of the Socialism Period in Eastern Europe”, so I began the interview with the subject of the reassessment of the art history of the soviet period, which would help us to move on to more topical questions concerning art, and possibly even the future of art.
Staying within the theme of the conference, I'd like to start with a line of questions regarding the post-soviet experience of our art. Where are we? How do we set out a strategy that would help us to both understand the situation and make a judgment as to how we should continue? What methods should we use? And first of all – taking a look back. If we assume that a clear regard for history really is important. What do we do with this huge legacy of soviet art?
Really, since 2004, no, actually a bit earlier, the theme of my work is bound with post-soviet issues. As a whole, my biography as a curator can be described very schematically. In the 90's I worked with what was later taken to be called the “performative selectioning of art”, i.e. working with experiments – like works in progress, open projects, dialog projects, etc. These projects, of course, were executed in post-soviet conditions, and in many ways, they problematized and sounded these conditions, yet they didn't see it as their job to embody the “post-soviet”. But then, at the beginning of 2000, I returned to, relatively speaking, the traditional exhibition format, and my work centered mostly on the post-soviet, post-communistic theme. In 2007 I made a large exhibition project for which, by the way, I came to Riga for the first time. The project was shown in four European museums – these were four independent exhibits, all dedicated to the post-soviet condition and part of the whole curatorial, conceptual and dramaturgical framework [1]. I gave this project the title “Progressive Nostalgia”, and in 2008 I published a large book – a large catalog [«WAM № 33/34. Прогрессивная ностальгия. Современное искусство стран бывшего СССР», 2008 – I. K.], in which, under the same name, I consolidated the material from all four exhibits. This project, I believe, is also the main reason you invited me for a conversation about post-soviet art. It wasn't shown in Moscow, by the way, and no one there understood why I was working with post-soviet art – why was I going to Kirghistan, Georgia, Armenia? Why does all of this seem interesting to me, when everybody knows that what is most important is breaking out in London and New York? When it's clear to everyone that there is nothing between Moscow and Berlin?
And why was that important to you?
Many reasons brought me there. Including personal ones: I was thinking about my family's taking part in the history of communism – which I don't look upon as a heavy load to bear, and from which I don't intend to distance myself...
It's important to talk about the soviet experience because... because it happened! But in the 90's it seemed to be something that should be crossed-out as unnecessary, as if it never were. It seemed as if a completely new life was to begin, in which it will be easier to settle-in if we destroy all ties with the past. That was the first post-soviet decade, and at the same time, the first decade of the New World Order, when everybody hurried to put their new, construed-in-haste identities into political commerce, as well as new historical roots, where the soviet-period was brushed aside because it seemed to be something inorganic, a kind of mistake, something forced upon, a sort of sidestep off of the normal way of things. Something similar, by the way, was experienced by colonial countries which, once independence was gained, began to wipe away the memories of their colonial past. This phenomenon – postcolonial theory, was, thanks to Leela Gandhi [2], called the will-to-forget. But the problem – or rather, just one of the problems! – hides in the fact that it is enough for our countries to reject the soviet past, that our belonging to the current times (meaning modernity) becomes questionable. Because the soviet past – that was our current time. We had no other! But, if we have had no current times, then we can be ethnicized, i.e., our experience can be described in national, ethnic or racial terms. That is exactly what the West began to do, beginning their colonization work there, where the Second-World used to be. That is why, if we want to be able to say that the problems that are timely to us have the same relation to global symptoms as those of Western Europe or North America, we have to admit to our having belonged to the soviet-period and we have to gain this experience anew.
When you said that your reasons for turning to post-soviet topics could seem unclear, this prompted a reply – everything that happens in the post-soviet territory is also a continuation of this past experience, and that is why the question of a soviet legacy is topical.
I think that, especially in the beginning, if the soviet-era was starting to return, it was not in the linear narrative form. To pick out our present from the soviet past – that is beyond our powers at the moment. It is enough to step out of the world of anti-communistic stamps that have been pushed from their pedestals or nostalgic apologies for us to understand that the soviet experience is too encompassing, complex and variable to look at with a linear legacy.
[1] In 2007, the curator Viktor Misiano organized the exhibition “Return of the Memory” at Tallinn's contemporary art museum, “KUMU”; the exhibition “On Geekdom” at the Benaki Museum in Athens; the exhibition “Time of the Storytellers” at Helsinki's contemporary art museum, “Kiasma”; and the exhibit “Progressive Nostalgia” at the Luigi Pecci Contemporary Art Center in Prato, Italy.
[2] Leela Gandhi (1966) – Professor at the University of Chicago (USA), acclaimed academic in the area of post-colonial theory, co-editor of the academic journal “Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction” and editorial board member of the journal “Postcolonial Text”.
As I've noticed, in most post-soviet countries the communistic past returns after a period of forgetting or rejection, in the form of unwanted nightmares, i.e., formless suspense, unobtainable with consciousness, and most likely, loaded with consequences. In his famous work about the “uncanny” [S. Freud, The Uncanny, 1919 – I.K.], Sigmund Freud wrote that the suppressed returns in deformed, horrific forms. But in another of his writings, “Mourning and Melancholy” [S. Freud, 1917 – I.K.], he asserts that mourning is a job that (like any other job) can be finished and successful or, the exact opposite, unfinished and a failure. Failure at mourning leads to melancholia, which means the inability to separate oneself from the loss and making oneself and the loss into the center of the universe. And the really enormous job with the returning of memory, which started practically simultaneously in the cultures of almost all post-soviet states, created memory texts, rather than texts on memory, in its first stage. The theory of culture calls similar post-traumatic memory text types as “acting-out” – when trauma is carried over to discourse, creating never-ending reproductions and regurgitations of the overbearing images [see LaCapra D., Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001 – I.K.] There's an enormous amount of such examples of text in our countries' art and culture...
I would still like to return to the first question: what do we do with this huge legacy of soviet-era art? In a way, I'm particular to Andrei Yerofeyev's [3] position, which is that we should create a museum of soviet civilization, to which should be sent, let's say, 80 percent of that, which counts as this period's art; and then there will be a clean space in which to create a “clean” view of the art of this bygone period [4].
In my opinion, this idea, specifically, is also “diagnosed” by its will-to-forget symptoms. It has been created by the will to isolate the past, alienating it, making a stand that we are not part of it. According to its stage, it corresponds to the period of the early 90's, i.e., the very first post-soviet period, when a similar line of thought was very widespread. Since that time, it seems to me that we have lived through a complicated experience, rich with many stages; in accordance, we see the reality of the present and its connectivity to the past as something much more complex.
Having lived through and admitted to this acting-out experience, we couldn't not realize our hybridization (yet again using post-colonial terminology, in this case, Homi Bhabhas'). [Homi K. Bhabha (1949) is one of today's most notable researchers in post-colonial issues – I.K.] With that, I mean that we become aware that our subjectivity consists of many parts, and that the soviet in that is indestructible. And, even if we judge this past to be traumatic – but whose past is not traumatic? – then, as we have learned from psychoanalysis, trying to be rid of this past only makes the trauma deepen. The idea of this megalomaniacal museum is an example of a failed “work of mourning”, which becomes the inability to separate oneself from the loss, and making oneself and the loss the center of the universe.
I also think that the first stage of the “work of mourning” should be that which scholars of post-traumatic texts term as “working-through” [see: LaCapra D., op.cit. - I.K.]. The subject here is not only forgetting and rejecting, which inescapably makes the rejected and forgotten return in the form of monsters and nightmares, but also the fine balance between the acceptance of the memory and the ability to create new connections with life.
This radical idea, however, promises a certain satisfaction for those who were repressed at the time.
Fine, I'll try to explain it differently. I am not against the idea of a museum of soviet civilization. Everything can be put in a museum, preserved and researched, and a museum like that can be very useful and interesting. However, objectivity demands that a museum like that must represent the whole soviet experience, with its dialectic and complex nature. What principles should we use to decide which 80% to include, and which 20% to reject? Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin's “facism – that is facism + antifacism”, we can say that the soviet is the soviet + the anti-soviet. Or, paraphrasing Thomas Mann, who said “my brother, Hitler”, we can say – “my brother, Stalin”. In addition, we're not only talking about the fact that it is necessary to show not only soviet rule, but the resistance as well, but also the fact that it must be shown how both of these vectors were part of the same system, how they both sustained one another. In other words, if such a museum is made, then in the middle of the exhibitions there should also be Andrei Yerofeyev, because his unrelenting anti is part of his oppositional object, because his maniheistic and schematic approach to this period is itself a creation of this period, and it has never left it.
Along with this, it is important to understand – how will this museum implement the “work of mourning”? If it were a simple mausoleum or cemetery vault, in which the despised deceased and his possessions will be placed, then, of course, that will provide satisfaction to those who haven't gotten over their traumas. But will it help create new connections with life? I think not...
[4] Andrei Yerofeyev (1956) – art historian and curator, former Head of the Section on Newest Currents in the Tretyakov State Gallery (2002-2008); before then – Head of the Section on Newest Currents in the museum-reservation «Царицыно» (1989-2002); amassed a voluminous Russian-Soviet art collection, which was given to the Tretyakov Gallery in 2001. In May 2007, as curator of the exhibition “Forbidden Art – 2006”, was involved in a criminal case, in which in May 2008 he was accused of instigating racial, national and religious hate. In 2010 he was found guilty and fined. [https://aerofeev.ru]
[5] TV program «Царицыно», 2009. [Hosts: Tatyana Tolstaya, Avdotya Smirnova. Guest: Andrei Yerofeyev.]
Кулик И. Запретный куратор. Путешествие Андрея Ерофеева из Парижа в Таганский суд Москвы. Артхроника, 2010, #9.
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Alright, but then what should we do to get over this experience?
It is difficult to get over traumas. But maybe we don't even have to!? They are part of our subjectivity. Maybe they should be accepted as something inescapable and we should try to look at their good side!?
“Working it out” – that is a job that is associated with using the past in the present, using it to solve topical problems. Because that is precisely what postcolonial theorists worked on – they knocked not only the colonial off of its throne, but also the pre-colonial legacy as well, showing that the history of the pre-colonial period is a myth that was created in the heat of the battle with the colonizers, when the postcolonial elites secured their place. They deconstructed the postcolonial condition not only in those countries that had lived under colonialism, but also in countries that were once metropolises. They were able to demonstrate that the postcolonial condition is a requisite of the modern world as a whole.
We can do something similar. In place of celebrating our traumas, we can reveal their global symptomatics and meaning. We are all post-soviet – such an idea has been thrown out to us by the American philosopher Suzanne Buck-Morss [Buck-Morss S. Theorizing Today: The Post-Soviet Condition. // East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe. IRWIN, ed. London: Afterall Books, 2006. – I. K.].
I have to explain that in a local context, we haven't had such a transformation. And that, in my opinion, induces a lack of clear signposts. It holds back normal development of the art scene and everything is fenced in by the level of subjective personal resentment.
If that's the case, then that is bad! That is bad, that that hasn't happened! There's nothing more I can say about it!
Well, no one has really tried to solve this problem.
However, for the whole of this last decade, the problem in connection with this legacy – its dialectic, living link with the present, as well as the present's roots in the past, has been one of the main objects of experience and contemplation. And not only in our part of the world, but globally, as well. The task at hand, to create a new view of the past, plainly revealed itself after the first post-soviet and post-communistic decade. It was clear that history – including art history – needed to be revised. The world has changed, and along with it, the way the world looks at the past has also irretrievably changed. We can no longer use the blueprints that were created in the era of the Cold War. If the world has already globalized, then there is no more first-world art history and second-world art history. Just as there is no third-world history – this we know from postcolonial theory...
And what should we work with now?
Speaking in the language of journalists – if in the 90's we discussed the present, but then, in the 00's we discussed the past, then now, in my opinion, we should return to the problem of the future.
That would be logical.
I don't think that the future will appear to us in the form of a new social utopia. I tend to believe that that will be an anthropological utopia. It seems to me that much of what was discussed in the 00's, at least the post-Fordism theoretical school – and that was the most interesting in the last decade – takes us directly there. I'm talking about thinkers, post-operaists, from Negri [Antonio Negri (1933) – an Italian Marxist sociologist and political philosopher – I.K.] and Hardt to Virno, who implemented Foucault's [Michel Foucault (1926-1984) – a French philosopher, social theoretician and historian of ideas – I.K.] ideas about biopolitics and the society of control. I don't know if these ideas are known in Riga, but they have materialized in Moscow relatively recently and immediately attracted a lot of people.
Elaborate, please!
In his later years, Foucault had an idea about how the society of today, which we conditionally call the postmodern, that is, a society that has overcome high modernism (but a shining example of a society that has overcome modernism was also the soviet society – one of the most radical examples)... and he, you see, brought attention to the transformation in European society. The fact that in our time everything isn't so very set in stone, or in its place, when people don't have to hold on so strongly to prescription, it seems that there is some sort of illusion of freedom in our society. But in truth, that is no longer a society of discipline, but a society of control. That is a society in which you think that everything is allowed, but in truth, everything is allowed only within certain constraints and you are given a priori, at the level of biopolitics, the level of bodily practice, strong frameworks and marked amplitudes, which you have supposedly chosen yourself. That was one of his last ideas, which wasn't even published as a finished text; I believe it was during one of his last oral interviews that he stated it. And that's just about the way the idea formed – that to improve daily life, to recognize new landmarks, you have to work with daily biocontrol practices, going outside of the framework. In large part, the new tasks that people, art and thinking artists have to deal with – they are precisely these problems of an anthropological nature.
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Do you see a concrete goal in this sort of research of art?
Yes, I do. The art of the 90's (if not earlier) started to deal with these issues in many ways. Interactive art had just announced itself at the time, as had the aesthetics of communication and dialog, and so on. That is, right at that time art began to operate in the sphere of life; it started to root its practice into the sphere of behavior and existence. But let's not forget that the 90's – that was the era of the communication business – the internet, the tourism business, the entertainment business, PR and various political technologies, etc. And on this base, a huge communication business machine was created. In this way, this business and this art are synchronous apparitions, they are symptoms of a shared era. The conditions developed in such a way that many artists were eaten by these technologies, they were swallowed by this huge entertainment, communications and tourism industry. And that's why this impulse, which came from the 90's, completely died out by the end of the decade. But at the same time, there were artists who continued to stay interesting, and they were joined by new figures at the end of the decade, who are even still appearing now. I think that, in the context of the currently new biopolitical discussion, for the first experience of the creators of performative communication... after twenty years they again have the chance at a new life. You see, that is currently the most interesting perspective.
Notwithstanding the global nature of your thinking and your work in the “wide world”, I still associate you with Moscow.
For God's sake! I am not ashamed of Moscow...
I'm interested to know, what do you think of these already popular, though ambiguous, reactionary art groups like “Война”, “Бомбилы”, “Протез”? How do you view their progress in the context of art? On the one hand, they seem to be continuing the communicative performances of the 90's, which were both ruthless and unreliable; on the other hand, they create a slew of additional questions.
The actions of “Война”and similar groups can in many ways seem like a part of the perspective that I spoke about a little while ago. In truth, they don't just simply work with the critiquing of today's implacable Russian society and their system of art, but they also attempt to live in harmony with their beliefs and aesthetics. In such a way, they seem to demonstrate that we are not living in an age of politics, where the ideological struggle was fought in the language of manifestos and ideological arguments, but rather in the age of biopolitics, where the authorities squeeze into our way of life, our behavior, our daily structures. And that is why the activists of “Война” started to speak in a language of social gestures, of unconventional behavior independent of the system, and so on. With this, they pleasantly differed from the common conformable and commercialized spirit of Russian contemporary art. And with this, they seem more principled than many of this system's formal critics, who usually aren't apt to take a risk and are completely unprepared to fall out of their criticized system. The impulsivity of “Война” and their almost animalistic baseness, their anti-intellectualism and anti-discursiveness, their rejection of creating for the market, of the museum-like – even those, it seems, are traits that are recognizable from an anthropological perspective. And overall they are carnival-like and often times clever; it is pleasurable to tell of their actions. The appearance of these fun, cheeky and reckless boys is heartening in this atmosphere of the dead into which both Russian society and Russian art have sunk into.
They are unpredictable, which can be both a good and a bad thing.
You're absolutely correct – unpredictability also has its unproductive side. The critique that I could address to the new Russian activists has to do with their unwillingness or inability to create an alternative to the official system of art that would be a transparent, responsible and communicative system of art. This activism in itself is a symptom of a non-transparent, irresponsible and closed society, but with their spontaneous and unreasonable protest they seem to duplicate its characteristics. They reproduce many paradigms of the cultural industry's commercial media, against whom they wholeheartedly struggle. They use a spontaneous language of gestures in their critique, which only serves to quicken the drowning of Russian society in the current imprudence; they exploit the cult of the radical hero, which consequently leads to acquiring the cult status of a media star; their trump is scandal, and that is a tactic of the technology of success.
Of course, but they're teasing the system.
Yes, they're teasing the system, and at the same time, they are becoming heroes of this same system. And the official state award jury gives them the Grand prix.
You see, that's what I don't understand.
But really, that's quite expected. If they don't create their own alternative art system, but just – as you said – tease the system, then it turns out that they don't have any other system. They may be lousy, but they are ours. That's why, when they – as representatives of the corporation “Russian Contemporary Art”, come into conflict with another corporation – the police or the Ministry of Domestic Affairs, they will be defended, of course. Because you defend yourself, the interests of your corporation, its resources, the social authority, etc.
But did they accept this award?
I don't know.
I tried to find an answer to this question on their website. There was an ironic remark about receiving the award, and the gist of it was that the award was supposedly given for “not that” work.
But you really can't understand anything about them. You can't understand where “Война” starts and where it ends. Manifestations that become associated with the name “Война” – are they really their manifestations? From time to time they begin to object, they say that the group “Война” wasn't involved, but then, immediately, information to the contrary appears... Is this chaos or the result of their uncoordination? Or maybe that's the way it's supposed to be – uncoordinated? For the time being we can call upon the classics of Marxism and Leninism who, following Hegel, said that quantity will become quality. Let's wait and see how this will all end...
And still, regardless of the fate of the new carnival-like activism (I only wish them creative success), I am sure that there is another methodology, much more quiet, more concentrated, that isn't so focused on flashy public effects and scandalous apparitions. That there can be other vectors in the manifestation of the anthropological turn of events. There is a measuring stick known as man – his subjectivity, his pain, his fear constitute a whole layer of existential problems, which is also forgotten and full of undiscovered meanings and problems, including not only deeply sentimental ones, but specifically political ones as well. I believe that work that includes humanistic subjectivity, that doesn't throw out such hot-headed challenges full of bravura, but is more quiet, more concentrated, is no less courageous in a political sense. At least in terms of consequences.
That means that its form is not hooligan in nature.
Yes, but I wouldn't want to encourage excessive caution. And, by the way, if I was on the state award jury, I don't think I would have given a prize to “Война”. And that is simply because I wouldn't be on the state award jury. Not never, but not just right now, in this specific political time span. But to make some sort of event out of my refusal – I wouldn't do that either. I'd make do with some sort of excuse, for instance – I won't be in Moscow at the time. That is, in fact, what happened: that is precisely what I told them when I was offered a spot on the jury...
What are you working on right now? Do you have a current exhibition project?
I am currently working on an exhibition project in Moscow, titled “The Impossible Connection”; thirty artists are taking part and a three-volume catalog will follow. The center of the project is the problem of a united existence, the search for new life modalities. The exhibit will open September 6, 2011, in the central and largest building of the Moscow Contemporary Art Museum on Gogol Boulevard.
And after this exhibition?
I would like to develop a comprehensive university course, and then publish a book based on it. Even two courses and two books – about art and the theory of a curator's work and practice in the last two decades. But you know, I have told myself so many times that I am through with curating, but every time I get an offer, I can't refuse. That's why I'll leave this question unanswered.
What binds you most to the job of curator?
First of all, curator projects mean an opportunity to communicate with people. I universally believe that a good artist is first of all a good person. I have yet to have an experience that would prove the contrary. In this instance, I don't mean that a good person is only one that helps an old lady cross the street or operates a shelter for abandoned dogs. I think that good people are fulfilled people, people that have devotion, an inner mobilization. That is why an exhibit is a sphere of intense communication, it is an existential experience, it is an adventure, an adventure taken together with others. In this way, the work of the curator is an ethical practice. And the second thing that binds me to the job of curator is, as ever, the end result. The notion that, at the beginning, there was a physical emptiness, and then it was filled, and filled according to some sort of plan, a drawing... the imaginary becomes material – that is also part of the appeal of this job. I'm not bothered at all about who views the exhibit and how many of them there are.
So you organize exhibits for yourself?
I have a prepared answer to this question. I don't organize exhibits for the public because today's public, in the era of cultural industrialization, has lost its intellectual and ethical conformity. I organize them for myself, the artists that I work with, and a few more people who are always in my consciousness as intellectual and ethical touch points. And I assume that there may be one, two or three, or even more people in the public who will see this exhibit the way I do, and they could potentially become my rapporteurs, but they are fated to stay unknown to me.
