New First Unexpected

VIRTUAL MUSEUM OF THE (YUGOSLAVIAN) AVANT-GARDE

Since 2009, the Zagreb, Croatia-based Virtual Museum of Avant-Garde Art has been the online home to the Marinko Sudac Collection. In 2004, Croatian art collector Marinko Sudac started accumulating the Avant-Garde art of the former-Yugoslavian region, primarily art produced in Yugoslavia from 1914 till 1989, but later his interest included related materials from Central and Western Europe.

Today, the collection comprises some 20,000 items that include not only works of art but also publications and documents ranging from private letters to documentary photographs, videos and films. According to museum curator Branko Franceschi, whose winter exhibition "Tune in Screening: Psychedelic Moving Images From Socialist Yugoslavia 1966–1976" at New York City's Stephan Stoyanov Gallery, was included in the Village Voice's Fifteen Best Art Shows of 2011, the later is very important considering the documentation of public art, installations, performances and happenings occurring during 60s and 70s. Sudac's strategy is simple, says Franceshi, "to collect all that was relevant to enable present day and future research of the local Avant-Garde production, its connections and collaborations with the international movements and artists of its epoch. This research should become the foundation in positioning the local avant-garde production within the existing narrative of the 20th Century history of arts and culture which is predominantly west oriented."

As the Sudac Collection’s vehicle for ongoing development and research, the Virtual Museum of Avant-Garde Art is a portal for the dissemination of information about the avant-garde art that connects and integrates those interested in how the visions, methods, and ideas of the historical avant-garde can contribute to contemporary cultural discourse and practice, including its participatory potential, proclaimed social responsibility, and ability to humanize technology.

While annual exhibits at regional museums of key parts of the collection have been well attended and well received, Franceschi believed that a permanent presence was required in order to fulfill Sudac's mission of disseminating information on the Yugoslavian-region avant-garde. The Virtual Museum of Avant-garde Art fills that void.

While many arts-minded Americans are more familiar with Avant-Garde art of Russia and Western Europe, most probably don't know much about the Yugoslavian strain. So I asked Franceschi to give a brief history and overview of the movement:

 

COOL KIDS REDUX

I wrote this rather long piece on the enduring presence of Russian Avant-Garde art in the United States for Bomb a couple of years back. At the time it was whittled down by their able editors to just longish captions accompanying a slide show of some works by Alexandr Rodchenko. I've decided to post the whole original essay here because it's a pretty good example of what I want this blog to be about.

 

Big Faces: The Cool Kids of the Russian Avant-Garde

Recently, while walking down Broadway, I noticed a banner hanging off of a building with that arresting wide-eyed woman’s face from the cover of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poem Pro Eta—or “About This.” You know it—whether you know who the woman is or not, or even if you don’t even know the poem, you probably recognize the face—sure you do. Of course that’s Lilya Brik, a former dancer, filmmaker, and general darling of Russia’s avant-garde in the years straddling the revolution. Brik was the muse for Mayakovsky’s poetry for some 15-odd years, and she would also inspire the pioneering photographer and graphic designer Aleksandr Rodchenko, the man who took that famous picture for Mayakovsky’s book, as well as many others of her.

It struck me then how iconic that image had become—this time it was being appropriated by a commercial video-editing company, an absolutely appropriate thing to do with a Rodchenko image. People might not know who Lili Brik was, but the image has come to represent the Russian Futurist and Constructivist arts movements for people who don’t even know a thing about the Russian Futurist and Constructivist arts movements—and that’s probably all that matters for the “cutting-edge,” or perhaps “avant-garde,” Broadway ad firm Red Car.

PEOPLE IN TREES

Mikola Gnisyuk, People in Trees (The Rooks Have Arrived), 1964. Courtesy of Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography, Moscow

Following Stalin's death in 1953 , his successor, Nikitia Khrushchev tentatively opened a period of episodic reforms that became known as “The Thaw.” During this brief window Soviet artists found space for the development of a "personal voice" and new modes of self-expression. These reforms created the possibility of closer contact with non-Communist nations, including the United States, which presented two important U.S.-organized art exhibitions in Moscow in 1959 – Edward Steichen’s Family of Man and the American National Exhibition.

This year's FotoFest 2012: Bienniel - Contemporary Russian Photography, which opens today in Houston, explores this period as it pertains to photography with After Stalin, “The Thaw”: The Re-emergence of the Personal Voice:

Many of the works in this section of the Russian exhibitions are vintage photographic prints on loan from private collectors Natalia Grigorieva and Edward Litvinsky, founders and owners of the Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in Moscow, founded in conjunction with one of the first private galleries in Russia devoted to fine art photography.

Other works come from members of Novator, one of the most important and enduring of the independent Russian photography associations, founded in the early 1960s by individual photographers and photography lovers in Russia. More than photo clubs, the intent of these associations was to open a space where photographers could present and discuss new ideas in photography, and re-visit the unofficial, often banned, works of Russian-Soviet photography of the previous three decades. Members of these associations shared historical and contemporary works not approved by the state.

Two other major exhibits include: Perestroika, Liberalization and Experimentation, mid-1980s–2010 and The Young Generation, 2007-2012.

FotoFest 2012 will be on view through April 29. Wish I could be there.