New First Unexpected

DRAWING ON DOVLATOV

My review of the exhibition of Alexander Floresnky's illustrations for the collected stories of the great Russian humorist Sergei Dovlatov for Bomb Magazine:

In 1993, Alexander Floresnky, founder of the infamous Russian underground art group Mitki, nearly turned down the opportunity to illustrate the collected works of the great Russian humorist Sergei Dovlatov—thankfully, he did not.

Of the Soviet writers who emigrated to the United States between the late 1970s and end of the 1980s, the Russian humorist and novelist Sergei Dovlatov probably had the most significant influence on the American reading public outside of émigré communities. Significantly, while several of his books have been translated into English, eight of his stories appeared in The New Yorker. Indeed, poet Joseph Brodsky, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1987, called it about right when he said that Dovlatov’s popularity in the United States was “natural” and predicted that one day he would be just as popular in Russia....

DON'T BE SILENT

The latest riff on Alexandr Rodchenko's original--this one from the Belarusian political art collective Project Antibrainwash, which I saw at EFA Project Space back in March:

"Don't Be Silent, 2011. Downloadable protest poster (36: x 48"). The text along the bottom reads: "Silence is consent."

Rodchenko's original:

Plakat Alexander Rodchenko "Books". The Board for the Leningrad branch of the State publishing house «Gosizdat». 1924 Reproduction Private collection © DACS 2008 © Rodchenko archives.

This image is appropriated time and again, most recently by the band Franz Ferdinand, and before that by the Dutch punk band, The Ex. And not least, by my wife as her Facebook profile pic:

EDUARD STEINBERG: BURIAL AND RESURRECTION

Composition: Burial and Resurrection (1987, Oil on canvas)

Painter Eduard Arkadevich Steinberg, considered by many to be the standard bearer of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist legacy, died from cancer last week in Paris.

Steinberg was a prominent figure in the so-called second wave of the Russian Avant-Garde arts movement of the 1960s that included, among others, painters Erik Bulatov, Viktor Pivovrov, and Ilya Kabakov. Although the establishment of Socialist Realism in 1934 marked a clear end to the first wave of the Avant-Garde, the movement did not end there. After Stalin's death in 1953, and at the beginning of the Thaw, the second wave of the avant-garde--or Non-Conformists--began to emerge. Born between 1932 and 1938, these artists began their careers in the late 1950s. By the late 60's and early 70's, their paintings evolved as a conscious rejection of the official subjects of Socialist Realism--and, as a result, didn’t see much daylight until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

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.

MAN ABOUT MOSCOW: DIEGO RIVERA'S MAY DAY SKETCHBOOK

May Day, Moscow, 1928. Watercolor and crayon on graph paper, 4 1/8" x 6 3/8"

Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art, MOMA’s winter painting exhibition, brings together key works, drafts, and ephemera related to Rivera’s now famous 1931 MOMA mural exhibition, but what caught my eye in this otherwise lackluster show was a remarkable collection of 45 small and individually framed crayon and watercolor sketches that, on the surface, don’t seem to have anything at all to do with that original exhibition that helped make Diego such a superstar.

Exhibition notes reveal these small works to be pages from a notebook kept by the Mexican muralist on a 1927 trip to Moscow—a sort of tourist’s diary in pictures, if you will. The so-called Moscow sketchbook, according to the notes, is a record of his 1927-28 visit to the Soviet capital for the tenth anniversary of the Russian revolution, that follows an anonymous family as it prepares for the big day's festivities, highlighting the outsize spectacle of the event—colorful banners, posters, and floats—with the city's landmarks (the Kremlin, Lenin's tomb and St. Basil's Cathedral) in sight. While intimate in scale (4 1/8” x 6 3/8"), the sketch’s focus, as to be expected from an artist otherwise famous for portraying sweeping historic narratives, was the exuberant and swelling crowd—men and women, soldiers and civilians—turning out for the celebrations. In short, history in the making, hardly the subject of small sketches.


May Day, Moscow, 1928. Watercolor and crayon on graph paper, 4 1/8" x 6 3/8"

Rivera had been invited to the Moscow May Day celebrations by the Soviet government itself and, upon his arrival, was soon invited to teach monumental painting and composition at the State University there. He was also contracted by Anatoly Lunarcharsky, the first Soviet People’s Commissioner of Enlightenment, to create a mural in the reception room of the Red Army's high command, the actual impetus for Rivera’s sketches in the Moscow sketchbook, a detail that the exhibition notes fail to mention. It may seem a fine distinction, but while the small sketches currently hanging on MOMA’s walls certainly speak for themselves, it seems important to clarify that the Moscow sketchbook  wasn’t so much a “record” of a sight seer's trip, rather sketches toward a major commissioned work.

Rivera was quite surprised by his near-instant celebrity in Moscow, but a healthy dose of hindsight explains all. Historical circumstances had created a special bond between the Soviet Union and Mexico. Both had recently emerged from revolution and artists in both countries confronted many of the same issues, including the relationship of the avant-garde artist  to a mass audience. As a result, Mexican artists and intellectuals eyed the new Soviet state for relevant models to identify and engage with their own revolution and, as milestone anniversaries seem to demand some sort of an assessment, the Soviets were looking for new models of historical narrative to continue to engage their own revolution as it embarked on its second glorious decade.


May Day, Moscow, 1928. Watercolor and crayon on graph paper, 4 1/8" x 6 3/8"

Besides, Rivera, a member of Mexico’s own Partido Comunista since 1922,  was already fairly well known among Soviet intelligentsia. In 1925, the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky had visited Mexico and returned home with reproductions of Rivera's work, which he used to illustrate his own lectures and readings. The poet's praise, which included a declaration that Rivera's murals were "the world's first communist frescoes," helped to establish the Mexican’s bona fides in Soviet cultural circles.

But if MOMA’s new exhibition is a celebration of Rivera’s earlier exhibition in New York, why include the Moscow sketchbook at all? According to the exhibition notes, Abby Rockefeller, an early admirer of the Mexican's work, bought Rivera's sketchbook for $2,500. (Rockefeller gifted it to the museum in 1935.) What they don’t tell us is that the funds were meant to partially offset the artist’s expenses while in New York preparing for the 1931 exhibition--the missing detail which links it to this somewhat slipshod exhibition that runs until May 14, 2012.

TOUGH BOOMERANGING FOR THE KREMLIN

From my piece for Bomb Magazine's Web site on the 40th birthday of Octobriana and the Russian Underground:

In 1970, Petr Sadecký slipped across the border of Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia with a cache of illegal comic books and the fantastic story of the dissident Russian artists who risked everything to create them. A year later, the publication of Octobriana and the Russian Underground, with its lurid illustrations and the suggestion of secret organizations staging drug-fueled orgies behind the Iron Curtain, was just the thing to send the anxious Western imagination over the edge.

UN/OFFICIAL: ILYA KABAKOV AT EDELMAN ARTS

My review of The Study of Kabakov exhibition at Edelman Arts for Bomb Magazine:

...In 1965, Ilya Kabakov, officially a children’s book illustrator, gained intense notoriety when his Shower series was exhibited with other Soviet unofficial artists by a Communist organization in Italy. The series depicts a man standing under a shower head, but the water that comes out of it somehow avoids touching him or lands like snow on top of his head. Western critics claimed the work symbolized the lack of material resources in the Soviet Union, and Kabakov was heralded as the voice of the anti-Soviet generation. But the artist himself explained that it simply depicted an existentialist dilemma, one of  a person who is forever waiting. Indeed, in a recent interview with the Daily Beast, the artist’s wife, Emilia Kabakov, put it this way: “If you go looking for political meaning you can always find it. If you don’t, you don’t.”...

ON TURTLE BAY

I have a *personal essay* up at Mr. Beller's Neighborhood.

On Turtle Bay

Twice weekly, we ride the ferry across the East River from the India Avenue landing in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn to 34th Street on the Island of Manhattan. Two hours later, we make the return trip. Each time we come aboard, the pilot, the bill of his cap pulled low on his brow, greets us with a taciturn nod. In turn, we reward his sullen acknowledgement with just the same gesture. No more, no less. The crossing, including a brief stop at Hunter’s Point in Queens, is short, but for those seven minutes on the river’s steel-gray waters—a trip that spans three boroughs—we are among the river folk...<read more>