Contemporary Russian Art Newsletter - May 2003.
15 years after Perestroika.

Contemporary Russian art is a phenomenon that emerged quite recently, 15 years ago, simultaneously with Gorbachev's perestroika. Its instantaneous and brilliant appearance on the international arts scene was related to certain utopian hopes of the late 1980s. In the epoch of the political transformation of the world, as earlier in the epoch of the great geographical discoveries, it seemed possible to discover an unknown land of Russian art (likewise, Cuban, Chinese, Mexican, South African art), left behind since the time of the avant-garde. Were the hopes placed on Russian art justified, or during the process of its institutionalisation, did actuality turn out to be much more interesting than cultural demand? How does contemporary Russian art function now, at a time when artists have an ambiguous attitude to national identification? The task of this News Letter is to show what constitutes the Russian art scene in 2003, propose certain "thematic" routes, mapped out for contemporary Russian art, including such sections as political, feminist, corporal, media. These themes, repressed in the preceding period, became the object of artistic reflection during the process of fundamental changes that took place in the USSR. Then artists had the opportunity to remove themselves from the uniformity, even in their opposition to Soviet political, economic, aesthetic context. The political context, the existence of art in the epoch of mass-mediasation, gender differences, and the corporality of art have remained important for contemporary Russian art throughout the three periods into which it can be tentatively divided. These are, first, the period of discovering the unknown, revolutionary Russia which began in 1987 (in fact the forerunner of this period was the underground art of Moscow and Petersburg, historically the most active centres of art) and lasted until the early 1990s. The second period was distinguished by the political and corporal radicalism of the generation of artists which replaced it. It culminated in 1997-98. And finally, the third period, which started in the late 1990s and continues to this day, is characterised by a certain neo-modernist tendency, expressed in the wish to embody the Great Narrative in art, and to institutionalise contemporary Russian art.

Since this News Letter is the first one, inevitably is has a historical section. The latest productions of contemporary Russian artists were presented on the basis of the most important exhibitions, which were held or are being prepared for opening in 2003, both in Russia and abroad. Thus the 50th Venice biennial doubtlessly is one of the most important events. The participation of the artists in the biennial is obligatory mentioned, at the same time when more complete information on the Russian pavilion is to be found on the official site. For analysis of the latest works done by Petersburg artists, the large project "Graz. Cultural capital of Europe 2003" was important, held in January-March this year. Contemporary media art (Moscow and Petersburg) will be presented at the exhibition "Neue Ansaetze/ Zeitgenoessische Kunst aus Moskau", which opens on 31 May in the Dusseldorf Kunsthalle. Material for a description of the current situation in Russia was gleaned at the 7th International Art Fair "Art Moscow 2003" and especially the non-profit project Art Moscow Studios that followed immediately after the fair. When choosing artists, their international renown was taken into account, as well as their importance in the Russian context, for example, personal exhibitions held in such major museums as the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Russian Museum, and the presence of their works in the collections of state museums. Although the News Letter genre presupposes that material is organised on the principle: that which is new. Nevertheless, exactly the thematic approach seems most adequate for this News Letter, since it lets us look at the contemporary Russian situation from the certain historical perspective.

The definition of the political has such a broad connotation that it is difficult to discover any art that is not "political". However, in Russia it is connected to the history of the direct interaction of politics and art, from the Russian avant-garde to unofficial art. Up to 1987, in spite of all internal differences, Soviet art, divided into official and unofficial, was perceived exclusively within the framework of the political context, both in the USSR and in the West. In a paradoxical way the political mode for perestroika instantaneously made Soviet/ Russian art a timely artistic phenomenon. At the turn of the decade of the 1980s-90s, there were exhibitions in the major West European museums, such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam ("In the USSR and Beyond. Seventy seven Russian artists in the period 1970-1990".1990), and the Kunsthalle in Dusseldorf ("Sowjetische Kunst um 1990", 1991). In 1988 a Sotheby's auction took place in Moscow, with sensational prices for works by previously unknown Russian artists. The attention of renowned Western galleries and collectors, and the emergence of the first collections of contemporary art within the framework of state museums, such as the Museum of the Object in Tsaritsyno (founded by Andrey Erofeev in 1989 and transferred later on to the Tretyakov Gallery together Erofeev as a curator) - all this legitimised the instantaneous transfer from timeless, state regulated art in Russia to contemporary. At the same time, in the late 1980s, in the West, contemporary Russian art was perceived through the prism of the Russian avant-garde, which was assisted by the energy of the artistic project and utopian impulse of the political, economic, and aesthetic revolution which had occurred.

The political as a theme was reflected for the first time by "Sots Art" (a term thought up by artists Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid in 1972), who were able to not only ironically distance themselves from the Soviet context but also to make it the object of their reflections on the art of Social Realism. However, around the end of the 1970s, many Sots artists emigrated from the USSR to the West. Despite the fact that their works were shown immediately at the start of perestroika in Russia at such exhibitions as "Transit" (1990), for example, in 1997 the question unexpectedly arose: Was it possible to call those artists "Russian" who had lived and worked in the West for a long time? This question was asked when the founders of Sots art, Komar and Melamid, were invited to represent Russia at the 47th Venice biennial. As a result, Russia rejected the "foreigners", referring to the lack of a budget, and the artists were invited to the international pavilion. It's true that at the next biennial, the 48th, this political incorrectness was adjusted. Komar and Melamid presented the "Ecolaboration - Collaboration with Animals" project in the Russian pavilion, which they shared with St. Petersburg artist Sergei Bugaev Afrika. At the 49th Venice biennial one more crucial Sots artist represented Russia, Leonid Sokov, with the project "The Shadow of 20th Century Sculpture". This way, they demonstrated what the basis for contemporary Russian art was.

Nevertheless, one of the key areas at the beginning of perestroika was Moscow conceptualism, grouped around Ilya Kabakov (who received the Golden Lion for the Russian pavilion in 1993) and Andrei Monastyrskii, (who is invited to take part at the 50th Venice biennial) the founder of the group "Collective Actions". It is not only because Kabakov is the Russian artist most famous in the West, speaking in the same language of conceptual art, but about his own subject. Moscow conceptualism was reinterpreted, passed from hand to hand, by the next post-conceptual generation, and specifically by the group "Medical Hermeneutics" (founded in 1987 by Pavel Peppershtein
(who is making a special project for the exhibition "Moscow-Berlin", which will open in autumn 2003 in Berlin), Sergei Anufriev, and Yurii Leiderman, who also participates in the 50th Venice biennial). Moreover, Peppershtein named the Moscow conceptual circle NOMA (NOM was the name for an administrative district in ancient Egypt. In each of these districts, a part of Osiris' dismembered body had been buried.) The mythologisation of the "Soviet" served as the basis for creating a hermeneutic language of the conceptual circle of artists. A reading of such monumental constructions as the underground and Permanent Exhibition of National Economic Achievements as sacred texts of empire, the psycho-pathology of Soviet man's everyday life - these are the themes developed by conceptual and post-conceptual artists, represented in almost all post-Soviet exhibitions. "Soviet", as distinct from Sots art, was for the conceptualists not an object of ironical inversion, but those sacred parts of Osiris' dismembered body, which had to be gathered and "buried" in the earth of discourse. That is why conceptualism was timely even when the Soviet context ceased to exist, in contrast to Sots art, which had lost its basis.

Nevertheless, the ironic distancing, be it directly from the power discourse or from its representation in the mass media, is one of the important artistic strategies in modern Russian art. Possibly irony was a kind of defensive mechanism for most of the Russian population, which has endured the downfall of all seemingly unshakable orders. Sometimes this irony becomes regressive, like that of Konstantin Zvezdochetov, legendary founder of the AptArt movement and Club of Avant-gardists KLAVA in Moscow in the 1980s, who will be presented in the Russian pavilion at the 50th Venice biennial, and who creates comic pictures based on the Soviet humourous language of the 1970s.

In Leningrad, in contrast to the hermeneutic and hierarchical Moscow conceptualism, beginning in the 1980s, the neo-expressionist graffiti tendency developed, presented by the "New Artists" group (founded by Timur Novikov, who started with neo-expressionist painting in the late 1970s and in 1980s created an original theory of semantic perspective, embodied by the artist in collages on fabric) and the Club of Friends of Mayakovskii (president - Sergei Bugaev). In their creative work, the "New Artists" reappropriated Soviet symbols, the art of Social Realism and the Russian avant-garde. The parallel can be found in the "Irvin" group in Slovenia. One of the most attractive phenomena of Leningrad / Petersburg cultural activity was the "Orchestra of Popular Mechanics" by Sergey Kuryokhin, in whose presentations many artists participated. Kuryokhin, who combined in his Popular Mechanics rock group and the Military ensemble, for example, the popular Soviet variety singer Edita Piekha and Vanessa Redgrave in a musical collage, also managed to eliminate the oppositionism of Soviet culture. The Necrorealism movement emerged in Leningrad in the early 1980s, embodying the social nihilism characteristic of the time. Established by Evgenii Yufit, founder of the legendary studio "Mzhalalafilm", Necrorealism appeared as a spontaneous punk movement, parodying the favourite motifs of official Soviet culture - courage, heroism, readiness to give one's life for the homeland. This movement, generated by the dying Soviet ideology, referred in its very name to the Social Realism style.

The idea of the carnival inversion, Mikhail Bakhtin's proposal in the novel "Francois Rabelais", was already extraordinarily popular in the late 1980s, since the time when it was necessary to explain what was happening in contemporary Russian culture. For many Western researchers, specifically Bakhtin's idea played the role of an authentic (Russian) concept, in particular for the interperetation of Necrorealism. The inversion of the attitude to death, tabooed both in Soviet society, where death for the homeland was the only kind of death that was ideologically justified, and in Western society, where death was pushed out of sight because of hygienic considerations, characteristic for such artists as Yufit and Kustov.

From the start of the 1980th in his diverse activity, including actions, black and white photography and 16 mm. films Yufit studies the borderline territory between life and death. Since the late 1990s the main theme of artist's feature films has been evolutionary processes. "Killed by Lightning" (2002, screened at MoMA, N.Y.> May 2003) is Yufit's last film. His main themes, which go all the way through his individual cinema, is the psychopathological behaviour of a man who became the victim of a scientific experiment and psychological trauma, and evolutionary processes.

Vladimir Kustov, a founder of the necro-method, аlong with studying the iconography of death, turns directly to such sources as, for example, medical graphics that diagnose the death of a person, or photographs from forensic medicine reference books. The artist's attention is concentrated on that interval between life and death, which he calls the corridor of dying or the space of absolute dying. In the artist's latest installation "The City of Nucleic Dreams" (2003, represented at Graz: Cultural Capital of Europe 2003, Rotor Gallery) he restores the city cemetery.

In the 1990s, radical corporal art, or Moscow actionism, came to replace conceptualism in Moscow. The attack on conceptualism, which arose before perestroika, and in the opinion of the new generation of artists, captured all leading positions both inside and outside the country, was pursued in the form of brutal corporal actions. The art of Moscow actionism was political in the sense of open left-radicalism and the artists' direct involvement in political actions. In this period, the art of performance returns, which in the perestroika period had been overshadowed by representational art. The corporal turned out to be opposed to the discourse. More precisely the body became discursive: Oleg Kulik becoming a dog and Aleksandr Brener defecating in the Pushkin Museum, writing a dollar sign on a Kazimir Malevich painting in the Stedelijk Museum, the radicalism of Anatolii Osmolovskii, who exposed himself naked on the pages of art journals, and the E.T.I. who spelled out the world "Khui" (dick) with their bodies on Red Square. (the left-radical journal "Radek", founded by Osmolovskii, is invited as a special project to the 50th Venice biennial). Around the mid-1990s, Russian art amazed the world with its "wildness", bodily brutalism, and ideological radicalism.

Kulik is one of the most famous Russian artists, glorified by his own scandalous actions, like biting a viewer ("Interpol" exhibition in Stockholm, 1997). In one from his latest installation, "Museum" (2002), he created four display windows with wax figures: "Sportswomen" (closely resembling Anna Kurnikova), "Cosmonaut" (resembling Yurii Gagarin), "Singer " (resembling Bjork), "Actress" (resembling Madonna). In contrast to the wax museum, exhibiting copies of pop stars, figures of idols of modernity shown by Kulik so that they do not at all look alive. If one looks closely it is possible to see crude seams, fastened as in a taxidermist's workshop on the body of stars. Thus the stars of mass culture turn up in Kulik's "Museum" as dead scarecrows. These copies of crudely sewn pop figures are not only unable to become the model of identification but on the contrary, are shown as one of the rare breeds of human.

In the beginning of the 1990th "Neoacademism" emerged in St. Petersburg - Timur Novikov's project, neo-modernist in its essence, calling for the preservation of classical traditions and struggle with modernism. Immediately Oleg Maslov and Viktor Kuznetsov, www.oleg&viktor.com Egor Ostrov,www.ostrov.rivernet.ru Georgii Guryanov, and Olga Torbeluts and many others artists joined in this project, which exploited the classical background of the city, that had acquired the name of the cultural capital, the city of museums and classical architectural ensembles. Despite its "classical" character, the neo-academic project was perceived as quite provocative, trying to revive the Great Story in art.

Corporality is displayed in Neoacademism as a movement to the ideal image, as the creation of the ideal hero. The political, in contrast to the left-radical performances of Moscow actionism, became the neomodernist idea of rewriting history. At the same time it is possible to speak of the media character of the works, reappropriating the images of beauty from the history of art, fashion, the mass media.

New journals were launched in the 1990s: ("Kabinet" - a discursive journal of philosophy, art, and psychoanalysis, and "Khudozhestvennyi Zhurnal" (Arts Journal) www.guelman.ru/xz/ , which is the most professional periodical on contemporary art). Art criticism appeared in periodicals (Ekaterina Degot, Andrei Kovalev, Fedor Romer, Nikolai Molok, Milena Orlova, Viktor Mazin and others), Centres of Modern Art appeared (Viktor Miziano and Joseph Bakshtein's centre) in Moscow and the Department for New Tendencies in St. Petersburg (founded in 1991, directed by Aleksandr Borovskii). The Soros network of Centres for Contemporary Art and National Centres for Contemporary Art, established by the Ministry of Culture, worked actively all over Russia. Art fairs also made their appearance, first Art Myth in 1993, than in 1996 Art Moscow and Art Manege, and new galleries were opened. In Moscow in 1996 the Moscow House of Photography appeared (founder and director - Olga Sviblova) which actively institutionalised the art of photography (not having the status of art in the Soviet period), was transformed in 2003 into a Multi-media Centre of Contemporary Art.

In 1990 the Marat Guelman gallery appeared in Moscow. He was the founder of the best culture Internet portal www.gif.ru ,www.guelman.ru in Russia and a renowned cultural figure, and it was one of the most radical and socially active galleries. Direct participation in political life as part of the cultural project, which, it would seem, can not be combined with the idea of traditional gallery activity; the search for radical artists; and attention to the Russian province are what make it unique. The specific of the XL gallery (founded be Elena Selina) www.xlgallery.com , opened in 1993, is its original interest in post-conceptual art. The gallery presents not only artists of the conceptual school, but also feminist art, the art of new technologies, and painting as a conceptual project. Aidan Salakhova's gallery www.aidan-gallery.ru is the first Russian gallery of contemporary art (she is an artist and gallery manager who was in at the beginning of the First Gallery in 1989 in Moscow, and opened her own gallery in 1992) to present art as a process in photography and objects, and to pay attention to feminism and, as well as to the quality of the individual programme of the neo-academic tendency that arose in St. Petersburg. The Fine Art gallery features painting as a conceptual project, as Dmitri Gutov last project. The Regina Gallery www.regina.ru , established by Vladimir Ovcharenko at once became one of the most famous, because of the radical projects for which Oleg Kulik served as curator. It is known for the attention it devotes to social projects, radical art, painting, and photography, particularly the photography of Sergei Bratkov who also is represented at the Russian pavilion at 50th Venice biennial. In Petersburg, gallery activity, which spontaneously emerged in the late 1980s and came together in the 1990s, almost disappeared. In the second half of the 1990s a new type of commercial gallery appeared with its own programme, artists, and projects. The Gisich Art Gallery www.gisich.com (founded by Marina Gisich) specialises in video art, post-conceptualist art, and photography. D-137 gallery www.d137.ru (founded by Olga Kudriavtseva) specialises chiefly in presenting a unique kind of the Petersburg brand of Neoacademist tendencies. Dmitrii Semenov's gallery www.ds-gallery.ru , based on Russian-Swiss contacts, specializes in painting. Then there is the gallery of the NOMI journal.

The State Russian Museum is the most important center for contemporary Russian art from 1990, when the international exhibition "La territoire de l'Art" took place. The State Hermitage organized in the 1990th the seria of the exhibitions dedicated to unofficial artists who have been working in the museum in the 1970th. From 2000 the Sate Hermitage become crucial place for representing key figures in the 20th-21st century arti. The activism in non-traditional museums was very important as well, in the Freud's Dream Museum www.freud.ru (art related to psychoanalysis), for example, or in the Nabokov Museum. The institute ProArte is a unique place for studying and representing contemporary art.

Gradually contemporary art in Russia was institutionalised. With the 1990s, the period of declared radicalism in art split apart. On the one hand, Moscow actionism could not compete with the left-radicals such as, for example, the writer Limonov, sentenced for the possession of a weapon. On the other hand, the reaction to art became increasingly radical. So for example, in the case of the action of Avdey Ter-Oganjan at the Art Manege fair in 1998, when the artist, having proposed to viewers that icon reproductions should be chopped up with an axe, was forced to flee from Russia, persecuted by religious organisations; or the exhibition "Caution: religion" held in the Sakharov Centre in Moscow in 2003, which was wrecked by religious extremists.

For the last 15 years the rapidly changing social-political context has had a direct influence on art. If Soviet symbols were reappropriated in art at the end of the 1980s - having become a sign of the new Russia - then in the mid-1990s, in the epoch of disenchantment in political and social transformations and "leftism" of society, the time had come for politically incorrect artistic projects. Among these projects the "patriotic" (like the project Olga and Alexander Florensky are working at the moment) ones can be singled out tentatively, in which the artists refer to past myths, whether the are of "tsarist", "Soviet", or "Slavonic" Russia. There are so-called "Islamic" projects, in which artists in one way or another play the Muslim card, in the geo-political card game of the world. There are also psychopathological projects in which the political turns out to be one of the phantasms of the split consciousness.

Throughout the 1990s Sergei Bugaev Afrika created his installations, analysing the traumatic effect on people caused by the rapidly changing political, economic, and aesthetic context. The artist has worked with the aestheticisation of trauma. His installations, devoted to the opposition of the two super-states, Russia and the USA - "Donaldestruction" (1990), the problem of collective and personal memory and amnesia - "Doctor and Patient. Memory and amnesia" (1996), loss and acquisition of symbolic territory - "Crimania. Monuments, Icons, Mazafacka" (1995), a map of the world which is associated with a patient in a psychiatric clinic, under the influence of electroshock therapy - "MIR: made in the ХХ century" (1999) -- manifest the material and psychic artefacts displaced by the subject living under the influence of a master of the narrative of prevailing ideology. In his last installation, "Stalker 3" (2002), Afrika subjects semiotic terrorism, provided by the modern mass media, to criticism. The project is based on a documentary video recording shot on 16 April 1996 by Chechen fighters led by Khattab, and seized by a special subdivision of Russian troops as a war trophy..

The AES group www.aes-group.org, which mounted the famous "Islamic Project" in 1996, works with the social and political context. The artists presented views of the largest cities in the world in 2006: New York, Moscow, Istanbul, decorated with Muslim architecture - the cupolas of mosques and minarets. A paradoxical image today, 7 years after the project appeared, it is perceived as politically incorrect. The artists' latest work is computer collages representing a unique kind of Star Wars 3 "Action Half Life "(2003). Production photographs of children -- chosen by the artists with the help of Moscow model agencies, and equipped, by means of computer montage, with futuristic 21st century weapons -- are placed against the background of the Sinai desert. The project was perceived as a criticism of the new order, which established a new form of totalitarianism in the name of Western democracy and justice.

The new heroism, related to the loss of utopian hopes for the reconstruction of the world, is accomplished by means of inversion. The Novosibirsk artists Konstantin Skotnikov, Vyacheslav Mizin, and Dmitrii Bulnygin, in a series of light boxes, "Kunst Macht Frei or The Just Pogrom" (represented in the frame of "We-They" exhibition at Art Moscow 2003), perform the role of nationalists dressed in quilted jackets and caps with earflaps, and brandishing pitchforks and axes at beauties on an advertising billboard. The irony is related to the traditional division of society into right and left, a meta-position occupied by artists in relations with power and truth.

Georgy Gurianov turns to a re-thinking of Soviet art of the 1930s-50s, creating an original variation of non-art, according to the motifs of Social Realism art. Orienting himself toward the creative work of Aleksandr Deineki and Aleksandr Samokhvalov and following the thematic romanticism of the epoch, the artist creates a pantheon of ideal heroes - "Sailor", "Aviator", "Athlete". The series of Guryanov's paintings represents the heroes of a totalitarian utopia, as though it had come from the screen of Abraam Room's feature "The Stern Youth" (1936). This united in its stylistics Russian constructivism and neo-classical tendencies. The neo-modernism of the artist's personal project and a post-utopian impulse are combined with the mass media aspect of his images.

The neo-modernist project "Novonovosibirsk' (exhibited in the State Russian Museum in 2000) by Andrei Molodkin, Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, and Gleb Kosorukov. The artists proposed to transfer the Russian capital to the geographic centre in Siberia and to start its creation with monuments in the form of a gigantic head of Apollo, where the Ministry of Education was supposed to be placed, or a Colossus, planned for the Ministry of Agriculture. The artists' later personal projects were connected to modern mass media society. Molodkin's project - Love @ - was related to inversion, substituting a skull and bones for the sign of love -- a heart, reproduced in modern consumer society, declaring the author's right to love. Belyaev-Gintovt's project "Skin Hits" is formed of newspaper "hits" printed by the artist on canvas, but using prints of his hand instead of a paintbrush.

In spite of the fact that interest in painting, which occupied a leading position in the hierarchy of Social Realism art, partly diminished beginning in the 1990s, nevertheless it was precisely in 1990 that painting projects appeared. It seemed to confirm Kabakov's assertion of the 1990s: "the picture dies, but does not surrender". Kabakov himself returns today to the painting. Either there was a direct turning to the heroics of socialist realism as with Gurianov, or comics as with Zvezdochetov, graffiti like those of the Petersburg artist Kirill Shuvalov, who created the Petersburg comics of "War and Peace" - an anti-utopian Petersburg text, literally killing citizens and demolishing the city with the gigantic volumes of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi; or there was a conceptual idea of painting like that of Vinogradov and Dubosarskii. It is most interesting that the Russian pavilion, where their works will also be displayed, is devoted to "The Return of the Artist" (curator - Viktor Miziano). With the exclusion of the special photo project of Sergei Bratkov, the pavilion is dedicated to paintings.

Aleksandr Vinogradov and Vladimir Dubosarskii - the creators of the project "paintings to order", whose success in a paradoxical way was be related to the mass media nature of modern society and the process of its total aestheticisation. In their pictures, which in the final analysis line up in one Great Picture, turning to advertising and video clips, to mass culture stars and cliched images, the artists re-appropriated the visual images of the world around them. Vinogradov's and Dubosarskii's painting project arose in the epoch of total mass-mediasation, when one of the most important issue was not production, but the use of culture. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, it can be said that their paintings speak of the production of art not so much in the epoch of "its technical reproduction" as in the epoch of its mass media consumability.

Kerim Ragimov is St. Petersburg painter who works with mass media images. The "Human Project" is a series of pictures made by artist according to mass-printed originals, representing anonymous group portraits. Ragimov's latest project - RoadOff - is a series of paintings where the artist combines two stereotypes, the most famous Russian paintings of the 19th century, the subject of national identity and the Western automobiles most popular among New Russians.

It can not be reconciled with what was legalised by the institution of modern culture, and legalised by it as an example - this is what differentiates the work of the Moscow group Escape,www.escapeprogram.ru established in 1998 by Valery Ayzenberg, Bogdan Mamonov, Anton Litvin, and Liza Morozova. The group's strategy is escape, and above all, escape from the institution of modern art -- although this specific position makes their creative work especially attractive for institutions. Thus the group Escape just received the main prize of the Moscow Art Studios, a non-commercial exhibition, which followed the fair after the video installation "Quartet" - an allegory of the impossibility of mutual understanding, embodied in the "dark" room, with the video recording of the performance of a Beethoven string quartet, accompanied by the sound track of a Shostakovich string quartet.

Escape from the power discourse is one of the artistic strategies of the St. Petersburg artist Dmitrii Shubin. www.mediamix.ruIn "The Petersburg project. Death as photography" the artist photographs scenes of murders that were committed in St. Petersburg in the late 1990s, when the city acquired one more name - crime capital. The fact of death appears against the background of views of city sights, combined with the message that on this spot a murder was committed, which the artist places below, under the photographs, as an inconspicuous commentary. In 2003 Shubin created the "Presidential Project" , a series of photographs embodying the view of the Authorities. Documentary photographs with views of Moscow present literally what the president of Russia sees from his car on the way home from the Kremlin./b> In this way, the artist criticises the way the subject is controlled by power, through the view, even if this diffused view is not that of a totalitarian power but a liberal-democratic one.

Power is impersonal not only when it is embodied in the view of the president, but also in the prayerful swaying to and fro of mannequins, wrapped up in black, as in the installation "ABAK" by Sergey Shutov, shown in the Russian pavilion at the 49th Venice biennial in 2001. Shutov was one of the pioneers of new media, which started to develop in Russia at the end of the 1980s in particular, when the first video recorders became accessible. In Leningrad the first video artist was Yuris Lesnik, who experimented with the formal possibilities of video and received the blessing of Nam June Paik (a check for 1000 dollars, which he preserved as a work of art). In 1990, video art actively developed in Moscow, thanks in part to TV-gallery, then the Media Art Laboratory, which assembled a collection of Russian video. Now the new generation of video artists arrived, not only St. Petersburg and Moscow, but also from the provinces, for example Mizin and Shaburov from Novosibirsk. Also the group from Ekaterinburg "Zer Gut", who had done almost their first work, presented in the studios of "Art Moscow". St. Petersburg artists Tatyana Golovzina made a video installation on the basis of interviews made with homeless people in shelters and got a prize during Art Moscow 2003. Dmitrii Bulatov from Kaliningrad created an urban documentary video.

Vladislav Efimov and Aristarkh Chernyshev www.artinfo.ru/chef/ are pioneers of multi-media installations. The artists started to work together in 1995. They created meta-scientific installations, such as "Genetic Gymnastics" for example, or "Shining Prostheses". In 2003 both artists made two personal projects. Efimov's project "War and Peace" unites images of monkeys and a typewriter. In this project the artist poses the question: Is it possible for a thousand monkeys by chance to create a new "War and Peace"? Chernyshev created a new kind of Shining Television in the Art Moscow Studios. In his own way the artist continued Nam June Paik's manipulation with transmitted images, which in a certain way are distorted by means of a special computer programme.

The media-nature of art is related to feminism, re-translating the mass media images and stereotyped representations about the role of woman in society. Lyudmila Gorlova , in a series of photographs played out a situation typical for serials - a new phenomenon of post-Soviet society, which have become the object of mass feminine identification. In 1998 Aidan Salakhova created the post-media painting "Suspense" - a portrayal of a seated pregnant woman, animated by an identical video-projection. It gradually starts to "come alive", partly going beyond the boundary of the painted image, deviating from it, and returning to its place.In the 2003 work "Love and Death", the artist presented photographs of two Ushui girls, with swords in their hands, wearing stylised Far Eastern clothing, who gradually come to life, separate from the static image, and start a ritual battle. The girls change places and then, meeting in space between two photographs, return to the boundaries of their images.

Olga Tobreluts works with the media on the boundary of the fashion industry and the history of art. In the series "Sacred Figures" (1999), she inserted figures sanctified by the modern mass media into famous images from the history of art. In 2003, returning to the series, she introduced into her new works some words that are most often uttered in contemporary political speech. Finding itself, as it seemed, outside politics, the figure of Venus, falling into the context of the words WAR, AGGRESSION, SHOCK, VIOLENCE, begins to remind us of a victim of the bombing. And the scarcely readable inscription on the brassiere STOP THE WAR is perceived as a commercial message. This pacifistic slogan occupies the place of the commercial brand name.

Feminism in Russia has quite a complex history. In spite of the fact that there were many women artists in the art of the Russian avant-garde, and that immediately after the 1917 revolution, women received equal rights with men, the totalitarian Soviet society was phallocratic and patriarchal. Divided into two camps (official and unofficial art), the women artists nevertheless came together in one area - in the rejection of gender differences, in the desire to be an artist of the male sex. At the end of the 1980s the question of feminism and gender differences became one of the keys in the process of forming the discourse of contemporary art. At this time the first women's exhibitions were being mounted in St. Petersburg and Moscow, conferences were being organised. There was a rejection of the division "on the basis of gender". In St. Petersburg, for example, male artists were invited to participate in the exhibition "Woman in Art" (1989), exhibiting their works under female pseudonyms. At this same exhibition, the artist Vladislav Mamyshev, known as Monroe , debuted, and took a change of identity as his strategy. Repeatedly impersonating his beloved heroine in performances, feature films, video films, and photographs, Mamyshev-Monroe later turned to other famous historical personages, such as Catherine the Great and Sherlock Holmes, Adolf Hitler and Count Dracula. He embodied as well famous personages from Russian folk tales in a series "Russian Questions" (1997), or told the history of a star of the totalitarian Soviet cinema, Lyubov Orlova, in the series "Happy Love" (2000), or reincarnated himself as the hero Tin-Tin (2003).

Having become one of the symbols of perestroika, feminism in this initial period was immediately related to the ideological context. Thus the conceptual artist Elena Elagina created an installation devoted to Olga Lepeshinskaya - an almost mythological figure of the Soviet woman - a scientist who took it as her goal to prolong human life.In her later work "Girl and Death" artist reflected the gap between prevailing ideology and gender differences."Girl and Death" The object of Maria Konstantinova, which represents a soft coitus of star and swastika - two totalitarian symbols of the 20th century - is an example of the combination of political and feminist discourse in ironic dismissal. Olga Chernysheva exhibited at the 49th Venice biennial a Russian landscape, which included a photographic series of fur hats - the favourite headgear of Soviet-Russian women. In 1990 she investigated the sacred book of Stalinist housewives: "The Book of Tasty and Heathy Food". Artists were active in Petersburg in the early 1990s such as Bella Matveeva, who re-appropriated the salon, decadent style of the early 20th century in her paintings and photographs; Olga Florenskaya, who since the late 1980s created in a "women's" technique" collages using fabric; Vita Buivid, who printed nostalgic photographs in the spirit of the 1950s on paper napkins. In the mid-1990s the "Soviet" gradually ceased to dominate in women's art. A new generation of women artists appeared, working with gender differences, for example, Tatyana Antoshina, who created her own "Museum of the Woman" and inverted the traditional opposition: woman as the object of observation, man as the producer of thought. There where the history of art set up a female model, she replaced it with a male model ("Olympia", "Turkish Baths"). Tatyana Liberman created a series of eroticised photographs of fruits and a (seria "Imagination technique", 2003). There was fetishism, when the wish to predominate shifted to the subject, the partial object, replacing the whole. So, for example in the works of the artist Helena Berg, who creates her paintings from artificial fingernails (seria "beauty an the Beast", 2002).

Feminism in Russian is related to corporal radicalism. Thus the performances of Elena Kovylina, who calls her art "positive radicalism", always turn out to be a testing of limits, in particular, the limits of the physical existence of the artist herself. In 2000 during the performance "Do It Yourself", she stood on a stool for two hours, with a noose around her neck, and instructions on knocking away the stool, in the Zverev Centre in Moscow. In the same year, in France, Kovylina danced a waltz (the performance "Waltz") while drinking glasses of vodka. It seems that the artist is experimenting with the durability of the stereotypes that exist in society, using her own body as a space.

The Petersburg artists Glyuklya (Nataliya Pershina-Yakimanskaya) and Tsaplya (Olga Egorova) in their first performance "Poor Liza" in 1996 also tested the limits, having made the "advance" in the memory about the heroine of P. Tchaikovskii's opera "The Queen of Spades", who jumped into the Winter Canal. Sacrifice was one of the leitmotifs of their creative work, embodied as it were in the initial trip through the claustrophobic space of a submarine (the installation "Abelard and Heloise") or in the altruism of the "White" personages which they devised. One more motive of their creative work is in the resounding voices of historical heroines, in white dresses, combining the desire to experience something grandiose, great suffering.

An artist from Ufa, Angelina Verigina, made mother's milk the main subject of the work in a video installation with a gastronomic element, in the artist's definition, "Cannibalism as the highest form of love" (2003), shown at the Art Moscow Studios. The artist decants milk on three computer screens and then presents the final product - a buffet of mother's milk. The altruism of the female body is in using the woman's own body to nourish, as the highest form of love.

Speaking of the peculiarities of contemporary Russian art in 2003, we can summaries that for the last 15 years the Russian artist ceased to play to advantage the role of an extravagant figure with relation to the international art scene. It is no longer necessary to justify hopes for an avant-garde past, it is unnecessary to surprise the world with brutality and thus distinguish oneself by "Russianness". The desire to be included in the international artistic situation was embodied in the dream about the Great Project (Miziano and Bakshtein), which assembled the most famous international curators in Moscow in early 2003. For 15 years the institutionalisation of contemporary art in Russia has proceeded and simultaneously a change of attitude toward it from outside. Many young artists live in Germany (Joulia Strauss, Elena Kovylina), Austria (Anna Ermolaeva), Paris (Olga Kiseleva, Andrey Molodkin) and many others, and work in Russia as well. Instead of the dream of the end of the 1980-90 - the most thing for the Russian artist was to be noticed in the West - now it has to be evaluated also in Russia.