Newsletter: Yuri, you have attained considerable recognition in Russia through personal exhibitions in the largest museums as well as your web site (www.utopia.ru). Your work became one of the symbols of the "Moscow-Berlin" exhibition opened in Moscow at the beginning of April. However, it would not be an exaggeration to say that you are even more involved in the international art context. How would you characterize relations between the Russian art scene and the Western art world?

Yuri Avvakumov: That recognition is relative, of course. Nothing like Malevich. And I don't especially feel like a symbol. As for the international art scene, I do not consider myself an actor in the international troupe, which in the end simply provides wider possibilities for acting. I would say it has better equipment. If you are asked to act there, you are immediately provided with everything needed to do so. Here, you have to organize the enterprise yourself. The relations between the Western and the Eastern art scenes were best described by Mladen Stilinovic: "An artist who doesn't speak English is no artist."

What are your plans for the immediate future? What shows are you participating in? What are your expectations for the "Moscow-Berlin" exhibition in Moscow?

However, 1990 is also the year in which Timur Novikov and Sergei Shutov made their video Sunrise (Voskhod solntsa), a work of plain, almost bare visuality. Enclosed in the simplicity of a red square on a black background, a stylized, minuscule yellow sun slowly slides up to the extreme upper side of the square. It is a 40-second piece of enjoyable and amusing straightforwardness whose impact is strengthened by the other three videos the two artists made together: Airplane (Samolet), Submarine (Podvodnaya lodka), and Penguins (Pingviny).
. . .. From the perspective of the history of Russian video art, namely its first steps, it is relevant to stress that this work resulted from the collaboration of two artists based in two different places: Timur Novikov in Leningrad and Sergei Shutov in Moscow. Chronologically, Leningrad was the place where the very first videos were "consciously" made. But it is Moscow that "institutionalized" the medium, organizing shows from the beginning of the 90's in which videos and video installations were placed at the center of the stage. These were exhibitions of video works expressly presented as such, as well as videos from well-established foreign artists.
. . . .Leningrad at that time was the eclectic breeding ground of the collective Pirate TV (Timur Novikov, Yuris Lesnik, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, and others), whose tireless activity spanned three years, from 1989 to1992, and resulted in the production of several video works packaged as a television broadcast. Despite such important differences as a time lag of some 20 years, the lack of government grants, and the absence of technical support from professional cable television systems, Pirate TV's activities recall American artists who toward the end of the 60's saw in video a powerful artistic medium capable of facilitating the production of alternative television. Barbara London's words on those artists point out significant similarities to what happened in Leningrad at the very end of the 80's: "Video art was largely initiated by small artists' collectives scattered across the United States, as a form of political and aesthetic opposition to commercial television genres and to the more traditional art forms."
. . . .At this point, it should be noted that Sunrise is a work made using Shutov's Atari computer, craftily modified by the artist himself to serve his aesthetic purposes. In fact, this modified use of the medium differs very little from the technical innovations made by the pioneers of American video art.
. . . .Sunrise is, by nature, a minimalist video. Minimalism was a key concept in the production of another duo working in the field of video art, Blue Soup (Daniil Lebedev and Alexei Dobrov), in which another minimalist sun rose eight years after the sun made by Novikov and Shutov. The work in question is aptly called For Ever in the Wake of the Sun. Once again, the visual space is aseptically simple: on a black background, a large yellow disc symbolizing the sun very slowly crawls up until the whole screen is filled. The visual impact is strengthened by the loud singing of "For Ever in The Wake of the Sun", sung, as the credits claim, by "the Male Trio and Chorus of the Cinema Orchestra, Pyongyang, Korea." The work received immediate international acclaim and, together with the whole body of their mature works, has ensured for Blue Soup a prominent position in the history of Russian video art.
. . . . Russian video artists are of course more concerned with making videos than learning about the history and evolution of their medium. It is entirely possible that Blue Soup, creating their own sunrise in 1988, were unaware of Novikov and Shutov's "version". This observation exemplifies an interesting -- and in many ways unfortunate -- tendency, i.e. that many video artists, especially those belonging to what today can be called the "first generation", were not familiar with the works of their colleagues. As stated earlier, this was due to the fact that at the very beginning of the genre videos were shown only in a given artist's private flat or studio. Further, the absence of a systematic and comprehensive archive as well as complete disinterest on the part of academia has made access to "old" works shamefully limited.
. . . .Nevertheless, this situation has changed considerably due to the ever-growing number of exhibitions including videos -- even though these works are very rarely more than five years old. Accordingly, the duo behind the group Blue Noses (Alexander Shaburov and Vyacheslav Mizin) was well aware of Blue Soup's work when -- five years later -- they made their own For Ever in the Wake of the Sun, shown at the "Viewing Platform" ("Smotrovaya ploshadka") exhibition (curators: Andrei Erofeev and Tatyana Volkova) at the Central Artist's House in Moscow in October, 2003. Mizin and Shaburov's choice of technique was of vital importance to the evolution of video art in Russia. Instead of making a "parody collage" of another artist's work (changing movies to animations or paintings to photographs), they produced a "digitally retouched", complete version of the Blue Soup video, albeit with one important change: in line with their continuous playing with the well-established imagery of popular culture and contemporary art, they replaced the large yellow disc with a - similarly large - yellow silhouette of a phallus. This technique clearly transcends the mere act of making a joke only for the sake of making (and having) fun, granting a certain authority to the work under attack -- as all parodies do -- and lending it the status of a work of art. In short: by parodying Blue Soup's work, the Blue Noses have basically helped to institutionalize the authority of one video work in particular, and by extension of video art in general.
The Blues Noses' For Ever in the Wake of the Sun requires a brief postscript: In this video presentation, traces of the original work were purposely covered up; Blue Soup's video was not shown at the exhibition, and no references to it were made in the credits at the end of the video or on the information card hanging in the exhibition hall. Consequently, the pleasure of recognizing the parody was enjoyed only by those familiar with the original, as often happens with many works of contemporary art.
. . . .In conclusion, it is rather interesting to note that all three works dealing with the sunrise theme originated with "collectives", as was frequently the case at the dawn of American video art, although this might be seen as mere coincidence. More pertinently, the recurring imagery of the sunrise is a well-suited visual metaphor of the rise of video art in today's Russia, a country in which just a few years ago the combination of the words "video" and "art" was considered -- especially in the bureaucratic world of institutions -- a contradiction in terms.