Gaiety is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia, Saatchi Gallery
It was Russian Art week back in November last year, which should still be providing a bumper payday for those sorts of galleries that exist to flog art to Oligarchs at multi-million pound price tags. There are unsurprisingly quite a few in London. A Ukrainian translator and teacher recently shared that she had taken on a private assignment, acting as interpreter and translator for an art dealer and prospective client (of the Russian speaking variety). The fundamental dilemma appeared to be whether to spend £3m on one picture, or £2m on another. The final decision was apparently made solely on the size of the wall. If I ever, by quirk of fate, amass such amounts of money I hereby promise not to be so vacuous.
It is for these sorts of reasons I have always thought that the link between modern art and PR makes nonsense of the art itself. Refer to sharks-in-formaldehyde, messy beds and so on. There is a reputation manufactured around an artist that becomes an exercise in branding and vast sums change hands for their modern art which is at best described as a commodity. It seems art based on your interior design concept is actually a bit less risky.
Charles Saatchi is the king of this world. A founder director of Saatchi and Saatchi and latterly M&C Saatchi, he created a brand of PR which made corporations millions and broke others who caught on too late. He created ‘Labour isn’t Working’ for Margaret Thatcher and became synonymous with the 80s excesses.
He also has built up possibly the most extensive and valuable collection of modern art in the world. The reason his collection is so valuable is because he made his artists famous through PR. The current home for his collections is in Duke of York Square in the Kings Road, not far from where he resides with his wife and TV Chef Nigella Lawson. I had never been there, having previously thought that the business of formaldehyde-sharks was nothing more than simply that, a business.
Russian Art week saw The Saatchi Gallery launch a distinctly unique exhibition with a Russian theme, so I went along. The Gaiety is The Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia exhibition is something of a challenge.
There were indeed some stand-out pieces worthy of the formaldehyde-shark label. Irina Korina’s work Capital, 2012 is supposed to represent the wasteful dysfunctional urban environment in a Marxist context (Das Kapital – get it?). It is in reality a pile of over flowing rubbish. Equally so, Daria Krotova’s Heart, Organ of Love (Sometimes My heart Turns into A Chicken) 2011 is actually papermache representations of the human heart that manage, cleverly, at the same time to look like roasted chickens. Works on so many levels you see.
Aside from these pickled sharks, I thought there were one or two pieces that provoke the observer to stop and to think and to look closer. They are the pieces that are completely and distinctly Soviet, they can be nothing else. Whether a photograph constitutes modern art is surely up for debate, but Vikenti Nilin’s From the Neighbours Series of black and white photos of ordinary everyday looking citizens perched on the widow ledges of their Khrushchev style apartment blocks is fascinating. Are all these people going to jump? Some look as if they just appreciate the view. I’ve seen those sorts of people and those sorts of apartment blocks, you wonder if any of them did jump, what would the photographer do? But these pictures can’t be real surely or this wouldn’t be art, would it?
Boris Mikhailov’s Case History 1997 – 1998 is more telling. The people in his collection of 413 photos are ordinary residents from his Ukrainian home town, Kharkov. Most of them are toothless, ill, scarred and beaten by the change of life around them. Some are drunk or hysterical, some look resigned and some look entirely dead behind the eyes. He has persuaded many to strip off, making them look ashamed or vulnerable. Some look defiantly aggressive, as if they still think they can beat The System. The System is what the piece is about. Mikhailov has documented the abandoned working class, young and old, chronically poor, and newly homeless individuals who fell through the cracks of a system now without a net, failed by the promises of Perestroika and capitalism.
Tattoos in the Soviet Union have a symbolism we do not recognise in the west. They are an art form synonymous with crime and prison. The nearest is probably the Japanese organised crime units, the Yakuza, and their elaborate shoulder tattoos. In Soviet times tattooing was illegal so these were home made designs with coded messages. Prison rates reached as high as 1 in 5 under Soviet times, so there are many examples. Sergei Vasiliev was a Russian newspaper photographer and prison warden in the 50s. He together with a colleague began cataloguing the designs on prisoners. They created the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. Their photos always show the full face and body of the owner. It makes art itself out of a photo of a very personal and individual art.
I have two favourites that are not photos. Valery Koshlyakov’s works are shown in a separate room, specifically with a balcony allowing you to view them from height. The Grand Opera Paris 1995 and High Rise on Raushskaya Embankment 2006 are almost dreamy landscapes, colours merge like the Impressionists. However, Koshlyakov has used torn fragments of cardboard boxes as his canvas. His message is one of a failed utopia, almost as if he is saying, look I give you these buildings of high culture with promises of a shiny bright future, but they are only built from rubbish. Is this a post-communist rejection of capitalism? He is also trying to convey an artistic message, as if this is art, but painted on transient waste.
My own stop and think piece was Dasha Fursey’s Boundary Post of A Cat Bajun 2012, ironically it is all about formaldehyde this time. The piece is a collection of 6 pickle jars, sitting one on top of each other. Each one of them contains typical Russian pickles; cabbage, mushrooms, berries and the like. They don’t look the best, somewhat decaying and battered, as if the pickling process has failed or the harvest wasn’t all that good in the first place. I have seen these jars before many times. Babushkas sell them all over cities and in the countryside, all their own home grown pickles, because that is what they have traditionally done to survive. Preserving fruit and vegetables this way is a very rural eastern art, traditionally it was designed to see out the harsh frozen winters and make the best of the fertile soils of the regions. I think Fursey’s message is that you may encase anything in the old protective ways, but if it is rotten in the first place there is nothing you can do. It is about fear of shortage and starvation but it is also about the futile preservation of evil in the new Russia. In Kazakhstan, by the roadsides of the Polygon (Kazakhstan’s huge nuclear testing site) I saw jar after jar of perfectly preserved home grown vegetables, all sold from stalls by babushkas in head scarves. They know they are contaminated and toxic, but their own babushka did this. It is what everyone did. Keep on preserving what is rotten, because sometimes there just is nothing else you can do.
So Mr Saatchi, maybe after all, you do have a point. I saw those Russian jars and vegetables and I instantly saw what it meant. This is because I understand the painful nuclear legacy and land contamination in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the cultural and environmental significance of traditional food preservation, the economic collapse of Russia and its effects on those old babushkas who pickled.
Pickling I understand, however, I know nothing about sharks.
It is for these sorts of reasons I have always thought that the link between modern art and PR makes nonsense of the art itself. Refer to sharks-in-formaldehyde, messy beds and so on. There is a reputation manufactured around an artist that becomes an exercise in branding and vast sums change hands for their modern art which is at best described as a commodity. It seems art based on your interior design concept is actually a bit less risky.
Charles Saatchi is the king of this world. A founder director of Saatchi and Saatchi and latterly M&C Saatchi, he created a brand of PR which made corporations millions and broke others who caught on too late. He created ‘Labour isn’t Working’ for Margaret Thatcher and became synonymous with the 80s excesses.
He also has built up possibly the most extensive and valuable collection of modern art in the world. The reason his collection is so valuable is because he made his artists famous through PR. The current home for his collections is in Duke of York Square in the Kings Road, not far from where he resides with his wife and TV Chef Nigella Lawson. I had never been there, having previously thought that the business of formaldehyde-sharks was nothing more than simply that, a business.
Russian Art week saw The Saatchi Gallery launch a distinctly unique exhibition with a Russian theme, so I went along. The Gaiety is The Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union: New Art from Russia exhibition is something of a challenge.
There were indeed some stand-out pieces worthy of the formaldehyde-shark label. Irina Korina’s work Capital, 2012 is supposed to represent the wasteful dysfunctional urban environment in a Marxist context (Das Kapital – get it?). It is in reality a pile of over flowing rubbish. Equally so, Daria Krotova’s Heart, Organ of Love (Sometimes My heart Turns into A Chicken) 2011 is actually papermache representations of the human heart that manage, cleverly, at the same time to look like roasted chickens. Works on so many levels you see.
Aside from these pickled sharks, I thought there were one or two pieces that provoke the observer to stop and to think and to look closer. They are the pieces that are completely and distinctly Soviet, they can be nothing else. Whether a photograph constitutes modern art is surely up for debate, but Vikenti Nilin’s From the Neighbours Series of black and white photos of ordinary everyday looking citizens perched on the widow ledges of their Khrushchev style apartment blocks is fascinating. Are all these people going to jump? Some look as if they just appreciate the view. I’ve seen those sorts of people and those sorts of apartment blocks, you wonder if any of them did jump, what would the photographer do? But these pictures can’t be real surely or this wouldn’t be art, would it?
Boris Mikhailov’s Case History 1997 – 1998 is more telling. The people in his collection of 413 photos are ordinary residents from his Ukrainian home town, Kharkov. Most of them are toothless, ill, scarred and beaten by the change of life around them. Some are drunk or hysterical, some look resigned and some look entirely dead behind the eyes. He has persuaded many to strip off, making them look ashamed or vulnerable. Some look defiantly aggressive, as if they still think they can beat The System. The System is what the piece is about. Mikhailov has documented the abandoned working class, young and old, chronically poor, and newly homeless individuals who fell through the cracks of a system now without a net, failed by the promises of Perestroika and capitalism.
Tattoos in the Soviet Union have a symbolism we do not recognise in the west. They are an art form synonymous with crime and prison. The nearest is probably the Japanese organised crime units, the Yakuza, and their elaborate shoulder tattoos. In Soviet times tattooing was illegal so these were home made designs with coded messages. Prison rates reached as high as 1 in 5 under Soviet times, so there are many examples. Sergei Vasiliev was a Russian newspaper photographer and prison warden in the 50s. He together with a colleague began cataloguing the designs on prisoners. They created the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia. Their photos always show the full face and body of the owner. It makes art itself out of a photo of a very personal and individual art.
I have two favourites that are not photos. Valery Koshlyakov’s works are shown in a separate room, specifically with a balcony allowing you to view them from height. The Grand Opera Paris 1995 and High Rise on Raushskaya Embankment 2006 are almost dreamy landscapes, colours merge like the Impressionists. However, Koshlyakov has used torn fragments of cardboard boxes as his canvas. His message is one of a failed utopia, almost as if he is saying, look I give you these buildings of high culture with promises of a shiny bright future, but they are only built from rubbish. Is this a post-communist rejection of capitalism? He is also trying to convey an artistic message, as if this is art, but painted on transient waste.
My own stop and think piece was Dasha Fursey’s Boundary Post of A Cat Bajun 2012, ironically it is all about formaldehyde this time. The piece is a collection of 6 pickle jars, sitting one on top of each other. Each one of them contains typical Russian pickles; cabbage, mushrooms, berries and the like. They don’t look the best, somewhat decaying and battered, as if the pickling process has failed or the harvest wasn’t all that good in the first place. I have seen these jars before many times. Babushkas sell them all over cities and in the countryside, all their own home grown pickles, because that is what they have traditionally done to survive. Preserving fruit and vegetables this way is a very rural eastern art, traditionally it was designed to see out the harsh frozen winters and make the best of the fertile soils of the regions. I think Fursey’s message is that you may encase anything in the old protective ways, but if it is rotten in the first place there is nothing you can do. It is about fear of shortage and starvation but it is also about the futile preservation of evil in the new Russia. In Kazakhstan, by the roadsides of the Polygon (Kazakhstan’s huge nuclear testing site) I saw jar after jar of perfectly preserved home grown vegetables, all sold from stalls by babushkas in head scarves. They know they are contaminated and toxic, but their own babushka did this. It is what everyone did. Keep on preserving what is rotten, because sometimes there just is nothing else you can do.
So Mr Saatchi, maybe after all, you do have a point. I saw those Russian jars and vegetables and I instantly saw what it meant. This is because I understand the painful nuclear legacy and land contamination in the Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the cultural and environmental significance of traditional food preservation, the economic collapse of Russia and its effects on those old babushkas who pickled.
Pickling I understand, however, I know nothing about sharks.
