Shaping Soviet art - two German exhibitions; various artists; Doucumenta-Halle, Kassel, and Kunsthalle, Cologne - Report From Germany

Art in America, Sept, 1994 by Margarita Tupitsyn

The Ludwig collection's preference for painting explains the secondary position to which avant-garde photography was relegated in this exhibition, a position that parallels its orphan status in Soviet art studies in general. Although the selection of late '20s and early '30s photographs made up perhaps the most visually complete--and in many respects the most novel--part of the exhibition, it seemed a mere afterthought. The photographs were separated from the historical avant-garde, despite the fact that they were an intrinsic part of its history. For instance, comparison of Boris Ignatovich's aerial shots of Leningrad monuments and industrial sights with his later photographs of swimmers and bathers (both included in the show) effectively illustrates the shift that took place around 1935, as both artists and photographers moved from structurally complex and thematically reductive subjects to more formally conventional and romanticized images.

Like Malevich, Kabakov appears here as a proper name, as a convenient label rather than as the artist responsible for founding the Moscow conceptual tradition. The nature and extend of his influence on a generation of younger artists was not articulated. Many of the contemporary artists included in this exhibition, Vladimir Yankilevsky, Vladimir Yakovlev, Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Oskar Rabin, Mikhail Grobman, Dmitry Prigov, Grisha Bruskin, Eduard Shteinberg and Igor Zakharov-Ross among them, have only a circumstantial

0 relationship to Kabakov or to one another. They were all considered "unofficial artists," but their presence together in this exhibition testified primarily to the distortions created by Soviet cultural structures rather than to any shared ideological or esthetic affinities. Had these artists' careers developed under more normal conditions, most of them would never have ended up on the same exhibition checklist. Furthermore, despite the title, the show did not qualify as a historical survey, since major contemporary names--like Ivan Chuikov, Vladimir Nemukhin, Oleg Vassiliev, Irina Nakhova and Leonid Sokov--were missing. Nor did the contemporary section serve as a history of any particular tendency in post-Stalinist Soviet culture, such as abstract art, figurative expressionism, Conceptual 0 or Sots art (Soviet pop art)--all of which could have been explored.

There are other themes that might have been used to connect the otherwise random selections dubbed "the second avant-garde." There is, for instance, some link between Kabakov and Yullo Sooster's drawings from the 1960s, which were exhibited here. The two artists became friends while working in adjacent studios; Sooster's knowledge of Surrealist traditions (he had access to Western art publications, a rarity at that time) had some impact on the spatial and iconograhic qualities of Kabakov's early experiments in graphics. Also, the conceptual vocabularies of Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov (whose paintings were generously represented in two rooms of the show) are closely connected: they owe much to the children's book illustrations both artists made throughout the 1970s in order to earn a living. It was this practice which most likely led to the combination of drawing and text which has been the primary format of their conceptual investigations.