Old - Fashioned Passion.
Canvassing Russian Rhetoric
Victor Misiano
<...> So, a principle
of reduction has taken full charge of the strategies of this new "third
wave" that has rolled into Moscow in the course of the last few months.
An utter absence of values came to be replaced by a newborn sense of responsibility,
as well as by a search for solid, primary, and primordial foundations. The younger
painters were to face themselves with an unexpected discovery: once reduction
has run its course, the solid deposit remaining in the crucible can only be
art itself. What else, in fact, could serve as a solid base, if not immediacy
of their own activities? And what could constitute the primary element of any
artistic strategy, if not the phenomenon of art itself? But looking at art in
terns of its very own immanence remains a great innovation in Moscow's art world.
Never before could art be simply art; in had always been forced to be more than
that. The epistemological catastrophe was to crush the last extant from of "regime
art", which has always been a question of bending the spirit of art towards
subservience to an ideological Utopia. The very same ruins were also to bury
the last surviving underground, which had declared creativity's subservience
to Utopias of spiritual confrontation. The reductive frame of mind, on the part
of the "third wave", has freed itself from the weight that the ethical
brings to bear on the aesthetic, as well as from social analysis, culturological
mythologizing, schizoid deconstruction, and finally, from everything else that
defined the intellectual context of Moscow's artists of the last twenty years.
By proclaiming the demise of Moscow's artistic tradition, the younger painters
appear on the scene like so many new and newly ingenuous Candides. They have
cleared their minds of categories like "God", "epistemological
void", "linguistic structure", "magic", etc. Their
minds, in fact, are typified by a truly surprising quality: passion. While theorizing
once on the reflexive and mediatory qualities of the conceptualist sensibility,
Dmitri Prigov - one of the major exponents of the Moscow underground -was able
to coin a category to which he referred to as the "new passion"; so
the reductive, primary attitudes of the younger painters might now be defined
as "old-fashioned passion".
<....> In the person of Dmitri Gutov, "old-fashioned passion"
appropriates still another of the aspects of art: style. The material on which
this painter works is the style of the 1960s, which was the very last period
in which the whole of Soviet society - from furniture design to the Sputnik
- was permeated by a single model. One notes that the artist is intrigued by
the neofunctionalist forms of the era of "the thaw", and not by that
"Stalinian" neoacademism which was subjected to various manipulations
on the part of "Sots Art". The reason for his option lies in the fact
that the style of the 1960s was generated by an aesthetic Utopia, making it
style in the absolute, whereas "socialist realism" played the role
of permissible ideological doctrine; it was a pseudo-aesthetic phenomenon where
style found its function as a mask. The totality of the aesthetic project of
thirty years ago strikes Gutov as a clear manifestation of the possibilities
of an integral and self-sufficient lapidary, and universal artistic world. Style
for "old-fashioned passion" is in any case something more than a purely
formal mechanism; it is also psychological, and as such it harbors a dimension
of profound warmth and intimacy. Gutov relates to the 1960s as the epoch of
his childhood; the wall-paper, the kitchen buffet, and the sets of glass plates
in his paintings are therefore imbued with a tone of nostalgia. So style acquires
a value as a new way of breaking with the tradition of the Moscow underground.
One remembers that the poetics of "apt-art" demanded the suppression
of style, insisting that style belonged to the class of official and normative
values, like the slogan, the parade, and the military uniform. Gutov insists,
entirely to the contrary, and in perfect consistency with his own point of view,
that the figurative parts of his style relate to the texts of the popular Russian
proverbs. The slogan, by definition, belongs to the sphere of ideology; proverbs
are a part of the sphere of experience. <...>
Flash Art
May-June 1991, p. 111-112