Digest: Fall 2009. The Third Moscow Biennial of Contemporary Art

Find out about Jean Hubert Martin's remake of Magiciens de la Terre, and the Moscow audience's reaction, as well an oversaturated parallel program with not one but two art fairs to boot.

In late September, OPENSPACE.RU gave its Russian readers extensive coverage of the Third Moscow Biennial. The biennial's main project opened on held at the Garage, a former bus depot built by Konstantin Melnikov in 1928, now a new Moscow art venue operated by Daria Zhukova, fiancee of Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. In the following we want to tell our English language readers what they missed by opting not to come to Moscow so soon after Istanbul.

OPENSPACE.RU's coverage of the Third Moscow Biennial's main project began with an interview http://www.openspace.ru/art/names/details/3209/ with the main project's curator Jean Hubert Martin almost a year before the opening. "I want the coming Moscow biennial to be truly international, with the participation of artists who aren't just from Europe or North America, but from other continents too. That is my specific theme. Artists from Africa, Australia, and New Zealand will be taking part in the biennial. I think this is especially important for Moscow, because that kind of art has almost never been shown here before. People here have seen art from China and Japan, but there are very interesting artists from Central Asia too, and this art requires special research," he announced. He also explained why he believes that contemporary art can and even should be religious, and that it is precisely the religious gaze - upon which there is a secular taboo in Western art - that opens up the rest of the world's artistic productions.

If this position sounds similar to that expressed in Jean Hubert Martin's Magiciens de la Terre (1989), it is no coincidence. In fact, Martin stressed again and again that the project, titled "Against Exclusion," would revisit the themes and artists of that landmark exhibition. In a video interview with OPENSPACE.RU, Alfredo Jaar remembers the motivations and political importance of Magicieans. The second part of the video is in French: theorist and critic Jean Pierre Salglas tells OPENSPACE.RU why people in France were so critical of the exhibition at the time.





The Exhibition

OPENSPACE.RU covered the main project of the biennial while it was being installed, and also did an in-depth tour http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/12903/, which you might want to watch without sound just to get an idea of what was actually shown. The exhibition was a linear parcour, strictly enforced by ever-present security guards. It led from "birth" to "death" (this was one of the ways Jean Hubert Martin explained his curatorial logic), beginning in the dawn of a new global world of two floating globe-baloons by Annette Messager, and a fountain of falling text in waterdrops by Julius Popp, and ending in a morgue-qua boutique with coffins by Samuel Kane Kwei and fancy dressed corpse photos by Moscow artists AES+F, located across from the Garage's "European-style" cafe.

The exhibition included artists who became famous through Magiciens de la Terre such as Esther Mahlangu as well as some interesting new discoveries of Aborginee art from Australia, accompanied by openly anthropological texts explaining tribal provenance without really shedding light on the actual meaning of the artifacts. There were superstars of international art such as Wim Delvoye (present with a gothic bulldozer) or Anish Kapoor, whose minimalist-kinetic sculpture of red vaseline was dubbed "The Cheese" by an audience that misunderstood it as a pop-object in the vein of Jeff Koons. Moscow audiences were also impressed (and in some cases, revolted) by the quantity of live animals and taxodermic dummies. Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen installed a chicken coop, Chinese artist Huang Yong-Ping built an elaborate terrarium with lizards, snakes, spiders, and scorpions, which began to die and stink over the course of the exhibition, and there was even a volaire with live birds who would land on specially tuned electric guitars on stands by Celeste Boursier Mouginot. There is a video interview with the artist on OPENSPACE.RU at the end of the following clip, which also featured Bombay-artist Anita Dube and Tunga.





Highlights of "Against Exclusion" included Alfredo Jaar's "Sound of Silence," translated perfectly into Russian, and an immaculate photo installation by Wolfgang Tillmans with the only mention of Central Asia (with a gay rights poster reminding us of the homophobic repressions of Kyrgizstan). "Against Exclusion" also prominently featured art by Russian contributors, including Pavel Pepperstein (with work similar to that featured at Russia's pavilion in Venice this year), Valery Koshlyakov, conceptualist classic Ivan Chuikov, newcomer Haim Sokol, actionist-turned-post-minimalist Anatoly Osmolovsky, pop-conceptualist Dmitry Tsvetkov, and outsider artist Stas Volyaslovsky, as well as the art brut legend Alexander Lobanov, who was juxtaposed with Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. Arguably, the most incisive Russian contribution was Dmitry Gutov's installation "Parallax," in which five layers of protective wire netting are drawn one over the other, with various construction materials left over from the installation strewn on them imitating a three dimensional version of one of Malevich's suprematist compositions. Whenever the viewer changes his position, the elements produce an illusion of shifting and coming alive.

The Reaction

The Third Moscow Biennial's main project boasted record numbers, claiming close to 100,000 visitors over the course of the show, most of them young and as of yet unconnected to the art world. There were long lines in front of the Garage, and the reception in the press resonated with an unprecedented enthusiasm.

As OPENSPACE.RU art section editor-in-chief Ekaterina Degot puts it http://www.openspace.ru/art/projects/89/details/12568/, "at first glance, almost everybody liked the exhibition, in fact "liked" is not strong enough a word. Many said that they had never seen anything like it. The crowd breathed in one rhythm. What's interesting is that no one, not even the VIPs, complained that contemporary art is incomprehensible [as they did at the last two biennials,] though when I asked people what they thought the main idea of the exhibition was, nobody could really say for sure." Degot criticizes Jean Hubert Martin for bringing a "beginner's exhibition in global art" to "unsophisticated Moscow." This, to her, explains why so few foreigners came. She also accuses the exhibition of lacking a theme. "Many people think this is good because it doesn't limit the artist. But it can also lead the kind of result we have here: an exhibition of the achievements of the world art economy." (Here, Degot is refering to the All Union Exhibition of National Economic Achievements or VDNKh, the Soviet version of the 'great exhibition.')

Most importantly, Degot sees a problem with the post-colonial themes that the exhibition wants to address: "Jean Hubert Martin says he wanted to fight against Russian xenophobia. This is a noble and necessary aim, and I support it passionately. But are Africa and Oceania really our Other? No, for us they are more like a children's fairytale about elephants and hippopotami. We have lots of other others, real Others: Chechens, Tadzhiks, Poles and Turks, even Israelis and Palestinians are our Others, and we have complicated and dramatic relationships with them all. Not a word of this is mentioned here. The exhibition - at least this is how it looks to us - remains on the level of an exotic restaurant, whose delectible lunch will never help you to understand or love the waiter."

Indeed, public opinion was divided as to whether or not Jean Hubert Martin's curating was simply great, or whether it was a display of neo-colonial ideology. In a another video by OPENSPACE.RU http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/12567/, architect Yuri Avakumov praises the project as highly professional, while IRWIN member and NSK-co founder Miran Mohar says that he cannot understand how the exhibition is connected to the Moscow situation, comparing it to a cloud of dreamlike figures. Nikita Kadan of Kiev's REP group says that he can imagine the curator on a stroll through the exhibition in a colonial helmet and with a walking stick, creatizing its total lack of contextualization of art from radically different contexts. Media art legend Alexei Shulgin observes that "Against Exclusion" follows a general trend of increasingly spectacular, haptic mega-shows, which are good, in his opinion, because they attract mass audiences to contemporary art, but also blur the boundary to the "car showroom," in his words, where he swears he saw pieces much like the one by Julius Popp.

OPENSPACE.RU later organized a panel discussion http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/12906/ on "Against Exclusion," where members of the Moscow art scene including curator Evgeniya Kikodze, art critic Irina Kulik, philosopher Keti Chukhrov and OPENSPACE.RU art section editor-in-chief Ekaterina Degot discussed the main project and its reception. Kulik defended the exhibition for not only exposing Moscow to "world art," but also for re-establishing the links of time with "older," traditional art forms, while Kikodze offered an impassioned defense of art's "true magic," which did not happen at "Against Exclusion," in her opinion. Keti Chukhrov launched into a scathing critique of the particularist universalism, the overt exoticism, and the political irresponsibility of Martin's exhibition. Anatoly Osmolovsky countered with a defense of "exoticism" and encouraged Russian artists to abandon their fears of being "post-Soviet Papuans" and to admit their own "exotic" qualities. Dmitry Gutov made an incisive comment about the relativism at the base of Jean Hubert Martin's aesthetic, a gaze that sees both kitsch and avantgarde at once, that is always willing to suspend and engage an illusion.

The Parallel Program

Aside from the ambitious remake of Magiciens de la Terre at the Garage, the Third Moscow Biennial sported two art fairs, as well as over 100 exhibitions at all of Moscow's major venues, some of them only established for the occassion. I wrote about some of these exhibitions of the parallel program in my Biennial diary here http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/13776/, here http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/13777/, and here http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/13780/, but I have to say that I perceived its sixty-someodd events as overkill to put it mildly, and found it physically impossible to go to more than a dozen or so.

One of the highlights of the parallel program was a major show by the Atelier Van Lieshout at Winzavod in Moscow, organized in cooperation with the Museum Folkwang. This exhibition featured some of the most recent sculptural work in the "Slave City" cycle. OPENSPACE.RU did an interview with Joep Van Lieshout, and asked him to tell the Russian public about his art.





Another interesting feature of the biennial's parallel program was that it sported two art fairs. Art Moscow, the most important local fair for contemporary art, was moved from the spring to the fall, with the expectation that the biennial would bring foreigners to Moscow, which turned out to be an illusion. Ekaterina Degot went to Art Moscow's opening and was dismayed to see the spreading influence of Triumph Gallery, the Moscow outlet of Jake and Dinos Chapman for the ultra-rich, which also represents Russian ultra-rightwing activist and artist Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt who won last year's Kandinsky Prize. "It's a frightening trend," notes Degot, comparing the Triumph Gallery's stands to those of other Moscow galleries that deal in more harmless commercial art "here, big and sexually attractive art has a distinctly militaristic, revanchist, imperial, and nationalist shading. This art isn't devoid of meaning; quite on the contrary, it is meaning that attracts its clients, though often on a subconscious level." This does not only apply to the works of Belyaev-Gintovt, but also to those of Tanatos Banionis, a fictional artist representing a collective that includes one of the Triumph Gallery's owners.

One of the reasons Triumph Gallery was able to expand to all of five stands was that many Moscow galleries boycotted the art fair, citing inflated stand prices. Many smaller art dealers or non-profit initiatives and collectives organized a counterfair that also took place during the opening days of the Moscow biennial. Called "Universam," it was (self)organized by a group of Moscow artists including Stas Shuripa, Anton Litvin, and Maxim Ilyuchin. OPENSPACE.RU featured an interview with Ilyuchin, in which he explains that the art fair's self-organized conception is a copy of the Supermarket art fair in Stockholm. The fair took place at a sublet space inside the constructivist building of the newspaper Izvestija, making for a claustrophobic environment.

OPENSPACE.RU decided to use the density of this parallel program, in which almost every curator working in Russia today put together an ambitious exhibition, to initiate a prize for the best curatorial project at the biennial. The prize was awarded by a jury including OPENSPACE.RU art section editor-in-chief and curator Ekaterina Degot, curators Jaroslava Bubnova, Anna Zaitseva, Vitaly Patsyukov, and Elena Sorokina, as well as artists Dmitry Gutov and Igor Makarevich. The jury made a special feature on OPENSPACE discussing the criteria of a strong exhibition. The award, which included a trip to London sponsored by the Ahmad Tea Company, went to Elena Yaichnikova for a show called "40 Lives of One Space" at the Red October Chocolate Factory. The jury cited the exhibition's subtlety, independence, conceptual and artistic clarity, as well as its resistance to artist branding. As one of the members of the jury put it, "this exhibition did not represent world stars, had almost no budget, and found itself almost completely ignored by the critics, becoming a barely noticeable intervention into its surroundings."