moscow art critic andrey kovalev
homepage

New Andrey KOVALEV's Organizer (in Russian) is here
My old homepage - Art critic working table. http://members.tripod.com/~krititizer/hallo.htm
contact -  [email protected]
Articles in Russian are here

All enents see in RUSSIAN ART GAZETTE

From Andrey Kovalev's Organizer:

1. New!!! Ilya Kabakov Dossier

2. "Caution, Religion!" Criminal Against Head of the Sakharov Museum!!!

3.   Special research for Thomas Krens

4.  Francesco Bonami and Venice Biennale spy reports

Articles

Total Return. Art News, May 2004 (Volume 103/Number 5)
The issue of “trophy art”, which used to arouse so much emotion, now reached the phase of stagnation. German ambassador in Russia Hans-Friedrich von Ploetz speaks of “complex of restitution” and humbly repeats that he “can only express his desires, hopes, expectations”. He also states that the issue of “artistic trophies” of World War II “is one of the few remaining unresolved issues” in relationship between two countries. In the nineties the German government used the “art trophies” question for bringing pressure upon Boris Yeltsin, but now the situation has changed. The issue of Russian debt to Germany is not as keen now, and Moscow began using the old problem for its own purposes, directly provoking Germans.
Irina Nakhova. “Increased alert degree” // Flash Art, May 2004
Light-boxes are spread around the dark hall, on their glowing sides there are pictures of gas stations in the night and houses typical for one-storeyed America, colored with Christmas illumination. Something Vladimir Lenin referred to as “the idiocy of rural life”, a perfect scenery for David Lynch’s chasing around his American phantoms. This combination of disunity and collectivism, incomprehensible for a European, had already been described by Jean Baudrillard in his famous book “America”.
Avdey Ter-Oganyan – Artist and Public Enemy - Flash Art, 2003, Summer issue
exhibition “Art Manege-98” where he cut to pieces cheap paper icons bought in a church shop. Later he was sued for a fabricated charge of “promotion of international and religious hatred”. In 1999 he became an outlaw and currently resides in Czechia without even being able to visit his own exhibition. There is another Russian artist who was also forced to become a political immigrant, Oleg Mavromatti who nailed himself to a cross during an action titled “I’m not the son of God” in 2000, he was charged on the same cause and escaped to Bulgaria. Both cases show that previously ungodly Russia eventually becomes a country where atheist sayings are persecuted by the state, and religious extremists are allowed to go unpunished for attacking exhibitions. In 2000 Andey Ter-Oganyan’s exhibition at Marat Guelman’s gallery was attacked. It is quite important to denote that religious extremists domesticated some of radical artistic technologies, as they painted their malediction upon the iconoclastic artist with spray cans. The “performers” who attacked the exhibition “Beware – religion” at Sakharov’s Center adhered to similar technique.
Francesco Bonami. Biennale Is Not a Total Installation. Interview by Andrey Kovalev (in Russian. - 'Vremja Moscow news' - 04.02.03)
What I mean is you cannot display your dream, art for art’s sake. Nor can you focus on a simple description of the world.
I don’t think so. Obviously we are all obsessed by the idea of “public” as a certain abstract group of individuals. But it is necessary to work with the individual viewer in mind. Especially, if you’re getting up a major exhibition where the viewer will have very little time for examining any one item.
The last thing I want is a trite effect. My chief objective is not just to illustrate some abstract idea, but to show the metaphors it sprouts. I do not intend to offer the viewer a master key to understanding, my aim is to achieve the purity of idea representation.
Andrey Kovalev. Moscow Express. Kulik v. Kourni in the Russian art capital
Shorter version - at Artnet.com http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/kovalev/kovalev12-2-02.asp
Though Kulik has not given up his old tactics of epatage and scandal, the wild '90s in Russia, when Kulik acted a mad dog, are now over. His history of aggressive actions is increasingly associated with a notion of "wild money in Russia being made basically by those who embrace violence as a lifestyle." The quotation belongs to Victor Tupitsyn, the Russian-born American critic and philosopher who supports Moscow conceptualists with Ilya Kabakov as their head and bitterly attacks those of the neo-NEP movement.
In truth, Kulik's achievements in the 1990s mirrored the Russian Capitalist revolution, and reflected step by step the intensive transformations of the new class's collective body. Oleg Kulik, the bad dog of young Russian capitalism, now concerns himself with legal decoration of offices and informational flows. 
Russia, Where Monsieur de Jourdain Meets The Great Gatsby or Russian Art Economy: From Potlatch to Market Utopia
This fact also reflects the reality, for during the 90’s several galleries have been stoically functioning as museums of modern art, kunsthalle and other non-commercial institutions. Thus, the main trouble of the art market in Russia is that legal non-market forms of production and distribution are hardly noticeable within it.
“The story of K&M”. Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid. “Dmitry Tveritinov’s story” @ Marat Guelman’s Gallery.
ttp://nyartsmagazine.com/70/km.htm
And now, in an atmosphere of patriotic excitement that embraces America, such deconstructing gestures also look like evidences of a might-have-been story. This brutal and ironic gesticulation seems somewhat irrelevant from the standpoint of American patriotism. So the merry old fellows had to travel back to eighteenth century. But the real problem is that conceptualism that declared the impossibility of direct message and ambivalence of significates and denotations also became a historical style after 9.11.01.
Andrey Kovalev. Kassel Documenta
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/museology/kassel.htm
Kassel Documenta is commonly compared to the Olympic games, but, being an inhabitant of former Eastern Empire, I remember great all-Union exhibitions held in the USSR, where regional unions of artists struggled fiercely for the right to ‘represent’. The rhetorical scheme designed to justify these pragmatic actions (‘National diversity of Socialistic realism’) bore a somewhat suspicious resemblance to today’s postcolonial terminology.
It is quite understandable, since contemporary art is product of gladiators, lance-knights, legionaries, mercenaries, soldiers of fortune, pilgrims, conquistadors, double agents.
However, the actual state of international contemporary art is not that pitiable. Yinka Shonibare (Gallantry and Criminal Conversation), a British artist, exhibited a work that inspired some optimism — headless dummies in 18th century costumes making love in every imaginable position. What is really required of modern art is a good sight and positive emotions.
Big Politics in Moscow. - Artnet.com
http://www.artnet.com/magazine/news/kovalev/kovalev6-4-02.asp
By all accounts, the group spent only about an hour at the Hermitage. The brevity of the trip was wryly noted by local commentators, as the Hermitage is huge and it takes at least 15 minutes to cover the distance between the entrance and the nearest painting. Thus, observers calculated, the Bushes spent less than 30 minutes with the masterpieces of the Hermitage.
Nevertheless, George W. clearly saw at least two paintings and had a chance to demonstrate his IQ. When the portrait of Catherine the Great was shown to him, he asked cunningly, "And where is Potemkin?" 
So, perhaps missing the Malevich wasn't that much of a loss for Mr. Bush -- he will probably be able to see it at Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue, eventually, should he care to appear in that alarmingly modernist structure.
Andrey Kovalev. Maria Serebryakova. Regina, Moscow. - Flash Art International n° 225 July- September 2002
http://www.flashartonline.com/issues/225international/singlesections/reviews225int.asp
Serebryakova has had a classical art education, i.e., sometime ago she was involved in the teleology of painting as absolute creation, an idea which was renounced by the art of the last century. So the desire to create a painting can be described in this cold intellectual work dealing with the “painting of desire.” The desire for that very form of painting which kicked the bucket long ago resembles the phantom pain of amputated limbs.
The trivial maxim that “painting is a window onto the world” is strangely inverted into a statement like “windows are paintings of the world.” 
The answer to the question of why one of the most radical Moscow galleries moved from raging social performances to dry discussions of the essence of art may be found in Lenin’s The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
Blackest Square. - Studio international website
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/painting/malevich.htm
However, the former owners of the ‘Black Square’, the bankers belonging to the epoch of primary accumulation, were not fully conscious of the value of the items they possessed. 
Finally, as long as it is owned by the state, the ‘Black Square’ is eligible to be transported across the borders and be exhibited at any affiliate branch of Guggenheim all around the world. Or, for example, in the Hermitage rooms at Somerset House.
Andrey Kovalev. Skythian baba’s: A painting counter-revolution. - Studio international website
Natalia Goncharova: The Russian Years. Russian Museum, Benois Wing, St. Petersburg. From 25 April to 15 July, 2002.
http://www.studio-international.co.uk/painting/kovalev.htm
Goncharova, who had never accepted ‘the great denial of art’, was nevertheless a very determined woman.
But anti-modernist and anti-western words said by a European intellectual secretly refer to the critique of European culture practised by Gaugin, Picasso and German expressionists.
If one tries to interpret neoprimitivism in the manner of Eduard Said, as a specific form of colonialism, it seems obvious that German and French artists had to carry out their predatory expeditions in faraway lands (such as Africa and Tahiti). Russians, according to local imperial tradition, developed domestic artistic spaces. 
Andrey Kovalev. Aidan Salakhova. Ka’bah. XL Gallery. - Flash Art, May 2002
Russian Azerbaijani Aidan sent a hard and clear message about the danger of both feminine and oriental discourses. Let me just remind that Sufis were not only ethnic dancers, but are directly associated with assassins, the mysterious sect of poets-terrorists. But Sufis and assassins are definitely not examples of orthodox Islam, while Moscow embraces non-typical kind of political correctness.
Painting at a Price. The Moscow Arts Center is launching the Knave of Diamonds Moscow news, N16 2002
The most amusing thing was that the breakthrough had been achieved by the very artists who were vehemently opposed to culture in general and to Western culture in particular. The mammoth 1994 show called Great Utopia (New York-Berlin-Moscow), that summed up the Russian contribution to world culture, began with the Donkey's Tail, not with the Knave of Diamonds. The attempt to catch up with the winners was dismissed out of hand. The 20th century pantheon accepted Marc Chagall's blue Jews soaring high over Vitebsk; Kazimir Malevich's heavy Suprematist other-worldliness; and Wassily Kandinsky's paranoid theory-backed abstract shapes.
On the nature of illusion and the illusion of nature.(Francisco Infante, Nonna Goryunova. “Between sky and earth”, Krokin-gallery, Moscow).
Boris Groys, the cunning historiographer of “the second avant-garde” included Infante in the golden roster of “Moscow romantic conceptualism”, although the latter leaned towards manipulating with languages and always seemed to operate visual images recalled from his own memory. Besides that Infante also had his own audience, the supporters of the technocratic utopia, which was quite a popular thing back in the sixties and was gently smothered later in the seventies. The annihilation of that utopia resulted in escaping to the realm of Nature a la Henry Thoreau.
Spectre of Warholl Wanders through Russia
The principal impression from the visit to the Pushkin Museum is that Warhol was ultimately unable to become a machine of desire in the epoch of total mechanical reproduction. For that the surface of the canvas is too hand-made and exciting, the whole is put together too roughly and incongruously. It all breathes, but the breath is somewhat hard and smothered... A curious observation: at the Hermitage, among the Scythian chariots, Warhol looked quite natural and at home, but at the Pushkin Museum he turned out to be an unwanted guest.
Die russische Aktionskunst in: Elisabeth Jappe. Perfomance, Ritual, Prozes. Handbuch der Aktionenkunst in Europa. - Munchen - New York: Prestel, 1993, SS. 61-63
Die russische Aktionskunst seit futuristischen Zeiten eine ganz eigene Tradition. 1914 gingen Kasimir Malewitsch und Alexej Morgunow in der eleganten Moskauer Kuznetzky Most spazieren, einen bemalten Holzlöffel im Knopfloch. Die typisch russischen Elemente dieser Aktion: sie wird von Randfiguren der Gesellschaft aus geführt, und zwar meist von einer Gruppe, zumindest von zwei Künstlern. Performances wie die der Wiener Aktionisten, die sich auf den Künstler und seinen Körper konzentrieren, fanden in Rußland nie Anklang. Russische Performance galt immer als >sozialkritisch<, obwohl dieses Soziale in Wirklichkeit eher die Ausnahme war.
Meta-Tinguely, Or Pandora's Box on the Bank of the Moscow River - Parkett. Zurich. No. 25, Sept. 1990
To compare the apotheosis of the dump in Tinguely's works with the aesthetics of garbage which is so popular among Moscow conceptualists in the circle of Ilya Kabakov, and which is now seen in the West as a prime example of cultural convergence. Tinguely's social criticism is based on the rhetorical gesture of pointing at the phantoms looming on the fringes of comfortable existence in a post-industrial society, whereas the aesthetic speculations of Kabakov and his followers focus on the solid layer of communal waste surrounding every Soviet person as the only observable reality
AFFLUENCE AND TOTALITARIAN MERCANTILISM. Swiss artist Jean TINGUELY is interviewed by art critic Andrei KOVALEV - Moscow news weekly. No 10, 1990, October.
I had the impression that the maestro was playing a trick on me, especially about the Stalinist conception of arts, and I think that the reader might have the impression that my interviewee was a boring advocate of Critical Realism in art or some kind of Eurocommunism fundamentalist. But those who choose to visit the exhibition on Krymsky Val St. will believe the opposite and will really be enchanted by the fantastic, cosmic, moving, terrific constructions from old wheels, rusty metal, discarded masks and real human skulls.
Brener: Street Fighter and His Limits. - "Urbanaria", Soros Center for CContemporary Arts, Ljubljana 1994 - 1995
Brener attained his objective in a masterly manner: he managed to enrage everybody quite enough. On the other hand, his end in no way justifies his means - the artistic society tries to be indifferent to the memories of cyclic and disgusting repetitions of gestures and to the historical perspective. In this case the effect is reminiscent of the impact of hard-core pornography - it stirs up the intellectual as much as the truck driver.
Does Ilya Kabakov exists?
Ilya Kabakov, the bard of Soviet Atlantida which has sunk to the Time ocean bottom, sings it anywhere but Russia for here his "total installation" theory may well be taken with a smirk, which seems to prevent the master from returning to the present constantly changing context of this reincarnated country.
The "new" Kabakov has nothing to do there after he won the world's best museums by deliberately stylizing all such shabbiness and garbage. The real Kabakov, if only he deigns to return, will alight at the Tretyakov Gallery of the Pushkin Museum. As long as this has not come to pass, the only cure for Oedipus perversion is to tell each other stories of what Daddy would do.
Avalakiteshvara's Mantra and its Revolutionary Essence.
However one cannot but admit that the scene for social activity has been chosen correctiy. On semantic fields of new Russia advertising has replaced political agitation and Propaganda , though during the past decades of the Soviet regime political agitation and Propaganda clearly demonstrated a degenerated and utterly automated structure in the zone of complete indistingtion. A specific feature of modern Russian advertising is that it can in no way become an automated method , but arouses vital human feelings as political agitation and propaganda did this before. In worldly aspect our artists shall be bound to give up elite alienation and enter advertising and design business.
Alexei Shulgin / Sergei Leontiev  "Let God save the beggars".
The mental and physical body of Moscow is schizophrenized as a result of the capitalist invasion. The pathetic text of the capital of the empire of evil is illustrated with symbols of consumerism and post-industrial economics - coca cola advertising is placed on a Stalinist house in former Gorky-street, along which luxurious cars carry the russian nouveau riche. This nouveau riche has changed their numenklatura black volga's for a mercedeses recently. 

SHINING PROSTHESES.  Vladislav Efimov & Aristarkh Chernyshov. TV-gallery. September 16 - October 10, 1998
In the 80s, first in the West and then in our country, exhibitions and museums filled with dissected, virtualized and therefore extremely unhappy bodies. It seems that this bacchanalia withstands an elevated balance of the Heavenly and the Earthly, which was discovered by the artists of Renaissance. However, in its harmony one can feel a stinking smell of a dissecting room, as it leans on the possibility to examine a human body in its material aspects. To get a harmonious man, it was necessary to dissect a body-monad-vessel Creator’s idea cast into. Thus, David of Michelangelo is a straight forefather of Frankenstein and Terminator.

Andrey Monastyrsky. «Gosagroprom». - «Vecherniaya Moskva» magazine. June 22- July 5, 1998)
Russian art once had the Golden Age of reflexive art – the «Collective actions» group, that existed in the 70s, guided by the brilliant and mysterious Andrey Monastyrsky
Thus, after shock therapy and searches of the empty center, a simple statement is made - that the art message could do without a word of explanation. The True Truth always looks trivial and revolutionary. Still, the explanatory note could be hidden within a closed case, though this text might not help to understand what is not intended to be understood. It’s that simple: Conceptualism never speaks of decoding the message, only about possibility of communication. Certainly, the windbag critic will unmask the tricky artist, and inform the whole world that combination of Stalinist decorum and private stuff (the cigarette-holder) is just about the time of opposition between Power and intellectuals. Jupiter may do whatever he wants, while a poor bull can’t say a word.

"Sacrifice" - Oleg Kulik performans at "Rigina gallery
The provocation took place at the level of the mass consciousness and it gratefully responded to it. Mass media, which is generally quite indifferent to the occupations of artists, got unexpectedly excited and rumors concerning the developments at the Regina Art Gallery acquired the range of a well - planned scandal. What made everything especially poignant was the fact that it was a private gallery, and it belonged to the world of brokers and joint ventures.
The strategy was a smart shot, and 0. Kulik happened to be the first to publicly tear off the slippery mask of an augur and teacher of life and engaged himself in that very thing the contemporary artist is to engage himself in, i.e. in provocation, in tickling public consciousness which is always prepared to take a well-fed nap.

Letters from the Red Star or A Brief Reflection on the Quickest Ways to Improve Human Nature through Properly Organized Structures - International Colloquium TOTALITARIANNISMS AND TRADITIONS - Ars 2-3 / 1993, http://www.dejum.sav.sk/OBSAH/Ars9323.htm

The avant-gardists Paradox/ New realities in Soviet Art and Art Research. AICARC (AICA ARCHIVES), 1&2. 1989, pp. 11-13

The Whole World of Violence. Applied Victimology of Russian Art - International conference "Body in kommunism", Berlin, 1995
It is worth noting, that the policy of the body, the attitude towards physicality, as well as many important performances and happenings, done in 1910 - 1916, are still the problems waiting to bbe researched and reflected. Here one can recall Mikhail Larionov's painting of his body, wotty and shocking performances, which accompanyied almost all exhibitions of the russian futurists and so on. The most radical of the known episodes id the futuristic funeral of their own mother, which was organised by two sisters-futurist in Kharkov. In fact, the last performance was the funeral of Kasimir Malevich in a futurist coffin. By that time physicality had been entirely appropriated by the power, and the rejected had to do with the domain of the spirit.

Today will never come. Virtual Revolution project. 
Garbage is the only place where such a wonderful, global and total democracy (shitocracy, which is more to the point) is possible. Though, the main excuse of the Internet is in the great Pornography, new courtly lyrics which dominates over horror of dimmed eyes and sweatened palms. Call-girls are the only ones that understand love. The reality is realized by virtual addicts hooked on games. The private and the individual haven't survived but in the junkyard, among read-out newspapers, used-out condoms and fast-food packages.

Andrey Kovalev's news sourses

Chardzjijev case

Nicolas V. Iljine 

My name is Andrey Kovalev, I am an art critic from Moscow.  I’m a Ph.D. in Art History. (Moscow State University, Historical Faculty, Art History Department). Thesis: Soviet art criticism of the 1920s). For the last 15 years I've been working as art critic for different  newspapers and magazines. Present position - art critic in daily newspaper "Vremja - Moskovskije Novosti" ("Mosccow news"). Author of three books, now write a book “Russian art of XX century” for “Galart Publishing House”, Moscow.

Andey Kovalev - [email protected]