The exhibition of Andy Warhol at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and the Warholl Week held simultaneously by the Moscow galleries of actual art have passed with great pomp. The famous pop-art leader and his influence on Russian artists are discussed in the essay by the art critic Andrey Kovalyov.

paradoxes and paradigms

The truth pure and simple uttered by Andy was that Moscow had nothing beautiful because it hadn’t a McDonald’s. He couldn’t know of course that in the early 1990s the hamburger sandwich washed down with dark, sweet soda water would arrive in our capital as an ultimate sign of prestige. Now the prestigeous thing was to go to the Pushkin Museum and look at the Big Mac and Coca-Cola, at Marilyn Monroe, Mao Tse-tung, Elvis Presley, and the immortal portraits of Campbell Soup. It was a provincial supermarket, however: just fifty works from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh which remains, as it has always been, a settlement of urban type known only for the fact that Andrey Warhola left it in time to begin his career. It is a pity the exhibits were not from the MOMA, but we must realize, after all, that the paradigm of a Coke from the night stall by the metro station is absolutely adequate to that of a Coke from Ramstore. It was this realization taking so much intellectual effort that enabled our local public to “squeeze out drop by drop” their provincial complexes and regain their right esthetic sense in order to see that looking at Warhol’s pictures is just as unexciting as contemplating adverts of diapers and anti-perspirants.

But it is just as unexciting as looking at Malevich’s Black Square. We were lucky that Malevich was unable to implement his Great Utopia. The US administration acted much more radically than Stalin’s Soviets: it recognized pop-art officially. The exhibition was organized by the US State Department and entitled “The life and Works” as if Andy was ... a Merited Artist of the Buryat ASSR. The imperialists-globalists love Warhol not only for being the ideal embodiment of the “American Dream”. It is more important that he channelled the rebellious energy of the 1960s youth revolution by inventing a PR move - subjecting the consumer society to irreverent mocking, extracting from the collective subconscious all the trash accumulated there. To reproduce the already reproduced cynically making big money out of it - that was “shock therapy Warhol-style”. But alas, the result of all that daring began with time to look amazingly trivial, the manipulations with the profane became merely vulgar.

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.

in connection with Warhol

In spite of the highly official status of the Warhol Week in Moscow all the participants had a good time: the musical esthetes in the House...??? at the show of Velvet Underground remakes and remixes; the scholars at the conference on “The Artist and Mass Culture” held in the lecture auditorium of the Pushkin Museum; the party-going set in the City club at the Warhol-Party - the Man with the Red Face; the rock-pop fans at the Refuse Heap club; even the cinephil snobs who watched with their characteristic cool approach the retrospective of Warhol’s monstrously tedious films at the Museum of Cinematography.

But the central event of the festival was, naturally, the exhibition “Warhol Connections” staged by Marat Guelman’s gallery on the premises of the L-Gallery. The exhibition whose title had a prison-like dubious sound (bearing in mind the well-known tastes of the Symbol) demonstrated the sadness and wistfulness of Russian artists lost in the world once again facing the overproduction of signs. To remind, the classical rationale of Sots.Art was the overproduction of goods “there”, and the overproduction of ideologies “with us”. The truth is that the Great Tempter Andy subverted a lot of artists living in the Evil Empire, and finally the Sots.Art engendered by the capitalist propaganda brought down that colossus on clay feet.

It has transpired today that our artists can hardly perceive adequately the reality around them and are unable to see that in this new transvestite world the overproduction of goods still causes ideological hysterics. Therefore, Andy’s only real heir here is Marat Guelman himself who fashions political images with cool mastery and hob-nobs with the high and mighty. And how neatly he again pulled the blanket onto himself with his Warhol festival! And quite successfully too, with support of the choice art brigade from Timur Novikov and Vladik Mamyshev to Alexander Brener and Oleg Kulik. Though no apotheosis resulted, the anamnesis was of high quality. Even in the sale of Warhol’s soul by Komar and Melamid some kind of concealed crank could be felt: you can’t become great by imitating the great. Normal people usually conceal being bastards, but our national custom is to emphasize one’s origin from the abyss of vice. Truly Warholesque - to use the elegant term used by Nikolai Molok - are only those who rubbed shoulders with the crowd at his Factory. And our today’s imitators can hardly be said to have partaken at that feast.

It is a sad sight to observe several generations of Russian artists frustrated: first the poor Yuriy Albert developed a complex - “I am not a Warhol”, then Avdei Ter-Oganyan, masked as a provincial blockhead, colored a condensed milk can with felt-tip pens to look like Campbell Soup; then the demented Alexander Brener dishonored not only a picture by Malevich in Stedelijk , but also the sacred name of Andy by drawing on it his trademark dollar sign, for which he was put to prison, let it be a Dutch one. But you can oppose the consumer society only if you are part of it.