Yevgeniy Fiks, “Moving
Icons”
Alexander Rubchenko, “These Twenty Cans
of Chunky
Beef Soup Could Easily Pass for Advance Wages in Siberian Verkhoyansk”
Andra Ursuta-Rozin, “20 Cans of Chunky Beef
Soup”
Elena Sorokina, “Reality Passion”
Alexander Shnurov, “Suprematists”
Anna Genova, “Recipe for Happiness”
Alexander Genis, “Vasya” Russian Van Gogh
----------------------------------------------------
Yevgeniy Fiks / “Moving
Icons”
In the text that accompanied the Cosmopolitan exhibition which was hosted
in New York in September 2000 by Nikolai Fine Art, artists Cornford &
Cross commented that video contributed to the erosion of the Communist
value system by spreading Western images of property ownership and patterns
of consumption. The post-Berlin Wall era turmoil in Eastern Europe has
been perhaps a reflection of the desire to live out fantasies informed
by globalized media imagery. Moving images of the 'free world' delivered
mostly by video in the 1980s undermined the symbolic order existing in
the Soviet block pushing its inhabitants to break with the nonspecular
Soviet tradition which had failed to provide its followers with moving
images of equal power.
Up until the 1960s, the Soviet motion picture industry and Hollywood were
equals, both in terms of technological achievements and in narrative strength.
Then, the Soviet movie industry started to fall behind and by the late
1960s it was too late for the Russians to overtake Hollywood. The mainstream
Russian film-makers semi-consciously continued to make art films never
to achieve imperial specularity of Hollywood blockbusters, while underground
film and later video scene found their own niche serving a community of
intellectuals. A fundamental importance of video in the late-Soviet and
post-Soviet cultural landscape lay in the post-ideological nature of this
media which has proven to be perfectly capable of delivering commercials,
pornography, or European art films with equal aplomb. The Berlin Wall
served back then, perhaps, as a two-sided movie screen transforming Europe
into one big American drive-in movie. We had long been separated by this
concrete screen on which one party projected misleading images of the
'free society' while the other used the wall's opposite side for equally
suspicious cinematic propaganda.
Video/Cinema While cinema was adopted
by Russian culture rightfully quickly and well, taking its place in the
national arts pantheon, with a great many important discoveries made in
the 1920s and 1930s by Dziga Vertov and others, video has never been as
successful. It remained largely an 'alternative' media through the mid
1990s notwithstanding its availability to Russian artists since the 1980s.
On a more fundamental level, Russian filmmakers tended not to see video
art as a stand-alone art form but rather as a special case of cinema,
viewing its aesthetics as a proliferation of that of cinema. The history
of Russian video art in the late Soviet and post-Soviet cultural landscape,
therefore, is tightly connected to that of experimental cinema in its
tradition of cultural underground.
There had never been an official video art scene in the former Soviet
Union, which is explained by the current 'perfect timing' of video as
media. The emerging of the video art scene in Russia coincided with the
social and political upheavals of the late 1980s - early 1990s. However,
even at that time the democratic nature of video as media and its directness
was not something that Russian video artists necessarily desired. Reflecting
the old complexes of the underground cinema, Russian pioneer video artists
longed for grand projections and a higher social status -- a Union of
Soviet Video Artists perhaps -- while remaining largely marginalized due
to their consistently underground practices. Russian videomakers seemed
to have wanted to preserve the cinematic experience, where the rectangle
of the screen 'rises' toward the viewer in a capacious embrace, without
inviting participation or eliciting contemplation. The video screen was
supposed to subdue a post-Soviet subject, taking her into the world of
a nostalgic moviegoing experience. Perhaps in its attempt to present in
year 2003 exclusively works of Russian cinematographers living abroad,
Red Shift Festival signals a critical tendency in the Russian identity
politics. This festival highlights an avant-garde icon that has managed
to survive since the 1920s, a Russian with a movie camera, which is perspicuously
performed today by ex-Soviet subjects living in a state of self-imposed
displacement.
Moving Icons Alina and Jeff Bliumis's
Videolog, in which temporal modularity yields to a flexible temporal grid
with consistent repetition of shots and stills, indexes a golden age of
Russian underground culture. Pointing their camera at several cult figures
of the Russian émigré community of New York in the year
2002, all of whom took residence in New York in the 1970s, the Bliumises
signal a growing interest in Russian avant-garde, which is inevitably
becoming a recognizable trend in the aftermath of the 1990s. The presence
of poet Konstantin K. Kuzminsky, artist Vagrich Bakhchanyan, and sculptor
Ernst Neizvestny, avangardistov par excellence, establishes in Videolog
a clear connection between the Russian avant-garde and its representation.
Although Videolog is constructed out of pieces of documentary footage
-- the viewer witnesses one of Bakhchanyan's telephone-assisted performances
and gets mesmerized by Neizvestniy's self-luminous monologue -- the factuality
of documentary footage appears to be mutable through the use of juxtaposition
and repetition. The artists comment on the fact that a piece of live action
footage has become a sequence of graphics and lost its status as document.
Breaking with the factuality of video, Videolog essentially presents a
sequence of moving icons, where each icon becomes a graphic of (un)critical
devotion.
The Bliumises draw heavily on the new media methodology, which manifests
itself not only in their use of temporal-spatial montage, but more importantly
in the use of one of the key new media forms -- the loop. By relying on
the loop, which has become perhaps the most characteristic techniques
of new media including CD-ROMs and computer games, the Bluimises essentially
construct a new media narrative. The traditional narrative is not supposed
to repeat, for it is supposed to function as a leaner progression through
numerous events. The Bliumises interrupt the narrative flow: they present
a continuous repetition of shots. Although one can find this form in early
avant-garde cinema, it is only now that the loop is truly becoming part
of the aesthetics of cinema and one of the narrative forms of new media
art. Therefore, Videolog is very much a product of the contemporary new
media culture that highlights continuity between technology-informed digital
video and the early cinema.
Russians as a Database The Russian cultural and intellectual scene
in New York is beginning to enjoy cultural and ideological independence
from 'mainland' Russia once again, independence that it seemed to have
lost in the 1990s. Notwithstanding strong ties to the art scene in Russia,
Russian artists and intellectuals in New York are now assuming an identity
of a 'local' cultural community once again. Being referred to often, even
among themselves, as simply 'Russian,' this community, however, remains
a collection of representatives of a number of local Russian art scenes
which include Moscow, Saint-Petersburg, Minsk, Kharkov and many others,
qualifying Russian artists in New York as a database.
Dmitriy Rozin's Book About People clearly references the necrorealist
underground cinema of Saint-Petersburg where it was pioneered by Yevgeniy
Yufit and others in the mid 1980s. Nevertheless, Rozin's film is very
much a 'local' production and was shot in New York between 1997 and 2003.
In staying faithful to the necrorealist aesthetics with its alternative
sensibility, Rosin's film is an interesting comment on the dynamics of
cultural traditionalism and identity politics.
Having discovered necrorealism while a film student in New York experimentally
approaching independent cinema, Rozin, a Saint-Petersburg native, has
applied himself to the continuation of this largely Saint-Petersburg tradition
from a New York perspective. Book About People is informed by the digital
technology, for only part of the footage was actually shot on film while
the other was digital video effectively simulating 16-mm quality. In a
situation where necrorealism is being abandoned in Saint-Petersburg even
by its former proponents, Rozin effectively makes necrorealist cinema
reemerge in New York in year 2003 adding a distinctly post-Leningrad voice
to New York's database.
Zip Code 20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup,
a documentary by Yuriy Gavrilenko and Slava Solganik, presents an unsettling
new example of the adage that 'the personal is political' by highlighting
the bonds between individual freedom and particular social and economic
conditions. Artist Maxim Vakhmin's story is narrated mostly by the protagonist
himself describing his experiences in his newly adopted city from the
perspective of his 'life on the streets.' Gavrilenko and Solganik's documentary
becomes an afterimage of a tale of displacements and reshaped identities.
In 20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup the protagonist becomes the 'other,' a
'casualty of New York,' representing a variety of cultural icons, including
a fallen artist, a Euro-trash intellectual, a New York homeless man, a
Russian, and so on. Gavrilenko and Salganik facilitate a process of narration
through Vakhmin's convoluted and yet amusing monologue. In raising important
issues, this video mostly documents Vakhmin's performance proving once
again the essence of cinema as sampled time. If the majority of viewers
and critics equate cinema with storytelling, then this video is a largely
unmodified photographic recording of real events that took place in real
space. Shot straight-on, 20 Cans of Chunky Beef Soup provides the audience
with the evidence of Vakhmin's unsettling stunt.
When the camera is smuggled into the Chelsea Hotel to document the protagonist
sneaking in and taking a bath or into a local grocery store to record
Vakhmin shoplifting, the footage becomes somewhat disturbing -- even on
a phenomenological level this type of response on the part of the audience
would be qualified by habituation. Gavrilenko and Salganik are making
the audience as the intruder into private space. The audience is distressed
because they are experiencing the invasion into the private spaces of
a fallen artist, a Euro-trash intellectual, a New York homeless man, a
Russian, etc. -- the exposed nakedness of these cultural icons makes the
audience realize that this could have been their private space.
Afterimage Red Shift clearly did not
aim to present a complete picture of the state of Russian video art today,
but rather a collection of highly individual voices of the late Soviet
and post-Soviet subjects that have undergone transformation, in their
case a transformation through their experiences in the West. The employment
of subtitles at the festival reinforces this sense of transformation by
evoking linguistic deterritoriazation. These voices of the 'other' and
often about the 'other' reference, however, a more general tendency in
contemporary culture to reflect on the bankruptcy of the neoliberalism
of the 1990s and the return to the rhetoric of the 1960s. In contemporary
experimental film and video, this apparently marks once again a shift
to the logic of the historical avant-garde, which has been a hit among
art aficionados in the West for almost a century. Russian video art, however,
seems to remain unaffected by this transformation since Russian moving-image
making practices have largely never passed the cinematic stage. The program
of Red Shift demonstrates a number of examples that after over a century
since cinema's birth, cinematic ways of seeing the world, structuring
time, and use of cinematic language continue to influence contemporary
experimental film and video. On the other hand, in these post-neoliberal
conditions, many cinematographers effectively utilize non-narrative and
new media narrative forms often equating them with the findings of the
historical Russian avant-garde and the Soviet underground culture in its
complex manifestation of identity politics.