Opposite the building which houses the entrance to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) stands a sculpture depicting Kasmir Malevich presenting the viewer with his provocative Black Square composition.
Demonstrating his mission of creating a repository of Russian modern and contemporary Avant Garde works,this is one of Zurab Tsereteli’s distinctive sculptures. It is by the man who, as President of the Russian Academy of Arts, establlished the museum in December 1999.
Colliderscope.
The 20th Anniversary of this project – MMOMA 19/99 – could be significant and, so, bemasked and temperature checked, I found myself in the lobby of the place on a wet late July along with clusters of attentive young people.
The translated visitor’s guide promised a birthday party which would fiunction as a kind of mosaic where at the right moment strangers collide and find common language.
Three floors of white and black rooms were given over to the diplays. These had been hand-picked by invited curators, which included such names as Bernard Blistene, the curator of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, Vladimir Sorokin, the important Russian novelist and… a footballer called Fedor Smolov, among others. They had grouped the exhibits into supposed unifying themes such as History, Perfumery, Gastronomy and so on.
Most of the names were Russian but some Western ones popped up, such as the American Keith Haring. The earliest work that I noticed was Bathing Boys by Natalia Goncharova from 1911 and this was alongside plenty of offerings from a hundred years or so later.
As always with my visits to MMOMA, I was prodded and entertained by much of what I beheld. The accent fell on neo-Modernism, primitivism, pop art and kinetic sculpture and a few mixed media installations. It was to the oil on canvas productions that I gravitated, with a degree of guilt. This riot of diversions defied a simple or immediate response: I found it much of it clever-clever, beautiful, jocular, irritating, predictable, mind-boggling, insipid, sinister, refreshing and cheeky.
Abstracts.
Some of the non-representative material on offer held immediate decorative appeal.The 31-year-old Sergei Lotsmanov’s Abstract Landscape (2004) – an oxymoronic title if there ever was one -was one such, with its bold colours and geometry.
Ivan Chuykov’s acryllic on hardboard Red Sea from 1989, with its scarlet surface offset by – what? a fragment of newspaper type? -had similar aesthetic impact on me.
The most memorable of the abstracts for me, however, was Mikhail Shvartsman’s Spring, from that same year.With its muted browns and pinks set in apparent three dimesnsions, this rewarded focused attention. This artist, who toiled in obscurity during the Soviet period, has left behind a posthumous treasure trove.
Metaphysics and sureality.
Then the circular oil on canvas compositions of the 76 year old Sergey Shablavin -Moscow (1989 – 1990) and The Intersection of Centuries transported me somewhere, with their sense of timelesness.
I also enjoyed the simple surealism of Flight of Birds Inside the Head by Leonid Tishkov from 1986 and, on similar lines, the gaudy bodily jumble of from thirty years ago, just called Composition by a reperesentative of the Moscow unofficial arts scene – Ernst Neizvestny.
Ideas.
Not all was dreamy impulsiveness, however: there were some points being made. The concept behind Arman’s The Mechanism of Time (1960) seems interesting enough. It exemplified the approach of the New Realism that he developed alongside Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely which involved using real world objects in opposition to abstractionism. However, the plexiglass and metal collage made up of the innards of watches does not seem to do this concept justice.
However, another take on man’s relation to mechanisms came through loud and clear to me in Ivan Sotnikov’s brutalist but comedic The Machine from 1988.
There were some quasi-political gestures too. In what I took to be a comment on the militarisation of everyday life in Russia the AES + F group created the Action Half Life Series (2005 – 2007) which, via digital printing on canvas, parades prepubesent children manipulating the latest military hardware before us. (Russia is a country where you can buy children’s balloons adorned with detailed pictures of military jets and missiles).
Light and shadow.
If there existed some darkness here – a room of coats with outstretched hands extending form them, a black room around which was projected fractured cityscapes -then this was alleviated with some levity.
One artist had revisited Malevich’s Black Square but these were set at wonky angles, almost as if about to fall off the canvases. There was a portrait of Brezhnev in cool shades and with the legend Alcohol. Andrei Monastyrski’s Cannon from 1975 bewildered us with a black rectangular box with protruding tube mounted on the wall which gave a harsh metallic ring when a switch was activated, as the viewer was invited to do.
I could discern no overididng theme to what I saw (and there was far more of it than I can do justice to here). There was a sense of it being Russian insofar as the remnants of Soviet culture were often being chewed over and there was a certain spirited resilience in evidence (which I have come to recognise as a national trait). What I did not see, and had hoped for, was anything like a direct engagement with the current Russian political establishment.
