The Perm Anomaly

PERM, Russia—Although it didn’t generate a lot of press, the 2008 edition of Art Perm, which ran January 18 to 27, marked a new start for the ten-year-old art fair. Like its host city, Art Perm is small in scale and reputation, with most of its 30-plus exhibiting galleries coming from the surrounding Ural region, but if the fair still has a ways to go before becoming a truly contemporary event (and it does), this year it showed significant progress. For the first time ever there was a gallery from Moscow, Moscow Fine Art, which sells paintings by Dmitry Gutov, one of few Russian artists featured in last summer’s Documenta 12. More significantly, there were two curated sections, including works from the collection of Igor Markin, Russia’s first celebrity art collector. But what really made Art Perm 2008 seem different was the growing awareness of the “Perm Anomaly”—the phenomenon by which this small regional city, through what one local curator calls “a magical constellation of mystique and politics,” is on the verge of becoming an international cultural destination.

The Russian art world on the whole stands poised between the 20th and 21st centuries. With the exception of Moscow and St. Petersburg, in most of the country one finds virtually no contemporary work in city museums and private art galleries are scarce. But there are a few exceptions, and one of them is Perm, a city of just under one million that until recently has been known for its industrial facilities and everything that comes with them (including a nearby atomic explosion in 1957, which resulted in acid rain and a generation of elevated cancer rates). But now, after centuries of cultural obscurity, this remote city is drawing top collectors, investing in cutting-edge art, and courting top art-world figures from around the globe.

The man behind the Perm art scene is senator Sergey Gordeev, who represents the city in the Federation Council of Russia. Gordeev wants to finance a new building for Perm’s art museum, which is currently housed in a 19th-century cathedral that is set to be returned to church authorities, and seriously update its contemporary art collection. Gordeev is a well-known art enthusiast: through his Russian Avantgarde Foundation he paid for repairs of the Russian pavilion in Venice before the 2007 Biennale (Gordeev has a background in construction and real estate, and some have suggested he repaired the pavilion to influence the nominations for the Venice Biennale of architecture), financed various architectural exhibitions in Moscow’s Museum of Architecture, and bought half of constructivist genius Konstantin Melnikov’s house with the intention to open a museum devoted to the architect.

Gordeev even brought Guggenheim Foundation Director Thomas Krens to Perm to talk with officials about turning the refurbished Perm museum into another Guggenheim partner. The competition to build the new space includes such leading international architects as Zaha Hadid, Asymptote, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Hans Hollein. The winner will be announced on March 25.

While working on the museum project, city officials, in particular the region’s culture minister Oleg Oshchepkov, took an interest in contemporary art, and the results showed at this year’s Art Perm. Since the fair’s inception in 1998, the art on display has consisted primarily of figurative painting targeted to an aesthetically conservative, provincial public. This year was not much of an exception (Moscow Fine Art notwithstanding) due to a lack of contemporary art collectors (one local video artist says there are only two of them in town). However, the fair did contain two curated sections that would have been unimaginable in the past. The first was “Product Placement,” an exhibition brought by the local division of the State Center for Contemporary Art that explores the problematic relationship of brands to art and society. Though the project’s emphasis on ad-busting techniques would look a bit light in Russia’s capitals, which are eager to explore more serious topics of, for example, faith (as in the last year’s contemporary blockbuster “I Believe” at Moscow’s Winzavod Art Center), in Perm the concept stands out as very modern. “Product Placement” features, among others, Vladlena Gromova, who took Russia’s most prestigious art award, the Kandinsky Prize, in December 2007.