Courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow

Pavel Pepperstein, "Observations" (1984). One of 15 drawings, ink and watercolor on paper, each 14 x 91/2 in.

   November 2008 Reviews

Paul McCarthy

Eleanor Antin

Roger Hiorns

Lorraine O'Grady

Ron Amstutz

Raha Raissnia

Alexandra Grant

Dave Cole

Multiple Modernities:
India, 1905 - 2005

Clare Woods

Gemma Holt

Roger Hilton

Joachim Koester

The Talamoni Collection

Amelie Von Wulffen

Ilya Kabakov Alexander Melamid Raymond Pettibon Erik Bulatov Komar Pavel Pepperstein The Kandinsky Prize Visits London Echigo Triennial Brings Japanese Countryside to Life

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Like all important postwar art movements, Moscow Conceptualism is governed by specific norms concerning its aesthetic identity and, at the same time, by a certain misunderstanding over themes pertaining to its theoretical discourse and interpretation. Up until very recently, for example, conceptual art under Communism was broadly categorized under the label “Soviet Conceptualism,” while the continuing controversial status of conceptual art (“as a style, it is a dead end,” Thierry de Duve cried out in a recent lecture) lends complexity and uncertainty to the historical evolution of this secret underground movement. To his credit, this is where art theorist Boris Groys—in true deus ex machina style—has chosen to intervene. The survey exhibition “Total Enlightenment” at the Schirn Kunsthalle seems to be a great chance for him to finally set things right, offering a reading that does justice to the movement’s magnitude and his own involvement with it: after all, Groys had to finish what he started in 1979 when he shrewdly coined the term Moscow Romantic Conceptualism, a style that he now readily describes as “a kind of discursive Pop art.”

Though lacking the panache of a professional curator, Groys lays out his argument knowledgeably and aptly. Despite the stuffy and claustrophobic atmosphere of the Kunsthalle, which echoes the hermetic and bittersweet character of many artworks, the viewer has plenty of time to get a handle on the basics of the Muscovites’ approach—among other things, their overwhelming communal sensibility, self-referentiality, antivisuality, absurdity, escapism, and buffoonery. In terms of narrative format, the works in “Total Enlightenment” owe a lot to Ilya Kabakov’s experimentation with antiretinal strategies. The exhibition begins with I’m going (1975) and Trademark (1986), two large-scale paintings by Eric Bulatov, both depicting trademark Soviet symbols against a cloudy sky. Bulatov’s politically incisive imagination, infused with a dose of dark irony, is a hint that what follows will be something more than lampoons of Lenin, Stalin, Brezhnev, and their doctrines.

Komar & Melamid’s consistently witty artworks are the most compelling moments in this show. In Nikolai Buchumov (1973), from the series “Legends,” the duo invented a one-eyed early twentieth-century Russian painter. Their installation, consisting of a vitrine with various memorabilia (such as an eye patch and the artist’s palette) as well as sixteen small oil panels of a banal seascape featuring Buchumov’s protruding nose, is a deadpan parody of the stereotypical martyred artist.

Meanwhile, the Collective Actions Group (formed by Andrei Monastyrski in 1977) offers a few sharply satirical swipes at the Soviet totalitarian regime. The group’s incongruous actions, often performed in a vacant field in the countryside, were effortless and “empty”: inflating balloons and watching them disappear high in the misty sky, for instance. In this way, the members of the group ironically comment on certain absences in the “field” of Russian art (namely, those of the public, the market, exhibition spaces, and criticism), which resulted in a self-referential overkill that informed not only their tactics, but the movement as a whole. Comparisons are odious, but this is Anglo-Saxon Conceptualism stripped bare, spotlighting Dionysian aspects as opposed to the more Apollonian strategies of the Russians’ American and European counterparts, who focused primarily on the critique of the market and the institutions.

The photographic documentation of the group’s actions forms a sharp contrast to Boris Mikhailov’s marvelously melancholy photographs of desolated landscapes and lonely outcasts in a state of emotional disorder. Known as the founder of so-called “unofficial photography,” Mikhailov never sentimentalizes his portrayed subjects but respects the mysteries of their tortured souls. Unlike the highly declamatory style of many contemporary photographers, his celebrated “Unfinished Dissertation” series (1984) captures the everyday life of his compatriots with a voyeuristic curiosity.

In the last room, Pavel Pepperstein, cofounder of the group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics, is represented by two outstanding series of ink and watercolor drawings. Inspired mainly by illustrations in children’s books, including those by his father Viktor Pivovarov and the protoconceptualist Kabakov, and the tradition of absurdist Soviet literature—Mikhail Bulgakov’s allegorical stories come instantly to mind—Pepperstein’s “Observations” (1984) combine text and image in a comic, almost caricature style, reminiscent of Raymond Pettibon’s text-laden images. This inspiring but seriously undervalued work justifies his status as one of the most talented among the second generation of Moscow Conceptualists.

Broadly speaking, one is tempted to suggest that the movement’s road to recognition by Western audiences resembles the delayed critical acclaim of so many great Soviet writers under Communism. Any attempt however to do proper honor to something—especially when that thing has reached its end of life—is a low-risk and tricky task. From this standpoint, the experience of now viewing the Muscovites at the Schirn Kunsthalle was somewhat equivalent to that of watching Russia’s leaders paying emotional tributes at the funeral of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize–winning author who died this August. “The times, they are a-changin’,” and none too soon. "Total Enlightenment" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' November 2008 Table of Contents.