Rules on the Road

Oleg Kulik Anatoly Osmolovsky Valery Koshlyakov Oleg Kulik The Kandinsky Prize Visits London Advice and Verse in London Politics and Performance at Kandinsky Prize Ceremony Russian Artist's Work Temporarily Censored at FIAC

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Moscow and St. Petersburg have vibrant art scenes, but elsewhere in Russia "there are no contemporary art museums, no exhibitions, no collectors — nothing going on at all!" exclaims Pierre-Christian Brochet. The 48-year-old collector has taken upon himself to remedy that lack with "The Future Depends on You: New Rules," a touring exhibition of Russian contemporary art.

The aim of the unprecedented 11-month, 9-city tour, he says, is to "get people interested and kick-start the market nationwide." It is also a bid by Brochet, whose personal holdings now comprise 400 works by 150 artists, to raise his profile among the moneyed Russian culturati. Competing fiercely in the collection-building game are such well-heeled and -connected connoisseurs as Igor Markin, whose Art4.ru museum opened in 2006, and Stella Kesayeva and Vladimir Seminikhin, each of whom has a foundation. In addition, Kesayeva recently announced plans to open a giant museum in a converted garage, aping the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, which was launched last September by Dasha Zhukova, the girlfriend of the oligarch-collector Roman Abramovich.

So far, the key players — and major events, such as the Moscow Biennale and the annual Art Moskva contemporary-art fair — have been concentrated in the capital. But opportunities exist in new places, as Brochet knows from experience. The entrepreneur moved from Paris to Moscow in 1990 to work for the French publisher Flammarion and has lived and bought art in Russia ever since. His novel "New Rules" project — equal parts business venture, cultural crusade, educational program and self-promotional vehicle — gives him access to an untapped market of provincial oligarchs at minimal personal cost, thanks to the support of the strategic sponsors MegaFon, the only cell-phone operator providing coverage across Russia, and the domestic airline S7.

Brochet began assembling the exhibition with a group of coinvestors — a Swiss businessman and two directors of a Russian energy company, all of whom wish to remain anonymous — in fall 2007. It includes 87 works by 21 artists, including such established stars as Valery Koshlyakov, Oleg Kulik, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Dubossarsky & Vinogradov and aes+f, as well as up-and-coming figures like Alexei Kallima, Pavel Pepperstein and the 2007 Kandinsky Prize winner, Anatoly Osmolovsky. Many of the pieces — paintings, sculpture, videos and photographs — are museumworthy and represent the strong conceptualist tendencies in Russian art now. They were purchased from galleries or directly from their creators for between €1,000 ($1,200) and €120,000 ($152,000) each, for a total outlay of €1.2 million ($1.5 million). Brochet believes the works’ combined worth is now €2 million ($2.5 million). Presumably, the tour will boost the value of the collection, which will eventually be sold.

"New Rules" — currently on view through January 25 at the Kovalenko Art Museum in Krasnodar, near the Black Sea — had already been to the Pacific port of Vladivostok and to Krasnoyarsk, in southern Siberia, by the time I caught up with it last June in Khabarovsk, a city of 600,000 some 5,000 miles east of Moscow, 200 miles from the Pacific and 20 miles from China. I traveled as the only journalist with Brochet’s entourage, encountering local artists, many of whom had never seen the work of their peers from the west of the country, and detecting more than a whiff of the Soviet past. 

We meet at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport. Brochet is accompanied by three artists in the exhibition: his wife, Annushka; Dmitry Gutov; and Sergei Bugayev, who is better known as Afrika, the 1980s film star. Also on hand is Sasha Shakalov, a popular Russian TV presenter, who serves as a celebrity draw and master of ceremonies for all "New Rules" press conferences, lectures and events. Khabarovsk is seven hours and seven time zones from Moscow. We touch down the next morning in 95-degree heat. A hulking statue of Lenin lurks in the trees outside the airport. We barely have time to check in to the Intourist hotel, a drab concrete structure where Internet access is promised but never delivered, before being whisked to the local Gubernia TV station to be interviewed for the weekly culture show. Afterward we repair for lunch to Brochet’s local HQ: the Hospital Club, which is outfitted with steel-wire banisters, cut-glass chandeliers and red plastic sofas.

In every city on the tour, Brochet scouts out the most promising young local talents. Of the artists I meet here, a handful are as good as many working in the capital, and all, regardless of age or aesthetic preference, are keen students of art history, although lacking exposure to the latest international contemporary works. Our first studio visit in Khabarovsk is with Kyrill Yakovlev, 46, who worked as an architect in Soviet times but stopped, in 1987, because there was "no future and no scope for creativity, so I started to draw and paint." To earn money during perestroika, he made and sold jeans, mastering silkscreen techniques to produce convincing Levi’s labels. His studio doubles as a tiny flat, and much of his output, which includes collages and pastel-colored fantasy landscapes populated by dinosaurs on magic carpets, is stored on his sweltering balcony.

From Yakovlev’s studio we head downtown to the Dalny Vostok Art Museum, where "New Rules" is being installed. In Vladivostok the exhibition was held in the Primorsky Regional Museum, a former bank now full of model ships, telescopes and stuffed leopards; in Krasnoyarsk, it was in the former Lenin Museum. Brochet says it’s better to be in an institution like this one in Khabarovsk, where the director and staff know how to display art.

Inside the museum is a tangle of cables, boxes and Bubble Wrap, and installers will be working all night. How will Valery Koshlyakov’s giant drip-style take on a train-station notice board get through the doors? It won’t. The Koshlyakov stays on the landing, which it transforms into a waiting room.

Logistics are Brochet’s biggest problem. The works were flown from Moscow to the first venue but have since been transported by train. Special freight cars with enlarged doors are needed for the crated pictures. There is no freight service from Vladivostok to Krasnoyarsk, so Brochet hired a special train for more than $30,000 — part of the cost of doing cultural business in remote outposts.

At the afternoon press conference, a few local journalists are joined by a throng of businessmen, nouveau riche art lovers and museum supporters, many of the latter pretty young women clamoring to pose with Brochet. One comes up to him in tears and cries, "It’s the first time I have ever been moved by an exhibition!" Black-robed models serve Ararat cognac. Crowds mill on the landing beneath Koshlyakov’s work. Polina Rekhovskaya, the deputy editor of the local culture magazine Bonzaï, declares that "everyone is gobsmacked" by the exhibition, although "older people are shocked." The cause of that shock may be the video of quick-fire comedy sketches by the Blue Noses duo or the one of Oleg Kulik’s controversial Mad Dog performance, during which he bites passersby. "Why don’t you stage your exhibition in a zoo?" is one outraged viewer’s comment on the show’s Web site.

That evening, Brochet hosts a reception at the Hospital Club. Downstairs it’s a heaving disco. Upstairs the entrepreneur lounges on a red plastic sofa, declaiming his cultural credo to the educated professionals, who are eager to emulate their free-spending counterparts in Moscow. Brochet is hoping that these newly rich businessmen, with money left over after securing fancy houses and cars, will be lured by the status boost of owning art. It is too early to say how successful his efforts to cultivate connoisseurs have been, but this evening they listen raptly as Brochet compares music and art. "Modern music cannot renew itself, but art can." In Moscow, he says, there are 100 major collectors, of whom 25 purchase a new piece each month, while five acquire a work a week. He exhorts his audience to "buy works by 10 good artists: Keep five for yourself, and lend five to a museum for a couple of years — that will increase their value." Dramatic pause. "You will need good advisers. I’m independent, not like dealers."

Brochet has been asked to "advise" on the creation of a new Khabarovsk contemporary-art museum. The regional governor has already OK’d the funds. "We’re catalysts," Brochet says with a smile. (Now, however, their buying impulses may be on hold because of the global credit crunch.)

The next morning we make our way to a packed auditorium at Khabarovsk University for a panel discussion related to the exhibition. As an Art+Auction contributor and art market specialist, I am invited to talk about how the market operates and about the relationships among galleries, auction houses and collectors. Gutov preaches the gospel of contemporary art. Brochet works the crowd of 200 students, telling them that in today’s Russia, where art is no longer state sponsored or persecuted, it is not the work alone that has changed but also how it’s shown, viewed and bought. Top Old Masters or Impressionists may be out of reach, he explains, but not top contemporary pieces: "In Russia, collectors have always been more prescient about the value of art than officials. The future depends on you!"

This must be eye-opening — and a bit perplexing — to the students, who have virtually no exposure to contemporary art. Khabarovsk does not have a single gallery (the nearest is in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, 250 miles to the north). It has painters and sculptors, of course, but most create in traditional modes, and their work is not easily viewed.

The 15th floor of a grim apartment block next to the former kgb offices has been reserved for artists since Soviet times. Back then, to acquire paints and canvases, let alone a studio, artists had to study for years and then be admitted to the artists’ soyuz, or union. Dutiful subscribers to the tenets of Socialist Realism could expect enough official commissions to survive. Private sales were virtually nonexistent. The state no longer provides commissions, but little else has changed. There is still no commercial infrastructure and few collectors. The soyuz here still has 100 members, and artists still go through rigorous academic training. When we visit floor 15 of the building, our host is Vitaly Drozdov, the 69-year-old doyen of the Khabarovsk art scene and a former soyuz secretary.

About two years ago, Drozdov sold a picture to a Chinese collector for 200,000 rubles (about $7,500). The memory rankles. Selling privately is "against my conscience," and he has no intention of kowtowing to the uneducated taste of today’s buyers, he says, adding with a sigh, "These days, money goes to entertainment, not enlightenment." The very idea of pricing a work throws Drozdov into a panic. In Soviet times, he recalls fondly, the state set prices according to picture size. But despite his nostalgia for Communist paternalism, Drozdov is no Socialist Realist. In his giant but unheroic canvas of a howling guard dog and a Red Army soldier, the soldier is dead, with only his head above ground. A depiction of a ward of sleeping infants suggests an orphanage in Nicolae Ceaucescu’s Romania. Occasionally, "for the soul," Vitaly paints landscapes. He has no patience with contemporary art that departs from academic tradition. "New Rules," he snorts, with its trivial subject matter and absence of painterly technique, is "impossible to take seriously."

Drozdov’s next-door neighbor, Andrey Blazhnov, disagrees, calling the show "unbelievable — something we could never imagine happening in Khabarovsk." Blazhnov’s parents were artists, but he did not see any other contemporary works until 1997. He specializes in photography and graphic design, explaining that "one can’t sell oil paintings here." Last year he teamed up with Yakovlev and some interior designers to "promote art for private spaces." It does not sound terribly lucrative; they don’t even have a Web site.

At 36, Blazhnov is the youngest artist we talk with in Khabarovsk; Brochet meets some students at the city art academies but says they are "very traditional, all doing portraits and landscapes." In fact, he feels that the best provincial artists he has encountered are those over 50. The younger ones, Brochet says, are less technically proficient and not as imaginative or innovative, perhaps because, unlike their elders, who struggled to express their individuality in Soviet times, the current generation enjoys a freedom that makes it lazy and conventional. His touring exhibition is his way of fighting this inertia.

The "New Rules" odyssey will end in March in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania. Brochet plans an epilogue at the Moscow World Art Fair, at the end of May, for which 50 rich Russians will be jetted in from around the country by S7 Airlines. He and his partners had originally planned to sell the collection once exhibitions had ended, but they are now keen to expand their holdings. Even in the faltering global economy, Brochet asserts that their purchases will continue. The opening of galleries and exhibition spaces has "given the market fresh impetus," he says, proclaiming himself eager to see whether "Russian art can follow the success of Chinese art." Brochet believes it can. He also believes that cutting-edge art is being taken seriously outside Moscow and that provincialism will be overcome. "Contemporary art in Russia is no longer a subculture," Brochet says with characteristically brash confidence. "We’re proving that."

"Rules on the Road" originally appeared in the January 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2009 Table of Contents.