If Warsaw-based artists Zbigniev Rogalski and
Wilhelm Sasnal are currently being celebrated as great young talents, it's
because there's more to their painting than a mere hankering for
decoration. In Rogalski's recent paintings, which can be seen in the
Berlin gallery
griedervonputtkamer, the blurry view of the world might in reality be
a view of art history: as with Mikhailov, the relationship to the object
in Rogalski's works is broken, the viewer dependent on a familiarity with
the past - even if it's only to conjure heroes like
Yves Klein, whose "Leap into the Void" appears through one of Rogalski's
light blue paintings, over which the word "jealousy" is written as
graffiti. But who is this jealousy directed at - the French artist, or his
high-flying artistic freedom?
Zbigniew Rogalski, Untitled (Jealousy), 2004,
Courtesy Galerie griedervonputtkamer
Cinderella in Moscow
Pavel Pepperstein, Landschaft mit Einsiedler, o.J.,
Deutsche Bank Collection
In Moscow, it wasn't a
love for role models but rather a distance to the market that artists used
in their attempt to escape from the hegemony of the West in the early 90s.
It was the time when Marat
Guelman founded his gallery, which today represents the vast number of
116 artists and collectives. The collector and patron sees the chief task
of his gallery in functioning as a kind of "cultural machine" to
disseminate information on Russian art - in exhibition spaces, at fairs,
or on the internet, where the gallery's homepage even features a German
translation. In Moscow, the galleries
Aidan and XL, which
were also founded in the early 90s, work with a similar mixture between
presence on location and virtual window to an international art public.
What counts here is not an uncompromising independence in asserting one's
work against the West; more than anything else, Guelman seeks contact to
the faraway provinces of the former Soviet Union, because they belong to
the same culture that fell apart following the end of the communist regime
in 1990. He is not concerned with conjuring up a lost solidarity or
patriotism, but in mutual strengthening through visibility. To illustrate
what he means, Guelman reverts to a fairy tale: "The story of Cinderella -
that's the Russian version of the American dream." While the stepmother
finds the girl to be lazy, ugly, and stupid, the prince finds her
beautiful; in a similar vein, Russian art needs someone with "a completely
new system of criteria to discover it, appreciate it accordingly, and
revere it."
Quite possibly, however,
Cinderella might have already long since turned into a princess herself -
isn't Anna Kourinkova a tennis
player, model, and pop star all in one?
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Oleg Kulik, Museum (Detail), 2002/2003,
Photo: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, courtesy XL Gallery
It's no accident that the Moscow-based artist Oleg Kulik modeled the athlete
true to life in wax for his installation Museum - she represents an
aggressive, high-performance symbol for the cultural emergence from the
post-Soviet dilemma.
Political Hallucinations
Perhaps
refusal and reverence are merely two strategies of the same game. For
Pavel Pepperstein, who counted among the members of the Moscow group
Inspection Medicinal Hermeneutics, along with
Sergej Anufrjev and Vladimir Fjodorov during the early Nineties, the work
led back to the roots of Russian literature. Together they transferred
their extravagant characters, similar to those in stories of
Gogol and
Dostoyevsky, into contemporary situations. Boris Groys interpreted
these drawings as an attempt, to save one's "own pop sub-culture." In
terms of form, Pepperstein's works are reminiscent of classical book
illustrations: symbols of the old Soviet system are placed in a
folkloristic setting for his drawing series
Political Hallucinations, while rural maids as Malevich painted them
in his later works are lugging around soldier's helmets, improvised water
buckets which themselves quote the national flags of the USA and the USSR.
Inspektion Medizinische Hermeneutik, Fraktale Träume Provinziell, 1991,
Deutsche Bank Collection
Indeed, flags are an
important element in Pepperstein's drawings: as signs, they again and
again seem to promise the national identity that the artist, born 1966 in
Moscow, was himself denied. In 2003, Pepperstein created his series
Ghosts of Globalization, which depicts figures balancing tiny flags on
their lips or wearing them as hair adornments. The austere black and white
stands for the loss of colour as a result of world wide corporatism, which
according to Pepperstein, "makes them into ghosts as well, ghosts that
dissolve in the ghostly light of globalization, even if not entirely."
Thus, politics becomes a hallucination, a personal map, partly esoteric
and partly historically staged. Pepperstein is not concerned with the
ritual of exclusion, but with new forms of self-determination: one has to
continuously recognize anew who one is and where one stands.
Translation: Andrea Scrima
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