Fake reproduction – Weekend – Kommersant

The Manege Central Exhibition Hall is hosting the USSR House of Culture exhibition, which is a worthy and intelligent set of works created during the years of Soviet power, as it had developed around the beginning of perestroika. Grigory Revzin explains why such a collection of works can in no way be passed off as the history of the culture of the USSR.

“DK USSR” – an event held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Soviet Union. ROSIZO was appointed responsible for its organization, but today it looks like a peripheral circumstance. Each section of the exhibition was curated by its own important federal institution, and, in particular, painting – the Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery. Five days after the opening of the director of the Tretyakov Gallery, Zelfira Tregulova was removed.

Of course, not for the exhibition. However, the exhibition to a certain extent answers the question why the public does not consider this dismissal a cultural catastrophe. By the way, I think, but this is a marginal position.

Now there are people who see in the current times a return to the ideals of various Soviet periods, including the so-called Brezhnev stagnation. So in 1971, say, such an exhibition would have been a breakthrough. The early Soviet avant-garde is shown, and not only Malevich, Filonov, Petrov-Vodkin, but also Georgy Stenberg, Natan Altman – something that was once (in the 1940s-1950s) in general was in the storerooms. The “severe style” is presented very well – Geliy Korzhev, Tair Salakhov, Mikhail Savitsky (this part was supervised by Zelfira Tregulova). An excellent collection of Soviet abstraction of the 1960s – Francisco Infante, Lev Nusberg, Vyacheslav Koleichuk, Yuri Zlotnikov – and where, in the Manege, where until recently Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev scolded abstractionists as pederasts! The children’s book illustration is excellently displayed: Lebedev, Konashevich, Mavrina, and May Miturich – well, everything is as it should be.

In 1971. And half a century has passed since then. Everything shown in this exhibition has already been shown dozens of times and published almost hundreds. It became canon and moved here in its canonical form. As the program on the history of Soviet art for specialized universities from the beginning of the thaw called the corresponding section “The Struggle of Currents in Soviet Art in the 1920s-1930s” – that’s how it is called here. The exhibition is reminiscent of a set of examination papers: “Severe style. Geliy Korzhev and Tahir Salakhov”; “Competition for the Palace of Soviets. Iofan project. alternative projects. foreign participants. Project Le Corbusier”; “Traditions of the Avant-Garde in Book Graphics in the 1920s-1960s”. Textbook works, textbook layout, and even, if we talk about architecture, textbook expositions, which have already been shown more than once both separately and as part of large projects. The only exception is the section of Soviet abstraction of the 1960s (curated by Irina Gorlova) – this is not such an endlessly hackneyed material, at the Moscow-Paris exhibition in 1979 it was not even shown yet, but at the Moscow-Berlin in 1995 – only individual pieces.

Actually, this is not quite the art of the USSR. This is the art of anti-USSR. This is the one that in the USSR was exposed by well-wishers and pursued by the authorities. There is not a single artist, as I understand it, who did not suffer from the Soviet regime. And the avant-garde, and Petrov-Vodkin, and children’s book illustration, and the harsh style, and the abstraction of the 60s – everything was some kind of scum that launched the process of study, and authorities – from the Ministry of Culture to the KGB – that picked it up.

And the role of worthy art critics in this chain consisted in the fact that after this study, they again slowly returned the relevant material to print, then to exhibitions, then to the permanent exhibitions of museums – and so by the beginning of perestroika, an intelligent history of Soviet art had developed, the digest of which at the exhibition and presented.

That everything exhibited is, so to speak, the product of a collaboration between the avant-garde and its destroyers, the children’s book and its destroyers, the performances and their destroyers, is so self-evident that it is strange to even talk about it. However, at the exhibition there is no party, no bodies, no plenums, no resolutions, no image of a contemporary, no image of a Soviet woman, no image of a leader – nothing that would indicate the other side of the collaboration process. Only good art remains, only monuments of collaborationism, when there is no one to nod at to explain why it was.

Zelfira Tregulova would have been an exemplary director for 1971. The older generation has an undoubted respect for her merits, knowledge, professionalism, for the scale of that academic study of the history of Russian art, which was produced by the exhibitions held under her. But the younger generation, at least part of it, has a lot of complaints about it. She defended no one, she more or less carried out all the directives that were passed down to her. She, so to speak, heroically dragged everything that could be dragged, and tragically did not let go everything that they demanded not to let go, and as the spirit of the times changed, the proportions shifted somewhat.

The situation with the USSR is such that many perceive it as a model and ideal and are trying to revive it. At the same time, the USSR is diverse, so the strategies are different. Someone imagines a picture of a great chessboard, on which the Soviet and American intelligence services played on an equal footing. For some, it was the policy of friendship between peoples in the USSR, where everyone was internationalists and Soviet people. For some it is a social policy that excludes social stratification. For some, this is the avant-garde of the 20s and the thaw of the 60s, which are so good that there is nothing to add. The problem is that the USSR is such a bond that has burst. We played on equal terms, but lost outright, so that I don’t want to remember. The peoples were friends, and those who were not friends were subjected to deportation and vivisection. Social policy rested on special rations and special distributors, so much so that in the end millions of rallies came out against privileges. It’s the same with art.

You can be so imbued with the idea of ​​returning national history to the Brezhnev era that you can continue the tradition of “small deeds” according to the “fig in your pocket” principle. 100 years of the USSR, official ideological exhibition. And we will take and drag there everything that was forbidden, what they denounced, what we shrugged off from the world. And nothing of how and with what it was forbidden: no congresses, no plenums, no resolutions, no official art, no Stalin, no Khrushchev, no Brezhnev. And it is not necessary, the context is restored by itself. In the middle of the exhibition, the directors of the world’s largest museum are removed in order to strengthen the leadership cadres.

The exposition was designed by Anton Gorlanov, and this is an excellent job. In the center of one section of the Manege, Lenin’s giant ear is on display, a reconstruction of a sculpture in the Palace of the Soviets, shown for a sense of scale. In the center of the other is a theremin. This is a musical instrument created by Lev Theremin in 1920 (later this man was repressed and was engaged in the creation of listening devices and alarms in the NKVD sharashka system, so this is a glorious artifact of Soviet history).

The theremin catches the movements of the human body and emits radio whistles and indistinct rustles from this. That is, the exhibition is organized by a semantic axis, where Lenin’s ear tries to distinguish the rustles and sounds spontaneously emitted by citizens. Citizens are not silent – they rustle and whistle, but it is difficult to advocate for such ideals because of their purely vagueness. In the Brezhnev era, such sounds were made by shortwave receivers when trying to catch the BBC (now blocked in Russia). But you can also take them for the approval of the policy of the party and government. This can probably be understood, if not as a metaphor for the USSR, then as a metaphor for Soviet art history as of 1971. But when someone is driven from work, it turns out that from the point of view of the Big Ear, it was still the BBC.

“House of Culture of the USSR”. Central Exhibition Hall “Manege”, until April 1

---

Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram