Unsettled – Weekend
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Twenty years ago, artists Sergei Kalinin and Farid Bogdalov showed the first sketches and sketches for the painting “Meeting of the Federal Assembly” (2004): then the project, which was even discussed in a talk show on Channel One, seemed to be a statement that contemporary art in Russia is about to turn from an export commodity into a state affair. However, the application was rejected by both exporters and government officials.
In the fall of 2004, an exhibition of one painting, or rather a mega-painting, opened at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art on Petrovka. For the first time, the public was shown in all its glory a huge canvas, measuring 4 by almost 9 meters, “Meeting of the Federal Assembly” by Moscow artists Sergei Kalinin and Farid Bogdalov: it was a remake of “The Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council on May 7, 1901,” in which the then political The top of Russia was represented in the images of royal dignitaries from Repin’s portrait. That Kalinin and Bogdalov were working on a free paraphrase of “Meetings of the State Council”, dedicated to the centenary of the film, became known several years earlier: the project was widely advertised; sketches and sketches, and Kalinin and Bogdalov, following the example of Repin, wrote many sketches, back in 2003 they were exhibited at One Work Gallery and sold at Art-Moscow and Art-Manege; one of the portraits of Patriarch Alexy II, who blessed the painters for their godly work, sold for as much as $50 thousand. But the result disappointed almost everyone: some immediately, others later.
It wasn’t a matter of painting’s shortcomings at all. The artists received a classical art education, Kalinin graduated from the art department of the Moscow Technological Institute, Bogdalov studied at the Surikovsky faculty of painting, both were incomparably better at using a brush than the official state portrait painter Shilov. However, the project did not require virtuoso mastery of the brush: it was, of course, not a question of competing in skill with Repin and his assistants, Kulikov and Kustodiev – the authors of the remake jokingly boasted only that they had surpassed the original quantitatively, writing by eight there are more characters (89 versus 81) and the canvas is 2 centimeters longer (which was dictated by the design of the stretcher). It was about a kind of magic, about a talisman, about a self-fulfilling prophecy – about a work that would conjure up a government order for contemporary art. And although the invitation to the exhibition stated that, in addition to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, it was supported by the Moscow Government and the Russian Academy of Arts, it was difficult to suspect Kalinin and Bogdalov of laying claim to the laurels of “new Repins” or “best Shilovs.” No, they, like many artists in their environment, claimed that modern art should no longer be considered a marginal practice, a Masonic lodge, or perverse behavior.
There are many myths regarding Repin’s painting – this is, they say, a criticism of the regime, which has not advanced one iota towards constitutionalism in the 100 years since the establishment of the State Council, and a premonition of all the future troubles of the country, from the Russo-Japanese War to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 The facts are more prosaic: Repin carried out an official government order, attended meetings in the Mariinsky Palace, painted his characters from life – they were required to pose. Regarding the painting by Kalinin and Bogdalov, it immediately became clear that they did not have any government order, despite the fact that the artists’ studio was located opposite the Kremlin (the space was rented from the Vernadsky Geological Museum on Mokhovaya), among those few who agreed to pose in person or at least on photo shoot, it turned out to be both the patriarch and the leader of the LDPR, the picture was then shown in the Kremlin and in the Moscow City Duma, and invitations to exhibitions were sent to everyone depicted in the portrait (the vast majority ignored them, but the real pop star Zhirinovsky attended all opening days and willingly gave interviews). “Meeting of the Federal Assembly” was a private initiative of artists, supported by a private investor, and today seems something of a parody of the adventurous entrepreneurship of the 1990s: Kalinin came up with the project in late 2001 and approached Bogdalov to implement the idea as part of a joint venture venture on based on Bogdalov’s own One Work Gallery, whose employees handled accounting, office work and advertising, without distracting artists from their painting business.
The first post-Soviet decade is called the era of galleries: apart from foreign voyages to festivals and residencies, galleries alone, by and large, served as institutional hope and support for contemporary art. However, the free market did not live up to expectations—the idea of an order was in the air. Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov came up with a social engagement for themselves and began to play the role of these capitalist realists who work for the new bourgeoisie and write an unimaginable potpourri of socialist realism, glamor and discourse, focusing on the taste of an imaginary customer. But as gallery owner and political strategist Marat Gelman (recognized as a “foreign agent”) increasingly involved contemporary art in various political campaigns, the idea of a social order was replaced by the idea of a political order. Dmitry Vrubel and Victoria Timofeeva, with their pop art “Putiniana” of the early 2000s, were the first to formulate the claims of contemporary art to a new statist status. “Meeting of the Federal Assembly” could have been a much more successful attempt to seize the initiative from the old Soviet functionaries from the iso in the service of the new government: the new regime more and more clearly indicated a commitment to traditional values - artists who put on the mask of the court portrait painter Repin and dressed their heroes in Nicholas uniforms with gold galloons, it would seem, ideally corresponded to this then restrained conservative course.
Of course, only a naive viewer would think that Kalinin and Bogdalov are unfortunate academic orphans who went on a crusade against the “actualists” with the motto “for true art” on their banners. Both artists belonged to the Independent Party since perestroika times; Kalinin exhibited with the City Committee of Graphic Artists; Bogdalov was one of the creators of the legendary squat in Furmanny Lane. Another thing is that both were not considered the top figures of the Moscow art scene of the 1990s, and their work did not arouse much enthusiasm as it was either too populist or too official—professional criticism mostly spat and cursed. Gelman, who specialized in political art, initially showed no interest. Of “their own”, only the Kolodzei Art Foundation volunteered to support the artists, which was planning to take the painting to the USA. Meanwhile, it was a subtly and competently arranged conceptual project.
The “Federal Assembly”, where the current president and patriarch, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, Zyuganov and Zhirinovsky, Fradkov and Gryzlov, Gref and Kasyanov, Khakamada and Matvienko, Nemtsov and Khodorkovsky (arrested by the time the film was completed), met, was an absolute fiction – the heroes ended up in portrait as a result of fair and direct elections: the artists launched a website where everyone could nominate candidates who had the greatest impact on Russian life in the first post-Soviet decade, and began to paint those who received the maximum number of votes. Almost no one noticed the secret nod to “The People’s Choice” by Komar and Melamid, who made the “best” and “worst” films according to the results of opinion polls. Of course, the popular vote offered painters the most media-friendly faces that had become familiar on television screens, but the project was precisely designed for media resonance and overcoming the party elitism of contemporary art: the artists who threw down the gauntlet to Repin himself were talked about on prime-time talk shows and written about in the yellow press. At painting exhibitions in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in the best conceptualist traditions, extensive documentation was presented, including photographs from which the subjects were painted, and correspondence with potential models – for example, with a refusal received from the Moscow mayor’s office.
In the fall of 2005, at the end of a year-long tour in both capitals, the canvas was put up at the Sovcom auction with a fantastic estimate of $1 million and, naturally, was not sold – much cheaper studies, sketches and photographs were bought much more readily. But the pre-auction exhibition at the Metropol Hotel and the auction, which was led by Artemy Troitsky (recognized as a “foreign agent”), turned into a bright social event – the last in the history of the “Meeting of the Federal Assembly”. It is hardly worth explaining this failure by the political content of the picture: by the fact that it glorified an honest and direct popular vote at the wrong time, or by the fact that some dangerous hints and subtexts could be hidden in the arrangement of the characters on the canvas. Contemporary art lost the battle for state orders – orders as such were gradually delegated to oligarchic art foundations. In the protest season of 2011–2012, “Meeting of the Federal Assembly” was included in Gelman’s traveling exhibition “Motherland”: Gelman was losing political influence, the scandals surrounding “Motherland” no longer looked like successful PR, the fact of participation in the exhibition indicated another defeat – Kalinin’s witty project and Bogdalov was not intended to serve as an artistic background for political opposition. Then the painting lay rolled up in the artists’ studio for a long time – at the end of 2021, unexpectedly for the authors, a buyer was found for it. Now “Meeting of the Federal Assembly” is kept in a private Moscow collection – awaiting better times.
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