Confronting Soviet Art and Artists : Cultural exchange highlights cultural differences

SAN FRANCISCO —  It’s supposed to be a routine interview with three young Soviet artists. It turns out to be an education.

The occasion is the first important museum exhibition sampling Soviet contemporary art in the age of glasnost. A cultural-exchange affair, it is titled “10 + 10” because it is composed of 10 noted Americans of the stripe of Donald Sultan and Ross Bleckner and an equal number of painters who work in Moscow, all utterly unknown in these parts. After ending its run here at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Nov. 4 it will stump three more U.S. museums and move on to the Soviet Union with stops in Moscow, Tbilisi and Leningrad.

A certain amount of confusion dogs the interview. The trio of artists came over for the show along with Pavel V. Khoroshilov, director of the U.S.S.R. Union of Artists--a jolly aparatchik in the corpulent Khrushchev mold. They have been up in the galleries all morning dealing with the press and are fed up with having to talk without tobacco. Accommodating museum public relations ladies scuttle about to find a smoking space and come up with a conference cubicle that looks like an interrogation room. Certain wisecracks are made about whether the interviewer is with the KGB or the CIA. Everybody laughs a little nervously.

The artists are all around 30 but look like kids. Vladimir Mironenko, an American girl’s ideal hunk, smokes Marlboros and wears a Levi’s jacket. The cowboy. Andrei Roiter seems European in glasses and a scrubby beard. He speaks decent English but lapses into Russian so as to not take advantage of his friends. Skinny Konstantin Zvezdochetov could only be Russian in a sailor’s middy that makes him look like a character from “Battleship Potemkin.” He and Roiter roll their own.

The translator, Kevin Gardner, is a formally suited young chap with earrings and a skunky punk hairdo in brown and blond. He runs into some befuddlement on account of the Muscovites’ habit of all talking at once and then lapsing into eloquent silences, morose or ironic. They didn’t teach him this at Yale.

Well, how do you guys like the States?

They exchange looks. Every question seems to mean about four things to them.

The cowboy, the most urbane of the group, says the streets of San Francisco reflect democracy in the faces of the people, their clothes and even the way they walk.

“Yes, yes,” says the union director, “just like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.”

The boys don’t think it’s funny.

Well, then, how are they enjoying the new artistic freedom that seems to have come with Gorbachev’s reform policies?

Zvezdochetov, the sailor, says he felt free before glasnost , painting privately in his ramshackle studio. He explains that Soviet artists of his generation have long done experimental work shared with friends and fellow artists. He liked the quality of pure artistic and intellectual expression that went with making art that way.

“Now there is a negative permissive atmosphere. Before we had a private self-respect. Now we must compromise and align with the mechanisms of museums and publicity. We must put on airs. Tonight we are going to the symphony where black ties are obligatory. We don’t have black ties.”

He is heartfelt. He is scornful.

Americans think that Soviet contemporary artists had to develop without being able to see much in the way of Western-style avant-garde art except in reproductions that drift into the Soviet Union. What great modernist artists impressed them this way? Picasso? Their own master Malevich?

“Malevich is already Europeanized,” scoffs the union director.

“I have no relationship to Malevich,” insists the sailor. “His art reflects a time of Utopian violence, a time of the rape of the spirit.”

His contemporaries, he says, influenced one another. “We all lived and worked together. Our life is our people.”

The cowboy chimes in, “One’s neighbor is more influential than far-away famous names.”

Roiter has been silent, smiling at some private joke. “Western information was mythological. It didn’t cut it for us.”

“We all supported one another,” says the sailor wistfully. “We valued the connection more than the work. We’d sign our works with the name of the group. Now everyone signs with his individual name.”

To somebody accustomed to talking with American artists who like to rattle off the artists and styles that have influenced them, the soulful, philosophical Soviet responses are a revelation.

The union chief says, “That’s because Western art works like this”--he makes a gesture indicating the links of a chain. “American artists want that connection because it joins them to the marketplace and the mass media.”

“Our style,” says Sailor, “was like jazz, like a jam session--we all played solos but there was harmony and a common work. Our art was a form of existence. Our exhibitions were like concerts where everyone participated in the music as it was being played. Selling art or hanging it in a museum or gallery is absurd.”

Cowboy makes a stab at summing it up. “Before, our battle was with power. Now it is with commercialization.”

“We live with the most extreme situations in the U.S.S.R.,” says Sailor. “ Perestroika is only one arrangement of life. It seems normal now, but it can change and then we’ll have to deal with that. What counts in the end is just life itself. Do you understand?”

The exhibition itself is so affected by cultural confrontation that it is virtually impossible to read in a normal way. For starters the biggest surprise is the visual similarity between the American and Soviet art. The snippets of Soviet art we have seen here have been either the pathetic daubs of underground refusenik artists or slick Western knockoffs in multiple reproduction. Neither of these retro styles prepared us for the hipness of the Soviets. They even have Western-style appropriationist jokes like a little pencil-nosed cartoon figure by Yurii Albert. It is hung upside-down and titled “I Am Not Baselitz!,” in reference to the German Neo-Expressionist painter.

Like our lot, they tend to produce large-format paintings that match and mix modern and traditional styles in any way that appears meaningful--or potentially meaningful--to the artists. On both sides there is a terrific sense of confusion, of not so much making art as trying to figure out a way to make art through Post-Modernist recombinations. The grammar of painting is in both cases used less for what it looks like than for what it symbolizes--so that the work is intended as much to be read as to be looked at.

David Salle is up to his usual tricks, combining such images as grayed, quasipornographic women, an evocative word, a snippet from an old marine painting and a portrait. His brand of horny cultural romanticism is as clear as an Evening at Pops concert. The work of Zvezdochetov is not so different. One combine painting puts together a length of wooden fence, a slab of painted brick and an illustrative image of a guy crawling away from a factory and toward a slice of watermelon.

Looking at it you suddenly realize you don’t speak Russian. In American culture a slice of watermelon is either a sign of racial slur or an allusion to the painting of Rufino Tamayo. One strongly suspects that’s not what Zvezdochetov meant. Our understanding is not at a dead loss. Obviously a suffering man is crawling away from a bleak society toward something desirable. Again and again the show leaves one feeling that the art is so culturally based--and so fundamentally literary--that we miss the fine points. With an artist like Kandinsky this is not a problem.

When our countrywoman Annette Lemieux shows us “Something for the Boys” we know exactly what’s going on. Its a blown-up vintage photo of some Shriners-convention type plucking a dancer’s scanty costume--the whole wrapped in a red-white-and-blue ribbon. All our current knowledge of feminism with its political and sexual overtones comes to bear and the work is as clear as a Calvin and Hobbes strip, if considerably less amusing.

The Muscovite Alexi Sundukov is no less graphic in a painting of a sea of faces called “Face to Face.” We seem to recognize portraits of the likes of Gorbachev and Gromyko, but it would take a fairly detailed familiarity with the appearances of Soviet VIPs to be sure that the painting is really about what it seems to be about--the actual suppression of the masses in a supposedly classless society. And if that’s it, are these artists making art or cultural propaganda?

The evidence leans to cultural propaganda--or rather sub-cultural propaganda, since it all represents special-interest points of view and sends finely tuned signals to audiences assumed to be insiders who can decode the message. This means that much of the Soviet work will be enigmatic to American audiences and vice versa when it gets to Mother Russia. American artniks have no trouble understanding the ironies, parodies and historical jokes in Peter Halley’s Neo-Geo hard-edge fluorescent abstractions, but what about Mironenko’s elegant geometric compositions? The work of the cowboy of the interview has the most sophisticated design among the Moscow artists. One work called “Ours-Yours” is perfectly accessible. It shows two identical sets of mirror-image abstract blobs divided by a fluorescent tube and striped bands that look like frontier barriers. The work’s allusion to maps and the twin “territories” conveys a mordant message about countries that fight thinking the other is the enemy when the other is really itself.

The transparency of this work only dramatizes the opacity of the rest. How will the audience in Leningrad fare with Mark Tansey’s strange brown history painting of a meeting between the officers of two armies that seem to come from different wars? Will they find the title “The Triumph of the New York School” amusing after what they’ve been through?

In the end we must have recourse to the purely visual aspect of the work. All of it has a kind of nonchalant desperation. In general the Americans look comparatively slick and professional. (Rebecca Purdum is a notable exception. At first I took her big, sincere scrubby abstractions for Russian.)

The Soviets, by contrast, paint in funky, loving-hands-at-home style. Compared to the self-confident stripes of Ross Bleckner, a red and black grid by Anatolii Zhuravlev looks like something done in an hour with a cheap house painter’s brush, but it conveys the message that the idea was more important to him than the object.

What will be made of all this? Given our infinite capacity for misunderstanding one another, the Americans may find the Soviets an amateurish, deprived class and they may find our finesse a way of making art as a commodity in a consumer society.

Mistakes all round. David Bates, despite his tiresome allusions to Marsden Hartley, is a fine chunky painter. April Gornik’s romantic landscapes are historically retrograde but authentically romantic. Technical command lends art authority.

The Soviets get the prize for soul. Roiter shows a suite of paintings called “Unseen Voices,” big olive-drab slabs with louvered portholes and panels of decoratively painted fruit. They look like battleship bulkheads but in fact allude to old radios common to Soviet households. Like that of most of the Soviet group, Roiter’s work is at once, thoughtful, tough and lyrical. It embarrasses our stuff a bit. It is so heartfelt, so meant .