Russian’s Daunting Art Task

Many Russian job descriptions have changed radically since the former Soviet Union was dismantled. Alexander D. Borovsky’s has become infinitely more interesting. As chief curator of contemporary art for the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, he is charged with building a collection of art that was officially ignored for several decades.

“For us, contemporary art was art of the 1920s and Socialist Realism, of course,” Borovsky said, referring to the museum’s mind-set during the early years of his 15-year tenure. Prominently situated on St. Petersburg’s Arts Square, the museum boasts the world’s largest collection of Russian and Soviet art. But the national treasure house didn’t include the work of ideological dissidents until recently, and vast holdings of early 20th-Century Russian avant-garde art were off limits to the public and staff alike, he said.

Now that anything goes art-wise in Russia, Borovsky has the daunting task of filling a gap that grew wider with every year of hard-line Communist rule. He must consider abstraction, Expressionism and realism, modernist formalism and postmodern conceptualism--executed from myriad points of view in many media by former dissidents--as he attempts to make up for lost time. Part of Borovsky’s job is to catch up with Russian artists who left the country and to understand how Russian contemporary work fits into the international panorama of art.

He and his wife, architecture historian Elena Borovsky, recently came to Los Angeles as an integral step in fulfilling that challenge. As the first Russian participant in a new exchange program between USC and the Russian Museum, Alexander Borovsky will spend a semester doing research at the university and getting to know Southern California museums, galleries and artists, as well as any Russian connections they may have. (USC graduate student Jennifer Cahn is currently in St. Petersburg. The exchange program, initiated by College of Fine Arts Dean Lynn Matteson and John E. Bowlt of the Slavic languages department, is funded by the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation.)

While this is Borovsky’s first visit to Los Angeles, he has made several trips to New York and he attends major exhibitions in Europe, such as the recent “Documenta IX” in Kassel, Germany, even if he has to foot the bill. It’s all part of being informed, he said. To help Russian artists learn about the international scene, he has organized exhibitions of work by Americans, Russian emigres and the late German sculptor Joseph Beuys at the Russian Museum.

Compiling a collection of contemporary Russian art is not a straightforward project, according to the curator. “In the States or in Europe, you would look for the main figures, the main direction, the mainstream. We have to explore a wider territory, including artists who don’t live in Russia,” he said. During the year that he has been working on the project, he has bought about 150 works, including one by Komar & Melamid, a Russian team of painters who live in New York.

Artistic reassessments following the end of the Cold War have complicated Borovsky’s job. Artists who are revered elsewhere for criticizing the excesses of the Soviet regime--such as Grisha Bruskin, who made a big hit at Sotheby’s landmark auction in Moscow in 1988, and Ilya Kabakov, a critically acclaimed conceptualist who is in demand at the most prestigious exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States--are thought to be rather old-fashioned in Russia, Borovsky said. “We can live without Bruskin,” he said. That is not true of Kabakov, “but it’s difficult to catch him,” he said of the widely traveled artist.

“Fifth-rate American artists who have been considered first-rate Russian artists” also have to be sorted out, he said. These Russian emigres have been admired in their homeland because of their political stance or humanitarian work, but their art doesn’t measure up to international standards and it’s unlikely to find a place at the Russian Museum.

Developing strategies to deal with such problems can be exhilarating. “Working in Russia is like life in Chicago in the ‘20s. Everything is possible,” Borovsky said.

On the other hand, the lack of structure presents problems. There is a dearth of art criticism because state-financed art magazines have folded. “The government was cruel, but they paid the writers,” Borovsky said. Critics had to address prescribed subjects in the defunct magazines, but at least they could practice their critical skills. Now the only avenue open to most Russian critics is exhibition catalogues published in other countries, he said.

The Russian audience for contemporary art also has dwindled. “In the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s, everything was for the people. Simple people were told that if they liked art and they could understand it, it was good. When they see contemporary art they don’t understand, they assume it is no good,” he said.

Forbidden art also had a certain cachet that is missing now, Borovsky said. When there was a distinction between official and unofficial art, “everybody thought art was important, even the KGB,” he said. “Crowds lined up for 10 hours to see the first underground show.” In contrast, only a few hundred people came to see the Beuys show at the museum, he noted.

Another change is that people in the arts used to pride themselves on knowing nothing about business, but now they need business skills to survive, he said. The Russian art market is elusive, however. “There’s no real system of galleries in Russia,” Borovsky said, “so we work directly with the artists.”

The Russian Museum has a paltry acquisitions budget, but it is adequate because artists happily sell their works to the museum for as little as $100. “We are very poor but prestigious,” he said.

Recently acquired contemporary art is not on view at the museum, however. Neither is the avant-garde collection. “The museum is in a constant state of reconstruction,” Borovsky said. “There’s no problem of policy now. There is a problem of space.”