IZO

Biography of Russian emigré artist, Paraskeva Clark (Montreal Gazette). Below, her Parachute Riggers, 1947, in the Canadian War Museum.

Brener-Schurz update: Dianne Beal of Galerie Blue Square writes:

We had a Brener happening at Galerie Blue Square last week during a private reception for Igor Makarevich while he was in Paris. There were aggressive shouts of "down with capitalism" etc. but we narrowly avoided the nudity and feces show of Schurz who had evidence from her last performance still visible. Apparently, the respect Sasha has for Igor avoided a bigger scene and they did not show up again for our publc opening of Makarevich's exhibition "Manifestations Conceptuelles" [Galerie Blue Square] two days later.

Komar and Melamid "Absinthial Vodka" for sale (ebay).

Two takes on Central Asia:

Historic colour photos of pre-Soviet Asia by Prokudin-Gorskii at the Museum of Russian Art, Minneapolis (Star Tribune).

A New Silk Road: Algorithm of Survival and Hope, by Kirgiz artists Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, at Impronte CA from 14 January 2010 (Impronte).

Vitali Komar's New Symbolism.

Inna Levinson show in Berlin, 2006.

Bakhchanyan and Death (thanks, VK and MK).

"Evgeny Rukhin" on ebay.

The artist and writer Vagrich Bakhchanyan has died in New York, aged 72 (Radio Svoboda, in Russian) (thanks, AB and several other readers). There is a good choice of web resources, but this seems particularly good, uniting images, reminiscences and aphorisms (samizdat.zaraz). Bakhchanyan had been suffering for months from a neurological disorder that led to him hearing loud unstoppable screams; it is reported that he committed suicide. IZO reader Mark Kelner writes:

He was a rare example of an artist who was open, warm and loving in life, as he was talented, imaginative and a true non-conformist in art.  A true one-of-a-kind, I feel he was under-represented if only because he chose to use paper instead of canvas, which collectors seem to appreciate more. I like to think that he was simply ahead of the curve and that the world will catch up with his ideas in my lifetime, but sadly not in his.

Below, a Bakhchanyan that formed part of the Forbidden Art show (IZO). When it was made, in the 1980s, it was risky because the satire directed at Lenin; nowadays, in Russia, the problem is the image of Christ.

 
UPDATE: a late work: the ears refer to the noises he was hearing towards the end of his life; photo by Bakhchanyan's wife, Irene.

. 

On the beautiful and mysterious Marousia (Miriam) Nissenholtz and Boris Schatz's art school (Haaretz).

Rare and exotic stuff: Komar and Melamid elephants' art academy painting for sale, $200 (craigslist).

And Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz drawing in London (Bonhams) (thanks, MK).

"My name is Melamid. I am an artist. I am your God. I am the God of Gods" (Melamid World Ministry).

Grisha Bruskin at Marlborough Gallery, NY, from 16 September (Artdaily).

Interview with Vitali Komar (myninjaplease).

Tate, MOCA LA and Philadelphia Museum of Art to present Arshile Gorky retrospective (Artdaily). Way to get ahead as an emigre:

With his sister, Vartoosh, he eventually arrived in the United States where, claiming to be a cousin of the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, he changed his name to Arshile Gorky. 

Meet Alexey Steele (LA Times):

The son of Socialist Realist painter Leonid Steele, he paints in an outsized Renaissance scale and burns brightly with the primal place of art. He grew up in the Soviet Union, and likens himself to a citizen of Atlantis, a nation that's sunken beneath the seas. The place, though gone, profoundly shaped him. "In the West," he says, using a rusty knife to flip the cap off a beer bottle a few weeks before the concert, "art is a luxury. In Russia, it is a means of survival -- collective survival for everyone. Going back to the Middle Ages and the Tatars. Art carries the torch -- something that will not let the wind blow it down!"

Good interview with Vitali Komar (Artnet, in German):

Kitsch can today as it were play the role of the avant-garde, because it has the power to provoke all those whose taste is schooled to like the avant-garde. (...) Kitsch is the only dream of happiness that has survived.

New book on Leonid Lamm (Amazon). Lamm's show opens in the Russian Museum on 10 September.

NY Roerich Museum "twice-heisted" in June (NY Post):

Cops said they had few clues in the thefts, and surveillance video of the hallway has yielded little information.  Officials said the museum employs four staffers and receives only about 25 visitors on an average day.

On post-Soviet musicians in the USA: Regina Spektor, Gogol Bordello, Aline Simone et al (RFE/RL):

"The main thing is to not let yourself get sucked into the emigre quagmire," [Russian journalist Boris] Barabanov says, "where you can make a living playing in restaurants and fool yourself into thinking that it's OK."

Interview with Regina Spektor (CNN) (thanks, MK):

CNN: Your song "Dance Anthem of the '80s" is very cute. Did the music of that decade make a big impression on you? 

Spektor: Yeah, I think because I spent all the '80s in the Soviet Union, my '80s were the '90s...even the beginning of 2000 actually. But I just love the fun of it. I think that it's not so dark and "me." It's very extroverted and it just doesn't take itself seriously. Fun, weird sounds and fun hair, and floppy everything.  Even though artistically it was really a fun decade, I think economically it was a very dangerous decade. It was a time of big, fast spenders and people who just didn't really think about the consequences of their greed.

New stained-glass works by Vitali Komar, photographed in his DUMBO, Brooklyn, studio. Komar will show new paintings at Ronald Feldman in November.

Sculptor Alexander Ney creates beautiful structure of DiMora’s forthcoming $2million car (Luxurylaunches.com).

Ha! According to this cunning journalist, Michael Jackson, in chiseling and bleaching away at his body, was enacting something analogous to the ideas established by Komar and Melamid in their World's Most Wanted Paintings research (Rob Tannenbaum/NY Mag):

I thought about artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who in the mid-nineties hired pollsters to determine the qualities people most liked to see in a painting and used the research to determine color, theme, and other elements in their canvasses. Michael Jackson did something similar, without the formality of polling (...)  A pollster would likely find what Jackson discovered: The most popular singer in America would be black, but not too black; male, but not masculine; sensual, but not sexual.

Way to make a connection to Russian art, Mr Tannenbaum.

Politically incorrect: on Russian emigré Simka Simkhovich's Depression-era mural in Jackson, Miss. (USA Today):

It's a large, three-panel mural titled Pursuits of Life in Mississippi that was painted in 1938 by Russian-born Simka Simkhovitch. Part of a federal program during the Great Depression designed to put artists to work, it depicts a white family at a plantation-style home.  It also shows faceless black people picking cotton and a black figure in the foreground smiling and playing a banjo.  The judges of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the mural covered several years before [Judge Henry] Wingate became the state's first African-American federal judge in 1985.

Vitali Komar's new project, entitled New Symbolism, will open at Ronald Feldman in New York on 7 November.

Short photo-report on the show Born in the USSR: Living in Germany (gerzo). A bit more info here, including video-report (gerzo).

Early last week I was told Alec Melamid was planning to sue people involved in the prohibition of his show at Phillips de Pury (IZO, earlier). Now PDP has sent out a press release to say the show has been re-scheduled for the Spring of 2010.

Sergei Korolkov is I guess the only artist to portray one of the more shameful incidents of World War II: the forced rendition of hundreds of Cossacks by the British to the Soviets in the town of Lienz, Austria. Many of them had fought on the German side, but some hadn't and were, for example, civilians; and many were not Soviet citizens at all. Korolkov died in the USA in 1967. 

A description of the handover (Absolute Astronomy):

The first to commit suicide by hanging was the Cossack editor Evgenij Tarruski. The second was General Silkin who shot himself. . . . The Cossacks refused to board the trucks. British soldiers [armed] with pistols and clubs began using their clubs, aiming at the heads of the prisoners. They first dragged the men out of the crowd and threw them into the trucks. The men jumped out. They beat them again and threw them onto the floor of the trucks. Again, they jumped out. The British then hit them with rifle butts until they lay unconscious and threw them like sacks of potatoes in the trucks.

Alina and Jeff Bliumis are at Black and Whiite Project Space, Brooklyn (we make money not art).

Is Ilya Kabakov's real name Anatoli (salnikov-vova, in Russian)?

Boris Mikhailov takes an impromptu photo at the Bereznitsky Gallery opening, Berlin, 1 May. The model is artist Birgit R. Deubner.

Sensational development. The corporation which bought the initial rap-artists series (IZO, earlier) from Alex Melamid is now threatening Phillips de Pury and Melamid with court case for breach of contractual obligation if the  21 May London show (IZO, earlier) goes ahead. In fact, it looks like it's cancelled. The BBC is going ahead with the documentary about de Pury and Melamid, to be shot next week in New York (thanks, ZZ).

Top lot at Christies 24 April sale, and of the New York Russian week as a whole, was Svyatoslav Roerich's portrait of his father, Nikolai, which made neaely $3 million (AuctionPublicity.com). This was one of collector Valeri Dudakov's picks in an article referenced on IZO last week. As Dudakov points out, the work is primarily of "historical value" (Art Times/Open Space, in Russian). Which is an interesting indicator of the overriding values in the Russian art market. Overall, Christies sold 69% of lots for $13.2 million (Luxist). That's a good selling rate, by dint of course of reduced catalogue size and reduced estimates. Other interesting results: Alexander Gerasimov still-life $146,000; Pavel Chelishchev $230,000; Boris Grigoriev's Portrait of a Girl $206,000, more than doubling its estimate (Kommersant, in Russian).

New York-based emigre Leonid Sokov in his studio (thanks, MK):

Slava Tsukerman's film Perestroika opens in New York on 17 April in the Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street; there's also a dedicated website (perestroikathemovie.com).

Gipsy singer: Alesha Dimitrievich and Kostya Kazansky, Emigre Tango, performed at a Russian emigre concert in Paris in 1977. And further down, Dimitrievich performs Two Guitars with Yul Brynner (via _o_tets).

The poet Alexei Parshchikov has died in Cologne, age 54 (Lenta.ru, in Russian). I knew him in the 80s, when his girlfriend - or was it wife? - was Olga Sviblova and he was part of the metametaphor (метаметафора) group of writers and artists that included the painters Evgeni Dybsky, Igor Ganikovsky, Boris Markovnikov and Zakhar Sherman. UPDATE: memories of Parshchikov (avmalgin, in Russian).

Slava Tsukerman, who a generation ago made Liquid Sky, which I didn't like too much but which is apparently a cult, has made a new movie (LA Times):

Tsukerman's new film, "Perestroika," is about a man who feels like an alien when he returns to Russia in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union. (...)  He is also experiencing a midlife crisis (...)  In this highly personal film, Tsukerman bristles with insights and ideas, pondering even whether it's God's plan that man should destroy all life -- yet manages to work his way rigorously toward a note of spirituality.

Evgeni Dybsky's Giotto Project is at the Ludwig Museum, Koblenz, from 29 March.

On Alexey Brodovitch, the first art director of Harper's Bazaar (Chic Today) (thanks, MK).

An archive of thirty years' worth of "refusenik" documents is now online (JTA) (thanks, MK). Actually, I'm not sure "refusenik" is the right term: the refuseniks were those not allowed to leave the USSR, and this is an emigré archive; of course, many emigrés were at one point refuseniks.

New York emigré Emil Draitser has recently won a New Jersey arts award (Hudson Reporter):

Draitser said that his latest work, his memoir Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin, was the most rewarding.

Russian-Jewish life in the present: an interview with Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar of the Chabad Lubavitch, under whose auspices the Abramovich-Zhukova Garage functions:

A. ... there is a lot that Israel could do to foster a warmer friendship with Russia.   

Q. Such as?

A. Well — the world very often condemns Russia in reaction to terrorist attacks that take place in this country. Take for example what happened in Chechnya. I think Russia would like to see more understanding from Israel at such times.

Komar and Melamid remix competition (RemixComps.com).

Artist Georgi Kizevalter's gloomy take on the emigre life in Canada (Torontovka, in Russian). I guess it was written a while back: he's since moved to Moscow.

Alex Melamid's Holy Hip-Hop opens at Forum Gallery, New York, on 15 January (studio-online). Below: L. T. Hutton, 2005.

Valentina (Wikipedia) at MCNY (MCNY).

[Post removed].

Komar and Melamid's Most Wanted paintings at heart of new Theory of Art (dododreams).

Valentina Kropivnitskaya, the wife of Oskar Rabin, died in Paris on 23 December (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

The first Russian number of Art + Auction is out now (Open Space, in Russian); in it you will find my article on Alex Melamid's recent work.

Contemporary Russian shows in New York (Katya Kazakina/Bloomberg):

"If today you are showing a New York-based artist from the former Soviet Union, people pay attention,'' said Chelsea dealer Stefan Stux. "There's something of a consequence.''