IZO

In December the Ukrainian government will launch a contest for a monument to the Golodomor (the forced starvation in Ukraine in circa 1932-33). The budget is 750,000 hryvnias (about $120,000) (intv-inter.net, in Russian). It's part-and-parcel of the creation of a fresh Ukrainian history designed to bolster the country's independence. Much of the new history is anti-Russian. Whether one can legitimately describe the murderous policies presided over by Stalin and other leaders of various nationalities as purely Russian crimes is I think a moot point; the Ukrainian government would like the Golodomor to be recognised as genocide. UPDATE: Russian political technologist a Sergei Markov's speech to the Golodomor conference in Kharkov: he considers the Ukrainian position to be not only anti-Russian but also anti-semitic; and he thinks that Ukraine historians are under greater pressure to falsify history than their Russian counterparts (Unian, in Russian). There have been several sceptical responses to Markov: Ezhednevny Zhurnal for example calls his speech the "export version of Putin's ideology" (Ezhednevny Zhurnal, in Russian).

30,000 inhabitants of Krasnoyarsk were asked which "typical Englishman" should be immortalised in a statue next to the James Shark Pub in the city-centre? Winnie-the-Pooh? James Bond? Winston Churchill? Mister Pickwick? Mick Jagger? David Beckham? In the end they passed on all the above and chose Roman Abramovich (Oreanda, in Russian).

Tsereteli in at # 10 (Virtual Tourist).

A 2-metre high plaster statue of Lenin standing in a square in Ryazan was blown up and completely destroyed at 3 am this morning; no-one was hurt (Kursor, in Russian).

Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Girl will be re-erected in Moscow by the end of 2009. Restoration of the sculpture itself is complete, what remains is to build the 35-metre plinth (Vesti, in Russian):

parts of the sculpture have been cleaned and treated with special anti-corrosion materials developed in institutes connected to the aviation industry. "What is more, the inner carcas system has been built in such a way as to facilitate access to all the important parts of the sculpture for repairs," said [head of the Moscow culture heritage committee Valeri] Shevchuk. "A special lift system and stair connections have been built, these were not there before."

Reader KY asks, vis-a-vis the recent Sotheby's sale in New York (IZO, earlier):

It's very interesting that the final sale prices for the Neizvestnys (both painting and sculpture) are much less than what equivalent works are going for in his current gallery show at Mimi Ferzt in New York. Why?

I agree it's interesting. In one sense it's maybe just the difference between prices asked and prices actually paid. Of course, what Mimi Ferzt is offering may not be directly comparable to what Sotheby's sold. No matter how much the art-investment funds might like you to think so, the price of a work of art art is not directly calculable by comparison with other works: the devil's in the details. There are multiple considerations: quality, rarity, subject-matter, date, medium, provenance, even such factors as colouring (blue and red worth works are worth more than green and yellow, for example). Auctions usually insist on low estimates, dangling the carrot of a possible high price on the day, which often enough doesn't transpire. In the case of older art, or art by deceased artists, when the supply of work is finite, auction prices often seem to match or exceed gallery prices. But I think there's often little enthusiasm at auction when buyers believe that in the artist's studio or gallery there might be more similar work. Attempts to sell at auction contemporary works by Dima Gutov, Blue Noses, Oleg Kulik etc have suffered from this perception: there's no real compulsion to buy because you can always get something similar tomorrow, direct from the artist or his/her gallerist. Whether Mr Neizvestny actually has a significant backlog of work in his studio, I don't know.

Results of Sotheby's NY sale today; the Russian works performed well. It's an interesting indicator of collector bias that Ernst Neizvestny's paintings cost more than his sculpture (Sotheby's)

Guelman Gallery is planning an exhibition of work by Alexander Brodsky in the spring of 2009; it will be Brodsky's first major show in Russia for several years. Brodsky has turned out to be the star turn of the Guelman-curated Russian Povera show in Perm. His last solo show was at Feldman Gallery, New York, earlier this year.

The Communist Party is proposing to the Moscow Duma that the statue of the chekist Dzerzhinsky, pulled down in 1991, should be returned to Lubyanka Square (Kommersant, in Russian).

Two hippopotamuses, er, humping; by the assassinated priest Alexander Men (1935-90).

The well-known sculptor Lazar Gadaev has died in Moscow aged 70 (Kommersant, in Russian).

Zurab Tsereteli gives an interview on his work and also on the Russia-Georgia conflict (Argumenty i Fakty, in Russian; via galerist):

The antagonism is temporary. No matter how much you love your wife, you will have moments of coolness. At the moment we are cool towards each other. But tomorrow the romance starts anew.

Gleaned from Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper on the plane: when restored, Vera Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Girl will stand on a base 35 metres high and 75 metres long, echoing its first display in Paris in 1939, rather than the 10 metre high plinth it had until recently. This is not purely aesthetic: the base will conceal a four-storey underground car park. There is a degree of anxiety about how successfully the 6000 individual pieces of stainless steel can be re-assembled; they were originally welded together in situ on top of the Russian pavilion in Paris, but since disassembly in 2003 they have suffered some deformation, apparently.

According to Наша Версия На Неве (Our Version on the Neva), Zurab Tsereteli used to house a Georgian "spy" of "non-traditional sexual orientation" in his Moscow studio (Our Version on the Neva, in Russian).

Worker and Collective-Farm Woman update: the restoration of Vera Mukhina's famous sculpture will now be completed in 2010, "provided that there are no problems with financing" (Russia-IC):

[Head of the restoration group] Vadim Tserkonvikov noted that about 150 million rubles [$6.5 million] were allocated for the monument restoration, but the whole amount went to subcontractors at once.

In The Shadow Of The Bronze Soldier: as the author, Mark Almond Oxford, says, an affair that may be worth revisiting in the light of the Russia-Georgia conflict (Mark Almond Oxford).

A three-metre monument to macaroni is to be installed near Borovsk (gazeta.ru, in Russian):

The monument to macaroni, which will be unveiled on 26 July, consists of a 3-metre piece of macaroni coloured red, surmounted by a macaroni-horn in the form of a smile. On the ends of the "smile", opposite each other, there will be sculptured images of a man and a woman eating a huge piece of spaghetti from both ends."

An interview with Zurab Tsereteli (Vechernyaya Moskva, in Russian).

Igor Markin denounces taste of Moscow city authorities, who have decided not to permit the installation of a statue to Yeltsin that he has commissioned (Artinfo).

Russian gangster funerary slabs (niffiga.net, via dmitrivrubel).

In Russia, the cult of Putin, in Ukraine - of Timoshenko? (Ekspress Gazeta, in Russian).

The enema-monument story began its English-language existence more than a week ago on IZO, now it is all over the place; here's a report with (small) pic (Russia InfoCentre).

A bronze monument to the medical procedure known in the West as an enema or clyster has been installed at a hospital near Stavropol; it consists of three angelic children bearing aloft a pear-shaped syringe (Vesti.ru, in Russian). I can't really explain the popularity of this procedure in Russia; one person I knew used enemas as a part of her bulimic strategy, in an attempt to lose weight after over-eating (I don't think it helped much).

Mamaev Barrow, Volgograd, today, 9 May (Victory Day as celebrated in Russia) (from ru_politics). I think the huge sculpture is by Vuchetich, but haven't checked. Considering the Putin government's harking back to Soviet glories, it seems a failure of the imagination not to return to the city its old name, Stalingrad.

In an act of vandalism, black paint has been poured over the base of the monument to the Soviet Warrior-Liberator in Vienna (Gazeta.ru, in Russian).

Vera Mukhina's Worker and Collective-Farm Girl monument, dismantled for repair in 2003, should be restored by the end of 2008 (RIA Novosti, in Russian).

The Solovetsky Islands museum has rejected the offer of a hundred-metre monument by Zurab Tsereteli (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

Zurab Tsereteli is planning a monument to victims of political repression, to take the form of a 100-metre-high figure of Christ situated in the Solovetsky Islands (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

The International Federation of Russian-speaking Writers (Международной федерация русскоязычных писателей) plans to site bronze Pushkin monuments, designed by sculptor Leonid Vatnik, in countries all over the world (Lenta.ru, in Russian).

A 40-metre high gilded Buddha monument will be erected on the former Lenin Hill near Kyzyl, Tuva. It will be accessed by a 6-700 metre staircase (Vzglyad, in Russian).

The Moscow City Duma has turned down an application to install Dmitri Kavargi's monument to Boris Yeltsin on Lubyanka Square, describing the idea as "premature" (Lenta.ru, in Russian). Kavargi won a competition staged by Igor Markin's ART4RU museum.

I love this work: Alexander Brodsky's Barrel-Organ (Шарманка), in the Markin Museum.

Today I visited the very good indeed Boris Orlov retrospective at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art. Intriguing were the pre-sotsart works: tableaux that evoke paintings by Dali, cast in resin. The influence of Dali on Brezhnev-era art is an interesting thesis topic, maybe. I bought a catalogue, which they told me was "the last one". Then I bought a book on AES+F, also "the last one". Then a book on Russian video art: also "the last one". Then a book on Moscow conceptualism: also... Do they say that to all the boys?

Zurab Tsereteli is planning a 47-metre bronze Colossus of Olympia in an edition of two, one intended for the Olympics in Beijing, the other for the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. The ancient inspiration is the lost Colossus of Rhodes (which I seem to recall was one of the Seven Wonders of thje World). It will have lifts inside it and "space for a museum". Now what would he put in that museum, I wonder? (Lenta.ru, in Russian)

In Tadzhikistan the last monument to Lenin, by the architect Vladimir Kozlov, which stood in Dushanbe for 80 years, has been taken down (Regnum, in Russian).

Moscow sculptors, including the chairman of the Moscow Artists' Union Ivan Kazanski, are going on hunger strike as part of a campaign to keep control of the Moscow House of Sculptors, from which they've been evicted (Lenta.ru, in Russian). As I recall there's a pending eviction also from the House of the Actor.

Fragments of the Soviet pavilion from the 1937 exhibition in Paris have been found in the basement of a French chateau (Pervyi Kanal, in Russian; with video - you may need to scroll the text on the left and click видео at the bottom).

Doesn't like

In the Daily Telegraph: Boris Yeltsin's daughter doesn't like the winning project for a monument to her father from the Markin Museum competition. It looks a bit of a jumble to me. Markin's projects, in fact, have a certain "hooligan" aspect: I appreciate his apparent allergy to art-world preciousness, and admire his creative attempts to reshape the museum experience, but it's a bit hit-and-miss. Last night, for example, he opened a show which focused the current market value of the works displayed. The idea of a museum addressing market forces is a great one, I think, except that as presented here it was something of a speculative exercise (who knows what these pieces would would fetch in reality?) and tended to trivialise the experience the art (at least, that's my conclusion based on a couple of reports).

Dead, but did they pay taxes?

Death-masks from the Sergei Merkurov museum in Armenia (via dmitrivrubel). Below: Mayakovsky.

News round-up

The indefatigable Zurab Tsereteli is planning to install a series of sculptures in Sochi in time for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

An obituary of top animator Alexander Tartarsky.

There are 25 finalists in the competition to build a new art museumn in Perm, a mixturer of Russian and foreign firms: Acconci Studio + Guy Nordenson and Associates LLP, Adjaye Associates, Aleksandr Brodsky bureau, Asymptote Architecture PLLC, «А+», Coop Himmelb(l)au, Esa Ruskeepaa, Esa Ruskeepaa, Hans HOLLEIN, Kitagamura – Dendra, LOMA architecture landscape urbanism, Meili, Peter Architekten AG, Naga Studio Architecture, Nieto Sobejano, NOX Lars Spuybroek, Odile Decq Benoit Cornette Architects and Urban Planners, ООО «А – B», OOO Bernasconi, Schmidt Hammer Lassen k/s, Soren Robert Lund Arkitekter, Tatiana Bilbao, Totan Kuzembaev Architectural workshop, Valerio Olgiati, Vladimir Plotkin, Zaha Hadid Architects trading (from the Centre for Contemporary Architecture, in Russian).

The Danilovsky Bells are leaving Harvard for Russia and the new bells have been consecrated. Slight off-top, but some pessimistic thoughts on the increasing role of Orthodox religion in Russian life here.

Not exactly news: Richard Feigen on The Bubble:

At the Sotheby’s sale on 8 May, a Russian was seen in a sky-box in a black shirt, with a bottle of champagne and a blonde, bidding on and apparently buying for $23,280,000 a second-rate Feininger that would not have fetched $3m two years earlier.

Sculpture in the park

The spoof and the truth.

The New Yorker considers Zurab Tsereteli's monument To The Struggle Against World Terrorism.

On a recent sunny afternoon, two men drove up and parked near the monument—a Bayonne resident and his son, home from college. They walked around its base, studying the names. The father pointed at one with his shoe. “See, there’s Noley,” he said. Asked what he thought of the monument, the father looked up, shading his eyes against the ferocious brilliance of the Tear of Grief. “Pretty impressive,” he said.

Lvov monuments

More Russian rumblings about the removal of war memorials, this time in Lvov. There was a huge number of such monuments erected across the former Soviet Union, so this story could run and run.

Round-up

The Moscow Times has detail on a couple of events covered here a few days ago: the Innovation Prize and the projects for a monument to Yeltsin (or EBN [Eltsin, Boris Nikolaevich], as someone dubbed him). In a sign of the times, in Moscow, the Soviet-era Museum of Public Catering will become a museum of the art of cooking. Russia is Guest of Honour at the Geneva Book Fair; the curator of the Russian pavilion describes contemporary Russian literature as ""tough, brutal and visionary at the same time." And in the St Petersburg Times Leo Mourzenko looks the new patriotic Russian cinema in the form of the movie May and finds it to be A Crime Against Art.

Soldier moved

The Tallinn bronze soldier will be relocated to a military cemetery and re-opened to the public on May 8, writes The Baltic Times.

Estonian war memorial

The disputed Soviet war memorial by Estonian sculptor Roos was removed (pdf) from central Tallinn last night. The removal led to several hours of rioting and looting.

Yeltsin monuments

Zurab Tsereteli intends to create a monument to Boris Yeltsin, reports Dmitri Vrubel (in Russian).

And collector Igor Markin has announced a competition  (in Russian) for a monument to Yeltsin to be sited outside his museum.

Towards an Appreciation of Zurab Tsereteli

The interior of the Apple is, in its overall aspect, almost granular: the details of erotic drama  don't really grip, and the effect is of a great mass of quite similar, virtually abstract elements pushing into each other in mazy ways. It's not at all like the interior of a real apple, that's for sure. But it is, it seems to me, rather like the interior of a pomegranate. The pomegranate is highly-prized in Georgia, important in the national cuisine, and has been cultivated there for millennia. Tsereteli must have seen a million opened pomegranates. His sculpture (why an apple? was he distracted by the Bible story? or did he hope to settle this one in New York?) embodies - I suspect without the artist's even knowing it - the ancient culture and consciousness of his people ;)

Tsereteli interview

The Georgian Times's interview (pdf) with "billionaire" (but a billion of what?) President of the Academy of Arts, Zurab Tsereteli, gets off to a cracking start:

Q: You were included in our list of the top ten richest Georgians. Do you have any comments?

A: An artist can be rich only by his art, not by the “rating” which you made. Therefore, I am going to sue you in the courts.

Bits of Mukhina

Englishrussia.com has images of Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farm Girl dismantled in the course (presumably) of restoration. These photos provide what the average image doesn't: a sense of scale.