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On one tendency in the Russian video-art

"… the Russian tradition of buffoonery and craziness got combined with the experience of Dadaism and absurdity." From the Electric Visions Festival catalogue.

Last month there were two representational shows of contemporary Russian video-art in St Petersburg. One of them was much publicized in the city (curators: Maria Korosteleva and Marina Koldobskaya) and attracted incredible hordes of people to the House of the Cinematograph where it was held in the framework of the Festival of Electric Visions. The other show, which had hardly been promoted at all and set off no great buzz of exhilaration, was held at the Israeli Cultural Centre (curator: Kirill Shamanov) and brought together only a few regular frequenters of the centre and some friends of the curator's. Both events, though different in scale, did elicit the concurrence of selection criteria applied by various curators, which allows us to speak about a certain tendency peculiar to the development of the Russian video-art. To describe it, I would resort to the terms that were coined by other people but which I find most appropriate, namely, those of video-fun and art-joke.
   The question that has long been brewing up is whether we can speak about the existence of national video-art, and if we can, then in what sense? An English artist Mark Vollinger (who took part in the festival [Pro]view) demonstrated how the English sense of humour found its expression in video-art; and the Russian masters of video-art, in turn, were eager to show how the Russian fun-for-the-fun-of-it, playing the fool and people's love of buffoonery got actualized in it.
   Yet, fun can be different.
   Jesters Number One in the contemporary Russian video are undoubtedly Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov (* ^)[1]. This fun is meant for export. Much loved by their countrymen, these artists, nevertheless, do not forget that they must be understood by the more solvent foreign viewer. With this goal in view, they keep on employing various Russian hackneyed subjects: the Russian winter, Father Frost, mafia, quilted jackets, barracks; and when referring to them - it is bin Laden, twin-towers, Monica Lewinski.
   One of the types of home derision is pruning. Reduced to two sentences in the "Eradication of Illiteracy" (LikBez) by Victor Davydov, the plots of "Crime and Punishment", "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace" may well be both a mockery of the answer given by a non-achiever at school and an allusion to the folk myth-derivation, which is to omit insignificant details. Simplification in certain video-works is redolent of Harms, as was illustrated in "Lenin and Stalin 1" (^) presented by the group "For Anonymous and Free Art" (* ^), which tells us about the great love between Lenin and Stalin, the only bad thing about it being their inability to produce offspring.
   Russian fun can also do without a smile when the artist is sure of the seriousness of his intentions, as, for example, is Kirill Shamanov (* ^) in his work "Software to Suit All Emergencies" (^). The point is not just to send a VHS-cassette to the president with the text of the oath to remind him of his pledges made to the country, but to do it as if there still existed the blessed opportunity to disregard the art-context, as if there never existed, say, mail-art or political actionism. In this case, the point of the young artist's fun is a mixture of political engagement and artistic innocence, which, in essence, are his political innocence and artistic engagement.
   The buffoonery, made salient by the Russian video-art, in my opinion, partly derives from the perception of the futility to ever achieve Their technical accomplishments, Their natural belonging to the world art space, and partly from the national peculiarity of sneering at everything which is foreign, including the Western video-art that has flooded our literary, pictorial and cinematographic arts.
   The strong side of this buffoonery is the unveiling of any fashionable language automatism: the discourse of the flesh, national identity, de-centering - in fact, of all post-Derridan ideological medley. For example, Mizin's video-piece, "Self-portrait", (*) in the context of the 'bloody' works by Uri Katzenstein, looks like "Our Response to Chamberlain". Instead of sophisticated inscriptions made with blood filling a syringe by an Israeli artist, Mizin executes a jovial caricature of himself - with blood oozing from a vein.
   The gist of works lies in the logo-centrism of the Russian culture, where image is subject to word.
   For many of the presented video-works (e.g. "Daybreak" by Gor Chakhal (*) or "Connecting" by Maxim Iluykhin(*)), one look is enough to understand, to enjoy and to grasp the coup de maоtre that makes one laugh. Here the poring over is of less importance, understanding being the point. The picture is not a value in itself, it is the key to the game of meanings and cultural codes. Insulated from all contexts, the artistic in video-art yields to the visual that implies incorporation of images into various cultural, social and political contexts.
   Alongside with working on the visual, Russian artists keep criticizing the spectacular. Yet, the contemporary Russian video-criticism of la sociйtй du spectacle (Velikanov (^), Gorlova (*), Shamanov (^*), Mizin and Shaburov (^*)) is ungrounded and happens to be but the homage to the artistic vogue. Russia with its random housing schemes and pathless woods has never been la sociйtй du spectacle in the way the urban space of the post-Hausmannian йpoque was, the latter being declaimed by the idol of the younger generation of home artists, Guy Debore.
   When attempting to conceptualize the whole thing, one is likely to pose a question of whether the above-described tendency of total irony is aptly grasped or, rather, whether it is skillfully invented by curators. The major part of the Russian programme Electric Visions is a video-documentary of actual events and performances, where video is nothing but a means. Both historians and artists use paper to write or to paint on, but we cannot say that they are engaged in paper art. The abundance of video shows in St Petersburg testifies to the fact that our home artists employ video as a medium. And what about video-art?
  
  P.S.
   We would like to touch upon the problem of duration. It is obvious that it should be different for video-shows and video-installations in the gallery. Artists and curators sometimes forget about it. Some of the presented works fell out of the temporal regime of the video-run. Yet there were examples of apposite manipulating of viewers' attention, as was the case with "22.07.2002" by Vladimir Bystrov (*). At the face value, this work is a travesty of the much-loved Scandinavian video-art's genre of autobiographical soliloquy. The "Talking Head" is the artist's grandmother, who examines those topoi of her face that resemble those of her mother's and father's. It is the picking on the search of identity that western video-reels' characters are ceaselessly engaged in. The truth is that viewers are rarely much interested in other people's identities, same goes for this old woman. Yet the author makes a good use of the feelings that viewers have - the duration of this work coincides with the time needed to understand it. Looking at the face is timed to make the woman's speech a crashing bore, but the repetitious "I have my dad's eye, my mum's chin, etc." produces the effect of histrionics and irony. You realize that you yourself, when talking about yourself, for example, when showing pictures of yourself, cannot stop. And then, when all of a sudden the woman stops the game and speaks to her grandson, the whole thing goes beyond the frame of the hackneyed monologue. The work ends. For comparison, the work "Quartet" by the group "Escape" (*), also employing the duration effect, is devoid of simultaneousness of the author and viewer. The knack of the work is that musicians play one piece but a different one is sounded, and one can realize this before, though not at once, the video-reel ends.
  
  Anna Kharkina
  
   [1] Here and onwards (*) means that the work is shown in the framework of the video-programme Electric Visions, and (^) stands for the Israeli Cultural Centre.
  
  
  Names of plates:
  
   Vyacheslav Mizin, Alexander Shaburov, along with Oleg Kulik. "Death in Venice", 2003.
   Vyacheslav Mizin, "Self-portrait", 1999
   Vladimir Bystrov, "22.07.2002", 2002.
   The Escape Programme. "Quartet", 2002.