Memoirs of an Art Dealer

At the Central House of Artists last Friday, art dealer Marat Gelman presented "Artist's Diary," an exhibition that shows how some 40 artists have made their lives an integral part of their works, and vice versa.

For some this meant documenting actions, as in Yury Albert's "The Artist Wrote This With His Own Blood," where the rust-colored text serves as a record of a gut-wrenching 2004 performance. Others offered insight into the process of a long-term project, as in Nikolai Polissky's "The Forest School," a set of interviews with the rural craftsmen he has trained to build bizarre and beautiful wooden objects -- some of which house the monitors that play the videotaped interviews.

The show, a special project of the Moscow Biennale sponsored by the Marat Guelman gallery, casts the artists as romantic and modern heroes. Its works suggest that their actions are inherently significant or that they find significance in everyday actions.

Lately, Gelman has been portraying himself in a similar role. The dealer celebrated the 15th anniversary of his gallery's founding last month by organizing an exhibition at the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and publishing a substantial catalog. Both of them look at the gallery's work over the past 15 years in an action-packed "dealer's diary."

"The gallery is an intensely personal business," Gelman said in a recent interview at his central Moscow apartment, and described the challenges facing the gallery as it moves ahead as a "mid-life crisis."

The catalog, printed as a companion to the Russian Museum exhibition and titled simply "15 Guelman," opens with light-hearted memoirs by Gelman and his cohorts about the beginning of his art-dealer career. They list a series of spontaneous moves and mishaps, such as unsuccessful attempts to publish exhibition catalogs at the Artists' Union print shop, or trips to Kiev and Odessa to hang out with artists. After the would-be dealers brought the artists to Moscow, they spent days with them consuming nothing but vodka, crushed caviar spread and matzo, as there was nothing else in the stores.

The founding of the gallery is described as the result of an offhand remark. "[National Center of Contemporary Art director Leonid] Bazhanov came round one day and suggested I open my own gallery," Gelman writes.

Elaborating in last week's interview, he said: "In the 1990s, I was just thrilled by art. I didn't really understand anything about it."

Gelman has dabbled in other businesses, but he said that in the gallery's early days it made enough money to support him and his family. In the early 1990s, when the astronomical prices for works by Soviet underground artists were just a memory, but a fresh one, forward-looking businessmen bought works of contemporary artists on the assumption that prices would eventually rise again. Young Russian banks wanted to copy the model of their older Western counterparts and decorate their offices with contemporary art.

In the mid-1990s, Gelman entered the lucrative business of political consultancy. Ahead of the 1995 parliamentary elections, he and spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky co-founded the Foundation for Effective Politics, a pro-Kremlin think tank. They also worked on the campaign against Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov during the 1996 presidential elections, and in 2003 Gelman played a key role in the creation of the nationalist Rodina party, which began as a Kremlin project to lure voters away from the Communist Party in that year's parliamentary elections.

At times, art and politics coincided. The controversial 1996 exhibition "Kompromat" encouraged artists to use their craft to forge compromising materials, such as a vintage KGB memo concerning Zyuganov's sexual preference.

Igor Tabakov / MT Gelman, pictured here in his central Moscow apartment, says that after 15 years, his eponymous gallery is having a "mid-life crisis."

Nowadays, Gelman prefers to speak in oblique terms about his consultancy work, offering only that he was involved in "other things."

The late 1990s were a difficult period for the gallery; some rising stars who had first shown their works at the Guelman Gallery -- such as Oleg Kulik, who kicked off his notorious series of performances as a wild dog there in 1994, or the painting duo Vladimir Dubosarsky and Alexander Vinogradov -- left for XL, where the directors played a more active role in the life of the gallery.

"There was no master in the house, and the artists didn't like it," Gelman said.

But now the "master" is back. Since his last consultancy gig in the summer of 2005, in the service of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, the gallery has yielded enough profit that Gelman can devote himself to it full time.

Gelman believes that he and his gallery have more important achievements than financial success. "The gallery worked artists at the beginning of their careers and raised them to museum level," he said. "That is the classic goal of any gallery." The dealer added that his exhibition at the Russian Museum, titled "Thaw, or In the Middle of the Road," was the proof of it.

Now Gelman has his eyes on the international stage, where even the most successful Russian artists are still marginalized. He has plans under way to open galleries in London and Shanghai, two cities where he sees potential for growth in the art business. "In the last seven or eight years, London has become a cultural capital," Gelman said. "But its gallery world is still not as developed as New York's." He said the planned gallery would deal in the art of the BRIC countries, using economists' shorthand to refer to the world's four major developing economies -- Brazil, Russia, India and China.

"As for China, the growth of the contemporary art market there in recent years has been hard not to notice," he added.

Yet at the same time, Gelman is anxious about his gallery's continued success back home in Moscow. The "classic goal" of the gallery remains the same, but Gelman feels a gulf between himself and the emerging artists of today, unlike in the early '90s when new artists were his peers. "I'm rooted in the '90s," Gelman said. "I can't tell young artists apart."

Nonetheless, "Artist's Diary," which features several artists under 25 among numerous veterans of the Moscow art scene, displays Gelman's commitment to promoting new talent. Valery Chtak's "On/Off" is a series of black-and-white painted panels on the problems of Jewish identity. The group Nalivka-Zapekanka offered "Rowing/Fucking," where the viewer's motions on an exercise machine determine the speed and intensity of sex shown on a monitor. There is also a series of small sculptures with human teeth by Igor Gelman-Zak, Gelman's son, who is currently an art student in London.

"I was hoping Igor would take over the gallery," Gelman said. "But he wants to be an artist."

Another factor of the gallery's "mid-life crisis" could be the current stability in Moscow's art world. In the old days, Gelman got an adrenaline rush from working in a wilderness with virtually no other galleries, while museums displayed nothing but realist art. Now, Gelman said, the situation has "normalized." Russia has approximated the Western model of the art community, with functions more or less evenly distributed between galleries and museums, dealers and curators.

To a considerable extent, the normalization is the result of Gelman's own efforts. As one of the only people in Moscow to organize large-scale group exhibitions -- from controversial projects like "Kompromat" to broad overviews like "Artist's Diary" -- Gelman has generated buzz about contemporary art, bringing it from the squats and subcultures of the early 1990s into the mass media and the cultural mainstream.

While an artist can still strike a heroic pose, as "Artist's Diary" shows, in a smoothly running art system the dealer has to yield center stage -- something that Gelman talks about wistfully. "The heroic period is over," he said.

"Artist's Diary" (Dnevnik Khudozhnika) runs to March 10 at the Central House of Artists, located at 10 Krymsky Val. Metro Park Kultury, Oktyabrskaya. Tel. 238-9634/1245.