Canvas is an attempt to fill the broad gap in English-language information about Russian art, be that for insiders and professionals or for the expat gallery-goer. Topics include (but are not limited to) the latest developments on the Moscow scene, visits to artists’ studios, coverage of exhibitions that don’t make it into the newspaper, and takes on the issues facing Russian art today. It intends to spotlight art that even in Russia passes under most people’s radar, as well as the oligarch parties with which it tends to be associated.  Boris Groys claimed that art criticism is “some kind of surplus, an excess of writing;” that is what this blog modestly aspires to be.


We begin, appropriately, with a beginning. Russian culture ministers of the last few years have not let contemporary art escape their attention. That’s not always been a good thing, however. When the first Moscow Biennale opened in 2005, Mikhail Shvydko referred to contemporary art as “bullshit.” Two years later, Alexandr Sokolov stepped in to prevent several politically charged works from leaving for an exhibition in Paris, infamously labeling the Blue Noses duo as “Russia’s disgrace.”

So it was a surprise to hear new minister Alexander Avdeyev open April’s state-funded "Innovation" prize ceremony at Winzavod with a speech in which he proclaimed, "We should have done a museum and state center of contemporary art twenty years ago," and promised National Center for Contemporary Art director Mikhail Mindlin that “we will help you build a 17-story building for your center” to replace its cramped two-story home.

Mindlin himself was so taken aback that he took to the stage and asked Avdeyev back to explain himself further. And rightly so, as it happens. Avdeyev’s statement wasn’t too far away from something like, “Yes, Jeanie, there is a Santa Claus.” Moscow is one of the few major world capitals without a major contemporary art museum like London’s Tate Modern or New York’s MOMA. Building one has long been its art world’s biggest dream; for the moment it has to make do with five serious galleries, two small museums, and a recent growth in privately funded spaces such as Stella Kesaeva’s eponymous foundation or Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture.

It was against that backdrop that Avdeyev’s speech came so far out of the blue.  Months went by without any further developments. Two weeks ago, however, what it was he had been talking about became clear when the Culture Ministry announced its intent to build a “world-class” international contemporary art museum inspired by Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou. This will be built literally on top of the NCCA according to a design partly drawn up by Mindlin himself. Its 17 stories (aha!) will include about 25,000 square meters of floor space, a cinema, a café, and other amenities while incorporating the NCCA’s current building and activities.

Beyond that almost nothing is clear. When asked why the government had suddenly decided, 17 years after the NCCA’s founding, to green-light the project, Deputy Culture Minister Pavel Khoroshilov limited his answer to a cryptic “Better we build a museum than a beer hall.” Nobody seemed to have any idea where the projected 3 billion rubles for construction is going to come from. When Regina Gallery owner Vladimir Ovcharenko, who along with fellow gallerist Gary Tatinsian has agreed to assist the NCCA in building a permanent collection, began to speak about public and private funding, the press conference quickly descended into a classically Russian shouting match. There is little idea of what art will actually go in it either. NCCA art director Leonid Bazhanov’s general idea is based on “international post-Soviet art” of the last two decades, which he vaguely and somewhat worryingly characterized as “[Paul] McCarthy, the Chapman Brothers, [Damien] Hirst.”

Money aside, it’s equally difficult to see how even the NCCA’s best efforts can produce a top-level museum for Moscow. An “international” institution will almost certainly require bringing in a team of international art professionals — who some refer to as “Guus Hiddinks” — of the sort conspicuously absent here. Without salaries high enough to lure them over, as was done in Russia’s financial sector, the NCCA will have to compete with the forbiddingness of Russia’s weather, language, high cost of living, and still-nascent art world. Those circumstances are far beyond its control; unless they change, foreigners with an interest in Russian art will remain limited to a small number of specialists and Russia enthusiasts.

I’m also unsure whether such a museum is what Moscow really needs. After all, the likes of Hirst, indelibly associated with mass-production, prices well into the millions and a certain vapidity, are exactly the opposite of what the NCCA does so well. Its 2,500-piece collection is a small treasure trove of Russian art from the late Soviet period onwards; its 2,500-square-meter exhibition hall is one of the best places anywhere to view that art, which, due to Russian art’s insignificance on the international market, would otherwise be eclipsed by those Hirsts and McCarthys.

There’s a sense that the place for them is Garage, as exemplified by the show from Francois Pinault’s absurdly expensive collection (which had a great McCarthy installation as well as works by the likes of Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami) in March, which marked the Moscow debut of art bought and sometimes loved by oligarchs the world over. The NCCA’s stock in trade is more like the show from artist Vadim Zakharov’s collection on there now, made up largely of works given to him as presents by most of the best Soviet-era nonconformists whom high prices continue to pass by. The Zakharov show may lack Pinault’s PR clout and price tag, but — for my money at least — it’s easily one of the highlights of the year in Russian art so far.

So it’d be a shame to see that eclipse the domestic produce of which the NCCA has been such a staunch defender. For optimism we can look to their excellent "Another Mythology" exhibition in February, which paired works by foreign stars like Marina Abramovic, Tony Matelli, and those same Champans with Russian conceptualists like Igor Makarevich and Zakharov in an improbable dialogue. The dark side is partly exemplified by "Unconditional Love," a noisy mess co-organized by the NCCA at this year’s Venice Biennale whose bizarre conception and incomprehensible roster of artists made the thing look more like a PR exercise than an art project.
 
As ever, I will hope for something like the "Mythology" show. After all, the museum is at such an obviously nascent stage — it doesn’t even have a name — that making any kind of predictions seems premature. But the questions remain: Is this just another insane and unrealizable utopian architectural dream of the sort Russians are so fond of, from Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International to the awful “Gazprom Tower” under construction in St. Petersburg? Or is this the moment when Russian art finally claims its place on the world stage? Only time will tell. The museum is slated to open in 2015 at the earliest. Watch this space…