Digging Out a New Underground

Twenty years ago this fall, Moscow's contemporary artists were concentrating on not being bulldozed.


Left with no alternative, artists showed their works on the walls of their apartments, if they showed them at all. The notorious "Bulldozer Exhibit" of 1974, where militia destroyed countless works of art, is only the most graphic example of state suppression.


Dima Vrubel, Sasha Dzhikiya and Nina Kertselli were, respectively, 14, 11 and 12 on that day. By the time they came into their own as painters, Russian contemporary art had not only come out from underground, but evolved into its own establishment. Thirty different galleries show modern art in Moscow today, and the same work that was bulldozed in 1974 is selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars at Western auctions.


Vrubel, Dzhikiya and Kertselli want nothing more than to go back underground. Sitting around a card table in the old-style "apartment-gallery" where they have displayed their paintings for almost a decade, they admit to having a little nostalgia.


"The ideal was a past time when they were a little afraid, but not so fiercely," said Dzhikiya of Russian contemporary artists. "That's when they worked really well." For dramatic punch, of course, it's hard to out-underground the original nonkonformisty, who worked in solitude for years with no assurance that they would gain even local -- much less international -- renown. But the rebels of the '70s and '80s, like Ilya Kabakov and Dmitry Prigov, have now become a new orthodoxy, Vrubel said.


"Kabakov -- Gorbachev," he said, dismissively. The galleries' shortlist of commercially successful painters is no less tyrannical than the Party repression, he said. "It's just a different mafia."


The artists among the shestidesyatniki -- the liberals of the 1960s -- fought for the opportunity to show their work, but the market came hand-in-hand with exposure, and the market has proved a corrupting influence, he said. "To sell and to paint are two different things," Vrubel said. "For a real artist, it doesn't matter whether there are viewers or not."


The evolving art market is increasingly dictated by nouveau riche Russians rather than foreign collectors, they said. The idealistic Communists of the 1920s recast artists as simple workers. Vrubel's New Russian customers, who drive up to the studio in Mercedes 400s, see it differently.


"Everyone thinks they are all bandits," Vrubel said. "You'd think it would be frightening, right? Well, when they come in here, they think we are these strange people, living in a different world -- a world that will not admit them."


"They sit here like schoolchildren and say, 'Unfortunately, I know nothing about art. Tell me about it,'" Vrubel said. "These are the people that are setting the art market."


Often, rich Russians are attracted to the largest possible painting, or disappointed at an artist's asking price because "they want to pay twice as much," he said. Still, the mere fact that


nouveaux riches are beginning to invest in contemporary art is an encouraging sign, and suggests that they may eventually become educated buyers.


"They can understand antiques. If you have a Rembrandt or a Faberg? egg, that is clearly understood, that's solid," Vrubel said. "If, on the other hand, you have a Nina Kertselli in one corner and an Alexander Dzhikiya in another corner and a Dima Vrubel in the other corner, well, it's not a Faberg?," he added. "Of course there's still one corner left for the Faberg?."





To visit the "Kvartart" gallery, call Dima Vrubel at 943-3763.