Opened in the Tretyakov gallery the exhibition “Nevsegda. 1968-1985” — apparently, the main exhibition of the Moscow summer. It offers a large-scale revision of the art of stagnation and connects seemingly unconnected things, challenging existing hierarchies and commonly accepted good taste. More important, however, is the opportunity to look at the actual era and to try to get rid of the myths that have long determined its vosprijatija stagnation reinvented in recent years, more than any other period in recent Russian history. Partly the fact that the previous decade look a bit exhausted, and subsequently — not quite closed. Talking about Stalinism and the thaw that often turns into a repetition and clarification of the particulars of reform and ‘ 90s — nostalgic memories and the settling of accounts. Stagnation is the story, but the story is just now opening as such.On the other hand, affects a popular way to talk about contemporary Russian reality as a new stagnation. This myth (not that of the eternal return, not about the tragedy, repetitive farce) can nurture, and can be disproved. In any case it does not work completely dismissed. The exhibition in the Tretyakov gallery builds on this double challenge of a new distance and new surroundings.* “Long seventies” different from the neighboring epochs not only the distance compared to today. Those have a simple, easily definable style: sublime, slightly tacky thaw, pathetic, farcical restructuring. The stagnation it is not. There is the key, which can be formulated in words, deeds and images of the time. However, they recognized. It is necessary to tune and look at a more subtle way.In a conversation about society and art of the 70’s long reign a series of oppositions: the Soviet/anti-Soviet, underground/semi-official. When the need for division into friends and foes disappears, it becomes clear that opposition to poorly describe this era. Rather, it is in the power of non-oppositions of different kinds of ambiguities.Stagnation — a time of cynicism and idealism, of bezbednosti and consumption of the spiritual quest and total irony, emptiness official speeches and the heyday of the humanitarian thoughts of frustration and infantilism, hiding holes and frightening depths. These contradictions define the internal voltage of literature, film, official and unofficial art of the era. Even if the artist decisively chooses one side, it almost always feels the pull of another. It seems that the inevitable ambiguity does not give the sensitivity of this time to be in style.In visual arts it is felt most clearly. By the early 70s almost dying socialist realism (or rather, it disappears from what can be called professional art, PEwill regedit in the area of Handicrafts). But the dominant manners thaw — harsh style, soft modernism, the new abstraction — is also sidelined. They lose Pobediteley, the desire to Express the spirit of the time, to show him the direction. The era is no longer dominant.It’s not because she ends the story — the modern story, which kept Soviet world and inspired his art— history purposefully to create the future in simple terms, movement to communism.For this condition there is a simple definition of the postmodern. One of the conceptual advantages of the exhibition at the Tretyakov gallery, that she first represents all the box art of stagnation — the “young” melancholic left Mosha, metaphysical with little Georgia, to photorealism — how postmodern. At the heart of their very different aesthetics — the first combination of incongruous styles and elements, application of eras, a sense of the end of history, light and heavy permissiveness of homelessness.* The seventies were not conscious postmodernists, with the obvious exception of the circle of Moscow conceptualism. It is the conceptualists in hindsight proved to be major artists of his era — at least for the next generation of its historians.With their peers they shared many Hobbies, conscious and unconscious installation. They are distinguished by two things, closely related to each other. The conceptualists first became interested in such a thing as “modern art”, which includes not only a range of visual practices, critical gestures, but also a certain system of functioning of the institutions of the art market. They were conscious postmodernists, because they knew that there was a capital — primarily symbolic, but in logic its like real. In the 90s, when contemporary art was a mandatory part of the new market world order, they become patriarchs.They were also conscious postmodernists because they knew that there is a story. What is modernism in the broad aesthetic and political sense — a time of great ideas and utopias — was over, and he who dares to commit it, feel all the death, he will become his heir. Despite the irony and companiesmost in the movement’s ambition of triumph. The conceptualists had saved their archives, translating the present into the past, seeing that the only effective way to produce the future. For other artists of the 70s mechanics of samakhiali was intuition (as Tatyana Nazarenko, Olga Bulgakova, or put yourself and your friends in a romantic ambiance of past centuries). In conceptualism, it became a principle. So at the end of the last century theorists have easily appointed him to the last link in the triad of the great styles of Russian art laste avant-garde and socialist realism.So conceptualists become finaliters history, the rest was a background (at the end of the stagnation Ilya Kabakov wrote the famous “In the future take not all”). In “Nenasala” work conceptual school, of course, is a great place. Being the most reflective artists, they largely organize the logic of the rest of the material. Trying to put a conceptual art back in the context of its time, allows us to understand something about the art of stagnation as such.* Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, not just retold, the main insight of the Sots art movement: in the West the public space is filled with images of goods in the Soviet world, this place is empty, the signs of ideology; the art of pop art appropriates the first Sots art uses the second.Opening the art market, the commodity nature of contemporary images and words, the postmodern West has always maintained a longing for an impossible authenticity and sincerity, lost the aura (the melancholy fills the whole art of Warhol).Soviet society in 70s market relations existed but were not in the foreground. However, the art has experienced something similar shortages. If the product is longing for the real thing, pop hit- the longing for true happiness, in the empty ideological object, the poster, the slogan hides a longing for the ideal.Almost the entire conceptualism — cloud Bulatov, stories about dreamers Kabakov, kvazistaticheskogo experiences of “Collective action” — pointed out this gaping ideal. A brilliant trickster Komar and Melamid was different in that it worked with its pure form — the emptiness from ideal as such.It seems that this discover the lack of conceptual ideal is the basis of the sensitivity of the stagnant art. “Long seventies” was the epoch of the dying utopia. The ossification of the official ideology of such simple things as the poster is easily turned into a blank form. However, born of the utopia of art could not so easily reconcile with the emptiness.The artist could not consider myself a Communist, but the position of the Creator of Soviet art was required from him of bias. The heart of this art in all its variants, from the revolutionary avant-garde to search for the thaw, was devotion to an ideal — changing, but keeping a base of any creativity. Rejecting Soviet ideology, the non-conformists of the 60’s or in their own way shared the same devotion (for example in the form of a return to the avant-garde), or openly challenges her. In the ‘ 70s, the feeling was becoming almost impossible. Soviet postmodernism — official, semi-official and underground — were born not in the criticism of ideology, but in the crisis of the ideal.Here is the reason some curious effect, which is often p��pow the art of the seventies, stylized under the Quattrocento portraits of drummers Oleg Filatchev, mystical surrealism rigs Camille Mullashev, alloy iconographic tradition and psychedelic visions Vitaly Lisitskogo. Born of the crisis of languages thaw hiatus sublime required a filling, and it was fit by all means. In spite of the apparent adinamical, statics of their work in the art of the seventies has sort of cramps ideal search. Convulsive this sometimes comes to shaking, confusion, almost of delirium.* Ideals, common goals and shared values make society. When they die, the community is falling apart. The art of the 70s in different ways captures these metamorphoses.One of the key themes of “Nenasala” community: from the ordinary friends to “Collective action”. In the paintings of the severe style of the 60’s a group of people represented the society in the 70s it introduces what has come to replace him— the lack of integrity, private communication. But the decay process is not stopped and the company has the following stage — alone.The plot can be most interesting worked on the exhibition— the fascination of the seventies self-portrait, self image and name of the mirror, leading to the disappearance, dissolving in his own eyes. (As in the film by Tarkovsky, the key to the identity of the era.) Losing connection and guidance, man himself becomes a gaping. So he gets a special, new vision.Together with the social fabric in the painting of stagnation as if at odds with the fabric of the visible world. Seventies obsessed with the failures, the gaps, the blackouts and flashes. The most subtle artists of the time, this feeling gives rise to a special metaphysical geometry. This is best noticeable in Oleg Vassiliev and Erik Bulatov. But equally, for example, the photorealistic Andrei Volkov and Alexander Petrov (also submitted to a kind of duet) artists very different aesthetics, but with a very similar sense of form.The porous tears of this reality can be a source of promise or threat (one of the obsessions of the epoch — the image of an atomic explosion). They can be a door to mystical secret (as in the hieratures by Mikhail Shvartsman) or empty articaine (a comprehensive study which involved Kabakov). Can be slit through which the present comes the past (as in manifestarem “Moscow evening” Nazarenko). These breaks beckon, they want to get away, but you can, at least in jest, to try to pull them (as in “the Contraction of the continents” group “Gnezdo”).The art of stagnation organized around this invisible center. All of his confusion, the confusion of styles is somehow drawn to him. If staying, the Soviet exploded, formed a funnel. Its gravitational force and created bbeschislennye ambiguity to his opposites, not quite allowed to be held ideologies and styles. This art of the 70s often have a feeling of failure, not completely controlled absurdity. If you do not treat this failure down, to try to understand its structure, you can experience dizziness, fainting history.Read more
