2015 Russian Art of the 20th Century and Contemporary Russian Art

Art residencies start their history from the second half of the 17th century, when the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture founded the “Prix de Rome” that allowed outstanding artists to undertake trips to Rome.
During the 20th century the art residencies appeared in museums, galleries and educational institutions around the world and started to play an important role in the international cultural process. As a result of a consistent instituonalization of art residencies professional networks were created. Participation in such programs became widely available and assumed different forms. The intensive development of art residencies indicates an increasing popularity of this format of work and also reflects important changes that take place in contemporary culture in global context.
Today the functions of art residencies are permanently expanding beyond traditional cultural exchange and improvement of professional skills.
The forming of new cultural and social values in Russia after 1991 played an important role in the development of local art residencies. Cultural institutions obtained more independency, professional mobility increased, necessary conditions for international exchange were secured.
Contemporary Russia still remains an “exotic” destination for many specialists, thus an opportunity to work here in the framework of an art residency attracts a lot of attention of the international professional community. In the current political situation art residencies are an effective tool for cooperation in culture and arts. They play an important role in supporting the world’s cultural balance.
This report presents an overview of existing local residency programs as well as tendencies and perspectives of their development in the current Russian context.

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An artist of modern and contemporary period (since the 19th century) in the study of art (Mikhail Yampolsky, Jonathan Crary) is often related to a type of a collector, archivist, a flaneur, a travesty. It is obvious if we consider the world view of the modern and contemporary periods in comparison to the classical one. Jonathan Crary wrote in his book “Techniques of an observer”: “…destroying the classical field of vision, the imperatives of capitalist modernization created a technique of imposing visual care, rationalization of sensation and perception management. These disciplinary techniques requested creation of an idea of a visual experience as something instrumental, modifiable and essentially abstract, and never giving the world the opportunity to become whole or eternal. Once the vision was localized in the empirical immediacy of the body of the observer, it was owned by time, the stream of death”. Constant circulation of visual images similar to circulation of market value of goods depreciates the truth of the artistic vision. According to Mikhail Yampolsky, a junk shop is similar to such vision called after Sartre “panoramic”. This consciousness is “failing to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant, fixing everything around (junk shop is a cultural product of this non-discriminating consciousness)”.
To drop out of circulation of the market inauthenticity of the seen objects helps the distance, which can be created as a total archive of meanings “walking” in the market. Then this is a strategy of a conceptualist archivist. It can be incorporated into a kind of a travesty play about an artist-junkman, who discovers the grains of truth under a layer of media and consumer rubbish. Then this is a strategy of tactile recreation of art aloof from us by dogmas and cliches of art. This strategy is successfully used by the young artist Jan Tamkovich.

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S. D. Domnikov in his book “Mother Earth and King City” offers to consider a city as a place of origin of the “universal non-local tradition” as well as a synonym for power directed from the center to the periphery. On the contrary, the peasants are inclined to the local tradition perceiving the world as a hostile chaos. This opposition between the town and the country was reflected in the views on the ideal structure of society, especially in the light of the eschatological sentiment of the early 20th century. The city as a perfect hierarchy and the peasant community as a perfect agreement.
Specific features of the artistic life of Russia during this period determine the broad interpretation of painting’s meaning. Some artists consider painting not only as a presentation of material objects, but also as a life building practice, based on the functioning of artistic values in the society and totally affecting its formation. Among them, P. Filonov and E. Chestnyakov are of particular interest, both perceived their art as a social service; P. Filonov in the city and E. Chestnyakov in the village.
An artistic language of Filonov and Chestnyakov, despite the academic background, is based on the primitive. Primitivism in art from the 18th century until the mid 20th century remained within the classical paradigm, seen more as an idea not associated with the specific visual sources, because the concept of “primitive” was largely due to the perception of a particular author. This leads to the assertion of primitivism within the classical tradition in the paradoxical non-classical forms. Paradoxical, because in the classical tradition the non-classical form implies only the negation of illusionist similarity, leaving aside all other qualities of the primitive. This allowed the use of the primitive language to express complex utopist concepts.
Hidden controversy of the social concepts — “Winner of the City” by Pavel Filonov as the triumph of the individual, overcoming anonymity and hierarchy of an industrial metropolis, and “City of commonwealth” by E. Chestnyakov as a celebration of the community.

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The exhibition “Life and Being of the People of the USSR” organized by the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia was opened on May, the 3rd 1926 and appeared to be one of the largest Soviet expositions of the1920s. It became the extensive review of artworks created during target trips to different regions of the USRR and the demonstration of the first achievements in the art field after the October Revolution as well. The public criticism of the exhibition took place in Soviet periodicals in May and continued till November 1926. The opinions varied from the definition of AKhRR as “Russian painting Renaissance” to regarding it as an extreme “artistic conservatism”.
Consideration of the exhibition gradually turned into a discussion and then into polemic about more complicated problems connected with the path of development of the Soviet art and the AKhRR’s place in formulating the contemporary style of painting. The discussion revealed controversy in the state arts policy and opposite views of the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment and the Head of the Art Department of the same Commissariat was a perfect example.
The polemic about the 8th AKhRR Exhibition “Life and Being of the People of the USSR” gives opportunity to analyze the complex of problems connected with the necessity for reorganization in the field of Soviet art in the1920s and to answer the question about definition of the art of AKhRR as “Soviet Renaissance”.

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