Censors and sensibility

Alexander Kosolapov’s enemies keep changing. The 64-year-old artist fled the Soviet Union in the 1970s to make a life in New York’s Greenwich Village. A pioneer of a Russian political art movement, the 1970s Sots, he merged highly charged symbols to create disturbance. “Icon-Caviar” showed the Madonna and child made of a sturgeon’s fish eggs; “McLenin’s” showed Lenin with McDonald’s arches emanating from his head; “This is My Blood” juxtaposed Jesus Christ and Coca-Cola.

Like his contemporaries Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, he deconstructed the language of social realism. Taking the power out of propaganda was not approved of, and his subversive work was banned by Soviet censors especially annoyed by his mockery of Lenin.

Today in the US, Kosolapov belongs to the pantheon of the Russian non-conformist artists. Prices for his silk-screen prints have risen to about $80,000 and the Guggenheim recently purchased one of his works. Yet Kosolapov is becoming less popular in some circles. His works have been disincluded from, or uninvited to, official exhibits in Russia.

In March 2005, his work in Beware, Religion, a show at Moscow’s Andrei Sakharov Museum, was vandalised by local groups who thought the work was incendiary. Later that year, the director of the national Tretyakov Gallery overruled the curator of Russian Pop art and eliminated Kosolapov’s “Icon-Caviar” from an exhibit.

“In my opinion – from someone who has already experienced government control – there is increasing censorship in Russia,” says Kosolapov. “But they are using different methods to those of former times. There is a small group of people responsible for contemporary art in Moscow and they do not select artists who can be controversial.”

Some members of the artistic community – curators, literary scholars and artists – have a growing sense of unease about the atmosphere in Russia this election season. (Parliamentary elections were in December and presidential elections will be held in March.) Protest artists find themselves in a curious position, hailed and reviled at the same time. Some curators and artists are trying out new techniques to transport art out of the country – on disc, without frames, in regular luggage – unnoticed.

Others disagree, saying that censorship is no worse in Russia than in Europe or the US. Georgy Ostretsov says that his political satire – even his performance art piece with former chess champion and opposition leader Garry Kasparov – goes unhindered by the government. Ostretsov’s “Sleepy Government” installation has a childlike appeal and a piercing humour: men in black rubber masks, who look like a cross between Darth Vader and a housefly, sit at a desk with Lenin, gesturing officiously and drawing on doodle pads. A new series of performance works featuring men with masks is called “Arses with Ears”. His colourful cartoons depict an absurdist combination of mayhem and unintelligible research data to support strange edicts.

“I was never banned,” says Ostretsov. “What I do is not understandable and not concrete. I do make connections between my fantastic government and real government but our government does not pay any attention to me.”

“The KGB is not interested in us,” says Alexander Shaburov, one half of the team Blue Noses. Shaburov and his partner Vyacheslav Mizin have fun with images of Lenin, Putin, Jesus and Pushkin, among others. Unlike Ostretsov, their work is concrete and it is impossible not to take notice of their pranks: their photographs of themselves and friends romping in underwear with masks of Putin, Bush and Osama Bin Laden have been stopped at the Russian border and confiscated a number of times by customs officials.

“What we are trying to do in our art is distance ourselves from clichés,” Shaburov says – and that includes the clichés that the FSB (the successor organisation to the KGB) or Putin are out to get them. “But artists live in a cultural ghetto and it’s hard for us to realise we no longer play a significant role.”

In February 2005, a controversial exhibit called Russia II revealed a promising surge of Putin-era protest art, a new creative era of discontent. Moscow agent provocateur Marat Guelman brought together ageing dissidents such as Kosolapov, performance artists in exile like Avdey Ter Oganyan and Ostretsov, and the pranksters from the provinces, Blue Noses. The result was a cacophony of criticism of the Russian Orthodox Church, Russia’s government and the long-running conflict in Chechnya, themes that had been forbidden in the first Moscow Biennale, which ran simultaneously.

The careers of some of the artists included in Russia II have since blossomed. Blue Noses were selling their work for about $3,000 in 2004; now it goes for $15,000 upwards. Their mentor, Oleg Kulik, a long-time performance artist, curator and artist, sells his work today for $20,000-$100,000.

Yet for some “provocative” artists, life has become more complicated. Russia’s culture minister Alexander Sokolov regularly shows his disapproval of such art, using terms such as “pornography” to describe it. Indeed, as recently as October, Sokolov held a press conference to denounce some of the work in an art show that was being sent to Paris. In the end, a few dozen works were left behind in Moscow.