LV   ENG
PETERSBURG. THE CITY ON SWAMP, ABOVE SWAMP OR ON IT?
Sergey Timofeyev
 
  At the beginning of 1990s the samizdat magazine in Leningrad "Mitya's Magazine" published excerpts from the young British art historian Andrew Solomon who had spent quite a while in Moscow and Leningrad at the times when the soviet art was in vogue trying to discover what he could offer to his commissioners' in the galleries. Then he identified a peculiar discrepancy - how hard, mad and selfless was the life of artists from Moscow bohemian circles and how easily, carefree and with gusto the "young artists" from Petersburg lived in their suddenly acquired large flats and sometimes even the large sums of money. St. Petersburg "New wave" concentrated round such figures as Timur Novikov, Sergey Bugayev (Africa) or Sergey Kurehin and all of them were not only artists and avant-garde musicians but they also set a certain style, they were cult figures, opinion leaders of the time.

The official party views dominated in Moscow and by the exerted strain on its artists created such an field of pressure where any artistic statements came with difficulty, immediately became confronted by certain ideological resistance. But in the meantime Petersburg folk were listening to the new music (incidentally the first rave parties in the post-soviet territory were held in the huge studios of Petersburg artists), drank Western gin, smoked good cigarettes and enjoyed well-deserved love and attention of numerous female fans. The widely known tension between Petersburg and Moscow, which after establishment of the soviet power acquired official status, promoted Petersburg-Leningrad to the role of the opposition leader, not to the role of the cradle of yet another revolution with blood and shooting (this was the label attached to Petersburg by Moscow party bosses - "the cradle of three revolutions"), but became to signify another style of life. Quintessentially the most popular image of this style of life was an image of a young musician-artist played by Africa in Sergey Solovyov's film "Assa". The wide audiences were presented a young neo-romanticist with numerous attractive idiosyncrasies in the company of equally strange people (it was in the same times when Viktor Tsoy and his Petersburg group "Kino" sang about the soviet realities: "...But none of it will become an obstacle for a romanticist's stroll, neo-romanticist's stroll").

Pop cultural, "Warhollian" approach to the contemporary art as a mode of life flourished in Leningrad in extravagant bloom. Even all the three centuries old cultural power accumulated at the time in Petersburg was not taken by the "new wave" too seriously, their object of reflection rather was contemporary urban reality, reality of the most Westward centre of Russia, the source of the populist artistic fashion. Even certain archaeological motifs which employed elements of Petersburg decadence of the early 20th century were "played around" with sufficient lightness, sufficient decorousness, without exertion, like it was, for example, in the works by Bella Matveyeva. And the Western galleries and collectors of those times duly appreciated this life-assertiveness of the new artistic culture of Petersburg-Leningrad. The best works were bought and taken to the West. By the standards of those days the young artists received huge sums of money. Their inventive and artistically inclined friends immediately started copying and multiplying their style (like in the case with the new expressionists and "new wild" with the above mentioned Africa and Novikov as their leaders). Such paintings were mass produced like the Russian dolls matryoshki and at a certain moment the interest of the buyers diminished. The Soviet Union collapsed. New Russia was to be built, a country backward by its standard of life but with a gigantic potential, which became the object of struggle for the new oligarchs, criminal and Kremlin structures.

The focus of attention clearly was shifted towards Moscow. The spirit of contradiction, opposition on which all the artistic "partying gang" of Petersburg lived and by which it was brought up, ceased being topical. The main aim was active and dynamic self-assertion that did not recognize the slightly languid romanticism of Petersburg. The scene was flooded by Muscovites and the dynamic provincials like Oleg Kulik, who despite his shocking images treats self-assertion as business that never ends. Business that is fixed in many ways on the manipulation with medium and playing with it.

Petersburg started slowly to dwindle. Dilapidated old houses, which quite recently had looked so romantic, after loosing this aura, in comparison with the quickly renovated and modernized Moscow, began to resemble simply abandoned buildings. All the decision making in artistic fashion moved to Moscow. But the still active generation of the "new wave" did not want to put up with it; the need to create a new, reconstructed artistic Petersburg ideology emerged. At that time Timur Novikov established his New Academy, focusing on Classicism presented in a post-modern manner and spiced with narcissist and homoerotic elements.  Pseudo-antique handsome young men participating in representation of pseudo-Roman and pseudo-Greek themes created the impression of semi-wakeful zombies enacting bacchanalia by some half-forgotten habit. It contained little life. But the works by the New Academy displayed in the central cultural place in the city - in the building on Pushkin street 10, which was given over to artists and musicians at the time - became the quintessence of the new destiny of Petersburg. The city examining itself in a mirror with delayed reflection and narcissistic contemplation whose self-adoration is shared by nobody.

At that time many intellectuals from Petersburg moved to Moscow, and the major artistic and critical institutions were formed in Moscow. And at the time when Petersburg "giants" like Sergey Kurehin, Timur Novikov passed away (from mysterious diseases, as if absorbing in themselves the general exhaustion of the city). Or they turned into the parody of their own selves, like, for example, Africa, the ultra-fashionable character, who became the editor of the uninteresting and badly designed magazine "Activist" published for the money of Finns, who had cast their eyes at Petersburg but never started an expansion like in Tallinn (after all, the difference in the scale is essential).

As a matter of fact, the most decent look is retained at the time by the most "hermetic", self-sufficient artistic figures not aiming at mass scale artistic success; by their personal activity they expressed the conviction that it is possible to have a professional existence without being recognized in Moscow. For me such a figure, for instance, is the essay writer and art critic Alexander Skidan who till recently went on working as a night watchman in a small heating company where he time and again threw coal into the furnace and read books. I believe not a single intellectual earned his bread in Moscow in such a way (they had jobs at the publishing houses, PR-companies and elsewhere).

In one of his articles ("About the Benefits and Harm of Life in Petersburg") Alexander Skidan is reasoning about the images and essence of the former capital of the Russian empire. "Petersburg was a certain inclusive fantastic image of the European capital in general or, shall we say, its "European-ness" in an exaggerated, large-scale and still superficial understanding... Presenting its vision of Russia, which in a ten-time acceleration attempted to gain the lost things: to outlive at the same time antiquity and Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment, recalled only vaguely as if only in a dream... In the course of time its stone features displayed even something Egyptian, something so very ancient which against the background of impossible, by the measures of other, "normal" capitals, three hundred year youth of Petersburg with its premature aging could not but create the sense of grotesque." Apparently the haggard state came not as a result of a natural aging process, which happens sometimes also to the cities, but as a result of collapse of a certain internal core, the idea of the city. The stride towards the West planned by Peter the Great, a European capital of a Eurasian state - all that has remained in the past like also the cultural opposition to the crumbling totalitarianism of 1980s. The city remained without an aim; it became "a protected country", a monument to itself. 

But could the "will to live" of Petersburg be extinguished forever? Couldn't really the social and artistic life of the city not give birth to new charismatic personalities, capable of taking the city out of the swamp? Perhaps Anatoly Sobchak could have become such a person, one of the activists during Gorbachev's perestroika, an intellectual, lawyer and the first mayor of Petersburg after the collapse of the USSR. He is ascribed the idea of transforming the city into the largest tourist centre (which, as we can see, in a planned way is becoming with Paris, whose centre the mayor wants to turn into a network for pedestrians, into the city for strolling). But Sobchak lost in the elections to the henchman of Yeltsin's Kremlin Yakovlev and some time later passed away (like the mentioned group of Petersburg artists) as if unable to put up with the non-significant role of the city. But the time comes when the man who in his day emerged on the political arena in Sobchak's team now occupies the top of the power in Moscow - it is Vladimir Putin. More and more Petersburg people appear in the corridors of the Kremlin, who have not been involved in the dealings of Yeltsin's time. But those are peculiar Petersburg people connected with KGB, Federal Security Service and power structures. They do not forget about their city, but they do not see it as a city open to all that is new and open to visitors from all parts of the world. They see it as a new place of residence for the centralized power. The palaces are reconstructed - the whole representational complexes in which Putin meets Western politicians and diplomats, the myth about Russia as a European power is being reconstructed, the myth in which Petersburg was prepared the key role. But to what extent this myth is correlated with the real situation, is it not another advertising, media manoeuvre, at which Putin's team has been so good long ago?

It seems that Petersburg people themselves have no answer to this question yet. On the one hand, they are clearly happy for those investments that came into the city for its 300th anniversary. On the other hand, they seem to perceive this spectacle like a show where the real spectators are sitting only in the VIP box. But the rest of the million and a half who, for instance, had gathered to see the laser show at night, dispersed afterwards like spectators of a cheap mass event - all on foot (no public transport was functioning in the city at the time, including underground). Perhaps because of this feeling of another surrogate, substitute of the real Petersburg with another political construct, many artists came forth with an appeal not to participate in the widely advertised celebrations of the 300th anniversary. They expressed also the protest against the continuing "mummification" of the city: "Rhetoric of the "rebirth of Petersburg" appeals to the beginning of the century, meaning, as a rule, decorative, removed in time to safe distance aesthetics of Mir iskusstva ("World of Art"), Dyagilev's enterprises, poetics of symbolists and acmeists. The main cultural and tourist industry brands turn out to be the ones enveloped in the old time mythology: "The White Nights", "Akhmatova", "Mariinka", and "Hermitage". As if there never had been Meyerhold, futurists, Oberiuts, Filonov, Bakhtin or constructivist architecture..."

But, certainly, not everything is hopeless. Say, at the end of 1990s a fairly strong cultural place appeared - multimedia centre PRO ARTE, supported by the American Ford foundation and cooperating with RIXC from Riga. But it is rather a high-class school working for the future; the fruit of its activity (seminars, courses, lectures) are only beginning to appear in the works of the very young generation. Apparently these twenty-year-old artists will be self-realized in a different, more balanced situation, and it is harder for those who are 30-40 years old now and who with great difficulty find their place in Petersburg "here and now". Perhaps that is why they start having ideas of manifestations, like this year on May 22 the action near the gallery Navicula Artis "Petersburg 003, or the Live Blood of Petersburg". 003 is the telephone number of ambulance and the jubilee number in the reverse. During the action "wine was transformed into blood with the help of capillary-catheter system". Thirty three litre packs of Spanish wine were hang between the trees in the garden where Pushkin had his duel. The wine in the transparent plastic sacks reminded of the heart upside down and at the same time the sacks used in drips during blood transfusion, which is done by ambulance. 

By the intentions of the "share holders" "the meaning of the action is revealed gradually in the process of consumption of the wine (the live but stale blood of Petersburg) by its participants (not vampires at all, but rather the transformers), involved into the complex donor-recipient (and the other way round) relationships with the city." Perhaps this symbolic action - boozing (but "the intellectual alcoholism" in the numerous parks and gardens is undeniable part of the cultural history of the city) will bring to life Petersburg, built in its day on the Baltic swamps as a symbol, perhaps as a city-museum, city-monument, and it will stop reflecting only itself in the rancid waters of its canals, but will start looking for new meaning and form. One would wish though that this new meaning would at least partly inherit life-assertiveness of the generation of "new romanticists" of 1980s. People for whom new records, books by French philosophers and smithereens of the former empires would be equally interesting.
 
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