Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change (8 page)

Harpers & Queen
, 1988

I had often wondered why people who went to Russia seemed to become obsessed with it, and I learned why on my first assignment reporting from abroad, in 1988, when the British monthly
Harpers & Queen
sent me to the USSR to cover Sotheby’s groundbreaking sale of contemporary Soviet art. Three years later, I published an expanded account of the same events in
Connoisseur
. Here, I have combined the two articles, reflecting those experiences of exhilarating discovery—not only for me, but also for the artists involved—as our personal and political worlds collided. The encounter described in this article launched me on the path toward my first book,
The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost.

“T
o Brezhnev!” said one of the artists. Since it was nearly sunrise and I was exhausted, I raised my glass of tea without quite registering the name. “To Brezhnev!” we all chorused, and downed our tea. Only then did it strike me as odd that, in the summer of 1988, we were toasting Brezhnev rather than Gorbachev. It must have been four in the morning, or perhaps five, and the conversation had degenerated; we had left behind Baudrillard and deconstructionism and postmodernism and were making jokes about Japanese tourists. The seven of us were crowded around a small table in a small room,
all talking at once, and all greedily attacking the food that one of the artists had made, taking turns with the plates because there weren’t enough to go around. Then came this toast, after which someone observed that it had been a good evening of good talk, “just like in the days of Brezhnev.” I was too unfocused even to ask.

We left the interlinked studios on Furmanny Lane, located, ironically enough, upstairs from a school for the blind, at half past six. Dawn had come to Moscow, and the street seemed incredible. I had been there since eleven the previous morning, and it had taken on that quality of being the sole reality that inevitably comes of protracted debate and total exhaustion. We parted with those words once more: “To Brezhnev!” Then one of the artists reminded me, “Be at the station at noon today. We’ll see you then.”

I went back to the dubious opulence of my Western hotel. At eleven my alarm sounded like a bad joke, and I peevishly dragged myself out of bed and set off for the train station, wondering all the while what could have possessed me to make this appointment. When I got there, I saw some familiar avant-gardists and, discovering that I was glad to see them, ceased to curse the missed night’s sleep and remembered why I’d sat up so late in the first place.

We all went off to a place of bucolic vista, about two hours outside Moscow. Only one person—there were about forty of us—knew where we were going, and even he didn’t know what we would find when we got there. We were on our way to an Action, by the Collective Action Group (K/D), and this mystery was part of it all. When we left the train we found ourselves at the edge of a thin strip of woods, and we walked single file, talking in low voices, sometimes laughing, waiting to see what would happen. After the first bit of woods we arrived at sweeping fields of corn, with odd, tumbledown houses beyond them; then came a wood of birches, then a lake surrounded by reeds newly gone to seed, then a pine woods with stolid trunks rising from a smooth floor. Imagine this: all the Moscow vanguard, the many faces of genius and the eager eyes of their acolytes, walking through a forest as still as the first day of creation.

We came into a field with a river running through it. On the river, fishermen in rubber boats were casting their lines and watching—
with some puzzlement but not much interest—the procession of artists. At last we came to a rise, where we stopped, stood in a row, and watched the river. Soon we saw an artist, Georgi Kisevalter, standing by the water. He jumped in, swam across, and disappeared on the other side. We kept our eyes on the spot where he had disappeared. He returned to the water’s edge carrying a huge, flat package, leaped in, and swam back. He went to a hill opposite our knoll, where he was joined by the leader of K/D, Andrei Monastyrsky, and another artist. They removed the brightly colored outer wrapping from the package to reveal a large black-and-white painting. They carefully took out the nails that held the canvas to the stretcher and laid the canvas on the ground. They disassembled the stretcher, which was of complicated design, until they had reduced it to its component strips of wood. They wrapped the wood in the black-and-white canvas and wrapped that in the outer covering. Then Monastyrsky distributed photocopies of the painting to the onlookers.

All the while, on a hill behind us, a bell was ringing in a blue box and no one heard it.

That was the Action. Two hours to get there, two hours back (not to mention the time to go to and from the station), and ten minutes of what I took to be ponderously self-important performance art. We had a picnic by the river afterward, which should have been jolly, but I was annoyed. I was glad to have seen the woods, and the bread and cheese were dandy, but the rest seemed pure idiocy. Sergey Anufriev, one of the leaders of the Medical Hermeneutics movement, took me aside and explained it in detail, articulating elaborate references to previous performance pieces, art’s connections to nature, old and outmoded Soviet aesthetic concerns, and episodes in individual people’s lives. When he finished, I had a moment of thinking I understood. By that time, I was too tired to worry about it.

Only later did I understand that I had understood nothing, and that that had been the point. By then, I had begun to realize why we had been toasting Brezhnev, the oppressor, and not Gorbachev, the liberator. Under Brezhnev, as under Khrushchev, the Soviet avant-gardists were unable to exhibit their work in public, so they would hang it in their apartments or studios and invite people to
come look at it. The only people who ever saw their work were other avant-gardists. They were, in their own phrase, “like the early Christians, or like Freemasons.” They could recognize one another at a glance, and they stuck together through thick and thin, never betraying the members of the circle. They believed that they knew a higher truth than was vouchsafed to the rest of the Soviet people, but they knew also that its time had not yet come. From their circumstances of difficulty, they learned integrity and built a world of mutuality. Though shot through with intense ironies and petty conflicts, this life force still gave their work urgency in a country where, for so many people, all gesture had come to seem futile. In the face of misery they achieved their tightly shared joy, and the constant surprise of such a profound sense of purpose taught them the value of their talent.

That talent was formidable. Their joy may have been considerable, but the passage to it was too fraught to tempt anyone who was incapable of transcendence; moreover, the frustration of battling the all-encompassing Soviet system with an inadequate intellect quickly defeated fools. The Moscow artistic community had no room for the passive observer; the commitment of its members was enormous. Since the experience of their work always depended on the experience of them as people—since the hundred or so individuals who made up the avant-garde were both the creators of Soviet art and its audience—the artists’ personalities were key to what they created. Their strong personas are defined in part by the place they fill within the art world, and in part by the proclivities with which they came to the avant-garde, but their genius is, of necessity, that of the painter, the poet, and the actor. This curious concatenation makes them compelling, irresistible, implacable, and ultimately impenetrable. It is why they combine that rigorous trait of integrity with a sly elusiveness that can all too often masquerade as dishonesty. Their work is full of truth, but all told in slanted language.

Anufriev’s description of the Action was a witty lie. I was being cajoled into the belief that what had happened was comprehensible, coherent, and straightforward. What had gone on was, in fact, a fascinating comment on the problems of contemporary Soviet art, and
at a fairly literal level it was explicable, but it was also an affirmation of the artistic community that oppression had created, a community that felt itself being shaken by freedom. The whole point was that it contained so many references that no one could begin to get them all. The artists in attendance could affirm their places in the avant-garde by getting many of them and could confirm the degree of their secrecy by failing to get the rest. The circle of the avant-garde, suddenly threatened by those who think that being an artist is an easy path to fame and fortune, holds such events to protect its terrible new fragility as loosening restrictions and foreign markets threaten its members’ psychic citadel.

I had come to Moscow to attend Sotheby’s sale of contemporary Soviet art. The hype surrounding the auction was blinding. Sotheby’s was organizing the ultimate Moscow tour, a package involving diplomatic entertainments, singing Gypsies, endless viewings of rarely seen icons, meetings with important persons, cases of imported champagne, and beluga buckshot previously reserved for czars and commissars. We were going not to a mere auction but to an important event in the history of East and West. On a drop-dead-smart brochure, the word
Sotheby’s
blazed red in both Latin and Cyrillic type against the sienna tones of an ancient map with illegible lettering. Charmed though travelers were by the prospect of fish eggs and icons, many were taken aback to discover that this map—the logo of the trip, reproduced time and again in the international press—was actually an old map of Bermuda. “It’s what sprang to hand,” one of the Sotheby’s directors told me.

As a for-profit company, Sotheby’s had reasons for staging the sale other than an interest in the work of the Soviet avant-garde. It was an opportunity to establish good relations with the Soviet government at the dawn of perestroika, with the possibility of monopoly contracts and other boons down the line. Initially, contemporary art and artists were seen as a means to an end. Although Soviet art had actually been discovered by the West incrementally during the decade preceding the Sotheby’s sale, when a few Soviet artists started to get exposure in
Western Europe and New York, the big players in the art game didn’t pay much attention.

By the time Sotheby’s was revving up for its sale, gallery exhibitions in the West were taking place, notably an installation at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York by Ilya Kabakov. He had created a Moscow communal apartment in which each room belonged to someone driven to obsessiveness by the close quarters. In one room lived the Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, whose space was filled with cards on which tiny items were pasted to boards and labeled: “lint from my pocket,” “dust from the corner,” “a paper clip,” “an insect.” In another room, the Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment had rigged a seat in midair with four huge springs that ran to the four corners of his ceiling, planning to fling himself into the freedom of the stratosphere. In yet another lived the Man (perhaps Kabakov himself) Who Described His Life Through Characters. Such exhibitions had impelled a few serious collectors of Soviet art, but though theirs was no longer an eccentric taste, it was still a cultivated, obscure one.

Before taking over as director of Sotheby’s Europe, Simon de Pury had been private curator to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. Traveling with him to the Soviet Union, de Pury had picked up word of the contemporary art scene there. He also gathered that a great deal of important work by the avant-garde of the 1920s in the Soviet Union remained in private hands, as well as precious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture and objects. He was eager to get off on the right foot with Gorbachev’s new government with its policy of glasnost, or openness, so that Sotheby’s would be in a favorable position if financial straits pushed the Soviets who owned these treasures into selling them. Lenin had sold some of the best works from the Hermitage Museum to underwrite his new government; perhaps Gorbachev might do something similar. The new art was a glorified bargaining chip. The “contemporary” sale that I had come to witness included a number of important works from the twenties—including major pieces by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Drevin. “Wait and see how long it takes before we have an office in this country saying
SOTHEBY’S MOSCOW
over the door,” one of de Pury’s
colleagues remarked. But de Pury soon saw that the contemporary art could be valuable in itself. “This is all a wonderful, giant risk,” he said to me. “We know so little about this work we are buying—except that we know it’s worth buying.”

The night of the auction, July 7, 1988, brought together people no previous circumstance could have assembled. At six thirty, the Sotheby’s tour group began to file into the great conference chamber of the Mezhdunarodnaya Hotel. After stopping at the registration desk to collect paddles, each guest walked to his or her reserved seat at the front of the room. Elton John’s manager exchanged pleasantries with the sister of the king of Jordan. A retired baseball player escorted a small bevy of titled Scandinavian ladies. A group of prosperous German women, dressed in red in honor of the host country, engaged in cheery banter with a member of the US State Department. “Are you really going to buy that one?” someone asked.

“At any price,” came the response, with a chuckle.

A thin woman with diamonds at her throat and an oversize crocodile handbag flipped back and forth between two pictures by two different artists. “I just can’t decide. I can’t decide,” she moaned, then asked a neighbor, “Which of these do you like better?”

Behind the Sotheby’s entourage came Westerners who lived in Moscow and powerful, overdressed Soviets, who looked fat and easy among Americans abroad and Western Europeans on holiday. American ambassador Jack F. Matlock was there with his wife, his son, and his son’s Russian fiancée. The sons and daughters of wealthy foreign businessmen stationed in the USSR were there. Many missed the habit of Western social events and welcomed this occasion to sport their Adolfo and Valentino. The press was there in spades with notebooks, cameras, and TV equipment—not art press flown in for the event but the political press, with all the Moscow bureaus covering this historic moment.