Andreas Broeckmann on Mon, 21 Apr 1997 20:30:46 +0100


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Syndicate: Gallery 21: A Conversation


Gallery 21:  A Conversation

The participants in this discussion  were:  Irina "Ira" Aktuganova (IA),
gallery director; Alla Mitrofanova (AM), ideologist, media critic and
curator; and Dmitry "Dima" Pilikin (DP), artist and gallery curator.

DP:	Any new project originates in the feeling that it's what's
necessary in the given instance.  So far as I remember, in our case the
impulse was mutual.  But let's begin with you two.  Ira, you had a
commercial gallery:  what caused you to jump to non-profit work?
IA:	That's such a personal question...  Anything I take up, I take up
not in the hope of success, but because I want to play some kind of role.
In Gallery 10-10 I worked with artists as an art critic.  Then I wanted to
try myself in the role of businesswoman and I opened a commercial gallery
in House of the Journalist.  When I figured out how that works, I became
bored.  Aside from that, I understood that in Russia business is not
respectable.  The difference between selling paintings and selling cars
isn't so great.  You find yourself in certain social circles, social
circles that don't suit me personally.  So, as soon as the chance to open
my own gallery on Pushkinskaya 10 appeared, I changed social circles.
	It was a fairly sad time - the early Nineties.  Galleries were
closing because they had no way to survive, and the ones that survived
turned into stores.  I could tell that success depended solely on new
ideas.  Although when I began working in the non-profit world, of course I
fostered illusions about there being an infrastructure here in Russia
similar to that which exists in the West, an infrastructure that could
support non-profit work.
DP:	But you couldn't help taking into account the trends and names that
had already established themselves.
IA:	During the three years I worked in Gallery 10-10, I came to know
the Petersburg art scene well, because I was visiting three studios a day.
Back then Timur Novikov was just beginning his new strategy with the New
Academy, and it was unclear how successful this would be.  The
necrorealists had exhausted themselves ideawise; this had happened to the
Mitki even earlier.  There was no temptation to play around with the usual
intrigues.
DP:	Alla, around this time you had already amassed a fair amount of
practical experience and had made a name as an ideological curator.  How
did the new media become something you were interested in?
AM:	The art critics of my generation (at very least, those people with
whom I socialized and worked) were ideologically formed by the
conceptualist style.  Then the conceptualist approach to creativity began
to withdraw.  It no longer was a matter of finding the position of one's
own semiosis, but rather of acquiring personal corporeal experiences and
generally moving from intellectual models to real-life practice. The time
for new means of self-expression (including technical ones) had arrived.
In the early Nineties I was awfully busy, overloading myself with reading
international anthologies of criticism, going to video festivals (as I saw
things then, video was the sphere most open to the new potentials); and
then suddenly, on a whim, I became interested in virtual reality.  To some
degree I'm indebted to the artist Mike Hens:  it was he who introduced a
totally new understanding of multimedia arts into my life, the idea of this
form of creativity as something synthetic, directed not towards the museum
space, but towards the construction of life, like the avant-garde Russian
productivists in the Twenties.  In 1993 he invited me to this seminar in
Geneva.  This was an insignificant event, but I was gradually getting the
hang of things.  And finally I matured to the point where I wanted to do
something that could be quickly realized, something that in one swoop would
unite all the things I was interested in.  The Stubnitz project's
giganticness arose from this desire.  I wanted to try everything at once -
computer installations and techno-philosophy.  To put together a local
team, creative and theoretical.  Some things worked out.  For instance,
thanks to my efforts an East-West panel with its own translator was planned
for ISEA '94; though our lecturers didn't end up making it there due to
organizational difficulties.
DP:  You've called your former interest in virtual reality something you
did for fun.  How did you think about it back then?
AM:	Back then I experimented heavily with drugs and techno-parties; any
form of altered consciousness was more than actual for me.  In this sense
electronic means grabbed me right away and I began classifying these states
on a par with psychodelic states.  Then I went to this expo in London of
the latest computer equipment - there were already VR helmets there, etc.
I worked with a VR simulator for a very long time, investigating inner
sensations.
DP:	I recall that this was when you were always travelling to various
electronic conferences - and at a time when here in Russia there wasn't any
of this stuff as yet.
AM:	Yeah, but as I've already said, before this I spent three or four
years reading the corresponding literature and experimenting with myself,
and that's why I found myself in the same ideological and creative field
with the entire Euro-American crowd.
DP:	How would you assess the results of the Stubnitz project?
AM:	Speaking strictly in practical terms, on that project forces were
brought together, forces which expressed themselves in Gallery 21's new
politics.
IA:	When the Stubnitz project ended, problems really emerged.  This was
the aftertaste of a big project.  On the one hand, the project gave us
organizers and many of the participants a gamma of completely new and
intense experiences; for the majority of the Russian participants it was
the first time in their lives they'd encountered that previously unseen
"Western" reality called the new media.  Psychologically speaking, after
that kind of project it's very hard to return to the everyday but outmoded
grind of exhibitions, however perfected it might be.  And then we thought
up this form, "New Media Studios."  This name also determined the structure
and form of our work for some time to come.
DP:	We've been working with new media for three years already and the
gallery has gotten a good amount of exposure with this direction.  But
periodically questions from the sidelines arise:  well, what have you
really accomplished? where are your computer artists?  I have an answer to
this question.  What would you two say?
AM:	The realized projects are there, an initiation into this new genre
has taken place; my consciousness, at very least, has changed.  Although it
would seem that I was in the cyclone's center and knew what I was doing.
Everything was new and unexpected.  And this newness and unexpectedness
went off like a gun.  At any rate, the latest version of our Internet
journal, "Virtual Anatomy," suits me.  Of course, intentions and
realization didn't coincide, but both one and the other proved to be
equally intriguing.  On the level of "intentions" there was the task of
creating a conceptual problem field on a vacant lot, which provoked extreme
theoretical foolhardiness.  On the level of "realization" it was essential
to bind up personal ambitions and learn how to hypertextually reorganize
the creative impulse.
IA:	We haven't produced any computer artists, but we didn't set
ourselves this task, insofar as a computer artist is someone who has
already closely merged with a constantly changing instrument base and,
consequently, has the need to work, in the commercial sense of that word.
We carried out the first Internet art projects in Petersburg; projects with
which, by the way, we participated in the opening of the first Internet
cafe in Petersburg, Tetris.  And for the time being there's no else in
Petersburg who has assimilated the Internet as an artistic space.
DP:	When I'm asked about it, I always recall that it was on the
Stubnitz that I touched a PC keyboard for the first time.  And in the three
years since that moment so much has happened - the Internet project and now
the experience of working with interactive CD-ROM.  The cultivation of the
field was carried out and has borne fruit.
AM:	The most interesting thing is that it's happened not only for us.
Nowadays even the  most moss-covered, traditional artist has some notion of
this method of artistic realization.  By studying continuously, we learned
to do something ourselves.  And now there's no longer any reason to
propagandize and instruct:  the process has already been launched.
IA:	It would interesting, by the way, to ask you about this, Dima.
When we were invited to the conference in Rotterdam and the necessity of
doing an Internet project arose, I asked various artists to think about it,
but it was precisely with you that something clicked.  What do you think,
what qualities were essential for that?
DP:	It's hard to assess oneself.  Although right now I recall how much
ground was covered in the space of a month.  My netsurfing experience was
fairly modest and when the time came to realize the project, I suddenly
understood with horror that the idea, which had already been proposed and
launched, didn't fit into the form.  It was then that I was forced to
switch on to full power and master a new space.  But what else could I do?
IA:	When Lev Manovich came here to lecture, he made two essential
observations having to do with artistic practice in the Internet.  First,
the Internet is an area that attracts unrealized n'er-do-wells.  Second,
artists relate to "computer anything" with mistrust.  How you would comment
on this?
DP:  One can't ignore the fact that 90% of the artists in Petersburg
express themselves primarily as painters and that in many ways this
tendency determines the structure of consciousness.  Contemporary artistic
practice, however, gravitates more towards the project form - that is, to a
multi-instrumental, conceptually organized utterance.  This disposition is
fully exhausted by the division into "physicists" and "poets"
characteristic of the Sixties.  It goes without saying that computers and
other sorts of technology relate to the "physicists" and, consequently,
cause mistrust.  As far as "n'er-do-wells" are concerned, some very amusing
processes are taking place.  The Internet created the illusion of romantic
democratism.  It seemed to many aggrieved artists that now it would be
possible to bypass the whole institution of critics and art historians and
savor the high of self-realization.  But once more democracy turned into
graphomania, and now the need for creating new mechanisms for appraisal is
already apparent, however undemocratic this might seem.  Otherwise we'll
drown under a heap of informational garbage.
	But let's get back to Gallery 21.  If we speak of
multi-instrumentalism, then is it at all possible to consider what we have
a gallery?
IA:	The word 'gallery' is compromising.  When people are introduced to
you and hear that word, they ask what it is that you sell, what's hanging
on your walls.  I'm forced to explain at length that nothing is hanging on
our walls.  I relate to this name like I do to my own name.  Our partners
from the Rotterdam organization V2 used to be called a gallery as well, but
now V2 is an organization.  So we easily could call ourselves the
organization "Gallery 21," since the diapason of the work we carry out more
nearly corresponds to this.
DP:	If one analyzes the gallery's work, then one might note that in our
ideological projects we passionately throw ourselves upon all the new and
the latest, after which, having hurdled this barrier, we lose interest in
what's already been done and look for new experiences.
AM:	I think that "in life" everyone has a chance to "open the trapdoor"
and define a new space, but in practice few are able to do this and even
more rarely to do it twice - because when you've opened the door and
crawled out, then you need to slave away until once again you're bogged
down in claustrophobia.  But if you've opened the trapdoor properly, then
there is so much space out there that you won't soon master it.  From a
conquistador you turn into a ploughman and farmer.  But in the pleasures of
conquistadorismo lies its downfall.  We've already made space for our
personal lives and what remains is the ravishing and absorbing problem of
filling it with artefacts.  To endlessly open trapdoors, what kind of
childishness is that?
DP:	One wouldn't expect to hear those kinds of words from a well-known
radical...
AM:	The forms of radicalism change.  At first you're radical in that
you cursed your mother with four-letter words; later, because you mastered
a new book; later still, because you gave birth to kiddies; and finally,
that you died elegantly.
DP:	Okay, let's look into how one of the latest ideological
elaborations came into being - "Post-informational Utopia."
AM:	That was Ira's idea, so I can only comment on it.  She came back
from her trip to DEAF-ISEA '96 in Rotterdam with this idea.  In terms of
undercurrents it was a pretty logical move, because our entire theoretical
and philosophical orientation towards the nonreflectivity of experience,
corporeality, nondiscursivity - all the philosophy we tried to tack onto
post-computer art - all of this was, in terms of intentions, precisely
post-informational.  We were never concerned with theory of informational
glut, with the theory of hidden information - all of those cyberpunk trips
from the Eighties.  Right now we're part of a wholly different situation, a
situation in which our personal experience is one of living through and
constructing a new semiotic space; this poses the problem not of a
collective informational space, but rather one of open, personal,
psychocorporeal experience.
DP:	To what extent was this idea a reaction to intellectual conferences
taking place in the West?  Keeping in mind that we Russians reflect on
tendencies and perspectives even without having the technical realia linked
to those things.
IA:	This wasn't linked to my trip per se, but the conference
undoubtedly served as the catalyst.  I had the feeling that the
"electronic" scene had changed a great deal.  The intellectual freedom had
vanished; hierarchies and, consequently, careerists had emerged.  The
pragmatists and businessmen had arrived.  The establishment had caught up
with us.  Besides, when I saw what Western cultural organizations do with
the powerful support of various foundations, I became miserable.  It's
senseless for us to compete with them in terms of technical potentials -
yeah, in general there's no reason to.  I came back from my trip and began
discussing my doubts with the intellectuals who're associated with our
gallery and it turned out that the rhythm of life set by this game caused
many of them to suffer from a deficit of real experiences, a certain flavor
of life.  Well, what can there be after an informationally saturated space?
Only a post-informational one.  And "utopia" because our desires are
utopian all the same.
AM:	  Ira had a reaction to the alternative politics of non-commercial
arts organizations.  Like us, they're seriously engaged in surviving and,
in connection with this, the working-out of democratic political
procedures, procedures with which they could harmonize; therefore they're
forced to engage in political semiotics and so forth.  For many of them the
problem of survival has turned from a practical problem into a
philosophical one.  That is, they drown the creative and philosophical
pathos in the problems of survival.  When all of this started to get under
Ira's skin, she resolved to think up such a form of ideological delivery
that there wouldn't be a glint of combinatory democracy in it.
DP:	All the same, let's sum up.  How does the gallery's ongoing work
shape up?
IA:	The previous, event-based policy, in which something had to happen
in the gallery every week, has exhausted itself.  The way we see it now,
the gallery should become a fairly "quiet" place in which there will be a
few more or less permanent expositions.  That after moving we divided the
gallery into six spaces with different functions, spaces concentrated in
one site, is optimal.  In the present situation your idea for a six meter
square microgallery is right on for Petersburg exhibitions.  One can
demonstrate an idea without enclosing it in decorations.
DP:	It turns out that now exhibition work exists in the background,
supporting the traditional gallery status, as it were.
IA:	Since after a number of big projects we ran up against the fact
there is no cultural infrastructure, it became clear that in order to exist
in a civilized manner and turn out, at very least, some kind of artefacts,
one needs money.  But there isn't any money, and the elementary problem of
survival arises.  And so it's already not the organization of exhibitions
that you're busy with, but the search for funds, foundations; you engage in
politics, public relations, you "get chummy" with somebody.
DP:	At the same time a number of big city events have taken place, such
as the festival in New York, events in which Gallery 21 was an
indispensable participant.
IA:	This is sooner the result of a correctly chosen strategy.  And the
credit for this should go primarily to Alla.  When you choose a direction
correctly, a direction that's actual, then by the time you've already
pumped up your muscles in that individual work of yours, the social
situation is just maturing and naturally calls for that actualness.  We
worked for three years, but it was only this year that suddenly everyone
understood that without the new technologies you just can't get by.  And
besides us, there's no else to turn to (at very least, in terms of solving
artistic problems in the new technological environment).
DP:	Do you harbor any sort of optimism?
IA:	The fact of the matter is that we live quite richly.  Nobody in
Russia gets their paychecks, there's no money in city, but we continue to
plan, to write projects and cherish the bright hope of having a constant
budget.
DP:	How do you assess gallery life in Petersburg?  The types of
galleries, cultural strategies?
AM:	The gallery surge came to a head about three years ago, when one
could still speak of gallery life, strategies, competition.  Nowadays in
Petersburg all of cultural and gallery life has assembled around
Pushkinskaya 10.  But no longer in the form of galleries, but in the form
of the creative activeness of a squat.  And here, in Petersburg, we still
have the right to speak of the presence of a non-profit creative life.
While in Moscow, it seems to me, it's already gone.  The most interesting
thing is that galleries which had the potential to develop in the big
gallery scene ended up enclosed in little cubbyholes, but each one of them
had prospects for its own, original field.  Thus, squeezed into these
corners, they proved to be not just communal apartment neighbors, but,
let's say, shadowy cardinals.  We judge the present situation not by
visible representation, but by hidden, secret ambitions.  And that,
basically, is normal during a certain cultural-historical period, but this
period is coming to an end.  Most likely, starting next year one won't have
to talk about "kings in exile," since the next wave will overtake us and
force us to move to a daily level of realization.  We're losing the
abstract grandeur of our ambitions.  But on the other hand we will have to
construct a new internal mechanism of realization.  Maybe none of us will
remain; or, having lost our personal ambitions, we'll meld into a common
organism.  And here it's also to the point that our entire cultural and
political life has passed through a period of chaotic searching, a search
which for the most part was based on the destruction of the previous
political and cultural formation.  But now the very delicate creative task
arises of getting energy not from destruction, but from positivity.
DP:  Do you have any kind of hope for the future of Pushkinskaya 10?
IA:	If some sort of monstrous cataclysm doesn't happen, then most
likely we'll end up with an ordinary, civil cultural center of the Western
type, and we'll be offered jobs there as hired workers.  But this will no
longer have any relationship to the actualities of the present.
AM:	I'm not so pessimistic.  I think that "pushkinskaya" cultural life
differs from the life of, say, the Rotterdam organization V2 in that
Western cultural centers are directed towards fairly quality cultural
production.  You see, between the idea and its realization there has to be
genuine, responsible work.  And I see the next period as a period of deep
creative unfolding and development, taking into account how our
consciousness unfolded thanks to that very same Internet.  There is no
longer any feeling of spatial boundaries, but the pleasure kicks in only
when you've got the apparatus of action in hand and you know how to use it
well.  A big, realizational high - that's what's in store for us.
DP:	How would assess the experience of producing our last project on
CD-ROM?
AM:	For me it can be summed up quite simply.  I approached that project
with a great deal of anxiety.  First, this was the initiation of the
artistic impulse in the transition to a more strictly structured and
demanding medium.  You can daub something, draw, do actions and videos -
but in the terms of the present day and age those media are fairly watery
and allow for prolixities and trivialities.  But with CD-ROM we have a
severely compressed means of utterance and I thought that most of the
artists whom we asked to play in this game would end up being creatively
impotent and out of fright would begin their statements with the usual
trivialities.  But it worked out just the opposite.  Everyone was able to
pull himself together.  And this is a serious hurdle, being this demanding
on oneself.  In the previous paradigm one could hang out, but now one has
to deliver, leaving the socializing to one's free time.  And the
programmers also rose to the occasion, the whole time they held up and
"carried" the level of artistic ideas.
DP:	I remember how glad I was that we taught people to play unfamiliar
games and they didn't wrack their brains thinking about it, but simply
played.
IA:	That's exactly why I go into raptures over working in a non-profit.
You can come out with any proposal - the reaction to it is absolutely open
and childlike.
AM:	In general it seems to me that CD-ROM as a means of realizing
artistic ideas and projects has a big future ahead of it:  it requires a
great amount of informational engagement and the invention of interactive
models for organizing the utterance.  For the time being it's impossible to
imagine creative means more adventurous than CR-ROM in combination with the
World Wide Web - for installations, performances and any sort of creative
project.
IA:	Yeah.  I just remembered - you asked me at the beginning of our
conversation what kinds of ideas I had when I opened the gallery.  Strictly
speaking, there were exactly two.  The first had to do with ambition:  to
make it into any art guide.  The second - to break free of the gallery;
that is, to translate it into some kind of incorporeal and maximally
compact space, a space free of hassle.

Translated, from the Russian, by Thomas Campbell