The V-A-C Foundation ("Victoria - The Art of Being Contemporary") from February 2 to March 31, 2015 collects projects for public art competition as part of the art program “Expansion of space. Artistic Practices in the Urban Environment”. The Foundation sets itself an ambitious task - to intensify the discussion about the role of art on the streets of Moscow in the public and professional environment. Archi.ru spoke with Katerina Chuchalina, Program Director of the V-A-C Foundation, about the specifics of this initiative and V-A-C's view of art for urban public spaces.
Archi.ru:
Fund V-A-C implemented several purely museum projects with well-known contemporary artists, of which, as far as I understand, only one concerned the comprehension of urban space - the exhibition "Shosse Entuziastov" about the phenomenon of Moscow sleeping areas. How did you decide to go beyond the boundaries of exhibition projects into the space of the city?
Katerina Chuchalina:
“Indeed, in 2012, we made several projects within the parallel program of the 13th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, one of which was the Highway of Enthusiasts exhibition on artistic interpretation and comprehension of this architectural phenomenon. But to understand where the idea of our “Expanding Space” program came from, it’s not even this story that is important, but the projects that we did with four local museums in Moscow. These museums are specialized, not art, and are not ready to accept contemporary art practices. They, like us, belong to the sphere of cultural production, but at the same time they seem to be on the other side of the barricades. And, as it seems to us, this disunity in the sphere of contemporary culture has become a sad consequence of the autonomy of contemporary art: the artists have placed themselves in a kind of "ghetto", exhibiting in the same museums and galleries and closing themselves in their own crowd. Contemporary art does not make contact with other, non-art museums, let alone scientific institutions. We decided to break out of these boundaries.
It all started in 2012 with a project in the small, forgotten by all Museum of Entrepreneurs, Patrons and Philanthropists on Shabolovka. This private museum then fought with the city administration for its dilapidated building. The artist Nastya Ryabova curated the exhibition “The Presidium of False Calculations” there, the participants of which understood the role of the market economy in our life, and the ruined space of the museum was probably the most telling exhibit. In the same year, we collaborated with the Presnya Historical and Memorial Museum, a branch of the Museum of Contemporary History of Russia, which contains materials about the three revolutions that took place in Presnya. At our invitation, the artist Arseniy Zhilyaev and the theorist, historian Ilya Budraitskis held lectures and seminars there for six months on the relationship between art, pedagogy and history, designed not for the artistic community, but for local residents. The series of lectures ended with an exhibition. Last summer we had a project at the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences on Patriarch's Ponds - this is such a closed institution without an exhibition space, with characteristic traces of the Soviet research institute in the interiors of Zholtovsky. This time the exposition was dedicated to the modern political protest against the economic and social system and the issues of postcolonialism. And finally, in the spring of last year, we made another challenging project at the Museum of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation on the street of the Soviet Army. This museum is not only located at the other pole of cultural production, it is even subordinate not to the Ministry of Culture, but to the Ministry of Defense. The artist Mikhail Tolmachev worked there, who researched the museum himself. The museum was his "medium", usually Tolmachev works with the representation of war in the media. In places like the Museum of the Armed Forces, you understand that you need to talk about it: about the building, about the structure, about the arrangement and design of the exhibition, about aesthetics, ethics, bureaucracy - in a word, about everything that it consists of. It is from these museum projects that we have grown a desire to expand the territory of contemporary art and create new connections with the city. Go outside.
There are many common ideas about what public art is: someone sees in it a kind of tool for branding the territory, someone sees it as a means of improving and harmonizing the urban environment …
- It is fundamentally important for us that this is an open question - what kind of public art does Moscow need and can be carried out outside the system of state and corporate orders. We do not yet have an answer to it, and we honestly admit it. The fact is that there is a huge gap between Soviet monumental art and today's festival, hybrid format of public art in recreational areas. We have missed many years during which this form of contemporary art has evolved, and we have no experience in comprehending this cultural phenomenon.
We are not interested in the branding of territories and its improvement, also because the pragmatics of Expanding Space differs from many public art projects that have a government order. In general, the state order for public art is a Western phenomenon that ultimately led to a deep crisis in this genre. For the creation of objects of art for the streets in America, for example, a lot of money has been and is being allocated. As a result, firstly, public art has become a tool for developers, a means of territorial development and gentrification, that is, it is ideally integrated into the socio-political system of modern capitalism. And secondly, the art market began to actively use it as a pricing lever. Beginning in the 1970s, as the controversy in sociology and urbanism developed about what public space is, in artistic practices, there has been a turn towards building ties with local communities, communication, and activism. The process of decentralization of cultural production began in search of various communities - small and large, professional, age, social - that were ready to participate in the creation of art objects for public spaces. Public art began to return a connection with the public and its interests.
And our situation has not reached this point. There is an open question about where the public space is in Moscow. It's not even a question of who needs public art, but where is the space in which it can be done. Public art, in my opinion, is in the territory of public compromise, no matter how unpleasant it may sound. If an object of art on the street is incomprehensible or causes rejection in people, then it is not at all necessary that the artist is good, and people are bad, because they do not understand his art. To create public art requires a dialogue between the artist and society, flexibility is needed. If you are not capable of dialogue, then there is no need to talk about the critical potential of art and its ability to involve wide sections in a discussion about something important. Therefore, one of the aspects that we wanted to see in our applications for participation in our competition is the conversation with the community. We believe that public art does not work as an ultimatum. In addition, there are people who handle the processes in the city professionally - from the janitor to the mayor. An artist must also hear them in order to get an answer: what his artistic initiative will lead to, how it relates to what the professionals do.
You see your task in the role of an intermediary between the artist and professionals, i.e. officials?
- Yes, and for me this mediation is not the underwater part of the iceberg, but a full-fledged part of the project, because there is nothing more important than identifying connections. This is a project about whether it is possible to make public art without including the Minister of Culture of Moscow on the jury. Is there a movement not from a higher authority down, but horizontally? Is it possible to do a project without seeking the support of influencers? To find out, we will try to find interested people. And I am sure that they exist: it is suggested by the experience of life in our city.
In which departments do you hope to find them? In the Department of Culture? In Moskomarchitecture?
- Not only, but also in the departments of transport, construction, media and advertising, housing and public utilities and improvement. The powers of the Department of Culture are limited to the territories around museums and parks, but public art objects can be very different. If it is an audio installation, an art object in the metro, or a flower bed, these are all different dioceses. Both we and the city administration know: according to the law, city officials must help any private institution that wants to do something in the city on a non-profit basis. We have not yet begun to communicate on the case with these departments, because we have not even finished accepting applications yet, but we are probing possible ways of cooperation. The Directorate of Mass Events recently explained to me how difficult the process of agreeing to hold just a concert on the ice of the Patriarch's Pond is. Consider: water is run, oddly enough, by Mosvodokanal, the earthen bank is another institution, the paved bank is the third, the house is the fourth, the benches are the fifth, and everyone must get consent. We'll have to go through something like this. And in order to install a public art object, for example, in a courtyard, you will need to obtain the consent of all residents of the quarter. And we believe that the approval procedure should be switched to a conversation mode.
In Russia, it is difficult to interest the community of residents of even one house - unless, if their material interests are directly affected, for example, by installing a barrier. Do you think public art is one of such pressing issues?
- So we need an art that will involve people in observation, research, action, reaction, well, contemplation is also an active process. The public art that we want to see harmonizes the environment, but not by its direct physical presence, but by the processes that it activates in society. At the same time, we do not stipulate for what place our contestants should create a work of art. An artist's work should exist where it has meaning, and not where an area is formally allocated to it. We are interested in the specifics of a place, a specific location or general phenomena inherent in the Moscow urban environment as a whole, and the artist's task is to reveal it with his object. This probably sounds utopian. I will be able to say how realistic our plans and perception of the idea of public art are, only at the end of the year. But at least we would like to see this kind of art.
Fund V-A-C for many years he has been collaborating with a certain circle of "favorite" artists. Does the open call procedure you have chosen indicate that you want to expand the reach of your programs?
- We do not have favorite artists, we cooperate with different artists, whose circle is constantly expanding. Another thing is that the format of an open tender is not peculiar to us. We preferred it in order to understand what exactly is interesting for a wide range of artists in the city, and then propose it to the city for consideration.
It was important for us to cooperate with various educational and professional institutions, the student audience: we told about the competition to schools that study contemporary art and curatorial practices, curators, galleries. The system of an open tender, or, as it is called in the West, an open call, is somewhat discredited in Russia, because such tenders, as a rule, are held by the state, and it is difficult to get rid of the feeling that the winning project has already been chosen in advance, or that it is doomed become an object of traditional figurative monumentality or an imitation of conventionally European public art.
In our case, the result is not known in advance. To support the research nature of the project and to acquaint interested people with Russian and foreign experience in the development of public art, we make special projects with "Theories and Practices", with professional magazines. We intend to blog about the progress of the project. And in September we will hold an exhibition in one of the museums, which will tell about the competition projects. For me personally, the meaning of "Expanding Space" is to come to an understanding at the end of the year which art can be relevant for the modern urban environment of Moscow. Our foundation is ready to continue financially, intellectually and somehow differently to participate in the process of creating public art, but in order to continue, it is important for us to understand if there is anyone else interested in this format. Such a project cannot last only one year. We, of course, could go forward alone, but this is boring and then, we are talking about art in a public environment, you need to understand who the interested public and the agents of action are. We would like to find like-minded people who, perhaps, would become financial partners as well. Here, however, there are many dangers that world art has already encountered. The first who may be interested in such a project are developers who use public art for the development of territories and the notorious gentrification. Although art on the territory of business centers, of course, has a right to exist.
And apart from such street art for office workers, is there anything interesting in Moscow, in your opinion?
- Public art projects within the framework of Marina Zvyagintseva's program "Sleeping District" are curious, the "Exhibition Halls of Moscow" are trying to develop something interesting in this direction. One of the most successful works ever realized in Moscow is Sergei Bratkov's "From Restaurants to Space" burning on Bersenevskaya Embankment, a phrase that Yuri Gagarin used to warn young people against empty idleness, prompting them to strive for something greater.
Do you think that the obstacle to the development of public art in Russia lies in the tradition of the ideology of our monumental street art? For me, the clearest illustration of this is the empty center of Lubyanka Square. Dzerzhinsky was removed, and there was no candidate for the role of the compositional and semantic core of the square. It turns out that we can't create anything cooler than "Iron Felix" in the genre of public art? Is not ideologized public art possible in the current political conditions?
- It seems to me that one cannot replace monuments with one another just because the composition requires it, this is a dead-end practice. If you mean by ideologized public art objects with a nationalist-imperial message, then perhaps, of course. There is a lot of it, these are all kinds of festival objects that have a definite place in the entertainment industry, they are no less harmful, because they present art as an attraction.
It is worth checking all the possibilities again and again, and it is imperative to record and show those mechanisms by virtue of which it becomes possible or impossible. This again refers to the issue of exposure of public debate, as well as the pragmatics and bureaucracy of cultural decision-making. For example, the State Gulag Museum is currently running a competition for a monument to victims of political repression; as you know, there is no consensus on this matter in the society. People with diametrically opposed views on historical events and on the current political situation are protesting against the very fact of erecting such a monument. Summing up the results of the competition, in whatever form it may take, and ideally the monument itself, should articulate and reflect all these contradictions. This is perhaps the most important thing about this monument.
But in general, if we consider that some art is impossible or powerless, then it is better not to work in culture at all. It is a matter of synergy in the area of cultural production. Is that why we go to non-art museums, to officials? Because there is no understanding and common language between people who work in culture and art. There is no understanding that we are doing a common cause. So the discussion of the same competition, in my opinion, cannot do without artists, curators, especially since the discourse of memory, monumentality and antimonumentality in the theory of visual arts has been developed in the most detailed way since ancient times.
Who, apart from artists, sculptors and architects, who are traditionally perceived as creators of public art, would you like to see among the participants in your Expanding Space program?
- The authorship of the project may belong to a group, which includes an artist and an architect, as well as all those specialists who are needed to create a particular work. If the project is related to landscape or biology, it can be soil scientists, landscape specialists, biologists; if it is connected with the media, with the urban media environment, then specialists in media technologies. If this is an olfactory installation, i.e. related to smells, these are the designers of smells. If this is an art associated with the formation of a community, then it can be deputies, sociologists or activists.
Tell us about the jury and how it will work
- The jury will consist of seven people - curators, sociologists, architects, i.e. practitioners and theorists from various fields. They will choose an unlimited number of works they like. If the list turns out to be too long, then after discussion we will narrow it down to twenty participants. After that, we ourselves - the foundation, as a party that understands the pragmatics of the competition - first of all, the feasibility of projects - will select a short list of three or five works. After that, we will start working with each artist: once again check the intentions for the place they have chosen, and re-examine the research they conducted. Well, then we will have to go through all the city authorities that are involved in the implementation of the project. And only then will we come to implementation.
As I understand it, you do not give a 100% guarantee that the project will be implemented?
- We do not give, because a lot depends not only on us. But the shortlisted contestants, as well as the people who will help them in their implementation, in any case, will receive a fee: after all, this is at least six months of work.
Why did you decide on a completely independent initiative, knowing that there are some institutions in the city that have established relationships with the authorities? The most obvious example is the Strelka Institute with many of its projects. Or why haven't you united with specific people who already have experience in the field of public art: for example, one of the founders of Strelka, Oleg Shapiro, is organizing the Art-Ovrag festival in Vyksa
- Unfortunately, in Moscow there are no institutions with successful and long-term experience in implementing such projects in the long term, in contrast to Yekaterinburg, Perm, Kaliningrad, St. Petersburg. We invited people from different institutions to the jury, including a representative of Strelka. The experience of holding festivals seems to us irrelevant. We want to get away from the festival format, because objects within the framework of festivals, as a rule, are determined by the goals of the festival and, more broadly, by the customer of the festival, they are weakly connected with the environment, and at the end of the festival the works disappear, and the empty space again ceases to be public.
Did I understand correctly that your maximum goal is to develop a sustainable mechanism for self-reproduction of public art, accepted by local communities, in Moscow?
- Absolutely. This is what we would like to achieve with our program.
