Source: Meduza
In Italy the 58th Venice Biennale started on11 May. The theme for this year is “May you live in interesting times” and the curator is Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward Gallery, an influential venue for contemporary art in London. The main prize – the Golden Lion for national participation– has gone to Lithuania for the ecological opera performance Sun & Sea (Marina). The best artist is the US film director Arthur Jafa, who shot the video about racism The White Album. Meduza tells about the most interesting projects at the Biennale and also about the Russian pavilion, the organization of which in 2019 was entrusted to the Hermitage – opinions on that score are divided.
The works in Biennale can be seen in Venice until 24 November 2019.
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In 2019 the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale has for the first time been prepared by the State Hermitage. The commissioner of the pavilion is Semyon Mikhailovsky, Rector of the Saint Petersburg State Repin Academic Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, a member of the President’s Council on Culture. He has held the position since 2014, when he replaced the art scholar Grigory Revzin, who left, as reported by the Ministry of Culture, on account of his “extremely active creative and journalistic activities in recent times” which did “not permit him to participate to the full in the project.”
A year ago, Mikhailovsky told journalists that a “project aimed at the demands of the moment” is needed to win the Golden Lion at Venice: “I have twice been part of teams that won prizes at the Biennale… I know first-hand how things work. But none of our projects have been short of attention from the press, the Western press included, and, most importantly, of attention from the public. Not because we are so wonderful, but because we live in a country that arouses interest. Still, despite the broad response to [our] exhibition, … I realized that we won’t be given the prize. Even though many people praised [it]. The competition is stiff.” Incidentally, the opinion exists that in actual fact the person directly in charge of the Russian pavilion in 2019 was Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky himself.
The 2019 display comprises an installation by the film director Alexander Sokurov on Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (together with Sokurov the project was prepared by Yelena Zhukova and Lidiya Kryukova, the director Alexander Zolotukhin and students of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts) and the “Flemish School” by the artist Alexander Shishkin (aka Shishkin-Hokusai).
Sokurov’s project “Lc 15:11–32” (the passage in the Gospel that relates the story of the return of the prodigal son) is placed on the upper floor of the pavilion, in a darkened room. Visitors comment that the exhibition is accompanied by lengthy texts that are hard to make out in the gloom, although they are important for an understanding of what is going on. For example, “The museum is a living, self-regulating entity that can accept or reject, do good or do evil, love or hate, teach or punish. The museum has chosen many remarkable people to be the writers of this story, all of whom gravitate towards the museum and know it well… They have succeeded in conveying, each in their own way, the three most notable qualities by which our museum is recognized: it is very much like a shrine, it is a spiritual place, and it is exciting and fun.”
One of the most prominent exhibits is the “casts of the legs of the Atlantes that adorn the portico in front of the entrance to the New Hermitage on Millionnaya Street”. Alongside is an easel-screen on which the wilderness appears with Ivan Kramskoi’s Christ, and with them present-day terrorist suicide bombers. The display also includes a sculpture of Rembrandt’s head placed on the floor and three-dimensional figures of the main personages in his paintings. Alexander Sokurov personally scattered sand on the heels of the prodigal son.
Shishkin-Hokusai’s project, the “Flemish School” is on the lower floor of the pavilion. It is constructed entirely of plywood – a “birch-bark Hermitage”. The plywood floor is painted like the floor in the Hermitage; on the walls there are distorted copies of paintings from the museum collection. “Some of the pictures have tubes protruding from the centre containing a scarlet substance. The little figures of spectators have been riddled by invisible bullets. You come out of the pavilion with the feeling that you are leaving a battlefield,” Milena Orlova of The Art Newspaper Russia writes.
Opinions are divided on the Russian pavilion. Sergei Popov, the Director General of the Pop/off/art Gallery, wrote on Facebook that the display in the Russian pavilion “bears no relation to contemporary art”: “Two words describe our pavilion better than any others in my opinion: bombast and substitution. The entire programme of the project is full of bombast: the Hermitage, Sokurov, Rembrandt, St Luke’s Gospel, the Academy of Arts, war, mercy, classics, darkness, videos… Substitution is a word that describes many processes in our country, and in culture more particularly. It is frightening, painful and horrifying to show the real current state and so we cover ourselves with museum classics and make them safe.” Popov called Shishkin-Hokusai’s works witty and said that they “tried to save the situation.”
Liza Savina, the founder of the Cultural Initiatives Foundation, on the contrary called the Russian pavilion “all of a piece and fairly intelligible”. In her opinion it speaks about national identity: from the 18th century Russia “did not have its own secular [cultural code]: they bought in the Flemish, the Dutch, a few Italians, French of whatever sort and started to learn to live with that. For that reason, as the basis of our identity and the main signs of the cultural code is the Hermitage collection. Over a couple of centuries, we managed to grow great Russian literature out of those signs; Christ in the wilderness as a symbol of Russian spirituality. … Strictly speaking, though, it is not the most risqué national identity. The Estonians, so they say, have lined their entire pavilion with glass vaginas.”
The Art Newspaper calls Sokurov and Shishkin-Hokusai’s exhibition a massive advert for the Hermitage, and the reporter for The Guardian admitted to running away from the Russian pavilion “unable to bear the Rembrandtian gloom, the spectre of Christ and the burning soldiers…”
