Bart De Baere: "They represent Russian post-Soviet art as the long-lasting value it has proven to be after the bonfire of its initial opening up".

Bart De Baere with honey-clock of Japanese-German artist Suchan Kinoshita in the reading space of M HKA. Photo: Christine Clinckx

There is Nothing Else Left

We may always pretend that art exists in a vacuum, readily available for the disinterested observer. Neither art itself, nor its position in the world, nor the observer really exists in such a pristine, disinterested state, however. It may therefore be preferable to consider and overtly articulate the wider cultural political impact, when looking at commitments such as Gazprombank’s collection of contemporary Russian art, or the public presentation of that collection due to take place in Bologna, and I hear there are also plans to show it elsewhere.

If we want to critically assess this move – the collecting and presentation of contemporary art by a company like Gazprombank – it is important to first validate its context. With which societal aspirations may it be connected? The Russian Federation has a reasonably developed state structure for visual art. Beside this public infrastructure, it can also boast some of the most highly qualified private foundations in the world, such as Garage and V–A–C in Moscow. This is not surprising for a country that has traditionally seen the arts as an integral part of the formation of its society, linked to both spirituality and politics. Such high-profile position for art foundations is not only to the advantage of the foundations themselves, because they, in turn, empower both society and the arts. They are in this way one of the emanations of a vision of society as a texture that is both rich already – in terms of non-economic values – and continues to want further enrichment, a task for individuals, companies and the state alike. This vision of society links Russia to Western Europe.

In a multipolar world it would seem too stupid for words not to cultivate this link, the link between the European Union and the Russian Federation, to name the two main political entities involved at this point. They have a larger global potential together than apart. Alas, it does not seem probable that politics will follow cultural logic here any time soon. As we know, the relationship between Russia on the one hand, and Western and Central Europe on the other, has been fraught with doubt and tensions.

Russia mentally positions itself in a way that is very similar to Great Britain, its adversary in the nineteenth-century "Great Game" in Central and Southern Asia that led, among other things, to the Crimean War between Russia and the other European powers in the 1850s. England, however seamlessly woven into the fabric of European history, always felt itself to be both inside and outside Europe at the same time, deeply part of it and yet intensely separate. Likewise, Russia often sets itself apart, thinking of itself as "Eurasia", a term established by Prince Nikolay Trubetskoy to articulate an emancipatory move for Russia, starting from his critique of European construction in his 1920 book Europe and Mankind.

At the end of this trajectory, however, Trubetskoy would write in a letter to his fellow Eurasian Pyotr Savitsky: "I think there is nothing else left but to go outside the confines of our nationally defined European-Russian culture and work for a general European culture, claiming to be a general human culture. There is nothing else left." [Letter from Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy to Pyotr Nikolaevich Savitsky, 8–10 December 1930, as published in the journal Slavovedenie, no.4, 1995]. In any case Western and Central Europe should be grateful to both England and Russia for having saved its skin, even its very civilisation, at the end of both the Napoleonic and the Nazi epochs.

With its Brexit melodrama, England is at this point making yet another move of separation. At the same time, it aims to immediately forge relations once again. This is merely the next chapter in its living apart together with Europe. What will be the position over the years to come of its traditional counterpart, Russia? If we look at the contemporary art field, we see a strange phenomenon. In terms of public awareness Russia at this moment barely registers internationally. In the past quarter-century, London has succeeded in turning itself into the main international hub for contemporary art sales. Russian art, on the other hand, did become internationally visible for a short time at the end of the 1980s but again faded out of general international view soon after. That is a shame. Not only is Russia one of the cradles of modern art, it still continues to house a rich, diverse, intellectually and visually sophisticated art community. All it lacks is visibility.

That is not good for a country. Recently I was struck again with these limits when making an exhibition in the Belgian Senate in Brussels, in conjunction with another museum, BPS22 from Charleroi. In each room we juxtaposed a pair of artists, one from each of the two main communities of Belgium, with an international artist, in a dialogue about a topic of concern to the Senate. Because M HKA differs from most museums in Western Europe in having a major Russian collection, Victor Alimpiev, Taus Makhacheva and Sasha Pirogova could be included in that dialogue. If this had not been the case, Russia’s presence would have remained limited to the 2008 video "Corporate Armies" by the Spanish collective PSJM, proposed by BPS22 for the section on economy, a piece that strangely interprets the 2007 amendments to the Russian defence law relating to the anti-terrorist protection of the biggest Russian companies as a licence to develop their own private armies.

It was therefore with some joy that I saw two years ago an exhibition of the Gazprombank collection in the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA) in Moscow. "Making Our Stay in the City Visibly and Invisibly" was the title. Another player had entered the field. The exhibition was an impressive, coherently curated survey of major works by some of the leading Russian contemporary artists, from Andrey Monastyrsky and Vadim Zakharov through Yuri Leiderman, Dmitry Gutov, Sergey Bratkov and Anatoly Osmolovsky to Viktor Alimpiev, Olga Chernysheva and UrbanFaunaLab.

They represent Russian post-Soviet art as the long-lasting value it has proven to be after the bonfire of its initial opening up. It positions itself in the continuity of the long intellectual tradition that is one of the defining factors of Russian cultural life. It is typically informed by the negative ontology of Moscow Conceptualism; it combines an astute and broad knowledge and understanding with a final visualisation that takes a narrow, very specific track, a stringent focus on one of the infinite possibilities that the space of reflections might open up. Art thus evokes an intellectual capacity, yet also turns it away from operational expectations into a reflective space that allows mankind to discover a cosmos beyond its usual capacities.

It is clearly of value that Gazprombank is building and exhibiting a contemporary art collection, thus promoting a critical, open corporate culture as part of its own wider reference system. That is instrumental even for the simple purpose of countering a paranoid image of Russia, a paranoia turning a profoundly cultivated country into yet another evil alien, as is sometimes done to Russia nowadays, in an endless reiteration of cold war knee-jerk reactions. The real potential advantages, however, obviously start elsewhere and move elsewhere.

First, they reside in the company’s commitment to contemporary reflection. That commitment has a clear starting base. This is not only a substantial collection – around 800 works now – but also a project that wants to respond to the intelligence of art with an institutional intelligence. In order to preserve the integrity and initial artistic idea, the collection tends to seek out projects as a whole, rather than acquiring individual works. It even has commissioned works in a way that strengthens the international presence of Russian artists, such as Taus Makhacheva’s Gamsutl video, now also in the Tate collection, for the Liverpool Biennale, or Arseny Zhilyaev’s Tsiolkovsky: Second Advents, a project for Ljubljana.

Secondly, Gazprombank presents its collection to the public, both through individual exhibitions of artists and through group exhibitions, within Russia and internationally. The potential scope for action is vast. To start with, the Gazprombank Collection will now meet a museum with its own reference collection: MAMbo in Bologna, Italy, one of the traditional reference countries for visual art. But next time as I heard the venue might be Baku, Azerbaijan - a country deliberately positioning itself as European, even if it might seem otherwise from a different angle. The curators chose the title – following the artist Svetlana Shuvaeva – to evoke the high level of contingency that is in the air at this moment. Their choice is solid, however. They welcome the clear proof of quality of a Russian company collection which reflects the state of the art-scene in the country. With this welcome, they open up the image of art in their own spot for these artistic proposals from Russia. Rightfully so, because contemporary Russian artists should and will find their place once again in the international framework of references. For those who are not aware of this yet, the title of the project may be of help as well: "It's OK to change your mind!"