Pandoctrina artists    Pandoctrina union of Novosibirsk artists: Shabatin, Voronzov the Younger, Vatolkin, Poluj (see Dispatch 17), Siderov, Kolonina, Voronzov the Elder, Ivan Prosakov (out of town) |
Artist Siderov |
(click images for enlarged view)
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| Four Novosibirsk neighbors sit around a bottle of vodka, recalling the recent Chechnya war of independence. One says he fought for the Chechens, another for the Russians. The third tells of his travels to Chechnya to do business, and the fourth, DENIS SIDEROV, describes Cannon Fodder (1998), his memorial to the brutal war. | |
  
Cannon Fodder (details) |
| The images are Xeroxed photos of Russian and Chechen soldiers who died in the Chechnya war of secession. | Each photos is affixed, like a bull's eye, to the lid of a canned beef container. The meat is the local equivalent of Spam. |
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Red Square Curtain (0:48 min. RealVideo clip. You'll need RealPlayer to see and hear these clips) 
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Red Square is the sacred turf of the former Soviet Union. On May Day, tanks and heavy artillery roll through the square in a demonstration of Soviet might. Lenin's tomb is on Red Square, and the founder of Russian Communism still lies there, embalmed as part of a tourist site. |
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In a performance at the Black Widow gallery in Novosibirsk, Siderov projects an image of Red Square on a curtain of toilet paper. When the paper fully absorbs the image, the artist sloshes it in water as if to develop the image. He then presses the water from the soggy paper, working, squeezing, as if he were cleansing Red Square of its history.
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Pressing History| In years gone by, technical advances in the Soviet Union were attributed to the magical workings of "Lenin's Lamp." The atom bomb, Sputnik, a tractor that did not break down, all popped out of the Aladdin Lamp painted red. | |
Freud's Lamp (1998) 
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Now that Communism has been buried, a replacement for Lenin's Lamp has arisen. Rub the lamp, and it solves your problems.
ANDREI VORONZOV is amused by the Freud craze in Russia. Russians apparently crave magical solutions, so he fashioned Freud's Lamp. Stroke its suggestive contours, and a genie with a couch appears. Voronzov withdrew Freud's Lamp from the Pandoctrina group show, Ambivalence of Choice. He objected to an installation that introduced Czarist themes. Like many Russian artists, Voronzov is sensitive to political nuance, and he acts on his convictions. |
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PETER SHABATIN composed the ambient music for the exhibition Ambivalence of Choice.
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Composer Shabatin |
Golden Child (detail) |
Artist Voronzov the Younger |
| The installation Golden Child (1998) surrounds a child with images of Kremlin treasures, the booty of empire. Yet the child is the true riches of the country. To ALEXANDER VORONZOV, the child is the unrealized potential of the Russian people. | |
Artist Kolonina
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JULIA KOLONINA is an art student at Wayne State University in Detroit. She spends summers in Novosibirsk with old school chums. |
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In Detroit, Kolonina photographed buildings gutted by the riots of the 1960s. The charred structures are dark reminders of a tragic era.
Kolonina carried large transparencies of her Detroit shoot to the exhibition in Novosibirsk. Russians like to be reassured that America is not perfect. The transparency is mounted on a window in the gallery. The building visible through the transparency houses government offices. |
Detroit #3, 1998 (transparency detail) |
Artist Vatolkin |
ROMAN VATOLKIN is an art student at the Novosibirsk Academy of Art and Architecture. |
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Good Morning, Modest Petrowitch, 1991 (detail) (Petrowitch is the patronymic of the composer Moussorsky.) 
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Vatolkin appropriated Valentin Serov's painting of Moussorsky when the composer lay ill in a mental institution. Good Morning, Modest Petrowitch showed in Germany and Switzerland.
Art from Novosibirsk destined for foreign countries has to pass through the hands of the Ministry of Culture in Moscow. The fee for the stamp is minimal. |
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