Thanks to the infantile state of American corporate journalism, I sadly have to tack on this introductory paragraph warning readers that this column speaks positively of historically “Russian” accomplishments. Since the miserable harvest of death in Ukraine commenced last year, our press has delighted in “Freedom Fries”-tier psychological warfare based in the belief that cultural boycotts, the protests of teenaged Belarussian tennis pros etc. would somehow discourage a Putin who is noted by the same press as a madman beyond the point of rational persuasion. Needless to say, I doubt the efficacy of such as a tool of war just as I doubt the long-term value of related ploys like economic sanctions. So I will make no apologies here for critically investigating Russian culture of the modern era, particularly when the culture in question was not even aligned with the official State imperatives of either Russia or the former Soviet Union. Furthermore, as an anarchist, it should also go without saying that I take no “sides” among competing brands of murderous gangster kleptocracy: both the Russian and American varieties still seem perfectly fine with immolating the entire globe rather than relinquishing a fraction of their power.
Having hopefully cleared that up, let us try to seek out sunnier shores. I have been meaning for a while to have a serious discussion about the late-Soviet era “apartment art” or “apt-art” movement in this space. Purely by chance, I recently discovered another obscure volume on this subject at a shop in Savannah, Georgia (a catalog from the exhibit The Space of Freedom: Apartment Exhibitions in Leningrad, 1964-1986, complete with a handwritten note, on University of Richmond letterhead, addressed from the curator to some mystery recipient). Curiously, this is not the first time I’ve found a book on the subject buried within the stacks of dimly-lit used bookstores: other finds have included the fascinating Ransom of Russian Art (the story of how eccentric collector Norton Dodge single-handedly brought Soviet “nonconformist art” to Western shores), and multiple bilingual volumes showcasing the collection of Leningrad’s Museum of Nonconformist Art). By contrast, such finds seemingly never make their way to the new bookstores lined with the sort of NPR- or TED Talk-approved middlebrow material for those who demand “extra credit” for being literate. In a way, this is highly appropriate, as it forms a kind of continuity between one “unofficial,” non-institutional narrative of human expression and another.
The words which introduce Space of Freedom are, in my reckoning, ones that should resonate with almost anyone of a creative inclination. Evgeny Orlov, participant in some of the most seminal “apt-art” gatherings and later director of the aforementioned Museum of Nonconformist Art, waxes poetically on our human relationship with physical space, and how it defined a movement which converted its private homes into sites of free exchange at a time when the State offered nothing comparable:
Whilst attempting to understand the condition of his space, humankind has also attempted to extend its concept of space to eternity. One’s home, apartment, or room could either become a window to infinity or a limitation, a finite space, a dead end.[i]
This truly is one of the fundamental questions that should accompany art-making now, or in any era: how to take the restraints imposed by nature, society and self, and use them as vehicles for something theoretically limitless? This was a challenge that always faced the homo Sovieticus of Orlov’s time, as the authoritative discourse not only placed well-known limits on the content of expression, but constructed a physical environment whose standardized nature was often difficult to see beyond. In particular, the prefabricated apartment blocks that dominated the urban landscape of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc seemed to epitomize conformity and functionality over all, to a degree that often made them ripe for farcical entertainment: in the popular 1975 TV comedy Ironiia sud’by [The Irony of Fate], the protagonist drunkenly stumbles into an apartment identical to his own, in a completely different city, and finds himself romantically involved once he discovers another woman inhabiting the apartment whose layout, furniture, etc. are indistinguishable from his own. Věra Chytilová’s 1979 film Prefab Story provides another example of Soviet-era architecture, in Czechoslovakia this time, showing how its inhabitants attempted to reconcile their aspirations with the limitations of their built environment.
The road leading to the “apt-art” of the 1960s-1980s is not a difficult one to follow, but some steps should be retraced nonetheless. As the historical record shows, Soviet Russia in its infancy was a place of intense and unprecedented artistic experimentation. However, by the dawn of the 1930s, official policy caused even avant-gardes sympathetic to the socialist ideal to be dismissed as "bourgeois formalism”: some of the most ahead-of-their-time experiments conducted within the Soviet Union were assumed to have secret or perhaps subliminal anti-Soviet motives coded within them (see, for example, the Russian Futurist forays into noise-as-music, or Velimir Khlebnikov's "trans-rational" Zaum poetry). The partitioning of art into “official” and “unofficial” (read: illegal) varieties came in earnest in 1934, with Socialist Realism being the only acceptable mode of production.
The eventual death of Stalin, and successor Nikita Khrushchev’s confessional 'Secret Speech' on Stalin’s excesses to the 20th Party Congress, were events that seemed initially to bode well for artistic experimentalism within the Soviet Union. Instead, the Soviet premier would make his displeasure with non-Social Realist art abundantly clear upon viewing the Manezh exhibition in 1962 (wherein some so-called “new art” was allowed to hang along with thousands of canvasses celebrating three decades of Socialist Realism): Khrushchev reportedly went on a non-legendary tirade in which he referred to certain works as "dogshit" and their creators as "pederasts," concluding with the prescient and discouraging proclamation “Gentlemen, we are declaring war on you!” It was, effectively, the cue for the state to begin treating "unofficial" artists of the ‘60s and beyond as a parasite class, and for the KGB to mobilize against them.
Indeed, not a small number of artists from the 1960s onward found themselves in the KGB's Lubyanka prison, or forced into mental institutions, or - as was suspected of "unofficial" icon Evgeny Rukhin – murdered outright (in Rukhin’s case, death in his home by arson was suspected, and it would be only the most notable example of cases in which the residences of nonconformist artists suspiciously went up in flames). The artists Yuly Rybakov and Oleg Volkhov protested with the prominent graffiti slogan “You crucify freedom, but freedom knows no boundaries,” and in turn earned prison sentences of six and seven years for their affront to the State (interestingly, Rybakov’s vindication would come in the form of his being elected as deputy for human rights in the post-Soviet State Duma). Lastly, every decent account of nonconformist Soviet art also cites the so-called "Bulldozer Exhibit" of 1974, in which a supposedly clandestine art show in a field outside of Moscow was ambushed by bulldozers and agents wielding firehoses. Such events, sadly not isolated, were indicative of a crackdown on artists that intensified once the State stopped focusing solely on dissident writers as objects of suppression, and only began to taper off during the Gorbachev / “perestroika” years.
Despite all these limitations, and others still unmentioned, the existing catalogs of nonconformist art reveal that the variety of works produced under such conditions was staggering, and also indicative that numerous unofficial artists were either aware of such Western movements as Color Field painting and Pop art, or - more interestingly - achieved results similar to their Western equivalents while starting from something close to a “zero point” with regards to knowledge of contemporary developments. Meanwhile, a direct line seemed to still connect the Russian avant-gardes of the early 20th century to the unofficial artists of decades later - the influence of Kandinsky and of the 'Cubo-Futurists' looms over many of the pieces in Norton Dodge's collection. Elsewhere, unofficial artists like Valery Klever, Boris Mitavskiy and Yury Petrochenkov created local analogs to the oneiric visions of Dali and Ernst, while Aleksandr Sadikov painted abstract figures of an explosive, spiraling dynamism, and Vadim Voinov contributed critical / ironic assemblages. Even a cursory examination shows that there was never a “house style” among the unofficial artists in spite of their doubtlessly close, regular interaction with one another.
With the aforementioned precedents for State hostility to any form of unapproved art, it is unsurprising that personal living spaces became a regularly used forum of artistic exchange. This was not necessarily a smooth nor “overnight” transition, though. Regardless of where works ended up being exhibited, only “official” artists were given access to professional-grade supplies, while unofficial artists either had to strike up secretive friendships with them in order to share in these supplies, or simply had to rely on alternatives that were widely seen as inferior: burlap or wall boards in the place of stretched canvas, picture frames assembled with a couple of tacks, or even older paintings which were 'recycled' (read: painted over), with the backsides of previously designed artworks also put into service. The unofficial artworks showcased in Dodge's massive collection also testify to the limitations on the size of works that could feasibly be produced: nearly everything produced with the hopes of international exhibition had to conform to a “suitcase” size in order to facilitate its smuggling. This was to say nothing of simply transporting artworks, free of official suspicion, within the city limits.
“Apt art" also involved sacrificing many of the conveniences of domestic life, once nearly every square inch of livable space (including ceilings, bathtubs etc.) was given over to exhibition space. Some apartments would be so crammed with artworks that they would be exhibited one of top of the other on the walls. In these circumstances, the utopian proclamation of “art into life” became realized via the dissolution of boundaries between public activities (exhibition) and personal, domestic rituals. Of course, the “privacy” of artists’ apartments never provided any guarantees against official interference, particularly when the sheer number of visitors to the more popular apt-art exhibits alarmed the residents of neighboring units. In his account of the On Bronnitskaya Street exhibition in St. Petersburg (still considered the most consequential summit of unofficial artists in the “apt-art” age), Sergei Kovalsky noted some of the cat-and-mouse games necessary to keep the authorities at bay in these circumstances:
Suspecting that the militia [police] might block the entrance to the apartment in advance, we decided to inform the painters and visitors about the exhibition only late in the evening, before its opening on Friday night, November 13. At that time, only the desk officers were on duty and the department heads were at home from the weekend. We thought that if the desk officers on duty were the only ones who found out about it, a decision to close the exhibit could be made by the authorities only on Monday.[ii]
Further problems would arise with, among other nuisances, the shutting off of electricity to housing units where unofficial art activity was suspected. Yet, in the romantic recollections of Yury Novakov, “not a one of the many visitors head[ed] for the exit, but, instead, [began] striking matches…the dancing, miniscule flames light up fragments of the paintings…the canvases immediately take on a marvelous multi-dimensional spatial quality.”[iii]
The heroic narrative of “apartment art” remains a particularly intriguing and relevant one when we consider how this culture anticipated many 21st century questions dealing with the presentation of art, and also those dealing with the post-digital flattening of “public” and “private” spheres. As to the latter, the apt-art exhibitions were “private” in the sense that we attribute to selective social clubs; they were perhaps “invitation only” rather than open to a public that could just stumble into them as they would other features of a shared urban landscape. However, they were not “private” in another sense that we use that word, i.e. that the artists and audiences were separated by some physical or virtual barrier that prevented them from interacting with one another, or which allowed for a certain predictability in terms of social interactions. On the contrary (and as Novakov’s reminisces hint at above), these events were ones of a fairly intense intimacy when compared with conventional exhibitions either in the “free” or “outside”world.
Their success cannot be truly appreciated, therefore, without also discussing the concept of obshchenie, a term that defies easy translation yet somewhat aligns with a combination of “communication,” “interaction” and simply “being together.” Obshchenie is not analogous to what we might understand as a social gathering, since it refers both the process of socializing / communicative exchange and the result of those processes. From surveying the recollections of former nonconformist artists, one gets the impression that the cultivation of obshchenie was more important than any of the exhibited work at any given show. It was also, notably, essential to the creation of what Kovalsky referred to as a “Parallelosphere”: not a virtual or physical space in which all the energy was diverted towards combative acts of being “anti-“ and tearing down the official discourse, but rather an environment in which participants merely acted as if such did not exist (interestingly, Kovalsky’s conception also involved a sort of synesthetic approach to the arts).
This is not to put the daily struggle for civil rights on some lesser footing, but I would submit that this struggle is far more effective when supplemented with some sort of levity, non-purposive experimentation, and, last but not least, deep inquiry about where one stands not only in relation to hostile power structures, but in relation to the totality of existence. Official authoritarian discourses, for whatever else we can say about them, are easily boiled down to a monotonous call for self-preservation, and whatever else we can say about that, it becomes deeply uninteresting and atrophying to the imagination. Better, then, to engage in what was called vnutrenniaia emigratsiia [“internal emigration”] in the USSR. The “apt-art” pioneers achieved as much: not just beating a tactical retreat indoors, but converting restricted private space into a forum for questions about limitlessness.
[i] Orlov, E. (2006). Preface quoted in The Space of Freedom: Apartment Exhibitions in Leningrad, 1964-1986, ed. N. Elizabeth Schlatter and Joan Maitre. Richmond: University of Richmond Museums.
[ii] Sergei Kovalsky quoted in Ibid.
[iii] Yury Novakov quoted in Ibid.