Kukarkin Emerging – Split nik at Moscow Biennale

Split nik, Moscow Biennale – in progress

Media coverage:

http://scanpix.no/spWebApp/preview.action?search.tabId=video&search.refPtrs=sy850d41

http://www.1tv.ru/news/culture/186171

http://www.tvkultura.ru/news.html?id=797368&cid=178

Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas’ Split nik installation opened in the Moscow Biennale on 22 September and the exhibition runs until 30 October 2011. Split nik is an installation re-reading a book published by Russian author, Alexander Kukarkin, during the Cold War period, discussing Soviet and Western ideologies in relation to consumerism, design and art. I am an ‘embedded writer’ with the project. The installation is a device to look backwards at the history of the Cold War in culture, focussing on the book Beyond Welfare (The Passing Age in English) by Kukarkin, and also to look forwards from now. The installation consists of three elements:

-       a presentation of Kukarkin’s book in Russian, Lithuanian and English,

-       extracts from a 1970s Lithuanian film Things and People that humorously examines our psychological and ideological relationships with objects,

-       and a wooden structure resembling convoluted raked seating designed for dialogue.

Installing the work was fraught with drama. It got held up in customs and then lost in the basement of the luxurious Tsum Department Store in Moscow – our exhibition was on the fifth floor. Then our team was beset with flu, a broken hand, and chronic jetlag – nevertheless after a few 24 hour shifts, Split nik appeared.

THE FOURTH ELEMENT

The Split nik project assistant, Anna Kotova, contacted Moscow artists via Facebook and Nomeda, Gediminas and I ran a week-long workshop which is the developing fourth element of the work. The participating artists are Elle Gard, Liza Izvekova, Anna Prihodioko, Maria Sokol and Vladimir Smyshlenkov. We discussed the work of Future Studies researchers such as the Global Scenario Group www.gsg.org  and Kingsley Dennis and John Urry’s book After the Car (Polity, 2009) and artists considering the future: science fiction, and artists such as Lise Autogena, John and Helen Mayer Harrison, Andrew Sunley Smith, Heath Bunting & Kayle Brandon, Kate Rich, Uta Kogelsberger, London Fieldworks and HeHe.

Talking of Khrushchev and Nixon’s 1959 Kitchen Debate, we wondered why the best conversations always happen in the kitchen. We set them a task to sit in a kitchen (their own, their grandmother’s, a showroom kitchen – whatever they like) and make some sketches of their vision of a future scenario – in whatever form they like: drawings, photo, collage, film, text, sound. We will be posting their developing ideas in a few weeks time. You, the reader, are welcome to submit your Future Casts to us too.

THE PEDAGOGICAL TURN

Elle, Liza, Anna, Maria, and Vladmir are also organising dialogues in Split nik during the exhibition with small groups of people. Documentation of these will follow. Sitting in the Split nik structure we discussed with them the pedagogical turn in art.

See Kristina Podesva, The Pedagogical Turn in Art

http://fillip.ca/content/a-pedagogical-turn

and artists and projects such as Tino Sehgal, The Long March (China), Platform (UK), Jeremy Deller (UK) and Nomeda & Gediminas’ other projects on http://www.nugu.lt – click on dossier.

We talked about theorists: Clare Bishop’s book Participation and her articles on The Participatory Turn; Christian Kravagna; Grant Kester’s book Conversational Pieces; Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics and Altermodern; Lars Bang Larsen, and then historically Joseph Beuys, Helio Oiticica, Milan Knizak, Marcel Duchamp’s text ‘The Creative Act’, Umberto Eco’s ‘The Open Work’.

KUKARKIN RESEARCH

Meanwhile, we are also progressing our research on Kukarkin himself, leafing through copies of Amerika magazine and Kukarkin’s personnel records, unearthed by Anna. The top floor apartment in Moscow where we were staying was showing the ill effects of a leaking roof and its age. We imagined it could have been Kukarkin’s apartment. The doors squeak painfully, the floors creak, the lightbulbs blow room by room, the toilet leaks, the kettle has a huge crack down one side but still works. Tea is a small mercy.

Kukarkin was born in 1916 at Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). His parents died when he was a child and he was raised by his uncle, a doctor living in Moscow. From the age of fifteen Kukarkin worked at the factory Dinamo. During 1934-35 he served as secretary in various offices. From 1936 he studied at M. Gorky’s Institute of Literature in Moscow, graduating in 1940. During his studies he published his first critical essays in the magazines Flag (Znamya), New World (Novyj Mir), Literary Observer (Lietarturnoje Obozrenyje). Due to bad eyesight he was decommissioned from army service and worked for various newspapers and publishing houses. In 1943 he was sent by the Communist Party to the Higher School of Diplomacy, which he graduated in 1945. After graduation he began a diplomatic career and was sent to USA.

He was working as an attaché and head of the Press Department at the Soviet Embassy in Washington from September 1945 to August 1946. His time there coincided with the period when Alexander Feklisov was the KGB handler for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at the New York Soviet Embassy. The Rosenbergs were executed as spies in 1953 and alleged to have given away US atomic secrets to Russia.

In August 1948 Kukarkin was part of a Soviet Delegation visiting the London Olympics at a time when USSR was negotiating terms to join the Olympics – it competed for the first time in 1952. He was a member of the Soviet delegations at the First World Congress for Peace in Czechoslovakia in April 1949; the United Nations Fourth Session September-November 1949; and the Second World Peace Congress in November 1950. The World Peace Council was established in response to fears of a third world war and the threat of atomic annihilation as the Cold War was escalating in Korea. Peace Congress deletes gathered in Sheffield in the UK, including Kukarkin, Picasso and ‘the Red Dean’ of Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Hewlett Johnson, who argued that capitalism lacked a moral basis and the moral impulse of communism constituted the greatest attraction. The British Labour government sabotaged the Congress and it was forced to shift behind ‘the Iron Curtain’ to Warsaw.

Kukarkin was a member of the editorial board of the magazine The New Times (Novoye Vremya). From 1951 he worked as editor of NEWS (Novosty) a newly established English language magazine for foreign countries. He travelled to France as a member of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations Sixth Session November 1951 – January 1952.

From 1953 he continued his literary work. He took a job as head of the Drama Department at the magazine Arts (Iskusstvo). He then disappears from the official records for five years. According to the personnel file during this time he was focussing on literary translations, and writing on Charlie Chaplin.

During 1958-61 he was head of the Foreign Film Department at the State Film Foundation USSR (GosFilmFond). During this time he collected materials for his major work on American film, which was published as part of the larger book: Cinema, Theater, Music, Painting in USA by Znanye (Knowledge).

From 1963 he started research work at the institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Science USSR where he worked until his pension in 1976. During these 13 years he wrote books, essays and articles on contemporary cinematography and critiques on bourgeoisie ideology and culture. The Passing Age – a book for foreign readers was published by Progress, and The Mass Culture of Bourgeoisie was published by PolitIzdat.

He lived his last years with his daughter and granddaughter – who we are hoping to find and interview. We are also very keen to find out more about his diplomatic career and whether there is any information on him, his book designers and illustrators in the archives of Progress publishers. If you have any information on Kukarkin, or would like to comment on his book or Split nik please contact us.

Also see http://www.vilma.cc/splitnik

 

Conversations on Collaboration

The following is an extract from an article that will be published shortly in the Doubt Guardian. The full article includes interviews I carried out in November 2007 with Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey and with Phelim McDermott from Improbable.

See

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/ah

for information on Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey’s projects and

http://www.improbable.co.uk

for Improbable.

Out of Control: Conversations on Collaboration

Tracey Warr

In the 21st century artistic collaboration has moved from being an aberration to being as commonplace as the individual artist. What are the reasons for this phenomenon?

Collaboration has a long history in the visual arts stretching back to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and beyond. At the beginning of the 20th century artists and writers groups were numerous. Dada, Die Brucke, Blue Rider, Futurists, Vorticists, the Surrealists, Bauhaus, Gutai, Fluxus, The Inklings, the New Realists, the Lettrists, the Situationists International and many more groups and collaborations contested the notion of the lone, individual, genius artist and the commodification of the signature artist by the market. They explored a composite subjectivity and took iconoclastic stances against entrenched and defunct positions. They challenged the canon of art history.

More recent collaborations are numerous and have included Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Gilbert and George and the Christos. The current burgeoning of collaboration has been reflected in a range of exhibitions, events and publications including Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century at the Smithsonian Institute in 1984, Team Spirit in 1991, Art Lovers in 2002, a consideration of group practice in Documenta XI in 2003, the Diffusion symposium at Tate Modern in 2003 and Collective Creativity at the Kunsthalle Friedericanium in Kassel in 2005.

There are many different types of collaboration with different dynamics within them. The psychologists Damon and Phelps developed a distinction between co-operation and collaboration, where the latter had a more fully realised equality in roles and responsibilities. Sometimes a collaboration is a merger of two or more hands into one, and sometimes it is deliberately manipulating the concept of a signature style itself. Sometimes it is a dyadic exchange. Sometimes collaborations are pseudo-kinship groups reflecting family dynamics. Sometimes they are conversational circles of peers sharing values and goals. Sometimes they are radial networks centred on a single person. A number of critics including Irit Rogoff have pointed out that the market and the historical canon can adapt to absorb the group as the author too. Paul O’Neil asks, ‘Is the collective just another marketable brand in disguise?’ Some collaborations, such as Platform or Critical Art Ensemble, are intersections of artistic and activist practice. Some collaborations persist and some have a shelf-life or fizzle out.

Shifts in arts practice to an expanded practice that includes large-scale, site-specific and interdisciplinary work, and the range of skills required to realise that work, is one of the factors driving collaboration. My own work with artist duo, London Fieldworks, has reflected this. Each of their projects has involved an expanded network of other collaborations with writers, composers, computer programmers, stunt kite flyers, scientists, mountaineers and musicians. They draw on multiple perspectives to approach large themes. Their work also raises the issue of ‘collaboration’ with sites and with communities. As early as 1957 Marcel Duchamp was discussing making meaning as a collaboration between artist, audience and posterity in his seminal text, ‘The Creative Act’. In this text, Duchamp also described the way in which artists generate artworks as a collaboration with context, as opposed to innate self-expressing genius.

Interdisciplinary collaborations often encounter the problem that there is a mutually inexpert and uninformed understanding of the other’s work in play. The understanding across disciplines is often a blunt instrument. Like speaking a second language, there is a conversation going on with a paucity of vocabulary. However sometimes that very paucity can invoke a more direct, more poetic exchange, free of jargon and ingrained assumptions.

Doubt Guardian’s enquiry into collaboration began in York with a meeting of artists and promoters discussing their experiences. This meeting included Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler from KMA. I then interviewed Phelim McDermott from Improbable, one of the most significant long-term collaborations in theatre, and Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, one of the most significant artist duos. In the following conversations they discuss collaboration as an art making mode and as an urgent subject matter reflecting how we are organised in society today.

Collaboration in the 1970s was ideological as well as pragmatic and many contemporary collaborations are also ideological. The Collaboration Arts website set up in 2005 by Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien locates contemporary art collaborations in an historical context stretching back to the establishment of the Kibbutz Movement in 1909 and the establishment of the Co-operative Movement in 1771. Contemporary collaborative groups such as Superflex are ostensibly addressing radical modes of social organisation.

The Russian artist duo Komar and Melamid asked what is art? Using a market research process they produced the person in the street’s favourite painting and their least favourite painting. What visual art is and can be has shifted substantially. For example, in this year’s Munster Skulptur Projekt in Germany, Maria Pask established a self-sufficient food growing and living site and a spirituality research centre in a city park. She then invited a series of art and environmental groups to inhabit the space and maintain it for the next groups coming in over a six month period. Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas’ ProTest Lab project where they squatted Vilnius’ last large cinema space to save it from indiscriminate developers and to facilitate a space of protest for other people is another example of artists’ practice asking questions about how society is organised – how we relate to each other and the environment.

The problems with collaboration include conflicts over authorship, ownership, competition and rivalry – differential success and recognition, money, editorial control. The advantages of collaboration include the ability to create your own critical research space, your own work context, your own sounding board and your own momentum, rather than having to be passively dependent on someone outside to give that to you. A collaboration can be a self-contained ‘reflexive artistic entity’ (Rogoff). Collaboration needn’t mean the absorption and loss of individual eccentricities and idiosyncracies. For many practitioners the advantages of collaboration are clearly outweighing the potential disadvantages.

Academia with its need to identify and quantify and its notion of original contributions to knowledge lags behind the critiques of authorship and origin established in collaborative practice. Rather than moving knowledge on are we moving knowledge around and making knowledge moving? Instead of a singular authoritative position there is an increasing recognition of intersubjectivity and interdependence. Artists’ collaborations are more than simply method. They are also subject. They enact a radical interconnectedness.

…

Collaborations: A Selected Bibliography

(1999) Afterimage vol. 27 no. 3 (November/December) special issue on artistic partnerships.

(1993) Art Journal 52, no. 4 (winter), special issue on collaborations between artists and writers.

(2007) Beaux Arts Magazine no. 272 (February) special issue on artistic partnerships.

(2004) Third Text vol. 18, issue 6, special issue on collaboration.

Ades, Dawn ed. (1984) Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London: Hayward Gallery.
Billing, Johanna; Lind, Maria & Nilsson, Lars (2007) Taking the Matter into Common Hands, London: Black Dog.

Bradley, Will; Hannula, Mika; Ricupero, Cristina & Superflex (2006) Self-Organisation/Counter-Economic Strategies, Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Chadwick, Whitney & de Courtivron, Isabelle de Courtivron eds (1993) Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, London: Thames and Hudson.

Charles, Green (2001) The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

Collaboration Arts http://www.collabarts.org.uk

Critical Art Ensemble (1998) ‘Observations on Collective Cultural Action’, The Art Journal, 57:2 (Summer), pp. 73-85.

Damon, W. & Phelps, E. (1989) ‘Critical distinctions among three approaches to peer education’, International Journal of Educational Research, 58, (2), 9-19.

Duchamp, Marcel (1957) ‘The Creative Act’ in Sanouillet, Michel & Peterson, Elmer (eds.) (1973) The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, New York: Da Capo, pp.138-40.

Farrell, Michael P. (2001) Collaborative Circles: Friendship Dynamics and Creative Work, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gilchrist, Bruce & Joelson, Jo eds. (2005) Little Earth, London: London Fieldworks.

Gysin, Brion & Burroughs, William S. (1978) The Third Mind, New York: Viking.

London Fieldworks http://www.londonfieldworks.com

McCabe, Cynthia Jaffee ed (1984) Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century, Washington: Smithsonian Institute.

Marcus, Greil (1989) Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

O’Neil, Paul (2007) ‘Group Practice’, Art Monthly, no. 304, March, pp. 7-10.

Sollins, Susan & and Sundell, Nina Castelli eds (1990) Team Spirit, New York: Independent Curators Incorporated.

Steiner, Vera John (2000) Creative Collaboration, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stillinger, Jack (1991) Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Watson, Gray; van Noord, Gerrie & Everall, Gavin eds. (2006) Make Everything New: A Project on Communism, London: Book Works.

WHW/What, How & for Whom (2005) Collective Creativity, Kassel: Kunsthalle Friedericianum.

Worsdale, Godfrey ed (1996) Co-Operators, Southampton: Southampton City Art Gallery.