Notes from the Overground: Russian Pride at Art Moscow

By Victoria Camblin

Just about every space you walk into in Moscow feels as though it's being used for some purpose other than the one for which it was originally built. Improvised mini-golf courses can be found sandwiched between parking lots, apartment layouts never quite feel right, and the actual functions of the city's vast number of commercial spaces are often veiled by uncooperative and oblique architecture. This dazzling impenetrability requires a certain engagement: simply seeing a building becomes strenuous, and actually entering one becomes an act of strength.

The Central House of Artists, a bulky expo centre by the river where the 12th annual Art Moscow art fair took place last week, is just such a challenging space – though not so much for the edifice itself. Rather, the building was surrounded by so many confusing, carnivalesque kiosks (some permanent, some not) parroting its contents that it was near impossible to see where Art Moscow began and ended. And sure enough, no perceived opportunity to sell some kind of art was left untapped: the underpass leading up to the Central House, beneath Krymsky Val, was filled with booths selling impressionistic, oil-painted landscapes in baroque gold frames – like they do on the banks of the Seine. Antique shops peppered the inside of the hall, from the ticket booth to the coat check to the very edges of the fair, and you could even buy a bootleg jazz CD on the floors leading up to the main space. As atmospherically confusing as such a setup is, though, it is also somehow subversive to see objects that an average souvenir-seeker could purchase rubbing elbows with contemporary artworks – not that any fair participants seemed to raise an eyebrow.

Art Moscow, Eastern Europe's largest contemporary art fair, is down to 44 galleries from the 70 that participated last year. This could be the result, one gallerist explained, of the selection committee having turned down foreign gallerists who would have been selling Russian artists back to Russians – a plausible explanation given the outlook of the fair, which was comprised mostly of Russian galleries (27 of them) packed with Russian artworks. It's no secret that the Russians are getting in on the art market in a big way, and that collectors are particularly keen on buying their own countrymen. Last year, the Economist reported that some 80 per cent of buyers at London and New York's Russian art auctions were from the former Soviet bloc. (Though they're also simply buying in general: last week, the billionaire Roman Abramovic dropped $86.3 million on Francis Bacon's Triptych (1976) and $33.6m on Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) at Sotheby's New York). In keeping with this, at Art Moscow it's not just the vast majority of galleries and artists represented who are Russian – so are the buyers, many of whom seem as new to the scene as they are eager to invest. And this seems to have as much to do with a sense of national pride as it does with the sheer amount of wealth inhabiting Moscow.

Nowhere was national pride more apparent than at last Thursday's premiere – part of the Art Moscow programme – of Defiance and Provocation (2008), a documentary chronicling the last twenty-odd years of Oleg Kulik's artistic career. More an instance of 'Kulik on Kulik' than a documentary per se, the film featured the artist, possibly the former Soviet Union's most well-known contemporary export, discussing his better-known 'dog' performances – such as A Mad Dog, or the Last Taboo guarded by a lonely Cerberus (1994), Reservoir Dogs (1995), and I Bite America, America Bites me (1997) – in which Kulik crawls naked on his hands and knees, harassing passersby. I bite America premiered at Deitch Projects in New York more than a decade ago; the occasion marked Kulik's break into the US and was a symbolic moment for the post-Soviet artworld, which has gained remarkable traction in the decade since. This might have something to do with why the Defiance and Provocation screening was the most talked-about event of the evening, despite competing against a number of gallery openings around the city. The audience received Kulik and the film's director Evgenie Mitta with an enthusiasm rare in older artworld centres like New York or London, and it was a refreshing break from the cynicism one encounters more and more as one moves westward.

Kulik is represented by Moscow's Regina Gallery, and Mitta, in addition to directing films about contemporary artists, runs Paperworks, a space that (appropriately) specializes in works on paper. Both Regina and Paperworks represent part of an emergent group of Moscow galleries that for better or worse resemble the gallery model you get in Western Europe or the US – that is, they are engaged in the reality of the contemporary art market and avoid the kitsch in a way that is rare here. Two more Art Moscow standouts were Triumph, and Pobeda – which, like Regina, is located at Winzavod, a former winery that is now home to an enclave of gallery and studio spaces. Pobeda is a photography gallery with a taste for fashion photographers: the London veteran Rankin is currently on view at their Winzavod space, and their booth at Art Moscow featured works by Ellen von Unwerth and Michel Comte.

Pobeda's co-director Nina Gomiashvili told me that photography is selling big in Russia today. Walking around the booths at Art Moscow, it would seem that the more staged the photo, the better – think Dave la Chapelle, or the highly produced utopias and dystopias of the collective AES+F, who were exhibited in the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year, and who are represented by Triumph. Interestingly, Triumph had chosen to only display works relating to a pieta theme, which contributed to an odd, biblical element about the fair. The New Testament Project, a special exhibition on the top floor of the Central House, consisted of large-scale works by Dmitry Vrubel and Victoria Timofeeva, paintings mainly adapted from newspaper photographs and captioned with quotations from the New Testament. Vrubel and Timofeeva have done some compelling work in the past, such as a 2002 calendar featuring twelve images of Putin's grimacing face, one for each month. Here, one couplet of paintings pictured two grinning Russian youths, described in the caption only as members of the Livejournal blogging group gopota_ru ('white trash_ru') and spookily accompanied by the biblical verse, 'My name is legion, for we are many'. Livejournal – hugely popular in Russia with every imaginable social strata – also had a booth and computer area in the building.

Art Moscow organizers said they expected double the number of visitors from last year, 15,000. Whether or not the sales will also double (from $4.5 million in direct sales and nearly $5 million in reserved works last year) remains to be seen, but given the speed at which things move here, it would come as no surprise.

Victoria Camblin is a writer based in Berlin and Moscow, and is assistant editor at 032c magazine.