I was with a group of art journos in Winzavod, one of those art developments that have become such a feature of our time. The floors are cement but they don't have the pearlescent semi-precious glimmer of the poured-cement floors of galleries in New York's Chelsea; they just look like ordinary cement floors. Nonetheless, New York is clearly the template here.
For decades New York artists have been setting up in raw, abandoned, sometimes illegal industrial spaces. When SoHo was colonised, the galleries followed. Came the Art Boom, then the boutiques, and the sky-rocketing rentals that uprooted some of the original settlers. So when it was clear that the action was drifting to the former auto-parts dealership neighbourhood of Chelsea, certain art worlders were ready. Those who acquired property have profited, hugely.
The Muscovites have simply streamlined the process. Winzavod was set up three years ago in a derelict industrial neighbourhood that had once been home to the Moscow Bavaria brewery, an ice-house and the winery from which the development borrowed its name. It is now home to the city's biggest photo studio, Eleven, various art and design-related enterprises and such crucial contemporary art galleries as M&J Guelman Gallery, the Aidan Gallery, XL and the youngest, Proun. And it has worked. Sofia Trotsenko, the collector who funded Winzavod, observes that "tourists came in droves, and real estate gained in value."
At the Guelman Gallery Maret Guelman riffled through a book of work by the Blue Noses, a duo of Muscovite art provocateurs. Guelman, a benignly opaque man with short hair and beard and two gold rings in his left ear-lobe, flipped to a graphic in which George Bush and Osama bin Laden appear to be up to something which is still illegal in certain parts of the United States. Then onto another photo-montage which features the poet Pushkin, Jesus Christ and Vladimir Putin. "They are good fools," Guelman said of the Blue Noses, fondly. Holy idiots! The artists themselves have described their work as "hooligan improvisation." [To read Saatchi Online's article on the confiscation of these works by the Blue Noses at Moscow's Sheremetyevo-2 airport click here.]
The Blue Noses, from 'Mask Show', 2002
Guelman mentioned that he had had occasional difficulties with "small nationalist groups." He spoke rather mildly for a man who had been savagely beaten in his own gallery in the winter of 2006 by eight men, presumably members of just such a group. That had been because he was showing a Georgian artist, Alexander Djikia. The Blue Noses caused him another problem.
"There were big problems with our church. They decide our gallery is centre for revolution," Guelman said. He flipped to a word piece by another of the his politically minded artists, Avdey Ter-Organyan. It reads: THIS WORK IS AIMED AT KINDLING RELIGIOUS CONFLICTS.
Winzavod also provides studio space for eleven artists. Artist studios, world-wide, tend to share an aesthetic. In the studio of Alexey Kalima, for instance, a painter with a growing reputation, PUNK'S NOT DEAD was written on a box of sugar cubes. Despite which, Prokoviev was on the top of a pile of CDs. Then the Kronos Quartet.
Kalima, an ethnic Russian, who once lived in Grozny, and who bills himself a "Chechen artist," is a painter with a growing reputation. In 2005 he won Russia's first state-sponsored prize for visual art with "Chelsea vs. Terek," an installation in which bearded Chechens in Adidas clobbered London's Premiership football club, Chelsea, which - as even some American readers must know - is owned by the oligarch, Roman Abramovich.
Alexey Kallima
Then we took off for some of the 30-plus venues where the Moscow Photo Biennial was taking place. The quality was as uneven as getting to see it all was unmanageable. Such known maestros as Rodchenko and Lee Friedlander were featured but I also chanced across a remarkable photographer of whom I had never heard, Magnum's Harry Gruyaert. But there was also much ordinary work including dire celebrity shots that sank to hackdom or soared to pretension.
Then there was Andreas Gursky, whose huge and hugely photo-shopped formalist pieces were hung in the Ekaterina Foundation, right across from the old KGB enclave on Lubyanskaya Square. "It looks good, doesn't it?" said Matthew Marks, Gursky's black-clothed Manhattan gallerist, who we encountered on our way through.
Vladimir Seminikhin, who created the foundation, was upstairs. A canvas by the talented - and avidly sought after - twosome, Dubossarsky and Vinogradov, was leaning against the wall. Seminikhin's curly black hair brushes his shoulders. He is a True Believer. MOVEMENT, EVOLUTION, ART is written on the front of the catalogue. Within the Russian art world the Ekaterina Foundation is accepted as one of the motors of the surging contemporary art economy. Outside it, not.
Vladimir Dubossarsky & Alexander Vinogradov, 'Computer', 2007
"You know Russian mentality. There is no press attention. It is difficult to get the name of private foundation in a newspaper. That is the problem," Seminikhin told us. He had set up Ekaterina with his wife, for whom it is named. Who chooses the work? "We are doing everything together. We both choose," he said. Adding cheerfully. "Well, sometimes she chooses. I buy."
He said there were two kinds of collectors: art lovers and speculators. Did he ever acquire art as an investment? "No. Never," he said, shortly. Does he work with a consultant? He shook his head. "Russian mentality is don't believe anyone," he said. How many serious Russian collectors are there? "Good question. More than a hundred pieces? Maybe just four collections like ours. Because we have different periods. But fifty pieces, maybe a hundred collectors." He added that there was no special legislation for collectors, no tax breaks. What new directions did he see? "I think the video. Today is its time."
Back outside I asked a knowing Russian woman how the foundation had been funded. She said Seminikhin was a property developer and pointed across the street. "This his building," she said.
The Gursky opening the following evening was attended by such peripatetic figures as Sam Keller, formerly of the twin Art Basels, now of the Beyeler Foundation, and the Moscow art world was there in force. Amongst them was Aidan Salakhova, who started Moscow's first contemporary art gallery back in perestroika days. "I did not sell one piece of contemporary art from 1993 to 1997," she told me. What got things moving? She simply indicated Seminikhin. Aidan was wearing a patterny black-and-white shirt. Where did she get it? "It's an American shirt. I got it in Dubai," she said.
Another motor in the swiftly changing Russian art world has been the magazine, ArtChronika. Its publisher, Shalva Breus, a compact man with pale blue eyes, a former national water polo champion, now a printing magnate, met us on the third floor of his building. Breus said the magazine sells 10,000 copies but that he was confident of achieving sales of 200,000 in two years. Some of the covers are eye-catching. Some indeed would have been unthinkable comparatively recently, like the one in which a nun bares herself, if only down to her décolletage, to reveal the familiar image of Che Guevara on her upper chest, the one which carries a portrait of Vladimir Putin, and is headlined ART UNDER PUTIN and most especially the one that shows two cops in the Internal Affairs department, kissing.
Actually that particular issue, which contained some particularly striking work by the Blue Noses, and which was guest-edited by Andrei Erofeev, head of contemporary at that part of the Tretiakov Museum called "The New Tretiakov," turned out to be unthinkable even now. The authorities talked of "Russia's shame" and it was swiftly prevented from traveling overseas.
"They say we are the only opposition magazine," Breus says with equanimity. And Erofeev? "He was the head of contemporary at the New Tretiakov. He doesn't work at Tretiakov any more. And he has a lot of problems with police." But it was clear that whoever wrote the legal brief had no more seen the original than Rudolf Giuliani had seen the Chris Ofili's work 'The Holy Virgin Mary'.
So to the Melnikov Garage, a wondrous 1926 space of Neo-Palladian Constructivism, so-called both because its original architect was Konstantin Melnikov, who also built the Mausoleum in Red Square, and because it had done time as a bus depot in Soviet days. Now, made over, a container for light, it will become a Russian-Jewish museum. It opens this autumn with a show by Russia's greatest artist, Ilya Kabakov. And so to the Manege, Moscow's biggest cultural complex, where the fifth Moscow World Art Fair will run from May 27 to June 2.
Our last dinner was in GQ, a fancy restaurant. Sam Keller seemed to have jetted on and I didn't spot Shalva Breus but I saw just about everybody else, which would not, of course, have been possible in London or New York. But Moscow is clearly on its way.
Anthony Haden-Guest
Anthony Haden-Guest is a writer, reporter and cartoonist. He writes for leading magazines in Britain and America, most recently in Esquire, GQ (UK) the Financial Times and Britain's Observer Magazine. You can email him directly with your comments at anthonyhaden.guest@yahoo.co.uk and/or post your views on the Saatchi Online public blog, making sure to put the title of this article as your header.
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