Contemporary Belarusian Art: Without a Common Denominator

The review was prepared as part of the joint project “Book Review” of the Political Sphere Institute “Political Sphere” and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Radius of Zero. An Ontology of the Art of the 2000s. Minsk, 2000–2010 / edited by O. Zhgirovskaya, O. Shparaga, R. Vashkevich. – Minsk: I.P. Logvinov, 2013 (New Europe series). – 532 p.

The review was prepared by Alexander Sarn

The catalogue-book Radius of Zero brought together under one cover works by Belarusian authors on the period of the 2000s, as well as materials from the exhibition of the same name, held in 2012 at the Horizont factory. The project’s curators, Ruslan Vashkevich, Oksana Zhgirovskaya, and Olga Shparaga, managed to solve a highly ambitious task and involve experts, analysts, and artists in research, the organization of the exhibition, and the presentation of its results in this book.

Thus, what took place was not only a “report on an event,” but also a “historical revision” of the situation that preceded it. The results of the project are impressive: the large-volume publication, more than five hundred pages, presents works by artists and texts by critics that do not confine themselves to a retrospective overview or the creation of yet another “archive,” but offer an alternative discourse on contemporary Belarusian art. Within this discourse, the authors attempted not only to study the artistic space and the art community of Belarus, but also to structure them, or more precisely, to conceptually justify the possibility of such “formatting” for understanding the current state and prospects for further development.

Between knowledge and power

Analysis as a “style of writing” is not identical to art-historical research. The relationship between such genres as scholarly research, art-historical or otherwise, the critical article, and the conceptual press release may be presented, following Michel Foucault, as a hierarchy of levels of knowledge fixed not only in various forms of discourse on contemporary art, but also in dispositions of power in their institutional configuration. In this case, the combination of all formats in the book is fully justified, since its discourse is initially constructed as interdisciplinary and beyond genre, uniting the most diverse positions and institutions. Radius of Zero is a set of texts built around key art events of the past decade on the basis of the presentation of a specific action, the exhibition, which as it were “drew a line,” but at the same time became a “point of departure” for identifying general tendencies and changes in contemporary Belarusian art.

The content of the book does not look consistent and monolithic; it is marked by a certain eclecticism and divergence in the authors’ judgments. Yet it could hardly have been otherwise given the situation in contemporary Belarusian art itself. Still, it is not difficult to find something that unites all the analysts: a critical assessment of the existing situation. Everything else, professional preferences, institutional affiliation, and the choice of material for the article, determined their positions and assessments, which cannot be reduced to a common denominator. One may therefore debate what there is more of in this publication, “ontology” or “anthology,” and whether it is possible to look into the past “as it is (in reality)” (p. 11) by analogy with the present, as well as the topological attachment of all the materials specifically to Minsk, given that the collection also includes works by representatives of the Belarusian artistic diaspora.

Moreover, Radius of Zero clearly lacks balance in the choice of objects of analysis, research methods, and the length of the resulting texts, ranging from general sketches that attempt to introduce the topic to expanded studies within a particular segment and comparisons of concrete practices of art production and distribution. To some, this may seem a shortcoming that did not allow the publication to cover all spheres of artistic practice, or at least the visual arts; as a result, forms such as theater, sculpture, and cinema remained “outside criticism.”

The power of painting

Ideally, of course, it would have been possible to implement a project by selecting authors specifically to analyze each segment of the field of art, assigning individual tasks in accordance with the critics’ professional preferences and competencies. Unfortunately, such a plan did not succeed: in their works, priority is quite openly given to painting, which functions as a “semantic horizon” and a means of evaluation even where painting is not directly at issue. This can quite plausibly be regarded as a significant, symptomatic situation, since it is precisely painting that retains its dominant position here and becomes a universal instrument for constructing the “aesthetic unconscious” (Jacques Rancière), not only among inexperienced consumers of cultural production, but also among established theorists. Can such a mode of framing or presenting theoretical imagination become conscious?

Apparently, painting in our art environment is regarded and used as a symbolic resource for asserting oneself and one’s identity, not only and not so much as a “professional” or an “amateur,” but rather as a “connoisseur of beauty,” fully in the spirit of traditional perception and consumption of art. For such a connoisseur, who may also be represented as a “gatherer” or collector, the question of choosing an object in which one might invest one’s capital, whether financial resources or knowledge, a matter of competencies and preferences, becomes so significant that it determines the very possibility of “investment.” And here painting turns out to be beyond competition, since behind it stands the authority of History and Tradition itself. It is painting that is perceived here as the full-fledged representative of all art, both classical and contemporary, thereby embodying its “absolute idea.”

Further work for the socioanalyst

There is no possibility, however, to go deeper into this issue here, since another aspect seems more important. The analytical texts and critical articles presented in this publication function as material that may serve as a case for socioanalysis, in the spirit of Pierre Bourdieu, not only and not so much of Belarusian art as a whole, but above all of the field of art criticism singled out within it. Such an analysis may be outlined preliminarily in three directions:

1) the status of the art critic, their affiliation with particular institutions that provide their resources, authority, and opportunities, allowing the critic to act not merely as the subject of an individual, authorial statement, but also as an agent of social change in this segment of the art space;

2) the principles of formation, organization, and development of the professional community, its openness or closedness, the possibility of including or excluding new members and of ensuring conditions for change within it through access “from outside” and “from within”;

3) the specificity of thematization and problem-setting in the judgments of art critics, which contribute to the formation of their conceptual imagination or “aesthetic unconscious” as normative ideas about art processes and artistic practices in Belarus: what they are now and what they should become, what the art community should be, and what influences the current processes and the dynamics of the field as a whole.

Analyzing the experience of implementing the Radius of Zero project at all its stages, one may summarize the following: the curators’ initial plan to combine the resources of state organizations and alternative structures did not fully succeed. The list of experts included only three representatives of state institutions, and only two of them remained as critics; many experts, critics, and artists refused to participate in the project; statements were made on behalf of authors, not institutions. This does not allow the activity of the analysts to be assessed as that of social agents, but only makes it possible to see them as subjects of critical statement and critical attitude toward what happened in the 2000s and what is happening now. Yet such a statement is usually simply lost against the background of general “noise” and may not be heard by other subjects and institutions.

The community is at the stage of formation and represents a set of individual persons who are usually connected not by professional partnerships, for example within the framework of particular projects, but by opportunities to exchange opinions and judgments in an arbitrary manner. The efforts of art critics are still aimed only at arranging and mastering public spaces as platforms for dialogue, since without this necessary condition everything else becomes impossible in principle. But at present there are clearly not enough media channels even for communication: among print media there are the official Mastatstva and the alternative pARTisan, and among electronic media the portals Art-Aktivist and Zнята; the remaining opportunities are provided by social networks and web communities. Yet one must take into account the low level of communication culture online in its open format, where anyone, under conditions of anonymity, can use these resources for their own purposes, replacing problem-setting and professional discussion with settling personal scores, provoking scandals, and quarrels.

It is therefore absolutely necessary to move out of the “Internet underground” and organize public discussions offline, like those held by Gallery “Ў” or the New Europe portal, open lectures within the European Café project. For now, constructive dialogue is not taking shape; all attempts to establish connections and create autonomous public organizations have failed, as in the case of the photographers’ union, so there is practically no real impact on the other participants in art processes. In that case, the most important task appears to be the consolidation of efforts to organize the community itself and its institutional formation, in order to gain the possibility of influencing decision-making by state institutions and administrative bodies, including the Ministry of Culture.

In the sphere of “professional imagination,” the horizon of art critics’ judgments remains rather narrow, since it is limited by the author’s personal predilections and competence, beyond which the author tries not to go and which the author does not seek to expand. The critic does not try to embrace the interests of the community and works to strengthen their social status only within a narrow specialization. Attempts at interdisciplinary analysis based on mastering “adjacent territories” from contemporary philosophy, sociology, or media criticism are undertaken extremely rarely, and the problems of contemporary art are often reduced merely to the development of painting. As a rule, the object of criticism is found “outside,” in the conditions of functioning of the art field in Belarus, based on its current state and social context; but “inside” the community itself it remains invisible, unrecognized, and unanalyzed.

In such a situation, it is probably necessary to direct efforts toward discussing the role of the art critic and analyzing the possibilities of “assembling” the community and strengthening its role as a player in the field of art in Belarus. At the same time, it is not enough to limit oneself to a general negative assessment and the statement that “there is no market” here, that the community has not formed, and that institutions tend to suffocate initiatives rather than facilitate their emergence. By carrying out a “revaluation of values,” focusing our judgments on concrete conditions of association and joint problem-solving, more can be achieved. For now, this is hindered by an atmosphere of mutual distrust, omissions, and grievances, which testifies to an inability to establish business cooperation on a professional basis and leads to open confrontation between state cultural institutions, unofficial associations, and commercial structures.

This gives rise to a whole complex of problems in organizing artistic practices within our art space, as the project curators indicated in their justification of its concept (p. 501): the absence in Belarus of alternative periodicals on contemporary art; the predominance, on the part of independent art critics, of only “point-like statements” about the state of the domestic artistic process, which are not collected or generalized in periodicals; the shortage of documentation of projects by alternative artists, which leads to the incompleteness and inadequacy of information about the situation in the Belarusian art environment; and the absence of systematic and qualified analysis of the field of contemporary Belarusian art as a whole.

It remains to be hoped that the appearance of the collection Radius of Zero will contribute to the discussion and solution of at least some, if not all, of the problems indicated. In any case, its authors strove for this. And it appeared not thanks to, but in spite of, the existing situation, which can be improved if there are more such works and initiatives.

Other responses to the book can be found here: http://eurocenter.by/books/radius-nulya-ontologiya-art-nulevyh-minsk-2000-2010