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The Museum of nonconformist art is an exhibition, science and archival center intended to research and promotion of nonconformist art as well as modern non-commercial art of Russia, Europe and America. The Museum originated with the collection of modern artworks gathered in 1980-90-s by unofficial artists and representing nonconformist art of Leningrad-Petersburg of late From 1998 to 2003 the Museum organized The Museum is in close co-operation with the leading museums and exhibition halls of the city: Hermitage, Russian Museum, St.Petersburg history Museum and others. In 2002 the Museum launched a 2-year project to present the museum collection in University museums of USA. The Museum staff have worked out the project of the “Festival of nonconformist art” to present it during the celebration of St.Petersburg
Director of the Museum of nonconformist art Eugeny Orlov
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History of Nonconformism in brevi Andrew Khlobystin, art critic, senior research assistant of the Museum of Nonconformist Art Within the Soviet cosmogony the world was divided into a battlefield of warring camps where thesis always signaled and provoked antithesis. This cultural system of polarities refers to the 1920’s when the world was split into the old and the new, the bourgeois and the proletarian, the functional and the decorative. From our point of view we understand that entity consists of contradiction, just like the Baroque contained Catholicism and Protestantism, Neoclassicism and the Rococo, Poussin and Rubens. Soviet culture, like any utopian culture, demanded an air-tight structure and rigid control so that anything distinctive was made peripheral or marginalized. Paradoxically these marginal elements were nourishing the structure at large, but any streamlined, oversimplified structure tends to fail. However, at the same time those marginalized elements themselves – associations of independent artists, musicians, writers or scientists - assimilated the energy of opposition. Consequently, having toppled the elaborate ideological machinery, they themselves broke up. Cast adrift after a long struggle, the artistic personality feels uncomfortable in the new environment of commercialism. Under such circumstances, the experience of the nonconformist movement of the late XX century was such that the spiritual achievements realized in works of art turned out to be quite useful. Conformism (from late Latin – alike, consonant) - is a moral/political term for the passive acceptance of the status quo. Accordingly, nonconformism refers to the refusal to follow public opinion by advocating the individual’s point of view. This is an ageless phenomenon in human society. The term “nonconformism” was first used to describe the Polish movement “Solidarnost”. In the early 1980’s it referred to the independent artists of Leningrad and the “Brotherhood of Experimental Art”. Later, it was extended to refer to all independent Russian art beginning with the 1940’s. The struggle of nonconformist artists for self-realization opened up new opportunities for commercial art that has turned out to be a more serious threat than yesterday’s official Soviet ideology. Today we can refer again to nonconformism or “postnonconformism” of the last decade of XX – beginning of the XXI century as a force opposing the new ideology of greed. The unique phenomenon of nonconformist culture only recently has become the object of research. In 1940-1980, the global ideological confrontation within the context of cultural, social, and political concerns posed immediate problems for art. Nevertheless, independent artists and writers, beyond the influence of the official circles of museums and the academy, independently developed various interesting, self-descriptive versions of nonconformist art as a cultural phenomenon. In the history of world culture we can find similar phenomena, more or less significant, that appeared wherever there was parallel existence of antagonistic or alternative versions of art. For example, we can cite iconoclasm in China and in Byzantine in the VIII-IX centuries, the Salon of the Outcast (1863) and “accursed poets” in France, and the synchronous Russian artist movement of Peredvizhniks and the populist writers. However, unlike these phenomena, what promoted nonconformist art was not the antagonism between mainstream and innovative art or between religious conceptions of art. It was the opposition to a repressive ideological system that united artists of different, even opposite views. In this sense nonconformist art is akin to various directions taken by the Russian avant-garde after 1932 when it found itself in opposition to socialist realism. In the 1950’s and 60-s Leningrad independent art (and the almanac regards it first of all) was the pacesetter. The battlefront of experimental art and the existential search was here in Leningrad.. The energy of the city attracted people from all over the country. Osip Mandelshtam defined two basic trends in Russian literature: the monastic/academic/conservative trend and the “vulgar tongue” trend. Using this allegory we can characterize two major trends in the evolution of postwar independent art in Leningrad. The movement that embodies the first trend was unique in modern art history. Immediate disciples of 1920-s avant-garde artists – K.Malevich, P. Filonov, M. Matyushina, P. Mansurov and others – preserved their creative energy in those grim times. The postwar generation – V. Sterligov, P. Kondratyev, T. Glebova, B. Ender – re-established home-schools and carried on the theoretical and formal research of their teachers. They were priests of art in exile. Russian avant-garde remained for them “the medium of secret but true professionalism, their religion and hope”. The second, quite spontaneous tendency, was initiated by a group young artists in the late 1940’s. Their appearance can be hardly explained by any external force. Talented artists like Alexander Arefyev, Vladimir Shagin, Rihard Vasmi, Sholom Shvarz, Valentin Gromov, based their search for aesthetic expression neither on joining nor opposing anything, but only on an inner flame, a burning and irrational craving for art. This movement was promoted by the sense of life common to all postwar youth weary of totalitarianism, and was, therefore, akin to French existentialists and American beatniks. Leningrad’s “Association of Impoverished Artists” (later known as the “ Arefeyev Circle”) was much more “marginal”. It was their intentional choice to join the impoverished and to be persecuted by the state. Their lives were a mixture of prisons, drugs, psychiatric hospitals combined with daily visits to the Hermitage, the public library, and a romantic devotion to art. These two trends however were not the only distinctive phenomena in Leningrad art of that time. There were the works of the remarkable theater director and artist N. Akimov. As a teacher in the Theater Institute. he initiated a number of eminent artists into “abstract expressionism”. It is also evident now that there was a synchronicty of the aesthetic search of E. Mikhnov-Voitenko, M. Kulakov, V. Mikhailov and others to the same process in the artistic life of Western Europe and America. In some ways, the artists of Leningrad were ahead of their contemporaries abroad. The school of O. Sidlin inherited traditions of the early XX century artists (Petrov-Vodkin, Osmerkin and others). Exceptionally successful, the artists of this school became eminent leaders of nonconformist movement. The formation of unofficial art as a movement was precipitated by the liberalization of Soviet culture during the “Thaw” that was initiated by Khrushchev after Stalin’s death. Artistic groups of the 1950’s and 60-s withdrew into art to avoid politics. The only organized action, the so-called “Exhibition of Workmen Artists” in the State Hermitage in 1964 (M.Shemyakin, V.Ovchinnikov, O.Ligachev and others), was an exception to the rule and the deplorable consequences were a token of the new political climate after the fall of Khrushchev. Brezhnev’s “counter-reformation” led unofficial artists to unite in their struggle for survival, for the opportunity to work and exhibit, and for access to the public at large. Authorities began to regard independent art as dissident and quite soon thereafter the artistic community began to divide into groups. Some of them employed the political context to achieve purposes that were far from artistic. The Jewish group “Aleph” was organized to aid Jewish emigration. At the same time, the situation gave rise to some ventures such as the secretly organized exhibition (only for foreigners) of the fictional “11 artists”, who, allegedly, were political prisoners. Strictly speaking the history of nonconformist art covers 14 to 15 years ( from 1974 to 1988) beginning with the first organized actions in Moscow (“Bulldozer exhibition”, 1975) and Leningrad (exhibitions in the “Gaza” and “Nevsky” cultural centers, 1974-75) and ending with the demise of the repressive Soviet ideological system during the period of Perestroika. On the other hand, the term “nonconformism” can be applied to all independent art beginning with 1940. The history of independent art in Leningrad during the1970”s and The source of inspiration was found in the traditions of the Russian avant-garde of 1910’s and 1930-s, in Western modernism, and in classical and folk art. Widely diverse artists, allied only by their antagonism to the official culture turned up on one side of the trenches. Some of the artists, like Ruhin, Zharkih, Arefyev, were talented public leaders as well. Nevertheless Soviet authorities managed to crush the first wave. An invisible war between state and nonconformists escalated and entered a new phase. A large number of artists were forced to emigrate, others had to go underground. The “time of troubles” had begun again.. At the same time, a new “culture” was maturing, a new breed of artists, some younger, some older from the “Gaza-Nevski” generation, yet both had a new sense of life and a new strategy. This generation organized the “second wave” movement launched in 1981 with the famous exhibition in a house on Bronnitskaya street. This led to the formation of the largest and most influential alternative association of the Soviet period – the “Brotherhood of Experimental Art”. The general image of an artist of the “Gaza-Nevski” period is that of an unappreciated genius, a prophet, and a victim of repression. He speaks of art and advocates rather than attacking or blaming. In the opinion of the “first wave” veterans, this new generation, choosing new companions almost irrespective of their abilities, seemed to be more fascinated with the image and style of the life of an unofficial artist rather than with art itself. This was not entirely the case. However, the aesthetic ideas of the new generation broadened and found resonance with the worldwide process that started in the 1960’s – the collapse of unified criteria of evaluation, categorical concepts of style, attribution, etc. The generation known as the “second wave” introduced new qualities into the artistic life of Russia – self-assertion, clear mental strategies, and a readiness to fight and to compromise in order to realize a goal. This created a new type of artist-curator and defined the artistic stage for the decade ahead. It also made it possible for the independent movement to remain unified and to survive and overcome all the trials of the coming decades. The artists of this new generation proved to be born myth-creators and masters of public relations. It was chiefly through these strengths that artists such as T. .Novikov (“New artists”), Dmitri Shagin (“Mitki”), S. Kovalski (5/4), K. Miller, B. Koshelokhov, Y. Rybakov, and Y. Afonichev were successful in their actions and enterprises, Lev Gumilev noted that during period of ethnic repression, those, who could be warriors and statesmen, become artists. The nonconformist movement clearly attracted a great number of extremely powerful personalities (“passionaries” according to Gumilev) — loyal soldiers of art.
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