Thursday, October 15, 2009

Creative Clusters in Russia and Siberia


I just returned from a one-week trip to Moscow and Krasnoyarsk, the latter an industrial city of one million situated on the trans-Siberian railway, last stop before Lake Baikal. I’ve been to Russia many times since 1999, mainly to St Petersburg where I was involved in a European funded project to set up a creative industries agency in the city. It failed, mainly because of the political, administrative and legal structures of the country, partly because of cultural resistance to the idea of creative industries (declaring yourself a not-for-profit artist meant you did not pay tax and were not subject to the predations of corrupt officials), and partly because I insisted on an agency rather than a space. I was looking at how a complex diverse sector might engage coherently with the economic development of the city, using an agency as a kind of cultural intermediary between two language groups in search of a shared agenda. They were looking for a space in which they might be protected from the brutalities of the business world - not delicate souls offended by dirty commerce (as anyone who knows the pushing and shoving required to secure everyday existence in Russia will tell you) but in search for a space of trust, autonomy, civility and culture within which they could work.

I, along with Kate Oakley and John Howkins, was giving a speech at a refurbished wine factory (Winzavod) in central Moscow. The space was one recognizable in any large city with an older industrial infrastructure anywhere in the world – from Truman Brewery, Beijing’s 798, Brisbane’s Powerhouse, Shanghai’s 1933, Marseilles La Friche, and a thousand others. It is physically and symbolically structured to channel the flow of the international art world through its spaces. This globalised (in the way the production of a computer, or car is global) ‘art world’ is made up of its command centres, its curators, gallery owners, agents, journalists, magazines, celebrities and academics, and now firmly symbiotic with the particular languages of city politicians, airline magazines, and Sunday travel supplements concerned to identify ‘buzz’.

These spaces are absolutely necessary to a city’s image, around which real estate, hotel developments and other high end commodity providers can coalesce. The Chinese government makes space for these places and (more or less) suspends its censor’s eye there. Russia too, suspends its visceral rejection of foreign bodies from its pure national space, and allows them to operate more or less freely. Does this testify to the power of art or its easy enlistment in the service of power?

Maybe both: as Benjamin wrote, ‘every document of art is at the same time a document of barbarism’. He was referring both to the necessary embeddedness of artistic production in barbarous social relations, and the way in which past art was held up in triumph to justify the current regime. Both these are at play here.

On the one hand these spaces are clearly marks of conspicuous consumption and clearly there to launder brutally acquired economic capital into cherry-on-the-cake cultural capital. Winzavod is run by the requisitely hyper-thin wife of a minor Russian Oligarch. Dining with them both in a state-of-the-art faux Italian rustic restaurant (a Nobokovian decadent aristocracy re-imagined through The Leopard) he revealed that he was an Ayn Rand devotee {assume this is not the children’s writer Ann Rand but Ayn Rand?} (each cell performs a separate and special function) and she that she was very nice. Winzavod’s rival is Garage – and old tram depot bought and kitted out by Ambramovitch for his wife, who also is apparently very nice. Football for the boys, art for the girls. There was an opening of ‘Slave city’ by a Dutch artist, and we saw him confidently swaggering through the gallery one step behind a camera, a microphone boom and a journalist. The exhibit was pointing to the inhuman city of the future, which merely completes the present state of affairs by recycling the bodies and body parts of its workers into a self-contained system. The first section, white plastic bodies in various states of dismemberment and disembowelment did recall Lyotard’s ‘inhuman’ – a representation of the ungraspable by thought. A shocking statement of the absolute alterity of the object, the thing, the other.

Yet people seemed to get over it, especially the oligarchess who though it was rather delightful. It seemed not to have occurred to her that slave city might have any relation to the world outside her walls. Actually, it is different. Russia is unique amongst developed nations in being more or less clear that it does not need its population. Apart from people to pump, dig and process raw materialism there is not much else that is required of them. In fact, this exhibition’s contention that the recycling of bodies merely completes the total domination of slave city is false. Russia has too many slaves to use efficiently and has little need of their bodies dismembered or otherwise.

On the other hand, in this space, behind these walls was a gentler, civil Russia of great sensitivity and optimism. Young people could wander around here in the cafes, using the free wi-fi, browsing the book stores. International artists and admin people gave off a sense of a free space in which the future could be outlined, some hope framed and fixed and held up. A parallel Russia in the magic garden of an oligarch.

We saw Krasnoyarsk on what everybody thought would be the last day of summer. It was autumnal and bright, the smoking factories looking pleasant here, like those on the horizon of Seurat’s Bathers. I doubt if it would look like that in winter. When the sludge starts. But set on the river it’s right in the heart of the Siberian Tigre – and the river flows north all the way to the Arctic. First stop, the Lenin museum, last of its kind built in late 1980s before the whole thing collapsed.

It has since become the city’s modern art gallery hosting the biennale that won a few awards from the Council of Europe and other worthies. It quickly became apparent that a 19th century wine factory had some things a hideous 1980s Lenin museum did not: workmanship, patina, functional space, testimony to a productive past. The paneled ceilings and gaudy chrome handrails made this one look like the sort of decorative mirror to be found in a 1980s bedroom.

But gradually it got more attractive. A labyrinthine structure, a sort of non-functional gangly-ness reminiscent of NASA’s lunar module, and the preserved presence of the original Lenin exhibits gave it a dimension not to be found anywhere in the regenerated art tourist landscape of the contemporary world. The biennale’s theme this year was ‘distance’, and there were multiple reflections on this. Upstairs a Korean woman artist jumped on video amongst the souvenirs from the museum – the only piece that brought lightness and humour to the whole thing. Another artist projected himself into the original museum’s miniature mock-up of Lenin’s study. Here, amongst the cabinets full of letters and photos we can find the truth of Benjamin’s aphorism: ‘there is nothing so distant as the most recent past’. It was one with the busts of soviet workers and dioramas of 19th century ‘capitalist society’ that still dotted the museum. I mentioned this quote to the director over lunch. But he seemed a bit put off by our refusal of vodka and was non-responsive. He did give me the requisite semi-jocular Lenin bust, and a wax candle in the shape of a light bulb. Communism equals soviets plus electricity I said, which finally raised a smile.

We also went into the forest.



Me bouldering in Siberia courtesy of an oligarch.

The administrators here do not know how to talk the language of art and culture. There is a concern with ‘creativity’ as a resource to be used to develop the city, and most say that education is to be the key to this. They all wanted to know what sort of education promotes creativity. What that creativity might be used for, and how it was to fit inside a system that was about the brutal exercise of power it was impossible to know. The specific knowledge of art as symbolic practice (not just artists but the apparatus within which it is sustained) was lacking; after talking about Manchester for ten minutes the vice-governor gave me a 40 minute speech on how they were doing more and better. Mainly by pointing to a one day festival in which people made floats and dressed up as cheer leaders and glittery soldiers.

Business linkage was evidenced by a coca-cola float. It is clear that nothing of any value will be forthcoming from these people. One might say that they have manufacturing and – ten minutes drive away – a mysterious closed city in which the space program is alive and well (‘it’s a city from the past, a young woman told me, all the buildings are the same and its spotlessly clean’, another kind of distance, another kind of magic garden). John Howkins (key publication, The World Guide To Satellites) got very excited about this. And certainly a city of eco-technology, linking hi-tech and design in the way Finland does, is a serious option. But you just know this will never happen. Equally, the old regional capital is falling down and no one lives there – but how to preserve its 400 year old wooden buildings? We talked of a retreat experience for the niche tourist – a quick river trip during a stop on the trans-Siberian. A few days in the silence of deep Siberia, with a warm hotel and copies of Pushkin and Dostoyevsky. But you know this will never happen.

Part of the problem is that the city has no money because it all goes to Moscow and (some of) it all comes back filtered through corrupt hands and with strings attached. Putin wants Siberia, not Siberians so why should he care? It’s easy to get gloomy as you see ideas pluming uselessly into the sky and big money is spent on hideous architecture (a new clock tower with electronic bells) and ‘high’ culture (ballet, opera, symphony orchestras).

In Moscow the parallel worlds are in protecting clusters, in cafes and arty restaurant/ bars (we saw one showing a film in the back room and full of the brightest young things); in Krasnoyarsk they are around the kitchen tables of private houses. But the youth are as globally aware as in Moscow and can only sit out the reign of the dinosaurs.

One young woman, widely traveled in the US and Europe, an economics graduate from one of Moscow’s top universities, has returned here – because of a patriotic duty. She believes the city and its people can and will change – but not yet. She is there to prepare the ground. Kate and I, long used to the abuses to which the pious simplicities of ‘creativity’ can give rise in the West, and the easy road whereby art and culture becomes an aestheticised consumption of the most exclusionary sort (the sort of critique, I should say, mostly dismissed as ‘elitism’ in the west) both tried to discriminate, to make a warning about the pitfalls of creativity – even that we might need a politics of creativity. This was lost in translation, as we laboured with consecutive translation in a language twice as long as English. My first powerpoint translated at length, I realised I had prepared a lecture of over 2 hours.

But it was not just that – it was something they did not want to hear. John Howkins is an open, intelligent and sensitive man with whose ideas on creativity I disagree (far too wide a definition to make sense). His paper was short, simple and eloquent – you need creativity and should value the quirky and the weird. This normally makes me want to run off and join a large bureaucracy; but here in the room it was doing something different. In a shift worthy of Chekov, the gloominess and fatalism was dispelled for a moment, and real meaning creativity flashed out across the audience. It was the principle of hope.