Dmitry Vilensky

November 2014

GR

If you follow the Viennese art scene, you might agree that this exhibition from the Chto Delat collective is a wonderful follow-up to Ines Doujak’s and Oliver Ressler’s project last month and represents an enormous development—not only for this institution but also within the context of a critical art scene in Vienna at large, which is quite advanced, if you compare it to other European cities. Also from the perspective of the genealogy of Chto Delat it’s really great to have this kind of collection of different works here. It’s great to see this history. It is possible to contrast the earlier videos, with their Brechtian, dialectical point of view with the kind of open projects we’re seeing now but I think there is definitely a through line. I want to jump right into our discussion with a very general question on the political situation in Russia because having been there last September, at a conference in Petersburg, I have a sense of what is going on. It’s quite frightening, also to visitors like me. Frightening not on a bodily level but more when you’re talking with friends, artists, activists there, about there being a kind of hidden repression in Russia, which has been going on for years. And there has been a dramatic change this year mainly because of the war in Ukraine. So, I think it’s good to start with this more general issue. And I just want to read some of the introductory paragraphs of the newspaper that was produced for this show. What it says in the second paragraph of the introduction, mainly referring to the installation and the film but perhaps also the whole exhibition, is this: “It reflects what art could be at the moment when familiar politics and everyday life start falling apart. The events of recent months have thrown Russian artists and creative workers into a completely new reality, a new cold-war atmosphere, an escalating search for enemies, ever tighter repression of all dissent, and an open military confrontation with Ukraine, leaving thousands dead on both sides. What seemed the stuff of nightmares yesterday is becoming reality today. Artists who want to address present conditions have wound up in a very complicated position. How can we carry on creating, speaking, and living when we are all frozen at our computer screens in hopeless anxiety, trying to make sense of the bloody mixture of contradictory and manipulated information, seething hatred, madness, and desperation, while the chance to be heard is ever more limited. Most things we liked to speculate about, relations between art and politics, activism and participation, simply stop functioning. Worse, they become irrelevant in a suffocating climate of nationalistic paranoia. And we face this desperate situation while audiences vanish, activist groups implode, and actually getting anything done becomes impossible.” I won’t continue reading, as I think the excerpt is devastating and depressing enough.

Dmitry Vilensky

Catastrophic enough.

Today, nostalgia for all things Soviet is a popular commodity that is so fluid precisely because its underlying experience has already been hollowed out. As the Soviet experience returns in new capitalist packaging, even the right to interpret its history becomes an object of unabashed speculation.

A host of contemporaries is attempting to construct a comfortable image of the past (Stalin – the might of empire – party dictatorship – socialist realism – avant-garde as surface design) to legitimate a flimsy power and a shabby everyday. To interrupt the din of this choir, it makes sense to turn to the central question that Benjamin asks in his theses on the concept of history: who is the subject of history? For those who take on the task of continuing the struggle for emancipation, the answer to this question is unambiguous: “not man or men, but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge,” a class-multitude that clearly realizes and rejects the status quo that fetters its lives, dreams, and the dignity and strength of constituent labor: all those who still remember the pride of belonging to the human struggle for freedom.

Published at the catalogue of Chto Delat? solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

(see here: https://www.kunsthalle-baden-baden.de/kaufen/publikationen/)

Singular Together!

Viktor Misiano: In one of the latest issues of Chto Delat you and Alexei Penzin discussed the ways that a new subjectivity is shaped. Indeed, how can protest consciousness suddenly emerge in a passive, apathetic society, which is what contemporary Russian society is? One possibility here (almost the only one) is traumatic experience, a personal encounter with flagrant injustice and cynical lawlessness capable of instantly jolting a person from their civic hibernation. Alexei defined this process as a kind of “metanoia,” a “transfiguration” that happens in an explosive, uncontrolled, revolutionary manner. Hence my question. How did it happen that a group of artists and intellectuals living in apolitical Putinist Russia united into a group that programmatically defends political goals? What “metanoia” could lead to the fact that during the second post-Soviet decade creative people began criticizing the regime – not, however, in unison with rightist/liberal public opinion, but speaking a language that had seemingly vanished into the past, reviving terms like solidarity, soviets, non-alienated labor, and communism? Moreover, what matters here are not even the gestures of fidelity to the communist legacy, because they have occurred (albeit extremely rarely) before and after Chto Delat’s emergence. The important thing is that until very recently you were the only example of an artistic practice that consistently identified itself with civic activism. So what were the circumstances, what was the trauma that led to the formation of your working platform?

КОММЕНТАРИЙ К ВЗАИМООТНОШЕНИЮ НОВОГО АКЦИОНИЗМА И ИСКУССТВА В РОССИИ

Опубликовано в Московском Художественном Журнале №81

текст написан в июне 2011

За последнее время появилась целая серия критических материалов о феномене нового российского активизма. Вот только некоторые из них: текст из блога Павла Арсеньева на сайте радио «Свобода», публикация Анатолия Осмоловского на сайте OpenSpace.ru, статья Андрея Ерофеева в «Артхронике» [1].Отдельно стоит отметить деятельность галереи «Жир», специализирующейся на репрезентации уличного и активистского искусства. Последние громкие акции группы «Война», недавний арест двух ее активистов, выход номера «Артхроники», посвященный их творчеству и, конечно же, присуждение им госпремии «Инновация» также подогрели интерес к вопросу, что же такое активизм в его улично-перформативных формах и как он соотносится с искусством, политикой и повседневной реальностью.

DV: What does it mean today to talk about the ‘communist imaginary’? What is it to ‘imagine communism’? Is it some revenge fantasy with a happy ending; Latin American tanks knocking down prefabs in the American South West? Is it the memory of the Fordist ‘worker’s state’ in the biomechanics of the Moscow Metro? Is it when we collectively invent practices that make temporary worlds beyond private property? Or is it when we imagine that the world is still moving toward the total emancipation of the socialized human senses, conscious species being, that reveals itself in the collaboration of a ‘free community of producers’? Can we imagine a communist government that conceives of governmentality as withering away, made up of our own incorruptible comrades? Or are we just imagining things? Does all of what I have just written sound absurd? That doubt is always there. Maybe its just idealism… If you consider yourself a Marxist, this is hell: banished to utopia. I’m not saying that we should immediately give up ‘imagining communism,’ but maybe we should try to be more “scientific” in an old-fashioned Marxist way, namely by setting out a central hypothesis, and then by proving that hypothesis in practice. It’s funny, but when I was studying at the university we were all obliged to take a yearlong course in ‘scientific communism’. Can you imagine this now? Of course, we played all kinds of tricks to escape this dull course at any price. Now things are quite different for me, and I’ve left that traumatic experience behind. I think that it definitely makes sense to keep on thinking the ‘hypothesis of communism,’ a term Alain Badiou has been using, and I think it’s the right place to start. I too would much prefer this term to the ‘communist imaginary,’ which seems so abstract. You can see it right away: we’re talking about two different intellectual patterns that are always actualized differently. One is practical – a hypothesis you set out to prove; the other is speculation that has no consequences. So what is this ‘communist hypothesis’? Let’s look at Badiou’s definition: given in its canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labor to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labor. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away.

To me, that doesn’t sound absurd at all, and I see no intellectual problems with still believing in the validity of this statement. But on the level of practice, the realization of the ‘hypothesis of communism’ encounters many obstacles at this particular historical moment as well, obstacles that we should talk about.

Нормальность.

Питерская художественная жизнь функционирует как никогда прежде нормально – вернисажи идут своей чередой, в “Борее” тусуются

писатели, в отремонтированной Пушкинской, 10, работает музей, Боровский открывает большие выставки и формирует коллекцию современного искусства, Африка представляет Россию на Венецианской биеннале, Олеся Туркина и Виктор Мазин пишут эссе для исторического шоу “После Стены”, работает новая образовательная программа для критиков и кураторов…

Список “нормальности” можно продолжать долго, впрочем, как и перечисление “ненормальностей”. Однако интересно понять, как достигнутый в середине 90-х годов статус-кво (очень точно закрепленный в каталогах выставок “Метафоры отрешения” и

“Самоидентификация”) поддерживается вот уже минимум пять лет практически без изменений (даже финансовый крах августа 1998 практически не повлиял на ситуацию)? И что значит эта атмосфера стабильности для члена петербургского артистического микросоциума и, конечно же, для автора этой статьи?

ArtMargins, Internet Journal, April 2010

Chto delat’? The Theory and Practice of Critical Intervention: Sven Spieker in Conversation with Dmitry Vilensky (St. Petersburg) (Podcast)

Dmitry Vilensky in conversation with Boris Buden

Published in Transversal Journal, An-academy, 12-2010

Activist Club or On the Concept of Cultural Houses, Social Centers & Museums

at New Productivism, 09 201; eipcp transversal

опубликовано на openspace.ru

ДМИТРИЙ ВИЛЕНСКИЙ отвечает Анатолию Ульянову, который больше не верит в потенциал левого искусства

Lolita Jablonskiene, guest-editor of the 10th issue of the “Printed Project”, interviews the St Petersburg based artist, member of the group “Chto delat? / What is to be done?” Dmitry Vilensky about the groups’ project “Activist Club”, its historical forerunner Alexander Rodchenko’s “Workers’ Club”, and the potential of contemporary activist art to subserve in creating new public spaces.

Lolita Jablonskiene: I would like to start our conversation with a historical note, taking a glance at Alexander Rodchenko’s “Workers’ Club”. After all you chose to reference its title in the name of your project. I know that you have some interesting and rarely published material on Rodchenko’s “Club”? What is it and why does it appeal to you?

Dmitry Vilensky: The idea of the “Activist Club” diverges from the original concept of the “Workers’ Club” introduced in the USSR in mid-1920s and represented by famous piece made by Alexander Rodchenko. Created in 1925 for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris it was never produced in the real life. So it was a sort of a model how such a places should be organised. The piece was introducing a Western bourgeois audience to the completely different method of www cultural activities in the workers’ free time in the USSR (such as “Lenin’s Corner”, a space for gatherings, or the performance of “Live Newspapers”, etc.) The task of the “workers’ club” was to orient the workers to issues of political struggle, and introducing them to a different type of aesthetic experience. It critically undermined the obsolete idea of an idle consumer, who, through the experiencing of the art object in the museum, could gain some pleasures and ‘emancipate’ herself from shabby everyday existence. It was about building a space based on educational methodology and creation.

In mid-July 2006, Saint Petersburg and Russia’s Petersburg-born president, Vladimir Putin, hosted the annual summit of G8 leaders. In keeping with recent buy lasix online summit practice and the aggressive reanimation of Petersburg’s erstwhile imperial image, most of the events of the summit took place at the lavishly refurbished Constantine Palace, in the southern suburb of Strelna. Meanwhile, in the far north of the city, on Krestovsky Island, hundreds of Russian leftists and a handful of their foreign counterparts gathered at the Second Russian Social Forum. The forum was held at the Kirov Stadium, a monument of Soviet public architecture now condemned lasix online to destruction. Although the forum had been sanctioned by municipal and federal authorities, in the event the blood pressure government proved to be, literally, two-faced. While activists who managed to get to the side effects stadium were treated to free meals and tents by the Emergency Situations Ministry and graced with a visit by the city’s governor, their comrades outside the stadium and throughout Russia were the targets of a concerted campaign of harassment, detention, and interrogation by security services in the days, weeks, and months leading up to the forum and the summit. Operation Barrier, as it was known, prevented or otherwise buy lasix discouraged hundreds of activists from coming to Petersburg. Alterglobalists who made it to the stadium found themselves in a peculiar situation: free to do long term and say almost whatever they liked inside their nearly empty “reservation,” they were refused permission (which had been granted earlier) to march from the Kirov Stadium to the Aurora, the famous revolutionary battleship permanently moored across the Neva River from the Winter Palace (The State Hermitage Museum). Outside the stadium, especially in the downtown district loop diuretics, most attempts at spontaneous public protest were quickly suppressed by the police and special forces troops.

RD: With greatest interest I red your manifesto on political exhibition and so far I am artist used to partake different kinds of the shows first would like to admit that many aspects of the show you’ve described fits to the ideal model I would like to deal with. But would you agree or not I found the model too much utopian and even contradictions because of many factors. First we should admit that the role of the Temporary Artists’ Soviets is nothing else but to seize the power. To what extend it should overtake the power? Curatorial, institutional, that inside of the art system or that of the whole society in general? What is the main goal of the seizing the power?

DV: First I should say that my idea of the Soviet is not about “to seize the power”. I think that Soviets, as a type of political organisation, is still the most challenging model because it non-dialectically embrasses two opposite types of power – constitutend (power over, force that administrates live) and constituting power – the potentiality in action – that is enable to permanently invent new forms of political life. So I do not want to speculate too much on the possibilities of crisis governing but I think that idea of the art soviets is about demonstrating that radically different form of organisation of cultural production and its dissemination from beuroctatic–corporate model is possible. And such a forms organise a sort of situation of clash of powers as once happened during Russian revolution when state power could do nothing without negotiation with local Soviets. But we should also admit that vice versa – Soviets also negotiate many of its activities with real power of state and its institutions and this is exactly the situation where the true politics begin.

Опубликовано в 2006 году

Newsletter: Дмитрий, как ты оцениваешь современную ситуацию в современном российском искусстве? Насколько по-твоему художественная среда отрефлексирована и критична по отношению к происходящему здесь и сейчас?

ДВ – ситуация на мой взгляд плохая именно с точки зрения рефлексии и критики. Возникает ощущение, что подавляющим большинством овладело слабоумие и предельная сервильность. Как точно заметил Виктор Тупицын в рецензии на выставку в Гуггенхайме: «эстрадный юмор не в состоянии компенсировать дефицит негативности и, в частности, нехватку критической рефлексии». При этом политическая ситуация эскалирует и, похоже, что власть теряет последний разум, и делает все более решительные шаги на пути своего разрушения. Искусство и культура в целом, пока делают вид, что это их не касается, и остаются далеки от процессов новой возможной политизации общества. В тоже время, как обычно, время отчаянья – это и время надежды. Появляются новые инициативы: я бы отметил активность группы КЭТ из Новосибирска, новые проекты группы Радек, недавнюю серию микро-политических дискуссии вокруг фашистских презентации, маршей и убийств – так что есть некоторое развитие, и я надеюсь, что в какой-то исторический момент эти процессы обретут массовую энергию, как это произошло во время перестройки. Я уверен, что нам предстоят снова очень напряженное и уникальное время, и мы в своей работе стремимся соответствовать задачам своего времени. Чем мне нравиться российская ситуация, так это своей нестабильностью, постоянной динамикой, где большинство отношений еще не зафиксированы в форме консенсуса.