Art
Unofficial
John McEwen Three years ago, there was a lot of publicity in the West for a show of underground Russian painting which took place on some wasteland in the outskirts of Moscow and was brutally closed by the public authorities. With the arrival of the exhibition Unofficial Art from the Soviet Union ([CA till 27 February), we can see the work of the artists who caused the fuss. For western audiences gorged with the fruits of free expression it will probably come as a disappointment. Much of it would not look out of place on the railings along the Bayswater Road. The same Daliesque surrealism, olde worlde fantasies, pop art collages, frenzied action paintings, computer abstractions, the same scale abound. At first glance, there is no protest in it at all. And, although closer scrutiny will reveal that one or two of these artists, notably Oscar Rabin (when a fish is painted lying on Pravda it is lying on 'The Truth,' don't forget), are more politically overt than the others, this first impression would be right. As Michael Scammell, director of the Writers and Scholars Educational Trust, editor of the magazine Index on Censorship and organiser of the exhibition, writes in his introduction: 'None of these artists has openly sought a conflict with the political authorities and it is for that reason that we have eschewed such emotive terms as
"dissident" or "underground" for this art
and prefer to describe it more neutrally—
and comprehensively—as "unofficial." 'This exhibition is about resistance to censorship not party political ideology.
It is probably impossible for anyone brought up in this country to realise just what Russian censorship means. As late as the 'forties the theory of relativity and the science of cybernetics were both considered reactionary and inadmissible. In the 'fifties, industrial design was similarly seen as an undesirable form of bourgeois pseudoscience. The present hatred of free expres
sion in the visual arts is no less dogmatic but even more convoluted. Anyone can paint what they like on their own, they can sell what they like to whom they like but they cannot publicise their work or exhibit it publicly without the permission of the authorities. After the commotion over the suppression of the first unofficial art show, the authorities relented. Another exhibition was allowed to take place for four hours. The artists' hopes were high, but subsequent vilification in the press, arrests and harass ment made it quite clear that the minimal licence offered had been merely to calm the hostility of western opinion. When exhibitions were not dramatised by public suppression, western correspondents and
diplomats were not interested. Few of them attended shows put on by the artists in their private apartments, although these were allowed to happen. This lack of interest further weakened the position of such artists with regard to the state. In the summer of 1976, the City Artists' Committee in Moscow established a painting section and invited all the non-conformist artists to exhibit, with the exception of Oscar Rabin and his son Alexander. BY this time, many of the foremost members of the movement had either been allowed to leave the USSR or been punished in other ways. Yet when work later appeared in Paris by these same artists who had been allowed to show in Russia under the auspices of the Committee it too was attacked in Russia for being anti-Soviet. Official attitudes can be said not to have changed.
Most of the artists exhibiting in the ICA have suffered inordinately in order to paint the pictures you are looking at. They have been deprived of any livelihood other than one derived from the most abject forms of unskilled labour. They have been spied on, had their work destroyed, been placed in psychiatric hospitals and taken to the slave camps in the islands of the Gulag Archipelago. The most important aspect of the work is therefore that it exists.
Oscar Rabin is undoubtedly the most outspoken against the authorities in his painting and Ernst Niesvestny, the sculptor, the most energetic draughtsman on view, but their work suffers no less than that of the others from its lack of contact with twentieth-century art, not least earlytwentieth-century Russian art. Apart from the distortion of illustrations they have had no opportunity of seeing any of the best twentieth-century art made after the Revolution, except on the occasion of half-adozen fleeting exhibitions. So in the end they have had to leave. Their great predecessors also left and only made a genuinely Russian contribution to twentieth-century art when they were forced to return by the First World War. Until the present day Russian artists have assimilated this history— through perhaps only a younger generation of Russian artists will be capable of this— we will not be able to judge them by the western system of values to which they mostly continue to aspire.
Terry Atkinson's exhibition HistoryDrawing (Robert Self till 19 February) contains a lithograph, etchings, pencil, charcoal and pastel drawings of soldiers in the First World War. The drawings are based on photographs of' the time, interviews with fifty veterans of the event and much reading in and around the subject. Notes from his reading complement the work in a lengthy catalogue explaining his various reasons for doing the drawings. Atkinson, until last year, was a member of 'Art Language,' a group formed in the late 'sixties to counteract the aimless trendiness of so much of the art and art criticism of the time. They personally abandoned any form of graphic or plastic representation and
engaged in teaching and the presentation at intervals of their disputations. It is important to mention this because Atkinson is obviously so self-conscious of this break with his past, somewhat controversial, activity himself. He has returned to drawing and, however unjustifiably, gives an impression of feeling that the knives are going to be out. In other words he has not dared to show the drawings without the backing of the grandiose and various designs of the notes. Atkinson sees the First World War as the most consequential event of the twentieth century. The drawings are meant to be accurate—showing the little details that his interviewees remembered, the importance of food, the difficulties of having a crap--and also ironic in their depiction and titles, 'Private Shrapnel-Face and Shrapnel-Face.' They are meant to expose the class and capitalist ways in which the war was fought and in which we have come to regard the war. But since Oh What a Lovely War! everyone has viewed the war in this way. The drawings themselves are bland and inclined to be too slick when in pencil, though capable at times of bringing out individuality or emotion, as in 'Burial at Becourt Wood.' The defensive confusion of ideas in the notes adds to the suspicion that he has been hurried into this show before getting things straight in his head and before deciding how best to represent his conclusions. It is a pity, for instance, that not more use was made of those fifty interviews with the now, relatively rare, survivors.
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