HALF A KINGDOM FOR A STRANGE HORSE !

There is no place for academis studies and chronologies in the atmosphere of a tragicomic and furious brothel that unexpectedly has woken up at the vast areas of Eurasia, for which I cannot find now any other name but the United Piratic Emirates. It is so not because we are lacking in time, though time is also one of the things we lack. But because the meaning of academism - as a reference point for research and reflective culture - has been lost at last. I am establishing this loss with a fair sense of "bakhtinism" - i.e. archetypal optimism - which regards man's death as a starting point for his new journey.

Therefore my report about Russian video art will be far from academism - I will flag only those events which are connected with breaking, running away, deviation, destruction, mockery of the things left behind... Left behind not in politics but in culture (first of all in audio-visual culture), like in a house with all the residents moved out. For all above-mentioned are the various forms of estranging (ostranenie) of the social reality as the fundamental attitude of creative individual to his life surroundings.

However, such is the origin of video art meant to record the appearance of individual audio-visual handicraft, the possibility of creating certain neopaleontological audio-visual product - but with the intentions not to sell it to a neighbour but to show it to him beating at a hairy chest and yelling: "That's me!". It is so, sine videoart is connected rather with video-neanderthal man's arrogant tearing away from the stuff left by tttthe cinematographic pithecantrophus than with real progress of arising neanderthal social culture. Rather with "joyous life at the rubbish-heap" than with concentrated cultivation of new reality in a fresh retort. And as its self-awareness and a considerable body of videotexts are formed, videoart falls apart into a number of independant audio-visual phenomena growing from its primitivistiv (but far from being primitive) corpse.

And the first question we are interested in is - where have the first Soviet video artists crawled to "the video rubbish-heap" from?

It is very important to stress, that they have crawled not from the professional cinematograph or TV as it could be prompted by the "linear" history of culture. The seeming similarity between video and cinematograph, the cheapness of videoinnovations and "older brother" syndrom have become the main barrier and gulf between these two phenomena. Of course, it was "underground" subculture - theatrical avant-garde, crazy amateur filmmakers and photographers, etc. - which began to try the videocamera like drugs, sexual games, etc. However, the origin of our videoart (like many other things) does not differ from that of the rest of the world.

And like cinematographic fixation of the world was a prime genre for the Lumieres, video fixation of a strange world - the world of "underground" subculture and bohemianism - became a prime genre for videoart. But "the effect of doubling", inherent to both phenomena, developped opposite reactions: the real world required precise documentation from the cinematoooographic fixation while the strange world of "underground" subculture required extremely distorting mirror from videoart, required the exponentiating of its strangeness as its basic reality.

"Fixation of Fantasy" paradoxical conception, documeting of an action as a contemporaray street tale ("dirty" in the main meanings of this word) penetrated the early video opuses of the 80's (Boris Yukhananov 1985-86, Moscow; provincial experiments by Igor Plekhov 1986, Tomsk; etc.) as well as the appearance of modern videomaker's bohemian circle. Such are the projects of ARTEOLOGICAL GARDEN group: "Plantings of Colombian Coffee" (February 1992), "New Russian Crying" (March 1992), videofixations by Georgy Gusarov, and so on. "THE NORTH" Group of the Independant Academy made the title out of this tendency for the video fixation of its action - "A Transparent Fixator" (1991). And Yury Lesnik in his videowork "Project: Toplogy In Sculpture" (1993) explains to us how to extract sculptural forms, created by him, by turning artistically cut ordinary plastic kitchen sponges inside out (such a parody educational video film!).

Against the background of, say, "videonaivety" of the 80's - which covers, as well, the 90's - the individuality of Boris Yukhananov, a theater producer and stage manager, is the most bright one. He studies theatre art in the master classes of two outstanding theatre directors of our time: Anatoly Efros and Anatoly Vasiliev. We can say that Yukhananov was born for the permanently boiling broth of subcultural "underground", where the remains of all 10 - 15 Muses have been cooking; for he combines furious and almost sacrificial degree of lively involvement in any of life situations with endless farce and falseness of bohemian circle, pronounced and settled professionalism with fantasies of a nouveau riche, the deep analysis of art text with intellectual delirium close to mental epilepsy. Yukhananov is a basic myth of Soviet "underground" subculture, and inside this myth he is Cronos born in wedlock of Zeus Atmighty and a kicking goat (such is a distorted mythology of basement people!). His theories of "video-karate" and "video-matrix", his series of "video- variations", "slow-video", etc., his many-hour videofixations in which the exhausting quantity develops sometimes the wonderful freshness of the second video-wind, his attempt to press the theatre into video or to splash video onto the theatrical and exhibition stage, his skill at preparing an incredible social and cultural cocktail of all these and of the people who got into this trashing-machine - these things convince us that Bob Yukhananov deserves the whole paragraph of our brief survey.

More than that, he has a craving for the involvement in creative and sexual contacts of everyone who finds himself in an unstable life position, who has left his familiar spot, who has fallen out from his nest. And this Bob's ability has really turned him into an extraordinary guru of Russian "underground" subculture. And now already dozens of young creators of all sexes, crazy about art culture, can be regarded as Yukhananov's learners in spite of their attitude to that fact. Having shot the videowork "Private Residence" in 1986, in 1987 he shot "Game of Ho" which became the first chapter of the very strange phenomenon - "Crazy Prince" videonovel. With the start of the enormous project "The Garden" in 1990, Yukhananov, to say, left videoart, turning his attention towards social and cultural functions of video fixations, towards refined interaction between theatre and video, etc. What will be the result of hundreds - without exaggeration! - of hours of videodocuments collected by Bob? Nobody knows...

So, the theatre gave Bob Yukhananov to videoart. But it is found that something was given to videoart by our war industry as well. The outburst of fashion for computer commercials, supported by the appearance here and there of proper hardware and software, on the whole didn't initiate art and experimental works in the field of electronic videoart. Surprisingly, computer scientific and technical staff began to act as artists actively changing their functions as of ordinary scientific and technical servants of computer displays. They succeeded in seizing art ground but, unfortunately, their ambitions covered only their wish to have their own hand in "drawing" banal computer commercials. But in spite of this, the first and unexpectedly fresh individual art works in the field of electronic art came just from the war industry - Boris Mazurok, a programmer who had shot by that time a number of amateur animated films as a director and animator, in 1989 using "Albatros" Computer System (designer - Boris Dolgovesov) made a one minute computer (3D) film "The Invitation to Space". And his next film "The Shadow" (1991) won the Prize at the "Prix Ars Electronica - 91" Festival. In 1993 two other Russian computer films took part in the competition program of this festival - "Aquarium" made by Vladimir Kobrin as a director (we will touch him further) and Andrei Topunov as a programmer and a demo reel of "Create" made by Anton Petrov and Natalia Khaliavka.

And at last, artists turned their eyes towards videoart. Video interested them most of all as, to say, an instrument - on the one hand - providing new possibilities of playing with old material and - on the other hand - a new material for playing. But Russian video, being for the most part a low-technological one, rushed into the development of the first tendency, in other words the tendency of performing "attitude towards..."; The more so as this paradigm from the formation of pop-art has become firmly established as the one of the main forms of author's self- expression in fine arts. Bob Yukhananov found a very precise and amusing name for "attitude towards" tendency - "high parasitizing". And one of the today's best works of Russian videoart was made exactly in this ideology. It is "A Sky Slow- Mover - 2" (1991) by Sergei Shutov. Using as a basic material a post-war blockbuster - the musical "A Sky Slow-Mover" (1945) with a lot of Soviet film stars of that time in the cast - the author worked up both sound and picture with the help of a computer - it gave freash features to the old film material - and then tried to put into practice as wide as possible a spectrum of all of the latest audio and video intonations.

The work of estranging already existing screen material is the characteristic property of the avant-garde videoclip "Fenso Lights" (1993) by "Fenso" Group and of the latest work of Sergei Shutov "Sensual Experiments" (1992, the video part of an installation) in which the video picture of an ordinary Western pornographic film is transformed into refined graphic picture of vaguely recognized contours and supplemented with reading of real love letters of a Soviet girl.

Artists are moving to their own video with caution. But there are some examples. We can mark out the dramatic work "Shades of Leaving" (1992; music of Brian Inn) by George Samsonov and the video "Exprolatory Laboratory H3" (1992) by Olga Tobrelits, in which high-technological video (the work was made in association with German TV Channel) didn't allow the author to go far away from the videofixations of her action as an artist's one. I have already mentioned that the enormous detachment of Soviet TV workers - people who live in the world of professional video equipment - have been just staying in the trenches of ttTV-cliched mind and, probably, are still waiting for an order to attack creatively videoart. However, there are some pleasing exceptions as well. For example, TV-program director Konstantin Ernst ("Matador" Program) who has a bent for "greater cinema". He likes to make his programmes as a well-considered mix of richly decorated stage of videotheatre and professionally made videoopus. Or young video film director Aleksandr Kuprin who doesn't hasten to carry out experiments at a blank space but brings careful - but of great changing ability - traits of estranging to traditional video sketches and video essays ("Fairy", 1992; "The Island", 1992).

But TV, aaaabsolutely unexpectedly to itself, played quite another role in the Soviet videoart - the role of genre form and total audio-visual stereotype, which resulted in the appearance of such an amusingly shocking phenomenon as "Pirate Television" (a series of videoworks by Yuris Lesnik as a film director and Vladimir Mamyshev, 1991-92). An intentional atmosphere of non- professionalism, an excitement of totally faded skit of the early 90's, a rich homosexual coating of the whole series - all these - being interspersed with finely cut fragments of official TV- reality - created such an uncommon genre which I would put as "a TV madhouse" and which was spitting not only at the forms but as well as at the very essence of TV. We can feel that Yuris Lesnik was playing his TV with pronounced pleasure and that sometimes he obtained direct satisfaction. But - oh! and alas! - "Pirate Television" is a domestic phenomenon and cannot be translated in any way. But this fact manifests its great - and, maybe, the main! - merit: it was made evidently "for home, for family", not for international festivals.

And what about professional cinematography? It is full of interesting things, but all the interesting is completely indifferent to video. And there is a lone marginal individuality of Vladimir Kobrin in the cinema, a master of experimental films whose works were widely demonstrated at various Western festivals in recent years. And all of a sudden this film master practically opted out of making 35mm films and in his home residence investing his own poor funds set a half-professional video-computer studio and... becama a beginner at videoart with his first video-computer opus "The First Apocrypha" (1993) (I'm not going to speak about it as I have a hand in this project being a producer and co-author of the project). The "School of Trick Cinema", established by Kobrin, combines the academic education with the attempts to encourage young directors "to feel free at ruins". The most interesting videoworks of the School's students are: "Boldero (A Non-Existant Word)" (1993) by Olga Dbrynin; "Clearing of Kabul" (1992) by Zhavakhir Kabulov and two computer works by Vladimir Koshin - "Spongers of Brain" (1993) and "Text...Currents of Love to Death in Fucking Electricity" (1993).

Starnge relations have been established between video and "parallel cinema" - a group of avant-garde amateur film makers (Igor and Gleb Aleinikov, Evgeny Yufit, Evgeny Kondratiev, Piotr Pospelov, Oleg Kotelnikov) which was even in fashion in the Soviet professional cinematographic circles of the second half of the 80's. These guys longed for "greater cinema" so intensively (but they were forbidden entering it for a long period of time!) that, having found themselves in its surroundings they were unable to change cinema for video. And I think there is nothing to be worth speaking about except, maybe, two videoworks: "Mirages" (1981) by the Aleinikovs and "An Aria with handbells" by P. Pospelov. But even these videoworks produce the feeling that it makes no difference for the parallel film makers what to hold in their hands - a film camera or a video camera. Their works arise out of something that has nothing to do with "a screen", probably, out of the inveterate desire to make something uncommon, exceptional, strange at any cost. But the phenomenon of "estranging" defies the author's artificial orientation, it is always a gift of surprised perception.

Back to the "parallel filmmakers", I should grievously note the dying of slightly naive - but conceptual - video by Vadim Drapkin (St. Petersburg) whose art is parallel to "parallel cinema". Well, now it is not very far to the final of or story about Russian videoart. And I think it is worth saying some words about the context - the things which surround it and "provide its service". There is a special videomagazine "Videoass" in Russia (chief editor - Vldimir Borev) but there is no place for video experiments in it. Two monthly TV programmes ("Silence No 9" by Tatiana Didenko, a music critic and "The Graet Trip" by Igor Barbe) - which pay more attention to videoart in its various forms - have been broadcast for somewhat a year. And the Institute of Art's Technologies, created by S. Shutov, appeared not long ago. We, together with V. Kobrin mature the idea of the School of New Screen Technologies. So, slowly, but we are developing... Viewing the revealed poor panorama of Russian videoart, we can understand that in its present stage low-technological "being" of video artists clearly determines their "consciousness". Just because of the extremely low technological level of the available equipment the majority of Russian artists have to deal not with new artistic possibilities and new screen material but with their own attitude towards the material already existing and - to some extent - cliched. And, o cccourse, an irony, parody, sarcasm, foolery, pronounced "mockery of sacred things", when one can give half a kingdom for a hoof torn from a bronze horse, have become the dominant of such an artist's attitude. All these make a noticeable stylistic and genre turn of current Russian videoart, cutting out only one narrow sector from a wide spectrum of the ways of estranging the world, of feeling it as a strange and unknown one. It may seem funny, but low-technologicccal "being" of videoartists dictates the development of "low genres" (M.M. Bakhtin) of videoart. Thus we have discovered one more "turn", this time - in videoart.

But who knows if there is a similar "turn" in the heart of Russian nature.

And then everything becomes much more serious...

Anatoly V. Prokhorov