ARTIST : An Artist on the Road With Glasnost

Seven months after an unprecedented auction of Soviet contemporary art in Moscow, artists whose works brought record prices remain in the news.

Exhibitions of their work are springing up throughout Europe and the United States, and critical reviews of their shows appear with increasing frequency in the art press.

But what about Soviet artists who were left out of the sale? Have they benefited from glasnost?

“Of course,” says artist-poet Dmitri Prigov, who contends that the Soviet Ministry of Culture “brutally” cut him out of the auction because he was in “bad standing” with officials. As a leading member the Avant-Gardists’ Club, a group of about 30 formerly unofficial artists, he was once limited to showing his works to friends or in such unorthodox places as a public bathhouse in Moscow.

But now, the 48-year-old artist is compiling a record of exhibitions in Switzerland, Germany, England and the United States, as well as prestigious locations in the Soviet Union.

Soviet government agencies haven’t helped him find a place in the international limelight, Prigov says, but as a director of a Moscow association of poets and the Avant-Gardists’ Club, he has developed “lots of contacts.” Currently an artist in residence at Ohio Wesleyan University, Prigov’s poetry readings are booked into top universities on the East and West coasts. His politically charged artworks are on view at the Struve Gallery in Chicago through Tuesday in a show that will travel to the St. Louis Gallery of Contemporary Art, March 15 to April 30.

In Los Angeles and the Bay Area this week for poetry readings at USC, UCLA, Stanford University and San Francisco’s hip espresso bar Cafe Cafe, Prigov talked about his work and his impressions of American art with the help of an interpreter.

The highly publicized auction was a spectacular aberration that “distorted the value” of most of the work offered for sale, Prigov said. The event gave “well deserved” attention to Ilya Kabakov and Prigov’s close friend Grisha Bruskin, whose “Fundamental Lexicon” painting sold for $415,756, a record for Soviet contemporary art. But many other artists’ prices were grossly inflated or deflated, he said.

Furthermore, the Ministry of Culture applied arbitrary “hierarchical” criteria in selecting artists for the auction, he said. Those whose work was judged “not good enough” suffered “traumatic psychological consequences.”

Official rejection may have seemed a nasty blow but it hasn’t been an insurmountable obstacle for Prigov. A child of Moscow conceptualism, which developed in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, he has established himself as a vital player in the glasnost- era art scene.

In his opening speech last year at the Avant-Gardists’ exhibition at the Sandunovsky Baths in Moscow, he advised his colleagues to “cleanse themselves of cliches and stereotypes, to cast off the accustomed cloaks of artist, viewer and art critic.” Prigov has written more than 11,000 poems, many of which mock Soviet cliches and tired doctrines. His visual art examines the acquired meanings of words or treats political personages to bizarre flights of fancy.

Prigov’s cutting comments on official pretense were missing in auction exhibition halls at the Sovincentr, a flashy international hotel and trade complex. But for the last two years his work has not been stuck in a Moscow closet. Prior to the auction, he was represented in a prestigious exhibition of young Moscow artists in Bern. And while the international press flocked to the sale, his works were prominently displayed in two large public exhibition halls in Moscow.

One was a sprawling affair, aptly called “Labyrinth,” that spilled out decades of pent-up artistic frustrations at the Palace of Youth, above a Moscow subway station. The other was a higher quality, more professionally presented show at the House of Artists on Kuznetsky Most in Central Moscow.

In those exhibitions and his current Chicago show, Prigov has displayed two genres of work: text paintings on Soviet newspapers and intricate renderings of fantastic beasts. Both present graphically sharp images in stark black and white with occasional flashes of color.

Most of the text paintings are done on pages of Pravda. Prigov generally extracts from the page what he calls “a key word of Soviet culture”--such as Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Reagan, glasnost, perestroika or AIDS--then blocks it out with stencils and sprays over the letters with black ink. The light newsprint letters stand out on a soft-edged oval of black, rather like flashing code words that symbolize the underlying text. A 24-page work called “The Newspapers” combines stenciled leaf shapes with words and lends a lyrical overlay to the political content. A 15-sheet piece, called “Glasnost,” alternates the large letters of the title with pages containing smaller words and leaves.

Prigov’s text paintings comment on the dead quality of public language, so steeped in official pronouncements that it has lost all meaning beyond that of power. The animals, on the other hand, are the monsters of a rich imagination. Prigov likens his invented creatures to a “medieval bestiary” or “heraldic animals.”

Looking rather like mythical beasts dredged up from the deep, they may refer to historical characters, political figures or even personal friends. One notably bizarre example, “Portrait of Permanent Figure,” portrays a muscular fellow with an elephant’s trunk who is drawn up into a fetal position and sheds a big fat tear. Across his chest appears the ever-present word glasnost.

The Chicago show has been “very well received” and sales are coming along nicely, according to gallery owner William Struve. A report in the Chicago Tribune called the exhibition “a pointed reminder of the extensive changes in Soviet society, one that just a few years ago permitted nothing but the most time-worn Socialist Realist images of heroic factory and farm workers striding confidently into the future.”

Struve said he discovered Prigov’s work in 1986, along with that of Grisha Bruskin whom he also represents at his gallery. At the time, it was impossible to bring Prigov’s political work out of the Soviet Union, but as cultural relations warmed, formerly restricted art was allowed to seek an international forum.

Prigov’s wife, Nadia, is an English interpreter and has arranged children’s exchanges between the United States and the Soviet Union. Her connections led to his artist-in-residence post at Ohio Wesleyan, which ends early in March. But the artist-poet has made his own discoveries about the United States.

“My special interest was to see contemporary American art in galleries and museums in New York,” he said.

And who are his favorites? Jeff Koons, a masterful salesman and self-publicist who currently replicates kitsch statuary in glossy ceramics; Haim Steinbach, known for presenting shelves of ordinary objects, such as lava lamps or ice chests, as artworks, and Meyer Vaisman, whose paintings take a cynical stance toward painting by exploiting methods of mechanical reproduction or turning the romance of abstraction into a cold system.

Why these artists? “They are able to transpose an object with as little change as possible and give it a different meaning,” Prigov said. Perhaps more important, he senses a kinship between the Americans’ ironic gleanings from popular culture and his own fascination with systems of communication and popular icons.

“My work looks different from theirs, but we are both dealing with contemporary cultural situations. The objects we choose are different because the cultures are different” but the concept is closely related, he said.

Another of Prigov’s discoveries is something of a traveler’s truism. “I arrived in the United States with a lot of myths in my head, both awful and magnificent, but they have nothing to do with real life here,” he said. “It’s not too difficult to see that human beings are similar all over the world.”