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SAN DIEGO COUNTY : Thaw Erasing the Party Line in Soviet Art : Art: With the advent of <i> glasnost, </i> contemporary Soviet artists are dissolving the strict boundary between official and unofficial work--and the San Diego Arts Festival benefits from the change.

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The San Diego Arts Festival: Treasures of the Soviet Union, which begins today, has its official and its unofficial events--those sponsored by the city, and those organized and funded independently.

Until recently, most art of the Soviet Union divided itself along similar lines, with members of the Artists Union producing official art, supported by the government, and all other artists’ work considered unofficial. The categories were never hard and fast, and now glasnost and perestroika are rendering them obsolete.

“The distinctions are blurring,” said Barbara Hazard, an artist and independent scholar of contemporary Soviet art who will be lecturing here during the festival. “The official and unofficial artists in Leningrad had a show together for the first time this year. Some unofficial artists are choosing to join the union, and are getting in. And some of the official work is starting to look like the unofficial work.”

Since 1932, when Stalin dissolved the Soviet Union’s many independent artists associations and established the centrally controlled Artists Union, official art has been the only art recognized by the state. Renting studio space, buying art materials from union stores, exhibiting and selling work are privileges reserved exclusively for union members.

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Opportunities to show their art and to travel abroad have greatly expanded for non-union members in recent years, but observers of the Soviet art scene note that the underlying structure of the system remains intact. No written changes have been made in the union’s policies and many of its members and high-ranking officials still covet their monopolistic hold on the dissemination of art. Like Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in his campaign for economic and political reforms, the champions of a pluralistic, democratic art scene face an uphill battle against conservative, old-guard forces.

Party line politics have been notoriously powerful within the Artists Union. To become a member, an artist must have graduated from an accredited institute of art, be approved by a committee of the union and have work shown in several official shows.

“The hook on all of that--since many of the unofficial artists have done these things--is that you had to swear that socialist realism is the highest achievement of art history,” Hazard said recently by telephone from her home in Berkeley.

“The other promise you had to make as part of official policy is that your work would enhance the role of socialism and the role of man in nature, as the highest development of civilization. If you did anything that was depressing, that showed people doing anything destructive to each other, or anything that wasn’t flattering to human beings, you couldn’t show it.”

Now much more is allowed, Hazard said. “Many of the official artists who had been quietly doing dangerous work on their own can now show that side of their work.”

The exhibition “Contemporary Art From Leningrad,” an “unofficial” offering of the local festival (at the Mesa College and David Zapf galleries), contains work by several former union members who couldn’t wait for these changes to occur. After years of filtering their artistic sensibilities through the union’s fine net of acceptability, they finally quit. They could feel self-censorship taking over.

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“They came to realize that they were losing some of their creativity,” Hazard said. “They were no longer free agents.”

Those artists may not have felt compelled to leave the union had they persisted into the mid-’80s, since the artists committees that now choose work for official shows have become more liberal in their selections. Jamey Gambrell, a contributing editor of Art in America magazine who has written extensively on contemporary Soviet art, and who will also be lecturing in San Diego during the festival, explained the new liberalization in a recent telephone interview.

Not only are union artists able to show their more challenging work in official shows, but non-union artists are now being invited to participate in these shows, she said. In addition, newly established informal associations of artists are now able to rent neighborhood halls and other exhibition spaces to put on their own shows, something they had never been allowed to do. Previously, they were limited to holding small exhibitions in their apartments or in the street, and even these risked closure by the authorities.

Collaborative artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid organized such a show in a field outside of Moscow in 1974. Officials responded with bulldozers, destroying much of the work and dampening the artists’ enthusiasm to stay in the Soviet Union. Having been expelled from the youth section of the Artists Union the year before because their work made officials nervous, Komar and Melamid soon left the country to pursue their art in Israel, and then the United States.

The Soviet emigres--whose “Sots-art,” a Soviet version of pop art, will be featured during the festival in an “unofficial” exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Gallery--were recently given prominent coverage in the Soviet Union’s most popular magazine, Ogonyok, which has a circulation of 3 million and an estimated readership of 10 million. Like the rehabilitation of previously banned authors, this attention to Komar and Melamid’s work signals a major shift in the status of unofficial art.

“This is quite something,” Gambrell said, “considering there were articles only four years ago calling them traitors and Zionists and God knows what.”

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Last year’s Sotheby’s auction of contemporary art in Moscow further prodded unofficial art from the shadows to the international limelight. The auction, the first of its kind in the Soviet Union, featured mostly unofficial works, and raised international attention with its record prices for relatively unknown artists.

Since the Soviet government has eased travel restrictions on its citizens, the fame of these and other unofficial artists has soared. “They’re being invited abroad, they’re making money from sales,” Gambrell said. “They’re gaining real international status as artists outside the country.”

Artists Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin owe their current stay in San Diego and their “official” festival shows at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art and the San Diego State University Art Gallery to this new expansion of mobility. As a testament to the fading of boundaries between official and unofficial art, critic Gambrell was unable to situate the pair in either category.

“Brodsky and Utkin belong to the architects union. They’re not official or unofficial, they’re just themselves,” she said.

The work they are showing here--etchings at the La Jolla Museum and an installation at SDSU--could easily be shown in the Soviet Union, she said, but “almost anything can be shown now, unless it’s pornographic or directly inflammatory.”

Soviet history, however, has shown that even such a refreshing thaw can give way suddenly to a chilling wind of repression.

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“That kind of concern is something that no one living in the Soviet Union today can escape,” Gambrell said. “There’s a society-wide level of angst that can’t be avoided by anybody.”

Just recently, an artist featured in the Leningrad show had a show of his closed for including “irreverent” work, Hazard said. “All is not rosy even under glasnost.

Nevertheless, the new spirit of openness has brought about unprecedented changes for Soviet artists.

Soviet Art Lectures

Jamey Gambrell lectures at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art at 11 a.m. Oct. 28.

Barbara Hazard lectures at Mesa College at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 8. Reservations required. (Call 560-2829.)

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid lecture at UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 9.

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