ART REVIEW : Out of Afrika Comes Russian Empathy

That imperial entity that used to be known as the Soviet Union has either just plain fallen ignominiously apart or is in the process of glorious rebirth. It’s a wonder anybody could make art in the midst of such a muddle but it hasn’t deterred a 25-year-old St. Petersburger known as “Afrika.” A traveling 70-work solo survey of his multimedia conceptual art has just arrived at USC’s Fisher Gallery.

It’s no wonder that the art itself is at first a bit befuddling. Part of the problem is that is looks so familiar and feels so strange. The whole enterprise functions like a walking oxymoron. What’s familiar is Afrika’s generic posture of

Beuys-and-everything-that-came-after-wards-in-the-delicious-decadent-West.

Yup.

It’s all there all right. There is an appropriation-cum-deconstruction “Anti-Lissitzky Series” based on a revolutionary poster by the Russian Constructivist master, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.” Afrika just swaps the color scheme around but because the original design was sodden with symbolic politics so, presumably, are the variations. Does “Blue Wedge Beats Pink” mean that men are going to win the battle of the sexes? Doesn’t matter. The point is that Afrika is a Ninotchka who doesn’t need a Melvyn Douglas to seduce him into enjoying all things that still pass for hip in New York.

One of the earliest works here is a Basquiat-like graffiti composition Afrika did in collaboration with some of his mates. He also knows semiotics is about decoding deep meanings buried in harmless-looking signs like those presumably international graphics we see in all the airports where cigarettes are crossed out and people in wheelchairs are informed which toilet to use. Afrika made a bunch of those in roughly the style of Matt Mullican. Others look like blown-up pages from a kid’s coloring book full of ducks, gliders and other images the artist knows full well have different connotations here from what they have in Leningrad--I mean St. Petersburg.

Afrika clearly understands that recent Western art’s real strategy has been to turn art’s traditional nuances of ambiguity into a maze of internal contradictions that allow it to say everything and mean nothing or vice versa. So who is this guy, a hip opportunist out to make Mark Kostabi look sincere or a perestroika waif mirroring the plight of a paternalistic authoritarianism trying to transform itself overnight into a freewheeling market economy?

Certainly a bit of both. Actually one can only hope the fledgling Russian federation catches on as fast as he did. In the end, however, that is not what makes Afrika’s art worthy of attention. What does is a sense that grows out of what remains strange and foreign about it. Unlike much of the art on which it is based, its irony doesn’t seem flip or arbitrary. It seems troubled, heartfelt and philosophical.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a complex installation called “Donaldestruction.” It is virtually impossible to understand without some help from wall labels and catalogue essays. Its main icon is a flimsy metal door that hangs suspended in a pipe-frame pyramid, ticking like a pendulum and flanked by miniature versions of itself. The door turns out to be a relic swiped from a familiar Moscow landmark, a 1937 statue called “The Worker and the Collective Farm Girl” by Vera Mukhina . The artist is unknown to Western history but she made this vast 60-foot-tall piece of revolutionary propaganda art. Afrika--his real name is Sergei Bugaev--pinched a door that leads into the female figure of the huge structure. The portal was placed where her sexual part would be. The exhibition includes a small, purposefully crude bronze version of the statue.

What does this mean? Why was the entrance placed in such a symbolic spot? Afrika swiped the door with a little help from his friends and climbed inside. What is this? A symbolic rape? A metaphorical rebirth? Did the artist vandalize the statue or lovingly preserve a piece of it?

Given the created context, it looks like the latter. The door is surrounded by material that suggests it as a holy relic. Behind it is a montage of revolutionary period photographs of Soviet workers taken by the likes of Alexander Rodchenko. It is flanked by two triptychs. One shows Lenin’s tomb, a set of quasi-mechanical drawings by an inmate of a Soviet asylum and a popular Russian Everyman cartoon character named Dunno.

The other cryptic triptych begins with the Taj Mahal. Oddly, Afrika identifies the Taj as the original Trump Tower. Then comes a wrapper for a Big Mac from McDonald’s Moscow and finally an image of Donald Duck. Clearly all these Donalds suggested the title, “Donaldestruction.” But that’s enigmatic too. Are we talking about the destruction of Donald or destruction by Donald?

Afrika was in town for the opening of the show, which was organized by guest curator Louis Grachos of the Queens Museum of Art. The artist likes the States but could hardly wait to head home. He finds the unsettled times in his motherland exciting if sometimes sad.

He feels sympathy for the old people of St. Petersburg who queue up for hours to get a single loaf of expensive bread. A few of them remember both world wars, the horrible Nazi siege of the city and the revolution. Afrika remembers one old woman on line saying, “In the war we put up with all this because we hoped for victory. What are we to hope for now?”

The artist pointed out that in the revolution the Bolsheviks immediately replaced the visual symbols of czarist Russia with those of communism--the hammer and sickle flag, the agitprop posters and heroic statues of the worker.

Statues have been pulled down in the recent revolution but the new government hasn’t replaced them with anything to signal momentous change. Afrika supposes this may be a good thing, but it bothers him.

In the end, his exhibition is about trying to deal with the terrible feelings of grief and abandonment visited on people who no longer know what to believe in.