Natural Consciousness in "Russia!"

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Ninth Wave, oil on canvas, 1850

“I assure you, gentlemen, that to be too acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest to goodness disease.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground, 1.2, 1864

Looking at the restraints placed on Russian artistic consciousness, seen in the Guggenheim’s “Russia!” one cannot help experiencing a weary exhaustion, taking up the struggles for expression and a hyper-aware national identity as so many peasants labored over the unending expanse of the oppressive motherland. In nature, Russian artists find a subject capable of tempering and challenging the force of totalitarian rule, as well as a source of inspiration to endure the bleakness of social currents and political turmoil.

How can something so beautiful and uncorrupted as the landscape of Russia’s glory present such overwhelming, staggering weight in place of the awe and giddy exhilaration one might anticipate? Pavel Peppershtein’s Flag in the Landscape (oil on canvas, 2005) consolidates centuries of history into a simple, desolate scene: stark white chill extending over three large panels in an arduous, all-encompassing and insurmountable expanse which dwarfs the seemingly-insignificant far-flung details of lone cottages, a single tree heaped with snow, a mounted rider perhaps in uniform, and at the most extreme distances tiny sprawling cities like remote islands. Instead of the corresponding white or grey sky one might expect for such a cold monolith of Siberian dominance, the viewer is assaulted with gaudy cerulean skies, choppy defiant brushstrokes rendering an even more detached harshness, punctuated with a thick red flag imposed at its horizon. In light of the foreground details so tiny they seem obscured, this flag becomes epic, consummate, occupying one’s vision with a disproportionate potency for its actual pictorial space.

So too does the domineering force of the Russian flag hulk over the minds of her artists, eclipsing and subverting identity into massive super-consciousness, too acutely aware of exterior pressures to the point of disease of consciousness, a uniquely Russian, pervasive epidemic.

Throughout the history of Russian art presented in this show – inextricably viewed in the context of national political and cultural history – a plague of suppression and subversion of identity spreads. Whether struggling to keep up with the French under Catherine the Great or attempting to work within the strict confines of Socialist Realism as mandated by the Communist Party, Russian artists have often faced an officially-prescribed doctrine of thought and agenda of visual culture. A conundrum arises as -- having relinquished the personal or idiosyncratic -- the sensitivity of national ego, the inherent pride or love for the land, or indeed the confounded imprisonment of so much of mankind in its service, fails to fully unseat the artist’s sense of personal awareness, yet captivates in national hyper-awareness.

Some of the most successful answers come in turning to nature, an indigenous path which arose in the late 17^th century icon painting – artists sought and found a space to ask questions, a terrain for thought, a place to project outrage or confusion, or even a force greater than any politics of man. Ivan Aivazovsky’s The Ninth Wave (oil on canvas, 1850) is an unsettling, dramatic and tempestuous scene of men hopelessly clinging to the mast of a sunken ship amidst colossal surging waves in the eerily beautiful sea back-lit to gorgeous transparency by an ambiguously eventful pink and yellow sky such as one may dream of in a vision of the heavens, either the most welcoming sunrise after the treachery of a night in turmoil or, more likely, the departing rays of a seductive and rapturous sunset sure to be the last vision of earthly beauty emblazoned on the minds of men about to be abandoned to the tortures of the night and certain death. This visage of man’s struggle is as horrifying as it is captivating, incorporating the most moody and awe-inspiring aspects of Romanticism with the wholly Russian introspection of a prescient self-awareness, a national consciousness drowning in its own tides of change and unrest, carrying all the weight of history against an airy optimism for the future, the fervent faith in spring which surely makes survival through the winter even remotely possible.

The undeniable and unequivocal importance of nature and the land – either as prison or salvation for the spirit – most poignantly surfaces as a status indicator of consciousness and identity throughout the tiresome and suffocating history of Russia. While at times bleak and cold, it shines through enough to demonstrate the true health and vitality of Russian visual culture; honestly, potently, lushly, cruelly, it is there, and it is real, acutely aware and always with an eye on the horizon, however historically manipulated or diseased.


LINKS:

- Russia! at the Guggenheim, New York NY
- Constructivist Criticism by Mark Stevens for New York magazine
- The" Russia!" art lovers should know by Roberta Smith for The New York Times