Natural Wonders: New Art from London
BAIBAKOV art projects, Moscow, Russia
Edward Fornieles, NEVER HIDE (2009)
Moscow’s landscape can never be trusted to stay the same. For more than 100 years the smell of sweets wafted across the frozen banks of the Moskva river, until last April, when the Red October Chocolate Factory moved out to the suburbs to make way for yet another block of luxury flats. Miraculously, however, the building has not yet become another victim of the city’s neverending redevelopment spree. Over the last six months its third floor has become one of the best exhibition spaces in Moscow, partly thanks to the financial crisis whittling down takers for the prime real estate, partly thanks to a typically large-scale autumn visit from Gagosian Gallery, and partly thanks to the efforts of ambitious young curator Maria Baibakova.
Still less than a year out of the Courtauld Institute of Art, Baibakova is one of the very few people with the passion and financial clout to establish a major contemporary space in a close-knit and still precariously developing art world. The daughter of a former nickel magnate, Baibakova began lobbying to save the factory for art in 2007 when she was just 21. And with good reason: its 3,500 square metres of floor space, windows looking out across the city, and beautiful mid-19th-century architecture should be enough to warrant preservation on their own.
Of course, rent like this doesn’t come cheap, but then cheap isn’t exactly what Baibakova does. Bersenevskaya Embankment now practically reeks of money, as BAIBAKOV art projects unabashedly embraces the glamur so beloved of Russia’s nouveau riche - and despised by so much of its artistic old guard. The uncharitable could claim that, with its VIP dress-coded openings, it has an eye as much on the society pages as the culture section. For the opening of ‘Natural Wonders: New Art from London’, the gallery even flew former Moscow Times critic Brian Droitcour over from New York to cover the exhibition for Artforum.com’s ‘Scene & Herd’. Despite all this, BAIBAKOV art projects débuted very strongly last December with ‘Invasion: Evasion’, an exhibition of 22 largely unknown Russian artists. There Baibakova and her co-curator Kate Sutton coached the artists to maximize the possibilities of the space, and, despite gathering a divergent group of artists, the duo managed to make the experience a coherent one.
Toby Ziegler, Resistance Equipment (2008)
But ‘Natural Wonders’, which opened two weeks ago, is something of a dud. The largest exhibition of new British art to leave those shores since the YBAs in 1995, it takes its title from High Art Lite (1999), Julian Stallabrass’s Marxist polemic targeting that very generation of brattish young things. Stallabrass conceived of the art world as ‘a country garden, cultivated but full of natural wonders’. The 22 young artists selected for ‘Natural Wonders’ have, however, little to do with this theme, and almost nothing to do with each other: there is figurative painting, low-fi sculpture, video installations, a huge image-overload canvas, and even two burnt-out black skips from a Battersea estate.
Douglas White, Counsel (2006)
This curatorial incoherence is defended by a largely impenetrable, uncredited essay that lazily unites the artists using a loose brand of armchair postmodernism: that the urban environment is the natural environment, that artificial development is a natural process, and that anything can mean anything, since thinking makes it so. Ironically, however, Stallbrass’s intended ‘natural wonders’ to be a criticism of just the kind of sloppy categorization and bombastic preening that overwhelm the viewer at BAIBAKOV art projects.
Eloise Fornieles, Carrion (2008/2009)
And the show doesn’t even stand up on its own terms. Gardening seems to have been forgotten altogether – there are so many works here that the space recalls more a scrap heap, making the expansive space feel restrictive, even despite an entire room being given over to Eloise Fornieles’ performance installation Carrion (2008/2009). Amidst a pile of old clothes, Fornieles spent the opening periodically sat glowering at a table, donning the clothes, stripping naked and stuffing notes of apology or forgiveness written by viewers into a stripped cow carcass hanging beside her. All this was intended as a critique of material consumption, and, given the free-for-all going on nearby, the seclusion made it perhaps the only work to emerge with effect intact.
Nathaniel Rackowe, LP12 (2008)
Since then, nearly a third of the gallery space has been closed off, and the show is distinctly poorer because of it. For every compelling work, such as Douglas White’s Counsel (2006) or Nathaniel Rackowe’s LP12 (2008), there are two that are muddled, dull or outright bad. In particular, Tim Braden’s Looking at Ballet (2006) seems to have been chosen for its topical relevance to Russia than for any artistic merit. Based on trips to the Marinsky Theater while Braden was studying at the St. Petersburg Academy of Art, it recalls common-or-garden 19th-century figurative painting, largely bereft of technical skill – the red fleck of paint over a sea of blue-and-white ballerinas seems either a careless mistake or a bad joke. Mustafa Hulusi’s Extacy Almond Blossom 4 [sic] (2008) mixes one photorealism flower painting with an abstract painting in the vein of Mark Grotjahn, without displaying much nous for either genre. Diann Bauer’s massive What You Can See Won’t Hurt You (2006) mixes so many apparently randomly chosen visual references from ancient Greece to manga, seemingly without any method or quality control, and John Isaacs’ I know this world…but it isn’t the way I know it…it doesn’t behave the way I was told (2005), a plaster-cast tree with light bulbs attached, has the vapid conception and blasé title worthy of the YBAs, but without the bravura that was their principal redeeming feature
Diann Bauer, What You Can See Won’t Hurt You (2006)
If Baibakova, Sutton and guest curator Nick Hackworth wanted to replicate the confusing hustle-and-bustle of a busy metropolis, they’ve succeeded, but at the expense of their own exhibition. Many of the works are as incompatible as their selection is incoherent. Anyone with the inexplicable desire to contemplate Braden’s ballet will find it difficult to picture Swan Lake with the sirens from Kirk Palmer’s video installation Murmur (2006) blaring around the corner. Even inside the huge Wild West set Shezad Dawood built with Russian theatre designers to house his loose and inane, albeit somewhat entertaining, cowboys’n’zombies’n’injuns film Feature (2008), the music from Idris Kahn’s Last Few Piano Sonatas…after Franz Schubert (2007) drowns out most of the dialogue. And for all the great views of the Kremlin, daylight streaming through the windows makes looking at Ryan Gander’s video Man on the Bridge (A Study of David Lange) (2008) and CutUp’s Untitled (2008), a depiction of a street riot drilled into a plywood board, all but impossible during the day.
Idris Kahn, Last Few Piano Sonatas…after Franz Schubert (2007)
London has every right to feel aggrieved at being represented abroad by this show, and given that seven of the 22 artists here come from Hackworth’s own Paradise Row gallery, any such claims would be premature. Muscovites, likewise, will be dismayed that this all-too-rare large-scale foreign visit is so underwhelming and puzzled by the odd feeling that their own small and myopic art world has more to offer - especially given how high ‘Invasion: Evasion’ set the bar. For some reason, the placards at the door have lost ‘Natural’ from the title: it would only make sense if ‘Wonders’ went the same way.
Max Seddon
Responses
Added by leckey,
To all budding relations and associates of oligarchs who are thinking of setting up a gallery for shits and giggles, this is the way it should be done: Ask artist first whether they like to be in the show. When they say say no don’t then go ahead and put their name on the press list. It doesn’t look good when they’re not actually in the exhibition and makes you look like their name rather then how they’re going to fit in with the others is actually more important to you, kind of like Chelsea football club funnily enough.
Mark Leckey
Added by Corto_Maltese,
“especially given how high ‘Invasion: Evasion’ set the bar”
Oh, you really have spoilt everything (well, not everything, but still) with that. The problems of the first and the second Baibakov exhibitions are very similar.
Valentin Diaconov
