Pavel Pepperstein
Regina Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Pavel Pepperstein, Black Square and Campbell (2008)
To a wider public, Pavel Pepperstein is better known for his best-selling books – in 2007 Russian GQ named him writer of the year – than his art work, despite being the leading latter-day figure of the Moscow Conceptualist school co-founded by his father Viktor Pivovarov. Indeed, Pepperstein’s uproarious essay accompanying ‘Either/Or’, his recent exhibition at Regina Gallery, threatens to dwarf his so-called ‘National Suprematist’ paintings.
‘Either/Or’ is effectively a follow-on to 2007’s ‘Russia City’, in which Pepperstein warned that replacing old buildings in Moscow and St. Petersburg threatened the ‘sense of Russia’. Instead he proposed that the cities were turned into ‘living museums’ and that a new capital should be built midway between the two. This was to include buildings with huge live heads on top, antennae for communicating with the dead, and a colossal floating ‘Mount Russ-more’, all illustrated in Pepperstein’s self-titled ‘psychedelic realist’ children’s book style.
Ludicrous as it was, ‘Russia City’ inspired as much awe as it did laughter, providing one of the most original artistic responses to Russia’s rapidly changing urban landscape. At ‘Either/Or’, however, the problem lies less with establishing where the joke ends than if it ends at all. A linguistic play on bizarre Russian political ideologies such as the nationalist-anarchist-punk National Bolshevism movement, Pepperstein’s modest aim is a ‘new representative style for Russia’, designed as a friendly riposte to both American culture and pop art. The exhibition consists of a series of brightly coloured canvases featuring a haphazard mix of Russian national symbols such as matryoshka dolls, pop art colours and markers of American capitalism, frequently interspersed with Kazimir Malevich’s all but obligatory black square.
Though Pepperstein’s deadpan hope is to see homes, public and private transport, businesses and Russian culture festivals ‘nationally suprematized’, his real achievement here is to have brought the Conceptualist play on Suprematism full circle. Where artists like Nikita Alekseev inverted Malevich’s desire to free the image from representations of reality by opposing it to official Soviet images, invoking the black square as a national representative style not so much completes it as confounds it.
This could have been excellent cause for reflection on the exploitation of images in contemporary society, were the rest of Pepperstein’s ideas not so blatantly and deliberately silly – starting with having a national representative style in the first place. Pepperstein makes the odd claim that, since Suprematism is too ascetic a style to find overseas approval, it’s necessary to add elements taken from Russian art nouveau to confer ‘the aura of a Russian holiday’ and rococo cockleshell spirals to form an ‘ecological matrix, ending opposition between earth and space.’ All this is too vague to make its execution coherent, seemingly encompassing any Russian or American culture joke for its own sake. Most often these are simply tired, from the old gag about Russia being the homeland of elephants to uninspired renderings of dollars as snakes and a man eating the Apple Computer logo.
The Birth of Hollywood (2008)
Still, a few are clever enough for a first-glance chuckle. The eponymous painting contrasting a black square crushing a blood-spurting Campbell’s soup can is, if nothing else, a witty literalization of Suprematism, while The Birth of Hollywood (all works 2008) parodies the famous scene from The Battleship Potemkin (1925), replacing the baby careening down the Odessa steps in a carriage with a black square. Some others, however, come across as weak, shallow and cheap, the main culprits being Obama-Mama‘s black woman in Russian peasant dress and Are you afraid off‘s [sic] gauche invocation of 9/11.
Obama-Mama (2008)
Ultimately ‘Either/Or’ is far less creatively ambitious than ‘Russia City’. Neither the threat pop art poses nor whatever relevance it may have to Russian culture is clear; in any case it is a much less interesting target than Vladimir Putin and Moscow’s all-powerful mayor Yuri Luzhkov. Cossack runs this home: painted in the same way as most of the ‘Russia City’ works, the solitary figure dancing the kazachok looks practically joyless, while the sort of horizon that Pepperstein has filled with what he calls ‘mountain-skyscrapers’ or a ‘Sphere of Russian Spirituality’ is troublingly empty. It’s hard to see an artist as imaginative and versatile as Pepperstein running out of ideas, but compared with so much of his previous work, ‘Either/Or’ can’t help but come across as a mediocre sequel.
Max Seddon
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