Oleg Dou: Melting Worlds (2019) print with acrylic
Coloured polymer and clay
Separate images throughout this issue are taken from the book Russian Art in the New Millennium (Edward Lucie-Smith and Sergei Reviakin Unicorn 2022).
It is interesting to see the artist community in Russia as divided as elsewhere with some nationalistic and some against war, some traditional and some revolutionary. The regular reports we receive that everyone in Russia is brainwashed and cannot see through the fog of propaganda do not wholly apply to artists and probably not those who talk with them. In the growing antipathy (wholly justified) toward the Russian military and the Kremlin we must guard against the broad brush of warmongering and making every Russian the enemy.
While we would suggest the great writers and artists of the past in Russia give the lie to Putin and his acolytes; nevertheless the past though is where we have all come from,and it remains the past. But we do emphasis there is a less brutal, more libertarian, more democratic side to Russia that we should not ignore. It is all too easy in war to acclimatise ourselves to hatred and demonization of the entire country of our enemy. I quote in translation Pushkin, “If you but knew the flames that burn in me which I attempt to beat down with my reason.”Apt because I too, feel the war beat and sense within my animal self a longing to teach Putin a lesson. Knowing that that lesson will cost millions of lives is all that limits the anger at what he and his military are doing to Ukraine and to Europe.
And yet thinkers … her artists … her writers and musicians. Is this not truly Russia. When the wars are over and the politicians long dead is it not to them we look for sustenance and an understanding of the humanity within a country?
Artists in Russia deal with their traditions and expand into the contemporary engaging with worldwide thinking and exploration exactly as all other artists but in their own voice and with their own spin. So we reproduce a few of the many voices in Russia not one of which applauds the invasion or the nationalism but seeks another voice; communicates another message; beats with a different tune.
Hearts can only be invaded by one person at a time and one-on-one brings reflection, wisdom, conversation … all the things war rips away.
