- Title: RUSSIA: Artists find new freedom of expression in credit crunch
- Date: 4th February 2009
- Summary: VARIOUS OF ART INSTALLATION
- Embargoed: 19th February 2009 12:00
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- Reuters ID: LVA815U0IULPQSAOKDLBXXA9S4W3
- Story Text: Visitors to an art gallery ensconced in a former Moscow chocolate factory were over the weekend drawn into the surreal world of a sordid dinner party.
In their performance titled 'White Rainbow over the Table', performance artists Andrei Bartenev and Katya Bochavar played with the idea of a banquet-gone-wrong. Two 'teams' of white-clad performers staged a food fight across the room, throwing cakes, flour and other products.
It was a scene of chaos and comedy, with ironic echoes of wasted plenty and wayward consumerism, in a time of crisis.
As the floor grew slippery with cake cream and yoghurt, performers fell over, got covered in food and took off the top layers of their clothing.
The lights went out and confusion reigned. Then came the black-clad teams, looking like riot police in their welding helmets and plastic masks.
The 'black' teams dismantled and destroyed Bochavar's table-like structure with blow torches and crowbars, giving the second part of the performance a darker, more sinister feel.
The audience - many of them from Moscow's art and society elite - sat at one end of the hall, ducking flying bits of cake and dusting flour off their designer black.
Maria Baibakova, who is the gallery's project director sees the recent credit crisis as something of a silver lining for artists, who are released form the restraints commercial art can place on creativity.
"Artists actually enjoy times of crisis because they feel that again they can make work that doesn't need to be commercially viable. They can be more free and I find a lot of artists have this romantic idea that their creative genius needs to suffer for something great to come out so a lot of people that are frustrated with their output, I find are very happy that they'll have this chance," she said.
U.S. educated Baibakova who funds 'Baibakova Projects' entirely through private sponsorship said last year's art boom in Russia did not always help the artists themselves.
"There was a lot of speculation on the part of western collectors who wanted to make a quick buck thinking that Russia would be the next hot thing and they bought a lot of works without really navigating through what's good and what's bad. And I think that that isn't a very positive thing because I think that that's supported some careers and didn't support others. And there isn't necessarily logic to who got to share the spotlight and who didn't," she said.
As well as giving artists a place to express themselves Baibakova, who also curates the Baibakov family's private art collection believes her gallery fills a new niche in the Moscow art world.
"The galleries in Moscow support the artists in the commercial sense so they don't have enough time to develop collective projects that are not necessarily commercial but inspirational, and thus in Moscow there needs to be various types of activity," she said.
The global financial crisis has hit the Russian art market particularly hard, with auctions of contemporary Russian art in December showing poor sales. Prices have fallen between 30 to 50 percent according to market analysts, with contemporary art especially suffering from the shrinking buying power of global collectors. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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