Syndicate: mailradek no. 7

[Oleg Kireev <radek@glasnet.ru>]

Moscow-based magazine "Radek", dedicated to theory, art and politics
continues the project "mailradek in english". The information about the
magazine is available on the Website:
 	http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Coffeehouse/1457.
Everybody who doesn't receive it can send a "subscribe english mailradek" 
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	Our address is: Russia 117333 Moscow, Vavilova 48-237, for O.Kireev.
tel./fax:(095)137 71 31. 

                		            			text no. 62
                               30.10.1998
	Moscow Contemporary Art doesn't exist anymore. This art was seen to embody
the most progressive centre of our new Westernership, to have worked out
strategies of the opposition to the power in the 70s and 80s, to have
represented Russia in the West in the course of Perestroika and claimed to
have a new social project. The dearest thing of the Moscow artistic milieu -
an international acknowledgement - came to an end (even Kulik-the-superstar
is not assured of the near future), the other one, which it hated mostly and
seriously hoped to beat - Tsereteli and the like - has grossly crawled all
over the capital. The galleries opened in the late 80s or the early 90s have
closed or become the local centers *for friends*, new issues of the *Moscow
Art Magazine* are not expected eagerly anymore, the newspaper critics who
attracted the most attention in the previous years, disappeared from their
newspapers, and even the size of cultural columns in newspapers has been
reduced or disappeared altogether. Thank God, we were among the first to
leave this drowning boat...
        Quite simply - they have created their social project in a wrong
way, developed their professional ideology in a wrong way, and built their
plans for the limitless future. The names of Elena Selina, Fedor Romer or
Yuri Leiderman are not telling much already, although these are the central
actors in history of our Actual Art. This art was just totally blind towards
surrounding it reality. The USSR epoch seemed to be gone completely,
democracy - was final, and ahead of them were only foreign trips, philosophy
and a high intellect. This philosophy didn't explain what the capitalism
was, and why any social institution exists the limited time only and then
historically changes.
        The main news of the week indeed sound anew in the context of such
history: Brener returns! The main terrorist and provocateur of the Moscow
art circle hasn't found success in the West also. But he was among the very
first to believe in universality of contemporary art and to build his heroic
strategies of resistance with reference to it. What will he achieve now?
There's even no one to get afraid of his return....
								Oleg Kireev

project: Anatoly Osmolovsky and Oleg Kireev
translation: Irina Aristarkhova and Oleg Kireev
realization: mailradek