Page 8 - Making Books

viktoR goPPe making books

Albert Lemmens
Serge Stommels

Artists such as Viktor Goppe are both the catalysts and change in the perception of art is the 1991 publication
the products of a paradigm shift in Russian art. Goppe of a special issue of the Leningrad Art Journal under
was born in 1962 in the provincial town of Kineshma, the title Ty Erot, which is entirely dedicated to erotic art.
about 200 km north-east of Moscow on the banks of Not surprisingly, young artists, seeing these signs of
the Volga river into a well-educated middle-class fam- transformation in imagery, wanted to experiment with
ily. In 1984 Goppe graduated from the sculptural de- the new possibilities in the visual language. Growing
partment of the Riga Stepan Erzia Art school. In 1985 up with constant change in the background, Goppe
he created his own ceramics studio in Kineshma where understood and exploited its implications for his own
he worked until 1987, the year he started his studies at life. In his examinations and analysis of topics such as
the graphic department of the Moscow Higher Institute ‘erotica’ and ‘being Russian,’ the changes of the 1990s
for the Decorative and Applied Arts (the former Stro- are ever present in his works, sometimes more and
ganov Institute). Between 1988 and 1991, he lived in sometimes less conspicuous, but always there.
Odessa and Warsaw, working as an interior designer.
In 1989 Goppe started his own publishing house in his In Moscow, the formative underground centre was ini-
Kineshma apartment. tially a mixed one. In the late 1950s, young authors
gathered around Evgenii Kropivnitskii, who was a poet
Goppe’s education in art and the beginning of his ca- and an artist at the same time. This convergence of arts
reer as an artist coincided with the period in which the was nothing new- on the contrary, many of the Russian
traditional institutions of the Soviet Union were under- Avant-Garde artists of the 1910s and 1920s developed
going heavy revision during perestroika. The influence a close cooperation with poets and vice-versa. In the
of these events on the arts were far reaching. Many 1960s the Moscow school of conceptualism had be-
of the young artists developed independent ideas of come the major underground force in the moderniza-
art, which often proved in conflict with ruling concepts. tion of Russian art. It not only concentrated on painting
Small wonder that the old generation regarded the new and sculpture but also on poetry. This group of painters
generation as polemicists, whose main goal was to and poets was widely known as the Lianozovo group,
break with tradition and to rewrite the definition of art. In named after the suburb where they lived, north of Mos-
the early 1990s, the animosity/these circumstances/…/ cow. The goal of their art was to challenge the Soviet
created a tumultuous atmosphere in the world of Rus- reality, to question it and to treat it with irony, whether it
sian art, opening the road to new possibilities for young concerned life, death, gender or sexuality.
artists such as Viktor Goppe. However, one has to real-
ize that during this period the renewal in art was not so The art of the Moscow conceptualism relied on the lan-
much a case of well-thought conception as a trial and guage of the Soviet Union, but by 1992 that language
error game with the officialdom, which was still in place had become anachronistic. The fall of the Soviet Union
at that time. A young artist would try a new concept and caused an enormous shift in understanding and creat-
then await the official reaction. With the officials them- ing Russian art and poetry, as is demonstrated in the
selves being at a loss about what was still acceptable works of the painter Viktor Pivovarov and the poets Igor
and what had to be rejected, this created a very bois- Kholin and Genrikh Sapgir, who were close friends.
terous and the same time scaring atmosphere. Igor S. Kholin was an outstanding Russian poet and
prose-writer, a brilliant figure of the Russian literary
The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the collapse of underground. Under the Soviet regime he could only
old institutional and social structures and allowed free- publish books for children. The essential characteris-
dom of choice in personal life. Artists, whether painter tic of Kholin’s poetry was freedom. In his view, to be
or poet, were aware of this, and observed how social a poet, one had to place oneself outside poetry. The
distinctions, officially non-existent under socialism, most important activity was not to write but to watch. As
were drawn into sharper relief. They were also forced Goppe had a rather close relationship with Igor Kholin,
to acknowledge the increasing visibility/ of more nega- the influence of the poet on the artistic development of
tive aspects of life, such as alcohol abuse, crime, sex, Goppe as a young artist must have been instrumental,
and ethnicity, which were downplayed or denied dur- the more so as Goppe published six books, forbidden,
ing Soviet rule. A very striking example of the complete during Kholin’s life time.
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