Hannelore Fobo • “Timur Novikov's New Artists Lists” - Chapter 11 - The New Artists’ lifespan: a wondrous metamorphosis

Chapter 11 • The New Artists’ lifespan: a wondrous metamorphosis

A certain weariness is apparent in Novikov’s conclusion that the New Artists “ceased to exist as a group”. It reminds me of Kuryokhin’s statement about Pop Mekhanika from about the same time, quoted by Alexander Kan in his biography about Kuryokhin:

There is no unity, no common feeling that would unite people and make them create a common culture. Pop Mekhanika was once based on the principle of friendship. It brought everybody together and, consequently, carried a certain spiritual charge. Now it is able to carry only a purely formal charge, and this is the only charge it is carrying. I can expand it compositionally, find lots of new stylistic devices, but the process has become somewhat mechanical. (Kan Skipper, p. 80, translated by T. Zyulikova)

It is true that Novikov stipulated a common culture (“the new Leningrad school”), while Kuryokhin, in contrast, lamented the absence of a common culture. Yet the result of expanding their realm of activity to the international field had a similar effect on both: it helped reflect on past experiences and opened the prospect of pursuing a personal career on a new level. This induced a desire to start something new.

But in 1988/1989, at the time Novkov pronounced his verdict on the end of the New Artists, they (and Pop-Mekhanika) just started gaining recognition in the West – paradoxically, for their strength and freshness. Several international exhibitions had been prepared or were about to be organised, and they were carried out between 1988 and 1991. The New Artists exhibited under their own label until 1989 (Stockholm and Aarhus, 1988, Liverpool 1989), and then with their individual names, but still together (Budapest, 1990, Nantes, 1991). At that time, Novikov had already begun his new project “New Academy of Fine Arts” (in short: New Academy). In two of the texts considered here, he mentions the passage from the New Artists to New Academy. In his biography from 1998, he dates its foundation to the year 1989, when a non-formal New Artists sub-organisation became the New Academy of Fine Arts:

In the 1990s, I began to feel the wonderful impact of classical art, and in 1988, we started to organise our New Academy. That was the first wave of conservatism. The following year, the New Academy of All Sorts – the old organisation of the New Artists – became the New Academy of Fine Arts.

In his lecture from 2002, the New Artists as a whole turned into the New Academy:

The Moscow intellectuals at the Moscow Art Magazine have started singing the tunes that the New Artists who went over to the New Academy had been singing in the late eighties and early nineties. (Timur, 2013, p. 157, text no 11)

If we stick to the facts, from the New Artists per se only Novikov himself, Guryanov, Medvedev and Maslov joined the New Academy, plus some artists from the very late New Artists movement like Khlobystin and a number of “other” artists. However, the majority of New artists present at the Sverdlov Palace of Culture exhibition – among them Bugaev, Gutsevich, Kotelnikov, Kozlov, Krisanov, Ovchinnikov, Savchenkov, Sotnikov, Tsoy, Verichev, and Zaika – did not adhere to Novikov’s new project. At best, we could call the New Academy a spin-off from the New Artists, if the latter hadn’t ceased to exist in 1988, according to Novikov.

A similar situation accounts for the passage from Letopis to the New Artists. In 1986, Novikov wrote about the New Artists “we can date the groups emergence to 1977: that was the year when the Chronicle [Letopis] group of artists emerged, a group that would be reborn as New Artists in 1982“. (The New Artists 2012, p.27, text no 4).

A little later in the text he stated that “the Chronicle [Letopis] group practically ceased to exist after its fourth group show in 1981. So the following year (1982) part of the Chronicle group – Timur Novikov, Ivan Sotnikov, Evgenij Kozlov – and their friends Oleg Kotelnikov and Kirill Khazanovich merged into a new community of artists.“ (Ibid, p.27)

We see that in both cases, with Letopis and the New Artists, the end is not the end. Accordingly, the limits of a group’s existence touch not only possible forms of afterlife, but possible forms of pre-existence. If we follow Novikov’s logic, we can extent the New Artists’ existence into both directions – from the beginning of Letopis to the end of the New Academy. It is a double metamorphosis: from Letopis to the New Artists the group becomes the New Artists proper, and thereafter it continues existing in the form of the New Academy of Fine Arts.

But at the end of this double metamorphosis, all eight founding members of Letopis and almost all New artists per se had disappeared. To be exact, it was Novikov alone who maintained the continuity between all three groups: no one else but Novikov had been a member of all three.

In this way, Novikov represented tradition, not avant-garde. To counter this effect, he also proclaimed the cessation of the older group, as this alone allowed him to speak of the emergence of something new, emphasised in the labels of both of his foundations: New Artists, New Academy. Bridging the gaps prior and subsequent to the New Artists in propria persona, Novikov acquired a type of “collective” personality: the “I“ becomes a collective “we”, similar to the majestic plural.

Seen from the outside, and particularly in retrospect, the group tends to become “Timur Novikov and the New Artists”, as the title of Ekaterina Andreeva’s article in the Oxford Handbook suggests. Accordingly, in her article, the New Artists lineup for 1985 includes thirteen names, but not Novikov’s.

If we consider that neither the New Artists nor the New Academy had a successor to Novikov, their founder and spokesperson, the degree to which others identified him with the collective becomes apparent. In my opinion, the New Artists ceased to exist not so much because they turned from a group into a movement, but because Novikov, possessing the power of naming, decided that they had ceased to exist. But the fact that none of the New artists intervened to keep the group alive also means that they were perceiving themselves as individual artists, independently of the “collective” – it was no substitute for their own identity.

to Chapter 12 • Table A. Distribution of New artists in Timur Novikov's texts
Table B. Selected New Artists exhibitions and performances (Leningrad) >>
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