Hannelore Fobo • “Timur Novikov's New Artists Lists” - Chapter 7 - The New Artists group and the New Artists movement

Chapter 7 • The New Artists group and the New Artists movement

By a common understanding, the term “group” conveys some kind of shared worldview or task. In art, the term doesn’t claim homogeneity of its members with regard to style and attitude, but a group’s cohesion would be higher than that of a movement, which typically comprises a larger number of adherents.

In 1984 / 1985, the number of New artists increased with several dadaistic performances, first with “Fashion Show” in 1984 more >>, and in 1985 with the “New Theatre” more >> • more >> and Sergey Kuryokhin’s “Pop Mekhanika” concerts more >>. Now, if the “Happy New Year” exhibition in December 1985 – the New Artists’ first large public solo show more >> – marks their consolidation as a group, as I wrote in the previous chapter, the question is whether at that point, the passage from “group” to “movement” had already begun.

“Happy New Year” opened on 27 December 1985 at the Leningrad Rock Club with a Pop-Mekhanika concert at the same venue, which saw the participation of many New artists. The exhibition is a frequent subject of Novikov’s texts. Kozlov documented both the exhibition more >> and the concert more >> with negative films and slides.

In an earlier article about the exhibition, I compared these documents with Novikov’s later lists and came to the conclusion that

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We see that at that point I still wasn’t quite consistent with the use of either “group“ or movement. In fact, I used them as synonyms.

Those ten artists from the exhibition are: five founding members – Sotnikov, Novikov, Khazanovich, Kotelnikov, Kozlov – Valery Cherkasov, made a New artist by Timur Novikov posthumously (see chapter 1, text no 1), as well as, from the "second" generation or wave, Andrey Krisanov, Sergei Bugaev, Vadim Ovchinnikov, Evgeny Yufit (the founder of Necrorealism). The six artists performing on stage during the concert were Georgy Guryanov and Viktor Tsoy (both from the KINO band), Vladislav Gutsevich, Inal Savchenkov, and New Composers Igor Verichev and Valery Alakhov. (For the sake of clarity, I should add that they were other performers on stage, too.)

All sixteen appear in Novikov’s Autobiography from 1998. The other four artists from the аutobiography I included in my New Artists lineup are Andrey Medvedev [1] and, from the New Wilds group (Novye dikie), Oleg Maslov, Alexey Kozin, and Oleg Zaika. There is no exact date indicating when the New Wilds joined the New Artists – apparently, they first showed their works together at the Sverdlov House of Culture exhibition in 1988 – but the New Wilds were part of the Nch-Vch community, an artists’ club that opened around 1986/1987, where Novikov and other New artists would also hang out.[2] more >>

In this way, my New Artists lineup for the year 1986 coincides with Novikov’s lineup in his autobiography (Timur Novikov, 2003, p. 11; text no 9):

Valery Alakhov Sergei Bugaev, Valery Cherkasov, Georgy Guryanov, Vladislav Gutsevich, Kirill Khazanovich, Oleg Kotelnikov, Alexey Kozin, Evgenij Kozlov Andrey Krisanov Oleg Maslov Andrey Medvedev, Timur Novikov, Vadim Ovchinnikov, Inal Savchenkov, Ivan Sotnikov, Viktor Tsoy, Igor Verichev, Evgeny Yufit, Oleg Zaika.

I intuitively regarded these twenty artists from the 1998 autobiography as a group, since they were all (also) visual artists – they had the same profession, in a manner of speaking – with the exception of New Composer Valery Alakhov. Valery Alakhov is also one of the sixteen names I established for “Happy New Year”. I added him although he is a musician, not a painter, because I included Igor Verichev, his partner from the “New Composers”, and Verichev is also a visual artist. In other words, I made the same exception for Alakhov as did Novikov, but decided to ask Alakhov himself whether he considered the New Composers as part of the New Artists or not. Here is his sibylline answer from 12 September, 2018. It proves that my meticulous categorising of the New Artists can hardly find an understanding among those it concerns:

Admittedly, a group of nineteen painters and one musician is a somewhat improbable phenomenon, but I regard this as a formal description: each of these artists belonged to the group around 1986, but not necessarily earlier, and most exhibited together later – in 1988, at the Leningrad Sverdlov House of Culture, where we find sixteen of them in Novikov’s flyer for this exhibition. If we stick to the works identified at the Sverdlov Palace exhibition, their number is seventeen plus musician Alakhov performing on stage.[3]

In his autobiography, Novikov is even quite precise about the succession of those fifteen artists adhering to the group's five founding members (see Table A), but it is one of Novikov's "seeming” accuracies: for instance, the New Composers appear together with Oleg Maslov, Alexey Kozin and Oleg Zaika,[4] which is definitely too late.

Novikov also mentions Sergey Kuryokhin in his autobiography in the context of New Artists exhibitions, but from here, it doesn't follow that Kuryokhin was actually a New artist (see Chapter 9, Sergey Kuryokhin’s Pop-Mekhanika. The principle of reciprocity). I didn’t include in the group artists from “Pirate Television“ (Mamyshev, Lesnik), either, because, as I have written above, I hold “Pirate Television” to fall into the transition period to Novikov’s next art project. This is a due to the periodization I made, where the years from 1989 to 1991 constitute a kind of late period or appendix to New Artists’ activities (see Chapter 3). But this is a matter of interpretation. We may, of course, exclude “Pirate Television” from the New Artists group and include it into the New Artists movement. The difficulty here lies with the fact that Novikov himself contributed to “Pirate Television”, and so it is counter-intuitive to align this project “only” to the movement and not to the group.

Another important point in Novikov's autobiography is that he only speaks of the New Artists as a group and doesn’t return to the term “movement” he created for the flyer from 1988, while he again occasionally uses “movement” in his two lectures from 2001 and 2002. I will come back to this point later.

For the sake of completeness, I should mention Novikov’s reference, in his autobiography, to the movie ASSA. Novikov writes that it is “essentially dedicated to the New Artists group, as well” (“который, в сущности, также посвящен группе «Новые художники»”), but I have doubts about including ASSA as a New Artists movie. Although Bugaev played the main role and Novikov and Krisanov shortly appeared with a band led by Kino’s frontman Viktor Tsoy, the plot as such has nothing to do with the New Artists. Andrey Khlobystin writes:

ASSA is a movie made in the spirit of late Soviet cinema. It goes without saying that it had nothing to do with the New Artists’ Parallel Cinema, although it was mostly their music, actors, works, objects and interiors that created the most interesting moments and a texture that was new for the audience. This is how the movie became a success.

According to Khobystin, Novikov was well aware of the fact that ASSA was a far way from Antonioni’s masterpiece (“это, конечно не Блоу уп» / this is, of course, not Blow Up; Ibid, footnote 260).

But even if we did include this movie, it wouldn’t add new names to the group. Put differently, at this point, I’m still talking about the New Artists group.

In the chapter introducing Novikov’s texts, I defined one of four possible approaches to deal with these texts. No 4 was “One of the (later) lists is more authoritative than the others.” I also wrote, “In the fourth case we need convincing arguments to state why one text should be more important than the others.”

The reason why I consider the autobiography from 1998 as more reliable than the two lectures from 2001 and 2002 is simple. In his lectures, Novikov tended to name those present, among them Necrorealist Yuri Krasev (Tsirkul) and artist and art-critic Andrei Khlobystin (text no 10), while ignoring some of those not present – e.g. Cherkasov and Gutsevich. It is likely that the audience’s physical presence had some influence on his speech. In this respect, I believe Novikov’s written text to be more carefully composed than the lectures, which were given more spontaneously.

In other words, I somewhat adapted Novikov’s 1998 autobiography to make it my authoritative source. This allowed me to consider the group’s formation as completed by 1986 with twenty names of, in the main, visual artists. Accordingly, all other New artists – be it prior or after 1986 – would belong to the New Artists movement.

Provided that we wish to differentiate between group and movement, I think that on the whole, such a classification of “twenty / plus others” makes sense. It is certainly not the only possible classification – although so far, no one has offered any other, not even Novikov himself.

Although Novikov uses both terms in his lectures in different ways – group in relation to the New Artists and movement in relation to the movement of the “New“ (движение “Новых”, dvizhenie “Novykh”) – the way he himself sets these two apart isn't all that clear. The Russian language allows two interpretations of the movement of the “New”: it can be a short form of the “New Artists” movement, or it may refer to New in a general way, which would then include the New Artists group as one of several elements.

Throughout his writings, Novikov offered two conflicting definitions; interestingly, the examples always relate to the years up to 1986. We find these mutually exclusive definitions even in a single text, his lecture from 2002. We could call them the principle of exclusion and the principle of inclusion.

The principle of exclusion holds the New Artists group to be a group of visual artists running parallel to groups from other genres – theatre, literature, music –, all expressing the spirit of the “New”:

I slightly changed Thomas Campbell’s translation of the first part of the English sentence to make it sound more literal. Campbell wrote: “The New Artists per se were only part of the New Artists movement.” Although movement is a possible translation of группировкa / gruppirovka, grouping or group, Novikov used the term movement – движение / dvizhenie – elsewhere, as we have seen.

Campbell, a highly experienced translator and expert in the field of the Leningrad and Saint Petersburg art-scene (he also translated Andreeva’s catalogue texts), opted for another differentiation of core members and other members: the New Artists per se versus the New Artists movement. Now, if according to Novikov’s statement, the New Artists per se are neither performers nor writers nor musicians, then they are, by way of exclusion, artists in a narrower sense of the word – visual artists.

This makes way for a double definition: the New Artists per se would be a group of visual artists, and the New Artists in a larger sense would be a movement that included the New Artists per se plus artists from fields other than visual art (I will now use the terms New Artists group and New Artists per se as synonyms). This type of distinction supports my own interpretation of the matter.

At least such a distinction is logically plausible, and this would explain why Campbell chose to translate Novikov’s term gruppirovka as movement instead of group – the New Artists movement.

Unfortunately, establishing two separate categories or sets hasn’t yet entirely solved the problem. Actually, they cannot be regarded as totally separate. We now proceed to the principle of inclusion. In the same lecture from 2002, Novikov explains how the New Artists “per se”, that is, a group of visual artists, became artists in the broader sense of the word: a person skilled in some creative task or occupation. The term New Artists now turns into a general term including all artistic genres.

But what happened next? Having mastered recomposition, the New Artists set about mastering different genres: music, literature, theatrical performance, film – everything was subject to their endeavours. What was needed were infusions of one genre into the other. (Timur, 2013, p. 153, text no 11)

Such mastery is not only a demonstration of talent; it is also mocks the rigid Soviet system, which claimed to rightfully keep every citizen within the limits of some desired or tolerated activity according to their formal education. Here, visual art figures as the higher-ranking category for all other genres, which thus become “branches” of the New Artists per se. Speaking in terms of set theory, “musicians”, “poets”, “performers” etc. are all subsets of the set “visual artists“.

This offered an advantage: Novikov could “recount” one and the same artist in different categories: in the set and the subset.

For instance, in his article “The Celebration of Arts” (text no. 3), Novikov lists ten groups participating in the Pop-Mekhanika performance. Among them are “a group of artists”, the“ industrial group“, and the “New Theatre”. The group of artists consisted of “Leningrad artists Oleg Kotelnikov, Evgenij Kozlov Timur Novikov, Sergei Bugaev, Vladimir Gutsevich, Moscow artists Nikita Alexeev and Nikolai Ovchinnikov”. (Antologiia, approx. 1996, p. 93). Of those, Timur Novikov and Sergei Bugaev belonged to all three groups or sets, and Oleg Kotelnikov to two, namely to “a group of artists” and the “New Theatre”.

This doesn’t violate the principle of the higher-ranking category “visual arts”. All members of the “New Theatre” and the “industrial group” (noise-producing artists) present on stage were also members of said “group of artists”. The group doesn’t get larger – it doesn’t turn into a movement.

Hence, if we want speak of the New Artists movement, what we need are people who are not New Artists per se but collaborate with them in their “side” projects – those people Novikov called “other artists, musicians, strangers and passersby.” (The New Artists, 2012, p. 107, text no 2).

Let us consider the case of the New Theatre. In his autobiography, Novikov wrote about the “New Theatre”:

Apart from the “New Artists”, with the [New] Theatre performed musicians from the Kino band, Natalia Pivovarova,[5] who later founded Kolibri, Zhanna Aguzarova,[6] at that time beginning her career, Necrorealists and fashionistas.[7]

To my knowledge, at these performances, the musicians of the Kino band and the Necrorealists were each represented by a single member, Georgy Guryanov and Evgeny Yufit, respectively. A little earlier in the same text, Novikov listed them both as New artists.

Thus, Guryanov and Yufit were part of the New Artists and its subset New Theatre. Novikov could have simplified the sentence in the following way “Apart from the New Artists, with the [New] Theatre performed Natalia Pivovarova, who later founded Kolibri, Zhanna Aguzarova, at that time beginning her career, and fashionistas.” But this would have made the performances less grandiose, and this was obviously not Novikov’s intention.

With regard to Guryanov, it is interesting that Novikov, unlike Andreeva,[8] never considered him as a New Artists founding member, although during the zero object scandal, Guryanov was just as active as Khazanovich in taking sides with Novikov and Sotnikov.

Now we are left with the remaining performers. Natalia Pivovarova, Zhanna Aguzarova, and fashionistas were definitely not members of the New Artists per se, but they participated with the New Theatre troupe. Would a one-time participation be enough to make them members of the New Theatre? Should they then be included into the New Artists movement?

Suppose we do. This doesn’t really get us very far, because the New Theatre is the most evident example of a New Artists’ group activity with “other” people, that is, extending the group to a New Artists movement. The situation is less clear with music, film, and literature. Did these activities actually attract people from outside the New Artists group?

Suppose we consider the “New Composers” as a musical branch of the New Artists – they performed with the New Theatre. But from here nothing follows, because in the 1980s, the “New Composers” didn’t “absorb” other musicians – they strictly remained a duo. So what about the Kino band? It was connected to the New Artists per se only via two of its four permanent members, Guryanov and Tsoy, who were also painters. In the late 1980s, they showed their works with the New Artists.[9] Andrey Krisanov and Sergei Bugaev were New Artists independently of their occasional performances with Kino on stage.

Film was represented in the first place by Evgeny Yufit, the leader of the Necrorealists. Necrorealist members contributed to Yufit’s films as actors, but were also Necrorealist painters. Evgeny Yufit (and to some degree Yury Krasev) connected the New Artists and the Necrorealists in persona. Is such a personal link enough to regard the Necrorealists as part of the New Artists movement? Again, it depends on how one looks at it. The same goes for literature. Ekaterina Andreeva and E. Kolovskaya included some Necrorealists – Yufit, Krasev/Tsirkul, Mertvy/Kumaryatsev into the New Artists Antologiia/Anthology. On the other hand, the exhibition catalogue from 2010 “Brushstroke. The New Artists and Necrorealists 1982 – 1991” sets these three artists into the context of “Necrorealism”, discussed as a group of its own.[10]

In essence, there are three questions: one – how substantial or influential was the presence of one or more New artists in some kind of collective activity with other individuals or groups? Two – if they were influential, were they influential in their quality as New artists? And three – at what point can we speak of those other individuals or groups as belonging to the New Artists movement?

I know this sounds rather formal, but the idea is that a movement is formed around a core of people drawing others into their orbit. Who exactly were these people “orbiting around” the New Artists per se?

Since there existed no written chart of the New Artists, there was no need to give a definite answer. Groups and individual names could all be subsumed in the extremely vague term “New Artists movement”.

[1] It is the only time Medvedev’s name is in any of Novikov’s texts on the New Artists.

[2] Furthermore, Maslov and Kozin are in the “Folk Art Lovers Club” Chronicle lineup dated to 1986 See Chapter 8.

[3] Among the works identified are those by three “newcomers”: Andrey Khlobystin, Maya Khlobystina, Alexander Ovchinnikov. For a list of all seventeen artists, see Chapter 1.

[4] “We were also joined by New Composers Igor Verichev and Valery Alakhov and the “wild“ artists Oleg Maslov, Alexei Kozin and Oleg Zaika.” (Text 9)

[5] Natalia Pivovarova isn’t documented in any of the three New Theatre performances, but she performed on stage with Pop Mekhanika at least once, in October 1986.

[6] Possibly at the Moscow New Theatre performance.

[7] Translated by the author. The English translation in Timur, 2003, is not very accurate and has “other members of the alternative scene” instead of “Necrorealists and fashionistas”

[8] “In 1982, the New Artists consisted of Ivan Sotnikov, Oleg Kotel’nikov, Kirill Khazanovich, Evgeny Kozlov, and Georgy Gurianov.” Oxford Handbook, p. 1004. See also footnote 7

[9] The other two, Yuriy Kasparyan and Alexander Titov (succeeded by Tikhomirov), were never related to the New Artists.

[10] The text on the Necrorealists is by Olesya Turkina. Generally speaking, in compilations, E. Andreeva writes about the New Artists, while O. Turkina writes about the Necrorealists.

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