9 days now in Russia and I'm just beginning to get started. I learned the verb "to establish oneself" at just about the same time I began to feel established. Я почти учреждалась.
Research. Skip this if you're not interested in that:
-I met with Yuri and he stressed again what everyone else has been stressing: that my research needs a concrete focus and a much narrower goal than I've been elucidating so far. He gave me some numbers and suggested I more actively use the resources available to me--my association with the Center of Contemporary Art, which can possibly get me ins where I otherwise wouldn't have them, for one. He also came up with a good idea for narrowing my field of interviewees, which until now has been rather nebulous and far too vast to yield any interesting or comprehensible final project. What if, he said, you ask a few very important people in the SPB art scene who they consider to be the 20 or 30 most interesting artists working right now in St. Petersburg, and maybe use that as a list of possible contacts. He gave me a few numbers and names, and I've scheduled to meet with the curator of the Russian Beauty show on Tuesday.
-The focus that my project is working towards is this one exhibit--Russian Beauty, Русская Красота--and the 30 or so artists that participated in it. I want to explore representations of Russian national and personal identity in the 21st century, see how artists see their work and how they represent themselves and their culture. Russia has been through a lot. The Paul Gauguin questions of Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going? are deeply embedded in art, in general, but these questions are especially pressing and interesting in Russia because she has changed so frequently, radically, recently. The past, the history of Russian art which Russian artists have to call their own and draw upon, is fraught with contradictions--each chapter has been villified and quarantined in turn. They know where they come from, but perhaps not how they feel towards it--and the questions of Who are we and where are we going are answered differently by each artist.
-So, I want to make a documentary video-collage that shows artist responses to these questions posed to them by a foreigner, an интосранка. I asked my friend Andrey, who's a film student, if he'd be interested in helping me out with the technical aspects of it--contributing his time, camera, and expertise to the effort. He said yes. Marina thinks it's still too vague an idea, too deep, and that the people I interview are likely to wax philosophical and forget to talk about art. I'll need to make it clear before hand where my interest lies and carefully formulate my questions so that people don't get carried away and so that "their speech went more or less about art". Marina gave me a list of 10 of the most interesting artists, in her estimation, 3 of which I already know (Yuri and the two Pyotrs, Bely and Shvetsov, who share his studio) and one more of which I've been hoping to meet.
-I don't know how large a part of my thesis this documentary can be, or if it's even appropriate thesis material (Art history theses are generally, um, written). I'm not an art major or a film major, so I don't know if I'll even get thesis credit for this. It might be, as far as the art history department's concerned, a dead-end waste of time--but that's only one opinion, and not the one that matters the most. For example, although she thinks my idea still needs refinement, Marina is thrilled that I want to do a video and put forth the idea of organizing a presentation in the Frants Gallery Space in New York, which is apparently devoted to St. Petersburg art (Who know?).
This coming week will be very fruitful!
Also, the solstice is tomorrow and I plan to go out walking all night with my roomie. Marvelous!
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