From “You’re Not in Moscow Here”
“….Vasily Slonov of Novosibirsk became the unintended hero of the ‘Perm cultural revolution,’ a programme of serious investment in the cultural life and construction of cultural institutions initiated by the then-governor of Perm region Oleg Cherkunov. The authorities shut down Slonov’s one-man show, devoted to the coming Olympics in Sochi, which signified the end of the era of cultural innovation: new cultural institutions and numerous festivals and the public art programme were closed down and the only museum of contemporary art outside the capitals, PERMM, was on the verge of closing. The cause of the scandal was the Olympic Series, in which the artists used the traditions and aesthetics of Soviet propaganda posters and caricatures. The paintings in the series combine popular Russian items—stove, izba, balalaika, bear, Stalin, GULAG, Cheburashka, Kalashnikov, talismans of the Sochi Olympics, a dacha outhouse, barbed wire, and classical ballet. The resulting vicious monsters make the slogan WELCOME TO SOCHI 2014, framing the pictures: more than ambivalent.
Like his colleagues using similar strategies, Vasily Slonov’s discourse addresses the lack of critical thinking and the suggestibility of the average person. The artist literally illustrates the myths about Russia, absurdizing them and making them surrealistic—here country is more important than a citizen, nationality more than the individual, appearance more than essence. However, this irony is addressed inward, to the average Russian, only on one side. There is a reverse ironic gesture addressed to this kind of thinking in the West. Depicting Russia as a territory of Hell and its residents as aggressive, vicious monsters—’They’re all lazy, alcoholics, and sadists!’—the artist also mocks the ‘Western’ view of Russia in the manner of Charlie Hebdo. The mythological consciousness in all its manifestations is the artist’s main target. The strategy here is not refuting but making literal the crude and casual stereotypes about the country held not only by the Russia’s ‘enlightened class’ but by ordinary people outside Russia, where the country exists in two simple versions—the stone village of Moscow, and all the rest, ‘Siberia where it is cold, lots of snow, and bears wander around.’ Within that framework, Russia’s largest industrial cities—Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Chelyabinsk, Omsk, Samara, Rostov-on-Don, Ufa, Krasnoyarsk, Perm, Voronezh, Volgograd, Krasnodar, Saratov, Tyumen, and Tolyatti—form one wild place. This is well illustrated by the Map of Russia, where the philistine (and apparently proto-fascist) places not cities constitute locations where not-quite-humans of varying disgustingness reside. This encompasses contiguous lands, where the phobias, hostility, arrogance, and imperial ambitions of that kind of mindset extend.
Vasily Slonov is inspired by the banality of the elements that rule the ‘aggressively obedient majority’ in every society, and offers viewers an opportunity to be amazed by their absurdity and simultaneous potency. The artist often uses an axe—the universal Russian response to any challenge and explanation of any ‘complications’ in Russian culture and politics (for example, the protests by the Russian oppositions is interpreted by pro-regime propaganda as ‘a call for the axe,’ that is, rebellion, which the genius of Russian literature Alexander Pushkin called ‘meaningless and ruthless’). He has a portrait of Dostoevsky engraved into the spines of the collected works of Lenin, and portraits of Russian leaders of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries engraved on axe blades and hanging on a carpet as an awarded named weapon. Statements about the ‘long-suffering people’ illustrate a series of kokoshniki made of black rubber, soldered metal, and fragments of gas masks—an S&M version of the traditional festive women’s headdress that have become popular symbols of Russian backwardness and preference for the past. The objects, executed in the characteristic fetishistic mode, provoke the wearer into personifying Russia (who is, as is well known, a woman) suffering from raw material monopolies, secret service agencies, and the occupier Moscow regime.
After the ‘events on Bolotnaia Square’ (protests of the Moscow middle class against falsified elections to the State Duma in 2011), the meme of vatnik [quilted jacket] appeared. This is the name for warm winter work clothing associated in Russia with unqualified labour, the labour of prisoners, labour in rural areas, with inadequate education, and bad taste. The theme, which represents the stupid representatives of ‘the vast majority’ that supports the policies of the president and the government, brought into being Slonov’s vatnik series—an alarm bell, a woman’s torso, a Kalashnikov, and a heart sewn like the clothing with the characteristic quilted surface.”