http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/home_frame.html
The Village Voice, October 8, 1991
Crossing Soviet Lines
The Peppers are actually two people, Ludmila Skripkina and Oleg Petrenko, a young husband-and-wife team from Odessa. Their seamless collaborations might, a first (or perhaps forever), confound American viewers, but even without understanding the Soviet references in their objects or aspects of their humor, the overall work has a strong aesthetic coherence and an immediate pull. There’s a pre-glasnost angst that pervade this work, which makes no references to recent historical events. It’s as if the Peppers have just begun to sprout, and will eventually flower.
The Peppers are part of a new wave (actually a second generation) of conceptualism in Moscow that evolved out of the unofficial movement of “apartment exhibitions” in the late ‘70s. Ilya Kabakov is an obvious mentor; one enters this show as if entering a separate environment. The main gallery at Feldman is filled with the Peppers’ conceptual “paintings,” while two hidden rooms (one is easy to miss altogether) contain the most moving works.
The paintings in the main gallery are uniformly covered with grids and statistical information written in Russian. Their flat, glossy surface, painted dull browns and yellows, are interrupted by a few ordinary objects attached to them. The total effect is perplexing, despite the tiny placards on the wall, which offer translations. One piece, for instance, is a “comparison of interest in various art forms exhibited by young workers with differing levels of education.” Movies prove to be the most popular art form (although the circus is a close second), while painting is the least favorite.
Three-dimensional rubber hoses protrude from some of these works like umbilical chords that connect to mundane objects. A surreal mound of peas tumbles from another, with a small breast peeking out of the top. Hills of peas and potatoes are signature images for the Peppers (if artists can have signature images at age 27). The peas and potatoes become stand-ins for the human race, or perhaps the abundance of these foods-as-objects signals starvation. The breast suggests that the peas might be hundreds of nipples, a reference to mother’s milk or the larger subject of reproduction.
There are 800 pounds of potatoes, along with a number of paintings and sculpture, in what the Peppers call the “Potato Room.” Potato mobiles hand from the ceiling and six canvases (actually on Masonite) depicting masses of detailed potatoes, as if they were faced in a crowd, hand on the wall; the paintings’ titles are footnotes to articles by Soviet scholars and critics. The potato paintings are dimly lit by lamps covered in sections of the now familiar charts, as if science could shed any light on this imagery. Once again, there’s nothing to be gleaned from these works, or at lease, there’s no hard data. (Maybe some hard Dada?) One can look through several plaster potatoes that are embedded with fisheye lenses, but they only spy on bits of empty wall space and fragments of other works.
There’s a tremendous amount of effort and energy going nowhere in the potato room, an obvious comment on the ineffectiveness of a political ideology driven purely by science. In a couple of works, the Peppers make concrete references to fascism (a sculptural loaf of bread is covered with more scientific charts and topped by Hitler’s head), but the overall effect of this work is more absurdist than ideological; it’s as if these pseudoscientific charts are covering everything like an uncontrollable rash.
The Peppers work with objects that were once functional, but everything seems to break down in their hands. In one piece, which appears to be a wheel, two enamel basins are attached to each other, bottom to bottom, and then rimmed with potatoes. The image becomes comical. Nothing is functional anymore in the Peppers’ landscape.
There’s a welcome surprise in a small room off the back gallery, where the Peppers demonstrate their flexibility as artists. While the chart-works purposely distance viewers, 16 small, colorful acrylic paintings on patterned handkerchiefs portray intimate moments of daily life in the Soviet Union. These charming portraits and still lives are often whimsical and enormously pleasing. They may have been conceived in the same cynical spirit of Social Realism that characterizes the art of Komar and Melamid, but the Peppers have a lighter touch; occasionally, a few corners of these material works even lapse into decorative motifs.
There’s a variety in handkerchief material that goes from masculine dark stripes and check to feminine floral embroidery, but there’s nothing very ornate. There’s also a practical range of Soviet citizens, from businessmen in their offices to peasant women in the fields, appearing in these tiny tableaux. The suited businessman sits at a large desk behind a Peppers painting, staring off into space. One of the artists’ objects makes a cameo appearance, usually an awkward one, in virtually every cloth. The disjunction between the art and its surroundings underlies the fact that prior to recent events, there was absolutely no public place for “unofficial” art. Nevertheless, the idea that a Peppers object sticks out like a sore thumb in their own works is also amusing.
One of the more humorous handkerchiefs depicts a large pile of shapely breads, among them the Peppers’ own Hitler loaf; another handkerchief shows three women at the hairdresser sitting under large cone-shaped dryers discussing a Peppers sculpture that one of them is holding. It’s as if their odd sculptures have become mainstream, a fantasy I suspect the Peppers have enjoyed. Yet, apart from all the jokes, one handkerchief shows an old, thin man sitting naked in a small basin, giving himself a bath; next to him on the floor sits the Peppers’ wheel (the one made out of basins), giving the sculpture, which sits in another room, a powerful base in reality. This is one of few images in the show that depict the poverty of living conditions in the Soviet Union.
We are reminded that a woman is half of this collaboration in a number of works. A large, medically inspirited installation, which remains somewhat impenetrable despite a long text on the wall, fills the back gallery; the piece seems to suggest that gynecology practices in the Soviet Union are archaic. In a nearby chart painting, the banal data runs over a realistic naked woman; the mock-scientific grid cuts her up like a piece of meat. In this country, the act of painting on fabric is a feminine statement, but the Peppers explained in their brief interview that they work together on every piece; husband and wife get equal credit for every development in the work. The handkerchief pieces are the gems of this show. Thanks to glasnost, these rags have become art and the Peppers can revel in their own brand of political incorrectness.
ELIZABETH HESSСсылка
