MOSCOW ARTISTS UNION INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM

North of West, East of North: Artists of the Wasteland
curated by Martin Holt

Ten years ago, (year?) I attended an international symposium sponsored by the Moscow Artists Union.  Invited  were fifteen artist from the USA, and twenty artists from the Soviet Union.  The Symposium was held at the Artists Union facility in Jurmala, Latvia, a Soviet resort city on the Baltic Sea.  Each artist had a separate studio, and was expected to produce work for the duration of the six week symposium, at the end of which would be an exhibition where the work made would be offered for sale to interested government offices anywhere in the Soviet Union.  It was a typical method for Soviet artists to produce work for which they could be officially paid by their government for their labor as an artist in a non commercial economy.  Soviet artists could do some of their best work at these symposia which were held at least annually.

This particular event was unusual because it also involved artists from the USA, working under the same conditions as the Soviets, with their room and board, exercise and medical facilities, studio space, materials, firing and fellowship provided by the people of the USSR.  Our only requirement was to make art seriously and produce it in a mildly competitive environment.

The Soviet artists came from all over the Soviet Union; from Moscow, from Estonia, Uzbekistan, Khirgizia, Lithuania, Ukraina, and Siberia.  We came from all over the USA; from North Carolina, Pennsylvania,  Minnesota, Arizona, Utah and Montana.  Altogether it was an amazing collection of artists working in the common medium of clay with every kind of style and approach, background and philosophy one could imagine. 

The "Americans" as we were collectively called had no idea what to expect; but as it turned out, neither did the Soviets.  They were quite unprepared for the vigorous and enormous output of work and play that emanated from us.  In fact, we used up most of the available material in just a few days such that our hosts had to send trucks and busses out to surrounding factories to bring in more clay so that there would be enough material to complete the symposium. 

Our work was not frivolous.  Some of it was "political" in nature, some was of a large scale, some was table ware.  We had brought certain things we did not expect to be available such as bright glazes, china paints, or colorful slips.  Our studio doors were open and we freely moved from one studio to another to visit, share stories, coffee, or to sing and dance, or collaborate on individual pieces.  In time we began to connect with the "Russians"  as they opened up and let us into their spaces, their studios, their thoughts and their hearts.  "The Americans are so free in spirit," they said.  "We do not have such freedom."

We noticed that there were a few of these Soviet artists who were more like us than others.  Their work was looser,  more experimental, more bold.  They combined materials and worked in collaboration.  Their work structured more space than it displaced and it had an expansive quality about its form and its surface.  As we got to know them better, it turned out that those Soviet artists  whose work expressed a freedom foreign to the other Soviets, were Siberians. 

They had lived their lives and studied their art away from the center, in a magnificent waste land which we call Siberia.  Siberia was the Soviet frontier, in art as well as in fact.  Most of the European inhabitants of that region broke the mold of conformism, and frequently that is why they ended up there.  By 1991, the extreme repression of Stalinist Sovietism had passed, and these young artists saw the Brezhnev era as a joke. 

They made their own rules, set up their own ceramics programs at the institutes and learned about clay as art from an instinctual source, "gleana krasnoya," plastic red earth of their mother land.  It stuck to their boots as they walked muddy streets in spring and fall.  It blew into their highrise apartments dusting the surfaces of mahogany wardrobes and clear plastic turntable covers from which they played, The Grateful Dead and King Crimson.  Their rivers ran boiling with it in the spring thaw, and they chinked the logs of their traditional log homes with it to keep the winter wind and snow at bay.

I have continued my contact with these Siberian Russians.  Their work continues to hold the promise for the future of that political and economic wasteland.  In time their natural resources will become a source of well being as globalism finds its way into their  niches.  But they have great hearts and lovely spirits and it expresses it self in their work.    

Those of us who have grown up in the north country, experiencing privation of creature comforts, resources and contact with the cultural centers, have outlooks and expectations which differ from those of other parts of the USA.  Out West, we have had to make do with what is available to us, and fashion from less, the objects of our dreams.  Perhaps something in that deprivation has enabled us to find our pleasure and beauty in objects and images which exist in a raw material state. 

Something like that attracted me to the effects of wood fired ceramics.  It can be primal in surface and raw expression of fire, mineral and vapor as it is displayed in iron bearing clay fired to very high temperatures, and held there for long periods of time.  Temperatures where ash is turning liquid, and dry clay is once again becoming plastic in the melt of heat.  We are happy firing in a common, folk style, single chamber kiln in which the fuel, the ware, and the fluids of combustion mix in the same atmosphere, creating a shared energy which becomes the fire that hardens, and colors and glazes the objects contained within it.

All of this work expresses something of primal essence.  All of the ideas are shared, borrowed or communal.  The work and this show is a collaboration among

 Artists of a Wasteland

which lies

north of west, east of north