In 1970-1980s Nikita Alexeev was involved in many significant events of Moscow artistic underground. He displayed his works at the first outdoor show of avant-garde art which was allowed by Soviet authorities to be held in the outskirts of Moscow, in 1974. He was among the pioneers of Moscow Conceptual art school and one of the founders of the Collective Actions group, an important art association for the moment, performances and texts of which articulated the basics of the “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism” (the term was coined by Boris Groys).Nikita Alexeev is not just one of the first Russian “New Wavers”. From 1982 to 1984 he was an owner of APTART, the first unofficial gallery in the Soviet Union: he offered his one-room apartment for radical young artists and facilitated the development of new art movement. During the perestroika period, the artist actively constructed the image of free youth culture integrating all kinds of art, ranging from poetry and visual art to rock music and films.
In 1987 Alexeev moved to Paris where, deprived of the familiar communication environment, he acquired a sort of monastery solitude in the new (and alien to him) social and artistic milieu. It was the “Paris period” that saw the final development of his personal style and emergence of exclusive individual subjects and formal methods he is still using today.
Paradoxical, as it may seem, Nikita Alexeev enjoying the statute of a recognized classic of contemporary art, quit artistic experimentation and took up journalism soon after his return to Russia in 1993. Yet, in the early 2000s he made a comeback to the Moscow art scene with exquisite lyrical drawings, unexpected for a veteran conceptualist. This short account of Nikita Alexeev’s artistic history is necessary not only to introduce him to the Istanbul public. It is also an opportunity to clarify his position in contemporary Russian art, on the one hand, and to outline the main sources of his strategies (both in life, and art), on the other.
The artist chose graphics – ink drawings and watercolors, works made by oil pastel and color crayon – as his main media. His works on paper formed extensive series. The series branched into complex spatial structures resembling full-fledged installations rather than traditional displays of graphics. Alexeev’s “graphic installations” are not scenically decorated interiors where narration unravels, involving a viewer in a sort of performance manipulating all the arsenal of technology available to contemporary art. They offer ephemeral, emotionally vibrant environments brought to life with an easy breath of poetical metaphors rather than the element of solid form or the epic magic of Hollywood style visual effects.
Existentially and professionally, the artist employs only one method: he speaks quietly, stays unnoticed, disappears at the moment when he is aware of a danger to find himself in the center of an art mainstream, in the focus of artistic fashion. This obvious escapism as the basis of aesthetical tactics is rooted in the desire of the artist to offer an opportunity to glide over the fragile ice of semi-transparent poetic texts for those who are interested in viewing and understanding them.
Adventures of mind where reason constrains streams of sentimental impressions are present in the Eurasian Songs project produced specially for the KUAD Gallery. It is the same old poetry, but it is structured according to the strict rules of various barriers – those of media, of subject, of methodology, not according to the romantic laws of the author’s free will.
Mutual resistance, mutual control of sensibility and sense helps to discover the meaningful nodes which require detailed decoding. These nodes include, in particular, contemporary Russian geopolitics based on the myth of Russia as a successor of the Byzantine Empire and modern Russian ideology of state based on the concept of chosen nature of the Russian people and of the “special way” for a great country. Nikita Alexeev explores all these old, but enduring “Third Rome” ambitions, all this ideological broth, according to his own rules.
The cross and the crescent as fundamental symbols of the “Russian idea” and signs of prevailing religious confessions in Russia travel from one drawing to another. They are also present in the titles of parts of the whole project.
It is not accidental that this “sing-song” was chosen as the main subject here (and an alibi of the author’s statement simultaneously). The melody, the lyrics, physiologically determined tidal breathing, personal vibrations of the human voice, simplicity and laconism are the traits of a song (and not of a novel or a story, or of any other narrative form capable of coexisting with music) which make it a universal method for the solving of “painful issues” of our time which are unsolvable on principle.
At the same time, color solutions and the method of the shift of meaning, mastered by the artist long ago, form the two main characteristics of Alexeev’s graphic series. In each of the series color carries profound intonations and interpretations as the foundation of fearlessness, nearly the one of a folklore type. While color is almost shamelessly kitsch in Watching the Crescent Song, color is clearly reduced in the Cruciform Songs for Istanbul for it is the base, not drawing that carries it. In the Campari Sunrise Song (Istanbul – Venice and Back Again) color is functional, it is a blatant hue of pink, of a “sugary” color that does not know guilt, its nature is in the recipe of the paint, a mawkish drink mixed with soda water.
The “shiftology” of lingering, captivating songs of Nikita Alexeev is rooted in the mismatch of a word and of an image where a gap between signified and the signifier opens up to an infinite flow of potential understanding. Principle of a shift of meaning is functioning in all his drawings, which some critics interpreted as a psychedelic move. A crow and a tulip, a cypress and a match sing voicelessly, contemplating a crescent. The Cruciform Songs for Istanbul scatter over the city. Scale and function of objects seem to be blended in them – for what could unite an ocean liner and a cucumber?
Nikita Alexeev’s songs are funny and reckless, and simultaneously severe and canonical. At the same time, all the levels of the entangled meanings are uncountable and can be interpreted only when we are aware that art is “neither a craft nor a religion, neither a politics nor a science”. And the words of Alexander Pushkin come to mind: “Poetry, my Lord, should be a bit foolish.”
-Sasha Obukhova
Image: © Nikita Alexeev, Kuad Gallery
