Authors

Kitty Brandon-James¹;  ¹ School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, UK

Discussion

‘It was all fake!’ Declared my interlocutor: ‘Fake institutions, fake exhibitions, fake freedom.’ Among the interviewees for my research on the development of Moscow’s cultural institutions (2012–2020), this ‘fakeness’ has emerged as a dominant theme. 

The narrative that post-Yeltsin, political and cultural systems were postmodern Potemkin simulations where ‘nothing was real, and everything was possible’ (Pomerantsev 2014) is at the analytical core of, e.g. Yurchak 2006, Groys 2010, Pomerantsev 2014, Curtis 2016, Yampolsky 2020; but also Putin’s lead political ideologues Vladislav Surkov and Alexander Dugin, who openly describe the post-truth system they engendered as ‘packed full of simulacra, doubles, and pacifiers, creating the appearance of pluralism and a wide range of choices, while being its opposite’ (Dugin, 2012).

 This paper explores the limits of post-modernism as tool for analysis of artistic production in Moscow 2012-2020. Using three horizontally-organised ‘do-it-yourself' printing houses and cultural spaces as case-studies, I analyse interview data in combination with primary written and visual sources to suggest where contours of ‘the Fake’ may be, and posit possibility for alternative explanatory frameworks.