Authors

Maria Engström¹;  ¹ Uppsala University, Sweden

Discussion

PetroArt: Oil in Contemporary Russian Visual Arts

In the paper, I consider the ‘oil text’ of contemporary Russian art through the example of the works by Andrei Molodkin, Alexei Chumak, Alexei Belyaev-Gintovt, and Aidan Salakhova. These artists can be attributed to the movement of ‘conservative avant-garde’ or ‘conservative futurism’. Common to conservative avant-gardists is the merge of technology and archaic. They all connect oil and other subsoil substances with the discourse of soil, tradition, and war as well as with the mythological and folklore plots; they reflect on the destiny of this chthonic organics in neoliberal digital contemporaneity.

Oil becomes the basis for ideological myths and the new ‘petropoetics’ only in the post-Soviet period. The key ideologeme for the Soviet era of high industrialism was coal, not oil. If Soviet artists captured industrial landscapes, the miners themselves, their labor enthusiasm and heroism, the fruits and conditions of socialist labor, then in the post-Soviet art the man of labor disappears. The artists of conservative avant-garde are primarily interested in the mystery of the blackest substance that commands the post-socialist and post-human world.