"There Is No Other Art": Lola Kantor-Kazovsky's Approach to Nonconformism

Lola Kantor-Kazovsky's book on the artist Michail Grobman calls for attentive reading. Her painstaking reconstructions of the artist's work, creative credos, and theoretical manifestos need to be followed in sequence to be properly appreciated, as she cuts through the "mythological fog" which the artist has cast over himself and his past. In its analytical and critical approach this book is far more than the biography of an artist, as it also offers important insights into the complex history of the Russian "second avant-garde" of the late Soviet period.

Writing a book about Michail Grobman, one of the main figures of the so-called unofficial art of the Soviet era, which now seems to belong both to the distant past and, simultaneously, to the present, is, indeed, no easy undertaking. Grobman's frequent changes in style, creative credos, and theoretical manifestos are challenging. After his most recent shift in artistic direction, Grobman emerged as a deeply engaged artist, as he became involved in political discourse. It is clear that despite her great sympathy and admiration, Kantor-Kazovsky was able to maintain the distance necessary to accomplish her analysis without becoming involved in the artist's personal mythology.

Kantor-Kazovsky's book reconstructs Grobman's biography and his immigration to Israel, introduces the reader to his theoretical articles and manifestos, and provides a chronology of his exhibits arranged by period. Whereas Jewish art and Grobman's place within its history are key themes, Kantor-Kazovsky also places the artist in new cultural contexts. She discusses the confrontation of Soviet and Western, mainly American, visual cultures during the Cold War, a subject that has not yet been examined from a comparative perspective in art history literature, thus allowing readers to see him in a fresh light.

Considering Grobman's work in broad transnational and global contexts enables Kantor-Kazovsky to transcend some of the previously established boundaries of the artist's contextualization, which is normally restricted to his Russian or Soviet background. This is the book's principal contribution. This transcendence is possible in part because Grobman himself stands somewhat apart from the trends of his day. He left the Moscow area of Tekstilshchiki before the Western world discovered underground Russian art, before the emergence of the Moscow conceptualists and Sots Art, and before Soviet civilization became the subject of conceptualist thinking and trivialization.

Kantor-Kazovsky uses the term coined by Grobman himself–the "Second Russian Avant-garde"–to describe the heterogeneous phenomenon of unofficial Soviet art, which is usually labeled "the other art" or "non-conformism." In so doing, she demonstrates that he is not simply a participant in an artistic group, but also an observer, collector, and archivist of an entire movement. In Grobman's article "The Second Russian Avant-garde" (2007), which she reproduced in her book, the artist attempts to classify the movement of which he was a part, speaking of a "heroic period" (from 1957 to 1971, the year that Grobman broke through the Iron Curtain and moved to Israel), a "reflexive" period (the 1970s), and an "intellectual-ludic" period (the 1980s). His biting characterizations in this piece are telling. He opposes the most popular term for nonconformist art–"the other art"–as, in his opinion, this definition is the "most widespread falsification in the history of the second Russian avant-garde [. . .]" (p. 204). Grobman argues that nonconformist art is rooted in rather than detached from the artistic tradition, or–in his parlance–it is "[a] cold, soured broth made of mutually exclusive ingredients, which they call 'the other art.' There is no other art" (ibid.).

In his challenging book In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowsky (1952–2015) investigated the otherness and unity of contemporary art in the former Soviet Bloc (with the exception of Russia!) and advanced a thesis regarding the general impossibility of...