An elegant bow tie is a more powerful challenge than a
shoulder belt and jackboots
 Timur Chagunava
Anatoly Belkin is the youngest and most
successful of those independent artists who gained fame in the `70s.
His recent exhibitions in the Russian Museum and museums in Berlin
and Hamburg were a resounding success. For most of his colleagues
and contemporaries that would have been quite enough, but his
principal role is not all there is to Belkin. The Americans have an
expression—"funny guy"—which describes someone who not only brings
joy to others, but enjoys himself as well. Anatoly Belkin has people
laughing their heads off at crowded birthday celebrations, consulate
receptions, art conferences. He is the author of a text, paradoxical
and precise, of which he himself is the stunning and dispassionate
performer.
Belkin is a very attentive observer and
interpreter; a whale, as it were, who lets the plankton of
Petersburg social life filter through himself. He is Leningrad’s
most highly-qualified flaneur of recent decades, a man who hasn’t
missed a single event of even the slightest importance.
"Pchela": Did you have occasion
to observe any sort of rightist subculture in the 1970s and
1980s?
Anatoly Belkin: The state was
rightist subculture. Leftist subculture existed. We were tiny
leeches on the body of an enormous rightist mastodon. Real
"rightism" assumed the form, rather, of the village madman. For
example, Alexei Georgievich Sorokin, a wholly legendary man, an
absolute monarchist. The only Soviet citizen in whose medical case
history it was written explicitly: "Prefers to snort cocaine in
baroque-style entryways." Sorokin was terribly indignant about that:
"I’m not that narrow-minded; I love both Art Nouveau and rococo." He
snorted all his life, gulped down pills, mixed them, drank. He went
around in a half-length frock coat, a walking stick in hand. He had
little blue eyes and a graying beard. He knew the names and
patronymics of all the deputies in the first three State Dumas [that
is, pre-Revolutionary]. Once we got a hold of twenty-five rubles (an
enormous sum in those days) and decided to have lunch at the Union
of Architects. We get into a taxi and Alexei Georgievich just whacks
the cabby on the back with his walking stick. The guy winces, turns
around. Without missing a beat, Alexei says, "To Podiacheskaya
Street, lout."
Anti-Semitism wasn’t perceived as a separate
current in popular thought. There was simply some jerk Petrov or
other, an anti-Semite. In fact, that whole crowd is utterly
uninteresting, they’re so uninteresting that to even talk about
their culture.... Back then you didn’t see the pathological types
like the ones you see now on Nevsky, across from my house, holding
these flags and handing out the newspaper Segodnya, Zavtra, Vchera
[Today, Tomorrow, Yesterday—an allusion to the communist/nationalist
newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow)]. It’s a pure clinic. They should all be
kept under glass. With little holes, so they won’t die, so that
people can look at them. In something comfortable, like a terrarium.
For example, in the Kreuzberg district in Berlin I saw a
demonstration against Gorbachev: Gorbachev with a cigar, those red
flags, swastikas, "Long live the Communists, the Soviets," not much
variety. It’s the same thing in Paris: a demonstration for Petain.
Their range is so limited.
"Pchela": In Paris there were
some very interesting demonstrations of anarchist
homosexuals....
- That’s different. The
largest demonstration of sexual minorities in the world—600,000
people came—just took place in Berlin. I saw a similar demonstration
in San Francisco. It was a carnival, these fat, pink monsters in
velveteen miniskirts with hairy legs, withered beanpoles dying of
AIDS.... I adore them all: they’re just a sheer pleasure to watch.
They fastened all these dildos in the most incredible configurations
and sizes to themselves. One guy was yelling something and this
dildo was shooting out fireworks and doves were flying. That is, the
whole thing was ecstasy, the joy of living. But those right-wingers
are such uninteresting rats, in my view....
"Pchela": It’s true, doing the
issue about leftists was more interesting....
- That’s understandable,
because the turn to the right always runs into a wall made up of
five names. Which [rightists] drag around like fetishes into public
toilets, onto the streets, on their bodies. Whereas leftism is
always a departure from the known or an interpretation.
"Pchela": What were the people
who ended up in Pamyat like?
- There was this guy, X.
Had a beard, spoke well, read various books. And he made the rounds
of artists’ studios, but he had to do that in order to be noticed.
It was fun with the artists. There wasn’t any money, but life was
fun. He came to me and told me how wonderful my works were. But
later we met on the street by chance and he asked, "What, you’re
still here?" So I asked, "And you’re still here?" He was in
Pamyat.
An incredibly boring crowd. Everybody that I
knew who wound up in Pamyat changed—the way they walked would
change, the look on their face would change. A look as though
someone had just spanked them and they’re thinking about what they
should do: get their revenge or maybe hide, gather their strength.
Or as if they’ve stolen something or shat their pants. As though
they’re embarrassed to live in the world.
"Pchela": Nowadays it’s possible
somehow to keep an eye on who the right-wingers are. There are
Barkashov’s followers formed up in well-ordered ranks, wearing
camouflage and armbands on their sleeves. There are the bleary-eyed
oldsters who are captivated by Alexander Dugin; there are simply
skinheads, kids from working class families....
- We knew—this one’s a
fool, this one’s an stool pigeon, this guy’s a doctor and that guy’s
a drug addict, that one brings him grass, that one says he’s an
artist, this guy’s a poet. Everybody knew. Sergei Kuriokhin made
Dugin who he is, by the way. This was a guy who was afraid of the
streets, afraid of meeting people. He was sitting around reading
some Austrian and German mystics. And suddenly Kuriokhin appears and
starts leading Dugin around like a first grader and introducing him
to various people: "This is the philosopher Dugin." At first he
absolutely didn’t know how to behave and was absurdly polite.
Kuriokhin was capable of meeting with sixty people in a day, and
since he dragged Dugin along everywhere, that meant Dugin met sixty
people, too. The next day there were fifty more, and they weren’t
the worst people. That’s how the figure of Dugin appeared. Any nerd
can use some charm. He got his charm inoculation. And an artistic
inoculation: it’s impossible to listen to that stuff seriously, but
with Pop Mechanics [Kuriokhin’s irregularily performing rock musical
extravaganza] everything is possible.
"Pchela": What can you say about
right-wing aesthetics?
- The aesthetics of the
rightists is quite primitive. It doesn’t go much farther than
jodhpurs, shaven heads. They’re all drawn towards discipline. And
they proclaim its primacy in any organization. Discipline implies a
uniform, and there have to be some sort of insignia on the uniform
to determine who’s the lowest ranked, who’s a little higher up, and
who’s the highest ranked. Who can clean his teeth with powder, who
with shoe polish, who with paste and with what kind of paste. This
game wasn’t dreamt up yesterday. All that is so uninteresting to me.
It makes me sick....I like girls! In uniforms! I really like it when
I see a girl in any kind of military jacket with shoulder stripes,
her pretty legs in boots. Somehow that excites me. Airplane
stewardesses excite me, female train conductors, with their curls
peeking out from under their service caps. The aesthetics of male
uniforms doesn’t turn me on. And whatever doesn’t turn me on I don’t
bother with....
I remember old Shuster, a refined and
perceptive collector of paintings. He stooped and was amazingly
handsome, with gray hair and a good eye. And he always showed up in
a bow tie. That bow tie was incredibly effective! He immediately put
itself in the position of being alien to everyone else in the
vicinity. He was so elegantly bourgeois in the midst of this shit
that I remember him even now, though I was a kid then. And that was
a challenge much more powerful than a shoulder belt and
jackboots!
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