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Awestruck by Art: Creating an Art Gallery
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19730 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1991 |
2,691 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
In February 1986, Phyllis Kind, the New York- and Chicago-based art dealer, found herself on the bleak, freezing streets of Moscow and Leningrad as part of the selection committee of the Chicago International Art Exposition. "We wanted to get unofficial art out of the Soviet Union officially," she recalls. "The theory was that if the Chicago Art Fair had a booth for Soviet art, perhaps, in this international context, the barrier between 'official' and 'unofficial' could begin to be broken down--or at least sidestepped." And sidestep she did. By day Kind and the four other members of the committee, escorted by representatives for the official artists' union, were bused from studio building to studio building to view the work they would be allowed to choose from. "I remember this enormous, gymnasiumlike building where yards and yards of ghastly paintings were shown to me. Some were pseudo-'School of Paris'--very tired still lifes--others, extremely well-made but very boring. And here I was, surrounded by these dull-colored, commonplace things, asking myself my favorite question--Is this a person doing something unique in all this world? Nyet, nyet."
But in the middle of the night she and her colleagues shook the people who had been assigned as their "guides," and, working from leads given to them by Soviet artists already living in New York, they climbed over roofs, moving from apartment to apartment visiting the unofficial artists who were, as Kind likes to say, "giving themselves permission to do things that were unique."
"It was a week out of my life, and I had no intention of falling in love when I went there, but fall in love I did. Every one of these artists whom I've since shown--Eric Bulatov, Oleg Vasiliev, Simon Faibisovich, among others--were unofficial. They had never exhibited outside their own houses, they had never sold anything. They weren't working for fame; there was none to be had. They could have joined the union, come under the official heading of painter, sculptor. And for that they would have been given a better apartment, a studio, materials. But they would have had to make work that was acceptable to the state, work that would become its property. But these people," she says, fixing you with a look that warns a pronouncement is coming, "these people didn't intend to be ordered."
During the balance of her twenty-four years in the art business, Kind may not have literally scaled roots as she did in Russia to find art that made her pulse quicken. But from her first days in Chicago, she has been one to bypass the safe, the accepted, to form her own definition of contemporary art. Ignoring the
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