Thursday, March 19, 1998
Russia has AIDS, drugs and issues, too
ART: Propaganda shows two countries aren’t as different as they
appear
By Michael Gillette
Daily Bruin Contributor
The Russian propaganda on display at the Kerckhoff Art Gallery
is relatively free of the America-baiting, pro-communist messages
students may remember from their youths.
Instead, the exhibit gathers a collection of post-glasnost
public service announcements, whose subjects will likely strike
viewers as very familiar.
The bulk of the posters feature warnings about AIDS, pleas
against drug use and messages about the environment.
This universality in fact was the impetus behind the
organization.
"We wanted to show that the issues relevant in Russia are
relevant in the U.S.," says Professor Susan Kresin, one of the
show’s organizers. "This is the first time that these issues were
talked about in Russia, and that makes the show unique."
The posters on display were made available for this exhibit by
Tom Ferris of the California Institute of Russian Studies. Ferris
worked with UCLA’s Slavic department that arranged the event, and
was also responsible for last year’s exhibition of contemporary St.
Petersburg artists at the same venue.
The show chronicles a unique moment in Russian society when
political art and public discussion centered on these once-taboo
issues. That moment has since passed, according to Kresin.
"Once Gorbachev fell from power, this kind of political art
stopped," Kresin says.
This kind of political propaganda art holds an important place
in Russian culture, says UCLA Slavic instructor Nelya Dubrovich.
"It’s in the Russian tradition from before the revolution, through
the revolution and even until now," Dubrovich says.
Before glasnost the issues dealt with in posters were different,
Dubrovich explains. Society addressed drug and alcohol issues, but
focused mainly on more mundane subjects like worker efficiency and
pedestrian safety. Political discussion was limited to the realm of
party loyalty and, yes, anti-Americanism.
"There were many posters with Uncle Sam as a monster gobbling up
Europe with blood dripping off of him," Dubrovich says.
Dubrovich believes the art in the posters at Kerckhoff is more
interesting than the placards from the Soviet era. She attributes
this to the liberation that the artists likely felt when their
concerns matched those of the government.
The posters chosen by the exhibit’s organizers run the gamut of
the very moving to the very amusing on nearly every subject. One
alcohol awareness piece, for instance, features a lonely despondent
man trapped inside a shot glass, while another work shows a flying
soccer ball smashing a liquor bottle.
Worker efficiency is still an issue in these pieces. One poster,
for example, shows a cigarette burning through a clock, while the
legend gives statistics equating the loss of minutes to cigarette
breaks to the larger loss of productivity in the gross national
product.
At the same time, though, some of the posters’ messages question
bureaucracy , equating endless trains of paperwork with the
impossibility of producing anything.
What might strike students upon viewing the collection is the
presentation of AIDS in the posters as a disease transmitted only
by prostitutes. This notion is an outgrowth of the government’s
stance on the disease, Kresin says.
"The government said that AIDS was brought to Russia by the West
and transmitted to prostitutes by rich foreigners," Dubrovich
says.
The exhibit, which has run for the past two weeks, will likely
strike students with both the similarities and differences between
their own culture and Russia’s.
ART: The Russian poster exhibit is on display in the Kerckhoff
Art Gallery through Friday.