I met Anna Parkina in the Wilkinson Gallery, preparing her collage creations, sculptures and film-art pieces for the opening of her new exhibition, Witness and Winner. Dark and fine-boned, the artist bears a disarming likeness to Audrey Hepburn. Her artwork, in fact, uses this physical similarity to perplexing effect; images of herself and the starlet pop up regularly in her oeuvre, confusing us as to which is which. If Audrey Hepburn is the ‘winner’, is Parkina the ‘witness’? This is the first of many codes I must crack to get to the bottom of this Moscow-born artist, and her will to re-interpret the Russian id.
Parkina’s work is viscous and psycho-sexual, vividly disturbing and absurdly comical in turns. Her primary mode of expression is the collage, and she feels this to be a distinctly Russian medium. Moscow, in Parkina’s eyes, is itself a canvas layered with contradictory influences. In her work, clippings from free Moscow newspapers are spliced onto iconic film images, whilst references to advertisements and free-floating text confuse and refigure expressive ink drawings and photo images of anonymous city-dwellers. Her style recalls the Russian avant-garde, the strong geometric shapes and bold colour seeming to reference Constructivists such as El Lissitzky, while the flat, dream-like landscape of entrance, elevator, stop’s button brings to mind Leopold Survage’s cubist, mazelike depictions of the city. Yet Parkina is reluctant to locate herself in the grand sweep of Russian cultural history, preferring to see her nation’s art as simply part of her blood inheritance.
‘Abroad, people say my work has its roots in the avant-garde, perhaps further back in Dadaism. I didn’t do this on purpose. There are ways in which Russians will always see subjects the same, a Russian...“attitude”. Making these works I was thinking more about the punk aesthetic, maybe even American punk, but then I realised this aesthetic is much older, going back to Dadaism and the beginnings of the avant-garde.’
Having first left Moscow in her teens to study in Paris at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, Parkina’s artistic career has been cosmopolitan, dipping in and out of art scenes in Paris, Berlin and finally Hollywood. The exhibition Winner and Witness marks the twenty-eight year old’s return to Moscow as a chosen home. What she feels she has acquired is a necessary distance from Russian culture, giving her ‘clear eyes’ with which to look back at her nation.
‘In the 90s there was this black hole in Russia, and anything could happen. There was an explosion of information, reality TV shows, fashions, advertisement. There is all this information coming in, and most of it is being controlled. Suddenly there is this totalitarian state on the one hand, and economic interest on the other. I see myself as trying to make sense of these contradictions, to be a witness.’
We are back to the ‘witness’ and the ‘winner’. Who are these figures? ‘In Russia, we have this idea that you have to succeed. You scream it. Big. Kitsch. It’s like a bad parody of American success. Grotesque. That’s a Russian “winner”.’ I think of the collage Contactor (see back inside cover) – a man and woman kissing, not only in public but as the machinery of the city itself, potent with energy and hurtling towards the future. ‘Yes, yes,’ she nods, curtly. ‘Everything, even love and sex, are overpowered by this drive for show, for success in the eyes of our neighbours.’
Parkina’s vision of a Russia caught between a totalitarian ideology and the demands of the free market is brutally captured in Reality – Drama – Nonstop. The architecture of the Underground has metamorphosed the three ticket conductors, who now appear as looming, identikit judges. Following the escalators upwards to the advertised end, ‘WIN’, we are swallowed into the belly of the threefold, ever-watching monster.
‘The underground is an example of the weird contradictions in Russia. It’s a masterpiece of architecture, a symbol of Russian pride, but no-one looks at it. We listen to announcements advertising household goods, or telling us to report drug dealers or tax evaders, then the announcers will play an old Russian folk tune or read a children’s poem, about snow or animals. It’s completely strange to me! Completely contradictory! In Europe and the US my artist friends are always looking for ideas, in Moscow you never have to look. It’s everywhere. It’s the way people live, actually.’
For Anna Parkina, Moscow is an endlessly protean puzzle in flux. ‘It’s a game for me,’ she laughs, ‘disconnecting what is real from what is not real. I take great pleasure in the game!’ Watching her laugh, I am struck once more by her likeness to that great cinematic icon, Audrey Hepburn. It’s time to ask my question. Parkina smiles, a little smugly. ‘Audrey Hepburn is the winner if you sit in the front row!’, she pauses, ‘but this is what I learnt from Hollywood, which now helps me to see Russia. Never sit in the front row. People think it’s better to be close up. No, it’s not.’ As Parkina folds her hands on her lap, she is the archetypal observer – quiet, inquisitive, intense. ‘I’m always at the back of the cinema, where I can see the screen and also the audience in front of me,’ she leans forward conspiratorially, ‘I have to keep my distance from what people are trying to show me. I want to see it all.’
Witness and Winner Anna Parkina Wilkinson Gallery 5 April–18 May 2008
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