Precarity in Times of Transition: Artistic Opportunity and Limitation in 1990s Moscow

The 1990s in postsocialist Russia was marked by economic and cultural precarity. Although the collapse of the USSR brought an end to artistic censorship in Russia, it also dismantled the institutional scaffolding of the art world. Artists were suddenly ushered into a free market, which brought considerable uncertainty. Yet it was in part the lack of institutions that gave artists increased artistic autonomy and space for creativity. I argue that the 1990s—a decade sandwiched between the restrictions of the Soviet period and the pressures of the capitalist art market—paradoxically offered an unprecedented moment of cultural freedom for artists. I show how artists adapted to instability, focusing on the precarity created by the absence of an institutional or market structure for the arts. The result is that artists were able to develop a new language of Russian art while simultaneously building a postsocialist arts infrastructure that a new generation of artists enjoy today.

My talk is based on interviews and ethnography in Moscow. I focus on the generation of artists born between 1951­–1970, who came of age during the Soviet period but developed their careers in the chaos of the 1990s. This generation was caught in a temporal triad: looking ahead to a more promising postsocialist future, reckoning with the uncertainty of the present in the 1990s, and retaining the training and nostalgia of the socialist past. They used art to critique and make intelligible the societal, political, and economic changes happening around them. But it was not just the subject matter of their work that reflected the transition; style and form did so as well. This paper considers the precarity that Russian artists experienced in the 1990s, addressing how they struggled to survive but also how they leveraged the artistic freedom into new creative possibilities.