TheEconomistOctober 5th 2019 751T
he industrialzone outside Yekate-
rinburg, a city of 1.5m on the edge of Si-
beria, has seen better days. On pavements
where Soviet workers once tramped to
shifts at the Uralmash heavy-machinery
plant, babushkas now lay out their wares:
apples, mushrooms, smoked fish. Al-
though the area has recovered from the or-
ganised crime that plagued it in the 1990s—
earning the city the sobriquet, the Chicago
of the Urals—most of the buildings on First
Five-Year Plan Square in the centre of the
district stand empty or underused.
The square is an unlikely place for a
clash between contemporary artists and
Orthodox believers. But this summer it
staged a drama involving accusations of
blasphemy, threats of bloodshed and an in-
tervention by the security services. The
conflict was ignited by a piece of street art
inspired by the Russian avant-garde of a
century ago. Unusually for a divided coun-
try and bellicose times, the combatants
eventually resolved their dispute.
“Pokras is a very peaceful guy, he never
meant to provoke,” says Andrei Kolokolov,
co-founder of Yekaterinburg’s annual graf-
fiti festival, which this year invited Pokras
Lampas, an up-and-coming artist, to make
a work in the square. He chose to create a
giant “Suprematist Cross” (pictured),
which took its shape from an existing tiled
pattern on the intersection and its inspira-
tion from Kazimir Malevich. In 1915 Malev-
ich inaugurated a new era of abstract art
with his “Black Square”, an entirely black
work on a white canvas described by Ta-
tyana Tolstaya, a modern Russian writer, as
“an uncrossable line that demarcated the
chasm between old art and new art, be-
tween a man and his shadow.” He founded
the Suprematist movement, which de-
clared the supremacy of feeling over the
representation of objects. The cross was
among its principal motifs.
Pokras’s cross in Yekaterinburg was a
supersized tribute to the movement. “The
history of the area is very close to the Rus-
sian avant-garde,” reasons the artist
(whose real name is Arseny Pyzhenkov),
pointing to the Constructivist architecture
of the industrial zone. Over three days in
July, with the help of 50 volunteers, he cov-
ered the 6,700-square-metre (72,000-
square-foot) site with a red, white and
black cross, using his personal calligraphyto weave in a quote from Malevich: “I have
untied the knots of wisdom and freed the
consciousness of colour...We, the Suprema-
tists, throw the path open to you.”
That path was blocked two weeks later,
when workmen arrived and poured a rec-
tangle of asphalt across the centre of the
piece. To some, the dark blob in the middle
of the work might have seemed a homage
to the original “Black Square”; in reality, the
city authorities had ordered a new road
crossing and forgotten to cancel it when
the artwork was commissioned. Either
way, the botch made national news, and
brought the work to the attention of a small
but vocal group of Orthodox believers, who
considered the design blasphemous. “Sud-
denly everyone is talking about how Yeka-
terinburg is this awful town that doesn’t
understand contemporary art, we pour as-
phalt on it,” recalls Oksana Ivanova, an en-
ergetic employee at a local religious muse-
um. Ms Ivanova says she understands it
perfectly; but she objected to the cross.
Opting to speak her opponents’ lan-
guage, she called for a performance-art
“happening” on the square, in which activ-
ists chanted and waved banners. “With
post-modernism it’s all a game, nothing
means anything,” she says. “Everyone
makes a chopped salad from whatever they
want, from any sphere, including the reli-
gious.” A viral video shows the situation es-
calating. “I can make an art-object too,” one
participant threatened. “I’ll smear [the
square] with the blood of these satanists,
there’s your art object.” Ms Ivanova was
briefly detained for organising an unsanc-Art and faith in Russia
Back to black
YEKATERINBURG
A tribute to the Russian avant-garde has set off a confrontation with believers
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