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THE MOSCOW TIMES

20.01.2006

FOREIGN TONGUES

Brian DROITCOUR

In «Confrontation,» a video installation by Yelena Berg on display at Aidan Gallery, a dozen people stand against a wall and lick it relentlessly. It is the third solo show at Aidan for the 41-year-old artist. Like Berg's previous works, «Confrontation» alludes to the barriers people create to hide their vulnerabilities -- a theme close to an artist who, despite the growing recognition of her works, feels awkward in the Moscow art world because of her relatively late start. «I'm like a bear who just woke up in his den,» Berg said in an interview at the show's Wednesday opening. «I heard a bee, and followed it to honey.»

When Berg graduated from the VGIK film institute in 1992 with a degree in set design, she already knew she wasn't interested in show business. «I realized that contemporary art was where I could say the things I wanted to say,» she said. In 1997, Berg made her first installation at the Cinema Museum. Titled «Epiphany,» it featured ice skates wrapped in foil that lay, seemingly abandoned, on a foil-covered floor, evoking stillness and a poignant sense of absence.

For her second installation, displayed at the State Center for Contemporary Art in 2002, Berg made what she described as a «Moscow om.» Simultaneously running tape players created a meditative hum, and only by coming close to each speaker could visitors discern the various Moscow locales where the individual noises were recorded: a bathhouse, a train station, a Versace boutique and so on.

Berg had planned to continue creating sound pieces, but when she began working with Aidan she left them behind for visual art. Her first show at the gallery came in December 2002. «Beauty and the Beast» was a series of works in which Berg spread items from a woman's makeup kit in repetitive patterns across black squares -- «an homage to Malevich,» she said. If the abstractionists of the Russian avant-garde exposed the illusions of figurative painting by reducing art to pure form and color, then in «Beauty and the Beast,» Berg pared female beauty down to its components: false eyelashes, false nails and false hair. Aidan brought «Beauty and the Beast» to Art Forum Berlin in 2003, where it was the only project representing Russia.

In a set of works displayed at the M'ARS Center of Contemporary Art last fall, Berg continued in the same vein by wadding up photographs from glossy magazines and arranging them in rows. Magazines are no less important to modern ideas of beauty than cosmetics -- people flip through them to find images to identify with and copy. But in «Reversion,» which was part of the survey exhibition «Portrait of a Face,» Berg undermined this function by crumpling the pages, distorting the images and emphasizing the physical material of the paper itself.

«Reversion» was to have been part of a larger, uncompleted project called «Vanity Fair,» which would have included rows of Q-tips and cotton swabs for removing cosmetics, Berg said. «Makeup is part of the image people hide behind,» she explained. «When you're wearing makeup, sometimes you feel an urge to wash it off, to cleanse yourself.»

Like Berg's earlier works, «Confrontation» appeals to her audience's sense of touch. But while the softness of false eyelashes or creases in glossy paper attract the fingers, the videos of people licking the wall involve a more sensitive muscle: the tongue, so central to language and sex. «It's not so important that it's a wall,» Berg said. «It's important that they're licking.»

The artist described a vivid childhood memory of a classmate showing up at her kindergarten with an orange -- a rare treat in her Siberian hometown of Kemerovo in the 1960s. «She was passing it to her friends and letting them lick the skin,» she recalled, visibly disgusted by the memory. «I wasn't her friend, so she didn't offer it to me. If she had, I don't know whether I would have licked it or not.»

Berg's squeamishness sets her apart from the many Moscow artists who exploit shock tactics -- like Vladimir Alexandrov, a.k.a. Emperor Wawa, who rehashed an art-world cliche last weekend by cutting himself to draw blood in a performance at Guelman Gallery. Berg entered the art scene as an adult and was disenchanted with what she found. «Artists hide behind sarcasm and scandal,» she said.

As she discussed her moral compunctions about pain and art, Berg cast uneasy glances at the 12 figures on the wall, who were each paid 300 rubles (about $10) for 20 minutes of licking. «I don't know how they could keep it up that long, and for such a miserly sum,» Berg said with a pained expression. «I tried a few licks. It hurt.»

«Confrontation» (Protivostoyaniye) runs to Jan. 31 at Aidan Gallery, located at 22 1st Tverskaya-Yamaskaya Ulitsa. Metro Mayakovskaya. Tel. 251-3734.

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