More often than not I get Billie to read her diary entries out aloud so I do not see her words on the page. This is a largely preventive measure: sometimes the urge to correct gets too overwhelming. When I do give in to it, Billie squirms as if during ‘Body, Mind and Soul’ class at school. To her, my straightening of her writing is a violation, yet another form of the elaborate non-listening at which her mother excels. It is as though I am in her room, making her bed, going through the clothes on the floor, choosing what to throw out and what to keep. And all she wants to do is to slam the door in my face. ‘Go and fix up your own things, Mum.’ The child, as they say, has a point.
But back to our final day in Moscow. ‘Mum, this is a masterpiece,’ Billie says, now fully awake and rummaging furiously through her bag in search of a little-used camera. The sculptural ensemble ‘Children, the Victims of Adult Vices’, which inspires forbiddingly high praise from my daughter and makes a lasting impression on me as well, was given to the Russian capital as a gift by Mikhail Shemyakin, an artist and sculptor of world renown. Shemyakin was kicked out of the Soviet Union in 1971 for his involvement in the wrong kinds of art projects, but not before being thrown into a psychiatric hospital (yes, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest all over again). After ten years in Paris, he moved to the United States, and there his monstrous renditions of adult vices and his angelic bronzes of blindfolded children were cast.
The materials for the sculptures, and their transportation to Moscow, were paid for by Rosneft, one of Russia’s oil giants. But as we stand in front of the sculptures, still blissfully unaware of all the behind-the-scenes machinations (blissfully because this kind of awareness, in Russia at least, does nothing for your art appreciation), Billie and I are in a synchronised state of awe. The grotesque figures of vices are hard-core, unsparing. A voluptuous toad covered in warts, baring her cleavage, has the word ‘Prostitution’ engraved at her base in Russian and English. Drug addiction comes at us, dressed in a tailcoat, a Count Dracula figure with a syringe in his hand. The pig with a sickly sweet expression on its face holds a sack of money with its long piano fingers; behind its back is a sack inscribed with the magic word ‘Offshore’. Theft. Alcoholism is a double-chinned, bleary-eyed Roman god sitting astride a barrel with nothing to cover his protruding stomach and man breasts. Clad in long monk robes, Pseudoscience has its eyes fully closed, while it holds the strings of a two-headed dog puppet, no doubt the end result of some kind of cloning experiment gone terribly wrong. At the very centre is Indifference, the biggest vice of them all according to Shemyakin. Eyes closed, fingers blocking its ears, another set of hands crossed on the chest of a coffin-like body.
Billie takes photos of each vice – I want to say ‘lovingly’, but this must be the wrong word. She looks mesmerised, but also relieved and vindicated, as if Shemyakin has understood precisely what she has been feeling on this trip, as if the maestro himself has heard her cries for help. Perhaps if these figures were paintings, they would have lost much of their impact, but as sculptures they pack a serious punch. Massive objects in the public sphere, they are imposing, permanent and thickly material. I would have been surprised to come across these figures anywhere, really – in Paris, New York or Buenos Aires – but the surprise is amplified tenfold here in the former home of totalitarian kitsch, where for seven decades the hollowed-out sculptural form serviced only one client. The monumental fetishism turned the figure of Lenin, in particular, into the equivalent of a village well, signalling the presence of some form of human settlement. These monuments were produced assembly-line style to several recurring and, soon enough, instantly recognisable templates. Lenin: sitting, standing, looking, peering like a visionary towards far-off horizons. Lenin: next to or atop an armoured vehicle, symbolising not the young nation’s industrial might, but its Zero Hour – the historically verifiable platform from which the start of the Revolution was proclaimed. There was a story when I was growing up, perhaps not even a joke, of a statue of Lenin in which he sported one of his distinctive visor hats on his head while holding a spare in his hands. It was only a matter of time before different parts of different versions would be accidentally welded together, creating a sculptural oxymoron of sorts.
Billie and I walk around Shemyakin’s sculptures, drinking in details, not wanting to leave. Unlike Billie, though, I am growing more suspicious by the minute. My daughter was not born yesterday either, but she was born in Australia, which means she is unlikely to ask herself, What’s the catch? every time she is presented with something unexpected, something out of the ordinary. I have spent decades freeing myself from the what’s-the-catch syndrome, which seems to be almost genetic here, passed down from generation to generation, and present here with me today. It does not take much digging to discover that the sculpture so deeply antithetical to, so mocking of, the taste of the previous regime was commissioned by a commissar of today, Moscow’s mayor, Yuri Luzhkov, who personally approved every single element, every representation of every vice. In fact, Luzhkov was so committed to the ensemble that he overruled a commission composed of city planners, architects, artists and arts experts who recommended finding another location to the one Luzhkov favoured, the historical square on Bolotnaya Square, which not only has one of the best panoramas of the city and the Kremlin, but is frequented by children of all ages.
In reality, many members of the commission did not want the sculpture erected at all, but they knew better than to look a gift-horse in the mouth, especially a horse so close to the heart of the city’s biggest cheese. Nor were highly charged debates about the monument confined to the members of the commission. Doctors and psychologists warned of the sculptures’ disastrous psychological effects on children’s fragile and impressionable psyches. Letters to newspapers asked, not without reason, why a square designed for rest and recreation had been turned into a site for shock therapy, and whether the sculpture was going to create a new category of children as victims of adult urban improvers. But Luzhkov, no stranger to unilateral decisions, was fanatical in his desire to make Moscow one of the truly great world cities.
As everyone in Russia knows, Luzhkov’s favourite architect is Zurab Tsereteli, the Georgian-born head of the Russian Arts Academy. Tsereteli must come second only to Putin in the number of jokes occasioned by his seemingly unstoppable gigantomania, his love of kitsch on a grand scale and his legendary workaholism. No one, it seems, is safe from another one of Tsereteli’s creations appearing at a park near them. The medals for the Sochi Winter Olympics will be created by Zurab Tsereteli. During the medal ceremonies, the athletes will be standing next to the medals. It was the public outcry over Tsereteli’s massive Peter the Great, one of the tallest statues in the world, which led to the creation of the Commission on Monumental Arts, the body which tried unsuccessfully to steer Shemyakin’s lurid sculpture towards a less conspicuous location. The Western world too, I should say, has not been spared Tsereteli’s lavish generosity. A stretch of Jersey City waterfront across the Hudson River from the site of the World Trade Center groans under a ten-storey, one-hundred-and-seventy-five-ton, nickel-surfaced teardrop entitled Tear of Grief, a Russian government gift to the grief-stricken courtesy of Zurab Tsereteli. Another of his subtle sculptures, Good Defeats Evil, stands outside the UN headquarters in New York. It’s a mystery how such tastelessness on a grand scale is given prominence in the public domain.