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Thursday, March 19, 1998

Russia has AIDS, drugs and issues, too

ART: Propaganda shows two countries aren't as different as they appear

By Michael Gillette

Daily Bruin Contributor

The Russian propaganda on display at the Kerckhoff Art Gallery is relatively free of the America-baiting, pro-communist messages students may remember from their youths.

Instead, the exhibit gathers a collection of post-glasnost public service announcements, whose subjects will likely strike viewers as very familiar.

The bulk of the posters feature warnings about AIDS, pleas against drug use and messages about the environment.

This universality in fact was the impetus behind the organization.

"We wanted to show that the issues relevant in Russia are relevant in the U.S.," says Professor Susan Kresin, one of the show's organizers. "This is the first time that these issues were talked about in Russia, and that makes the show unique."

The posters on display were made available for this exhibit by Tom Ferris of the California Institute of Russian Studies. Ferris worked with UCLA's Slavic department that arranged the event, and was also responsible for last year's exhibition of contemporary St. Petersburg artists at the same venue.

The show chronicles a unique moment in Russian society when political art and public discussion centered on these once-taboo issues. That moment has since passed, according to Kresin.

"Once Gorbachev fell from power, this kind of political art stopped," Kresin says.

This kind of political propaganda art holds an important place in Russian culture, says UCLA Slavic instructor Nelya Dubrovich. "It's in the Russian tradition from before the revolution, through the revolution and even until now," Dubrovich says.

Before glasnost the issues dealt with in posters were different, Dubrovich explains. Society addressed drug and alcohol issues, but focused mainly on more mundane subjects like worker efficiency and pedestrian safety. Political discussion was limited to the realm of party loyalty and, yes, anti-Americanism.

"There were many posters with Uncle Sam as a monster gobbling up Europe with blood dripping off of him," Dubrovich says.

Dubrovich believes the art in the posters at Kerckhoff is more interesting than the placards from the Soviet era. She attributes this to the liberation that the artists likely felt when their concerns matched those of the government.

The posters chosen by the exhibit's organizers run the gamut of the very moving to the very amusing on nearly every subject. One alcohol awareness piece, for instance, features a lonely despondent man trapped inside a shot glass, while another work shows a flying soccer ball smashing a liquor bottle.

Worker efficiency is still an issue in these pieces. One poster, for example, shows a cigarette burning through a clock, while the legend gives statistics equating the loss of minutes to cigarette breaks to the larger loss of productivity in the gross national product.

At the same time, though, some of the posters' messages question bureaucracy , equating endless trains of paperwork with the impossibility of producing anything.

What might strike students upon viewing the collection is the presentation of AIDS in the posters as a disease transmitted only by prostitutes. This notion is an outgrowth of the government's stance on the disease, Kresin says.

"The government said that AIDS was brought to Russia by the West and transmitted to prostitutes by rich foreigners," Dubrovich says.

The exhibit, which has run for the past two weeks, will likely strike students with both the similarities and differences between their own culture and Russia's.

ART: The Russian poster exhibit is on display in the Kerckhoff Art Gallery through Friday.