Portraiture and Proximity: ‘Official’ Artists and the State-ization of the Market in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan

Abstract

This article traces the production and circulation of state officials' portraits in post-Soviet Kazakhstan, as visual artists engaged in the cultivation of an art market after the dismantling of socialist-era state sponsorship. I argue that these portraits of the president and other high-ranking officials should be considered as an instance of commercialisation of art. Portraiture invoked proximity of artists to their powerful sitters, government officials, and consequently made artists' work more attractive to a particular kind of domestic buyer. Furthermore, I argue that these practices of commodification enable an understanding of how socialist-era legacies of state sponsorship have converted into the logics of proximity to power. The Soviet-era personalistic connections to bureaucrats have transformed into the means for representation of artwork's market value in contemporary Kazakhstan. As such, Soviet legacies of clientelism have rendered state icons as significant authenticators of commercial value and therefore central to the emerging market.

Keywords:

• Market
• state
• privatisation
• commodification
• art
• postsocialism
• Kazakhstan

Acknowledgements

Parts of this essay were presented at the 2008 Annual Soyuz Postsocialist Cultural Studies Meeting and the 2008 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Tania Ahmad, Lalaie Ameeriar, Mun Young Cho, Bruce Grant, Shana Harris, Dan Husman Alma Kunanbaeva, Liisa Malkki, Jeff Piatt Douglas Rogers, Tiffany Romain, Bridget Whearty, Emily Wilcox, Jessica Winegar, and Sylvia Yanagisako provided valuable feedback on various stages of writing this essay. I also thank two anonymous reviewers whose generous feedback shaped the essay in critical ways. The writing of this article was supported by the Eurasia program of the Social Sciences Research Council with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State under the Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII) and Mrs Giles Whiting Humanities Fellowship.

Notes

In contrast to other post-Soviet republics (e.g. Russia or Uzbekistan) where the state has retained its patronage over the arts, Kazakhstan's government drastically reduced its involvement after 1991. In contrast to Russia's 1992 law on culture that expressly dedicated 2% of the republican budget to the needs of ‘culture’ and delineated the mechanisms for financing, including tax breaks for private sponsorship, the law in Kazakhstan (both 1996 and 2006 versions) is deliberately non-committal, brief, and vague. The only stated priorities of the 2006 law are to preserve ‘national heritage’ and to support ‘educational facilities’. The state drastically reduced the number of art commissions formerly distributed through the Union of Artists.

Conceptualism has been associated with the art movement prioritising the concept over the traditional concern with the aesthetic form in art-making.

‘Commercial’, ‘contemporary’, and ‘official’ are categories that my informants used to describe the artistic field in Kazakhstan.

One artist estimated that as many as two-thirds of all artists in Astana were newcomers.

The majority of practicing artists lived in these two cities because it was easier to sustain a professional career as a full-time artist there than in other cities. Earning a living as a full-time artist was the norm for the majority of artists I worked with.

They ranged in age from early 20s to 70s; the majority of my informants were between 30 and 50. About two-thirds of my informants were men – which reflects the gender composition of the artist community; most commonly, artists were men, and art historians and gallery owners were women.

Two generations of official artists were commonly differentiated by my informants. The first group of more senior artists in their 60s had established their careers during the Soviet era. Commonly affiliated with the leadership of the Union of Artists, a Soviet-era professional organisation, these artists established their relations with many government officials in the 1980s and maintained them into the 1990s. The second generation consisted of artists in their 40s. Their formative 20s coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic crisis. The senior artists were habitually accustomed to working with state officials from their Soviet experiences. By contrast, the younger artists started collaborating with bureaucrats in the second half of the 1990s, after the state reneged on its commitments to sponsor art.

While some argued that this anti-market attitude was a distinct feature of the socialist regime, others showed that this mode of governance went back to the prerevolutionary (Rosenberg 1994) and furthermore, the Early Modern period (Kollmann 1987).

This was evidenced by the persistence of high indices of perception of corruption and the lack of rule of law (USAID 2005).

Commonly referred to as ‘the president for life’, Nazarbayev remains one of only a few post-Soviet presidents who has held onto their power. He has served in this capacity for the past 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The interview was published in one of the most commonly read newspapers in Kazakhstan Vremya. The tone of the interview, as indicated by the journalist's questions and his final framing of the interview, was rather sarcastic. It was apparent that the journalist perceived Karymsakov's practices as dishonest and bluntly manipulative. ‘It is easy to live in Kazakhstan, one can make any deal’. [V Kazahstane legko zhit', obo vsem mozhno dogovorit'sya], Vremya newspaper, 16 March 2006.

My focus here is limited to how portraits were intended as gifts by their producers. I investigate the use of these portraits as gifts only in so far they enabled the commodification of artists' works.

‘Nur-Otan’ had a strong affiliation with Nazarbayev's first name Nursultan.

In these societies, the domain of culture emerged as the battleground for the modernisation project by the state. The interactions between the state and the cultural producers are part of the new state/nation-building initiatives. Artists, writers, musicians, etc. are called upon to contribute to these higher causes.