- Artists
-
Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe 1969 – 2013
Yuris Lesnik born 1957
Timur Novikov 1958–2002 - Medium
- Film, 16 mm, shown as video, monitor, colour and sound (stereo)
- Dimensions
- Duration: 30min, 9sec
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by the Russia and Eastern Europe Acquisitions Committee 2021
- Reference
- T15807
Summary
Pirate TV was a complex video art project conceived, devised and recorded between 1989 and 1992 by the members of the Leningrad (St Petersburg) collective known as New Artists. According to their leader, Timur Novikov (1958–2002), ‘New Artists TV was a form of pirate television that appeared in 1989. It was created by the director Yuris Lesnik, the actor, writer and artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monro, myself (designer, producer, script-writer and sometimes even actor) and, of course, all our friends and acquaintances.’ (Timur Novikov, ‘Autobiography’, in Timur Novikov, Moscow 2003, p.14.)
Pirate TV was conceived as an unofficial video channel that would piratically feed into the official Soviet cable television broadcasts which had only two, heavily controlled and censored state channels. It took the guise of a video news journal, presenting short programmes consisting of episodes featuring participants drawn from the Soviet underground art community as well as international guests. New Artists members Georgy Gurianov (1961–2013) and Sergei Bugaev-Africa (born 1966), and Moscow based Sergei Shutov (born 1955) also actively contributed to the content of the programme. The artists claimed to hack the State cable TV channel and invited an audience for staged unofficial screenings of VHS tapes.
As such, Pirate TV was a video outlet for the creative activities of the New Artists as well as the underground creative circle in Leningrad/St Petersburg during the period of the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989–1992). It consolidated the artists’ individual studio practices with performance, actionism, sound art and art criticism into live and time-based documentation that formed the first complex video artwork produced in the Soviet Union. Pirate TV is characteristic of the New Artists’ practice of engaging the visual language of popular culture through performance and art interventions aimed at bringing it into contact with totalitarian contexts through anarchic actionism. Participants believed there were about ten hours of programmes recorded in total, but the exact amount, as well as the order of episodes and chronology, are not established. One of the guest-participants – the artist Olga Torbelius (born 1970) – recalled that the idea of keeping track of their activity, making back-up copies or building an archive could not come to the minds of any of the artists involved with Pirate TV as it would have been contrary to the anarchic spirit of the project (in Antonio Geusa, History of Russian Video Art, vol.1, Moscow 2007, p.44).
The anarchic nature of the project means the absence of a complete record of the episodes and features, as well as their order within each individual ‘programme’. The original 16mm films, presumed lost during Yuris Lesnik’s relocation from Russia to France, were transformed onto VHS tapes for public screenings. Various episodes were given to the members of the collective, participants and hosts. The most comprehensive record of episodes is with the Timur Novikov Archive in St. Petersburg and includes ten hours of footage.
The version in Tate’s collection is a selection of episodes lasting just over half an hour. It was made by Mamyshev-Monroe in 2005, edited on DVD by Sergei Khripun and released via XL Gallery, Moscow in an edition of five. Tate’s copy is number two in the edition and another from the edition is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The episodes were filmed in artists’ squats and studios, at art exhibitions and underground music concerts, during street performances and actions, recording interviews with soviet and international artists, critics and musicians. Pirate Television produced a large number of television programmes on video, ranging from biopics of famous people to reports from exhibition openings, sports shows to interviews with artists, short films to music videos, news programmes to quiz shows. The episodes were showcased from VHS tapes to an invited audience of friends and like-minded individuals during screenings that took place mainly at Fontanka Street 145 and Moyka Street 22 in central Leningrad (St Petersburg from 1991).
The resulting video work was consciously positioned directly in opposition to the official Soviet TV network. Here, good-quality, state-sponsored, ideologically charged broadcasts that were professionally scripted, filmed and presented were opposed by deliberately amateurish features that appeared unscripted and inelegantly produced, presenting anarchic content charged with humour, parody and travesty; they were also charged with LGBT+ content presented by Mamyshev-Monroe, either in heavy makeup or in drag and enacting a number of characters, in accordance with his wider practice as seen in works such as his Politburo series of 1990 (see Tate T15719). Also in Tate’s collection is a separate episode from 1990 of Monrology News, the mock news journal that formed part of Pirate TV.
Further reading
Ekaterina Andreeva, Timur Novikov's 10 lives, Moscow 2013.
Viktor Mazin and Olesya Turkina, The Life of a Remarkable Monroe, St Petersburg 2014 (in Russian).
Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. Archive M, Moscow 2015 (in Russian).
Natalia Sidlina
May 2019
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