Novikov's Shocking Coming Out

While striving for an aesthetic and at times even ethical and political conservatism, Timur Novikov’s New Academy (see artifacts 206, 207) and Novikov’s art and public persona themselves had strong camp and queer dimensions. Novikov himself was gay (or at least bisexual), and many other members of the group were as well—and the New Academy constitutes an early and deeply fascinating example of a specifically post-Soviet queer culture and aesthetics. However, neither Novikov nor the other neo-academists spoke openly about their sexuality or the role it played in their art. When they did talk about sexuality, they did so in an excessive, provocative, or even shockingly vulgar way. This is the case of this interview with Novikov and another prominent representative of the New Academy, Sergey “Afrika” Bugaev (who became a celebrity in the mid-1980s for playing the protagonist’s role in the cult movie ASSA). In it, to describe the “dropping” or “lowering” (opuskanie) of the avant-garde, Novikov uses the metaphor of prison rape, including very graphic and seemingly unnecessary details—while Afrika, for his part, claims that Novikov was acquainted with New York gay culture “by 20 centimeters or so.” Both Novikov and Bugaev call themselves “faggots” (pederasty), and they contrast the fundamental “femininity” of the New Academy with the “masculinity” of Moscow Conceptualists, their main rival in the field of contemporary Russian art. Queerness, while remaining undefined, was a defining feature of the New Academy. A queer sensibility, both in the form of a fluid sexuality, but also in the form of a kind of aesthetic and ideological “shimmering”—or oscillating between irony or detachment and sincerity, or a refusal to be confined to or labeled by a specific ideology or cultural convention—was a crucial aspect of Novikov’s and other neo-academists’ artistic strategy. Furthermore, this provocative attitude, the refusal to accept any fixed labels or identity, and even a specific form of “queer nationalism” is something that Novikov had in common with many post-Soviet gay and lesbian, or gay-and-lesbian-adjacent, cultural actors, including Slava Mogutin, Eduard Limonov, and Evgenia Debrianskaya. From a fully presentist, Western/American perspective, such a position can and has been seen as inappropriate, non-inclusive, essentialist, and most likely the result of a closeted, highly homophobic culture. At the same time, Novikov’s aesthetics and vision are highly original and had a long-standing impact on Russian art, fashion, and popular culture. And this form of queer nationalism or “queer totalitarianism” can also be seen as an alternative way of expressing identity and a reaction to widespread calls to adopt neoliberal cultural standards and norms of behaviors that in the 1990s could be easily perceived as fundamentally oppressive, and the product of cultural, economic, and political colonialism.