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I MET JOSEPH BACKSTEIN in the seventh grade, in Moscow. I think it was 1958. That was the start of our friendship. I was already an artist at that time, or at least I claimed to be one. But he didn’t have anything to do with art then. He went the usual way for boys in the Soviet Union, technical education. Most of the people I knew at that time were studying science and technology, because the Soviets needed to build weapons. I think Joseph became interested in art partly because of my influence—not only me, but my family, too. My parents were writers, and our home was a totally different environment from the one he lived in.
At that time, we knew that the world we lived in was wrong and unfair. We believed that the West, and the United States especially, was a kind of intellectual paradise. What was happening there, especially in the visual arts, seemed amazing. In the mid-1970s, I befriended an exchange student who started sending me Artforum when he moved back to the US. A group of five or six of us would get together and the artist Ivan Chuikov, the only one who knew English, would translate the articles for us out loud. Of course, articles in Artforum at that time didn’t make sense in any language, but especially in this translation into Russian, it was total nonsense—an absurdity. But we didn’t think that at the time; we thought there was a secret, a mystery behind these words that we needed to decipher, the mysterious world of the West.
At a certain point, after the end of the Soviet Union, Joseph took it as his mission to Westernize the Russian art world. He created the Moscow Biennale in 2003 and hired Western curators, preferably the most famous. At that time the Russian state was supporting these activities; the Russian oligarchs, Joseph always complained, were giving some money, but not big money. It was never enough for what he wanted to do.
Joseph’s death marks the end of a period in Russian history, an era of freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it seemed that Russia would become part of Europe.
But before all that, he started his work as a curator with two brilliant exhibitions that were not connected to Western art per se. In 1988, he did a show at Sanduny Bathhouse in Moscow. The reception was really limited to this art circle; nobody paid attention, only the artists themselves, who were half-naked, looking at these artworks in a steamy room. And then in 1992 he did another show in a famous Russian prison, Butyrka. It was absolutely incredible, introducing modern art, whatever that means, to the world, away from the white cube. That was a wild time in Russia—you could do things there that you couldn’t do in any other place on earth.
When we were younger, Joseph always carried a very old briefcase. I would tease him, “What is in your briefcase?” And he never told me. Later on, I figured out that he was carrying with him banned literature, some Western books, which could be dangerous. And he always kept his groups of friends and acquaintances separate. That was the old dissident rule in the Soviet Union: Never introduce anyone from different circles to each other, in case someone reports on you. Even after perestroika, and the brief time when Russia embraced, let’s say, a Western understanding of freedom, I think Joseph carried a Soviet-dissident mentality into his activities. I would see him every time I was in Moscow, but he had this old habit of being secretive. His life as a curator and organizer was quite complicated. It was a difficult and very diplomatic job, to keep these people together somehow—the government, the oligarchs, the artists, the Westerners—without revealing too much to any of them.
Over the past few years, he was terribly ill. When I think about it now, I realize that his death marks the end of a period in Russian history, an era of freedom after the fall of the Soviet Union, when it seemed that Russia would become part of Europe. For me, his decline was also the decline of an era. He was a true and creative barometer of his time. That’s why he’s so important.
As told to Rachel Wetzler.