Seen and Heard

Abstract

The shot in the arm that I experience in front of a demanding painting has often raised quizzical eyebrows in my home country. Not so in Russia, where the stimulus of direct engagement with an artefact has strong traction. There are, of course, uniquely valorized and institutionalized contexts for this, prominent among them the function of icon paintings as catalysts for spiritual devotion within the Orthodox Church. But the profound nature of artistic encounter surfaces in modern Russia in a more casual though no less significant manner. A hairdresser accompanies a quotation from Pushkin with elegant ekphrasis of his portrait by Kiprensky. A stranger enlists you in heated debate in front of a painting. A museum invigilator stays to discuss Serov long after a shift has ended, despite being paid well below a living wage. My point is not to set up vapid comparisons with visual attentiveness elsewhere or to contest other forms of cultural immersion, but to suggest that Russian spectators seem alive to forms of visual mediation in powerfully dialogic ways.