The article focuses on contemporary Russian neo-modernist utopia in visual arts, particularly on Anton Chumak's artistic work. In his project 'Borders' (2015), dedicated to Donbass, Chumak offers a vision of imperial remodernism as an alternative to the postindustrial new Middle Ages. The notion of the 'new Middle Ages' is often used today in socio-political discourse to characterize the new ideological role of the Orthodox Church in contemporary Russia. The 'conservative turn' in Russian politics and culture, the concept of traditional values and new legislative initiatives of the State Duma are sometimes described as 'the end of the Enlightenment' (Vladimir Sorokin). However, it is precisely the existing oligarchical globalism that is seen as the new Middle Ages through the conservative prism whereas the conservative utopia (Novorossiya, USSR-2, the Eurasian Empire) exemplifies the reemergence of the republican idea and the industrial empire. Contemporary radical conservatives such as Alexander Prokhanov, Alexander Dugin and Maxim Kalashnikov promote imperial neo-industrialism and offer a critique of demodernization processes in Russian culture and society. Their 'conservative remodernism' is characterized by a fusion of the leftist idea of social justice and the rightist idea of overcoming fragmentation and localization through the weakening of corporations and the oligarchy along with strengthening the state. Aesthetically, these ideas are manifested in a style, which can be described as 'industrial neo-classicism.' Industrial neoclassicists visualize the aesthetic utopia of the 'new antiquity' and 'new order' as an alternative to the chaos of neoliberal post-industrialism, which, according to them, has set us back to the new Middle Ages with its ethnic nationalism, fragmentation, irrationality, and uncontrollable emotionality.
In the framework of this new aesthetics of imperfection, the art of Sergei Shnurov and the band Leningrad can be regarded the most successful project in Russia in ideological and commercial terms. In the context of Russian symbolic politics, Leningrad’s visual language is of particular interest - especially recent music videos(actually short films) created by director Anna Parmas.
In contemporary Russian film, music and fashion, a recycling of protagonists, aesthetics and ideas from the late Soviet underground and the post-Soviet years during the 1990s can be observed. What at that time were utopias of a Russian ideological and aesthetic alternative to the West are now becoming increasingly mainstream. The artists view the world through metamodern eyes. They fluctuate between hope and melancholy, empathy and apathy, between the modern search for meaning and the post-modern doubt about the meaning of everything. Their cultural practice is the harmless, commercially attractive imitation of a revolution. The culture of the metamodern fits in with the current central political theme in Russia: "Globalisation without westernisation", incorporation into the global market, while at the same time turning its back on the norms of the "first world".
The article deals with the Neo-academism movemen which has been launched in Leningrad in 1989 by Timur Novikov (1958-2002), an artist and an art theorist. The New Academy of Fine Arts became the first community of an aesthetic "reactionism" and in many respects anticipated the ideological conser vative turn of the mid-2010s. Engstrom interprets the neo-academism as an attempt to overcome the artistic practices of post-modernism and as the first metamodernist movement in the post-Soviet visual arts.