contemporary russian art photography || after raskolnikov: russian photography today

After Raskolnikov: Russian Photography TodayAuthor(s): John P. JacobSource: Art Journal, Vol. 53, No. 2, Contemporary Russian Art Photography (Summer, 1994),pp. 22-27Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777478 .

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After Raskolnikov Russian Photography Today

John P. Jacob

22

he institutions of American culture have defined Russian photography as a newborn. On the cover of

Aperture's Photostroika: New Soviet Photography (1989), for example, pink and blue inks surround Antanas Sutkus's Pioneer, a member of the Soviet youth organization, from the series People of Lithuania, 1970-85. The fron-

tispiece of Photo Manifesto (1991), edited by Joseph Walker, Christopher Ursitti, and Paul McGinnis, shows Minsk photographer Sergei Kozhemyakin's Daughter, a naked infant

asleep upon a Soviet flag, while the cover of Leah Bendavid- Val's Changing Reality: Recent Soviet Photography (1991) presents an untitled portrait of two wide-eyed teens, the

single image of innocence in Igor Moukhin's series titled The City.

Photostroika, Photo Manifesto, and Changing Reality are the most recent book-length publications, edited by American specialists, that deal with contemporary photography from the nations of the former Soviet Union.1 Each was

published during the period of the collapse of Soviet author-

ity, but prior to the disintegration of the Soviet empire. In

presenting the photography of this time as nascent, each

participates in the redefinition of the history of Soviet photography from a distinctly Western perspective. While it is the

goal of this paper to explore the implications of this perspective, the complicity of Soviet specialists with American authorities in the process of redefinition must be noted. Indeed, the near-total disregard of many of Russia's newly self-

appointed specialists for the deeply interwoven histories of Soviet art and politics has been a critical component in the revisionist positioning of whole groups of artists by obscuring their material reliance upon the practices of various earlier, and thus less well-documented, schools of Soviet art.

This is especially true in Photo Manifesto. In many ways similar to the earliest large-scale, post-perestroika

exhibition and publication to present contemporary Soviet

photography to an international audience, Le Comptoir de la

Photographie's Say Cheese! An Insight into Contemporary Soviet Photography (1988), Photo Manifesto is large and eclectic.2 In Photo Manifesto, however, geographic groupings of photographs are surrounded with authoritative texts by American and Soviet writers. In these texts, Soviet photography is labeled (Valery Stigneev: "aesthetic of defect," "naive style," "anonymous photography," "conceptual photography," pp. 63-65); bound to the production of artists who worked

during the Revolution and World War II, periods already legitimated by Western art and photographic historians

(Walker, Ursitti, and McGinnis: "The USSR is currently experiencing a time in many ways similar to the postrevolutionary avant-garde period," p. 28); and dissected for evidence of opposition (Grant Kester: "fascination with the

body and state control suggests connections to Foucault's

study of the carceral realm in Discipline and Punish, " p. 79). Finally, Photo Manifesto separates Soviet photographers into three geographic groupings, Minsk, Leningrad, and Mos- cow, plus an all-encompassing category, "Independents," to which the rest are designated.

The Independents category joins together under a sin-

gle, politically misleading heading the conceptual photography of Boris Mihailov, Kharkov, the symbolist photography of Boris Smelov, Leningrad, and the sentimental tonalism of

Valery Stigneev, Moscow, among numerous others. Signifi- cantly, Mihailov, Smelov, and Stigneev are regarded as the masters of three mutually exclusive schools of photographic practice, each with his own crowd of students, critics, and public admirers. In Photo Manifesto, however, examples of their work are surrounded by similar images by students and mimics rather than shown as points of origin for several distinct strains of photographic practice.

SUMMER 1994



This misrepresentation is significant. Subsumed under the category "Independents," the stylistic differences between the images of Mihailov, Smelov, and Stigneev are obscured, while the geographic sections of Photo Manifesto are defined by adherence to a single style. The Moscow section of Photo Manifesto, for example, is composed entirely of conceptual works by the Immediate Photography group (about whom I will have more to say shortly). In Minsk and

Leningrad, as well as in Moscow, Photo Manifesto shows

conceptualism as the dominant tendency in contemporary photography. In fact, only in Kharkov, under the guidance of Boris Mihailov, did photographic conceptualism actually flourish in Russia. Until the international recognition of the Immediate Photography group in 1990 made such an attitude uneconomical, photographers throughout the USSR, includ-

ing Moscow, remained hostile to the union of photography with conceptualism.

What, then, are the origins of Russian conceptual photography? Photo Manifesto's revision, linking the "pioneering" creativity of the postrevolutionary avant-garde to "the issues of subjectivity and ideology that have come to dominate current Western art under the rubric of postmodernism" (Kester, p. 79), obscures a complex history of interaction between the politics and the practitioners of Soviet

photography, of whom some supported and others resisted the fusion of the medium with ideology. The very real and well- documented relationship of contemporary Russian photography to the tradition of humanist photojournalism and the doctrine of Socialist Realism is denied by this historical revision.3

Indeed, most Soviet photographers working in the late 1980s and early 1990s have been influenced as much by the histories of "amateur" worker photography and "professional" photojournalism as by the more or less discreet, more or less

repressed experiments of numerous pre-perestroika artists. In contrast to the revolutionary period, however, when European Futurism was redefined (and Marinetti, the representative of

European vacuity, was sent packing) by Russian artists, and to the post-Khruschev/pre-Gorbachev era, when cold war

politics prevented such joint ventures, much of the photography presented in Photo Manifesto functions exclusively within the fantasy realm of Western commerce. The Soviet ground upon which, as Ilya Kabakov has noted, conceptualism fell and flourished, was briefly fertile in the early 1970s, a residue of the short-lived cultural thaw. The adoption of the "experimental" by Russian photographers twenty years later, by contrast, has been motivated by the dual pressures of the Russian economy and the imagined demands of the Western art market, rather than by any innate tendency of Russian artists.

The development of a minor American market for Soviet conceptual art during the 1970s was an outgrowth of the U.S./USSR cultural wars of the fifties and sixties. The goal of "cultural diplomacy" had been to contrast the forms of

creative expression dominant in one nation as more or less enlightened than those dominant in the other (i.e., abstrac- tion in the United States versus realism in the Soviet Union) at international expositions.4 Following the spectacular re- pressions of the Manezh event in 1961 and the Bulldozer Show in 1974,5 American cultural institutions abandoned the neu- tral ground of the "expo" and began to export unofficial Soviet art through an underground railroad of private dealers and collectors (facilitated, in part, by employees of the State Department stationed in the USSR). This creative gesture of cold war politics succeeded in promoting dissident activity and instigating a keen interest in the Western art market among Soviet artists.

Moscow conceptualism evolved during this period as an attempt by Soviet artists and intellectuals to establish ties with their peers in Western Europe and the United States, and to adapt up-to-date aesthetic strategies to the doctrine of Socialist Realism. In the Sots Art of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, for example, the political implications of Pop art were applied to Soviet culture. New York viewers responded enthusiastically to presentations of Komar and Melamid's Sots Art at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1976 and 1977, and to group exhibitions of Sots artists curated by Margarita Tupitsyn for the Semaphore Gallery in 1984 and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1986. By the late 1980s numerous Soviet artists, recognizing the appeal of Sots Art, had begun to produce Day-Glo Lenins in volume for the growing number of American visitors to Moscow. In contrast to the elaborate visual and textual ironies with which the early Moscow conceptualists engaged their viewers in a critical discourse with Soviet material culture, the revival of Sots Art in the late 1980s emphasized popular stereotypes, producing images and objects that caricatured and dimin- ished Soviet culture.

Russian photography has followed a similar progres- sion. Until the founding of the Ermitazh group in 1986, the first semiofficial artists' organization to emerge from legisla- tion permitting cooperatives and "informal associations," artistic photography existed only as an amateur practice in the USSR. In most of the Soviet states, photographers wishing to work professionally were required to become members of the Journalists' Union and to produce images that conformed to the time-honored standard of "humanist art." Only in the Baltic states, following the creation of the Society for Creative Photography in Lithuania in the 1960s, were photographers organized into state-sponsored photographic unions.6

Ermitazh was the first alternative to the Journalists' Union to which Russian photographers might belong. In 1987 several smaller groups emerged from Ermitazh, including the December Group and Immediate Photography. Under the artistic guidance of photographer Andrei Aksyonov, the De- cember Group enacted and photographically documented elaborate conceptual performances and games which re- flected the randomness and poverty of daily Soviet life.

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24 FIG. 1 Alexander Slyusarev, Untitled, 1980s, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist.

Following Aksyonov's emigration to Finland in 1989, Decem- ber regrouped under Yuri Babitch's leadership as the Readers of the Letter, and refined its focus on performance.

The membership of the Immediate Photography group included among others Vladislav Efimov, Sergei Leontiev, Boris Mihailov, Igor Moukhin, Ilya Piganov, Alexei Shulgin, and Alexander Slyusarev. The two directions explored by the group, which Viktor Misiano identified as "the immemorial paradigms of Russian culture," were "the search for truth and faith in beauty. . . . A moral orientation and a spiritual aestheticism."7 The development of these paradigms into distinct aesthetic practices by the Immediate Photography group in the mid-1980s continues to influence Russian photography today.

The first paradigm of Russian culture, the search for truth and the moral orientation of the artist, is exemplified by the early work of Boris Mihailov of Kharkov and, more recently, by the works of Moscow artist Alexei Shulgin, both members of Immediate Photography. In his series Luriki, for example, begun in 1975, Mihailov fused the traditions of the lubok, an illustrated broadside which made use of bold, energetic colors as easily readable symbols, with the lurik, a hand-colored postmortem photograph, employing a shift from pure document to constructed image. Mihailov's colorful critique of the photographic invention of memory extended from the private citizens depicted to their communal society, from the family or personal history to the history of the Soviet people. Mihailov's Luriki series, the first strategic use of found materials in contemporary Soviet photography, illustrates the role of photography in the construction and per- petuation of Soviet mythology: its refusal to distinguish in-

vention from reality runs parallel to the official documentary history of the Soviet people.

Alexei Shulgin began his series Others' Photos in 1987.

Employed by a Moscow architectural firm, Shulgin discov- ered a vast, forgotten archive of photographs, ranging from scenes of construction and destruction to landscapes and touristic souvenirs. Shulgin's appropriation of three hundred of these images for Others' Photos called into question the role of the artist and citizen in maintaining the tools of state

oppression. Others' Photos undermine the authority of the state by re-presenting the photographic depiction of history as an endless series of banalities.

Others' Photos are banal in the sense that they repeat the scenes of industrial progress that citizens of the former USSR are all too familiar with. Nevertheless, Others' Photos are evocative in ways that other documents of Soviet construction, such as Rodchenko's White Sea Canal series and Max

Alpert's Fergana Canal Construction series, are not. In Others' Photos, images of construction half completed contrast sharply with Rodchenko's and Alpert's crowded frames. The honorific images produced by those (and countless other) artists gloss over the subjects of enforced labor and the mass resettlement of ethnic minorities by means of which the Soviet state was built. In Others' Photos, the scarred and half-

empty frames of industrial images and the emphatic erasure of personal identity underscore the great and tragic losses that accompanied the industrialization of Soviet Russia. The vastness of the unfinished Soviet project, depicted in ruins, awakens in the viewer a sense of danger that verges on sublime terror.

Immediate Photography and the December Group brought the intellectual exercises and metaphysical games of Moscow conceptualism to the amateur traditions of Soviet

photography. Within the historical context of Soviet photojournalism, however, these groups appeared as aberrations, and were largely ignored by Soviet and American cultural authorities. (In Europe, however, the links between the new

photography and Moscow conceptualism were duly noted. By 1990 exhibitions and publications featuring Soviet conceptual photography had appeared in Germany, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Austria, and France.)

In 1989 Margarita Tupitsyn posed the question "whether alternative Soviet art will finally become integrated into international discourse or be doomed to even further

marginalization as an ultimate exotic resort for a libidinal investment of Western orientalist fantasies and desires."8 As if in response, in 1991 the Walker, Ursitti, and McGinnis Gallery's Photo Manifesto both sponsored and documented the abrupt trend toward mass production of conceptual imag- ery by Soviet photographers, an economically motivated parallel to the production of Sots Art (primarily by Moscow artists) and of Neoexpressionism (primarily by Leningrad artists), for American and German consumers respectively, during the same period.

SUMMER 1994



The dominance of "Moscow-centric" conceptualism in Photo Manifesto illustrates the speed with which Russian

provincial photographers adapted to the imagined demands of market competition. A survey rather than an art history, Photo Manifesto describes a lineage of moral and physical value that extends directly from the modernism of Rodchenko to the postmodernism of contemporary Russian practice. The

complex history of Soviet visual culture is obliterated, and the period from approximately 1930 to 1990 portrayed as a vast period of artless repression. In effect, Soviet photography is represented as an experiment that, with a few short- lived innovations, never really happened.

Baltic photography, for example, for thirty years the most significant creative and political influence upon con-

temporary Soviet photography, is absent from Photo Mani-

festo. Missing, too, are such significant figures in contemporary Soviet art photography as Gennady Goushchin, who, in the early 1970s, produced Sots Art collages based on paint- ings by the Peredvizhniki, Vladimir Jankilevski, whose color still lifes examined the border between realism and surreal- ism in daily life, and Igor Makarevich, an early conceptualist whose many activities included photographic documentation of the performances of the Collective Action Group.

What distinguishes Photo Manifesto from other recent publications of Soviet photography, such as Aperture's Photostroika and the Corcoran Gallery's Changing Reality, is the degree to which it reworks the conceptual strategies of Boris Mihailov, Alexei Shulgin, and other members of the Immediate Photography group whose photographs focused on issues of truth and the moral orientation of the artist. In fact, however, by 1991 the revival of Sots Art had exhausted the aesthetic values of conceptualism, and the Moscow art com-

munity had reached a point of crisis and collapse that

paralleled the social and political disintegration of the USSR. In photography, the sentimental attachment to Mos- cow conceptualism had been abandoned in 1990, when Tat- iana Salzirn declared the photographic production of Sots Art an anachronism. In 1991 Boris Mihailov rejected conceptualism to pursue the series UZemli, a "pure documentation" of the social and political situation in the Ukraine.9 Dur-

ing the same year, Alexei Shulgin began the series Latent

Energy, attaching motors equipped with ultrasonic detectors to framed archival images. Shulgin's energetic photographs, which defy both interpretation and reappropriation, spring vigorously into action as viewers approach and rest again only when they have backed away.

Mihailov's and Shulgin's actions are indicative of a significant, though largely unreported, transformation in the Russian art scene. Yuri Leidermann, formerly of the conceptualist group Medical Hermeneutics, has described this transformation as a return to personal strivings: "If, before, everyone spoke of collective syndromes, of the collective schizophrenia of our circle, now talk begins with personal ... ambitions."'o For Mihailov, the transition to documenta-

tion was an attempt to digest personally the enormity of the physical and spiritual demands upon the Russian people following the breakdown of Soviet authority. Shulgin's Latent Energy, too, represents a dramatic revision of the concept of a shared "genetic code of cultural memory" that informed Others' Photos." In its defiance of viewer interpretation and reappropriation, Latent Energy represents a rejection of the communal and a revival of the search for private, personal truth.

Despite its presence as a subject for books and exhibitions such as Photo Manifesto, the integration of Soviet art into the international market has not occurred. The Western

response to individual Russian artists, with the exception of a limited market for works by a small group of Muscovites active in the 1970s, has been ambivalent at best. In light of this Western ambivalence, the return of Russian artists to the visual expression of personal experience suggests a

throwing-off of Western subjecthood. Indeed, far from fulfill-

ing the Western idea of an infantile Soviet practice or a

regression to revolutionary modernism, one sees among numerous Russian photographers today a return to the second of Viktor Misiano's "immemorial paradigms" of Russian culture: spiritual aestheticism.

The "faith in beauty" of the Immediate Photography group was no less pioneering than its moral orientation. Misiano's spiritual aesthete, a solitary photographer devoted to exploring "the contours of carefully arranged objects such as mirrors, glassware, and plaster copies of antiquities" in the obscurity of his or her studio, fittingly describes Alex- ander Slyusarev of Moscow, a member of the Immediate

Photography group. Slyusarev began to photograph at age fifteen. In the 1960s and 1970s, like many other Soviet artists, Slyusarev was deeply influenced by Baltic photography, and in 1979 his photographs were first presented to the

public in a guest exhibition of the annual photographic festi- val of the Baltic republics in Ogre, Latvia, organized by Lithuanian photographer Egons Spuris. During the 1980s Slyusarev photographed in extensive series, devoting one to two hundred images to the investigation of each of his sub-

jects. Although the focus on conceptual photography has obscured his importance, Slyusarev is recognized by his peers as a central figure in contemporary Russian photography (fig. 1).

For Slyusarev, as for numerous other Russian artists, photography functions through the sensuality of vision, sig- naling the artist's recognition of objects and spaces as signs of a deeply spiritual interaction with the world. In photographs by Boris Smelov of Leningrad, the association of objects and spaces with spiritual culture is illustrated using transhistorical signs from art and literature. Like Slyusarev, Smelov is known within Russia as a master of the school of

spiritual aestheticism. The cultural signifiers Smelov em- ploys in his photographs are recognizable expressions of the resilience of the Russian spirit. In his Man with a Hatchet

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FIG. 2 Boris Smelov, Man with a Hatchet (after Raskolnikov) 1975, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist.

FIG. 3 igor Moukhin, from the series Monuments, 1992, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist.



FIG. 4 Igor Moukhin, from: the series Monuments, 1992, gelatin silver print. Collection of the artist.

(after Raskolnikov), for example, Smelov extends the struggle of Dostoevsky's protagonist across history to explore the moral

hunger of modern-day Russians (fig. 2). Like Smelov, Igor Moukhin, another member of the

Immediate Photography group, makes use of cultural signifiers in his photographs. What binds Moukhin's documentation of Soviet monuments to the photographs of Alexander

Slyusarev is their shared belief that such signifiers are re- minders of the unique and persistent human consciousness that developed in relation to Soviet political order. Moukhin

originated the Monuments series as a tribute to Lee Friedlander. Following the collapse of Soviet authority, however, the series acquired the immediacy of a documentary project as the campaign for public sculpture that was so central to the Communist idea of culture was abandoned and its artifacts demolished. Moukhin's Monuments explore the

process of cultural self-identification by examining the frac- tured signifiers of Soviet authority. They merge the moral orientation of Boris Mihailov with the spiritual aestheticism of Alexander Slyusarev, using relics of the recent Soviet past like the pieces of a puzzle to reconstruct an image of the shattered Russian self (figs. 3, 4).

The representation of contemporary Russian photography as a newborn in Photo Manifesto and other publications obscures the deep connection of the diverse practices of contemporary photographers to Russian and Soviet history. The idea that the fantasized victory of democracy over Com- munism should include a reconstruction of the history of Soviet culture according to Western values diminishes Rus- sian artists, encouraging the replacement of intimate discourse with mass production of Soviet kitsch for external

consumption. These ideas are antithetical to the goals of

contemporary Russian photography. In truth, what most characterizes Russian photography today is not the task of

deconstructing the Soviet past by assigning blame and com-

plicity, but rather the reconstruction of Russian national and cultural values through the identification of signs of truth and of the spiritual awareness of beauty that can occur even in the midst of repression. Far indeed from the culture of the state or the marketplace, the revival of spiritual aestheticism in

contemporary Russian photography represents not a denial of the past, but rather a search through history for moments of individual creativity and of collective dignity in the face of

ongoing material decay. 4,

Notes 1. Photostroika: New Soviet Photography (New York: Aperture, 1989); Joseph Walker, Christopher Ursitti, and Paul McGinniss, eds., Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR, exh. cat. (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1991); and Leah Bendavid-Val, Changing Reality: New Soviet Photography, exh. cat. (Washing- ton, D.C.: Starwood Publishing, 1991). 2. The exhibition "Say Cheese!" was organized by the Galerie Marie-Franqois George, Paris, a commercial gallery devoted to sales of contemporary photography from the former Soviet Union. It was presented in Paris during the "Mois de la Photo," 1988, and in the United States at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, December 22-February 7, 1990. "Photo Manifesto" was organized by the Walker, Ursitti, and McGinnis Gallery, New York, a commercial gallery that deals in Russian art and photography, and was presented at the Museum for Contemporary Arts, Baltimore, May 19-June 21, 1991. 3. See, for example, Olga Suslova, "Photojournalism in the Soviet Press," in The

Photographic Memory: Press Photography--Twelve Insights, ed. Emile Meijer and Joop Swart (London: Quiller Press, 1987), 102-15; or Vladislav Zimenko, The Humanism of Art (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976). 4. See, for example, Frederick C. Barghoorn, The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1960). 5. For information on the Manezh event, see John Berger, Art and Revolution (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); and Roy A. Medvedev, Khruschev (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982). For information on the Bulldozer Show, see Igor Golomshtok, "The

History and Organization of Artistic Life in the Soviet Union," in Soviet Emigrd Artists: Life and Work in the USSR and the United States, ed. Marilyn Reuschemeyer (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1985); and Alexander Glezer, "The Struggle to Exhibit," in Igor Golomshtok and Alexander Glezer, Soviet Art in Exile (New York: Random House, 1977). 6. See, for example, Daniela Mrazkova and Vladimir Remes, Another Russia:

Through the Eyes of the New Soviet Photographers (New York: Facts on File, 1986). 7. Viktor Misiano, "Photographers without Photography." Contemporanea (September 1989): 65. 8. Margarita Tupitsyn, Margins ofSoviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present (Milan: Giancarlo Politi Editore, 1968), 136. 9. Christine Frisinghelli and Manfred Willman, "A Sort of Unprotected Pain," Camera Austria 42 (1993): 15. 10. Quoted in Susan Emily Reid, "Center and Periphery in the Contemporary Art World of the CIS," unpublished paper, 1993, p. 8. My thanks to Susan Reid for

sharing this paper. 11. Tatiana Salzirn, "Moscow-Vienna, New York-Moscow," in Moskau-Wien-New York: Kunst zur Zeit (Vienna: Wiener Festwochen, 1989), 106.

JOHN P. JACOB is director of the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University.

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