Garden by the Sea

28Feb08

Roman Korovin. From the series “Garden by the Sea,” 2005-2007

I remember Latvia in the mid-1990s. Somehow, it was a romantic place. The landscape was picturesque: trenches from World War Two overwrote the pinehills on the Kurland peninsula hiding one-family-house villages from the beachwinds of the Baltic sea. The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought squalor and chauvinism. It also brought a widespread misconception: namely, that privatization would be about national and personal individuation, that it would bring a “grounding” of the “groundless” world, that it would reinstate the intimacy of the interior. This romantic idea has become impossible today. Privatization is clearly a public affair, as one could see at “Public Mirrors,” a retrospective of the Latvian poster, and “PRIVATE,” a show of young Latvian photography, both currently on display at Winzavod. Both insist upon a national tradition of individualism and private property, one that eased the transition to full-fledged capitalism and EU membership.

Vilnis Vitolin. From the series “100 Rooms”. 2007

But what is this public insistance on privacy? What do we see when we look at Vilnis Vitolins’ photos of individual interiors? Shelters or a world theater of the private man? Reconstructions of personal paradise lost? In their glamorous aesthetic, these photos have something in common with the work of the Ukrainian photographer Sergei Bratkov, whose work is always about the reconstitution of the interior’s aura as an obvious fake, and the simulation of the high bourgeois lifestyles on an inauthentic post-Soviet stage set. But these are not stage sets. They do not look like reconstructions, but like idiosyncratic remnants of archaic property, whose privatization is only completed when the interior is published as a glossy-glamorous media image in a lifestyle magazine or at a photo exhibit.

Alnis Stakle. From the series “Home Sweet Home,” 2006-2007
One can see similar moment very clearly in Alnis Stakles’ photos, juicy long-exposure images of cottages radiating into the night as archetypal personal dwellings, free-standing as worlds of their own, symbolizing the archetypal spatial form that preceded capitalism, one that predates the rise of the medieval town. In Latvia, the one-family-house is still the basic spatial form. It survived socialism and continues to exist. But Stakles’ glossy high definition images subsume these houses, turning them fluid. This mirrors what happens to the one-family-house in highly developed capitalism: the house no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the bank. This social ownership of “your” house is actually what makes it “private property.” Thus threatened, the house takes on a personality and shines its warmth into the darkness.

Zenta Dzividzinska. From the series “Servitude,” 2002-2007

So privacy is a sensitive plant. “Tend your own garden,” as Pangloss put it in Voltaire’s Candide. This retreat from the travails of public life would seem to lie at the root of the conception of private property, and Latvian public ideology assumes that its survival (and its emergence in Russia, with datcha allotments) sowed the seeds of the current state of affairs. This is probably true. But at the same time, the personal garden only becomes a cherry orchard when it is threatened, when real (i.e. capitalist) private property appears, when all that seemed so solid and unchanging melts into air. So what is this strange thing called private property?

Арнис Балчус. Я за день до отьезда в Лондон. Из серии “Современные латыши.”

Arnis Balchus’ series will tell you more. Presenting a typical character in a typical situation, it narrates the partially fictional story of a “normal” (i.e. lower middle class) Latvian childhood in socialist housing projects. Lumpenization goes hand in hand with a naive fascination with bourgeois high life, articulated in a flood of cheap consumer goods that broke down the Great Walls of China. Balchus’ fictional alter ego gets an Asian girlfriend who becomes a trophy, a temporary piece of “private property” whose perfect breasts he shows to his friends on internet forums. But then, he moves to London, escaping this somewhat hellish world in the projects, and promptly falls in love with a Muslim girl in a burka. This is almost a caricature of the deterritorialization that private property entails, when human capital circulates in global space, gravitating toward the unexpected. All the one-family-houses and gardens are gone. Even the biography itself has become a fiction. But is this all that has melted into air?

If one goes upstairs to the poster exhibit, it becomes clear that something else was lost. But that is another, much longer story.

Helmuts Sheiers, Let’s get read for the 3rd Spartakiade of the USSR. 1962

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