“So where do we start?” As I sat in RIGroup, at Boris Mikhailov’s current solo exhibition Historical Insinuations, I heard people asking the same question over and over again. This is no surprise; it says at the door that the show is celebrating the photographer’s 70th birthday, so that most people probably expect something like a retrospective. And retrospectives always have a beginning, middle, and end. Again and again, I heard the guard give the wrong answer. She was telling the visitors to start with Suzi Et Cetera (Syuzi i drugie), the earliest series in the show. Personally, I think this is a bad idea.
To understand what this show is all about, to grasp its central question, you have to start by looking at Salt Lakes, a series of roughly 40 sepia prints shot in 1986. This series – published as a book by Steidl in 2002 – is about free time and its alienation. Cinematic and painterly at once, the camera circles an improvised beach in an industrial zone, where old men, women, and children are bathing next to a waste pipe that spills untreated water directly out into the open sea. There are almost no “perfect” erotic bodies in this series, only the old and the very young. Stocky men and unshapely women in strange bikinis mill around on the shore and bathe without taking off their worker’s caps and kerchiefs. No one is smiling. This makes them look like living examples of archetypal working class heroes of Soviet art, all the more since some of the more striking pictures in the series seem to draw upon its familiar pathos formulae, as, for example, in a shot of three old women, whose tired wrinkled faces are photographed monumental from below. Deluded and left to their own devices, these veterans of socialist labor worship a pipe that spits out waste, believing it to have miraculous powers. This is 1986, and the future is as catastrophic as the skewed horizon (tilted, about to fall) that some of the bathers scan in one of the last photos of the series. Obviously, the “miraculous” waste pipe is no fountain of youth. Instead, it reads as a symbol of a civilization about to collapse.
This all makes Salt Lake look like an allegory that fits in well with Boris Mikhailov’s general image as a rigorous yet ironic social critic of the Soviet Union’s dissolution and the squalor that came in its wake. It seems to tell us what happened to free time in the Soviet Union, the time outside of work, that, in Marxist theory, measures the wealth of a nation far more than the dead, objectified time of surplus labor.
Then again, the space Mikhailov creates here is immersive rather than allegorical. Sometimes in the water, and sometimes out, the camera circles the bathers as a participant observer. Most of the time, it goes unnoticed, and when it doesn’t (i.e when it is noticed), it provokes either apathy or bemusement, as if to say “See that guy over there? He’s one of us.” The camera has joined the collective, sometimes miming its motions, sometimes taking a distance in panoramic shots. Mikhailov is a realist rather than a symbolist, and this is documentary photography, and not something staged. As such, it presents a certain normalcy, while at the same time capturing this normalcy’s central, surreal contradiction. Namely: free time has become wealth within poverty, timelessness within the inevitable passage of time; this is why people can sunbathe in the burnt grass of the wasteland, why families can camp out in the parking lot, autonomous, ready to come to rest wherever they like, even among piles of garbage and railway sidings. But how did this happen?
An answer to this question can be found in Suzi Et cetera, the most extensive series of the show, and the one that most visitors start with. This series of small, scratchy prints – also published as a book by Walter Koenig in 2007 – details Mikhailov’s artistic emergence from amateur photography in the Sixties and Seventies, a process that could be understood as an objectification or reification of free time, as professionalism is born from amateur creativity (samodyetal’nost’). And there was plenty of that in the Soviet Sixties. In fact, in the first part of the 1960s, as drastic gains in productivity made it possible for people on both sides of the Iron Curtain to work less, both Khrushchev and Kennedy were heralding the onset of an era of leisure, which was connected with utopian claims. In the West, the reduction of the workweek immediately meant the emergence of a new culture industry for the passive consumption of spectacular experiences, but in Soviet culture, it had a very different dimension more closely connected to the efforts of amateur creativity and active recreation (aktivny odykh), which, in the Soviet Sixties, became mass phenomena.
As I said before, Marxist theory foresees a socio-economic formation in which wealth is measured in free time, and not in surplus labor; gains in productivity (i.e. improvement of machinery, rationalizing evolution in labor processes etc.) make it possible for the worker to “step aside” from the labor process, gaining more and more free time for the all-around development of the personality. «Свободное время, — писал Маркс, — представляющее собой как досуг, так и время для более возвышенной деятельности — разумеется, превращает того, кто им обладает, в иного субъекта…» (т. 46, ч. II, с. 221). (hyperlink: http://tapemark.narod.ru/kommunizm/184.html). This new subject is no longer fettered by the limiting division of labor, but is far more productive, capable of “tilling the fields before dawn, hunting before lunchtime, and criticizing after dinner,” as Marx famously wrote in the German Ideology, having finally overcome centuries of rural idiocy and mindless consumption.
Suzi Et cetera (1960s-1970s) offers an insight into this new subjectivity born of free time. Originally trained as an engineer, Boris Mikhailov took up amateur photography in his free time like many of his contemporaries. It is not only personally significant that roughly a third of this early series is made up of nudes, nudes that seem to express this new subjectivity’s redefined relationship to women and sexuality.
They document what one could call the public-private eros of those years, a delimited, diffuse cosmos of desire and invention, born in a world of nudist naturalism, do-it-yourself fashion, and fleeting intimacy.
In improvised arrangements reminiscent of homemade porn, Suzi Et cetera is actually something far more potent, because it’s not based on passive consumption and masturbation; it’s more about making love, about creativity. It’s not prudish or squalid, as Irina Kulik suggests in her review of the show for Kommersant, but innocently playful (for example, when Suzi holds a young Boris Mikhailov like a pieta, ironically staging that old pathos formula for the camera’s timer). At the same time, this playful note does not banalize or dthe series’ eroticism. Each of the nudes is almost-ugly, like anything truly erotic, and makes you wonder that a camera is capable of not only capturing, but actually making such intimacy. It provides a brief glimpse of what beauty can be beyond the pornography of lifestyle silicone, once time is truly free. The aging female body (sagging breasts and folds of flesh) is eternally young in these images, innocent and at the same time arousing. Whoever said there was no such thing as sex in the Soviet Union…
But at the same time, Suzi is not only about the vitalism of the Soviet Sixties but portrays its denouement in the Seventies, its objectification, its deadening and flattening out, its transformation into wealth within poverty, its descent into phantasmagoria and decadence. The series shows what happens to free time when it is rejected by society as something anti-social, and when it sneaks in through the backdoor as “art,” where free time can survive, albeit in an alienated form. In 1965, Mikhailov was fired from his job as an engineer for making nudes like the ones in this series. And as anyone who has ever been unemployed knows, free time takes on an entirely new dynamic when left to its own devices.
For one, free time is literally objectified, as the eros of amateur creativity bleeds over into the world of things. The second third of Suzi Et Cetera is made up of arranged and found objects, still-lives, unlikely, playful arrangements reminiscent of surrealism: a head of cabbage and the skull of a dog, a loosened tie and a plate of dried fish, a mannequin’s hand on an armrest, skinned rabbits in sexual poses, images in which there is a mutual interpenetration of thing and body, and ultimately, their alienating identification with one another, as in a shot of a sagging breast that dangles disembodied from the leg of a table or chair.
Mikhailov also applies this view of objects to public Soviet visual culture, and, by doing so, comes much closer to sots-art and Moscow conceptualism, which were emerging in the same Seventies. He photographs dead ideological forms that no longer work and now appear as absurd “things-in-themselves”: a fallen head of Lenin, a statue of a goldfish for the courtyard of a kindergarten, or a pictogram of a soldier standing at attention. Mikhailov’s gaze eroticizes these objects, turning their wasted time into free time, their dead objectivity into art. But by doing so, he fetishizes them, coming much closer to real pornography. Take, for example, a shot of a girl posing in front of an overdimensional lamp post adorned with a decaying red star, and the next shot of her (is it her?) lying on a cot with her shirt rolled up to reveal her groin, abdomen, and breasts, as if about to masturbate, the sparse walls of her basement flat plastered with popular prints of socialist realist paintings of Lenin…
This, perhaps, is where the free time of the Soviet Sixties seems to burn out, growing tragically and prematurely old. This is what happens to Suzi herself in the series; at first, she plays innocent nudist games by the fire, prays to the sun, rolls around drunkenly in burning fields, holding a rose, looking through grass wearing a crown of flowers, her ugly-cute face suddenly masculine like that of a soldier in a Soviet war memorial. But you can tell that Suzi is getting older: overexposed in a yellow light, a barely recognizable Suzi – or is it her mother? – lies in bed in a nightgown, as if after a long illness. In this heartbreaking image, we can already see what happens when free time – once the collective wealth of a socialist society – is privatized as wasted time: eros turns into squalor; yesterday’s bohemian is tomorrow’s bum. We already see this in one of the most shocking images of the show, a penis covered in sores, a precursor of Mikhailov’s later photos of Kharkov’s homeless, as in Case History (Istoria bolezni), (1993). In this later series, which was originally supposed to be shown at the current exhibition, Mikhailov hires the homeless to perform anti-erotic and pathetic poses reminiscent of the pathos formulas of Christian art, converting wasted time into productive time by paying the homeless to show their wounds, translating and instrumentalizing the performative amateur creativity of his own gaze under brutal neo-capitalist conditions, becoming a successful contemporary artist, his work shown at MoMA and awarded numerous awards, including the prestigious Hasselblad Prize.
So where does all of this lead? This is something one can ask oneself when one looks at the last piece in Historical Insinuations, which is a rapidly timed slide-show of a more recent series called Holiday in Tenerife (2006). Again, Mikhailov’s eye gravitates toward free time, though now at a beach promenade on the Canary Islands, one of the most popular vacation destinations for the aging German middle class. Couples of German pensioners in sunglasses and tourist caps march back and forth against the horizon, taking off their shirts to show their ugly bellies, jowl and jaws determined, as if at work. Only six or seven shots in the series seem more playful: cheerful pensioners pose for the camera with tennis rackets and give a thumbs up to the camera in front of their hotel, but their smiles seem strained. It seems as though they are remembering and imitating free time for the snapshot, rather than actually enjoying themselves. In short, this most recent presents accurate, distanced images of an alienating vacation; they are far colder and documental than Mikhailov’s other work, and present a dismal view of leisure as a peculiar bourgeois boredom that is little more than an extension of work. Interestingly, most of the visitors at the exhibition seemed to be skipping this slide show. Having started in the middle, and moving forward to the beginning, they seemed unwilling to look at the end.
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