“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.

Viktor Alimpiev. Thrown banners look like an arable land 1, 2005, acrylic on canvas, 175 x 150

Everybody in Moscow loves Viktor Alimpiev. But no one really understands his work. Its meaning is hidden so carefully that you start to think that it might not be there at all. So I just can’t help being skeptical when everyone professes their love. I mean, come on. It’s Yuppie art. I like neo minimalist painting and Hollywood quality video and everything, but why does it all have to be pink, so poetic, so pathetic, so unreal, and so empty?

Alimpiev’s current solo exhibition at Ekaterina Foundation provides an answer of sorts. Curated by Theresa Mavica and Alexandra Kharitonova in collaboration with the artist, the show looks back over nearly ten very productive years. It creates a formalized space ideal for contemplation and aesthetic enjoyment, and not just of chocolate dipped strawberries and champagne at the opening. The parcour is stringent, reminiscent of a formal garden. The works are perfectly spaced, allowing you to concentrate on each piece in detail, to search for repetitions and differences, to swim through this world of rustling silk. Teresa Mavica is really good at helping artists to present the enigmatic and the obscure in a form that is legible but not comprehensible, as in her installation of a work by Andrei Monastyrski at the Arsenale in Venice, and here, she does it again. Corridors and rooms with paintings – shown in series that blur in memory, all somehow different though of course the same pale pink pleats, plaits, and curtains closing – lead from video room to video room, each properly darkened and soundproofed.

Exhibition view (c) Pyotr Zhukov // Openspace.ru

The quality of the video is high, and the lighting on the paintings too spectacular, as if to prove a point, to make the central message of the show known even to the illiterate: the whole phenomenon Alimpiev is not just about strange, almost-glossy movies, made in a slowed-down aesthetic of the high brow video clip; it’s also about brushwork and painterly plasticity. This plasticity, it goes without saying, is a luxury commodity that you can acquire.

Then again, this is not Regina, Alimpiev’s gallery, but a private foundation, and the one with perhaps the most high brow program (Yankilevsky, Valie Export, the Red Army, Gursky, and now Alimpiev) in town. Supposedly, here, commodity value is not art’s only meaning. And really, some singular emotion breaks in through all this intimate-erotic formalism, all these skin tones and fuzzy edges smelling of vanilla and baby powder and just a little morning breath. Intuitive half-automatic poetry formalized and edited in a virtuosic hypertechnological process, ultra-rational messages whispered in the act of love or on the edge of waking. Soft morning sounds, and enigmatic mating rituals, performed in a subtle musical sequence of dream-signs that only its author can decode.

Exhibition view (c) Pyotr Zhukov // Openspace.ru

Who’s that exhaling? What does it mean? There’s no way of knowing. So you watch and you watch and you wait until it’s over, determined to stick it out till the end, to listen to all those raspy whispers that interrupt the almost-silent, post-discursive world of potential commodities. Maybe this is the way you should look at art in general, you think. Sharp, keen, and balanced, fascinated and dispassionate, free of all those bothersome contexts. Never mind how much it all costs. In search of rhymes, loops, acts, and micro-events, but not in search of meaning. As Yuri Al’bert commented, Alimpiev is a “real artist,” somebody far more concerned with plasticity, spatial solutions, cropped angles, lighting, makeup and cuts that with any meaning, other than perhaps the most universal meaning of all. His work is about the fuzzy ritualized interface between people, mediated by the spectacle. Who knows what all these interactions mean. Meaning will come later when all the feelings have gone.

The edge of field 2, 2007, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 150

And there are plenty of feelings, most of them mixed. For one, the sense that those who insist on feeling alone trample humanity underfoot, as old Hegel once put it. And that there is plenty of disgust and manipulative cruelty in all these images, and not just an endless extenuation of desire and joy. His aesthetic is a strange mix, glamorous biopolitics by the elite for the elite, and intelligentsia melancholy, arranged around an image cult of purely personal aesthetic pursuits. It’s both autonomous art and a slowed-down high culture remake of all the gloss propagated to the nascent Russian middle class in lifestyle mags and on primetime tv. Alimpiev reveals that high-brow glamour has no meaning exterior to the metaphysical subtleties of its form, that it is nothing but a pure pink glory that one cannot quite remember once it’s gone. This is why he may just well one of the most – if not the most – symptomatic artists of what I call the New Russian Biedermeier and its cult of the interior, his art a figure of potentiality perfectly suited for the living rooms and offices of the Russian bourgeoisie.

The Russian version of this text is online at http://www.openspace.ru/art/events/details/1224/

I stood outside of Ekaterina Foundation for about twenty minutes with the other losers. The security was tight and the opening was packed. Everyone was eager to get in. It was an official occasion, a binding confirmation of the art scene’s hierarchy, but without too many artists or intellectuals. Socialites, curators, and collectors were all there, eager to make contact. Nobody knew what Andreas Gursky looks like.

Andreas Gursky, in case you didn’t know, is the most expensive photographer in the world. His most famous work stages sites at the very heart of capital: stock markets, racetracks, carports, hotels, warehouses, and museums. Elaborate half-abstractions, perfect color balances, distorted perspectives, all in epic proportions: these are better than multi-million dollar budget blockbusters, far more luxurious, sophisticated, fine, and compact. They actually redefine how much an image can be, and not only how much it can cost. In this sense, they are golden children of the era of post-production. They successfully reconstitute the aura of a genuine bourgeois art. This is why they look a lot better today than many of the other forgotten icons of the 1990s, whose utopian spirit no longer rings true.

So Gursky’s photos are classics, in a way. And not only because they try to harness so many new imaging technologies, or – as some critics have noted – that they try to reinstate 19th century realism’s central ambition, namely to grasp and describe reality in a total panoramic perspective. But because Gursky has done something to these photos to keep them from spoiling; he has sterilized them like tomatoes irradiated to keep the bacteria away. The result is epic, but at the same time, strangely banal. Gursky’s photographs are optical follies, a big huge “Where is Waldo?” book, only that the audience consists of ultra-rich adults, not innocent kids trying to find life in a space that has been pacified and redacted. This is part of the reason for why people stand there looking at Gursky photos forever; they contemplate and ruminate for much longer than they would look at a painting. They are trying to find something. But what?

What are we looking for when we stand in front of a Gursky? Are we searching for our own (petit) bourgeois reflection in these perfected, sterilized non-places (empty and waiting for their subject like Atget’s Paris streets deserted)? Are we looking for a glimmer of self-consciousness as we trace the lines of this inanimate world? Maybe. Gursky’s photos are ideal reflexive surfaces; they have been polished and sterilized to the point of having enough air and emptiness for just about any projection. They are mirrors. So the ultrarich can see themselves and jubilate. (This, at least in part, is what people were doing at the Gursky opening: “This is MY piece. You know that I am a citizen of Monaco…”). But there is also something else. We are looking for a real contradiction. Gursky’s photos show us the warped, compiled space of the world market, but they fail to show us its flipside, which remains out there in front of the gallery, among the losers, waiting around to be let past the face control.

Imagine a provincial late Soviet department store with half-empty shelves, sparse decorations behind the bleary windows. All the goods and appliances are a little dusty and old, held up by welded stand-screens of vertical iron rods falling askance Sixties style. A vacuum cleaner flies through space like a Sputnik. Handbags form suprematist compositions; transistor radios hang suspended on welded prison bar insets. There are op art shutterblind effects whenever you change position. The whole display is amazingly sparse and stylish, but also a little crude, an autistic fusion of decorative abstraction and pop produced by local virtuosos with the material sensibility for improvising quick solutions. Bicycles, clothes hangers, portable washing machines: so many satellites of a consumer communist Atlantis about to sink. These goods may have already seemed obsolescent when they were made. But somehow you know that they still work. They look like they were actually built to last for lifetimes.

In his new series “Used Goods,” a set of 13 wall assemblages, Dmitry Gutov imitates the basic elements of such an imaginary socialist shop window display. In doing so, he returns to a symbolic form that already appears in the first piece he ever made, “Art to Life” (1988), which combines two ready-mades from the Soviet Sixties into a handmade still-life or “easel object”: the lacquered door of an East German buffet serves as a background for a fancy-heavy glass with a spiral design characteristic of the epoch. It is attached to the improvised handmade frame and hangs weightless against a sky of deviating vertical tracer lines, singular trajectories of satellites and rockets flying up through socialist outer space toward communism, or falling down, to crash into an impending neo-capitalist reality.

Dmitry Gutov, Art to Life, 1988.

Gutov’s world is a forest of such trajectories. One finds them in his paintings, and not only in direct repetitions of the late modernist pattern, but also in his installations, as in “Above Black Mud” (1994, Regina), where the buffet door’s intersecting lines of flight reappear as the planks bridging the upturned soil of a construction site. It is no coincidence that “Above Black Mud” quotes a painting by Yuri Pimenov from the same sweet Sixties, the time of Gutov’s early childhood, which is when he started collecting all these razors, cameras, bags, and footstools for their plain and simple beauty.

Above Black Mud, 1994

So, as artifacts of a normal childhood in the Soviet Sixties, these goods are not really secondhands in the capitalist sense; they don’t really belong to the garage sale of our own hapless time, its endless flickr group of campy soup cans and pornographic media trash. Instead, they are things made for a world without private property: things-for-us from a utopian time repositioned and displayed as things-in-themselves, like rocks in a Zen garden, whose only possible use is disinterested contemplation and aesthetic enjoyment.

But unlike a Zen garden, the present series is not laid out on the floor. Instead, the assemblages are fixed to the wall as vertical formats. This automatically equates them to paintings, and not only imposes painterly or graphical compositional rules, but also means that that they are clearly for sale as objects for someone’s interior. This is a similar translation of painterly forms into metalwork as in Gutov’s manuscript-fences for documenta 12, only that now, the random virtuosity of an anonymous master takes place in the everyday decoration of a shop window. Through his choice of objects, Gutov shows that he was always something of a Kabakovian character, a man who could never throw anything away, a romantic Robinson with his treasure hoard. But this lyrical image of the collector is sobered up by the prose of artistic production: Gutov is actually framing and selling personal mementos to the raging hunger of other collectors, all too willing to continue a more profitable Robinsonade.

???, 2008

But why is Gutov parting with these objects now?

Maybe because the post-Soviet era is now definitively over. Until recently, it was still possible to maintain personal cults of all things Soviet, but now, even the dream of a new Thaw has been privatized and belongs to the PR managers of Dmitry Medvedev. But that is not all. There is a sense of closure all over the world. For example, one might say that the epoch of design has ended. Phillip Starck, known for his brilliant toilet bowls and toothbrushes, just recently said that he will stop working as a designer altogether. When he started, he was departing from late modernist assumptions: design was for the elites, and elitism is vulgar, so the only possibility for elegance lay in mass production. But now, says Phillip Stark, he is disgusted at having produced all this materiality (for the petit bourgeoisie, one might add). As society follows strategies of dematerialization, so Starck, the entire concept of the designer becomes redundant. New generations of bionic knowledge workers grow up in disposable realities where everything is automatically useless. The only way mementos of the material age can survive is as elitist works of art (read: commodities), either tucked away in a museum, or, as is more likely, in the hands of private collectors. They aren’t even safe at home.

The word capitalism itself says it all. There is nothing to hide. There is no free lunch. Artworks are commodities. It is what it is. Get used to it… Many artists and intellectuals hate such bourgeois bluntness. That’s why they would never go to the Tate Britain’s current retrospective of the British painter Peter Doig. Doig was once an outsider too, in the orbit of the younger artists of YBA, a little like our Dima Gutov maybe (they happen to be the same age). But now, after an amazing price spiral over the last five years (see here), he is one of the most expensive painters in Europe, and lives on Trinidad.

His work is perfect for the salon, because its rich textures have a calico melancholic folksy North American-Caribbean flair, a decorative alternative to photography, with enough metaphysical shadows and melancholic nuances to give any interior some contemplative weight. It’s bluntly bourgeois art, framed as a return to easel painting, the interiorized, private flipside of Damien Hirst, and it advertises itself as such.

Open the Tate Britain’s extensive documentation of this show here, and you will immediately see what I mean.

What’s the first thing that catches your eye? Other than the artist’s name (associatively placed above a magical rainbow, how charmingly unafraid to engage with Sixties dreamcatcher kitsch), you see a little label: “Supported by the Peter Doig Exhibition Supporters Group.” So there is some serious money behind the show; according to a little joke in Wikipedia, Doig’s collectors “include Finnish retail tycoon Kevin Kokko (who following an attempted robbery in 2005 has implemented a world class security system involving retina scans and biometric and voice tests)[citation needed] and Albanian mining oligarch Jono Dingle Dangles.[citation needed]…” These names are silly fakes. Of course, it’s Saatchi and Gavin Brown. “I don’t believe Doig is capable of making a boring painting,” says the Guardian’s Adrian Searle. “Uff, I’m not going,” says your critical critic.

Luckily, you don’t have to. The show has a big budget, plus the Tate Britain wants you to do some shopping (here). So strap on your own retinal scanner and look at the panoramas, two rooms of maddeningly textured landscapes. Don’t you feel a little dizzy?

Peter Doig says that the thought of someone reaching into their pocket and forking over 5 million pounds for one of these paintings makes him sick, and now, you can feel a little seasick too. Beyond nausea, the problem is that you might suddenly find yourself liking Peter Doig if you take a closer look. He seems like a pretty nice guy. And you will never know. Is this the advertising and its optical drug? Or some faint shimmer of reality under the magical veneer?

Peter Doig. White Canoe. 1990-1, Oil on Canvas. 200.5 x 243cm. Image: Saatchi Gallery,
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/doig_White_Canoe.htm

You will still feel like throwing up, of course, not only because of the prices, but also because of this veneer, this caked-on mass of fake organic ornaments over some fundamental sadness you will always know.

Doig can give you the blues so easily because he is clearly a virtuoso, a bit like Eric Clapton when they let him play the Royal Albert Hall, and a bit like Eric Clapton, he plays like a whiteboy: similarly conservative on the licks and brushspeeds, similarly anti-conceptual, similarly unruly and rugged, and maybe more than just a little traditionalist. In that sense something in the way he paints reminds me of American southern rock with slide guitars and a sophisticated fake hillbilly accent, because it’s always a fake, disconnected from the experience of slavery and the bonfire dance of real rural idiocy, a magical childhood executed in an almost Klimtian orgy of hallucinogenic-cloudy color.

Peter Doig. Canoe-Lake. 1997-8, Oil on Canvas. 200 x 300cm. Image: Saatchi Gallery.

The country-houses, ponds, and roads in his paintings are the acid stuff of the British-American-Caribbean landscape, a landscape that was always a hallucinogen, whether in Turner, the Hudson River School, or for the American painter Marsden Hartley; and its main drug is the false memory of the simple life before capitalism, produced as a nostalgic vignette from the wilds for the homes of the ultrarich. It is something we – your average planetary petit bourgeoisie – will only know through reproductions, which is actually where Doig’s false memories come from in the first place…

1.

A specter haunts the world of cultural production, the specter of criticality. All too often, this specter is truthless, little more than a caricature of a ruthless critique. Its appearance invokes an “aesthetic of administration,” born of too many compromises between market, state, and freelance rebellion. This kind of criticality pretends to found upon Foucauldian parrhesia or Brechtian “plumpes Denken,” but it does not articulate the interests of “class conscious culture workers.” Instead, it is the global petit bourgeoisie’s version of what was called paidea in late antiquity, the polite and deferent gestural-discursive code of conduct for educated (i.e. recognized) subjects at court.

This weak criticality is what distinguishes the “reasonable” petit bourgeois from a run-of-the-mill consumer of decorative-spectacular kitsch; criticality is a hallmark of enlightened citizenship. But of course, today, criticality is also an industrial product, a bit like bio-food. Its function is supply a semi-privatized “public sector” a new aura of governmentality, to the irrational, maddening glory of an “intelligent” or “soft” power that pretends to yield and change to your benefit when you tell it the “naked truth.” This, of course, is a lie.

2.

To be truthful, it has become very hard for cultural producers to tell the truth. “Telling the truth” always meant going beyond the vagaries of personal experience. It meant putting things into focus. It involved making a clear, collectively responsible statement that would finally grasp, describe and reflect a social totality. Today, the position of the speaker is all-important. Critical truths become necessarily vague. A multiplicity of dissenting (often divergent) interests drift and collide on the continental trade winds of capital. Here, the only possible master narrative is the idea that there is no outside, that we (as the makers of culture) are all somehow implicated and involved, more part of the problem than of its solution.

“It seems to me,” says Irit Rogoff of Goldsmiths College, “that within the space of a relatively short period we have been able to move from criticism to critique to what I am calling at present criticality. That is that we have moved from criticism which is a form of finding fault and of exercising judgement according to a consensus of values, to critique which is examining the underlying assumptions that might allow something to appear as a convincing logic, to criticality which is operating from an uncertain ground of actual embededness.” This actually mirrors the hegemonic version of authenticity: from within (i.e. from the position of the embedded critic), everthing is so beautifully vague, wobbly, and somehow authentic, like the spotted green nightscope naturalism of another war on CNN (cf. Hito Steyerl, The Uncertainty of Documentarism, in: Chto delat, Make Film Politically, 2007, online at http://chtodelat.org/)

Attempting to clarify and focus this vagueness through self-reflection, criticality can make great strides towards a new realism, as in Steyerl’s films and essays. But it can also go wrong, beginning to look like the urban neurosis of a Woody Allen movie, choked by the golden umbilical chord, a parody of the tragic revolutionary’s “unhappy soul” (Hegel), marking the trajectory from the folksong of the partisan to the vaudeville of the partisan review, perhaps. Self-clarification is not always a truth procedure.

3.

- So how can criticality tell the truth, how can it set the vague optics of embeddedness into focus?

- Only through a materialist analysis of the world that exists both without us and for us.

- But what is this materialism, actually?

One position in this discussion, as voiced by critic Isabelle Graw in Texte zur Kunst, is that we first need to know in how far criticality’s “artistic compentencies (research, teamwork, communication, personal initiative) can be fed into [...] the ‘new spirit of capitalism’.” Then, we should search for concrete artistic material sensibilities that are not so easily swallowed. To find these resistant sensibilities, we would have to expand our view of the artistic institution to include traditional studio work. This concrete materiality of art produced one-on-one in the studio has always contained a place for inner emigration (exodus). The material truth is refocused around the artwork and the artist who produces it as an object, a material product that survives in an institutional context and beyond.

Another position, as put forth by philosopher Gerald Raunig from Vienna on the transversal web-journal, is that we should be careful not to draw ultra-conservative consequences from a timely analysis: our critique should actualize critical truth-telling as the insistence on the possibility of another mode of handling collective self-governance and singular subjectification, one that does not take place between the same old archaic interior and the shopping center’s fake agora, but in the “publicity without a public” of general intellect, as ideology becomes its own productive force. Here, so argues Raunig, it becomes possible to invent “instituent practices” based on the possibility of disciplinary “transversal,” a combination of crossing-over and translation.The material truth is with the producers and the originality of their discourses, which self-institute a politically productive “flight to the fore,” to the avant-garde of immaterial production.

A third position is voiced by Prelom kolektiv from Belgrade, reprinted in the present paper. Combating the tendency toward idealism, they say it is time to refocus the discussion around a real materialist practice of critique. Methodologically, this means breaking with both the transcendental horizon of abstract humanism and the overly metaphysical metaphorics of immanence. It means calling things by their proper names: engaging in a more radical form of parrhesia that is not (yet) normative, calling the NGO an NGO, as it were. But it also means intervening in the etiquette of multicultural criticality by insisting upon the “existent impossibility” of communism (in Prelom’s case, through the partisan traditions of Yugoslavia). This means articulating its images and imaginaries in a de-culturalized form, unbound from the dominant narrative, which depoliticizes communism as a utopia. The concrete (material) aesthetic of socialist altera-modernism has not yet lost its claim to absolute truth, precisely because it can be actualized and used as a weapon in what is ultimately a neo-colonial, post-socialist struggle of the marginalized semi-periphery. The material truth is with this struggle and the practices it demands.

4.

All three positions are based on different aspects of the same material truth, the same contradictory reality. Though they arise from a polemic and contradict one another, we should not make the mistake of seeing them as an irreversible dialectic. Instead, we could consider them as three productive aspects of the same phenomenon, three lens rings that could focus the optics of embedded criticality, if adjusted properly. The point is to find the proper constellation. In our view, this constellation can be obtained through a collective reconsideration of critical realism. In brief, there are three moments that we might think about for now.

The first moment is that critical realism must make the abstract diagnosis of “the wrong whole” – and this is the only real content of vague and diffuse criticality – more concrete. First and foremost, its narrative of “typical people under typical situations” (and isn’t this the narrative of embeddedness?) must become stereoscopic through the precise, “virtuosic” use of mimetic procedures to show the contradictory nature of reality. These are sensuous material, social, and practical movements that approximate the truth in its becoming, turning the whole rotten fishsoup into an aquarium, as the Moscow artist Dmitry Gutov once put it. The eye becomes a human eye. In that sense, the mimetic labor of critical realism, if rethought today, will inevitably have to have to involve sensualist, Epicurean “craftsmanship.” But the point is to use this mimetic craftsmanship critically, even barbarically, never forgetting that each mimetic device is also a practice or know-how that the dominant cultural discourse of criticality would like to neutralize as a form of embedded “non-representative” mimesis.

The second moment has to do with the self-constitution that mimetic labor always entails, and the desire to flee from those conditions of production that threaten to subsume it completely. Mimetic procedures are always-already instituent practices that create their own visual, textual, and narrative spaces, their own optics, their own realm of freedom beyond the realm of necessity. Cultural producers are translators; their work always “flees” or “deviates” from the original (and here I am vaguely reflecting upon my own embeddedness). Cultural producers today are also eternal dilettantes, and dilettantes can never quite get it right. In the 19th century, critical realism emerged from dilettante genre painting, which, in turn, imitated academic classicism, but it slowly moved out through strange jokes and ironic mutterings via the grotesque, finally to embrace the political vitality of the tragicomic everyday. It is precisely this deviation that allowed the critical realists to make such convincing otherworlds. But these otherworlds are very much here and now when they become exoteric, and launch themselves into broader reality, facing a “publicity without public,” producing a constellation that must make its own audience when it is put to practice.

It is this moment of double reflection that still seems so inspiring if one looks at the Peredvizhniki, the Russian 19th century critical realist painters known as the Itinerants in the West. On a painterly level, their brutal critique was sensual and almost loving, full of both comedy and tragedy, full of a humanity often far beyond the theoretical abstract humanism of its time. This quality – a combination of painterly virtuousity and narrative subtlety – made the nascent idea of communism plausible in the flesh, as it were, for years to come. And on an institutional level, their traveling exhibitions were actually a counter-institutional practice or exodus that broke with the previous feudal academic mode of production. Are the different self-organizing critical institutions like the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policy in Vienna, Chto delat in St. Petersburg, Prelom in Belgrade, or 16Beaver in New York the basis for new “itinerant practices,” new critical realisms? And will they share the fate of the Itinerants, if there is the sort of political transition we are all working towards? As we know, critical realism eventually produced the institution of “official” Soviet art…

This brings me to the third moment that seems so important today, namely the possibility of seeing the discredited legacy of the socialist alternative to modernism as a weapon for a class struggle that will come into focus in future years, perhaps sooner rather than later. This does not only have to do with the return of class consciousness to outsourced, precarious content providers from the semi-periphery, who are then cultivated and exploited (i.e. institutionalized and culturalized) by the Western industry’s “non-profit” branch, whose representative are often almost just as precarious…: a straightforward institutional critique of this intricately embedded position could never go beyond criticality. Instead, it is also the material, physical awareness of a constant double-agency: of miming socialism altera-modernism for the Western camera and the local capitalists, and actually exploring its truly alternative and emancipatory content in a materialist mimesis that does not only think but feels the transhistorical immanence of communism as a community to come. Yet such “weak messianism” of the communist imaginary is unthinkable without its concrete articulation in the everyday, retelling its tragicomedy in the prose of a contradictory reality that has not yet found its truthful voice, its consistent articulation. This would be the contradictory dialectical materialism and communist sensibility of Andrei Platonov (the critical realist per se, according to Georg Lukacs), the materialism of the subaltern, one that literally “grows weak when the truth drains from its body,” a feeling we know very well, whenever we see that capital has already appropriated the world we have just made.

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

Liechtenstein’s capital Vaduz has a population of 5.000. Other than the castle (upper left of the image), the main tourist attraction of this village is the Kunstmuseum. In the neighboring countries of Switzerland and Austria or even Germany, almost every larger town has a Kunsthalle or two. Most of them are modernist kasbahs like the one in the photo above.

The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is currently showing an exhibition of early work by Thomas Schütte.

Schütte (born 1958) is one of the most famous artists of his generation to emerge from the Düsseldorf art scene in the early 1980s, best known for working on the border between architecture, stage design , and ceramic figurative sculpture. Recently, he designed a plastic “Model for a Hotel,” which is now on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

The exhibition at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein focuses on Thomas Schütte’s lesser-known early works of the late 1970s, when he was at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter, moving from painting to sculpture. The exhibition, which runs from February 1 until April 20, 2008 was first on display at the Henry Moore Institute Leeds. (vernissage.tv)

Тhe slick, somehow still disposible materiality in these early pieces survives into his later oeuvre. You can see this at Schütte’s personal site, which has a very extensive artist’s portfolio. It was here, browsing images of illustrative architectural models, one-man-houses, disposable environments, that I had the idea that Schütte’s IKEA-art somehow fits in perfectly with the modernist kasbah (art to life for the standardized global petit bourgeoisie).

But at the same time, this kind of art has a tendency to dialectical inversion.

Though it comes from conceptualism and minimal, it lands in neo-expressionist figurality, as in Schütte’s gnarled handmade ceramics, or smackdab in the middle of a new Biedermeier, as in the watercolor series “My Private Kosovo” (1999).

These floral arrangements are dangerously poised on the brink to commercial kitsch. Their return to illustrative mimesis is clearly a private-profitable art therapy that refuses any real social broadening, other than of course, universalization through the commodity form.

The Spiral Jetty is an earthwork sculpture constructed in 1970.

Built of mud, salt crystals, basalt rocks, earth, and water on the northeastern shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point in Utah, it forms a 450 m long and 4 m wide counterclockwise coil jutting from the shore of the lake. (Wikipedia on Spiral Jetty, Utah.)

It is considered to be the central work of American sculptor Robert Smithson,

Smithson emerged in 1964 as a proponent of the then-fashionable minimalism. He soon became affiliated with the Primary Structures movement and artists such as Nancy Holt (whom he married), Robert Morris, and Sol Lewitt. As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying mathematical impersonality to art. He outlined this view in essays and reviews for Arts Magazine and Artforum.

In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey. He was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock. In a later essay, he described such places as the equivalent to the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in a series of ‘non-sites’ in which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass. In 1969, he began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts gained from his readings of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and George Kubler.

(Wikipedia on Robert Smithson)

Approach to the Spiral Jetty. Photo via toolshed4 on flickr

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation. The parks that surround some museums isolate art into objects of formal delectation. Objects in a park suggest static repose rather than any ongoing dialectic. Parks are finished landscapes for finished art . A park carries the values of the final, the absolute, and sacred.

Dialectics have nothing to do with such things. I am talking about a dialectic of nature that interacts with the physical contradictions inherent in natural forces as they are – nature as both sunny and stormy. Parks are idealizations of nature, but nature in fact is not a condition of the ideal. Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished.

When a finished work of 20th century sculpture is placed in an 18th-century garden, it is absorbed by the ideal representation of the past, thus reinforcing political and social values that are no longer with us. Many parks and gardens are re-creations of the lost paradise or Eden, and not the dialectical sites of the present. Parks and gardens are pictorial in their origin – landscapes created with natural materials rather than paint. The scenic ideals that surround even our national parks are carriers of a nostalgia for heavenly bliss and eternal calmness.

Apart from the ideal gardens of the past, and their modern counterparts – national and large urban parks, there are the more infernal regions – slag heaps, strip mines, and polluted rivers. Because of the great tendency toward idealism, both pure and abstract, society is confused as to what to do with such places. Nobody wants to go on a vacation to a garbage dump. Our land ethic, especially in that never-never land called the “art world” has become clouded with abstractions and concepts.

Robert Smithson in Art Forum, 1972

Spiral Jetty from the air. Photo via mbuitron on flickr

Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it.

Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.

Friedrich Engels in “The Dialectics of Nature”, 1883

Ground View of Spiral Jetty. Photo via on mbuitron on flickr.

Smithson proposes that the artist should start to map the “bleached and fractured” space of entropy which surrounds him. To deal with the real conditions of art production, but through “low levels of consciousness”, an “oceanic”, Neil Young aesthetic. This is something that has still hardly been started, and most artists who are influenced by minimal or concept art are doing the opposite, domesticating the signs of radicality within ruling class interiors. Yet perhaps we can also blame Smithson for this.

Merlin Carpenter in Spex, 1997

Spiral Jetty. Photo via CRYoung on flickr.

Further viewing:

A Red’s slideshow on Flickr
www.flickr.com/photos/trip-pix/sets/72157602752569…

mbuitron’s slideshow on Flickr
www.flickr.com/photos/buitron/sets/720575940939373…

Montage by David Riff

This just in via MAN: A new drilling contract in Utah threatens Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, an emergency email from the artist’s widow, Nancy Holt, informs journalists. A number of pipes and pumps will be laid beneath the water and shore, as well as roads built for oil tank trucks, and cranes for other development needs, all of which promise to severely alter the surrounding environment including Spiral Jetty.

By the way, “Spiral Jetty” belongs to DIA Foundation. Will they save it?