Remembering Times
Past springs
from a very personal place. I was born and raised in
Georgia, in the former USSR. The unity of Soviet life
was an ideological fiction.1 In reality everybody
had their own perspective on things depending on their special
social situation.2 In Georgia people of my generation
never thought of themselves as Soviets, always
ironizing the official style and ideology. The disappearing
Soviet reality was the environment that we lived in.
Two years ago when I visited the country for the first
time in five years, I realized that it was not the Soviet
symbols that were missing but the whole system of terms;
things had changed and been redefined. Since then, while
reviewing extensive slide files and conducting studio
visits, I have been looking for the kind of work that
deals with realities from the recent past. I have selected
a group of eight artists from various backgrounds and
generations. Their work is not ideological, didactic
or judgmental. It offers us various perspectives on the
assimilation of time into consciousness and the expression
of that process through art.
Visiting local artists' studios in Georgia, I came across a rare series
of photographs called Definitions by Guram Tsibakh. In these pictures the
artist used old negatives from the late 1940s, 50s and 60s
collected at Soviet flea markets during the last decade. He reprinted these
negatives on special technical paper that was used for X-rays in the USSR.
As a result the photos look faded and resemble archival materials. These
are photos of everyday mundane events: a photo of a man photographing a
group in an atelier; a dinner party; a Soviet tour guide in a party museum,
etc. Tsibakh draws over the photos and inscribes them with explanations
that verbally mock Soviet style. He creates a culturally specific context
that is unique to the Soviet lifestyle. In other words, these photos are
like a tongue-in-cheek dictionary of a particular reality that is my most
recent history.
Also from the former USSR
is the well-known artist Ilya Kabakov. Unlike Guram
Tsibakh, even after the collapse of the USSR Kabakov
insists on being called a Soviet artist.3 When moving
to the West in 1988 he brought with him "the Soviet
hell" the Russian realityto the "residents
of paradise."4 Visiting his installations the
viewers in the West were forced to experience that
reality: "the reality of Russian hell."5
The drawings included in the show are from the period
of Kabakov's 1970's albums of ten characters. One of
the characters is Flying Komarov. The text that comments
on the character tells a story of a man who, after
endless arguments and quarrels with his wife, steps
out onto his balcony. Suddenly he sees that people
and objects are flying through the air above the city
and he joins them. As Robert Storr has noticed: "usually
when something strange happens, it happens in the air.
This is logical. People and things in Kabakov's world
have nowhere to go except upand so they do."6
This exhibition is a New
York debut for German photographer Michael Schwab,
who studied philosophy at Dusseldorf University. His
series of photographs, Erinnern, exposes German realities
during and after the Second World War. In 1993, in
Hamburg, Schwab found a bag full of old anonymous German
family photographs. The artist reprinted the images
and overlaid them with the text from the backs of the
photographs. Schwab, who is in his early thirties,
approaches the war in a factual manner: in pictures
relating to the bombing of Hamburg in 1944, the information
comes from the text and not from the imageon
a portrait of a woman the text reads, "bombed
out." Both Schwab and Tsibakh use their native
languages as visual co-elements within their work.
When the text is incomprehensible our perception is
particularly drawn to the image. In Erinnern history
has been written on the photographs.
Oliver Nikolich, also debuting in New York, was born in the former Yugoslavia
and came to the United States in 1989 at the age of nineteen. Nikolich's
installation, Preserving What Is Mine, was part of the Traveling
Scholars exhibition at the Foster Gallery of the Boston Museum of
Fine Arts in the winter of 1998. The artist down-sized the scale of the
installation to adapt to the specific space of Apex Art. Preserving What
Is Mine refers to the recent chaos, despair and murder in the Balkans.
The installation involves photographs rolled up in glass jars. These specially
treated photos seem partially consumed by fire and stained by blood. Some
jars contain soil, the moisture of which results in accumulated condensation.
The photos were taken by the artist's friends and family still living in
former Yugoslavia. Nikolich sent them disposable cameras and asked them
to document their day-to-day realities. The film was returned to him undeveloped.
Christine Temin of The Boston Globe found affinities between Nikolich's
work and Christian Boltanski's installations of yearbook photos of Jewish
teenagers who later perished in the Holocaust.7
Nora Fisch is an Argentine artist who divides her time between New York
and Buenos Aires. Her latest series of works (computer manipulated
images digitally printed on fabric) evolves from images of early performance
and conceptual art at the end of the 1960's and 70's in North America,
as reproduced in magazines and art history books; the audience seen
in these images is the focus of the work presented in the gallery.
From her perspective as a New York artist, the work evokes a nostalgia
for the spirit of those times. The images are scanned and then layered
into vivid optical patterns: evoking fantasy and idealization. In the
artists words the work refers to the images that she encountered
while living in Argentina in the eighties. At the time, these grainy
black and white pictures carried a symbolic weight as sites of unbridled
creativity and freedom. Fisch compares the impact of these images to
the popularity of American blue jeans in Eastern Europe before the
wall fell: they function as conveyors of fantasy.
Ana Tiscornia is a Uruguayan artist living in New York since 1991. Her
thirteen portraits titled Trece Retratos allude to the topic of the "desaparecidos" (people
missing during Uruguays military era).8 Pictures of anonymous people
are placed under semi-translucent glass. The surface layer does not allow
the viewer to focus on the images, revealing the impossibility of seeing
clearly, the impossibility of knowing real identities.
Haghbat (20 minutes, black & white), a video by the Armenian-born,
New York-based artist, Sonia Balassanian was presented at the Armenian
pavilion in Venice in 1997. The video depicts an image derived from a childhood
recollection: a naked man disappearing into the dark cavities of gigantic
clay wine barrels, buried in the grounds of an ancient Armenian church.
This relentlessly repeated act refers to the tradition of cleaning wine
barrels in the fall and visually references her memory of Armenia.
Leandro Katz is represented by two pieces: the installation Joaquins
Column and the film El Dia Que Me Quieras (The Day You'll Love Me30
minutes, color, sound, 1997).9 The latter is a 16mm non-narrative film
investigating death and the power of the last photograph of Ernesto Che
Guevara as he lay dead, surrounded by his captors. This photograph was
taken by Freddy Alborta, the official photographer for the press conference
held at Vallegrande in Bolivia, in 1967. Not a political documentary in
a traditional sense, Katzs film portrays Che as a man for whom
the world had become intolerable and reminds us that though the world is
still intolerable, we simply cannot stand on the summit of the present
as if we were superior to the past.10
Irena Popiashvili ©1998
1 Boris Groys in With Russia on Your Back: A Conversation
Between Ilya Kabakov and Boris Groys, Parkett 34, 1992, p. 36.
2 Ibid.
3 Robert Storr, The Architect of Emptiness, Parkett 34, 1992,
p. 43.
4 Ilya Kabakov in With Russia on Your Back, p.
37.
5 Ibid.
6 Storr, Ibid.
7 Christine Temin, review of Traveling Scholars, The Boston
Globe (February 10, 1998).
8 Concerning the desaparecidos, Jean Franco quotes Leandro Katz in her
forthcoming book, Visual Culture, that the post-mortem appearances
of Che, whose body was put on display only to disappear until 1997, inaugurated
the practice of disappearing opponents (and innocent people)
that would be put to devastating effect by Argentine [and Uruguayan] military.
9 El Dia Que Me Quieras was awarded a Coral prize at the Havana Biennale
in December of 1997.
10 Franco in Visual Culture. |