Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective.

BORIS MIKHAILOV: A RETROSPECTIVE

THE INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

BOSTON, MA

SEPTEMBER 22, 2004-JANUARY 2, 2005

Living in the current post-Soviet era, the USSR--once prided by western intellectuals as a country that would be the first to successfully abolish class differences--finds a different image of itself in the photographic work of Boris Mikhailov. Although Mikhailov, born in the Ukraine in 1938, began capturing moments of daily life within his native town of Kharkov in the late 1960s, knowledge of his activity was unknown outside of his country. For during the reign of Joseph Stalin, the large, desolate nation full of pollution and poverty had little voice within global culture beyond the Communist Party line.

Since the end of Constructivism in 1925, the Soviet Union had long been an enigma, because it existed as a nation that sought its independence while severing all ties from the West. Yet it was only eight years prior when artists and Bolsheviks had been working together in the revolutionary overthrow of the Tzars who bore a host of familial connections to Europe. The Bolsheviks, however, eventually felt that avant-garde art was too autonomous for Russia's new anti-bourgeois society. By the mid-1920s, Russian intellectuals immigrated to America, England and France while the USSR gradually suppressed the activist artist.

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Mikhailov's career as a photographer officially began in the late 1960s when he was fired from his job as a mechanical engineer for having left negatives of nude women in the company's darkroom. Living under political censure, Mikhailov was never trained as a photographer but used the medium as a forum for free exchange which revealed controversial subject matter--such as nudity or the dire poverty that he and others witnessed throughout the neighborhoods of the Ukraine. While using documentary realism to challenge the discrepancy between what was seen and what was practiced politically by the Soviet regime, Mikhailov also used other techniques, such as collage, to create more sardonic depictions that utilized irony to break down the process of looking into the elements of perception--the arrangement of objects with color, contrast and text.

Mikhailov created nearly 26 series that revealed the stagnant life within the Soviet Union. "Susi and Others" consists of at least nine images made between the late 1960s and late 1970s, and exposes the artist's observation of women within the context of an androgynous society. One image, for example, depicts a large bust of Lenin, taken from a high vantage point, while another captures the raised, bare derriere of a woman. A separate picture suggests a hidden masculine metaphor through the representation of two orange persimmons on either side of a tall, glass jar of milk.

While woman as pictorial object is nothing new to western viewers, these photographs reflect a body politic that exists within difference, highlighting the fact that Communism masked both genders behind the singular idea of the "laborer." Mikhailov's ironic yet linear pastoral comparisons of female sexuality with kitschy government iconography initially appears mute when set in contrast with the activist art that proliferated throughout the West during the same time period. However, the vast censure that the USSR placed upon photography prohibited aerial photographs from being taken and, thus, placed these images in a more controversial context.

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Despite political restriction, Mikhailov pursued his use of the mundane, which deliberately undervalued the achievements of Soviet Communism, in order to suggest that the practice of photography is indeed ideological as soon as political censorship is imposed upon the medium. Another series of color photographs titled "Red" (1968-1975) explores the relentless use of this color behind the Iron Curtain and strikes a satirical note between the notion of "krasnoe" (red) and "krasivoe" (beautiful). When seen together, these images convey the overall ideological obsession with the color red as it appears in disparate areas such as the modular constructions found in a children's playground, the text or background of billboards, or even within ceremonial processions. Mikhailov ultimately mocks this kind of political investment with a photograph that portrays a scantily clad prostitute who sits upon a chair draped in red.

Set within glass vitrines, "Horizontal Pictures, Vertical Calendars" (1982) depicts pairs of images upon paper reflecting the photographer's effort to conserve materials. As a result, Mikhailov presents the equivalent of a daily journal, containing personal, black and white pictures alongside handwritten text. By eschewing color, he moved away from the stark ideology that was manifest in his earlier, whimsical work. As a result, these photographs appear less amateur and instead fall into the realm of documentary.

The realistic nature of photography has led the medium to be associated with truth, leading viewers to believe that each is a given of the other. When used for documentation purposes, the photograph exposes a host of fissures within society, portraying the condition of the immediate environment while simultaneously gauging it in a single snapshot. During the early twentieth-century, photography served as the conduit for the mass media, which then informed citizens about communities that existed beyond their own. The United States government, for example, relied upon photographers dispatched by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression to capture the devastation that the failed economy had wrought upon rural and urban neighborhoods. Photography was treated as a measure of truth even though some negatives that were submitted to the FSA, like those of Walker Evans, were considered too sentimental.

For this reason, the Communist government of the Soviet Union discouraged imagery that did not reflect national pride. "On the Ground" (1991) and "At Dusk" (1993) attempt to use the camera objectively. Each series depicts the residents of Kharkov relaxing on sidewalks, playing upon rubble or squatting in anguish on the street. All of these representations were captured by a camera that was attached to his waist.

An earlier piece titled "Salt Lake" (1986) captures an overwhelmingly large crowd swimming and relaxing on a large beach created by the run-off from a nearby soda plant. Everyone is surprisingly unselfconscious about their bodies and far from being disturbed about seeking leisure within a mass of pollution. "Case History" (1997-1998) is even more poignant, depicting the homeless in Kharkov suffering in the cold, bearing wounds such as skin rashes and tumors. Although "the study of popular culture inevitably leads into class issues," (1) these particular images first portray the working class of the Cold War era and then the poverty-stricken public, proving that both Perestroika and Glasnost left the people of the Ukraine with much less than they promised. While Mikhailov's photography reflects a large measure of "samokritika" (self-criticism), a trait shared by other citizens (2), his work existed beyond the "high" culture of kitsch that was initially designed by the Bolsheviks. His representation of the masses, moreover, demystified the Soviet notion of culture and reveals why none of these photographs were allowed to be exhibited publicly during that time.

Mikhailov's subject matter lived outside of the opulent urban centers, such as Moscow and St. Petersburg. If we follow Adele Marie Baker's suggestion--to examine all consumers and their use of products--one will inevitably reach an intellectual impasse. As a result, Mikhailov's work cannot be viewed as another facet of popular culture but instead a realistic view of what life was like under communist oppression. Due to the dire living conditions that saturated most of the USSR, independent photographers were shut out from the mainstream and functioned primarily within the underground. Throughout the Modern era, photography within the East and West has served a variety of political purposes. Since ideology is subject to change, the photograph is only able to preserve a single moment rather than extend a justifiable, national portrait.

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NOTES

1. Adele Marie Barker, Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 20.

2. Ibid., p. 17.

3. Ibid., pp. 16-17.

JILL CONNER is an art critic based in New York City.