Boris Mikhailov: A Retrospective in Berlin

[based on a review originally published in Frieze D/E Issue 5 Summer 2012]

Only over the last twenty years Boris Mikhailov gained recognition in the Western art world. Without a doubt, the belated discovery of the 74-year-old Ukrainian photographer’s work has to do with the collapse of communism and its aftershock. This large-scale retrospective in Berlinische Galerie reaches back even further and reveals Mikhailov as an avid chronicler of both the pre- and post-Soviet eras by presenting works made between 1966 and 2011. His photographs from the last 10 years are devoted to street life in Berlin where he has lived since 2001. The 1990s saw the first publications on art from the Soviet Bloc with special issues often built on simplistic anti-communist praise; recent years have seen exhibitions mourning the perhaps too easily dismissed socialist order, after the brave new world of capitalism provoked unprecedented economical damage and societal degeneration.

Despite the broader historical perspective, the exhibition seemed weighed down by some ideological prejudices – albeit from the West. When we read in the catalogue, Berlinische Galerie director Thomas Köhler writing that ‘in the 1990s [Mikhailov’s] focus was existential, threatening. When the Soviet Union collapsed, he turned to those who had lost out in the social transformation, took their portraits and depicted them in their poverty and despair, the result of the merciless, repressive Soviet political system’, we see what theses Mikhailov is supposed to help in proving. This overlooks the blindingly obvious fact that the photos actually depict the effects of a merciless new capitalism on the post-Soviet poor.

In fact, the whole show challenges a view of the Soviet system, in which the monster is controlling every aspect of every citizen’s life, just as much as the condescending sympathy about those "repressed by socialism". This view is often followed by something like ‘but of course the bold Soviet people were capable of finding the ways out, there was also space for laughter, picnics, flirtation, sex and silliness’ or worse, by that ‘actually a little bit of ideology would be nice’, that for example some of the recent shows or books on the ex-communist countries often imply.

Mikhailov is some of the most prominent artists emerging out of the crashed Soviet Union, who basically continued what he was doing before the collapse, but without making his art in any way more tasteful or palatable for the foreigners. He was influenced by Russian conceptual art (Moscow Conceptualists, Collective Actions) and to a degree, sots-art, but evolved it in its own, sublime, and  documentary way. His attitude varies from a Czech New Wave little realism, not afraid of the abject and sarcasm, but still sweetly funny, and something much darker and visceral. He's also a well known erotomaniac and exhibitionist. when the nude pictures of his wife were found by the KGB, he was fired and decided to take up photography full time.

Then he made his first and incessantly stunning, Red series(1968-75). Mikhailov obsessively photographed red-coloured fragments: found on a girl’s knickers and in blood on her buttock, at a playground, on socks, trams or a babushka’s headscarf. He’s haunted, not so much by the colour of communist ideology, but by the ever changing world around him. It’s as if he believed that looking at something long enough might lead to the discovery of its molecular construction. On his photos the ideology is present in the micro- as well as the macro-image, like in the mass ornament, parades, flags, commemorations. Yet seeing only the ideology behind the colour would be akin to following the official party line; so much more is going on. Anyone looking for unhappiness under the regime couldn’t find the evidence in these completely unofficial photos. Crimean Snobbery (1982) – a monochrome rest after the brightness of Red, where the young and old, skinny and obese, enjoy the sensual pleasures of the seaside resort – could be seen as a parody of the propagandist Bloc newsreels explaining why we’re no worse than Saint-Tropez. But these images also offer an anthropological and behavioral inquiry, much like Black Archive, series compiled from 1968 until late 1970s, another series full of sexual mystique, made by an author simply fixated with the woman’s body. The leitmotiv of his art remains Mikhailov’s subjects: strangely exhibitionistic, open, giving him a large access to their privacy. We never know if they’re acquaintances, lovers or relatives.

Regardless of the political system, Mikhailov has always refused to be a passive observer and kept on actively looking after 1991. The horrifying Case History (1997-99) and At Dusk (1993) series centre on the newly homeless and dispossessed around the ever appearing hometown Kharkov. They’re the biggest accusation of what happened after, not before 1991. It’s a complete collapse of any acceptable reality, of any limits of existence we could still call ‘humane’ (this word happens to be often applied to Mikhailov). The first are full format portraits of the homeless, presented in all their degeneration and disintegration. Extremely harsh, even too intimate in their frankness, they at least do not repeat condescending views on “the poor men and women”, but let them be just the way they want to be, grin, cry, showing their tattoos or genitals. At Dusk shows blue-suffused everyday scenes from Kharkiv: begging, lying with face on the street, dying. Cripples, drunks, old people, ill people.

If I was a German…(1993) where the naked author, his wife and friends are playing scenes dressed as Nazis occupying a small Ukrainian village in kitschy, SM pornographic poses, comes as a relief, although a brief one: soon discomfort takes over. Mikhailov took his stay in Germany seriously, picking the most taboo fragment of its history; self-mockery and exhibitionism are a vital part of the series’ creepiness and power. Why are you looking at me looking so hideous and ridiculous, viewer? – asks its protagonist. Aestheticized, campy Nazi imagery is nothing new to the fashion photography and indeed, in keeping with the original portraits of the perfect Aryan bodies. David LaChapelles of this world, beware: horror can turn back onto you.

Travels in Rural & Municipal Britain: Patrick Keiller in Self-Retrospective

[alternate version of a review of Patrick Keiller's Tate show from ICON #110]

From a foreigner’s point of view, it is hard to find an artist more parochial, more English (not even British) than Patrick Keiller. This filmmaker, researcher, former architect, polymath, obsesses over Britain, the relation between the land and economy, but strangely, it is not making him provincial, because it’s hard to be provincial, if one’s obsessive topic is the logic of western capitalism, hardly a local phenomenon. But Robinson, the character he created, is himself a kind of an exile, an outsider, a queer, and this is precisely, what allows him to see “the problem of London”, problem of the UK and subsequently, the whole western world, increasingly endangered by the food and natural catastrophy.

The current show in Tate Britain is a complex course in Keillerism and Robinsonism, but already so advanced and multilayered, such a rhizomatic net of references, varying from general, historical and political to extremely personal, that a novice may have easily get lost in this construction. It’s as if it was trying to imitate this arch-English novel, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, with the complicated, impossible storylines displayed as paintings, books fragments, photographs and scattered data (which makes you wonder what kind of architect Keiller could have been if he didn't drop it years ago; we know he was in the team designing famous London brutalist estates, Alexandra Road and Thamesmead); as if begged by his fans, Keiller made a map of his brain and way of thinking. But no worries: it’s a very rational, very logical brain: even English romanticism was rational, and in dealing with the monster of the late capitalism, one should be rather cool-handed.

The exhibition itself is divided in eight sections, each a small platform, like a dry herbarium, with screens, canvases and memorabilia. And as if straight away answering the “but I haven’t seen any films of his” dilemma, he, the most ferocious chronicler of the present financial crisis, makes a shift and retraces us to the very beginning, the start of industrial revolution. One of the first objects in the show is the threshing machine, one of the first ever technologies introduced to the countryside, forerunner of mechanized production and the object of Luddite movement’s hate and destructive attacks. It’s huge and heavy – hardly a precursor to an Ipad. In his Robinson film trilogy, Keiller examined the tension between the rural and industrial Britain. Where has the 500 years of capitalism led us and what maelstroms happened on its way?

We come back to the prehistory of modernity: the land enclosure changed everything on those isles and in the perception of the world as such. The show documents many movements of resistance to this act, mutinying peasants, who saw it as a seizure of their freedom. From now on it’s impossible to imagine common land with no possessions, where people live together and share, although the show also documents attempts at independent communities. Since then everything becomes a potential profit-maker, open to the speculations of the market. Keiller shows how our thinking would be impossible without this revolt, with signs of melancholy, even nostalgia after an unmechanised, rural world, a ‘biophilia’, as he calls it, to the most basic forms of life. But it is in a landscape after the humanity: we exploited everything, we had massive food crisis, we disappeared, leaving behind the scorched earth. But even at his most ‘biophiliac’, Keiller is not Tarkovsky gazing melancholically at the Zone, but an ironic, politicized observer. With what delight and suppressed anger must have he displayed the screens with the war economy (multiplying maps of the war zones, photographs of roads, lanes, closures, private accesses, warnings). Maps of Oxfordshire and Berkshire, primal locations of his films, overlap with maps of Iraq – because maybe the truth of one can be found in the other. Robinson believed he can best explore the world by walking, as if then the land unfolded itself in an act of political-economical transformation. We can also only do as much, images at the show haunt us, as if staring at them intensely enough, we could see the molecular basis of the historical events.

This obsession pervades his work. In London (1992) he looked at the UK capital of the late Tory rule, where, interestingly, only capital itself is left: we see what happens, if all the social relations are gradually stripped of any additional meaning than monetary and reduced to generating income. We see the strife of London of the early 1990s, with the systematic destruction of declining socialist infrastructure, IRA bombings, and other sinister effects of the Tory period. The city there was becoming a dark, independent organism, slowly decaying amongst the technocratic negligence. Then, in Robinson in Space from 1997, he went outside the city to see what happened to the countryside, finding the non-architecture of corporate sheds, retail parks & military zones. This was where the machine was still working, unnoticed. It anticipated the New Labour, also in terms of their architectural legacy: sheds, speculative, shoddy and expensive housing, symbolising the “boom” and what came after the bubble cracked.

Watch Patrick Keiller's London in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

In Robinson in Ruins (2010), after his tormented and ferocious Robinson is released out of prison, put there after he invaded a closed military zone, he relocates to a caravan, where he collects all his previous research and then mysteriously disappears, leaving his legacy to the Institute. The film itself, narrated by the person from the eponymous 'Robinson Institute' (after the real death of Paul Scofield, role took up by Vanessa Redgrave with a perfect, emotionless, flat voice), previously involved with the now deceased Robinson's ex-lover, is supposed to be fragments of his own film-reels. What a beautiful way of building another level of mystery and shaking off rules of autorship Keiller takes his final epopey's element to, denying himself not only the auctorial voice, but also any involvement in what we see on the screen. And what we see is filmic rudiments, stripped to absolute basics: no music, not any non-diegetic score, only nature's images, in long, neverending shots, eternally contemplative, and, one could seriously ponder, an anti-thesis of Tarkovsky's wistful, metaphysical approach to static filming of nature.

And so in the latter, we feel the presence of God, who is 'looking' and 'directing' the image, when the human is absent (nature is never solitary, remember), it is left in its eternal "beauty and mystery"; but of course, we know: we feel such an immense, stubborn presence of Tarkovsky's own eye and sensibility, that we cant really stop thinking about it. Keiller is not giving himself this luxury of rich directing. Of course, like only the great ones do, he is capable of 'directing' the nature, but in his films there's no one looking. Nobody watches, God's dead (sic), people disappeared, even work as such is dead, replaced by machines, there's nothing, only a very uncanny presence of machines (let's not forget the lichens too, of course); and the anonymous, deadly Production going on, that could seemingly go on even after we're all dead (at this moment of crisis, which may also become a serious food crisis, so and so megatonnes of food, it's said, mostly oil seed rape used as biofuel, was not meant for human or animal consumption). Invisible hand of the market at play. Tricks of the trade. Nature's pure relentlessness.

'Robinson's Institute' is also such an erudite delight all along - Warhol’s portrait of Goethe with Kippenberger’s The Happy Ending of Franz Kafka’s “Amerika”, novel, from where Robinson was born; Richard Hamilton intaglios of uncanny agricultural equipment, looking rather like some medieval miniatures, fragments of Quatermass series – and dozens of books. But something tells me that the copy of Borges’ Labyrinths is there less important than, say Engels, Marx, Hobsbawm or Karl Polanyi. And the ultimate message of the show may be to read and use this knowledge against the state of things, rather than attend a psychogeography evening.

Kapuściński The Biography - the best novel about post-war Poland so far?

[a much longer version of an article first published in the Guardian's Review in print on 4.08.2012, an online version in here]

Ryszard Kapuscinski has been the biggest cultural Polish pride abroad, a rare example of internationally recognised name, like ‘Milosz’ or ‘Polanski’, who gained fame due to his vivid literary reportages on power back in the 1980s. Emperor, The Shah of Shahs, Soccer War gained interest not only because of their authors unique position – a star reporter directly from the darkness of the communist Poland, then in the midst of the martial law after a failed workers revolution, but perhaps mainly due to their unusual style – very personal, meticulous, literary, digressive. This wasn’t the usual way of writing journalism and similarly, Artur Domoslawski’s stylish, digressive, written in the unusual present tense, nearly 500 pages long Kapuściński – The Biography is not a conventional biography. Both the author and his hero – also, a friend, a master – stand out of what is accepted in first – the cold war world and now – the post-communist neoliberal Poland by pursuing the truth. And if The Emperor was by some called "the best post-war Polish novel", Domoslawski's book can easily compete as the best novel about this time.

First of all, anyone familiar with the 'reportage' or 'travel' literature will know ‘colouring up’ is one of its commonest devices (think Robert Byron, Curzio Malaparte, Bruce Chatwin, even Oriana Fallaci and others), although it should be perhaps called just ‘literature’. And this was one of the biggest paradoxes of Kapuscinski’s writing, but well showing the enigma this man was. Some say, from today’s, ahistorical perspective, his journalism, from historiography point of view, is simplistic, even naïve “Lonely Planet” style travel writing for beginners, stating the obvious, making mistakes any serious research would wipe out. But what does it matter some Berkeley professor who studied the life of Reza Pahlawi for 30 years, has a better expertise than a poor, sleeping in a car and rags-wearing journalist from the Soviet Bloc country had back in the 1960s? It just doesn’t stand.

Domoslawski is trying to unpack his enigmatic hero, a life-long shy, unconfident man, whose main preoccupation was to be liked (find me a photo without his trademark innocent smile): by the regime, by colleagues, by readers, by critics. it reveals a man with high level of uncertainty. A huge section is devoted to tracing the relative lack of criticism Kapuscinski’s experienced, which was set precisely not to touch the taboo of his past: if they started to criticise him, they’d also have to start a painful debate over the engagement of the current elites in communism and perhaps change their current course: that would be too dangerous for the status quo.

The paradoxical shifts in this great reporter’s career are worth studying not only for the fans of his writing, but because they show in a nutshell the complications of Polish history. How come someone could be first a dedicated socialist, highly engaged in building the new post-war system, then its flagship reporter, traveling to all the revolutions across the war, then a supporter of Polish opposition, who sat with workers in the shipyards and then reluctant supporter of the transition, who nevertheless never really felt comfortable in the post-89 Poland. The censorship, suppression of any criticism made him feel disappointed with the promises of freedom. “Poland is becoming a boring, provincial country” – he told Domoslawski, “and more so, than it ever used to be.”

To understand his importance it’s enough to recall the controversies that arose upon the publication of Kapusciński – Non-Fiction (its original title)  in early 2010, both in Poland and abroad. The main reason for the foreign commentators was how he feigned or colorized the truth, in service to the style or political gains – that he met Che Guevara, Lumumba, Idi Amin or Salvator Allende, that a few times he avoided death from a fire squad. In Poland the widow tried to stop the publication of the book, due to its unembellished descriptions of the writer’s private life (in particular his extramarital affairs). But much more dangerous was confirming Kapuscinski’s firm belief in socialist ideology while the system continued and his uneasy adaptation to the post-89 reality, where he, the star reporter of the previous system, despite his support for the opposition, had to live in a denial. an honest biography required dealing with the political manipulations of memory, that are the daily bread of the Polish social and political life – how could a hero, a master, turn out to be doubtful in the one and only path Poland took after 1989?

Kapuscinski’s biography was tightly and intimately connected with various aspect of communist order and cold war and contemporary politics in Poland is still incredibly determined by the relation to its past history. In the post-1989 Poland there were only two acceptable ways of looking at the previous 50 years, which keeps reproducing ritual wars in politics: one is regarding communist regime as illegitimate, but still something that just has happened and after which we draw a “thick line” between the past and the present. The other one condemns the system unilaterally, in strongest terms, considers it criminal and considers those, who worked within is basically traitors, that therefore should be tried (the infamous “lustration” and a wave of processes for collaboration, effected mainly by the Law and Justice party of the Kaczynski brothers). Kapuscinski, member of all kinds of socialist organisations and a flag PRL reporter, himself was accused of being an agent a few years before his death and spent the last few years of his life in constant fear. Domoslawski goes beyond this binarism and produces a refreshing, essentially left-wing commentary, in which we see rather Kapuscinski a left-wing, a lifelong anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist.

The reason his past could possibly come as revelation is because this mysterious man had to lay low and keep quiet about his involvement in PRL from the start of the ‘democratic’ times. Between the witch-hunt for the former agents, that started in the 2000s Poland by the paranoid right-wing government and the support of the Iraq war by the liberal elites, he truly must’ve felt lonely. While the Polish ex-oppositionist media – particularly Adam Michnik’s "Gazeta Wyborcza", publisher both of Kapuscinski and Domoslawski – fervently supported the Iraq war, Kapuscinski was a rare figure of the post-communist intelligentsia to publicly oppose the war.

This book, while letting all kinds of critical voices – colleagues, friends, family, his professional critics, specializing in the areas Kapuscinski stood out the most: Africa, Latino-American revolutions, Iran – still, more than anything is a conformation of the greatness of the reporter. When Kapuscinski started to gain fame abroad, the Empire and the cold war itself entered a new, dangerous stage. He dropped his communist Party card and joined the liberal opposition supporting the Solidarity movement, and, preventing his American editors, removed the potentially inflammatory fragments about the role of the CIA in the overthrowing the Mossadegh regime. He subsequently gained an international recognition for his beautifully written reports from the conflict and other disasters-ridden Third World countries during the cold war, mostly Africa, always identifying with the weaker and politically misrepresented.

Domoslawski has lots of admiration for his hero’s dedication and sacrifice. Yes, plenty of questions arise about what was the real "cost" of the free traveling around the globe equipped with hard currencies. However his contemporary critics can allege about the pay back he had to do to the Party for his career – being a member of the intelligence, namely – the poor, mostly hungry, often ill and endangered by death Kapuscinski definitely didn’t gain much in comparison to his not only Western colleagues. What did he gain in return? – speculate his friends in the book – ill and endangered by death, how did he himself measure his ‘success’ as a writer from some communist country? It must have been a tremendous political passion and humanism, that made him such a profound critic of the wars in Africa or, especially, the Cuban revolution. He was wholeheartedly supporting Castro and rebelliants, and it was his passion for socialism, not cold war anti-americanism, that gave him insight into the negative role of USA in feeding the dictatorships worldwide. His reportings from Latin America could’ve been written yesterday. Yet this mutual appreciation had also darker sides: did Kapuscinski realise that his friends in Politburo were involved eg. in bashing students in anti-Semitic witch-hunt in Poland 1968? He found himself in the net of connections, that at the same time allowed him to travel and write and brought him suspicion from the persecuted friends.

And the book, not only because the constant speculations about the level of Kapuscinski’s engagement in the regime, reads at times a bit like a John Le Carre novel. The question of identity, one’s own image, of truth, of confabulation, shifts constantly and gains new meanings, turning the whole book into one great quest in search of Kapuscinski’s personality. Who he was? Not even the closest friends or family can answer this question.

His story remains determined by his origins – born in the 1930s in Pińsk, part of the pale of settlement, a Jewish town plagued by all possible atrocities of the WW2, although his own life was not in danger, he experienced enough of misery – holocaust, invasion first of Russians, then of the Nazis, and of Russians again, that it is believable everything he’s done subsequently was inspired by this image. He was from a poor family – and for the first time for people like him the PRL createrd chances. He took it with all belief of the neophyte – as a youth and student organizations activist, and then as debuting reporter. Maybe there his later need for bigging himself up and confabulation came from, having to do with social class and complexes of being from a peripheral country? He had to become what he aspired to be. One of his friends say “Rysiek produced a great work. However, in order to do it, he had to create himself, his own image. In the mid-1980s in America I observed how he learned that a writer must create his own image to gain success. He put a great deal of work into it – it was hard for him, but he passed that exam with flying colours. The image of a fearless war reporter. He reckoned without this legend no one would listen to a writer from a faraway Poland.” That would explain also, why he kept saying his father was nearly killed with 20,000 Polish officers in Katyn in 1940. And this myth of Kapuscinski really started a life on its own, sometimes to the harm of its creator.

Domoslawski is not a mindless unanimous communism-monger, but points out the disadvantages where he must. He gives full details of his character's espionage (he had the code names “Poeta” and “Vera Cruz”), in particular the notorious case of him spying on the academic and reporter Maria Sten in Mexico). But it's striking, how similar role in the end both of them ended up playing: Domoslawski is a reporter specialising in Latin America, freely presenting his soft or not so soft left views in this otherwise liberal newspaper, similarly to his hero, he's kept in reporting from faraway, at an arm's length.

Kapuscinski is an especially neeeded character today. In Poland of the last 20 years everybody behaved, as if communism was just an anomaly in our history, with everything Polish being necessarily anti-communist: church, Home Army, opposition. But mention it to them, Poles will remain curiously precious about “their” communism, as it happened only in there. Kapuscinski was seeing beyond this localism; that’s why he was capable of seeing Cuba, Iran or Guatemala as valuable struggles in “our” socialist case, and not in the simple cold war, pro-American black and white dichotomy.

When the moment came for coming to terms with the crumbling Soviet Empire, he completely missed his chance. Imperium (1993) (some of the many photos he did there here)is a book written in denial, a book, in which its author, normally so engaged, who could’ve told us the most griping story of his own engagement, disappears. Kapuscinski reacts with the biggest act of censorship - the argument must’ve been that it would be announcing to people in the new Poland, that he was a communist, so he had to choose to present himself as a victim. Truth be told this system left no other way than being at the same time both a victim and a beneficiary of it: both were equally true. But when it comes to history, in the post-1989 Poland there was no space for grey areas, there was only black and white, either you’re a victim or a perpetrator. He had to have an answer for his potential critics: How could I resist the system, look how powerful it was! The earlier reporter was trying to write the other, nuanced version of history – the feted Kapusciński of the new Poland was unable to do so. A hero is most revered when he’s silent - that’s why this book is valuable, both in bringing back the true voice of the reporter and for making clear where he stayed silent. For that only, Domosławski’s book is a truly great achievement.

Beautiful destruction: Einstürzende Neubauten's biography

[first time appeared in The Wire #339]

Blixa Bargeld and Einsturzende Neubauten: German Experimental Music
Jennifer Shryane

Ashgate 253pp Hbk

The first full-length study on the band, Jennifer Shryane’s book is already more in-depth and interdisciplinary than any fanatic of the group could demand – it was researched for a decade, and it has 17-pages of bibliography. A paradigmatic cult band and one of the most esthetically powerful bands of post-punk era surely deserves this kind of investigation. But on devouring the erudite pages of philosophical, cultural and artistic references one may have a feeling that the original topic gets a bit lost, or rather that the author’s flow has been suppressed to fit the rigours of academic presentation, thus obscuring Neubauten’s pop-cultural origins.

 

Einstürzende Neubauten - Interim Lovers from neubauten.org on Vimeo.

With Neubauten academic approach seems initially apt: their roots come from the high art just as pop and it is precisely the way they play with both the high and the low, that demands studying. Their meaning exceeds music or the Neue Deutsche Welle scene they helped defining by opposing everything it soon came to stand for. Their music embodied a vision of post-war West Germany: from the perfect name, to Entartete Kunst, cold war, DDR, Berlin Wall, Vergangenheitsbewältigung (German for ‘overcoming the past”, referring to the post-Nazi era just as to the post-unification process), architecture of ruins, decomposing cityscapes, fall of industry, Cage, Stockhausen, trash, punk, destruction, morbidity, dada, and in general the bleakest unfulfilled promises of modernity. You can’t think of them without seeing the city of Berlin, which was their site of creativity/destruction, and indeed they contributed to its lasting image as infinitely edgy place of experimentation, even if it bears little resemblance to the current reality. They also pressed heavily on the "Ostalgic" buttons, having had played in Berlin's Palast der Republik in 2004 shortly before the venue was demolished for purely ideological reasons, again, as a part of "overcoming the past".

The book is most interesting when it traces the historical meanings of the generation of so-called Nachgeboren (‘born later’, after Brecht’s famous poem), stylistically put between Darmstadt school of Serielle/Elektronische Musik and Kosmische-Krautrock eruption. Bargeld himself quotes Can, Kraftwerk and NEU! as major inspirations. It’s articulated, why Neubauten were cut off from, for example, the NDW label, as it become a curseword in result of German labels' rather careless ferocious signing and later - an easy term to put any German band from that era to the same sack. Still, musically, with time it seems it's the dance-rhythm oriented bands, like D.A.F., Grauzone or Palais Schaumburg, that get resurrected in pop music. It is because EN never were a band of tunes, they were a band of style, more like a conceptual theatre of method actors or performance artists, a cabaret in a post-Baader Meinhof house of fear that Berlin was, reenacting the German trauma in their driven shows. With their name calling for ‘new buildings’ to collapse, they were the model for a post-68 disillusioned generation lost in the ashes of history, unsettled by the uneasy peace West Germany had made with its past.

It is this cultural meaning that still haunts the arts and esthetics. They keep being referenced by the new generations of visual artists: in 2007, Jo Mitchell performed Concerto For Voice & Machinery IIat London’s ICA, a reconstruction of an infamous  Neubauten-related performance at the same venue in 1984 featuring Genesis P-Orridge and Frank 'Fad Gadget" Tovey, which caused some riots and destruction.

Shryane is passionate for ultra-modern elements of the band: the meaning of rubble, ruins, decay, destruction. Even when it comes to describing the music and sound itself, usually the weakest points of academic music books, it’s engaging, focusing on vocal, writing, sound and pivotal instrument-making techniques. What then makes it in the end underwhelming? Perhaps the presentation itself. We don’t really learn the way Blixa & co were absorbing influences or whether the namechecking by Bargeld came later. It’s great to know Bargeld acquired singing techniques from Artaud, Heiner Muller (a father figure and one of many, it seems), Diamanda Galas, Dadaist performances, cabaret and non-western practices, but it should be clear, that what Bargeld was absorbing is not identical with his creation. At points one would like the author to analyse the influences themselves, minus the band. Still, we have no doubts that their reading of Benjamin’s ‘Destructive Character’ and bringing it, with the meaning of ruins and faded industry, to music was really interesting. I only protest, when I’m supposed to consider still menacing what Bargeld is doing right now. Why was this band so subversive and revolutionary, if they fit so smoothly a set of high-art references? Without doubt, all the initial menace has faded by now, but the question is rather: was it there at all?

You’ve noticed the name written separately in the title and it’s not accidental: from his lyrics and way of life we know he likes being on the frontline. He smoothly adapted to the role of a celebrity and in a contemporary creativity-driven era, he’s a perfect gallery product, giving mostly poetry readings to his faithful audience who frankly, would probably just as well appreciate his reading of a laundry list. It’s obviously a result of his earlier output and charisma, but let’s not deceive ourselves: it’s as badass a thing now as having a latte in a Mitte bar. Fortunately, the book is rather a portrait of the whole era, not Bargeld, with compelling commentary on the newest German history and place of culture in it, best defined by “transparency” of sir Norman Foster’s Reichstag and Frau Merkel’s policies.

Ancien Regime: Laibach in Retrospective

[a full version review of a gig which appeared in The Wire #340]

Laibach – Monumental Retro-Avantgarde Show

Tate Modern, London, UK

Every movement that tries to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary – said no one else than Marshall Tito, repeating Marx. Ask Laibach fans what they think about it, gathering that windy night around sinister edifice of Tate Modern, monochromely clad in black leather ankle-length coats, white shirts with omnipresent medical looking Malevich crosses, thigh-high platforms and officer boots. The discipline of a Laibach fan is military, not only to get the quickly disappearing tickets. Like mercenaries for hire, wristbanded, we queque, surrounded by men in black, no matter, if you’re Mute's Daniel Miller, Hanif Kureishi or Anat Ben-David, we, the Laibach Police. As long as it is for fun and we don’t really have to worry about the rise of the far right sure, why not!

In the Turbine Hall, Albert Speer-like as ever, they’re already showing typical communist agit-prop for the last hour, after a conference that was taking place all day in Tate, where Laibach themselves were discussing their status as the walking work of art. But as it’ll become clear during this show called Monumental Retro Avant-garde, it is exactly the strong insistence on art origins and the relation with the art world, that in the end, instead of adding another layer of meaning, turns back onto them. Problem with many groups of 'conceptual' provenence is that they overtrusted in irony, overidentification, 'intellectualisation' as if it was in any case a road to artistic success. The knowing kitsch, vanity and irony, implied by the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) movement is precisely what is preempting the possible ideological menace both politically and as objects of art. The questioning of ideology and post-modern mindset of NSK (IRWIN, Novi Kolektivizem) begs question as to whether by questioning the political order of the 1980s group was yearning to the early communist collectivism or merely was embracing the western version of capitalism.

When the Fab Four, or rather the inter-generational combo, retrospective also in terms of line-up, enter the stage and begin their freak show, the latter seems more possible. The monumental Intro is stupendous and then they go nostalgic – fittingly with the Retro-Avant Garde in the title, they play a bunch of songs from the early postpunk period as a reconstruction of historical performances at Music Biennial Zagreb ’83 and Occupied Europe Tour from the same year. Milan Fras has the lowest, darkest and most piercing of basses – not surprisingly, Laibach did an opera once – and the first five or ten songs sung in Slovenian possess the dark, menacing, almost chthonic power, culminated in the Mi Kujemo Bodosnost (We’re forging the future), which, accompanied by the images of gigantic factory hammer and machinery, though thrills, provokes instantly the opposite: No, you actually don’t anymore! The constant references to industry, which shaped their youth and pervades especially their early work, can be now rendered only in an aestheticised form in a former power station turned gallery.

Head wants to explode among the intensifying rumbling of the rhythm and the drums. At some point a man steps out of the band, looking like a forest monster, a butcher or rather a steelworker who stepped from the screen, and exudes terminal gargle. The public freezes. More Slovenian songs, like Smrt za Smrt, causes the applause and singalongs of the Slovenian community in London by my side. Like on every cult band gig, there’s a strong sense of a ritual going on between the band and the crowd. Everything seems synchronized. A spectacle is a spectacle and Laibach are better in it than anyone else. I’m drinking the 5 L beer over the Yugoslavian newsreels, party meetings, fragments of Leni Riefenstahl and Yukio Mishima's Patriotism, Stalin and Tito speaking over the scene, which is decorated with the iconic deer’s head. A deep sigh. When Laibach came to concerts in Poland during the late Martial Law in 1983, at the conference, asked about political views, they said “we are communists”, much to the organizers and crowd’s dismay. What the band was excavating when they started in the late 1970s/early 1980s, was not to call the late Tito’s (the marshal died in 1980) socialist Yugoslavia ‘Nazi’, ‘fascist’ or ‘Stalinist’ – as eternal pranksters and born postmodernists, they rather wanted to wind up the 1980s Slovenian society by quoting its 1940s and 1950s past. The aim always was to shock and repulse.

Whatever works: in 1983 it was communism, in 1987 it was “songs for Europe”: a Nazified Queen’s One Vision, Geburt Einen Nation and Opus’ Life is Life. That was probably their peak and the songs of course appear in the gig, as carefully planned encore. Not only it worked at the time as a wind-up, it was really touching upon unhealed traumas and real shame in the country, that was the Nazi era or collapsing communism. The later re-makes mark their nature of recyclers: The Beatles (tonight with Across the Universe), Bach's Kunst der Fuge, The Normal’s Warm Leatherette, Gainsbourg’s Love on the Beat and Dylan’s Ballad of a Thin Man, which they perform as the last track. In theory, what's not to like about them. And in practice, I'm enjoying it, because how could I not, the look of it, the muscular sound, the aesthetics are everything to satisfy my perverted sophisticated needs; it's an intellectualised GWAR for art teachers or Slavoj Zizek. One could say: “they can get away with the ‘fascist’, because they’re from Soviet Bloc. If they were Germans, people would eat them alive.” But they did, with DAF, who not only wore uniforms similar to Nazi in the videos and gigs, Tanz der Mussolini (which also contains a line about dancing with Hitler) and Greif Nach Den Sternen contain quite straightforward fascistic repercussions, for which the band was severely attacked back in the 80s. DAF got played too, their Alle Gegen Alle.

Laibach were the anti-Kraftwerk, a projection of Ian Curtis turned real. In Turbine Hall in 2012 they are stripped to what they have always been, fancy dressed pranksters on sheer dregs of what they could’ve meant in the 80s, a pantomime, a splendid Grand Guignol without much reference to what is now happening in their country: recession after joining the Eurozone and a crisis of the whole post-Soviet region. In them, we seemingly cherish everything, that is disturbing in art, from Wagner to Leni R. to Syberberg. But here, we can start asking questions, whether they really could be put in the same line? There’s nothing they can do to still shock, cause resonance, even if they did a Socialist Realist album on the bad European Union, sucking all the energies from the remnants of the welfare state. Instead, they did a soundtrack to a film about Nazis in space.

Ostalgic Flying Circus

Dear reader,
I really wish I could break the bad and boring habit of only posting the already-printed-elsewhere material. Unfortunately, at the same time I'm now too incredibly busy to write anything fresh. Meanwhile, with the beginning of the summertime, I start a book-writing regime, and to inspire/divert myself (and you, hopefully), I'm going to post here with a great regularity bits and bobs from my vast archive and research and maybe also fragments fo writing. My book, published on the hopefully still cool & sexy Zero Books, if you didn't figure it out already, is going to be on the productive or not, encounters/misunderstandings/exploitations between the Cold War East and West and beyond. It will encompass art, politics, philosophy, design, film, culture, music; but I don't want it to be purely cultural, conventionally attractive as a book (although this wouldn't be that bad). As if writing in a second language wasn't an experience weird enough, the aim is ambitious and it's also political: especially since I've become a "British journalist", I see a growing discrepancy between how I perceived my life when I lived only in Poland and how it is perceived in here, regardless of education or ideology; that noone got the communist years and then the transition right, on both sides. Post-communist countries tend to repress it completely and condemn unilaterally, the western perception is often lacking the experience and is foreshadowed by fetishization. It made me curious, where we, the former Soviet camp, are in the end: are we looking backwards at the past history in a melancholic 'ostalgic' gesture or were we indeed the forerunners of the present crisis. What was indeed the effect of the cold war: maybe rather than split us irretrievably, it provided a mutual great narration, a great history, in which both me and my English partner, who couldn't grow up in different conditions than mine, can find each other?

I felt I have to tell this story of a peculiar transformation from victims to pioneers and back to myself: do I still feel that I come from a "post-communist" country, or did it just become an excuse; worse, do I want to be exotic (are we exotic?); I hope this will also enable me to understand better the current crisis and to construct a new map of influences and tensions, that were and are the shapers of the world I grew up and live in. Wish me luck.

Meanwhile, here's a brief recollection of my current writing in the UK press, which I cannot simply connect under some mutual thread; perhaps this multitasking is very telling of what is necessary for a writer today. Most topically, I written on the Yugoslavian modernism, yugo-nostalgia and its contemporary "albumisation": how a complex story is being condensed to an elegant, palatable and somewhat vain form. This for Architecture Today.



Then, unfortunately paywalled, I'm trying to reassess the vast and splendid career of the Ukrainian photographer Boris Mikhailov and his Berlin retrospective for the German edition of frieze. Mikhailov's vision of the USSR public/private life is a complex and unique questioning not only of the image of the daily communist ideology, but also image as portable ideology. Here, you cannot easily speak of communism as something that was simply "done" to people; question of subjugation and repersentation dissolute within layers and layers of image, that denies to unfold itself. It's neither critique nor apology; it's very funny, he's clearly making fun of the ideology, as if he could place himself outside of the system, which is impossible; the girl's buttocks may be only her buttocks, but through the color they start to belong to the revolutionary landscape; is the ferocious color just to prove the life under communism wasn't only miserable? He's intelligent enough not to suggest whether it's good or bad.

For the UK edition of Frieze I interviewed Eyal Weizman on topics, that are beyond anything on this blog; lesser evil, liberal idea of evil, famines, Holocaust, world order, forensics - interview had to be censored at the wish of its hero, because the truth of the Mittal Olympic Tower was not supposed to be given away - now its a public knowledge to everybody. Next, for this month's issue of ICON magazine I reveiwed the much-talked about show of the every archi-cum-psychogeo coat-wearing aspiring London bohemian favorite artiste, Patrick Keiller in Tate Britain. If that wasn't enough of my expansionism, I also dared to review for #342 The Wire an exhibition on socialist experimental music + art "Sounding the Body Electric" in the Polish city of Lódź, which is the most inspiring show I saw this year and items from/around it will feature a lot in the book/on the blog. This issue of the mag also contains my review of the Tri-Angle label showcase in Salford, UK and the reissue of my favorite band's Deutsche Amerikaniche Freundschaft debut album "Ein Produkt de...".

If that wasn't enough, for the venerable Sight & Sound magazine, I also written an essay on one of my favorite German directors, the provocateur, trash lover, social fuse and "a bit of a dick", as certain fellow artist called him, Christoph Schlingensief and his retrospective in Tate Modern. There may be more of that, unfortunately, but I forgot for now. I'll be back here next week with my regular Ostalgic pictorial/musical/other installments. Stay tuned.

Early Soviet Cinema - an unfulfilled promise to women

Women of the Revolution

[an article commissioned by Sight & Sound June 2011, never made its way to the webiste. I written on sound in Soviet film here]

The Soviet Union was the first country to recognize women’s role in public life after their large participation in the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. And although for the Party the liberation of the working class was no doubt a priority, the outcome was granting women, at least in theory, equal rights to men, at the workplace, in social life or at home. This meant establishing the right to maternity leave, eight-hour work day, legal abortion, state-supported care, access to higher education and an easy divorce. Still, the old sexual prejudices resisted. And how respecting women’s lib looked in the practice, was closely examined by the cinema. And the real scope of those new freedoms was actively and interestingly explored by the early Soviet cinema, where women’s new role in the society was closely examined. Among the profound social and cultural changes brought by the Revolution, cinema played a crucial role. The authorities quickly discovered its powers of influencing and agitating society and supported the filmmakers as heralds of the new regime. Lenin impressed this fact on Anatoliy Lunacharskii, Commissar of Education, by saying: ‘Of all the arts for us the cinema is the most important.’ And it was not only a handy form of propaganda for the new system, but a conscious politics of modeling the newly emerged post-revolutionary self. Despite the widespread interest in the early Soviet cinema among film scholars, there has been little discussion of the role of women or the transformation of Russian society. But many of the films included in the currently running Russian Film Pioneers section of the British Film Institute's KINO season explore how the “women’s question” acted as a trigger in a lot of the crucial new avant-garde art and cinema. Were directors really addressing women’s problems and helped creating a new woman figure in contrast to the pre-revolutionary obliqueness and patriarchy? Were women an important part of the development of cinema?

We discover actually a handful of women who really participated in the process of filmmaking. There were couple of important women-collaborators to their life partners, such as Alexandra Khokhlova, wife of Lev Kuleshov, an eccentric beauty starring in his early films such as the charming, Chaplinesque comedy The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr West in the Land of Bolsheviks (1924) or By the Law (1926). It was an era when eccentric, weird-looking actresses, like her and Elena Kusmina (who starred in Kozintsev and Trauberg's astonishing The New Babylon and Boris Barnet’s Outskirts), skinny, awkward and forthright, were highly criticized by the mainstream press for being too strange for the screen, which at the time was full of submissive, swooning or vampish sex-objects from Mary Pickford to Marlene Dietrich.

Russian cinema was not, unlike Hollywood or German cinema. More rarely, but tellingly, women were editors, such as Elizaveta Svilova, professional collaborator of her husband Dziga Vertov. Even more rarely, they were filmmakers, like Esfir Shub, pioneering documentary maker and experimenter with sound possibilities in film, author of the amazing Komsomol: Patron of Electrification (1930) showed during the season (I recommend a specialist in the field of Soviet documentary Michael Chanan's essay).

Women played prominent role in Constructivist avant-garde, like Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s artistic and life partner. And Lilya Brik, controversial muse of Mayakovsky, was also involved in films - she acted in The Young Lady and the Hooligan, based on poet’s scenario and produced an Abram Room’s documentary about Jewish collective farms (kolkhozes) in USSR, The Jew and the Land (1926) again, co-scripted by Mayakovsky and Victor Shklovsky,. But women were definitely seen more often in front of, not behind the camera. Closer examination reveals that Soviet and Western women were in the end confronted with similar problems, as if patriarchy was something transcending political systems and cultural patterns. Let’s also not forget, that post-revolutionary cinema in Russia, as everywhere else, grew in the shadow of Hollywood. As on other grounds, here a competition between two Empires was taking place. And although Soviets realized the power of mass entertainment very quickly, even the most obviously entertaining Russian films were never meant to be entertainment as understood within a capitalist economy.

The earliest soviet masterpieces, such as Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), an adaptation of Gorky's classic Socialist Realist novel, gave a pattern of a heroic, even saintly woman character, played poignantly by Vera Baranovskaya, who, unconsciously revealing her son’s conspiratorial activity and strike involvement, which sees him sent to Siberia, joins the revolutionary fight. With time, the depiction of women gets more complicated.

In many films we see women enjoying their work: on the factory line, packing boxes, plugging telephones on the switchboard, ringing, typing, make-upping, all in such a joyful manner that it’s hard to tell whether it’s work or fun. Especially Dziga Vertov was keen on exploring proletarian women's jouissance: women in The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) are just as well workers as they're machines, their progress is entangled with the progress of the industry. Apart from moments of fetishistic scopophilia: women un/zipping, un/dressing, laughing seductively, sitting in cafes, there's also an attempt to release women from this simple being-looked-at-ness, when women appear as agents: not only working, but also using the gains of emancipation to their advantage. But they're definitely women of different social classes as well: women in beauty salons are not the same women who worked earlier in a factory. It is not clear though, whether the juxtaposed factory lines and makeupping are to be counteralternatives, when Vertov is simply saying "you shouldn't like it", or his making a much more subtle ideological point. The ultimate question is about labour and the gender of labour: what is work, what is the value of work and how does various type of work differ (idle makeupping vs productivity). At the same time message is clear: women are not afraid of modernity, women are approaching it with enthusiasm, they like being able to support themselves (also: women are the greatest propagandists to the splendid progress of the USSR). This is quite different than his ideologically straightforward other films.

From the peasant Marfa, who brings a cream separator (in a famous, peculiarly erotic scene), and in consequence modernity to her village-turned-kolkhoz in Eisenstein’s General Line (started in 1927, finished as The Old and the New in 1929), to ‘Udarnitse’ (female shock-workers) from all over the USSR effecting the Five Year Plan in Vertov’s Enthusiasm (1931) and Three Songs of Lenin (1934), we see women enjoying all kinds of sometimes extremely hard work. The conviction women can do jobs as hard as men seems common in that era, but let us remember, that apart from the day job, unlike men, most of those women were raising kids and taking care of the house, which was making their situation even more difficult.

If we are talking about women, we have to talk about love. What happens to sex and various other social relations, if we strip them bare of conventional romantic gestures on one side and of Christian morality on the other? Are people in the kolkhozes or Kommunalkas still falling in love with each other or maybe we need a wholly different take on it? The most fascinating film challenging the traditional love drama was Abram Room’s Bed and Sofa (1927), scripted by Shklovsky, one of the best presentations of the split between the public and the private in Soviet Russia, bringing uneasy answers to alleged women’s lib. Film depicts Lyuda, trapped in a small room, where she lives with her husband Kolya, but unlike him, a construction worker, she's bound to spend all her days at home, doing housework. When Kolya invites an old friend, Volodia, to join them because of a room shortage in Moscow, their relative compromise dramatically falls. Left to the confines of private life, and the strong interest of another man, Lyuda becomes a mistress of both and becomes pregnant, but what she faces is the old jealousy, and the homosocial bond. The old patriarchy still haunts the Novy Byt (‘byt’ meaning in Russian ‘living’ in the most basic sense), and the free love under socialism cannot be realized. In the end Lyuda chooses escape and single motherhood, perhaps in contrary to both the patriarchal and modern approach of the Communist state, which, until Stalinism allowed abortion.

The director who was the most actively interested in women and their new role in the society was Boris Barnet, arguably the most talented comedy maker in the early period, a master of the satirical comedy of manners. His first effort, an attempt at an action serial, the three part Miss Mend (1926) was based on a series of stories by a woman, Marieta Shaginyan, who tellingly wrote under the pseudonym ‘Jim Dollar’, won the love of the public, giving him 1.7 million spectators during the first six months. The critics were more skeptical, accusing the film of a blind following of American patterns. And yet the film, with its fearless female hero, a militant union leader played with amazing panache by Natalya Glan, who nearly single-handedly manages to save the Soviet nation from the evil attempts of American capitalists to spread lethal gas over the land (sic!), is one of the most empowering female portrayals from that era. Barnet's work is one of the most interesting examples of Americanism in Soviet art, where official anti-imperialist propaganda met with genuine fascination.

In Barnet’s subsequent undertakings, it was always women who were the ambassadors or actors of what’s new or exciting about the new Soviet society, or who had to face backwardness and conservativism. Here, being anti-feminist is not only against the official policy of a state which supports women’s emancipation, but is simply stupid. In both The Girl with a Hat Box (1927) or House on Trubnaya (1928), probably his best comedy, young women have to face the caricaturically inept, patronizing, complacent and dull petty-bourgeois, who see them only as objects to exploit for sexual or physical work. We also have an interesting clash of the countryside and the city seen especially acutely in the girl/woman’s innocence conflicting with the city’s ruthlessness and chaos, on the one hand, giving them a unique chance for emancipation and self-fulfillment on the other. In the House, the charmingly natural amateur Vera Maretskaya as the 19 year old Parasha, comes to Moscow by mistake – she was supposed to stay at her stepfather, but they accidentally pass each other on the train. Left to herself, she becomes somewhat a “slave” to the pair of New Economic Policy beneficiaries, barber Golikov and his pretentious lazy wife, who fear she might join the union and learn about her rights. The disorder of their life is best portrayed by the disorder of the eponymous “house”, which is only being organized, after Parashka is allegedly chosen to the Soviets. Here, the fight for the “Novy Byt” was taking place quite literally.

There’s no mistaking the blatant propagandist overtones of Barnet's work. One can ask the question - to what extent did the screen image accord with the reality? At least until Stalinism, which consolidated its power gradually and inconspicuously throughout the second half of the 20s, women in the USSR really were experiencing enormous progress in their emancipation. Maybe the most significant moment of the backlash was the rise of Lyubov Orlova, the most significant Stalinist female superstar, the Leader and nation’s favorite, star of her husband’s Grigori Alexandrov’s hits, Happy Folks (1934), Circus (1936) and Volga, Volga (1938), films that had nothing to do with the reality of the USSR and were intended as replicas of Hollywood. A Shirley Temple, Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin in one, she usually played the role of ordinary girls, elevated to stardom by their talent and innocence. She was a mass entertainer and her sexuality was less important than vis comica. Awarded  honorable actor of USSR and Stalin’s prize laureate, she was supposed to be the living advertisement of Stalinist happiness.

The subsequent erasure of social problems in Soviet films had more to do with the abrupt change within the political system, but one cannot stop thinking of the unfulfilled promise the Soviet cinema made to women – first making them social and political subject with full rights, but then showing them always more as archetypes than individuals, and even if they were rewarded for their hard work, they could exist only as giants – deprived of their gender or individuality.