Today i want to recommend to you a new exciting Book with my contribution - thought as an inbtroduction to the practices, history and people involved with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio, an outstanding, today we'd say "collective", or rather, a communist era radio studio devoted to recording new electronic types of music, that, with the allowance of the state, could practice all sorts of new music without the necessary censorship or scrutiny of their actions. I wrote on them before. The book is divided into two parts: anthology and the lexicon, including entries on all sorts of experiments, from all around the world, with a focus on art & (a bit) on science or their mutual ways. In my entries (and a text on the "Warsaw experimentators") I tried first of all to excavate certain views and practices which I consider still unpopular in Poland: influence of socialist economy (and social control) on art, art and the environment, experimental architecture, competition between the Blocs, collectivity, reassesment of the early avantgardes and the social role of an artist under the socialism. You can purchase the book in here and as it contains also some English translations, it won't be wasted on you.
[I am posting this while listening to a mixtape I got this morning from a friendly Rouges Foam, Heck, You will hit something that looks like Mount Everest. He also become, for this sake, a cut-and-paste collage master - lovely! - but not really sure what to think of this sport imagination (below) - you must've become very americanised, my friend, during your stay in the US! It made me think though I should post this spiked live review for the Wire, which didnt get the editors' approval, making me think what is it, that I'm possibly getting wrong here? Why I find myself unable to appreciate the new music, at least from certain post-hauntological spectrum, find it boring, uneventful, conjunctural, moribund-without-a -reason. Rouge's mix, which encompasses much more than post-hauntology, shows at least certain interesting creative ricketiness, de rigeur moribundity, sure, but at least soundscapes in which something happens; the more 'happens' in music, the better, in my view; too much is just enough. Recently I was giving a lecture at the Krakow's Unsound festival about the end of personality in music: how lack of authorship, from interesting (from ballardian The Normal and such industry-jokes as Silicon Teens to anonymity of techno & house and then hauntology, Burial and so on) becomes today just a pose, just another element of reversed fashionable identikit. Characteristically, also in terms of sound, of things actually happening in the music, post-hauntology is rather uneventful and hollow, so alienated, so bleak (and so depoliticised). How strange, but also how apt, given this generation was born already to neoliberalism, from the beginning saturated in "there's no alternative"...Anyway, here're my thoughts after going to a gig of some of the hottest artists of the season, trying to at teh same time reflect on a style, of which Tri-angle roster seem most obvious exponent]
There must be a method behind the intense, exhausting
boringness of contemporary electronica shows: a group of people stand in
complete darkness, listening to hisses and breaks coming from nowhere, while a
stroboscope glides over their eyes from time to time. On some level it appeals
to me: it helps contemplation. It seems to me musicians are trying to
demonstrate the identitylessness of music-making in the times of the disappearance
of much bigger things. Or indeed they transmit this identitylessness. Hidden
under mysterious monikers and all that, in the darkness, amongst strobes and
huge amounts of dry ice, Holy Other, Vessel, Haxan Cloak and Evian Christ, new
artists on Brooklyn’s Tri-Angle label,
presented themselves recently to the Mancunian public.
The evening at this former working mill, now artists’
residences, seems very much of a piece, a homogenously designed environment.
Similar murky moods sweep into each other with no irritating changes. The most
interesting of the pack is Holy Other, not for their sampling of soul singers,
but because their sound seems to have more substance and physicality. Theirs is
an airy, spacey music, like an all-encompassing cloud over which beats, samples
and clicks occur, strangely deprived of the sensually charged atmosphere of
R&B and hiphop. Evian Christ produce a similarly slowed down, foggy take on
dance music using hiphop and R&B
cut-ups. Vessel finally provides some opportunities for dancing
within this stasis, with more readable beats and breaks. Haxan Cloak’s set has
a Lynchian (or Badalamentian) moodiness, with violin and cello parts played
from computer, but unfortunately this evokes a cheesy soundtrack to an
improvised black mass rather than existential shivers. And as I understand this may be the beginnings of some of those very young artists playing live, and how this may differ from the recorded and mixed material, I can still expect from music to grip me, to take me, transport me with it. I see where they're going: Joseph Beuys on the cover, strong fascination with Joy Division, love for GYBE! And nowhere may be a still interesting place to be, no doubt, but to me, this is still too uneventful even for a limbo.
Tri-Angle (and not only, cos those artists now transcended their initial label) initially attempted to achieve a
contemporary Gothic a la 4AD, but with various forms of urban music as source
material. Its output may be juxtaposed with some of the music only a few years
earlier, associated with Hauntology – not necessarily through how they
sound, but in the mental climate they evoke.Hauntology
has been criticised for empty miserabilism, philosophical vacuousness and
occultist nonsense, but artists associated with it, like Rolan Vega or
Burial, were at least addressing issues such as the decline of social democracy
or the death of rave culture. The music of younger generation represented by
Tri-Angle doesn’t match the activity of that same generation on the streets,
though. but it’s telling, how much it is a music of the cold late capitalist
world: with its energy as if from the start stifled, sucked in. Here, mourning has
developed into melancholy and can’t really place its reference anymore.
Fascinated by darkness, they make music which evokes depression in form, but seems to suffer from the more general malaise - lacking
the potentially activating political claims.They add a different set of
nostalgic references, sampling hiphop, crunk, triphop
(Vessel’s Sebastian Gainsborough is from Bristol), UK garage or r’n’b, but the
result seems purely decorative, very much ‘late internet’, where all those
elements collide and mix into a nondescript mass.
There’s something Catholic about
the show, but without the dramaturgy, leaving pessimism, eschatological thoughts
and, finally, misery. There’s no doubt those musicians are adept at putting
music together in a lush, Gothic way, but the paralysis they induce is
sometimes unbearable. This is not music to bliss out to, like My Bloody
Valentine, nor anything holding a hidden menace, like, say, Basic Channel or Tricky: it is a continuous wallow. A live recording
from this gig could be added to Dominic Fox’s Cold World, a book on depression and melancholy, but whereas Fox
sees a chance to turn passivity into militant negative euphoria, I can’t see
much in this music beyond the contemplation of mental paralysis. There is a
huge turnout – Salford is now a newly emerging space for indie culture
– but while the gig may have taken place in a post-industrial space, its
direct surroundings are a mass of recession dereliction, the ruins of new Great
Britain, casting a longer and longer shadow.
Lina Bo Bardi, Museum on the Seashore, Brazil, 1951
[longer version of a review for Architecture Today #232)
Rowan MooreWhy We Build
Agata Pyzik
Rowan Moore’s ambitious book starts with an image that is hard to beat: as a prominent critic of The
Observer and a former Architecture Foundation director, he is taken by the Dubai’s satraps for a
helicopter flight over the now so familiar landscape of thrilling, yet deeply
unsettling city. The list of financial excesses and cost of the inaugural parties
can be probably matched only by the declining Roman Empire.
And just like with the Romans, the Emirates' millionaires seemed decadently aware of
the fall that was just round the corner. Moore
sees a greater meaning in this, and as if responding to people, who’d like to
see architecture as something purely functional, makes a quasi-antimodernist
argument: architecture was, is and will be built partly as a result of our
madness, as a folly responding to our desires to change the world according to
our visions.
VDNKh Moscow
The motor may be love for beauty, for money or for vice, or for
power – all of those wishes are reflected in the madness of Dubai, as they are in seemingly much less
controversial projects. His book then continues as a catalogue, or an atlas of human follies as architecture. His greatest interest and
fascination lies with the fantastical. The most inspiring chapters
consider the fake in architecture (or the fake that becomes real), the spaces
for love and lovemaking (or simply sex trade) and spaces, that are expressions
of power. He discusses alongside each other, Richard Rogers flag projects of
Centre Pompidou in Paris and Lloyd’s in London, Stalinist Moscow’s metro and
the unbelievable VDNKh, the All-Russia Exhibition Centre for all the Soviet
Republics; John Soane’s uncanny house-museum, the billionaire Larry Dean’s
Xanadu or rather Dynasty-like Dean Gardens,
and the driven in its literalness phallic brothel by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux,
famous inventor of “architecture parlante”. He’s interested in how an even
single building may change the city, always ready to give dozens of examples
and in our fascination with power, stating very truthfully, that “we often like
a presence of force in a building, as
long as we feel it’s not directed at us”.
Dean Gardens
My definite favorite is the erotic chapter, where Moore assumes a role of an infinitely interested observer,
yet not a pornographer, with a wit confirming London’s reputation as a city of vice much
surpassing anything ever done by the French. He gently mocks Le Corbusier and Adolf
Loos, both erotomaniacs, who were in love with Josephine Baker, and their male
fantasies about women’s sensuality and sexuality. Let's not pretend in the case of many of the cherished great inventors in architecture, starchitects as well as their less monied, less talented, but still powerful colleagues (all no doubt The Fountainhead lovers), their sexual (sometimes not only) fantasies laid way to many ridiculously self-indulgent projects. Money and power meaning abuse of women shocker; to which probably the chapters on fascinating brutalist Italian architectLina Bo Bardi, as well as Zaha Hadid can be a counterbalance. Architecture remains a hopelessly men-dominated area and as I would oppose simplistic oppositions, it is rare on Moore's part to point out what often is hidden behind the spiky ambitions.
If the erudite delicious passages
about the French neoclassicist architecture, bathed in erotomania have any
predecessor, it will be the Anthony Vidler’s Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely or Robert
Harbison’s unique Eccentric Spaces or Reflections of Baroque. Both are
stylists, who want to take the architectural writing to somewhere more
interesting, than just sheer journalism. The postmodern era in building spawned
not only the atrocities of Philip Johnson (who gets kicking), but also some the
most sophisticated writing devoted to make it an expression of
the personality of both author’s and the strangeness of the built space.
The
consequences of the financial aspect of those follies are present, but not those, that drove the
Pomo architecture into the atrocities of the zero degree of architecture, which
is speculative housing. The quality and at the same time problem of this book is that Moore
doesn’t want to focus on mediocrity, and if so, only on the splendid,
larger-than-life mediocrity, like China Central TV Headquarter, project in
Beijing by OMA/Rem Koolhas or their Olympic Stadium from 2008. Despite pointing
out the cynicism of the authorities, who publicly aim at the ‘openness’ and
internationalism, it’s hard to resist an impression Moore is sparing us the final word. The time now
is hectic and the readers become more and more aware of the political complications
of the last 30 years in building – Moore
resists yet an overarching argument, which would turn his book inevitably into
a diatribe. Although it announces at the beginning it’s purpose is to “explain
this universal drive to build”, we’d still expect more of an erudite of his
sort.
LIna Bo Bardi, SESC Pompéia Sao Paulo, 1977
This book is not a manual, the charm lies rather in those little snippets of information, some great lines ready to be quoted, especially on Soane, Ruskin or sex. it is a formidable puzzle trying to hold together as an answer to how we build and how we used to build, written with grace, a bit in the way of ancient, renaissance or baroque authors of architectural treatises. But
what is sometimes lacking is the future tense here. for those willing to know more on architectire t is a great journey though, which in the end, makes us read his author’s and our own judgment between the lines.
[text written and then shortened as a review for The Wire #333 which was in September last year]
Deborah
Weagel
Words and
Music. Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould
In a way, relationships between words, especially poetry, and music, are self-explanatory, because poetry started as music or music started as
poetry (Orphic hymns, oral epics, vocal music, oratorios,
masses, operas). In turn, the
idea of synthesis of arts, and especially a kinship between word and music appears
first in the Greeks as ekphrasis, which is, in literal sense, an “expression”
of an idea, a rhetorical device of expressing one art via another and
perhaps also first ever definition of intermediality. Modern view on correspondences
comes from German Romantics, who insisted on the idea of the interdisciplinary.
Since then the idea of synthesis of arts was attractive to many, with Wagner’s
Gesamtkunswerk as a most famous example and all kinds of 20th
century avant-garde experimentation: Dada poetry, visual poetry or even
concrete and sonorist poetry or contemporary hypertext. All that was usually
evoking musical language, but treated rather as a metaphor, neglecting its
primary meaning. Yet something about the idea of blurring the distance between
music and literature still haunts the humanities and interestingly it is usually
the literary scholars than musicologists, who want to prove it.
In Words and Music Deborah Weagel interestingly overlooks all the
literary avant-garde traditions, from symbolism to dada, and chooses to focus
on four artists, two writers and two composers/musicians, Albert Camus, Samuel
Beckett, John Cage and Glenn Gould respectively, which also happen to be well established High Priests
of Modernism. She also states from the beginning, that what interests her
are only two aspect of musicality of literature: music in literature and
literature and music. First surprise may be engaging Camus to this crowd,
whose work is not obviously musical. Yet, as it is exposed, author of L’etranger had a great affinity with
both Mozart and Bach, believing, that music is an expression of “the unknowable
world”, asscribing to certain natural phenomena, such as the look of the morning sun or of the sea thinkgs, like tonality and counter-tonality. Camus lived in an era full of all sorts of experimentation in music, from Schoenberg to Stravinsky or Messiaen, but it
was a traditionalist Honegger, that composed music to his play. As we realise,
the most common and perhaps basic way Camus and many writers understood
musicality was a simple sonata form, A-B-A, that is: a topic, its variation(s) and a reprise. Yet the banality of the
idea seems to be able to express itself in infinite number of ways.
In turn, there’s no doubt
of Beckett’s interest in avant-garde music: minimalism and experimentalism of his
work, from Godot to Krapp’s Last Tape invite comparisons to
music and in his case rightly so. Sensitivity to voice, pitch, resonance and
duration often make his manuscripts look like musical scores. There’s clearly
parallelism between Beckett’s and some avant-garde artists, culminating in his
collaboration with Morton Feldman on the play Neither. Playing with the idea of test/textlessness, Beckett’s
primal element was word, and again, depending on what we understand by
musicality of literature, we can take those experiments as inventing a new form
or simply densifying of the linguistical texture. In turn, John Cage,
everybody’s favorite avant-gardist, used certain musical procedures in his texts,
such as Lectures on Nothing and Something or his famous book Silence. They were avant-garde, so not rooted in
music or language yet – what gave an interesting, but perhaps one-off effects, that cannot
be really pursued by anyone else. Cage’s elusive philosophy of work remains ever
attractive, but it wasn’t actually a more flexible language of art, because it
only can be bowed to Cage’s experimentation.
The last chapters, devoted to
genius interpreter of Bach Glenn Gould are perhaps the least predictable and
focus on his rarely discussed amazing radio works and auditions, like Solitude Trilogy, highlighting the piety and obsessive perfection, with which Gould
approached editing and recording of sound. Trilogy
is three sound documentaries, exploring the lifetime obsession of Gould,
the counterpoint, with the spoken word, using the sound of the sea or train as basso
continuo and exploring culture of Canadian Mennonites combined with songs of
Janis Joplin. The author of The Prospects
of Recording believed in the improving role of technology in maintaining
our environment. Various kinds of sounds and the account of his less known work
sound fascinating.
Yet, while being very informative, extensively footnoted Words and Music contribute less new to the general subject: it
gathers the material, but do not attempt to demystify or challenge artists’ methods.
What about Schwitter’s Ur-Sonate,
Cage’s important influence: it’s a musical score written for speech apparatus,
but there’s no meaning to it, then what does it have to do with literature, apart from its looks? You could say that these classifications aren’t
necessary, that they impoverish an artform that is completely self-sufficient. Does
this mean the efforts are futile? Not at all: it makes us contemplate the
mystery even more.
[I was thinking what I could possibly post to resuscitate blog a little, and because it's Nov 1st today, which in catholic countries is the Day of the Dead, I decided to publish this essay written on the occassion of reviewing a Jewish music gig for The Wire #344 10/12. The great photo above is that of Guta Berliner, a beautiful athlete in 1930s Warsaw, who was a promising sport star of the Warsaw's Klub Makkabi but in 1934 decided to migrate to Palestine, which saved her life. Photo was for a sculptor Nathan Rappaport, later an author of the Ghetto Heroes Monument in Warsaw, Guta's sculpture was either unfinished or destroyed by the war...More photos of Guta and Warsaw prewar Jewish sportsmen here] OHEL – 70. years of the liquidation of Warsaw ghetto
Ircha Gdola + Shofar + From thee to thee
Warsaw, Poland
For obvious reasons, playing music in Jewish tradition has in Poland special repercussions. But it must be said: in the last few years especially, the Jewish music has experienced a revival unheard of in this country before, that made this music enter a wholly new level. It is largely due to the rebirth of the Jewish community in Poland as such, which today still counts only around 20,000 in comparison to three million population before the Shoah. It’s thoroughly moving, how the community is growing back, but it is also, as one might expect, quite divided ideologically, namely around the question of Holocaust and Polish anti-Semitism, that did not ceased after the war and continued more or less in communist Poland, leading to the 1968 purges and many people forced to emigration. There’s no place in an English music magazine to consider the complexities of Jewish identity and its crucial problems today, like relation to its past, politics of Israel and politics of memory, but discussing Jewish music renaissance we also cannot completely by-pass it. Pre-war Warsaw was one of the most vivacious Jewish and Yiddysh centers in the world, where different Jewish cultures and political factions - that of Bund and that of Zionism and many others existed. You cannot overestimate the weight the occasion of the concert: 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, which started July 1942, could possibly carry, in a situation, where Jews are still looked at suspiciously by some groups in Poland, despite their incredible suffering and sacrifices they made for the Polish nation. All three acts that participated in the concert are formed by young musicians in their thirties, that at certain point in their careers decided that their identity it too important to be left out of their music, especially, since there’s quite 'radical' (also in the Zornesque meaning of the word) sense to performing Jewish music, especially today. But the ways of resurrecting this music can be as diverse as the community itself – and lets be aware of the danger of the holocaust kitsch hanging there with great possibility.
The open-air event took place near the center of Warsaw, on the terrain of the ex-ghetto (everyone walking around Warsaw cannot miss it, as the wall is traced with a memorial line on the pavement), from the beginning had an incredibly solemn atmosphere. Between the recitations, the musicians were actually trying to decompress this slightly po-faced seriousness. Ircha Gdola is a Polish-British fusion of the talents of many improvisers: saxophonist/clarinetist Mikolaj Trzaska, Michał Gorczynski, Paweł Szamburski, Waclaw Zimpel, and Ollie Brice and drummer Mark Sanders, Trzaska, experimental jazz musician, known for participation in many dissimilar around-jazz projects, from Łoskot to Milość and playing on polish avant pop records, a few years ago felt he has to pay a tribute to his own jewish tradition, absent form his music. His aim is to play Jewish music, as if the tradition wasn’t suddenly broken with the war, but continued, to keep it alive. And to get it, he goes to Armenia, Turkey, Egypt or Transilvanian Roma, where you can hear untouched Jewish influences.
The act was based on the melancholic sound of the many clarinets and , with tone predominantly elegiac and longing – I was curious, how the musicians are going to make it more diverse? And this way was supposed to come from free jazz, with which Trzaska, collaborator of the likes of Peter Brotzmann, is not a novice. Discreet microtonal whistles and rustles pervaded the sound, which
nevertheless couldn’t overcome a slightly ethnographic tone and Mark Sanders, known for many more outré projects with Evan Parker or Derek Bailey, unfortunately wasn’t trying to intervene too much, being entirely a background to his friends efforts. Simple arrangements and harmonies were sweet, but didn’t really stopped sounding a bit too predictably. Does melancholia have to express itself only as a lament?
Raphael Roginski of Shofar says he wants his music to be a musical equivalent of Talmud; as many traditions there is of commenting the scripture, it should be reflected in the music. Songs come from musicological expertise done in result of research and traveling around Ukraine, Moldova, former pale of settlement. Roginski, supported by Trzaska and Macio Moretti on drums, bent so low over his guitar you can believe he’s really in a trance. Drastic sounds of electronic guitar spread from his corner, while Trzaska finally dropped his melancholy and Moretti was his equal partner. This project, though too often looses edge in noisy jamming and juvenile garage spirit, at least put a bit of life into this a bit too static event. I’m not entirely sure Rogiński is right, but in that night he displayed Marc Bolan’s groove.
That certainly wanst the case with the last band, From Thee to Thee, which succumbed to all sorts of solemn Schindler’s List kitsch. Dozen of musicians supported by singer Ola Bilińska drowned in pseudo-seriousness, that made them only generate somber, one-note elegy, with pseudo-poetical lyrics vaguely waxing on loss. I instinctively feel this is not the way to do it. The question of appropriateness of commemorating such occasion without becoming sacrosanct, falsely pious is a difficult one. When Schoenberg, such rigorous objector of any unnecessary ornament, composed a very sentimentalist Survivor from Warsaw, his previously biggest proponent Theodor Adorno noted, as a larger stamement on post-Shoah experimental music, that if even him cannot convey thsi experience in a way that is not kitsch, no one could. Up to now, there’s no view of musical version of Paul Celan - poet, who managed to reinvent the language to talk about the trauma - but with the two first acts, especially Shofar, I feltWarsawcommunity got at least some not entirely embarrassing way of commemorating their loss.
[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.
