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Boris Mikhailov
Victor Tupitsyn
To cite this article: Victor Tupitsyn (2011) Boris Mikhailov, Third Text, 25:3, 291-300, DOI:
10.1080/09528822.2011.573313
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Third Text, Vol. 25, Issue 3, May, 2011, 291 300
Boris Mikhailov
Victor Tupitsyn
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Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2011)
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2011.573313
292
who remained from the Brezhnev epoch, from the final period of Soviet
power. He united in himself all the potentialities that had been tossed
about by Rodchenko and others.1
Dissertation (1985), seem to attest to the fact that at the moment of press-
ing the shutter-button this photographer is still capable of listening to
the gaze.
In his Red Series (1975 1982),2 Mikhailov deconstructively appro-
priated the old-fashioned technique of making hand-coloured prints. By
colouring the faces of his hopelessly faceless compatriots, the photogra-
pher added the zest of artificial festivity peculiar to the Socialist Realist
palette. The Red Series deals with the unauthorised recollection of
public events: jubilant demonstrations, law-abiding citizens at the
voting booth, military training routines and so forth. By toning and
hand-colouring these slightly anaemic photographs, Mikhailov re-
energises them to the degree that they become (almost) acceptable to the
mainstream of State Mythology, thereby serving as a meta-commentary
in regard to Socialist Realism.
Despite repeatedly visiting the US and Western European countries
during the 1990s, Mikhailov could never adjust his optics to their unfa-
miliar visual context. This problem, however, did not concern iconicity.
Rather, it had to do with the indexical relationship between the pieces
of the puzzle relating to visual otherness and visual identity in the
West. As a result, Mikhailov was always eager to return to his native
Kharkov to compensate for the lack of indexical comprehension that he
experienced abroad. But in 2001 this tendency to revel in blind spots
underwent some changes: while teaching at Harvard, Mikhailov pro-
duced the Cambridge series, in which he successfully practised his
skills as a street photographer. Here, I will cite an excerpt from my
2002 conversation with Mikhailov focused specifically on the Cam-
bridge portfolio.
The truth of the matter is that America no longer needs to know what it is
like. . . That is why the majority of photographers have left the street. The
previous reality, even though it continues to exist, ceases to be important
1. See Margarita and Victor
and has remained in the conscience of Robert Frank and those like him. It
Tupitsyn, Verbal
Photography: Ilya is as though it has already been shot.3
Kabakov, Boris Mikhailov
and the Moscow Archive While looking at several blurred Cambridge photographs, I shared with
of New Art, Museu
Serralves, Idea Books, Mikhailov my impression from these snapshots: The text, I quote,
Porto, 2004, p 178. slithers away from them undulating, like a lizard. All that it has left in
2. This is also known as the it is its tail. I also asked him whether this impulsive gesture was just
Sots Art Series. an unconscious attempt to avoid distinct textual readings. He agreed
3. Tupitsyn, op cit, p 141 and added that:
293
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. . . to a certain degree [he] is certain that sharpness and correctness will not
give [him] anything. Therefore, a kind of gesture is made in the hope that it
will (suddenly!) lead you out somewhere. This is a gesture of desperation.
In 2002, at the Barbara Weiss Gallery in Berlin, Mikhailov exhibited the
photographs taken from the television screen and aimed to investigate
what was occurring in Western politics, in Western media. This was
and still is an extremely rare phenomenon for the post-Soviet artists,
who have previously avoided responsible political reflection regarding
the outside world, since they did not believe that such reflection (by
them) could ever be adequate.
these anonymous images, to decide what the West is. And the television is
such an anonymous image, a medium by which the West wishes to give or
take something away.
One may argue that non-affirmative vision has always been the point
de capiton of avant-garde sensibility. An important exception to this rule
is the Socialist Modernism of the 1920s and the 1930s. The protopost-
modernist course of its proponents (El Lissitsky, Aleksandr Rodchenko,
Lyubov Popova, Gustav Klutsis, etc), compared with the traditional
avant-garde, is in the dialectical transcendence (removal) of all estrange-
ment, that is, in the transition from negation to affirmation. Giving this
fact due credit, Socialist Modernism may be viewed as an affirmative
avant-garde.
It has been claimed that photographers like Nan Goldin (who admires
and even collects Mikhailovs work) have truly experienced (with their
bodies) things they feed into the viewfinders. But do they really transgress
voyeurism or engage the referent into metonymic exchange with the sig-
nifier? Whereas Goldin positions herself inside the what, Mikhailov is an
insider of the how. The latter (for him) is negativity: he is wholly
engrossed with it and has no room left for voyeurism. Speaking of Case
History, it would be a mistake to say that Mikhailovs vision degrades
or abuses people he takes pictures of. On the contrary, he caresses
them. Such is the nature of his optic: affectionate, yet simultaneously
negative and panic-stricken. Negativity is, thus, the taxonomy of
panic, and Mikhailovs urban landscapes bear witness to that.7
One picture (brought from Kharkov) is of a six- or seven-year-old boy
and girl in a wasteland, smoking near a utility pipe. These kids are clearly
neglected by their parents. In another photograph a child of privilege
wears expensive roller-skates with his watchful mother hovering in the
background; not far from them a man lies on the ground either drunk
or dead. Once again we witness a play of differences which, regardless
of any specific narrative or even contextual frame, highlights the very
nature of negativity its addiction to the language of binary oppositions
(dichotomies). Negative optics can also be perceived as a mental grid,
imposed on reality a priori, ie, prior to the moment of taking the
picture. To dichotomise is to stage; therefore all Mikhailovs photographs
rehearsed or spontaneous are staged beforehand.
There are several landscapes here. In one of them red flowers are jux-
taposed with an industrial fence, as if separating beauty from ugliness.
Sexual organs both male and female are in abundance. Women are
urinating or displaying their vulvas, men their penises. All are highly
7. See Victor Tupitsyn and uninterested in what is happening. No doubt they pose for money.
Ilya Kabakov in Boris
Mikhailov: Case History, Most of them are people driven to extreme misery and fallen to the
op cit, pp 473 474. lowest rungs of the social ladder. They epitomise alienation: it splashes
297
uncanny nude is equivalent to the assertion that no one has yet known
it (the body), and therefore the viewer has the opportunity to be the
first. The explanation for this is in the etymology of the word canny
(originally from the Latin for to know). In addition, canny means
heimlich or homely, which is why uncanny nude refers to a nudity
not only unknown but (also) homeless. Its homelessness can be read as
lack of connection to the nuptial bed of knowledge.
The notion of uncanny sex organs echoes, to some extent, Nobuyoshi
Arakis monstrous representation of the vagina in his series A Part of
Love, 1987. Here, the idea of homelessness is associated not with the ejec-
tion of a nude body from the house to the street but with what Freud
described as displacement when, in his essay The Uncanny (1919), he
wrote about the displaced effects of castration anxiety. Mikhailov once
said that a good photographer is like a street dog, a mutt. His affinity
with a homeless animal comes as no surprise, considering this artists
compulsive fascination with the existential drama of homelessness.
Occasionally, single snapshots are grouped in small series. The way
Mikhailov links them to each other in Case History gives them additional
meaning so that they form a convincing visual narrative. Likewise, the
whole collection of such photographs reads as one big story. If I were
to give it a title, I would call it Romancing the Negative. Thus, for
example, a sweet-scented image of the photographers wife, Victoria,
standing naked in the sunshine, only makes sense as a means of sharpen-
ing the contrast with the worn-out faces and deformed stomachs of the
heavy drinkers.
Apparently, Mikhailovs piteous nudes in Case History are precisely
those self-identities which are put on hold, subjected to bracketing, and
(at times) masochistically exposed to make them unlikeable and unattrac-
tive. This unleashes alienation.9 To be more specific, Mikhailovs works
8. When saving infants from can be used as visual aids (charts), indispensable for those who team up
slaughter, God
distinguished between his
with the ideal ego (Idealich) at the expense of alienated personalities.
own and others by Boris Mikhailov is an exceptionally gifted artist, but speaking of him
palpating their sexual in these terms is the same as saying that a shark is an exceptional
organs.
swimmer. This is self-explanatory because it lives in water. A similar
9. Alienation is not a whole argument applies to Mikhailovs bodily swimming in negativity. For as
potato. It is more like
French fries, served on long as he stays there, his artistic competence is hardly in question.
different plates, at different What is at issue here is the itinerary of his journey.
times. It has become Many of Mikhailovs photographs are accompanied by texts written
excessively fractional
despite the fact that its sum on the margins, above or below the image. He regards photographic
total remains unchanged. representation as a part of the text, not in order to exempt it from
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298
text never coincides with the photograph in terms of feeling, and you
cannot force it. Instead, this is just distracting. There has to be a light drift-
ing from the photograph to the text only then do they combine well. . .
Besides, there are wall types of photographs, but it turns out that after
a certain time bad photos begin to look better on the wall than the
good ones, because the good ones become kitsch. And this gives the
photograph the prospect of development and a hope that it will not fall
into a crisis situation. Sometimes it seems to me: Thats it! Photography
is finished! Its a crisis! But here it turns out that no, it still has a chance.
Victor Tupitsyn Let us discuss the problem of the verbal levels of the photo-
graph using your works as an example. Which, in your view, models of
texts exist that are activated in the photograph? I am talking about the
conditions thanks to which photographic imagery can be read as a text.
BM Even if people photograph the same thing, and their camera is the
very same one, the pictures that result turn out to be different. I, for
example, managed to catch the postwar period in the USSR. The majority
of photographs of this time corresponded to one and the same idea:
Pause, instant, you are beautiful. The task consisted of capturing some
surprising, unique moment. Then it became clear that this was a lie,
that a seized moment does not define life, that the sum of moments
does not equal that of life either, and that such a moment does not
correspond with anything except for Soviet ideology.
VT But that was a textual ideology a textual ideology of looking. . .
BM Yes, some sort of textual ideology. In order to move on to another
level, you have to find something new. Now I understand that many of
the photographers who had begun working at that time began to translate
from one context to another, variations of which I had seen in many
magazines, in documentary works.
VT You mean factography?
BM No, factography is a different matter. . .
VT Youre right. Documentary is a genre, whereas factography is a
phenomenological enterprise.
In the transition from the Soviet social text to the Western one, it is
difficult to avoid the comic effect arising because of incommensurability
a differend between them. But if we analyse the methods and laws
of influence on the psyche of the viewer, then a more complex
phenomenology of perception could emerge along with the absurdity of
10. Tupitsyn, Verbal
Photography, op cit, pp
the juxtaposition. It seems that Mikhailovs recent works have effectively
148, 151 demonstrated this possibility.
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