Torn memory

Boris Mikhailov at the Center for Contemporary Art

For some reason, it is tempting to see the exhibition “Brikolage, or Yesterday’s Sandwich”, which opened at the NCCA, in associative connection with the monumental exhibition triptych by Ilya Kabakov, which seriously excited Moscow in September. In both cases, the syntax of artistic language is radically destroyed with the aim of its subsequent reformatting in other semantic fields outside the scope of art. Similarities can be seen even at the level of method. At the Garage art center, Ilya Kabakov simulated the creative biographies of three painters, each of whom reacted in his own way to the obsessions of socialist realism and avant-garde form-making. And the holes and gaping black voids inside the poorly drawn full-color or grisaille multi-figure scenes of scenes of Soviet everyday life, recognizable from newspaper editorials, are very impressive. They are impressive, first of all, for their absolute irrelevance (in the literal sense), associated with an essential misunderstanding of the gravitational field of the image as such, and the existential nature of the picture as a whole. In this regard, Kabakov’s three protégés are antipodes to another classic of unofficial art, the artist Bulatov. Erik Vladimirovich is always good at designing picture space. There is nothing wrong with Rosenthal - Kabakov - Spivak. Black and white holes (atavisms of the avant-garde worldview allegedly tormenting the eyes of Kabakov-born artists) are embedded in the canvases hung in the Garage in an extremely helpless manner. Radically inept. There is no dynamics, no rhythm, no unifying compositional idea. Gray melancholy.

Equally radically random and inexperienced is the photographic technique of Boris Mikhailov, whom Kabakov called a “total photographer,” bringing his method closer to his concept of “total installation,” where an eventless environment of life is recreated with dust clogging all the pores of existence in the modality of everyday life. Boris Mikhailov accidentally overlaid old slide films. I looked into the light. I appreciated random combinations and their endless variability. Presented first at the ART4.RU gallery, and now at the NCCA as “Yesterday’s Sandwich” 1967-1981.

In one picture, a naked girl is invaded by a colorful crowd of Soviet citizens wandering along a boulevard. On another, a clothesline hangs in a panorama of railway tracks. On the third - flies hang out in the residential area. Also, sculptures of estates and Soviet recreational facilities are hung with rags and obscured by household rubbish or someone’s unwashed feet.

In general, the visual writing is similar to Kabakov’s in its uncompromising squalor. And just as blatant intrusions that destroy the spatial image interfere—textural interference crumpling the picture, cutting up its geometric volumes, color planes flooding the frame. And again everything is desperately not done.

This undone paradoxically influences the fact that the attitude towards both projects of the masters of unofficial art of the USSR becomes piercingly personal. Mikhailov’s bricolages, paintings in Kabakov’s new museum, like children, by God. Unprotected and vulnerable. Babbling rather not about the global problems of cultural semiosis, but about the deeply traumatized consciousness of people born in dusty communal squalor. Both the haunting voids of Kabakov’s paintings and the torn memory of Mikhailov’s photographs are clear evidence of these traumas.

Sergei KHACHATUROV