Map and Territory
Triumph Gallery, Moscow
29.01.2014 – 13.02.2014
Information so clearly filtered and yet laying claim to be historical narrative undisguisedly bears witness to the fact that it is merely a slanted version with a lone alternative in the form of a term served behind bars, and so must be accepted unquestioningly. (…) But the object of belief turns out to be other than that in the name of which it has been proclaimed ‘the eyes will see, and the ears will hear,’ and any authority dosing vision and hearing as it sees fit, recognizing only one form of freedom – the freedom not to see and not to hear. (…) For this reason, to preserve the faithfulness of meaning and truth, this meaning must be understood in all the absurdity of its visual form, which in this case means to look and to see without avoiding or hiding away from the obvious, and not concealing it.
–Mikhail Allenov. The obviousness of systemic absurdism through the emblematics of the Moscow metro, or the Absurd as a phenomenon of truth.
“Layout of counter-revolutionary agent networks discovered by the KRO NKVD in Leningrad from October 15 to December 1, 1941. A total of 51 organizations comprising 148 persons in total”. Signed: Senior Investigator, Counter-Intelligence Unit, People’s Commissariat of the Interior, Junior Lieutenant of State Security Kruzhkov, December 15, 1941
If you type the words “Leningrad” and “photography” into an Internet search engine you won’t just find modern tourist shots. One of the first links will take you to an album titled The Unknown Siege. Leningrad, 1941—1945. From the articles and interviews by Vladimir Nikitin and other researchers that it comprises, you will learn that only reporters commissioned to do so by their editorial offices were allowed to take photographs in the city during the Siege. It was forbidden for anyone else to keep a camera at home (or, for that matter, radio receivers, film cameras and maps). Working on the book in the FSB archive (the FSB being the successor organization of the KGB), where the cases are systematized by surname (meaning that only a veritable miracle will lead you to the information you’re in search of), Nikitin, randomly, inquired about his own. In this way he learned of his namesake Alexander Nikitin. Attached to the file was a film roll that had been printed off where the “private individual with a camera” had ended up for illegal photography. In black and white shots of a snowy city in a light haze, shot in a fairly romantic manner, there is something of Alexander Grinberg. But if you look closely, you notice that the people in the shots aren’t just walking down the streets – some of them are dragging corpses across the ice. Attached to the case file was a map, on which, for some reason, Nikitin had marked some of the sites of destruction. He was charged under Article 58, sentenced to 5 years, and died in a camp near Solikamsk. Was he a spy, as the appropriate authorities maintained? Or, as is more likely, was he simply a normal amateur photographer?
Anastasia P. Fink, born 191
Sofia Shevchenko, born 1917
For Max Sher, work on the project Map and Territory began with this story, which he’d been told in person, along with other similar episodes. The core of his interest in the Siege, as a native Petersburger, became “the figure of absence” – a strange poverty of information, particularly visual, about what had happened to the city. In addition, there were too few monuments indicating the “human dimension” to what had happened, the meagre academic consideration of that past, and the weakness of attempts to present the subject in modern art:
“I don’t know how we can term it. A taboo? It doesn’t seem to be a taboo. A city secret? A strange myth that’s kept under wraps. To this day there’s been almost no attempt to comprehend, no words other than ‘a heroic feat of Leningraders.’ This is a colossal story, but there are just a few books about it. And the first of them, The Siege Book by Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich, came out only thirty years later. There’s some kind of taboo on thought. And a taboo on any image that differs from the official. The symbolic sphere here is for the most part represented by social journalism. I have an album, Artists in the Besieged City published in 1985 – in that, ‘art’ is simply reduced to propaganda posters, caricatures, newspaper illustrations, neutral landscapes, and that’s it. It’s as if the city is besieged to this day.”
Anti-aircraft visual deception techniques (from Youth Technology, a Soviet magazine, 1935): “A squatting soldier would be hard to distinguish from a tree stump; a group of soliders crouching together would look like a bush or a pile of crushed stone from above; soldiers lying in line one after another would resemble a foothpath when photographed from an airplane.”
At the exhibition, the fate of the amateur photographer Nikitin is symbolized by spoiled photographic film. There are few documents here in the normal sense of the word – carefully preserved pieces of evidence, objects that have been subjected to the conservation at museums. But nevertheless, none of the items are the work of the imagination of the author or part of the fashion for mockumentary. Real events stand behind each of them, although these events are not always recognized easily or without additional research. They are the result of painstaking work with books and museums, and detailed conversations between people and Sher himself.
Two of these objects provoke particularly powerful emotions – empathy, anxiety, fear, sorrow. The first is a little known Siege diary that was kept by Pyotr Gorchakov. This is a “not-made- up” object. Originally drawn up in Braille (Gorchakov was visually impaired), then decoded and kept, according to Sher, in the All-Russian Society for the Blind. The descriptions of daily life are interspersed with heroic wishes to be of use to the Homeland. Sher again has one of the pages composed in Braille. Before us is a white sheet, the dots on it difficult to make out – it’s easier to feel them. Beyond this lies not just a modern, often fairly superficial interest in the world of the blind (we’ve had a series of such exhibitions in Moscow), but deep thought on the subject. For example, on the idea that we can’t present the daily torment of the besieged city through banned photographs, but we can through the diaries of an almost blind man who uses a great deal of visual metaphors. Here we recall other Siege diaries, the authors of which were arrested for keeping them, dying of dystrophy in prison camps or being shot.
The second of these objects is a real map of Leningrad from 1927. There are unclear lines, sketched in pencil, indicating the route to Vera Slutskaya Hospital, and to a school in which, during the war, a hospital was set up, and in which the daughter of the author of the project now studies. You are forced to ask a question: Who walked on these streets before us, the people of today, and when? But Sher doesn’t just lazily leave a question posed. In the video presented at the exhibition, he walks those routes, keeping track of the time and trying to imagine the unimaginable – how many hours would it take him to travel these routes in an exhausted condition, in a besieged city covered in snow. The video allows us at least in part, perhaps only in a tiny part, to imagine those sorrowful, difficult journeys. But the surname of the person who allegedly owned those maps, Lavrova, is invented. Her story, nevertheless, interweaves authentic episodes from the lives of other people, such as the situation concerning the collecting of German postcards.
It is these developed explanations to the spectator of his concept that the author attempts to avoid. In his opinion, the division between the invented and the documentary in his objects shouldn’t be discernible without some effort. The aim, firstly, is to show the “non- readability” of individual imaginative constructions, of our “photographically unconscious” contemporaries. Secondly, it is to sense the irrational feeling of being in a place where everything has been turned topsy-turvy. It is not a matter here simply of the incomprehensibility of the internal world of another; the past itself is impenetrable. Not because all this was “a long time ago,” but because our point of view is subjective. Beyond the incomprehensibility, simultaneously, there stand several considerations. For example, of the world of trauma that cordons itself off in silence. Apposite here are the tales of modern families that reject information discovered by researchers on those who died during the war and those who faced political persecution. And the exclusion of the inability to experience simple human emotions, the numbing, the hardening, the bodily ossification and the confused entanglements of the consciousness are too. But this is also about total disbelief in the totalitarian state, where meanings are continually substituted and where it is unclear what is in doubt: the enemy encirclement and the need for security measures were a reality, but the paranoia of the authorities and their brutality with regard to their own people were a mixture of irrationality and the logic of concealment of one’s own lack of professionalism.
“If there were at least photographs, not to mention films, of signboards, shops, people, we would have an entirely different conception of this period,” Sher believes. The absence of “private” filming or photographing prevents us from imagining, first and foremost, daily life. The artist’s job is not to oppose the “heroic” and the “terrible,” or to take the old Soviet version of “heroic feats” and to add to it with horrifying details that began to emerge in the Perestroika era. The artist’s job, in fact, is to revive this world of everyday feelings.
Different schools of psychoanalysis tell us that visual impressions are intertwined with tactile impressions, and that they arise in the unconscious long before an ability to comprehend the world through words and texts. For this reason, art therapists use images with people with seriously damaged psyche: the artistic space “has resources,” it provides the strength to overcome, and with the aid of images we can draw or photograph that which we can only be spoken of with great difficulty. In Map and Territory, the rhizomes of the individual imagination of the photographer are not only transformed into a generalizing and typifying picture of a split collective consciousness and subconsciousness. The incoherent, ragged structure of the project reflects the impossibility for modern man of the imagining of the unimaginable, the extraordinary pain and tragedy of other generations, but it also in some ways creates a link of solidarity between epochs. It is as if Sher at one and the same time tries to reveal the difficulty of coming into contact with the impenetrable past and to sense a hope for the restoration of the world of feelings, and for its healing. His work with images is an attempt to process “long-term” traumas that is specifically needed by modern man.
Why are authentic texts and documents not enough for the author? Why confuse the spectator? And what is it that the imagination and memory are doing here? For example, the diagram of the “counter-revolutionary agent network” allegedly uncovered by Kruzhkov, an officer of the NKVD (a predecessor organization of the KGB), and the photographs of the members of an “enemy group,” the People’s Eye. Sher did the picture himself, this is not a “document of the era”), and the roles of “pseudo-agents” are taken by his colleagues in the photographic field. But the situation isn’t entirely invented: the author has based the work on published documents that can be seen, for example, in historian Nikita Lomagin’s book (also, in fact, titled The Unknown Siege). Investigator Kruzhkov existed. The networks were “exposed.” And judging by the absurd titles provided in the documents – Spiders, Cautious – some of them were simply invented. But there were spies too, nevertheless. The combination of reality and imagination was born within the NKVD itself. Some of the titles have “migrated” to Sher’s diagram, not entirely invited, but not strictly documentary. And photographing “in character” is not “playing at tragedy”; it shows the extracts from the past that are suspended in our imaginations, and our fears, continually reproducing themselves in a country that has never fully been through a process of grieving and consideration, and that the current ruling politicians have no interest in unpicking this tangle.
The text of the captions does not hint at where, specifically, there has been invention. Or where, to be more precise, one might ascertain that information by looking at the objects in greater detail. Involuntarily, one finds oneself considering the meaning of the splintering of text and image that prevails in Russian culture, its focus on “the literary,” and the “inattentive spectator” (an expression of the art historian Mikhail Allenov quoted above). In the case of Gorchakov’s diary, however, a deeper understanding of and interest in the subject is required, and a single viewing is not enough – by no means every spectator is capable of this, and to require this is unusual.
Will the author of the project Map and Territory be able to make contact with the exhibition’s viewers, to go beyond the confines of his own culture, to break through its atomized nature, through the inability to see and the desire to thoughtlessly enjoy the pomp of directed visual spectacles? Can a bridge be built between thought, text and image, or will the images remain superficial, as is the case with many Russian artists? How successful, how serious and how deep are this visualization of the imagined and the unconscious and attempts to show the process of displacement itself.
Perhaps not very. Working on the project, the author had doubts about the extent to which it should be indicated to the viewer that what was before him was documentary or not. The decision to obscure this division, and to create an exhibition where “everything exists in a certain newly created reality of images, where it is no longer important whether a fact is confirmed by something or someone, or is in fact invented” seems to me in itself to be extremely ethically dubious. It no doubt says something about the impossibility of making a clean break in consideration in one fell swoop, which is to say the impossibility of overcoming the existing artistic tradition. But the fact that the majority of these objects absolutely clearly go beyond the framework of a simple “imaginative game” is undoubted.
An argument about truth and plausibility (which, as we know, is neither true or false, but merely possible) has been waged since ancient times. During the Renaissance era, the conversations now being had about photography focused on literature. The theorists of that period came up with the idea of locating invented works in eras from which no documents had survived. The aim was to show the world as it could have been, constructed in a far superior manner to the then present day, a time in which heroes didn’t rot in chains, and a time in which Good overcame Evil. Everything else was the preserve of history. But as we are told by humanitarian theory developed during the post-Modernist era, any historical narrative, irrespective of the apparatus set up in the narration by the author with regard to “veracity”, turns out to be subjective and, what is more, conditioned by the ideological framework of the specific social medium that it finds itself in. The layers and masses of the past, into the depths of which the historian attempts to shine a torch, vexed by honest work with documents, are ultimately impenetrable. And a map is not the same thing as a territory.
The mining of this extent of the “inventedness” in combination with a breakthrough into modern technologies such as Photoshop has resulted in an alarming phenomenon – the washing away of the borders between the document and the staging. Fabricated memoires of the Holocaust, pseudo-war movies, historical inventions – all this exists in the world in significant quantities. The avant garde appropriation of the objects of others is taken to a mass level, and Baudrillard’s simulacra, taken to the extreme, replace the bastion of the documentary that held out to the last.
But nevertheless, as we can see, it seems that Map and Territory fits into another tradition. That tradition in no way came from those territories that we are in the habit of comparing ourselves with in a meaningless attempt to “catch up and overtake.” In fact, it’s more likely that it comes from the territories that we tend to belittle, perhaps because they suffered in the 20th century no less than our territory did. In Afghanistan and in Iran, in China and in India, many modern authors with varying degrees of delicacy or brutality tell of wars waged to restore a solidarity that has been undermined by ruling politicians, mourning the losses of mass purges.
They are all at the cutting edge of a battle for truth that cannot be reduced to voguish discussions of evidence being equivalent to invention. Because the confusion of reality and imagination is not just an “echo of distant wars” or a sign of the subjectivity of the historian in his work with open sources of information, the chasms and lacunae in knowledge, the incompleteness of ref lection, the deafness of society with regard to moral norms, is a part of a continuing present – an eternally renewing wound and the concrete efforts of politicians. All of these authors run up against complex moral problematics and are forced to continually ask themselves how and where, in the artistic sphere, the border between inclusion and recognition, the border between the revealed absurd, the visualization of the suppressed and “the Stockholm Syndrome” passes. The latter is where the author suddenly senses that he is participating in the “substitution of meanings” undertaken by the totalitarian ideology which has an interest in the archives being blocked off, in the absence of an independent expert, in the denial of a crime, in the direct destruction of documents and evidence, or simply in the creation of a sensation that “it’s all too confusing.”
Every artist achieves his goals in his own way, to a greater or lesser extent. The Lebanese Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige burn negatives of “beautiful Beirut,” printing scorched postcards of pre-war beauties, while The Atlas Group, headed by Walid Raad, creates non-existent military documents. Thirteen Argentinian artists combined photographs and mirrors in the “Identity” project in order to assist in the search for children lost during the “Dirty War.” The Iranian Bahman Jalali stamps his portraits with markings that were used under preceding political regimes at photographic studios, striking through their “revolutionary” red, the symbol of the censor – the depictions recall Soviet “vanished commissars.” All this is done not with the aim of “falsifying history.” On the contrary, it is done to graphically demonstrate that its back has been broken. In this context, Max Sher’s Map and Territory is one of the most fascinating projects to go beyond the framework of our own history and modernity alone. [ Text by Viktoria Musvik ]
© Max Sher