Third Text

ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

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

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2011.573313

Published online: 29 Jun 2011.

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 Third Text, Vol. 25, Issue 3, May, 2011, 291 300

Boris Mikhailov
Victor Tupitsyn
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Self Portrait, 1973, courtesy the artist

To begin, I will cite my 2002 conversation with Ilya Kabakov, in which he

offered the following overview of Boris Mikhailovs work:
During the process of selecting a shot, his nervousness, his phenomenal
concentration, and simultaneously his relaxed state are such that when
pushing the button, it works at precisely that moment when even immobile
objects, buildings and other things form a visual combination that merge
into some terrible, painful and unbelievably effective note. From the
way that Boris takes pictures, I have the complete impression of a cata-
strophic shot on the verge of self-destruction. . . It is very close work
with the edges, with what is forbidden to touch. This can be found in all
great photographers. And there is unbelievable good fortune in this
fortune for Russian culture, because in its final stages Mikhailov turned
out to be the only photographer of such caliber and with such a range

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

Mikhailovs optics is attuned to gaps, to sliding along the sharp edges of

ruptures. At the moment of shooting he resembles a terrorist who pulls
the trigger of the camera to blow up himself and those around him.
Many of his photographs are accompanied by texts written on the
margins, above or below the image. He regards photographic represen-
tation as a part of the text, not in order to exempt it from comparison
with other photographs but to impart to it yet another meaning. The
text compensates for the deficit of the other, and Mikhailovs conceptual
series, such as Viscidity (1982), Horizontal Pictures (1982), or Unfinished
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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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Image from Red Series, 1975 1978, courtesy the artist

. . . 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.

In Mikhailovs own words, he:

. . . really wanted to reflect on Western life, to attempt to investigate it, to
find in visual images things that are comprehensible to [him] and through
 294
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4. See my conversation with
Ilya Kabakov in Boris
Mikhailov: Case History,
Scalo, Zurich, 1999, p 477.
5. Karl Marx, A Critique of
Political Economy: vol I,
Part I: The Process of
Capitalist Production, in
Capital: A Critical
Analysis of Capitalist
Production, vol I, London,
1889
6. T W Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory 1970, Gretel
Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann, eds, Routledge
& Kegan Paul, London
and Boston, 1984, posits
the existence of a negative
dialectic of art that resists
unities and syntheses
embraced by historical
dialectics.
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.
Like many ex-Soviet artists, Mikhailov is not attracted to a secure well-
tempered clavier of existence. Daily life, as he understands it, is a carnival
of contrasts. A good example of this is Kabakovs comment, Life has to
be pretty like roses around a body in the morgue.4 And as far as free
personality in the West is concerned, Mikhailov expressed cautious
scepticism when I asked him about it. It turned out, he said, that this
doesnt exist. And social life is even more controlled.
In March 1999, a book of Mikhailovs photographs, Case History,
which represents homeless people in Kharkov, Ukraine, was printed by
Scalo Verlag in Zurich. Unlike Romantic negativity idealistic in
nature and subject to the mental eye Mikhailovs way of seeing
the world in Case History is not simply negative: it is bodily negative.
Here, bodily is synonymous with tactile visuality, whereas bodily nega-
tive is what we experience in times of war and repression. This is how
the concept of tactile power arises not because the power can be
touched but because it can touch us. Mikhailov knows that affirmative
images and identity have never existed apart from each other. After
all, he was educated under Socialist Realism, one of the most affirma-
tive of all cultures. To liberate himself, he embraced negativity. Seen
from this perspective, Mikhailovs negative vision appears to be his
ultimate identity. And yet, negation negates itself, which makes
this identity unfit to inhabit. To hold on to it, negativity has to be
constantly reproduced. If Walter Benjamins theories apply in Mikhai-
lovs case, then this author is definitely a producer: a producer of
negativity. I think negatively, therefore I am. Expressed in this
form, Descartess cogito teams up well with Mikhailovs photographic
production.
In Das Kapital, Karl Marx makes an inventory of items stretching
from material wealth to the intellectual potentialities from which prole-
tarians had been estranged, inasmuch as they were subjected to the
accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital.5
In light of this negative definition, the proletariat became identifiable as
a class, especially in the minds of intellectuals yet another negatively
defined group of people whose negativity (even if self-inflicted) was,
and still is, essential to their way of thinking. The specificity of intellectual
identity is the absence (or denial) of such. This is related to the fact that
identification and intellectual reflection are largely incompatible. Their
contract is a result of affectation. To equate them would be imprudent,
since identity is an affirmative (positive) concept while intellectual reflec-
tion is a negative one.6 For some intellectuals, identity is a necessary evil
a way of resisting oppression with regard to race, ethnicity, sex, gender,
religious and human rights, as well as professional or political belief
systems. It can also be based on a mutual anticipation of something yet
to come an ultimate identity (communalist, global consumerist, apoc-
alyptic, transcendentalist, etc). To other intellectuals the identity prin-
ciple is not sustainable, unless it involves emotions and passion. In their
opinion, one needs to feel identity, not to think it. In mass culture, the
intellectual niche is still vacant. As an example I will point to the
 295
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Scream, image from Case History, 1989, courtesy the artist

United States, where the image of the intellectual remains unclaimed in

the sense that he or she cannot be seen in movies, newspapers, magazines,
or on TV. And yet, at the same time, the intellectual ghetto (university
professors, scholars, theorists, etc) reflect on pop culture and the mass
media with vigorous passion and craving. Speaking of the proletariat, it
has long vanished in the West: its remnants are outnumbered by the
 296

clerkship engaged in providing services and employed by governmental or

corporate structures, small businesses, etc.
When taking pictures in Kharkov, Mikhailov depicts decayed environ-
ments, decayed bodies, and a decayed fabric of life. Such features of
dystopia, especially when juxtaposed with utopian imagery of the
Soviet past, present evidence of unfulfilled anticipation. In some cases,
the juxtaposition is only suggested by the photographer. For, if one
of the two poles (often, a positive one) in the binary opposition is not
in the picture, the informed viewer (knowledgeable of the context) can
quickly surmise the missing part of the equation. Among such missing
parts are the affirmative images of the 1920s and 1930s visual
language, endowed with the rhetoric of anticipation.
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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

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8. When saving infants from
slaughter, God
distinguished between his
own and others by
palpating their sexual
organs.
9. Alienation is not a whole
potato. It is more like
French fries, served on
different plates, at different
times. It has become
excessively fractional
despite the fact that its sum
total remains unchanged.
297
out of them. Mikhailov wants them to pose naked, as if trying to undress
the object of his desire negativity.
The abundance of sex organs in Case History is related to the photo-
graphers desire to convince viewers that they are looking at human
beings, not enigmatic aliens from outer space whose sufferings evoke
no pity since we do not know what is and is not normal for them. The
sexual organ is one of the most universal cliches: when exhibiting it,
the homeless (sick, persecuted) person evokes a special, incomparable
sympathy, not only mentally but physically.8
To comment on Mikhailovs treatment of nudity, I will bring into play
the concept of the post-Soviet uncanny, which yields two different trans-
lations. With regard to the naked body, the translation of the phrase
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
can be used as visual aids (charts), indispensable for those who team up
with the ideal ego (Idealich) at the expense of alienated personalities.
Boris Mikhailov is an exceptionally gifted artist, but speaking of him
in these terms is the same as saying that a shark is an exceptional
swimmer. This is self-explanatory because it lives in water. A similar
argument applies to Mikhailovs bodily swimming in negativity. For as
long as he stays there, his artistic competence is hardly in question.
What is at issue here is the itinerary of his journey.
Many of Mikhailovs photographs are accompanied by texts written
on the margins, above or below the image. He regards photographic
representation as a part of the text, not in order to exempt it from
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298

The Unfinished Dissertation, circa 1982, courtesy the artist

 299

comparison with other photographs but to impart to it yet another

meaning. Before I conclude, I will familiarise the reader with Mikhailovs
concept of a bad photograph. In our conversation printed in the book
Verbal Photography, I asked him if it is true that the interrelationship
of bad and good photos with a text is such that the bad one interacts
with the text much better.10

Boris Mikhailov Apparently, a good photo distracts ones attention. To

the same degree that two photographs kill one another when arranged
together, the good photograph and the text cannot get along. For if a
photograph is good, then no text is necessary. And if you give it a text
you derail the pleasure, the sensation created by the photograph. The
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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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300

Salt Lake, 1986, courtesy the artist