Irony at the age of 66
Boris Mikhailov, In the Street, 2001/2003,
Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
While Tokarski's path leads him through a global language of images that can
be used to operate between systems, the photographer Boris Mikhailov does
not allow his visits to Charkov to keep him from his work. Mikhailov, who
was born in the Ukraine in 1938, became world famous with
Case History, a picture volume and photo series published in 1999. The
photographs show the time-scored bodies of people living on the fringes of
society in his native city, a fact that also existed in Socialism - naked
and scarred, toothless and drunk. In any case, they didn't fit into the
eternal fountain of youth of Soviet
iconography, which was why it was always an inner conflict for Mikhailov
whether he should show the hard reality or other aspects of everyday life
in Charkov: "The city is so familiar to me that I can work best when I'm
inside it. I can just about feel it in my body. A month usually goes by
before I've gotten used to the climate and can take photographs. That's
when I resume work. I've made many photographs over the past several
years. The speed at which life is changing there is tremendous. I search
out the changes and arrest them."
These changes can now be
seen in the Berlin exhibition Privatizations: in his series
Streets, Mikhailov concentrates on fleeting glimpses of market places,
bus stops, and drinking halls. The people are as though trapped inside a
time capsule; details turn up in the photographs as relics from communist
times, together with consumerist logos from Western brands, leading to a
strange mix between communist tradition and a mood of departure. Yet in
contrast to his Moscow colleagues, the world as Mikhailov sees it is not a
dingy grey, but so colorful that it hurts the eye - very different than
his earlier images. Looking at the series Silver Lake (1986) from
the Deutsche Bank Collection, which portrays swimmers at a lake polluted
by Ukrainian heavy industry, the sepia coloration is what stands out most.
But the photographs are not an accusation; instead, Mikhailov is
documenting in great detail how the Soviet populace managed to cope with
everyday problems.
Boris Mikhailov, from the series "Silver Lake", 1986
Deutsche Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
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At the same time, it is again and again the photographic
act itself that is reflected upon. Mikhailov knows how close
voyeurism, accusation, and complicity are situated to one another; he has
also been investigating their complex intertwinement in the West, after
having moved to Berlin in 1996 upon receiving a
DAAD grant. When his new series In the Streets was shown at the
Barbara Weiss Gallery last month, it was mostly couples that could be seen
taking a walk in the western section of the city. What was important to
Mikhailov wasn't so much the wealth reflected in the clothing and gestures
of Charlottenburg's senior citizens, but a certain intimacy with the
living conditions - in the end, Mikhailov himself has hit the senior
citizen mark.
Boris Mikhailov, from the series "Silver Lake", 1986
Deutsche Bank Collection, © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004
Evidently, irony doesn't automatically end at the age
of 66. The extreme distance to the object, which nonetheless includes
compassion, makes Mikhailov into an exception. He takes the little
humiliations of the everyday with humor, which has earned him numerous
exhibitions in museums and private galleries alike. Otherwise, the roles
are clearly defined: while exhibition venues favor the Russian research
into social no-man's land, Western collectors prefer to look at the
opulence of handicraft found in young Polish painting. Pop instead of
politics - but does this assessment really hold up?
Wilhelm Sasnal, Untitled (Mooncraters), 2001
©Wilhelm Sasnal / courtesy Galerie Laura Pecci
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