Vicarious Photography and Postcolonial Figuration in Belarus*

Home , Galina, Kiev (brand), Michael Richard Bell

Presence Without Identification: Vicarious Photography and Postcolonial Figuration in Belarus*

SERGUEI ALEX. OUSHAKINE

No new photographs until the old ones are used up! —Joachim Schmid1

What photographic possibilities does the head contain? . . . [Photo-portraits] strive from the beginning not so much to reproduce their subject as to demonstrate all the effects that can be teased out of it. —Siegfried Kracauer2

A man in a military uniform poses for the camera. He stands in a corner of an open terrace located somewhere high in the mountains. One of the man’s hands firmly holds the terrace’s railing; the other rests casually on his waist. Slightly off-center, the vertical of the officer’s body is counterbalanced by the hori- zontal rows of bars. Far below, a sea merges with the sky. The portrait would have been a typical memento from a summer resort, except for one crucial detail: The officer has no head, for the figure is cropped tight across the shoulders. Despite this violent erasure of the subject, the photograph is disturbingly serene, and the officer, though headless, exudes confidence and even a sense of control. Titled Presence, this gray-toned snapshot is part of a photo series created by Sergey Kozhemyakin, a prominent visual artist from Belarus. The word “created”

* I want to thank Yve-Alain Bois, Natalija Arlauskaite, Alexei Golubev, Igal Halfin, Angelina Lucento, Olga Shevchenko, Kim Lane Scheppele, Perry Sherouse, and the Postcolonial Humanities Working Group at Princeton for their comments on the earlier drafts of this article. I am indebted to my friends and colleagues from Belarus, without whom I would have never discovered the Minsk School. My special gratitude goes to Igor Savchenko, Sergey Kozhemyakin, Vladimir Shakhlevich, Galina Moskaleva, and Vladimir Parfenok for sharing their time and work with me. The fieldwork for this research was funded by the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research. 1. As quoted in Martha Lanford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 32. 2. Siegfried Kracauer, The Past’s Threshold: Essays on Photography, ed. Philippe Despoix and Maria Zinfert (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2014), p. 59.

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Sergey Kozhemyakin. Presence. 1989–1992.

conveys the nature of the series only to a point: The images are all from the personal collections of Kozhemyakin’s relatives. From 1989 to 1992, Kozhemyakin rephotographed them, gradually compiling a small set called A Family Album: Real Photographs from Real Life: 1953–1989.3 In an interview with Kozhemyakin in Minsk in 2009, I asked him why he decided to crop the figure. He insisted that there was no alteration—“I would never allow myself to cut the head of my brother off”—and instead suggested his own reading of the image. In 1989, when he started working on A Family Album, “presence” (prisutstvie) was a term routinely used to refer to the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan between 1979 and 1989 (as in “the presence of a limited army contingent”). Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms put an end to this intervention, and the last Soviet military divisions were withdrawn from Afghanistan in February 1989. By fusing a political cliché with a found image of his brother, a military officer, Kozhemyakin offered an artistic generalization, a play with “a stereotype,” as he called it. His appropriation transformed the mechanical cut by the camera into a conceptual tool of sorts, creating a visual allegory for the unpopular and poorly conceived military invasion: a confident performance of the body unencumbered by the presence of mind.

3. The series is available at the photographer’s website, http://kozhemyakin.dironweb.com.

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This image, then, was “a certificate of presence,” as Barthes defined photography,4 but one that simultaneously certified an absence of the subject. It was a presence that made identification with the depicted individual impossible. As a rephotographed portrait, the image conveyed a second absence as well: that of the photographer. While activating a visual record of the past, Kozhemyakin left no traces of his own. I want to use this story about the retrospective activation of the photographic presence of decapitated military power as a starting point for exploring techniques of figuration elaborated by visual artists of the Minsk School of photography before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their emptied subjects— defaced but camouflaged—persistently demonstrated the structuring power of the uniform. Blurring the distinction between appearance and substance, these photographers presented subjectivity as a vocabulary of costumes and poses that could deliver meaning even when the identity of the performer could not be established. The past in these photographs was decontextualized and reduced to its material indices. This reduction, however, was not necessarily an operation of historical flattening. It was a mode of transcoding: History was approached as a storehouse of ready-made pieces that could be reactivated, reassembled, and reappropriated. In place of memory there were mnemonic objects, and facts become overshadowed by what Russian avant-garde artists of the 1920s called faktura—that is, by the tangi- ble characteristics of historical artifacts, their textures, colors, shapes, and sounds. The plane of interiority was dominated by the plane of physicality.5 I will refer to these visual techniques of figuration as “vicarious photography” to make apparent both the ready-made nature of its sources and the type of indirect subjectivity that it portrays. As a visual “discourse of self-restoration,” vicarious photography shares its main qualities with prosopopeia: Both grant “the power of speech” to “an absent, deceased or voiceless entity.”6 Yet this process of giving “face to the faceless” assumes a significant difference in vicarious photographs; camouflaging the original face that “can be missing or non-existent” is not the main concern here.7 The goal is not to make the unknown “as intelligible and memorable as a face,” as Paul de Man would have it; rather, the aim is to seize “a mask or a face” as a vehicle for surfacing the presence of the unseen in familiar narratives and histories.8 To emphasize the productive effect of this version of prosopopeia, I use a more gram- matically flexible term, “enmasking.” I will read, then, these enmasking acts of

4. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 87. 5. Philippe Descola, “Modes of Being and Forms of Prediction,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, no. 1 (2014), pp. 274–77. 6. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” MLN 94, no. 5 (1979), pp. 925, 926. Prosopopeia is a rhetorical device that presents absent beings, animate or inanimate, as “confidants, witnesses, accusers, avengers, judges, etc.” by making them act and speak. Michael Riffaterre, “Prosopopeia,” Yale French Studies, no. 69 (1985), p. 107. 7. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 44. 8. De Man, “Autobiography as De-facement,” pp. 926, 929.

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visual figuration as a particular form of postcolonial appropriation through which Minsk photographers critically resuscitated and redeployed visual languages of the Soviet period. By relying on postcolonial studies for interpreting the post-Communist present of Belarus, I foreground a structural homology between the new states that emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and more traditional sites of postcolonial experience.9 Postcolonies of Communism, despite coming out of a very different experience of domination, face the same fundamental question: how to engage with the colonial past without enabling its structure of subjectiva- tion. Vicarious photography, I suggest, allows presence without identification. Its “play with stereotypes” offers a way of recycling visual formulas of the Soviet period while simultaneously providing visual artists with expressive possibilities for demar- cating their authorial non-alignment with these formulas. In his study of postcolonial cultures in Latin America, Bill Ashcroft empha- sizes the ways in which power shapes and transforms the process of postcolonial “appropriation” of dominant discursive systems of representation. As Ashcroft observes, a colonized culture could absorb dominant forms by “making them ‘bear the burden’ of a different experience.”10 Such “tactical occupations” deploy dominant forms of representation “against their culture of origin” in order to control the frames and forms of self-representation.11 Ashcroft’s notion of appropriation as tactical occupation is critical for understanding the postcolonial specificity of working with cultural readymades: Postcolonial appropriations are not just another instance of the process through which reality—mythical or otherwise—is pack- aged in historically available metaphors; they are also forms of mimetic resistance. In the postcolony, techniques of appropriation are tools of re-signification, which offer subaltern groups “possibilities for ‘talking back’ to and through the categories that have been created to contain” them.12 The photographic projects of the Minsk School of photography activate photo- objects of the past. Since this “secondhand” photography cannot document or objectify the photographer’s own gaze, it draws attention to the syntactic and rhetorical conventions that help vicarious photographers perform their acts of mimetic resistance. Found photographs are selected, combined, and visually transformed,

9. This article is not the place to discuss the applicability of postcolonial theory to post-Communist experience. I explore some of the difficulties therein in my essay “How to Grow Out of Nothing: The Afterlife of National Rebirth in Postcolonial Belarus,” Qui Parle, 26, no. 2 (2017), pp. 423–90. 10. Bill Ashcroft, On Post-Colonial Futures: Transformation of Colonial Culture (London: Continuum, 2001), p. 32. 11. Ibid., p. 116. 12. Faye D. Ginsburg, “Screen Memories: Resignifying the Traditional in Indigenous Media,” in Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, and Brian Larkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 51.

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producing a post-factum archive of the period that is past. Created retrospectively, such postcolonial archives rely on visual analogues of reported speech, demonstrat- ing their constitutive dependency on premediated forms of expression.13 The deriv- ative quality of this visual production is not unproblematic, yet it vividly exposes such “paraphrasing” devices as re-focalization, re-sequencing, and tonal flattening through which the available visual legacy is recalled, recaptured, and rearticulated. By removing original photographs from their primary contexts, vicarious photography makes the “promiscuous” nature of photographs especially vivid.14 Their unknown origins, the lack of information about the depicted individuals, and the limited readability of their distorted surfaces significantly frustrate the search for the intended meaning of the photographic content. At the same time, this purposeful decontextualization encourages various forms of meta-discursive engagement with reappropriated images, foregrounding the importance of compositional moves that constitute the process of figuration. Here, I focus on only one type of figuration that dominates the work of the Minsk School artists. All photographic series that I discuss are shaped by pictorial conventions of the portrait. Unlike other types of mimetic representation, the portrait blurs the distinction between the medium and the object of representation, for the role of the pictorial in this case is to convey—to document visually—the referent.15 The portrait depicts but also identifies its subject. However, as Kozhemyakin’s Presence clearly suggests, the photo portrait can activate the evidentiary function of portraiture in order to radically subvert it. Kozhemyakin’s photographic portrayal of the headless body is hardly an example of “extended personhood.”16 Rather, portraying is used in this case to chronicle the disengaging and disengaged presence of its subject. Such an approach is characteristic of the Minsk School in general. With askance looks, fragmented bodies, and decontextualized environments, the forms of self-objectification that these projects outline are strikingly obfuscating. The prolifer- ation of palpable textures and semantically laden objects in the photographs com- pensates for the non-apparent subjectivity of the depicted people and their photographers. Positioning themselves outside yet near this genre of representation and the history that it entails, the Minsk School photographers downplay the referential

13. In his Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, Valentin Voloshinov defined reported speech as “speech within speech,” i.e., as an utterance that the speaker regards as belonging to someone else. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), pp. 115–16. 14. Joshua A. Bell, “Promiscuous Things: Perspective on Cultural Property through Photographs in the Purari Delta of Papua New Guinea,” International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008), p. 124. 15. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance: Three Notes on the Ends of Portraiture,” in Face-Off: The Portrait in Recent Art, ed. Melissa Feldman (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1994), pp. 54–55. 16. Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs and the Sound of History,” Visual Anthropology Review 21, no. 1–2 (2005), p. 31.

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function of the photographic portrait. Through their “de-facing” appropriations of the portrait, they visualize forms of indirect postcolonial presence. My own introduction to these photographic materials was also indirect. I have been visiting Minsk since the late 1990s, but I learned about the Minsk School of photography only after settling in the city in 2009 to do fieldwork on narratives of sover- eignty after Communism. My interlocutors—members of the Minsk intelligentsia— often mentioned the school in interviews, but its presence was more virtual than real. It had no clear institutional base, and there were no galleries or museums that perma- nently exhibited its work. Infrequent shows were often held in makeshift locations, such as in a reading room of a library or in a movie theater’s hallway. Until very recently, local publishers showed very little interest in popularizing the group’s work, and the few Western catalogues that included works of the Minsk photographers were not easily available.17 Incrementally, I learned that by the late 1980s, Minsk had become a crucial center for a small but highly active group of visual artists engaged in a persistent critique of the alleged objectivity and the assumed transparency of the medium of photography. The photographers whose work I discuss in this essay graduated from the same Minsk photo studio in the second half of the 1980s. Back then, all of them had daily jobs—mostly as technicians and engineers. With perestroika, they abandoned their professional careers and embraced photography as their full-time activity.18 By the end of the ’80s, the group had started gaining local and international recognition. Two crucial international exhibits—New Soviet Photography in Helsinki in 1988–89 and Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR in 1991 in Baltimore—finally put them on the art world’s map under the name of “the Minsk School of creative photography” or, more simply, “the Minsk School.”19 By interviewing different members of the group, visiting their homes, and attending their shows and classes, I gradually assembled a substantial digital and printed collection of their projects. Their visual narratives share the same postcolonial preoccupation with absence and distancing from Soviet history that I have explored elsewhere.20 However, the very nature of the photographic medium

17. See Past Future: The Point of Transition, Contemporary Photography from Minsk (Goteborg: Hasselblad Center, 1998); and 1989–2009: Turbulent World—Telling Time, Contemporary Photography and Video Works from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Germany, ed. Julie Reuter (St. Petersburg: Goethe Institute, 2009). 18. The Minsk School of Photography; ROSPHOTO Collection, ed. Anna Maximova and Igor Lebedev (St.Petersburg: ROSPHOTO, 2014). 19. Valery Lobko, “Fotografie aus Minsk,” in Fotografie aus Minsk: Uladzimir Parfianok, Igor Savchenko, Galina Moskaleva, Sergey Kozhemyakin, Vladimir Shaklevich (Berlin: IFA-Galerie, 1994), pp. 6–10; Grant Kester, “A Western View,” in Photo Manifesto: Contemporary Photography in the USSR, ed. Joseph Walker, Christopher Ursitti, and Paul McGinniss (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 1991), pp. 68– 79; Novaia khvalia: Belaruskaia fatagrafiia 1990-kh (Mensk: Logvinau, 2013). 20. Serguei A. Oushakine, “Postcolonial Estrangements: Claiming a Space between Stalin and Hitler,” in Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), pp. 285–315.

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forced the artists to substantiate local narratives about stolen history and absent subjectivity with material, or at least iconic traces, that could point to “presences of absence in the orders of visual appearance.”21 Refreshingly, poetic fantasies about the glorious Belarus of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (as a part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), which I had been offered by many Minsk thinkers, were of limited value for photographers. Their visual projects presented a new form of dialogue with the Soviet past, actively deploying Soviet artifacts to make statements about their current situation. For an anthropologist, the visual nature of these narratives is both helpful and challenging. Almost all of these projects are politically charged, yet almost all of them prefer to remain ambiguous and open-ended. There is no radical rewrit- ing of the past in these projects, but there is no erasure of it, either. Dialogical yet critical, these artistic reappropriations of the Soviet past are attempts to physically work through this past, albeit with visual means. Completed before the advance of digital technologies, the vicarious series are products of intense tactile engagements with the photographic medium through multiple exposures, cropping, enlarging, coloring, and/or montaging. By looking closely at these engagements with visual records of the past, I want to draw attention to the underexplored field of ethnography of media. Instead of focusing on technologies of mediation, networks of circulation, and the social lives of media objects, I will trace the particular interplay between the reproductive capacities of the photographic medium and the available conventions of photographic inscription. In her study of the “salvage photography” of the Cambridge anthropological expedition to Torres Strait, Elizabeth Edwards read photography as “a site of interaction,” that is, as a visual object capable of generating social relations that have consequences beyond the limits of the visual.22 While following this direction in my analysis, I bring the visual back by approaching the photographic frame as a site of social interventions.

Systemic Portraits Under Communism, the genre of the portrait had a complicated history; here I will single out but one trend crucial to my argument. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the genre was dismissed as a pitiful effort to duplicate reality through the means of artistic illusionism. In his 1924 manifesto about memorializ- ing Lenin, Kazimir Malevich famously proclaimed (once again) the end of representational art, comparing it to a mirror with no content of its own. True commemoration, Malevich suggested, would mean not merely multiplying the leader’s face in portraits but materializing his ideas as a cube, i.e., as a key symbol of eterni-

21. T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013). 22. Elizabeth Edwards, “Performing Science: Still Photography and the Torres Strait Expedition,” in Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the 1898 Anthropological Expedition, ed. Anita Herle and Sandra Rouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 121–22.

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ty.23 In his programmatic essay “From the Painting to the Photograph,” Osip Brik, a major figure of the Russian Formalism movement, also drew a sharp line between the old—“reactionary”—view of the portrait and a new, revolutionary understanding of it. Prerevolutionary painting and literature, Brik asserted in 1928, aimed at “differentiating individual people and events from their general context and concentrating attention on them.”24 Hence, the constant striving toward turning the subjects into “dramatis personae,” into freestanding personages removed from the contexts that had determined their social significance in the first place.25 As Brik defined it, the portrait was perceived as “an ideological phenomenon” deployed to produce and confirm the autonomy of the bourgeois self. For Brik, portrait photography fell into the same trap: By creating “an artificial photographic environment” in the photo studio, the photographer “abstracted” and “algebraicized” real-life situations, ultimately approaching the photograph as a non-painterly approximation of a work of painting. A truly modern photographer should not abstract but decode. The task was to use visual means to lay bare the social significance of an individual, event, or object. Correspondingly, the goal of photography was associated with maximizing the depiction of the social context. As Brik insisted, the photograph should make it unambiguously clear that the value of portrayed objects and individuals lies not in their visual outlines but “in the function [they fulfill] within the given social ambience.”26 The modern photographic inscription of people and things was expected to reveal the systemic qualities underneath their physical appearance. The process of representation was envisioned as being simultaneously depictive and analytic: a picture and a code, an icon and an index, in the same frame. In this context, individuality was perceived as a necessary point of entry into a system, as a metonymic connection to a larger social “structure” or “function.” And in order for the social function to become graspable, the individual “dramatic” features had to be flattened. This is not to say, however, that the fundamental downplaying of individual features meant their erasure. As Alexander Rodchenko insisted in 1928, the homogenized, synthetic unity of the portrait should be abandoned in favor of multiple snapshots because “a man is not just one sum total, he is many, and sometimes they are quite opposed.”27 The summarizing “portrait-

23. Kazimir Malevich, “Lenin,” in Formal’nyi Metod: Antologiia Russkogo Modernizma, vol. 1, ed. Serguei Oushakine (Moscow-Ekaterinburg: Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2016), pp. 834–39. 24. Osip Brik, “From the Painting to the Photograph” (1928), in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1989), p. 231. 25. Michael Fried would describe this later as “the inherent theatricality of the genre” of the portrait in his Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 109. 26. Brik, “From the Painting to the Photograph,” pp. 231–32. 27. Alexander Rodchenko, “Against the Synthetic Portrait, For the Snapshot,” in Phillips, Photography in the Modern Era, p. 241.

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biography” was to be replaced with the “portrait-index” (portret-kharakteristika), which could present individual qualities without constraining them within the limits of a comprehensive narrative about the portrayed individual.28 At the time, this demand for preserv- ing individuality in its dynamic iterations, taken together with the idea of the analytical representation, produced a series of projects that tried to find a working balance between the individual and the synthetic. Political photo portraits by El Lissitzky and Gustav Klucis were, perhaps, the most striking examples of this desire to combine the static quality of large ideological icons with the dynamism created by the mosaic of individual head shots. By the last decades of the Soviet period, however, these formal experiments had died out. The revolutionary dynamism had been lost, and painterly representations of the individual removed from his or her social environment again became the norm. But the demand for social relevancy that shaped Soviet photography during its inception was retained, albeit in a significantly modified form. More systemic than synthetic, this late- Soviet form of depiction firmly placed individual head shots within an ideological framework. Actual renditions of these portraits varied, but most of them were local interpretations of a particular genre of Soviet visual propaganda known as the “board of honor” (literally, doska pocheta, a board of/for respect), public showcases with Top: El Lissitzky. Lenin. 1930. 28. I borrow the distinction between the portrait- Bottom: Gustav Klucis. With biography and the portrait-index from Nikolai Lenin’s Flag We Shall Win in Tarabukin’s essay “Portret kak problema stilia” (The the Battles for the October portrait as a stylistic problem), in Iskusstvo portreta, ed. A. Revolution. 1933. Courtesy of Gabrichevskii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennaia Akademiia the Latvian National Museum khudozhdestvennykh nauk, 1928). of Art, Riga.

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Templates for mass-produced “boards of honor.” 1967.

rows of uniformed shock workers and exemplary citizens united within the borders of a larger material structure.29 Variations of this board existed on every level of social organization, from a factory’s shop floor to a university to an army garrison. In the board of honor, Brik’s idea about the systemic quality of representation was translated into political slogans and signs, while Rodchenko’s point about dynamic individualism took the shape of single-frame portraits. The ideological system was laid bare, acting as a structural background and an overall frame, while the emphasized autonomy of each individual shot provided the viewer with a series of focal points and personal- ized traits. System and elements, basis and superstructure, code and representation, were openly exposed in this form of the portrait. The genre even had its own paradigmatic example. Many Soviet offices exhibited the same portable iconosta- sis: a scarlet glossy poster that depicted a composite photographic representation of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, placing all the visual conventions of the genre within the proper ideological context. Of course, the corporate group portrait was not entirely a Soviet invention. Many societies have similar halls of fame. However, the late-Soviet edition of this genre was remarkably insistent on the stylistic anonymity of individual portrai- tures. The idea of downplaying individualism in the name of larger social, political, or geographic constellations was taken to its limits here. Being on the board was not really about the individual’s personal achievements; it was about being

29. In the 1960s, state publishing houses began producing source books, offering visual templates for creating the boards of honor. For a good example of these models see Elementy nagliadnoi agi- tatsii v blagoustroistve gorodov i sel (Kiev: Budivel’nik, 1967).

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Official collective portrait of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 1979.

incorporated into a new form of collectivity. Indeed, as the 1979 poster of the Politburo demonstrates, the significance of depicted individuals comes not from their personal features but from their shared belonging to a common (red) field of power, sanctified by the ghostly appearance of Lenin. Few signs of social origin or ethnic background could be discerned from these rows of party men without qualities. Sartorial details and hairstyles were carefully streamlined in order to produce an authoritative index of social unity. In the process of this propagandistic adoption of the portrait genre, something interesting happened to the portrait itself. It became self-referential, not so much representing a concrete subjectivity as exhibiting historically specific conventions of the process of portrayal. By enmasking the interiority of the photographed people, by shifting the emphasis from the biographical to the graphic, the group portrait drew attention to its own compositional morphology.

Substitutes of Subjectivity Kozhemyakin’s Children’s Album (1989) came out of this late-Soviet genre of the photographic collectives of homogenized individuals. Assembled during perestroika, Children’s Album was a pivotal event in the history of the Minsk School: It problematized seriously—if somewhat unexpectedly—the very act of photographic recording. Genealogically speaking, Children’s Album is a perfect example of an objet trouvé. In 1988, when visiting his parents in Minsk, Kozhemyakin stumbled upon several reels of negatives dumped by someone near his parents’ apartment block. A few months later, he found more reels. The origin of the negatives

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remained unknown; perhaps a photo studio was getting rid of materials it did not need anymore, or an individual photographer was clearing out his or her space. The images Kozhemyakin found were staged portraits of children of different ages: toddlers, preschoolers, and students of elementary and middle schools. Mostly dressed as Russian princesses or hussars of the imperial army, the children displayed an array of emotions, from utter bewilderment and proud self-presentation to annoyance and even frustration. Out of more than two hun- dred negatives, he selected eighteen for the Album. Presenting a strange concoc- tion of piercing looks, garish costumes, and scratched surfaces, Children’s Album became Kozhemyakin’s signature series. Every major catalogue and exhibit of the Minsk School included some selections from it. However, the work has never been exhibited as a whole, and the photographer’s website is the only place where one can see the images together. Despite their differences, almost all the images in the Album convey the same unsettling feeling of a radical split between what Ariella Azoulay called “the event of photography and the photographed event.”30 Costumes and postures could hardly hide palpable reverberations of the seemingly uneasy (and undocumented) interac-

30. Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, trans. Louise Bethlehem (London: Verso, 2012), p. 21.

Kozhemyakin. Children’s Album. 1989.

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tions between the photographer, the children, and the camera that preceded the moment when the shots were taken. Frozen in their poses and looking directly at the camera, the children displayed themselves “effortfully,” revealing the presence of the photographic medium.31 Lacking a script to follow, they exposed the process of photographic portraiture as a costumed performance inflicted by the photographer and delivered for the camera. What could have been an occasion for a playful, carnivalesque party was turned into an unequal power struggle between the subjectifying camera and the potential objects of the photograph. These were not just staged portraits; they were enforced ones—and the life that was caught by the camera was very much aware of the act of its capturing. Scratches, creases, and perforations of the images further materialize the process of visual encoding, as if baring the bruises of photographic inscription. During our conversation, Kozhemyakin pointedly insisted that, unlike many of his colleagues, in his projects he preserved the documentary integrity of found originals. No scratches were added to the images to increase their auratic effect, and no creases were removed to heighten the impact of the portraits. I find this insistence symptomatic. Perhaps more than anyone else from the Minsk School, Kozhemyakin foregrounded in his works the textural traces of the medium’s presence, as if trying to understand the aesthetic effect and semantic import of its materiality. Scratches and perforations helped to dispel the idea of the medium’s transparency and objectivity. Moreover, the distressed surfaces of the negatives chronicled their own pasts, compensating for the lack of knowledge about the biographies of the depicted individuals with biographic marks of the photo- objects, with “the faktura of the time,” as Kozhemyakin described it.32 That is, the depleted interiority of the portraits’ subjects not only increased the importance of the exterior but also helped to shift attention from the photographed event to the tools and modes of the photographic recording, from the referential function of the portrait series to the series as an organizational form. The questioning of the role and significance of the medium most likely was precipitated by the ready-made nature of Kozhemyakin’s original materials. The usual tripartite assemblage—photographer, photographed, and the photo itself33— acquired an additional component here: the photographer of photographs. Kozhemyakin’s own non-involvement in the actual event of photography afforded a productive meta-position vis-à-vis the visual materials. Selection, he repeatedly told me, was the only method he used to work with them. Avoiding any radical transformation of the found photographs, he approached them metonymically, as visual clues that could eventually help uncover larger realms of social relations.

31. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 65. 32. Valerii Vedrenko, “Sergei Ivanovich Kozhemyakin: Sokhraniaia balans,” Zniata, http://znya- ta.com/z-proekty/legends-kozhemyakin-1.html. 33. Jamon Halvaksz, “The Photographic Assemblage: Duration, History and Photography in Papua New Guinea,” History and Anthropology 21, no. 4 (2010), p. 415.

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Indeed, the documents in the Album were neither theatrically enhanced nor politically recharged, as is often the case with visual projects based on found photographs. Christian Boltanski, for example, often alters appropriated photos and incorporates them into complicated three-dimensional installations. Purposefully devoid of their referential function, these photographs reemerge as memorials, as sites of commemoration and “sources of emotivity.”34 The vicarious nature of Boltanski’s photographic projects is unmistakable. But just as obvious is the artist’s insistence on his authorial presence. Kozhemyakin’s projects demonstrated a very different way of appropriating visual objects of the past. By minimizing his own presence within the borrowed (and selected) frames, Kozhemyakin was able to activate analytical—as opposed to affective—potentialities of photography. Authorial presence was manifested not so much in the images themselves but in the relations that these images were selected to highlight. As a result, the process of compiling the Album evolved into a visual cataloging of pictorial clichés, social types, and public gestures. History became form—or, given the context, a set of uniforms. Russian Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum observed a useful distinction between those artists and writers who work with ready-made materials and those who tend to generate their own objects of analysis. Surveying the Russian literature of the nineteenth century, Eikhenbaum traced a correlation between the epistemological interests and temporal locations of different artistic generations within the same artistic movement. While earlier cohorts normally established themselves by open- ing up new venues and bringing in new materials, later ones tended to assert themselves through the creative appropriation of already existing materials, by organizing, systematizing, and otherwise “completing” previous discoveries.35 To quote Eikhenbaum: “ . . . writers canonizing or ending a given period use this material because their attention is concentrated on the method.”36 For Eikhenbaum, the methodological preoccupation was a marker of a more general epistemological concern. This “speculative approach” (apriornyi podkhod), as he called it, invoked examples and evidence only to confirm an already formulated argument. A writer driven by the speculative approach “writes in formulae . . . ; he no longer senses in them semantic nuances and details; for him they exist as abstract speech formations. . . . He is more concerned with the overall emotional effect, as if addressing a fast reader who will not linger over semantic or syntactic details but will only seek an impression of the whole.”37 Using the nineteenth-century Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov as his main example, Eikhenbaum demonstrated how Lermontov’s poetry utilized narrative readymades and thematic configurations created by earlier writers in order to use these “speech formations” for creating rhetorically powerful

34. Catherine Grenier. “There Is a Story,” in Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), p. 65. 35. Boris Eikhenbaum, Lermontov: A Study in Literary-Historical Evaluation (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), p. 46. 36. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov, p. 46. Italics mine. 37. Ibid., p. 113.

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“declamatory verses.” In this case, acoustic and emotional components dominated the explanatory function of discourse.38 Faktura eclipsed facts. Eikhenbaum’s emphasis on the temporal aspect of the process of creative reappropriation adds an important dimension to Ashcroft’s reading of postcolonial readymades. Postcolonial photography “ends” the Soviet period not only by subversively repurposing its language but also by exposing the internal organization of its affective power. The usual technologies of colonial mimicry—copying, duplicating, or reproducing—are still employed, but they are reoriented in order to enable various interventions on the level of the overall organization of these copies and duplicates. The point of vicarious photography is not to resemble the dominant style but to curate an archive of imitative devices. Kozhemyakin’s “speculative” engagement with ready-made photographs shows precisely this shift—from revealing the internal complexity of each individual frame of the series to detecting systemic principles of their seriality. His color version of the Children’s Album (made available after 2008) offers a grammar of bodily compositions, a primer of facial expressions, and a table of basic affective states. To approximate the genre’s convention, Kozhemyakin removed almost all traces of the film’s perforations (in the earlier version, he kept them to frame the

38. Ibid., pp. 113–14.

Kozhemyakin. Children’s Album. 2008.

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shots) but left the signs of the negatives’ texture intact. If previously published toned photographs emphasized the children’s unique facial responses to the intrusion of the photographer and camera, then the color series as a whole under- lined structural aspects that were somewhat unnoticeable before. The excessive ornamentalism of the clothing in the series could hardly hide the limited scope of sartorial choices, bodily positions, and gender roles. When assembled together, the images displayed not diversity but sameness. Surprisingly, color did not make the Children’s Album any more complex. Rather, it underscored in yet another way the constraints of expressive means—in this case, the limits of the chromatic palette (red-blue-white). Interpreting the series for me, Kozhemyakin singled out the disciplining effect of these limits and constraints. Limits expose rules, and the series, he main- tained, documented the “ongoing mechanism of socialization.” It showed “how a real person got incorporated into a system” by learning “how to play along”: first by being taught how to fit into someone else’s clothing, and later by making a proper facial expression. Pointing to a couple of portraits, he summed up the result of this transformative mimicry: “Look, these kids already know that this is a game and that they’d better play up. [You can see that] their faces have become cynical already.” Kozhemyakin’s speculative approach reminded me of Lévi-Strauss’s structural semiotics of masks. The French anthropologist also read the masks’ facial features relationally. Their individuality and sameness were perceived as a product of a carefully calculated intra-referentiality. Their formal differential quality, however, was structurally conditioned: Each mask of the same series also acted as a metonymic link to the symbolic system that constituted them as a set of compara- ble objects in the first place. As the anthropologist put it, “Each type of mask is linked to myths whose objective is . . . to lay the foundations for its role in ritual, in the economy, and in the society.”39 Similarly, for Kozhemyakin, the continuous interplay between sameness and distinction, which the Album enforced, offered a way to utilize individual portraits for articulating the fundamental message about social cohesion (abstracted as chromatic and gestural similarity) and social equality (algebraicized in uniformed attires) that linked the “enmasked” faces of the Album to a serial portrait of the Soviet system. His equation of “the system” with a look was important, and his point about “the process of the individual’s incorporation into the system” (vstraivanie cheloveka v sistemu) seemed to be relevant. Critically, though, the existence of “the system,” in this case, could be grasped only retrospectively and speculatively. The systemic “unity” of the photographic collection or children’s collectivity was imaginary. Most likely, the original photographs were never assembled together, and, given their age differences, the photographed children could hardly compose any meaningful collective in their

39. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 14.

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real lives. By turning diachronically shot images into a synchronically organized album, Kozhemyakin exposed a systemic distribution of things and people that would not have been visible otherwise. The manifestation of this systemic effect was significant, but it was difficult for me to follow Kozhemyakin into taking the limited repertoire of sartorial and gender choices (offered by the original photographer) for a representation of the social structure. Certainly, the dreary repetitiveness of the Children’s Album could, at the end of Communism, be seen as a critique of the existing social order, where even Minsk princesses were doomed to share the same outfit. But available collections of portraits taken in the late Soviet Union vividly document a far different trend. When, in the late 1970s, the American photographer David Attie invited locals to take their own pictures in a pop- up photo studio he had set up in Kiev, the results showed people’s clear desire to experiment with the medium and to push the limits of their self-representation. There were very few signs of constraint, let alone cynicism, in these self-portraits.40 Given this, it seems that the artificial photographic environment created in Kozhemyakin’s Album could also be read as a commentary on the process of photographic

40. David Attie, Russian Self-Portraits (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). In 1980, Top and bottom: David Attie. Nathan Farb did a structurally similar experi- Russian Self-Portrait. 1977. ment in Novosibirsk; see The Russians: An Courtesy of the David Attie archive. American Photographer Looks at the Soviet People (New York: Barron’s, 1980).

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inscription. What the Children’s Album expressed is not a late-Soviet version of Lévi- Strauss’s foundational myth (e.g., about social equality in the shape of universal princesshood), but rather a postcolonial variation of Barthes’s mythology; that is, a distancing reflection on processes and technologies through which myths are generated. The “cynical faces” that Kozhemyakin detected in a move of hermeneutical suspicion were indeed gestural responses to the “system.” But this system was that of photographic mediation. The Album exposed the process of recording as a mechanism of subjection. Significantly, the series demonstrated how much this subjecting to portrayal hinged on “abstracting” everything individual. The portraiture emptied depicted subjects, presenting them enmasked, as “always already the public substitutes of subjectivity.”41 What I find significant about Kozhemyakin’s princesses and hussars is not the process of the individual self-alienation, which they might or might not have expressed, but those techniques of objectification that vicarious photography was capable of revealing. Through their repetitive nature, serial portraits brought to light a striking connection between the disappearance of the subject and the continuous presence of the garb, which “imposes itself as if there were still life in it.”42 People might come and go, but the uniform is here to stay. Crucially, this ability to turn the systemic portrait into a catalogue of appearances is predicated on the necessity to disregard “semantic nuances and details.”43 Like Eikhenbaum’s poets and Barthes’s mythologists, the vicarious photographer is “condemned to metalan- guage.”44 Safely keeping their own identities non-transparent, vicarious photographers must hold reality at a distance in order to be able to distill visual formulas from ready-made histories and prepackaged subjectivities. In Kozhemyakin’s subsequent project, the evacuation of context and subjectivity in the name of revealing the workings of the process of the photographic recording became especially prominent. His Family Album was also based on ready- made photographs, but its subtitle, Real Photographs from Real Life: 1953–1989, pointedly emphasized the documentary quality of these instances of reported speech. As with Presence, the photos were “found” in the archives of Kozhemyakin’s parents and brother. Staying true to his position of externality vis-à-vis the genre (and history), Kozhemyakin selected a range of images that helped him illuminate the camera’s framing and structuring intrusions. Close-up portraits of “pre- sentably” posing relatives—the mainstay genre of a typical family album—were missing entirely.45 Instead, the series featured snapshots of familiar everyday scenes in which swimming, sunbathing, and/or resting people were observed from a distance and often from above. People’s faces were not disfigured, but they did

41. Buchloh, “Residual Resemblance,” p. 62. 42. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in Kracauer, The Past’s Threshold, p. 36. 43. Eikhenbaum, Lermontov, p. 46. 44. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), p. 157. 45. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 80.

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not act as logical focal points of the photos either. The photographer’s gaze focused on usually peripheral elements, and in many cases a somewhat random cropping of several images intensified the distancing and objectifying effect of the camera even more. One could read these “de-facing” cuts as signs of the photographer’s authorial power or as a means of withholding some important information. Yet the goal of Kozhemyakin’s Family Album was not to demystify the directionality of the photographer’s gaze but to present a particular view of history. If in Children’s Album Kozhemyakin relied on the retrospectively created seriality to disclose the diminishing interiority of the photographed subjects, in Family Album the selection of snapshots celebrated the eccentric and the marginal. Remarkably, Kozhemyakin rejected the usual organizational conventions of the family album. Family Album’s “real life” was not structured by linear chronology, nor did it trace a biography of a particular individual; it ostensibly lacked leading heroes and recognizable historical events. Yet just like the effect of seriality in Children’s Album, the avoidance of any thematic or temporal commit- ment in Family Album was an outcome of Kozhemyakin’s deliberate

All images this page: Kozhemyakin. A Family Album: Real Photographs from Real Life. 1953–1989.

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compositional strategy. Both Albums are, indeed, examples of figuration that help us glimpse a particular expression of postcolonial presence, in which the (imperial) past is rarely perceived as a sequence of frontal portraits organized in a narrative progression. Often out of focus, history neither jells nor crystallizes here, making itself available indirectly—in an oblique, fragmentary, peripheral way.

Materials of Ideology “Photographs are not ideas,” John Tagg remarked in his essays on photographies and histories; “they are material items.” Their semantic importance and cultural significance come from the relations of their production, from the ideological networks in which they circulate, as well as from the pragmatic needs and social concerns that generate and sustain these networks.46 So far, I have been focusing predominantly on the ways in which the ideological conventions of the Soviet systemic portrait were appropriated and subverted by the Minsk School. The work of Vladimir Shakhlevich and Galina Moskaleva demonstrates how relations of photographic production and the patterns of ideological circulation influ- ence the process of photographic inscription. As I pointed out earlier, in Children’s Album Kozhemyakin mimicked the conventions of the Soviet board of honor to demonstrate the erasure of individuality through the serial organization of the systemic portrait. In his Portraits for the Kolkhoz Board of Honor (1980–89), Shakhlevich performed a rare case of reverse engineering to show that such erasure of subjectivity is often a product of a photographic iteration, rather than a representation, of the photographed event. Shakhlevich’s Kolkhoz Portraits are not found photographs, exactly, but the series is, like Kozhemyakin’s Albums, an attempt to reclaim and reactivate photo- objects of the past through a chain of retrospective compositional moves. The project began in 1980 as a routine assignment to photograph the best workers from a Belarusian collective farm called Red Banner. As Shakhlevich later recalled, some photographs were taken in a field, others near people’s houses. During the print- ing process, the originals were cropped to meet the requirements of what Shakhlevich called the “typical portrait.”47 The final outcome presented nothing unusual: head-and-shoulders portraits against a textured background. More than a decade later, in 1992, preparing for an Amsterdam exhibit called Litsa: Contemporary Portrait Photography from Russia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine, Shakhlevich transformed what was a photographic routine into “an artistic act,” as he described it to me.48 Returning to the negatives from the original assignment,

46. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993), p. 188. 47. Vladimir Shakhlevich, The Portraits for the Kolkhoz Board of Honor, 1980–1989, http://vol686.wixsite.com/vadimir-shakhlevich/photo-80-90-h. 48. Personal correspondence with the photographer, August 2016. For the catalogue, see Ans Gevers, Olga Cholmogorova, Allan Jaeger et al., Litsa: hedendaagse portret fotografie uit Rusland, Wit- Rusland en de Oekrainë (Amsterdam: Stichting CIRC, 1992).

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Shakhlevich re-cropped the photographs at knee length and revealed some background beyond the textured backdrop. He also added a hammer and sickle to the background fabric, turning a piece of a linen sack into a Communist banner. Yet it was only several years later, when Shakhlevich published the completely unedited images, that his Kolkhoz Portraits powerfully demystified the disciplining capacity of Soviet ideology’s pictorial stan- dards. The series presented the ideology’s raw visual stock. Unlike “the typical portrait” from the board of honor, these originals conveyed the individuality of a photographic event. Makeshift settings—next to a fence, a wall, or a tree—suggested some degree of site-specificity. Body parts of the photographer’s assistants, caught by the camera, turned the typical scenario of the event into a series of unexpected variations. There was even something inviting about the shyness of the individuals’ facial expressions and the slight awkwardness of their poses. Like August Sander’s famous series of occupational portraits from the late 1920s, Shakhlevich’s “portraits-indices” captured their subjects in or near their working place. In both cases, the photographers were concerned not with individual selves but with social types, be they Shakhlevich’s Kolzhoz Worker or Sander’s Varnisher. Sander achieved the typological effect by suspending the process of actual labor: Posing individuals communicated their professional belonging through clothing details or working tools. 49 Profession was not performed in these Top: Vladimir Shakhlevich. 49. Ernst van Alphen, Art in Mind: How Reconstruction of 1980s (Chicago: Contemporary Images Shape Thought Portrait for Kolkhoz University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 27. Board of Honor. 2016. Bottom: Shakhlevich. Reconstruction of 1980s Portrait for Kolkhoz Board of Honor. 1992.

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All images this page: Shakhlevich. Portraits for the Kolkhoz Board of Honor. 1980–89.

images; it was designated by material props. Shakhlevich followed the same indexical principle, but with a twist. In his Kolkhoz Portraits, most of the material traces tell us nothing about the professional status of the individuals: A dairymaid is indistinguishable from a schoolteacher. Social significance was instead defined by the ideological substance that the individuals shared, represented here by the fragment of a linen sack strategically stretched behind their backs. This piece of fabric acted as a metonym both of the genre and of ideology. Like in Sander’s static portraits, this activation of the metonymic reference came with

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a price: In order to be designated, ideology had to freeze its labor in a moment of its objectified presence. The photographic transformation of ideology into a physical backdrop, its materialist flattening, somewhat deferred the ideology’s formative effect. When taken in their original, unedited forms, Shakhlevich’s portraits appear to parody official ideological portraits. Yet given the history of the project, these “parodies” nonetheless managed to contain all the elements that could be required for turning them into a “typically Soviet” representation. Instructively, Kolkhoz Portraits displayed the reductive quality of ideology’s future work. Indeed, the ideological fabric can (partly) obfuscate the perspective and close off the horizon, yet its totalizing effect seems to be a function of proximity—that is, to foreclose other possibilities, the ideological portrait must be experienced as a close-up. Or, to frame it slightly differently, the transformation of ideological potentiality into a fully-fledged ideological sign in Kolkhoz Portraits was accomplished not so much by imposing “a ready-made dramatic shape on the raw material”50 as by editing out unnecessary details. In 1992, together with his partner, Galina Moskaleva, Shakhlevich returned to this theme. In their series A Board of Honor (Doska pocheta), they documented in real time the disappearance of an actual board of honor in a Minsk district. Having stumbled on a board near a movie theater, the couple decided to photograph it. As Moskaleva recalled later, “We took a few pictures. But when we came back, three days later, the board was already gone.”51 Their series of seven black- and-white photographs showed a large concrete structure with several autonomous displays in a state of ruination. The Soviet insignia was still there, but the portraits were already half-gone, entering a stage of their spectral “pseudo- presence.”52 Sheets of protective glass had been broken, photo paper had been

50. John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary,” in Nonfiction Film: Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Meran Barsam (New York: Dutton, 1976), p. 22. 51. Personal correspondence, September 2017. 52. Benjamin R. Smith and Richard Vokes, “Introduction: Haunting Images,” Visual An thro pology 21 (2008), p. 284.

Shakhlevich and Galina Moskaleva. A Board of Honor. 1993.

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warped, and the varicose texture of the prints generated an eerie interplay of light and shadow. In their afterlife, these mechanically reproduced works of art seemed to have finally acquired a luminous aura. A Board of Honor activat- ed the same aspects of the serial figuration that I have explored so far; here recording is a tool for anonymizing subjects socially and visually.53 Although the names of the depicted individuals were still visible on plaques that had been mounted on the structure, Shakhlevich and Moskaleva’s camera rarely focused on them directly, leaving the previously honored individuals unidentified. Stripped of their ideological functions, the board’s portraits reestab- lished themselves as chromatic surfaces for displaying “the faktura of the time.” Strikingly, these photographs of Soviet photographs did not extend their lives but instead depicted the vanishing of the genre. Shakhlevich and Moskaleva documented the end of the epoch by exposing the decomposition of its representational styles, and All images this page: Shakhlevich and 53. Gertrud Koch, “The Moskaleva. A Board of Richter-Scale of Blur,” in Gerhard Honor. 1993. Richter, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), p. 40.

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Shakhlevich and Moskaleva. A Board of Honor. 1993.

their Board of Honor served as an obituary for the period’s pictorial conventions: a certificate of presence that authenticated a loss. Somewhat ironically, one of the images completed the historical cycle by bringing the story of Soviet mimetic realism to its aesthetic closure. The photograph recorded a remainder of a concrete cube originally designated to hold an individual portrait, with a wall of similar cubic frames protruding in the background. The original portrait was gone, but the remains of the wooden bars that held the portrait in place were still visible. Their off-white skeletal presence repeated the outline of the cube, creating a composition of two black squares, one within the other. Reducing the ideological past to a material figure, to a cube with no story to tell but with enough presence to structure surrounding space, the photograph presents us with a ready-made tomb for the genre of the systemic portrait. It appears that Malevich—with his radical rejection of mimetic portrayal and his celebration of the eternity of basic shapes— was not entirely wrong after all. Portraits are fleeting, but cubes persist—if not for eternity, then at least for the time being.

Epidermic Interventions In Board of Honor, Moskaleva and Shakhlevich displayed one of the most extreme examples of the phenomenon of “de-facing” whose iterations I trace here. The series chronicled a gradual erasure—by nature, by history, and by camera—of the subject and apparatus of the Soviet official portrait. Their new “black square”—the end result of this “de-facing”—is both a material object and an unexpected art-historical reference. However, the disappearance of the original (biographical and ideological) content strangely increased the semiotic potential of the photographic representation, and in the remainder of this essay, I look at several photographic projects that were realized through similar gestures of de-facing figuration. I show how these photographic works established themselves by actively borrowing visual “speech forms” of the past only to implode their grammar and syntax from within.

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Kozhemyakin. Transformation of an Image. 1988.

Technologies of conceptual and pictorial blur that were elaborated by vicarious photography were not only about artistic experiments and methodological critique. The Minsk School’s profound investment in questioning the limits of realist representation seemed also to be determined by a desire to destabilize existing frameworks of history, memory, and experience, on the one hand, and available modes of expression and documentation, on the other. Various meth- ods of appropriation—including active deployment of ready-made objects and the borrowing of stylistic conventions—pointed to the same basic urge to produce “an imitation which . . . must fail.”54 Copying, doubling, and replicating did not reconfirm equivalence, nor did they suggest a continuity with the past; instead, they introduced an unsettling ambiguity. Kozhemyakin’s Transformation of an Image (1988) was one of the earliest works of the Minsk School that turned such “repetition with difference” into a purposeful artistic device. Technically, Transformation of an Image is not a portrait. It is, rather, a composite image of a canonic monument of Lenin. Four copies of the same photograph were developed separately before they were assembled and rephotographed as a single image. The compositional structure of Transformation is deceptively transparent. A thin, white grid neatly brings together (and isolates) morphologi- cally identical segments, in which a vertical figure of Lenin functions as the visual and semantic focus. The sculpture remains the same throughout the series, but in

54. Ashcroft, “On Post-Colonial Futures,” p. 22.

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each segment the density and shading of the space around the monument change. However, the “sequence-image” provides the viewer with no obvious reading direction to follow the segments: There is no straightforward way to proceed from the bright day of Leninism to its twilight.55 Minimalist in its technique, the differential toning of the empty space turns out to be critical in its impact. The tonal modification of the segments’ planes gradually flattens the sculpture. As the monument’s own shadows become more and more even, the three-dimensional Lenin loses its depth, becoming a card- board-thin silhouette, a black cutout, ready to disappear in the enveloping dark- ness. Lenin quickly devolves from being referential to being simulacral.56 Similarly transformative is the development of the backdrop: White emptiness is instrumentalized as negative space, which could amplify or dissolve the borders of the object. Changes of tone undermine the traditionally focalized reading, for the viewer is forced to shift his or her attention away from the anchoring figure in order to negotiate the segment’s possible meaning by going back and forth between the monument and its surrounding context. Deprived of its epistemic autonomy, the ideological sculpture loses it semantic hegemony. To maintain its meaning, each iteration of the sculpture must be read differentially—against and along the sculp- tures and contexts in the other segments. Transformation’s decentering effect is even more pronounced when the series is approached as a single frame: In the center of the series, there is a void, pointedly emphasized by the grid’s intersecting lines. As the compositional structure of Transformation suggests, the actual spatial center neither generates nor anchors the explanation for the series. In order to understand the composition, one has to approach it eccentrically. The open embrace of the semantic and artistic potential of the photographic background in Transformation comes as no surprise. Kozhemyakin was one of the most astute explorers of the epistemic and aesthetic promises of faktura. But his dramatic reconfiguration of the empty backdrop of the monument into the monument’s menacing foreground changed the morphology of his representational system. The surface of the frame, or rather its “skin,” was converted into an autonomous tool of expression. In his discovery of the interpretive possibilities of the photograph’s epidermis, Kozhemyakin was certainly not alone. Yet his Transformation could be seen as a watershed that distinguished visibly intervention- ist approaches aimed at modifying the structure of the original from various attempts to activate new semantic layers of found photographs through their temporal and spatial recontextualization. The transformation of vicarious photogra-

55. Alexander Streitberger, “The Ambiguous Multiple-entendre (Baldessari)—Multimedia Art as Rebus,” in Photography Between Poetry and Politics: The Critical Position of the Photographic Medium in Contemporary Art, ed. Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2008), pp. 35–49. 56. Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October 75 (Winter 1996), pp. 38–39.

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phy into an art of dermoplasty was much more than a simple formal trick. It allowed the appropriation of fragments of the dominant visual regime while intro- ducing an additional visual layer for displaying signs of such appropriation. To comprehend the importance of this visual claim to authorial presence, I refer to the work of the German artist Gerhard Richter, whose appropriation of documentary media—above all photography—can be seen as a crucial historical predecessor of the visual series that I am exploring, although none of the photographers I talked to knew about the German artist in the 1980s and ’90s. Richter’s famous Uncle Rudi is particularly significant. The portrait is an example of Richter’s so-called “handmade photographs,” i.e., paintings that painstak- ingly reproduced photographic originals.57 In Uncle Rudi, the artist depicted his relative as standing against a wall in a nondescript location. Dressed in the uniform of the German Wehrmacht, Rudi occupies the center of the picture, smiling at the camera. The artist reproduced the family photo in 1965; to replicate the color scheme of the original black-and- white photograph, he used only various shades of gray. While mimetic, the painting is not transparent, for Richter subverted the photo-realism of the almost finished work by drawing a dry brush across its wet surface. The resulting “blur” obfuscated the clarity of the message, creating a ghostly image of an awk- wardly grinning Nazi officer. Scholars of Richter’s work tend to read this contra- dictory combination of transparency and opacity as a meta-commentary on the blurry distinction between the figurative Gerhard Richter. Uncle Rudi. 1965. painting of Socialist Realism and the © Gerhard Richter 2018. abstractions of the Western neo-avant- garde.58 True as this might be, for the purpose of my discussion, I want to high-

57. Thomas Crow, “Hand-Made Photographs and Homeless Representations,” in Buchloh, Gerhard Richter, pp. 47–58. 58. John J. Curley, “Gerhard Richter’s Cold War Vision,” in Gerhard Richter: Early Work, 1951– 1972, ed. Christine Mehring, Jeanne Anne Nugent, and Jon I. Seydl (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010), pp. 11–36.

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light two other strands of interpretation that focus on the social rather than pictorial significance of what would become Richter’s famous “blur.” The first points to the relationship between the means of expression and historical experience. As Benjamin Buchloh has suggested, the distortion that Uncle Rudi was exposed to was the artist’s response to the historically specific “impedi- ment” that “consist[ed] precisely in working through both the pictorial prohibi- tion of the unrepresentable subject (the familial tie to the fascist legacy at large and the fascist legacies of painting) and the necessity of representing this subject within the conventions of painting that traditionally served the purpose of historical recollection.”59 Uncle Rudi’s opacity, in other words, was an attempt to render the horror of the Nazi past not by constructing an adequately horrific visual narrative but by deliberately disorganizing the very process of visual narration. Rather than making itself known through thematic caesuras and semantic gaps in an otherwise legible story, the unrepresentable manifested itself on the level of articulation. Pictorial distortions, then—the picture’s skewed visual syntax, its crackled surface, its blurry shapes—indicated “the conflict between the necessity of constructing historical memory and the inadequacy of the rational means available to do so.”60 The second interpretive move insists on the necessity to avoid the tempta- tion to ontologize the inadequacy of rational means in Richter’s work. As many art critics have proposed, the unrepresentability of the unrepresentable in his paintings might have been given, but it was also historically and socially conditioned. For instance, as Stefan Germer put it, “by explicitly confronting the painting with a history that it can neither aesthetically transform nor overcome,” Richter constructed “a substitute for the social debate that never occurred.”61 There are several important parallels between Richter’s Uncle Rudi and the Minsk projects. In both cases, we are dealing with works that relied on the reproduction of ready-made artifacts (photographs, historical impersonators, sculp- tures). And in both cases, the pictorial content was purposefully obfuscated (through blurring, texturing, toning, or enmasking). The conventions of portraiture were similarly evoked only to be imploded by erasing the subjectivity or by defacing the subject. Purposefully avoiding narrative closure, the artists in both cases shifted the burden of interpretation on the viewer. Finally, each case emerged as “a quiet confrontation” that challenged the problematic social condition that radically toned down, if not completely silenced, the question of historical culpability and individual responsibility.62

59. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Divided Memory and Post-Traditional Identity: Gerhard Richter’s Work of Mourning,” in Buchloh, Gerhard Richter, p. 74. 60. Ibid. 61. Stefan Germer, “Unbidden Memories,” in Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977 (London: Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 1989), p. 9. 62. Tyler Green, “‘Uncle Rudi’ and Quiet Confrontation,” Modern Art Notes, August 11, 2009. http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2009/08/uncle-rudi-and-quiet/.

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By drawing these parallels, I am far from suggesting a historical equivalence between Richter’s post-Nazi situation and Belarus’s (post)colonial condition: The unrepresentable that each case was trying to negotiate was very different. But I do think that the similarity of their formal engagements with the past, which could be neither transformed nor overcome, underscores the same basic ontological problem: When the necessity to represent historical experience—colonial or otherwise—is constrained by the inadequacy of representational means, one might embrace these means to expose their inadequacy. Or, as Gertrud Koch described it, “If reality could not be understood, then the most adequate picture of it would be that with the fewest semantic promises.”63

In History’s Shadows Among the Minsk School artists, Igor Savchenko is perhaps the most consistent advocate and practitioner of the purposeful combination of semantic minimalism and representational deficiency, and his projects from 1989 to 1996 have established him as the most internationally acclaimed member of the group, with the most artisti- cally diverse body of work. Savchenko’s projects embody the major aspects of vicarious photography in the most comprehensive way. In his work, fragments do not coalesce into a linear story: Vestimentary objects replace disappearing subjectivity; the textural qualities of historical records dominate their narratives, and traces of the process of historical recording overshadow its semantic outcome. Perfect examples of reported speech, Savchenko’s works, however, are not duplicative; rather, he is a reporter and an actor at the same time. Avoiding frontal confrontations with visual records, he appropriates them in a somewhat slanted way, situating himself in the field of action indirectly but prominently. He amalgamates photography and graphic art, producing images that are simultaneously austere and uncanny. Like many of his colleagues, Savchenko creates series and sequences. However, the open structure of his sets often makes their “serial” quality rather questionable, and Savchenko prefers to call them “cycles,” emphasizing the returning (rather than linear) character of his engagement with each group of images. As is often the case with vicarious photography, Savchenko’s cycles offer no individualizing information about the portrayed subjects. Anonymity is the default choice, and history is approached mostly as an assemblage of decontextualized historical types, outlines, or imprints. Torn out of their temporal and historical settings, these secondhand photographic records are reclassified by the artist under whimsical rubrics: Alphabet of Gestures; Shadows; Faceless; Mysteria; About Love; About Happiness, etc. Externally imposed narrative axes reorganize newly recorded historical traces, suggesting a highly curated picture of the past. “Counter-documentary” in their nature, these visual records, as Olga Kopenkina, an art critic from Minsk, put it, “no longer belong to anyone, or, on the contrary, they belong to everybody who could remember.”64

63. Koch, “The Richter-Scale of Blur,” p. 40. 64. Olga Kopenkina, “The Picture Behind Him,” in Igor Savchenko: The Picture Behind Him (Rotterdam: Stichting Noname, 2001), p. 12.

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Chronologically, Savchenko’s source photographs can be dated from the 1930s to the ’60s. Some came from his family archives; many were found in flea markets and antiques stores. Yet, apart from a few rare exceptions, his photographic cycles do not date the “originals.” Instead, they offer the artist’s signature and the year of the image’s second “birth.” The time of origin, in other words, is re-coded as the time of the original’s creative appropriation. In an interview in 2014, I asked him about the “found” quality of his visual art and the temporal limits of his sources. The answer was unexpected: As a photographer, he explained, he could never succeed in “capturing what would really interest [him].” His own photography “was missing something fundamental.… Something was not quite present in it.” So he kept looking for “something that would appeal to [him]; for something that could make [him] feel it.” In the old photographs, he continued, “there are faces, relations, and some kind of connection between people that really touch me. I am not sure you could see that around anymore.” He rejected my suggestion that his retrospective orientation might be a nostalgic longing for a time he never experienced (or for the youth of his parents). Instead, he claimed that found photographs were appealing because “they were static, … they were from a different time, from the epoch that had been completed.” Yet, he clarified, photographs should come from a period “which is not too remote”; otherwise they would be “way too alien, totally alien (chuzhoi).” Neither should they be too impacted by contemporary concerns, he specified: When they are too close to your own life, “they lose their aura.” There are several important points that I want to emphasize here. Savchenko’s idea about the expressive power of ready-made objects is not surpris- ing, but it is crucial: Reported speech and borrowed conventions, as I have suggested throughout this essay, create a context for engagement and provide materials to work with. Interpellating the subject, photo-objects of the past “appeal” and “make” one feel “something fundamental.” Just as important is the temporality of this hailing. To retain its evocative effect of presence, the past—“completed” in time and preserved in photo-objects—must be not-quite accessible, mediating its presence indirectly through aura. Savchenko’s explanations express the core aspect of vicarious photography: Its indirect quality affords both an affective experience of a sense of connected- ness and, simultaneously, a safe distance from which this ready-made past can be subjected to various manipulations. His model of approaching the past—a combination of identification and distancing, obfuscation and exposure—points to the same oblique and externalized authorial presence that is so common for the work of other photographers of the Minsk School. What distinguishes Savchenko’s cycles is the extent of his transformative interventions into the structure of found materials. Perhaps like no one else among his peers, Savchenko developed an elabo- rate vocabulary of techniques that modified and recomposed available visual narratives. In addition to such usual dermoplastic gestures as blurring, overpainting, and

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scratch ing, he would also submit found originals to various forms of optic (pre-digital) manipula- tion. For instance, his Alphabets of Gestures (1989–94) were created through a sequence of re- photographing sessions, during which a found photograph would be enlarged and cropped multiple times so that a minor detail from the original could reemerge as a new focal center of the frame. Historical records were subjected to a rigorous inspection. All images in the cycle presented a fragment of an individual or a collective portrait, but instead of focusing on the subjects’ faces, Savchenko zoomed in on their hands or legs. Enlarged and cropped, the final frames depicted acts of complex gestural communication, reimagining the past as an intensely haptic experience of anonymous somatic configurations. Turning peripheral elements of the portrait into the centers of attention, the cycle documented the nuanced chore- ography of extremities that is often overshadowed by more Both images: Igor Savchenko. noticeable facial expressions. Alphabet of Gestures-1. 1989. When seen together, Alphabet’s gestures offer a strange spectacle of the body, familiar and alienating at the same time. The photographic fragments clearly came from static public portraits. However, in their de-faced and magnified incarnations, these hieroglyphs of limbs suddenly disclose the fetishistic nature of attempts to approach the historical detail too closely, converting the alphabet of gestures into the voyeur’s archive. Savchenko’s Shadows (Teni, 1989–93) offered a more complex syntax of working with borrowed visual formations. The cycle included toned photographs in

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which individuals or groups were placed within empty, grainy environments. Figures were “lifted” from different sources and then recombined and “laminated” as a single frame through multiple exposures. In some cases, Savchenko punctuat- ed the photographic space with flat, dark figures borrowed from other photographs to create a rhythmic sequence of almost identical silhouettes. In others, the frame was occupied only by a single individual. In yet others, he assembled black humanlike cutouts in a linear sequence that echoed the row of trees in the background, leaving the center of the frame unpopulated. As with many other cycles, Shadows provided no hint about the original sources from which Savchenko borrowed the figures to populate individual frames. All traces of the figures’ possible pictorial kinship have been meticu- lously suppressed. The images in the cycle do not reveal their genealogy, nor do they coalesce into a new version of the systemic portrait. History, Savchenko seems to be saying, is not about origin. Here appropriation is a process of alteration. Yet it is crucial that these vicarious techniques do not retrofit representational remains of the past with contemporary content, as was common, for instance, for many photographic projects in Russia in the 1990s.65 The postcolonial reappropriation of historical frames in vicarious photography is not synonymous with the appropriation of history. Control over the process of representation is assumed through the control over the process of photographic re- inscription: The remedy is discovered in the method of re-vision and recomposition. Breaking the analogous relationship between images and their subjects, this form of appropriation undermines the basic assumption about photographs’ ability to “convey evidence that can lead back to the body that created the imprint.”66 A photographic version of Plato’s cave, Shadows envisions the past as a collection of corporeal imprints whose prove- Both images: Savchenko. nance and identities are unknown. Shadows. 1990–1994.

65. See my essay “ ‘We’re Nostalgic but We’re Not Crazy’: Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” The Russian Review 66, no. 3 (2007), pp. 451–82. 66. Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), p. 68.

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Savchenko. Shadows. 1990–1994. Shadows of history indeed, these anonymous bodies turn the past into a landscape of ghostly somatic outlines, into a space colonized by recognizably human con- tours but unrecognizable individuals. Again, figuration here is purposefully not self-explanatory. As if giving up all pretenses of referential representation, in Shadows Savchenko activates photographic records of the past to demonstrate their ultimate failure to go beyond a simple reminder that the past has been there, as Barthes famously remarked.67 Six cycles of Savchenko’s Mysteries straddle the flattening distance of Shadows and the fetishistic obsession of Alphabets. In addition to cropping and refocusing, in this series Savchenko also overpainted found photographs. His Mysteria-1 (from the late 1980s) contains a set of portraits with epidermic interventions pointedly emphasized by the color red: Dots and lines of various thickness and intensity cover the background and people’s figures. Savchenko told me in an interview that in most cases he used paint only to highlight already existing cracks and scratches. As he put it, “For me, these defects of the originals were . . . traces of time, traces of those elemental forces of the period. There was something powerful going on back then. Hence the red color as the most appropriate in my view.” Some images are also accompanied by a handwritten caption at the bottom of the margin. The result is an intricate palimpsest of layers of appropriation: a cropped image of an acquired photograph that has been rephotographed, painted over, narrativized, dated, and signed. Through this layering Savchenko establishes a noncommittal relation with the past, which is manifestly distanced while being imprinted with graphic marks of adoption. The adoption is more formal than sub-

67. Barthes, Camera Lucida, p. 76.

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stantive, and the allegedly clarifying “caption”—“ . . . yes, of course; but it doesn’t mean that the Last Judgement doesn’t exist”—does little to clarify the nature of the artist’s intervention. But like the red paint, it does chronicle the act of intervention. If the photo’s origin as a found object effaced the authorial self, then multiple tactical occupations of the photographic space reinstated the authorial presence, albeit in a non-transparent and obfuscating way. It is useful to contrast Savchenko’s work (and his explanation) with another painting by Richter, one somewhat simi- Savchenko. “ . . . yes, of course; but it lar from the point of view of its technical doesn’t mean that the Last characteristics. Richter’s Party (1963) is a Judgement doesn’t exist.” 1990–93. painted reproduction of a photograph from the Neue Illustrierte, in which four glamorous women and a man drink punch, smiling at the camera. While recreating the photograph, Richter substantially “cor- rected” the original. In the painting, people are covered with bloody scars. The scars are not merely illusionistic; they are physical cuts in the canvas, which have been stapled, stitched up, and painted over with bright red. Analyzing the painting, Eckhard J. Gillen reads the slashes and bloody additions as an example of cap- italist realism, as materialized signs of Richter’s critical distancing from the content that he (re)created.68 Savchenko’s painterly incursions do not seem to have any obvious critical message. His overpainting refocalizes the image not by offering a counter-narrative but by amplifying “the faktura of the time.” Enhancing his authorial presence, he retraces the “elemental forces of the period” that have influenced the photo-object’s life and brings them to the fore. What Richter’s work helps to illuminate, then, is the different status of borrowed formations in the Minsk School’s projects: The goal of vicarious appropriation is not to antagonize found objects pictorially (with blood) or physically (with cuts) but to use them as mani- festations of substitutive presence. This attitude comes through especially vividly in Savchenko’s Faceless (1989– 91). The cycle includes mini-series and single portraits in which faces of many individuals have been completely hollowed out by being painted over. In Faceless, prosopopeia’s directionality is completely reversed: De-facement is utilized as a

68. Eckhard J. Gillen, “Painter Without Qualities: Gerhard Richter’s Path from Socialist Society to Western Art System, 1956–1966,” in Gerhard Richter: Early Work, pp. 72–73.

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device for establishing and forefronting the unknown retrospectively. Several mini- series chronicle a gradual erasure of facial features from one frame to another. Adding some visual dynamism, Savchenko marks sites of “de-facing” with a red line, as if authenticating the deletion. While there is nothing particularly sinister about the overall compositions or photographic content of these series, the traces of disappearance do produce a disturbing effect. The facial erasures are not total—hair, for instance, remains—and these sites of a surgically executed non-presence look like entry points into another dimension beyond the picture. When several works from the cycle were exhibited in 1994 at the Gallery of Contemporary Art at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, as part of a larger show, Monuments and Memory: Reflection on the Former Soviet Union, Savchenko’s work was presented in the show’s catalogue as a reminder about those who were made to disappear from history as well as about “the necessity to remove from archives, including works of art, any reference that would substantiate the prior existence of those made ‘persona non grata.’”69 Fifteen years later, during our conversation in Minsk, Savchenko completely dismissed this interpretation. Like many of

69. Joseph Walker, “Monuments and Memory: Reflections on the Former Soviet Union,” in Monuments and Memory: Reflections on the Former Soviet Union, ed. Theodore C. Burtt (Fair field: Sacred Heart Uni versity, 1994), p. 16.

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his colleagues from the Minsk School, he privileged the indexical at the expence of the biographical, claiming that the political reading of his cycle had “nothing in common” with his own intention. “These people are faceless because these are human models,” he insisted. “They present different models of people in different life situations. Therefore, there are no faces. Just mother as such. Or child as such. They are types. . . . [The cycle is] about a universal human being [che- lovek voobshche].” I had no reason not to believe him. After all, when, in the late 1920s and early ’30s, Malevich was forced to abandon his cubes and cir- cles, he switched to producing Peasants, Girls, and The People of the Future, whose personalities were similarly hollowed out. Faceless and de- individualized, they were also sup- posed to represent universal human types and social categories: shells to inhabit; models to emulate; outfits to try on. Unlike Malevich’s general- ized People of the Future, Savchenko’s “universal beings” of the past were not imagined; they were distilled and abstracted from historical records. However decontextualized and anonymized his “universal beings” were, they offered templates of an inhabitable past by pointing to experiences, situations, and rela- All images this page: tions that had been there. In his cycles, Savchenko. Faceless. 1990. Savchenko accumulated a collection of modalities that made the ready-

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made history accessible to changes and interventions. Through operations of frag- mentation and recomposition, he refocused historical records. He also reactivated the available past by de-facing its subjects and retracing its elemental forces. His art of tactical occupation did not produce an alternative version of history, but it did something more important. It unlocked “the substantialized ‘tower of the past’ ” and envisioned Soviet history as a space of new (visual) possibilities.70 Of course, there is a certain danger in replacing photography as a tool of documentary recording with photography as a speculative practice that relies on historical forms for building a foundation for hypothetical visions of the past. There is the clear threat of what T. J. Demos described as “the near complete disconnection of photography from social reality. Lived experience now appears merely as a secondary effect of the photograph’s own creative fabrication.”71

70. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), p. 201. 71. T. J. Demos, “Recognizing the Unrecognized: The Photographs of Ahlam Shibli,” in Photography Between Poetry, p. 125.

Kazimir Malevich. Budetliane (The People of the Future). 1933.

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Throughout this essay, I have tried to show that such disconnection does not have to take the shape of a flight from reality. As the visual archive of the Minsk School demonstrates, this distancing could also provide a necessary open- ing for generating forms of critical engagement with available photo-objects left behind by the vanished empire. Appropriating conventions of the portrait genre, these visual artists employed the visual language of the Soviet period to disassociate themselves from Soviet practices of photographic recording. By erasing subjectivity and abstracting imprints of lived experience, their vicarious photography articulated a model of dealing with history that allowed presence without identity or identification.

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