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| Artists are clever people but photographers less so Jegors Jerohomovičs, Art Journalist A conversation with Boris Mikhailov | |
| Everything that there is to love or hate about Boris Mikhailov was on show this year at the retrospective exhibition Time Is Out Of Joint (24.02.–28.05.2012.) at the Berlinische Galerie museum of contemporary art, photography and architecture. The exhibition included works from 1966 to 2011. Currently the 73-year-old Mikhailov is the world’s best known photographer to have emerged from the former USSR. Since the late 1980s, his works have been displayed in the Nordic countries, the USA and Western Europe, and have been included in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern and other prestigious venues. Mikhailov became famous thanks to several series of photographs depicting the consequences of the collapse of the USSR, in the form of urban and human disintegration in his native city of Kharkov, Ukraine. He photographed the bomzhi (homeless people without any social support, living in the streets), and other “declassed elements” naked, revealing their physical and spiritual scars. Mikhailovich has won just about every photography award going, both in Europe and Russia. The Berlin exhibition allowed an examination of his work in a much broader context and revealed how adroitly the classicist Mikhailov has dismantled the boundaries between amateur, experimental, social and conceptual photography and turned it into a fully legitimate contemporary art fact. Berlin loves and respects Mikhailov, and he has called the German capital home since 2000. Together with wife Vita he divides his time between Berlin and Kharkov. Our conversation took place the day after the opening of the retrospective. Initially Mikhailov claimed he didn’t want to talk because he was tired, but in the end he invited me to his apartment in West Berlin. “Thank you for the conversation and for being so insistent,” he wrote after the interview in my copy of the Time Is Out Of Joint catalogue. | |
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| Jegors Jerohomovičs: In putting together this retrospective in Berlin, what aspects and accents did you want to highlight? Boris Mikhailov: An exhibition doesn’t always develop in the way you have imagined and would like to see, but rather how in reality it comes together. There are various restrictive factors. On the one hand, you have to show your main works, but on the other hand you can’t have ones which have been recently displayed. I had to both show something new and to refresh the viewers’ memories about works they may already know. J.J.: You mentioned the “main works”. As time goes by, do you yourself regard the works differently? B.M.: There are things the world has accepted and which have made you, let’s say, famous. For example, the bomzhi. They tend to be regarded as the “maximum”, the world has judged them to be something of worth. All else may remain unnoticed. I have to hear things like: “We only know about you only because of the bomzhi. We don’t know anything else about your work.” The Berlin exhibition could overturn this point of view, because the bomzhi emerged from everything that I did before, and that means a great deal more to me. J.J.: You even live with one of the works from your bomzhi series – it’s here on your living room wall. B.M.: Yes, that’s normal, it doesn’t bother me. J.J.: What emotions did this series provoke in you at the time you were creating it, and later, when it made you famous? B.M.: I only know that these pictures still work. They have an impact. There are things that no longer work and become dated, and are no longer interesting to look at. This photograph on the wall still has an impact. It doesn’t get on my nerves. Even in this series there are works that haven’t stood the test of time. As I say – they “don’t stand in time”. My task was to create pictures that would stand the test of time and work in the future. On the whole I think I succeeded. Just like this exhibition has succeeded. J.J.: Yes, in the exhibition the bomzhi look you straight in the eye. B.M.: In this room, too, they look at you. J.J.: How did you manage to gain their trust? B.M.: To gain someone’s trust... I don’t really like this phrase, because it sounds as if you initially want to gain their trust so that you can cheat them later. Vita Mikhailova: If you treat them like people, mutual trust develops quickly. B.M.: Vita, sit down. I want you to ask my wife also a few questions afterwards. J.J.: Is your wife your co-author? B.M.: Yes, you could say that. She did indeed work with me. We visited the homeless together. Vita covered and protected me. She also took a few pictures. She was part of the process. J.J.: What do you mean she covered you? Did you feel safer with her? B.M.: Yes, of course. For example, I would go down into a cellar with these people, and she would be waiting for me outside. If anything happened, she would be able to call for help. It wasn’t the militia I needed to bring along, they would have arrested me. No safety from them. So I couldn’t have done it all without Vita. J.J.: Why don’t you sign your works with both names, like Iļya and Emilia Kabakov? B.M.: Perhaps the pictures should be signed with both names, but there is an artistic tradition that the artist remains... It’s like the artist loses face: earlier he was Ilya Kabakov but later became Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. What’s going on? Who was Kabakov before the formation of this duet? V.M.: I’m not an artist, after all. Just because you live with an artist and help him out doesn’t mean you are an artist too. But you do live in this artistic world, in its thoughts and reflections. J.J.: The exhibition includes many works in which Vita can be seen. Are you Boris’s muse? V.M.: I very much don’t like the word “muse.” I think of a muse as being some sort of dull creature without a brain. B.M.: In fact, she has become an artist. Part of the creative process is on my wife’s shoulders. Without her I wouldn’t be an artist. V.M.: I have learned to see and to perceive, I have learned to sense. I’ve learned many things. But when I go out into the street, I always forget my camera. When I see something on the street, I always have to ask Boris: do you have my camera? I always forget about it. It’s not my priority. Like Boris, I’m an engineer. As a young specialist I came to work at the factory where the famous Kharkov photographer was already at work. B.M.: At that time I wasn’t an engineer, but Vita was... You know what I think about our conversation – you also are heading down the bomzhi road, and I don’t like it. J.J.: I’m not going down that path. B.M.: You were at the exhibition, but you asked about the bomzhi. It’s getting to be a conversation about the bomzhi. What did you personally like there – the bomzhi again?! J.J.: There was a lot that I liked, but as I’m sitting in your living room, the homeless people are staring at me. I see photographs from this series, not other ones. V.M.: Yes, first of all, they are the homeless people. Secondly, I view this as a distinctly Russian, even Soviet work. It isn’t easy for me to find a work of art that I can live with. I would never put a painting by Shishkin or Aivazovsky on the wall. I’d be ashamed. But in this work there is everything I hold dear. This image links up with my understanding of my culture and my homeland, and enhances it. J.J.: I didn’t want to ask very much at all about the bomzhi, because it seems like the subject has been vexing you for many years. B.M.: It doesn’t bother me, we can talk about it. Encoded in these works is the big question – why? I want to hear this specific question – why it is or it isn’t important. But what this question should be, concretely – I don’t know. J.J.: When you are working, do you ever ask yourself the question – why? B.M.: Sometimes I ask myself that question, but when I’m photographing I just want to capture a good picture. I look and I decide whether it is good or bad. Why these works are later exhibited somewhere, why the world accepts some or shuns others is no longer a question for me – it doesn’t apply to me anymore. It is impossible to repeat something good and successful in any case. You can’t swim in the same river twice. In any event it will turn out differently, even if you continue working in the same direction as before. I don’t like repetition, because I myself am already in a different situation and following another situation. I don’t want to return to an old situation and to restore it – I never do that. J.J.: At what stage did you realise you are no longer a photographer, but an artist? B.M.: It’s completely the other way around. I was an artist who then became a photographer. This exhibition proves it. You enter and the first thing you see is a composition of artistic works – a great deal of work by hand. This is the superimposition series I worked on from the 1970s to 1981. It was like a dialogue between artist and photographer – which is which. It all depends on priorities. Until 1981 I had artistic priorities. After that they became photographic, because it was more interesting for me to document Soviet life. At the time this seemed more important than investigating artistic space. The photographic space was more important to me than the artistic space. For me the entire artistic work process is explained by the method I used in the superimposition series. Something comes into the artist’s mind or he gets a whack on the head – that’s how an idea emerges, and he implements it. I work by using elementary combinations of images, and thousands of such combinations and layers create a single picture. You collect photographic elements in order to obtain a new work. Artists work in a similar way – they have at their disposal a number of elements which they can combine to create new works. I have understood that any work by an artist can be divided into at least two photographic elements. I could shoot an entire roll of film and get five masterpieces. Initially I thought that these layers of images reflect life, but as it turned out – it wasn’t entirely so. They had more art than the living truth. It was the question of truth that became particularly vital to me in the early 1980s. I wanted to move closer to reality, because art often pushes reality away. J.J.: The truth is ensured by photography, not art? B.M.: Yes, truth – there is more in pure photography. Art is not quite truth. It’s something else, because art requires a deeper, more precise analysis. That’s how I see it, but maybe other artists have other, more convincing explanations. Artists are clever people, after all, but photographers less so. Photographers and artists must react in different ways. An artist must understand, analyse and explain everything, while a photographer must react. That’s the primary element. The photographer seeks the primary element, while the artist must create something from these primary elements. J.J.: Currently are you a photographer? B.M.: Right now one has to be an artist again. There is an enormous volume of photographs accumulated in the world, and the artist must somehow “package” this mass, using his or her vision. An artist must be aware of what’s going on. He can present the results of his reflections as a finished artwork, and this will be one way out of the situation. Because all of the separate little works form thousands of multifarious diversities in which nothing is clear any more. J.J.: What do you do in these circumstances? B.M.: I don’t do anything. You just walk, and walk, and something eventually turns up. Something will appear. You’ll get a blow to the head with a brick and you’ll have a painting. No brick, no painting. J.J.: How do you force yourself to work? How does the creative impulse come upon you? B.M.: I wait for something. And always something has come along. I wait and look where I have previously found something that seemed important to me at a particular period and I tried to develop it. Sometimes it moved away from me or became something significant. J.J.: Do you look for it within yourself or in the world that surrounds you? B.M.: That’s the biggest difference, because an artist searches within himself. But for how long can you rootle about in yourself? You have to be either a schizophrenic or have such a rich imagination that you don’t need to look at what’s going on around you, because your fantasy just blows you away. I don’t know how deeply you can look within yourself – if you need to dissect yourself, or draw blood. How will you get something like that from yourself? So it happens that it doesn’t come only from yourself. You will, for instance, browse through books and find some element that helps you to merge two photos into one. The overall culture acts upon you, you learn this culture and that’s one way how you can work. The other way is that as a photographer, you not only master the overall culture and certain subjects that interest you, you also draw inspiration from life, you participate in life. Conversely, photography can help an artist to participate and immerse himself into life. They are two different levels. The first level is the photographer, who searches for something and photographs it. The second level is the artist, who gains inspiration from it, who scoops the cream from the photographer’s work and uses it as a reference point – to move further along this “creamy” path and hatch out something. Essentially, it’s the artist who decides how these photographs should be placed, what’s important and what isn’t. There are thousands of photographs, and the photographer is not always able to pick out the most important – in this queue he is in second place. First comes the artist, meanwhile the curator monitors the artist. The curator is overseen by the museum director. Everybody is so different, all systems so diverse, and within them things tend to change, just as values and hierarchies change. J.J.: Many of your photographs are based on a happening or performance, the essence of which often remains outside the frame. Your wife Vita, the photographer and artist Sergei Bratkov and other colleagues have all taken part in these events. How important are the things that remain out of the picture, things that the viewer or exhibition attendee will never know? Were you ever interested in other artistic genres, for example performance? B.M.: You can ask yourself: are you an artist or a photographer? A photographer or a creator of installations? Do you work with sculpture and photography at the same time? You do a lot, it’s like a decathlon. If sculpture pays three roubles and photography 50 kopeks, will you still do photography? Perhaps sculpture is more lucrative? But perhaps your work revolves around your inner necessity rather than money? The questions are all very different. Your question is also very pertinent, because as a photographer I have instruments that let me obtain the sort of photographic work I need. To take part in staged scenes is not an aim in itself, the aim is to get a picture, a photograph. It’s not even a performance, it’s more like posing in front of the camera. Performance is a totally different game and a different story. Our story is about getting photographs. J.J.: So the picture has always been important to you. B.M.: Exactly, the picture matters most to me. Everything that has to go into the frame is important. If it isn’t a clean, complete picture, then it’s important to show movement. Let’s say movement, transition from one picture to another and so on. Sometimes this movement between pictures and frames becomes an asset. Even if there are no people, cats or anything concrete in the picture, but the image is blurred, it can still be useful and interesting to me. J.J.: You yourself can be seen in many of your photographs. B.M.: Once this used to matter to me. It was connected with the image of the hero that relentlessly oppressed me, a myth that was promoted by television and other information media. You saw the Soviet hero on the TV: a young, strong man with a child on his shoulders. An engineer with burning eyes, driving forwards. Or a worker, just as powerful and purposeful. A good, beautiful blonde woman. A whole range of Soviet hero images. But I was an antihero, the antithesis. None of my gifts conformed to the stereotype of the Soviet era hero. So in my works I was able to depict the antithesis. J.J.: You look very artistic and ironic there. B.M.: In those pictures I have many forms. Irony helps, because to act out sorrow... Though that can also be acted. You can pretend to be mad. Various reasons – various moods and various qualities. J.J.: What’s happening with your image at the moment? B.M.: At the moment I’m not playing at being anything. Everyone has become like me. J.J.: Everyone has become an antihero? B.M.: No, because there are no more heroes left. If there isn’t a hero, then the antihero goes too. You can maintain the presence of some playing, and occasionally I do that, because it’s convenient for me. Not because I want to show myself off, but because it really is easier for me – I don’t have to find actors. V.M.: It’s easier to arrange everything with yourself. B.M.: Correct. One, two – tried and ready. For me, photography isn’t connected with some great process of preparation and organisation. Complicated organisation is more for cinematographers, or superstars of photography who know exactly what they need. They already have a painting in their head and they organize everything to make it happen. I am a yard dog, who jumps around and goes where he pleases, and for whom a quite elementary gesture is the most important. J.J.: Has Iļya Kabakov had an influence on your creativity? B.M.: I think he has. He has the same attitude as me, or vice versa. I have been influenced by his characteristic incorporation of thought into a painting, and this incorporation may be mechanical, in the form of captions. This element seemed very important to me and I took a liking to it and it stayed with me at some level. I don’t know how it affected my pictures, but the fact is that I also ended up incorporating text into photographs – even before I had seen Kabakov’s works, and not quite the same way he does it. I use text to reinforce the power of the photograph. In its essence, photography is connected with text. A photo is always enhanced by its caption: first love, first kiss, first snowfall. A photo always has commentary attached. Text and photography coexist together. It’s important to understand that the painting is part of the work that coexists with the text, they are not separate things. The artist has understood this. I introduce text into photography, and the result is not artistic space, but rather a story space with its own nuances. The story space may reveal some influence, but it is not derivative. J.J.: Do you keep in touch with Kabakov? B.M.: Yes, we have good relations. J.J.: Is it easy for you to establish rapport with colleagues? V.M.: If the artists speak the same language it is easy, you understand what they are talking about. For example, Erik Bulatov and I speak the same language. B.M.: I’d put it differently. Artists find it hard to accept the success of others. In our workshop there’s a quality that I wouldn’t call envy – though that’s common enough amongst artists – but rather professionalism, it’s a feeling of personal dissatisfaction. You can’t jump out of your skin and do something well, and here misunderstandings arise. I have always found it easier to deal with artists, because I play in the field of photography, not art. Everyone has their own turf. I’ve also had an easy time with photographers, because I was not quite an artist and not quite a photographer, and that meant that I had my own place and my own field. But clearly the sense of dissatisfaction upsets you, and you have to fight it. J.J.: What upsets you? B.M.: Other people’s achievements and successes. Not the achievement itself, but the fact that the person has done his job, while you, fool, just sit there. You are simply a fool for not being able to create a new work that is also powerful. This has a profound effect on your state of mind. J.J.: Does it often happen that you try something and it doesn’t work? B.M.: Of course, I often fail. You have to wait awhile, and something will turn up. V.M.: It was like that with the bomzhi, the homeless. You go out onto the street, you are overwhelmed by powerful emotions and you shake like a leaf. First frame – no pictures. Second frame – no pictures. Third frame – again nothing. Then suddenly it’s go, go, go. Then you look again – what the hell is going on? So you start all over again, a bit differently. You think something is missing. You know that if it’s a Russian image, it’s missing winter. OK, that’s all, I’ll be quiet now. B.M.: I can see how you’re being quiet. J.J.: Is the issue of price important to you? B.M.: Isn’t it important to everyone? V.M.: It’s the same as if, for example, you organise an exhibition and no one comes. The feeling is the same – the works haven’t been appreciated. B.M.: Of course it’s important, it defines your life and who you are. If you are that good, then why are you so poor? It’s hard to look to the future and hope that one day you will get recognition, some time later. I think it’s very rare that someone will look into the past, seeking artists worth celebrating. They are more likely to notice and promote those who have already made their entrance and have exhibited their works. So artists have to strive to show what they can do right now, rather than hoping someone will discover them later. J.J.: Would you like to hold a big retrospective in your native Ukraine? B.M.: Not any more. Not now. The situation in our homeland is such that people are waiting for something, but they don’t know what it is. They need to be amused, or surprised or presented with something serious. Otherwise they’ll say, why are you pulling our legs? It’s difficult right now. I can’t give them what they want. J.J.: Do you feel that you are more in demand in the West? B.M.: The exhibition opening in Berlin proved that people are increasingly more interested in things associated with real life. Here it is in great demand. Over there, in the East, the focus is on games, poking fun, a carnival aesthetic. Of course you have that here too, the carnival and the rest. But there is a more serious attitude here towards both the contemporary and the historic. My experience has shown that it doesn’t work there. There’s a different postulate about what is important. In both Moscow and Kiev other things take precedence, but they don’t know themselves what it is. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my feeling. J.J.: What matters most to you? B.M.: Life and how it is reflected. More life, rather than more of the game centred around art and postmodernism. More life. What is accepted here in the West is rejected over there. For example, the superimposition series that I call Butterbrot – “sandwiches”. Here “sandwiches” work very well – people watch and feel satisfied. I showed the same Butterbrot in Moscow, and there was not a single review or article about whether it was important, or good or bad. Who needs an exhibition which gets no reaction at all? Why should I stage anything more there? There was no discussion, nothing. Like tossing a stone into a pond and getting no ripples. Do I need that? Here everything is fine – here they think about what it is and why. People’s minds are switched on. This is a series without an equivalent, in the USSR or elsewhere. There they decided that there’s nothing to be seen, and no one even bothered to look. Not that absolutely nobody looked, but the attitude was dismissive. So I speak with a feeling of having been insulted. I am offended, because they didn’t show any desire in Moscow to look at these works. Then afterwards say: it’s shit! Give us an argument as to why you don’t consider it worthy of attention. There was no such discussion. Maybe other authors don’t need a reaction, but I certainly need one. J.J.: Do you feel financially secure? B.M.: I can’t complain. Everything has turned out normal for me. Everything is good. Yet I never have inner peace and comfort. This is some kind of social unease. So what troubles me? The fact that I sit like a fool, doing nothing. Why haven’t I done anything new? What do you think, you’ve made something about the Soviet Union and now you tell them all at school that everyone there was a red idiot or something? What are you yourself then? Are you looking at what is happening in life right now or not? Where are you looking anyway? These are questions which are important for everybody. Even those in the oil business. Although you can’t compare an artist with an oil trader. The artist always has to take stock, see whether he has created new work or not. That’s the main thing. J.J.: When you started creating a new photographic series, did you have a clear concept straight away? Or did you simply start shooting film and then enhance the work with an idea afterwards? B.M.: I have never had any concepts. Perhaps I express myself incorrectly. I have had impulses, when it was clear what I needed to shoot. There are moments when everything goes right and you just shoot, shoot, shoot. Afterwards you look at the material and you understand what can be done with it, and why you need it. You simply have to go on and keep working. You obtain material, you copy pictures, and something interesting gets added on. In the early stages my photography had a connection with the cinema – I didn’t make movies, but I created series of slides. I had to create a sequence of images, to find images that could be shown one after the other. These images lead into one another, so that the author’s statement has continuity. The author has to think about the whole, rather than individual pictures, because one image taken out of context may not say anything. The slide show was accompanied by music – songs by Pink Floyd, for example. I was hoping you’d ask me something about Riga. J.J.: Do you know any Latvian photographers? B.M.: I was never close to any Latvian photographers. I did meet Gunārs Binde a few times. V.M.: Binde photographed scandalously beautiful girls. B.M.: I often think of Jānis Kreicbergs, but for me Egons Spuris and Inta Ruka were the most important personalities. Latvia, however, for me is associated not so much with photography but with the fact that I worked for three months in a factory in Riga. “Nākošā – Ganību dambis!” [“Next stop – Ganību dambis” – Mikhailov makes a public transport announcement in good Latvian]. I will tell you a fairytale about how I got lice in Riga. We lived in a dormitory. I played basketball, and we had a great coach in Riga who was in the USSR national team. The only problem was that my body itched terribly. It itched and itched. I started worrying that I had become too nervy, and there was something wrong with me. I went to see a number of doctors, but they couldn’t tell me what the matter was. But then once I noticed my neighbour at the dormitory – hop, hop, hop! – catching lice. It turned out they were lice. After basketball, all was well because I had a hot shower and they disappeared. But back in the dorm the itching started again. I had a great time in Riga in the early 1960s. I wasn’t taking photographs yet, I was more into basketball. At that stage of my life Latvia became my main base. Latvia had the most beautiful women and the handsomest men, because it’s the place where East and West meet, and you get harmony. I don’t know if you will write about the lice, but it would be good if you did. It will immediately liven up the story. /Translator into English: Filips Birzulis/ | |
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