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A glimpse of Soviet dissident culture and everyday life via photography exhibit at the Zimmerli
Archived article from Nov 15, 2004
By Amy Vames
In curating an exhibit of Soviet photography now on display at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Diane Neumaier wanted the show’s title to convey how photography is a part of everyone’s “memory system.” So after coming up with several of what she says were “really bad titles” for the show, she settled on “Beyond Memory.”
“Many of us remember things that we don’t actually remember,” Neumaier notes. “What we remember are the photos. I wanted to link the idea of memory, how we look at the past” and photography’s role in extending memory.
The exhibit, subtitled “Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art,” runs through Nov. 28 and includes 400 works from the Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Neumaier, who teaches photography at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, says her goal in preparing the exhibit was to highlight the vast range of photographic expression in the formerly communist country.
The exhibit begins with “official” photos from the 1920s and 1930s that the Soviet government used to record and promote the industrial achievements of the state and to celebrate the worker and everyday life. Images of happy children and families enjoying the benefits of a communist system lead into more objective, less utopian, but still goal-oriented photos of the 1940s and ’50s, such as those of factory workers and athletes. Neumaier’s goal in including those photos in the exhibit was to give viewers an idea of what the Soviet government considered acceptable photography. The next section, “Everyday Life,” examines how unofficial photographers saw their surroundings. “Some saw them as loving and joyful, some saw them a little more critically, some took great risks and photographed illegally, in hospitals or military installations,” Neumaier says.
Other sections of the show focus on Soviet conceptualism, nudes (which the government banned), landscapes and urbanscapes, and portraits of artists themselves. Also included are works of photorealism – paintings done in such exacting detail they almost look like photos – camera-manipulated photos and documentation of performance art. And, as you might expect from a society that repressed its artists for 75 years, the Soviet government and its leaders are the bull’s-eyes of many works.
The idea for the exhibit began seven years ago when Norton Dodge told Neumaier that he wanted the Zimmerli to mount a photography show that would draw from his collection of Soviet art, which includes more than 20,000 paintings, drawings and other media. He wanted an exhibit that would reveal not only Soviet photographers’ depth and range but also their creativity and resourcefulness in less-than-ideal conditions. “He felt that we should include everything from snapshots the artists made to record their personal lives to works that used the camera in a conceptual way to document artwork,” Neumaier says. “Norton thought I would be the person to go through the collection and fall in love with it, and he was right. I did fall in love with it.”
So Neumaier began the task of going through boxes and boxes of mostly unframed photos sorted alphabetically by artist. She also began collaborating with art historians and Soviet photographers themselves to create a catalog for the exhibit and with Alla Rosenfeld, curator of Russian and Soviet nonconformist art at the Zimmerli. “Without her, the show would not have been possible,” Neumaier says. “Although photography is not her specialty, she has a great instinct.”
Neumaier says she tried to make the show accessible to museum visitors unfamiliar with Soviet photography. Photography tends to have wide appeal and is “a vernacular medium, for us and the Soviets and for most of the planet,” since nearly everyone has used a camera at some point, she adds. Many of the works are fascinating simply because they offer a glimpse of what Soviet life was like. There are shots of one photographer’s daughter as she grew up, others of a typical Soviet apartment, still others of ballerinas or of Russians going about their daily lives.
Many works convey caustic and witty commentaries on the repressive Soviet regime. A photo collage titled “Restoration of the Taj Mahal Mausoleum” by Gennady Goushchin shows two cheerful women building a wall to surround — and ostensibly improve upon — the glorious Indian monument. An entire section of the show features works that subtly or overtly destroy the reverence that Soviet society had for certain images. For example, an untitled photorealist work by Vagrich Bakhchanyan grotesquely distorts Lenin’s face. “The Soviets had a great sense of irony,” Neumaier points out. “Irony was a sneaky way of saying what was otherwise forbidden.”
Neumaier has traveled often to what was formerly the Soviet Union and counts among her friends many of the artists represented in the show. She says that with the collapse of the communist system, artists there are faced with new challenges. Good materials for their art are now available but they often are unaffordable. And while they are free to create art in any way they wish without censorship, selling those works in a capitalist market is not always easy. As a result, “some artists have turned the focus of their opposition to the consumer market instead of the Soviet regime,” she says. “They’ve gone from Lenin being the enemy to Coca-Cola being the enemy.”
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