New Brunswick — "BEYOND MEMORY: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo Related Works of Art" at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum here samples the extensive photo-based experiments of Russian artists from around 1953, when Stalin died, to the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Organized by Diane Neumaier, a photography professor at Rutgers, it draws on works from the museum’s expansive collection.
For most viewers, I guess, Russian dissident or nonconformist photography is a kind of undiscovered country. This exhibition offers a crash course, although it is the kind of course that requires studious attention; it took me two hours to make my way through the more than 500 exhibits crammed into two barnlike spaces on the lower level of the museum. But it’s well worth the effort, for not only is much of this work little known outside the Russian contemporary art community, it’s also aging splendidly.
The exhibition is divided into eight thematic sections, beginning with official Soviet photography. This section serves as a kind of control, illustrating the mostly documentary and propaganda uses to which photography was put (and to some extent restricted) across the country throughout the Soviet era. Here you will find images publicizing the state’s industrial achievements, celebrating the idealized proletariat, and singing the virtues of Stalin. Mostly, these images are faintly ridiculous.
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The next few sections present imagery of everyday life, landscapes, cityscapes and some still lifes. Although Socialist Realism remains the dominant style, these sections reveal a broadening of subject matter. They also suggest a familiarization with Western photographers and photographic techniques, in particular the work of the French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. But, more important, you can detect in these rooms the first stirring of Russian experimental photography.
Oleg Burbovsky's "Roofs" (1971) and Aleksandr Slyusarev's "Interior" series (1977/79/80) are two early, worthy examples of this experimentation. Both are what art and photography theorists would call Formalist photographs: that is, they place greater emphasis on the form (the shape, size, composition, scale, structure, color, focus and perspective) rather than content of the image. To paraphrase a wall text: now what was important was not so much what a photograph said, but how it looked.
Boris Mikhailov was another early nonconformist photographer. He was also one of the group's great innovators, being among the first to shoot in color film and probably the first to experiment with the random layering of negatives on photographic paper to create subversive visual juxtapositions. His series "Red" (1960-1970's), for instance, is one of the era's great experimental masterpieces.
Here the exhibition shifts into another area of the museum, reopening with a display of Moscow-based Conceptualism. Most of these photographs are documents of performances (Rimma Gerlovina, Sergei Borisov) or Conceptual artworks (Ivan Chuikov), or a mix of both (Yuri Leiderman, Vadim Zakharov and Nikita Alekseev). Artists were also beginning to make photo-based installations, such as Rimma Gerlovina and Valery Gerlovin's "The Interchangeable Graphic of Happiness (The Wedding of Lyubov and Victor Novatsky)" (1978).
Nearby is a selection of artist portraits. These are fascinating, showing how and where the artists lived, what their studios were like, and who their friends were. Probably the most important images here, at least from the perspective of art history, are the ones documenting early, secret and highly illegal nonconformist art exhibitions in people's apartments. These photographs document the first flowering of nonconformist art during the Soviet era.
The final section of the exhibition presents a rambling selection of photo-based works ranging from collages to paintings inspired by photographs. The most striking inclusion is a wall of Gennady Gushchin's witty photo-collages from his "Alternative Museum" series. The humor and eccentricity of the images make for great fun, like one of Gorbachev with Mona Lisa eyes, nose and mouth. It's a real lark.
By this point, so much has changed in Russian photography (from those early, adoring portraits of the great leader to Gushchin's mocking satire) that it is tempting to go back and view the exhibition all over again. I did, and in the process noticed how much it also conveys the extraordinary changes in Russian society during the period under review. More than just a user-friendly introduction to Russian nonconformist photography, this exhibition makes for a fascinating study in social history.
"Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography and Photo-Related Works of Art" is at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, through Nov. 28. For more information: (732)932 7237 or www.zimmerlimuseum.rutgers.edu.