assemble, imagine, discuss

A story:

You are on your way to see an exhibition called Vision and Communism. You know nothing about the art but you heard something about it on the radio and it’s sunny and Saturday and the museum is free and not so far, so you decide to head over to see the show. As you drive, you muse a little about this title, about the claim it makes by throwing those two words together as if they had some natural affinity. Why “vision”? Why “communism”? You pull down the side street, park, and walk into the museum, passing through an enclosed courtyard garden and into the bright modern lobby. You heard it’s a show about Soviet posters. Half-remembered images fill your inner eye as you walk up the steps, through the doors, and ...

That is the moment of potential, when anything might still happen, just before expectations tumble into reality.

Or rather, that is one possible moment of potential, or a potential moment, in an exhibition called Vision and Communism. There are many other such possible moments and paths to this threshold of viewing, all contingent upon the nature of “you” and a multitude of other more or less unpredictable external factors. But you would enter the museum with some loose notions about what kinds of experience might await you within an exhibition dedicated to these two words. This exhibition is focused on that state of mind. It wants to make vivid what you were already thinking about “vision and communism” without knowing it.

The unfolding exhibition displays work by the Soviet artist Viktor Koretsky (1909—1998)—posters, maquettes, photographs. Perhaps the posters are not so different from the concert announcements and advertising flyers you passed as you drove to the museum, their repeated imagery wheat-pasted to walls and stapled to telephone poles and otherwise fairly seamlessly integrated into the urban landscape. But here the posters have been culled and called out—separated, framed, brightly lit within an otherwise dim gallery.

Rather than presenting these objects in a supposedly neutral or didactic manner—one version of this display style would involve large plain rooms with works evenly spaced and evenly lit, accompanied by extensive explanatory texts and historical contextual information—this exhibition does something else. Any directive elements within the design emphasize the experiential over the informational; they also attempt to account for the mental landscape of the “potential viewer” in the United States in 2011 (such a concept obviously entails a variety of questionable assumptions about the “average viewer,” but let’s leave those concerns aside for the moment). This proposed viewer— “you”—exists in a strange state of limbo when confronting the exhibition, because you probably possess ready psychic access to the material it displays; that is, without much guidance other than a few translations, you can make sense of these displayed objects—unlike, say, an encounter with Roman bronzes or Aztec stone carving, objects that would demand a great deal of forceful contextualization. In this sense Viktor Koretsky’s world is “our” world. You need no help to understand the basic outlines of what is happening here. The images that depict racial violence and Klansmen are surely graspable to “us,” to most American viewers. They make sense without anyone telling us anything more. Yet, at the same time, the specific critiques and proposals that propel Koretsky’s art are not simply unfamiliar; they exist outside the realm of serious contemplation in contemporary American life. That’s the heart of the matter. The situations and emotions that populate the exhibition feel as if they are intensely “ours,” while their accompanying indictments and solutions remain absolutely alien.

How to negotiate this paradoxical balance of alienation and familiarity? One approach would be to produce a spectatorial situation that would be akin to that of a nonbeliever entering a place of worship. Most of us have spent some time in spaces dedicated to religious convictions that we do not personally share, yet such situations often lead to powerful experiences—experiences that, nonetheless, do not alter one’s religious convictions (or lack thereof). Similarly, Vision and Communism wants to pull you into direct engagement with the empathetic ferment and visceral urgency of this art, but not in order to “convert” you to the faith.

The exhibition also resonates with Koretsky’s statement that “the poster always works on the leading edge, in the thick of events, and precisely for this reason its representational form must be developed and kept new.”¹ The exhibition thus includes constituent parts that extend beyond visual art. Music, along with wall-mounted song titles and lyrics, occupies the exhibition’s center. Texts provide information about the recorded music—all from South Africa. Further texts note that films by Chris Marker (1921-) and Aleksandr Medvedkin (1900-1989) form another part of the exhibition. Additional material provides facts about Koretsky and his art. All of this is contained within a small space that is central but set off from the rest of the exhibition. Such experiential density and the sheer amount of material test your interpretive capacities. The exhibition wonders what an “adequate interpretive context” for this kind of cultural experience would be.

This space calls attention not only to the media that comprise the exhibition—visual art, music, film—but also, implicitly, to the modes of spectatorship that each medium demands. Film has generally been experienced collectively; screenings gather disparate viewers together as an evanescent whole. Workers’ and protesters’ songs have been produced and consumed by generations of engaged groups. And the “visual art” shown here was meant to circulate in public spaces as disposable communication. All presume that the receiver will be part of a collective “we,” rather than simply an individual “you.”

This possibility for collective response is crucial. Performance historian Lynne Conner has described the ancient Greek practice of having poets appear before the audience in advance of a play to offer background information: the poets “accepted that the play was one part of a larger learning operation in which the audience’s collective and individual reception would invariably shape the ascribed meaning. For the Athenian community, the tragedy was never an end in itself—and certainly not for its own sake—but the point of departure for the exchange of ideas, opinions, and passions that are the fundamental criteria of useful civic conversation.”² While Vision and Communism exactly contradicts this model by asking viewers to engage Koretsky’s art without any such preamble, it nonetheless takes seriously this call for cultural experience to be a point of departure for the exchange of ideas, opinions, and passions, an exchange that will ideally extend the civic conversation collectively, over time, outside, among us.