While the hostility of the Cold War yields to the flow of time, its implication lives on in memories, narratives and visual language. Nearly 50 years of tension, isolation and mistrust between Russia and America has resulted in historical conflicts, political dramas and individual tragedies.
Falling Forward – Yulia Tikhonova
While the hostility of the Cold War yields to the flow of time, its implication lives on in memories, narratives and visual language. Nearly 50 years of tension, isolation and mistrust between Russia and America has resulted in historical conflicts, political dramas and individual tragedies. The affect of the psychological destruction, which occurred and swept through countries and continents, bears a commonality in all cases.
The poet Barrett Watten stresses the nomadic character of war by saying that "the war, too, becomes a floating signifier, not attached to any specific war, but somehow including all the permutations of war, the Second World War, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf war, Cold War." He continues by saying that "the Cold War… lingers over all the wars." At a time when notions of the Soviet and the American other are no longer valid, they have been substituted with endless constructs of other presumed threatening forces, which resulted in the conflicts of the Gulf Wars, Chechnya, Albania, Kosovo, Congo, Guinea-Bissau, 9/11 and the hunt for Al Qaeda. These conflicts are evidence of the fact that one power is used to fight others, generating a new threat out of what it seeks to destroy. Consistently, as every conflict perpetually induces another tension, a war phenomenon may be only temporarily evaded.
The visual language and themes of the Cold War are reflected in a group exhibition "Fallout: Cold War Culture," curated by Jay Corney at Mitchell-Innes and Nash Gallery, which comprises work by both established and emerging artists.
Interestingly, its title "Fallout" could be read literally as referencing a radioactive cloud but also could equally be thought of as describing Cold War reverberations in a pictorial context. The show addresses the dissonant nature of time and memory, while refocusing attention on surveillance, propaganda and fear, it is these attributes which are often implicated in contemporary politics.
Prominent in the show is a C-print by the twin British video artists and photographers, Jane and Louise Wilson. Their work Star City (Cosmonaut Suits Mir) has as the focus of its imagery the interior of a spacecraft in the cosmonaut training facility, situated just outside Moscow, which the artists visited in 1999. This visit resulted in a series of photographs that address the sophistication of science and its exploitation in the name of the space race. The past glory of Russian power in the cosmos and its pre-eminence is represented here by the empty suits of two cosmonauts, which symbolically embody something of the ultimate futility of another Soviet utopia.
Strangely, the surface of their helmets reflects the interior of their cabin, but excludes the artists, who, by the laws of perspective, should be visible. This fact further arouses conflicting thoughts about the possible manipulation of that image but also implies the presence of disguised surveillance cameras. Surprisingly, these surveillance methods and tools from that era are still in practice in a contemporary context and have been developed to a high level of electronic sophistication. This proved itself when Rodney King was beaten by police officers and the documentary footage of this event helped to spark the L.A. riots. It was an endorsement of alternative memory and a capability of technology to fix memory forever as opposed to finite of human memory.
This photograph is complimented by the sleek installation Skylab, by another British artist Adam McEwen, a participant in the current Whitney Biennial. His protracted vertical silkscreen on Mylar cannot escape being a kind of narcissistic trap comprising a glossy surface which reflects the silhouette of viewers, thereby including them in the scene. However, the ominous bomb outline printed on the upper end of the work implies the ever-present threat of annihilation, which endangers to overwhelm every one who enters the art work. The proximity of a UFO detector next to the silkscreen suggests another invasion, which is comparable to the threat Communists once were perceived to have through the propagation of propaganda.
The theme of scientific methods of destruction is also addressed by Martha Rosler, whose fragment from the larger installation titled Fascination with the (Game of the) Exploding (Historical) Hollow Leg, presents a collage of newspaper clippings concerned with the nuclear arms race. Rosler combines images of anti-war demonstrations and technical charts of nuclear weapons and its air carriers, supplementing these with anti-war cartoons. The artist has created a work that is highly charged with the spirit of history, powerful in its voice for peace and in opposition to political hypocrisy. Here, as in her other works Rosler investigates the political and social landscape, while literally mapping the whole spectrum contained in various texts which reference the media is contribution and its coverage of peaceful resistance.
The theme of surveillance, which is taken to an extreme in the political environment of eastern Germany, is explored by Thomas Ruff in his large-scale print Nacht 5. Here the artist uses the benefit of a phosphorescent screen, which adds a green cast to the image, very much in the same way as light-amplifying lenses are used in military devices to see at night. The night scene is one of a street in Dusseldorf, where Ruff lives at present.
This has the effect of presenting a spooky green light which is reminiscent of a kind of florescent light that was once used in public spaces in order to detect people who were gathering to share their alternative political views. The stillness of the scene and its focus on shabby buildings, which resembles a temporary lockup, alludes to the repellent and frightening bugging of that time. The Terrorismushysterie was a particularly German phenomena and the Stasi claimed to be the world’s most expansive operation devoted to mass covert surveillance. These intimidating tactics follow the East German attitudes at that time which resulted in a suppression of free thinking. In many ways, the artist uses a related methodology in presenting his photography as minimal communication, where silence is safer then an unspoken truth. The reverse to the past is revealed by Charity Scribner as a modern manifestation of nostalgia for the east, which involves a longing for the days before the unification, Ostalgie or nostalgia for the East.
This show arouses haunting memories, unearthed from ideological terror, memories that can now be communicated freely. The imprint of mistrust and fear is deep rooted and often left suppressed and is numbed by the exuberance and noise of contemporary culture. The trauma of the past invisibly presents and manifests itself through many nostalgic memories, which our society has not dealt with until now.
In the context of contemporary unrest, when history takes an unpredictable course and catastrophes became merely seasonal, the themes touched on in this show remain relevant and address the extreme uncertainty of our past and future.
