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One
of the artists who arrived from the former Soviet Union
in the course of the crumbling and collapse of that Empire
is Michael Iofin (b. 1959). He grew up in Leningrad when
the only acceptable form of visual and other self-expression
was still Soviet Socialist Realism. In art as in life,
to be and do other than what was prescribed had been to
risk at least comfort, at most life. The avant garde had
been underground since the Stalinist decrees of the early
1930s, hence a phrase used by Western art historians,
"two-world condition," referring to the necessity
of living in and producing images acceptable to official
Soviet policies in order to survive physically, while
producing images of a different sort in secret that, in
satisfying the artists own creative needs enabled
him/her to survive psychically. Some artists carried their
ideas and their paintbrushes and canvases to distant outposts
of the Soviet world, such as Uzbekistan, as we have noted.
Others merely hid their avant garde inclinations behind
the closed doors of studios into which only close and
trusted friends and family members might gain access.
Iofin came of age as this system was beginning to collapse
but when for many, leaving the realm of familiar discomfort
for a New World was still a desideratum. Moreover, for
Iofin and many like him, the condition of Soviet artistic
life was further complicated by the fact that he is a
Jew. A Jewish artist with avant garde inclinations experienced
a "three-world" condition, caught between the
official and unofficial, acceptable and unacceptable realms
of creativity and further pulled by the question of where
in either realm the Jewish part of ones identity
might fit. The matter there was and remains different
from that matter here: Jews in the Soviet Union and its
Russian offspring are considered a nationality like Georgians,
Lithuanians, Azerbaijanis, Uzbeks and others, not a religion
as they would be considered in America.
By paradox, Jews wanting to leave to go to Israel could
do so more easily than if they wished to go, say, to the
United States, since the Soviet regime regarded Israel
as the homeland of the Jews and therefore saw such emigration
as repatriation. But Soviet Jews might consider Israel
no more their home than any other particular place, perhaps
even less so given the decades of anti-Israel propaganda
to which they would have been subject by the time of the
1970s when the first burst of Jewish emigration began
and the more so by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s
when members of Michael Iofins generation were in
the process of leaving. One gains a strong sense of this
from Iofins "Return
to Jerusalem" (1992). Divided into three parts
so that it is functionally a triptych, the paintings
right and left sides offer cityscapes of Petersburg (former
Leningrad) and San Francisco, respectively. It is summertime
on the right, winter on the left; blue skies and green
trees on the right are balanced by gray skies and snow
on the left. The center scene is separated from the side
scenes by a pair of trees: a snowy, leafless tree to the
left near which a heavily-dressed middle-aged man huddles,
and a palm tree to the right against which a lightly-dressed
young man leans, eyes closed, dreaming.
The central cityscape is Jerusalemic, with domes and arches
and a church tower and a minaret; the whole bathed in
a pinkish-golden light, with the Judaean hills rising
in the background. In the foreground a series of
ures
huddle, one with his eyes open, the others in various
positions of the sort of discomfort one recalls from the
uneasily sleeping Roman guards in Piero della Francescas
"Resurrection of Christ" in Arezzo. There is
a bundle and a suitcase tied with rope among them; one
of them wears the striped garment and yellow star that
identifies him as a former resident of some Nazi concentration
camp. Above the group, near a rough wooden door lying
ajar sits a gigantic angel, in the pose of Rodins
"The Thinker." Jerusalem is the site to which
the Jewish exiles dream and if they are fortunate, return
a city dominated during the centuries of exile
by churches and mosques; that having been the center of
the Jewish homeland might rebecome or might not rebecome
that homeland. From distant Petersburg it may be dreamed
of, summer and winter, year in and year out, but is it
home when it is achieved can you go home again?
Is the earthbound Jerusalem, divided between religious
and political powers and ambitions and harboring refugees
from broken exilic homes with broken bodies and hearts,
capable of lifting them and itself up toward the idealized
vision of a heavenly Jerusalem over which God and Gods
angels preside?
The artist painted this work shortly after he had managed
to emigrate from Leningrad-become-Petersburg, not to Israel
but to the United States, following in the footsteps of
the millions of refugees and immigrants who preceded him
to these shores. From a 300-year-old city rent by canals
and a malfunctioning infrastructure he came not to a 3,000-year-old
city rent by politics and religion but to a much newer
one, by the endless sea, rent by the occasional earth
tremor and a complex art scene. Indeed one of the difficulties
for artists from the world that Iofin left behind who
come to the West is how to redefine themselves under conditions
where any sort of art is acceptable this is the
land of infinite choices and virtually untrammeled freedom
to choose but where one might be lost among the
endless array of artists recognized or not recognized
by the art world, and where one lacks the strong support
system that ones intimates back home had provided.
Put otherwise: what had been home with regard to that
support system was never home in the larger sense because
it was always a home at risk within the larger system;
coming to the United States meant coming to a place that
could take years or decades to feel like home.
This is the condition of any refugee from one place to
another; should the refugee be both thoughtful and Jewish,
it might occur to him that he is part of a condition that
has run through nearly two millennia of Jewish history.
Iofin is both, and his work in coming to America in part
reflects this. He dreams of Jerusalem as he still dreams
of Petersburg as he fantasizes about San Francisco. The
"Hagiography
of Communal Apartment Dwellers" (1994-98) charts
a journey at once personal and communal that, three to
seven years beyond immigration remembers, dreams and transforms
nightmarish memory into the sort of coloristic symphony
found in Chagalls "The Blue House". In
the middle of the painting there is a once-elegant apartment-building
hallway, its spectacularly-colored blue walls cracked
to reveal under-layer and brick, its bright yellow floor
tiles broken, its elegant dark brown double door closed.
This was the doorway into the well-appointed apartment
of someone socio-economically successful before the Revolution;
it was turned into a residence for an entire group of
families with the advent of the new Soviet regime. Near
the door sits an empty wine bottle; the floor mat harbors
a cigarette butt and an unopened envelope perhaps
a letter (perhaps a letter of invitation from someone
in the United States to come settle there).
The central image is ringed by fourteen smaller ones,
(appropriately, the number of the Stations of the Cross,
since life in such a communal apartment was painful and
required Christ-like patience), each and all surrounded
by trompe-loeil framing inscribed with Russian "titles"
in the Old Slavonic style and English-language translations.
The form resembles an altar piece, with a main subject
surrounded by small predella scenes. If the Icon, as we
have noted, is a window into the Other realm, it has been
replaced here by a closed door into a realm that superimposes
seventy Soviet years over centuries of Tsarist rule; of
upper-class elegance fragmented into working class pieces;
of a world still alive in its debilitation more than a
decade after the Soviet Union collapsed and the artist
left; of the cake of life sliced into fourteen portions
of varied palatability.
We recognize elements of Iofins life embedded within
the cycle of life before us; we recognize elements found
in his other paintings: the gigantic angel in trompe-loeil
stone that appears and reappears guarding or guiding
or both? in his little boy bedroom, alongside the
old neighbor he recalls who still engaged in the complex
lace-making that is part of the old Russian tradition.
The angel helps carry down the stairs of his apartment
building the sheet-draped body of a neighbor who has died.
The sublime and the spiritual cannot be disconnected from
the down-to-earth and the ugly. Near the scene of death
another neighbor finds the only place and moment of peace
and privacy: the communal toilet; as long as he manages
to sit there, he will be able to read the newspaper and
think about the world beyond these crumbling walls. For
a young man and woman with no place for privacy, "Bath
Day" provides the only time and place for sexual
intimacy. Across the way we see a wedding scene in which
the bride and groom in their Sunday best share the frame
with a neighbor in a sweat suit (the same sweat pants
as are on the man on the toilet) busy using the communal
apartment phone as the wedding party squeezes through
the door. The frame above this scene is more densely packed,
with all of the inhabitants sharing the communal kitchen
to cook what little food any of them might have. Elsewhere
below, the "Holiday Fireworks" are virtually
invisible.
The artists parents are at the top, at home in Leningrad
during the 1970s, on "New Years Eve."
A Christmas tree dominates the window, grim expressions
dominate their faces; a sparse supper and celebratory
bottle of champagne await the termination of the interminable,
predictable speech by a Communist Party functionary who
fills the small black and white television screen
ignored by both parents, as he cheers the accomplishments
of the regime in the past year. For the young artist the
only space and time for the creative enterprise is at
"Night on Earth" when, in their one-room portion
of the communal apartment his parents are asleep and the
building has become sufficiently silent to think and paint
providing nobody complains too loudly about the
smell of oil and turpentine seeping through the crumbling
walls and ill-fitting doors. The "Passover Meal,"
celebrating the journey of the Israelites from Egypt to
Freedom and the Land of Promise is as grim as "New
Years Eve," but its contemporary reality as
real for Soviet Jews as for Harriet Tubman and her celebrants
on the move.
A constricted and confining world but this was
home and this is still remembered as home, nostalgically
even if with gritted teeth or even backward-looking disbelief.
"Hotel Residents"
(1993) follows the artists mind and memory through
even more abstract walls, doorways and windows wrapped
in the invisible cloak of irony. It is a surreal exploration
of the phenomenon of homelessness and temporary housing
that connects the personal and the communal to the universal.
It is allusive both to the tenets of Soviet Socialist
Realism in being so technically successful in depicting
its elements with a camera-like eye and to the history
of Western art by way of many of its details and fragments
in this fragmenting image. One is reminded in particular
of the Surrealists, since Iofins "realist"
style repeatedly fragments, reconfigures and transcends
the reality of the here and now. Windows and doors punctuate
the stage-set-like walls with their peeling wallpaper:
temporary is more than merely temporary; every window
is an opportunity to leave and a question as to what is
out there besides blue skies. Like the other two works
discussed here, this image is part of a never-ending Petersburg
series, fastened together by the sort of dream and memory
glue that Chagall carried around in his head which for
him yielded never-ending allusions to Vitebsk.
How does one shape the home and the life that carries
one from one city or country or culture to another, and
from a progression of hotels to a house to a home? Is
it by being the consummate artist like Albrecht
Durer, his 1498 self-portrait reproduced at the base of
this three-tiered-by-three-section-wide image, who became
wealthy by working not only with paintbrush on canvas
but in reproducable print media that carried his works
across Europe during his lifetime? Certainly the self-portrayed
Iofin, leaning forward in his chair at Durers table
might consult the sober German genius. Maybe instead he
should follow the lighter lead of the pipe-smoking, tippling
Dutch master, Jan Steen, who joins them at the table of
life and art to yield a painterly threesome. How does
one become free? That question asked since Moses led the
Israelites wandering from Egypt to the Promised Land,
(a journey of transformation that took forty years to
accomplish), dwelling in temporary residences along the
way, is seen in a ghostly visual pun through the lower
right-hand window. There, on the roof, like the famous
Chagall fiddler, a symbol of the uncertain existence for
Jews in Tsarist Russia, is the outline of a dancer, his
pose reminiscent of Kazantsakis Zorba the Greek,
whose instruction was simply to dance to be free .
Larger than the question of finding a way and a certain
place in which to plant ones roots is that of what
reality it is that is briefly home to its residents, but
never truly home to any of them. Is it the realm of comedy
and carnality (the clown and prostitute on the lower left
but we recognize that this clown is of the Pierrot
sort, who weeps inwardly as he makes us laugh, for the
Columbina who consistently ignores or disappoints or betrays
him or is it the realm of somnolent spirituality
(the angel asleep beneath a colorful blanket on a bed
that hovers against and within the right-hand middle window
and its landscape (or is it before and within the thin
wall between that window and the doorway below it)? These
walls are both external and internal; the bird that lifts
its voice in song and spreads its wings against a stunning
blue sky is mechanical, and sprung from the grandfather
clock become cuckoo clock that hovers against the wall.
Time moves in strange ways in this world of constant inconstancy.
It is a world like that of the former Soviet Union and
that of the current United States and perhaps that
of everywhere and anytime where one cannot be sure
whom to trust. Perhaps not even the purveyors of Faith,
one of whose symbols in the history of Christian art is
the white lily that leans before the great clock. This
is the lily of the Virgin Marys purity, who brought
forth One who would sacrifice Himself for human salvation.
The purveyors of faith remind us again and again of the
danger to our immortal souls without such salvation: on
the ledge of the open window to the left, before an elderly
woman and a young, lushly naked woman is the stripped
skull of mortality to which the physical aspect of the
wit and wisdom of us all will ultimately be reduced. The
naked woman suggests the repentant Mary Magdalene, particularly
in juxtaposition with that skull. This is a vanitas painting:
the entire world, with its interweave for us humans of
religion and art and politics and economics is home, but
a temporary home. Not just one country or another, one
people or another, but all of us anywhere and everywhere.
What we think is home is merely the hotel we stay in briefly
as we pass through (on our way to the Funeral Home and
the tomb).
Iofins work is layered with puns that interweave
each other. From the two-world condition with its additional
layer for Jewish artists he has come to a world in which
he resides with less anxiety and more physical comfort
than in the one he left, but in which his paintings reflect
the two world condition of past and present, Saint Petersburg
and San Francisco, Russia and America, the Soviet Union
and the United States and all the concomitants of that
double reality. So he and his works reflect on "home"
as a bi-lingual phenomenon on many levels including
the literal one of speaking Russian with fellow emigres
far from what was and wasnt home and speaking English
with those who might or might not be real new friends
in what might or might not be or ever become a real home.
In the jargon of the postmodern epoch of literary and
visual art, interweave and overlay from different arenas
are referred to by Charles Jencks as "dual coding":
one code for Everyman (who simply recognizes exquisite
aesthetic details) and another for the initiated, art-wise
audience (which recognizes the symbolic and allusive layers
to those details). What literary criticism calls intertextuality
is seen to occupy the endless interstices of Iofins
paintings.
It is, as with so many great artists, a very personal
visual intertextuality, the central element of which is
home and the question of how and where it might be. In
carrying from one city and country and continent to another
it interweaves at least one more layer of irony if one
applies the title of one of the great American novels
Thomas Wolfes You Cant Go Home Again
to Iofin and also to Lawrence and others (which,
in applying visual art to literature is clear intertextuality).
Soviet artist refugees (and Soviet refugees who arent
artists) come to America and dont easily find it
home; Africans forced to come to America certainly did
not find it home and many of their descendants still dont,
two or three centuries later. But the world of this discussion
defies national, religious, ethnic or racial boundaries.
Before the end of World War I dispersions of peoples most
obviously and frequently referred to Jews and Africans,
and then also to Armenians and Palestinians. Since that
time the list of groups to which the home-defying term
"Diaspora" might apply has multiplied. The past
centurys cruelties have produced more homeless adults
and children and more makeshift ways of rethinking "home"
than all of prior history combined.
"What is home?" begets not only the question
of definition and counter-definition of what constitute
the essential parts of "home" and how they differ
from and overlap those of "house" but
whether, if we leave home (by choice or not), we can ever
find it again. The answer will differ from people to people,
culture to culture, language to language, artwork to artwork
and individual to individual, depending in part upon how
each does define home as well as house, both inside and
out. That the human mind and imagination determine this
variously is corroborated from an oblique direction, an
invention of human thought: the computer terminal. For
that invention offers yet another layer to the discussion,
circling us around to its beginning. At the computer terminal
where this discussion of words and images is being written
to be read by others, the key "home" is used
variously to evoke the idea of returning to the
beginning of a line, a paragraph or an entire essay. By
contrast, nowhere does the keyboard indicate "house".
Through the instrumentation of the computer terminal,
words and the expression of ideas and the discussion of
images and other products of human effort may be communicated
from within any one house or home to the wide world outside,
endlessly multiplying the possibilities for connecting
us. And for raising questions, suggesting answers and
both reinforcing and eliminating confusions whether
about "house" or "home" or any other
concepts we would define.
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