Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  It’s hard to love one’s neighbor, and harder to love one’s enemy; indeed, the latter is sometimes an exercise of poor judgment. Social animals, we organize according to similarities. Embracing diversity may be an ecological imperative, a societal responsibility, and the ineluctable nature of a shrinking world, but ignoring the differences among people and cultures always backfires. Contrary to liberal expectations, some persuasive research suggests that children to whom race is never mentioned tend to sort themselves according to skin color, while children to whom the contexts of difference are emphasized are more willing to commingle. We are essentialists who achieve our identity primarily by contrasting it to the unfamiliar character of others. There could be no America without an abroad; if you could demystify the abroad entirely, America as we know it would vanish. But we can segregate by our passports and still strive toward kindness among nations, recognize that the Marshall Plan worked at least as well as the firebombing of Dresden, and support as equals those who lack our advantages. We can separate the urgent need to identify our already existing enemies from the rank folly of making new ones.

  * * *

  After my husband and I had children, we began taking them with us on trips as soon as they learned to walk, because we wanted them to have a sense of the world as a large and varied place overflowing with possibilities. Children are malleable for a short time only, and whatever limits you set soon become their norm. We wanted that norm to include what is surprising, enchanting, uncomfortable, glamorous, disorienting, exciting, and weird about travel. They can decide to be homebodies when they grow up, but at least they will know what they are setting aside.

  My daughter is eight and my son is six and a half, and both are already excellent travelers. When they were toddlers, people would say, “They’re far too young. They’ll never remember Spain.” But we don’t have current experiences only for the sake of future memories; adventures have their worth even if they are restricted to the present tense. While I anticipated that George and Blaine might not remember a particular place, I knew that I would remember taking them there, and that they would be shaped by the earliest possible understanding that people have varied customs and beliefs. When Blaine was three, I carried her outside a restaurant to see the sunset over the Place de la Concorde and told her about having seen the same sight with my own mother. “Oh, Daddy,” she said, “I’m so happy right now.” A year later, we were on the floor playing with her dolls, and she announced, “Emma is hungry. She has to go get something to eat.”

  I said, “Well, where would Emma like to get something? Maybe from Central Market?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Paris.”

  My son George has shown a particular interest in maps. He studies them for hours on end, tracing where one country abuts another. A New York cabbie announced to us that he came from Senegal, caught the eye of then five-year-old George in the rearview mirror, and said, “I’ll bet you don’t know where that is, little boy.”

  George said, “South of Mauritania, next to Mali and Guinea.” The driver nearly crashed the taxi.

  A few months later, we asked George where he’d go if he could go anywhere in the world. He thought for a moment before responding, “Syria.”

  John and I were both alarmed. “Syria!” we said. “Why Syria?”

  George said patiently, using an expression that has some currency in our house, “Someone has to tell those people that what they’re doing is inappropriate behavior.”

  Traveling with my children offers three primary pleasures. First, their delight in new things kindles my own delight, returning freshness to a ride in a gondola, a Rocky Mountain vista, the Changing of the Guard. Many touristic clichés are overexposed because they are singular and spectacular, and children provide an excuse to enjoy them again. Second, the advantages of traveling make a worthy legacy: I am lucky that I was given the world so early. In passing that gift along, I rekindle my intimacy with my mother; taking my children to faraway places honors her memory. Finally, my children have returned a sense of purposefulness to my travel. I’ve been to so many places and seen so much, and sometimes it feels like a glut of sunsets and churches and monuments. My mind has been stretched by the world’s diversity, and may be approaching its elastic limits. In addressing the minds of my children, however, an urgent sense of purpose is renewed. I do not expect that George will settle the conflict with ISIL, but I think the knowledge he and Blaine and their half siblings Oliver and Lucy are accumulating will broaden their inherent kindness and thus increase the planet’s depleted stores of compassion.

  * * *

  I used to think that I was unusually reactive to the thinness of the air in a plane’s pressurized cabin. I cry on planes—at the movies I watch, the books I read, the letters and e-mails I attempt to answer. Those surges of emotion have a quality of abrupt intensity that is most often associated with substance abuse. Sometimes, it’s a good trip, and sometimes, a bad one; sometimes, the emotionality is thrilling, and sometimes, deeply distressing. For years, I presumed that this hypersensitivity was affiliated with other physiological effects of altitude, such as the diminished ability to distinguish flavors—a mercy on most airlines. I sought research that would reveal whether more or less blood was flowing to which areas of my brain, how my pulmonary capacity was compromised by the angle of ascent.

  Now I’ve come to believe that departure simply makes me sad, whether it points to someplace I’ve always wanted to see or to the home I have missed. Though travel can intensify life, it also evokes dying. It is a detachment. I grow anxious at takeoff not because of the air pressure and not because the plane might crash, but because I feel myself dissolving. I was brought up to value safety more than comfort, and comfort more than courage, and have spent adulthood striving to invert that hierarchy. Rilke said, “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” As we climb above the clouds, I practice letting go of the place I’ve come from or the place I’ve gone. Though I am sustained in these departures by the prospect of arrival, separation always tugs me toward at least momentary regret. Even in that sorrow, however, I know that I failed fully to love home until I went repeatedly abroad and could not appreciate abroad until I had returned home time and again. Valediction is, at least for me, a precondition of intimacy.

  USSR

  * * *

  The Winter Palettes

  Harpers & Queen, 1988

  I had often wondered why people who went to Russia seemed to become obsessed with it, and I learned why on my first assignment reporting from abroad, in 1988, when the British monthly Harpers & Queen sent me to the USSR to cover Sotheby’s groundbreaking sale of contemporary Soviet art. Three years later, I published an expanded account of the same events in Connoisseur. Here, I have combined the two articles, reflecting those experiences of exhilarating discovery—not only for me, but also for the artists involved—as our personal and political worlds collided. The encounter described in this article launched me on the path toward my first book, The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost.

  * * *

  “To Brezhnev!” said one of the artists. Since it was nearly sunrise and I was exhausted, I raised my glass of tea without quite registering the name. “To Brezhnev!” we all chorused, and downed our tea. Only then did it strike me as odd that, in the summer of 1988, we were toasting Brezhnev rather than Gorbachev. It must have been four in the morning, or perhaps five, and the conversation had degenerated; we had left behind Baudrillard and deconstructionism and postmodernism and were making jokes about Japanese tourists. The seven of us were crowded around a small table in a small room, all talking at once, and all greedily attacking the food that one of the artists had made, taking turns with the plates because there weren’t enough to go around. Then came this toast, after which someone observed that it had been a good evening of good talk, “just like
in the days of Brezhnev.” I was too unfocused even to ask.

  We left the interlinked studios on Furmanny Lane, located, ironically enough, upstairs from a school for the blind, at half past six. Dawn had come to Moscow, and the street seemed incredible. I had been there since eleven the previous morning, and it had taken on that quality of being the sole reality that inevitably comes of protracted debate and total exhaustion. We parted with those words once more: “To Brezhnev!” Then one of the artists reminded me, “Be at the station at noon today. We’ll see you then.”

  I went back to the dubious opulence of my Western hotel. At eleven my alarm sounded like a bad joke, and I peevishly dragged myself out of bed and set off for the train station, wondering all the while what could have possessed me to make this appointment. When I got there, I saw some familiar avant-gardists and, discovering that I was glad to see them, ceased to curse the missed night’s sleep and remembered why I’d sat up so late in the first place.

  We all went off to a place of bucolic vista, about two hours outside Moscow. Only one person—there were about forty of us—knew where we were going, and even he didn’t know what we would find when we got there. We were on our way to an Action, by the Collective Action Group (K/D), and this mystery was part of it all. When we left the train we found ourselves at the edge of a thin strip of woods, and we walked single file, talking in low voices, sometimes laughing, waiting to see what would happen. After the first bit of woods we arrived at sweeping fields of corn, with odd, tumbledown houses beyond them; then came a wood of birches, then a lake surrounded by reeds newly gone to seed, then a pine woods with stolid trunks rising from a smooth floor. Imagine this: all the Moscow vanguard, the many faces of genius and the eager eyes of their acolytes, walking through a forest as still as the first day of creation.

  We came into a field with a river running through it. On the river, fishermen in rubber boats were casting their lines and watching—with some puzzlement but not much interest—the procession of artists. At last we came to a rise, where we stopped, stood in a row, and watched the river. Soon we saw an artist, Georgi Kisevalter, standing by the water. He jumped in, swam across, and disappeared on the other side. We kept our eyes on the spot where he had disappeared. He returned to the water’s edge carrying a huge, flat package, leaped in, and swam back. He went to a hill opposite our knoll, where he was joined by the leader of K/D, Andrei Monastyrsky, and another artist. They removed the brightly colored outer wrapping from the package to reveal a large black-and-white painting. They carefully took out the nails that held the canvas to the stretcher and laid the canvas on the ground. They disassembled the stretcher, which was of complicated design, until they had reduced it to its component strips of wood. They wrapped the wood in the black-and-white canvas and wrapped that in the outer covering. Then Monastyrsky distributed photocopies of the painting to the onlookers.

  All the while, on a hill behind us, a bell was ringing in a blue box and no one heard it.

  That was the Action. Two hours to get there, two hours back (not to mention the time to go to and from the station), and ten minutes of what I took to be ponderously self-important performance art. We had a picnic by the river afterward, which should have been jolly, but I was annoyed. I was glad to have seen the woods, and the bread and cheese were dandy, but the rest seemed pure idiocy. Sergey Anufriev, one of the leaders of the Medical Hermeneutics movement, took me aside and explained it in detail, articulating elaborate references to previous performance pieces, art’s connections to nature, old and outmoded Soviet aesthetic concerns, and episodes in individual people’s lives. When he finished, I had a moment of thinking I understood. By that time, I was too tired to worry about it.

  Only later did I understand that I had understood nothing, and that that had been the point. By then, I had begun to realize why we had been toasting Brezhnev, the oppressor, and not Gorbachev, the liberator. Under Brezhnev, as under Khrushchev, the Soviet avant-gardists were unable to exhibit their work in public, so they would hang it in their apartments or studios and invite people to come look at it. The only people who ever saw their work were other avant-gardists. They were, in their own phrase, “like the early Christians, or like Freemasons.” They could recognize one another at a glance, and they stuck together through thick and thin, never betraying the members of the circle. They believed that they knew a higher truth than was vouchsafed to the rest of the Soviet people, but they knew also that its time had not yet come. From their circumstances of difficulty, they learned integrity and built a world of mutuality. Though shot through with intense ironies and petty conflicts, this life force still gave their work urgency in a country where, for so many people, all gesture had come to seem futile. In the face of misery they achieved their tightly shared joy, and the constant surprise of such a profound sense of purpose taught them the value of their talent.

  That talent was formidable. Their joy may have been considerable, but the passage to it was too fraught to tempt anyone who was incapable of transcendence; moreover, the frustration of battling the all-encompassing Soviet system with an inadequate intellect quickly defeated fools. The Moscow artistic community had no room for the passive observer; the commitment of its members was enormous. Since the experience of their work always depended on the experience of them as people—since the hundred or so individuals who made up the avant-garde were both the creators of Soviet art and its audience—the artists’ personalities were key to what they created. Their strong personas are defined in part by the place they fill within the art world, and in part by the proclivities with which they came to the avant-garde, but their genius is, of necessity, that of the painter, the poet, and the actor. This curious concatenation makes them compelling, irresistible, implacable, and ultimately impenetrable. It is why they combine that rigorous trait of integrity with a sly elusiveness that can all too often masquerade as dishonesty. Their work is full of truth, but all told in slanted language.

  Anufriev’s description of the Action was a witty lie. I was being cajoled into the belief that what had happened was comprehensible, coherent, and straightforward. What had gone on was, in fact, a fascinating comment on the problems of contemporary Soviet art, and at a fairly literal level it was explicable, but it was also an affirmation of the artistic community that oppression had created, a community that felt itself being shaken by freedom. The whole point was that it contained so many references that no one could begin to get them all. The artists in attendance could affirm their places in the avant-garde by getting many of them and could confirm the degree of their secrecy by failing to get the rest. The circle of the avant-garde, suddenly threatened by those who think that being an artist is an easy path to fame and fortune, holds such events to protect its terrible new fragility as loosening restrictions and foreign markets threaten its members’ psychic citadel.

  * * *

  I had come to Moscow to attend Sotheby’s sale of contemporary Soviet art. The hype surrounding the auction was blinding. Sotheby’s was organizing the ultimate Moscow tour, a package involving diplomatic entertainments, singing Gypsies, endless viewings of rarely seen icons, meetings with important persons, cases of imported champagne, and beluga buckshot previously reserved for czars and commissars. We were going not to a mere auction but to an important event in the history of East and West. On a drop-dead-smart brochure, the word Sotheby’s blazed red in both Latin and Cyrillic type against the sienna tones of an ancient map with illegible lettering. Charmed though travelers were by the prospect of fish eggs and icons, many were taken aback to discover that this map—the logo of the trip, reproduced time and again in the international press—was actually an old map of Bermuda. “It’s what sprang to hand,” one of the Sotheby’s directors told me.

  As a for-profit company, Sotheby’s had reasons for staging the sale other than an interest in the work of the Soviet avant-garde. It was an opportunity to establish good relations with the Soviet government at the dawn of perestroika, with the possibili
ty of monopoly contracts and other boons down the line. Initially, contemporary art and artists were seen as a means to an end. Although Soviet art had actually been discovered by the West incrementally during the decade preceding the Sotheby’s sale, when a few Soviet artists started to get exposure in Western Europe and New York, the big players in the art game didn’t pay much attention.

  By the time Sotheby’s was revving up for its sale, gallery exhibitions in the West were taking place, notably an installation at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York by Ilya Kabakov. He had created a Moscow communal apartment in which each room belonged to someone driven to obsessiveness by the close quarters. In one room lived the Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, whose space was filled with cards on which tiny items were pasted to boards and labeled: “lint from my pocket,” “dust from the corner,” “a paper clip,” “an insect.” In another room, the Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment had rigged a seat in midair with four huge springs that ran to the four corners of his ceiling, planning to fling himself into the freedom of the stratosphere. In yet another lived the Man (perhaps Kabakov himself) Who Described His Life Through Characters. Such exhibitions had impelled a few serious collectors of Soviet art, but though theirs was no longer an eccentric taste, it was still a cultivated, obscure one.

  Before taking over as director of Sotheby’s Europe, Simon de Pury had been private curator to Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza. Traveling with him to the Soviet Union, de Pury had picked up word of the contemporary art scene there. He also gathered that a great deal of important work by the avant-garde of the 1920s in the Soviet Union remained in private hands, as well as precious eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture and objects. He was eager to get off on the right foot with Gorbachev’s new government with its policy of glasnost, or openness, so that Sotheby’s would be in a favorable position if financial straits pushed the Soviets who owned these treasures into selling them. Lenin had sold some of the best works from the Hermitage Museum to underwrite his new government; perhaps Gorbachev might do something similar. The new art was a glorified bargaining chip. The “contemporary” sale that I had come to witness included a number of important works from the twenties—including major pieces by Aleksandr Rodchenko, Varvara Stepanova, and Aleksandr Drevin. “Wait and see how long it takes before we have an office in this country saying SOTHEBY’S MOSCOW over the door,” one of de Pury’s colleagues remarked. But de Pury soon saw that the contemporary art could be valuable in itself. “This is all a wonderful, giant risk,” he said to me. “We know so little about this work we are buying—except that we know it’s worth buying.”