“Visions of Transcendence: Creating Space in East and West."

Wende Museum, 10808 Culver Boulevard, Culver City, CA; November 11, 2023 through April 7, 2024.

Rather than limiting its scope, Wende Museum’s tightly focused mission has the effect of provoking wide-ranging possibilities for examining art and culture in relation to a shared reference frame. The core mission to collect and display materials from the history of the Cold War provides a lens of refraction for engagement with multi-dimensional thematic issues in programs, collections, and exhibits. The Museum’s name, as the “About” page explains on their website, means “turning point” or “change”—thus invoking the transformation of culture that occurred as the Berlin Wall fell.[1] Describing the institutional history, the text notes that the collection was founded in a moment when many museums in Europe were de-accessioning artifacts of the same period. Recognizing the importance of preserving the history of the Cold War era through physical evidence and other documentation, Justinian Jampol, a European historian, was prompted to initiate the museum project in the mid-1990s.

            The range of possibilities that this framework supports is strikingly evident in the current exhibition, “Visions of Transcendence: Creating Space in East and West.” While its origin point is in Cold War cultural politics, its endpoint is contemporary America.

            I first became aware of the Museum more than a decade ago, when it was still in its temporary space. Now the institution has a bespoke building, fine garden, and excellent location on Culver Boulevard. If you have never visited this small gem, the current exhibition of work by and about incarceration should compel you to do so. Also on display are parts of the permanent collection. In the open shelves along the outer walls, Russian-language publications, many from the Soviet era, are a stark material reminder of the occupation of East Germany (German Democratic Republic) from 1949 until 1990. Facing the books are glass cases with other items that, at first glance, have a cool, kitsch nostalgic feel to them until one realizes that the surveillance equipment, systems for identification, and other instruments were not props for a Hollywood version of spy scenarios, but objects integrated into very real systems of oppression. Given the stylistic features of the commemorative plates for Soviet space exploration, the material qualities of scrapbooks assembled under conditions of relative material impoverishment, and other eloquent witnesses to East German and Communist regimes, a visitor can quickly slip into an aesthetic appreciation that needs to be tempered by the reminder of the realities within which these things operated. The current exhibition is just such a reality check.

            The exhibit fills most of the museum’s main space and the narrative of installation moves forward in time from the earliest works to the most recent as the theme of detainment crosses considerable geographical and temporal space. Most of the works were made by individuals in detention, though a handful of photographs document prison life in Hungary, Russia, and elsewhere that were created by individuals who visited those environments from outside.

Maks Velo, Two Inmates (Two Prisoners), 1993, ink on paper Collection Wende Museum

Among the earliest, and in some ways most chilling, works are those created by political prisoners. For instance, Maks Velo’s striking black and white figurative glyphs, made after his imprisonment in 1978, are unflinching images of the brutality of prison life. Crucially, these hover on the edge of abstraction, suggestive, referential, but evocative rather than illustrational. This matters because Velo was incarcerated for his aesthetic positions. Drawing on the stylistic innovations of Matisse, Picasso, and others, he incurred the wrath of authorities whose prohibitions against modernism were of long-standing and deep conviction. He was imprisoned in Albania for his artistic activities, which were considered political agitation. The reality of being imprisoned for aesthetic choices is unimaginable in most of Western culture, and it is not romantic.

Velo’s images and profile bring home the stark difference between the imagined “political” work of artists in many museum and gallery systems and the reality of choices that have serious consequences. The claims to “transgression” or “subversion” practiced by many contemporary artists are easy to make when they don’t result in jail sentences, deprivations, and death. The figure of the brilliant early 20^th century writer, Daniil Kharms, children’s author and playwright, stands out as emblematic of this horrible fate. Nothing heroic at all about death by starvation in a Stalinist prison. Kharms, who died in his cell in 1942, is not present here, but brought up as a reminder of the reality of oppression, one individual among the millions killed in Stalin’s purges.

Reading a line or two on a didactic wall plaque that describes years of a prison sentence allows a viewer to pass very quickly over an extended experience of abject misery. To absorb the gravitas of Velo’s images, one has to let them sink in, like hot lead cast on water, penetrating the psyche, searing and heavy in their dark matter. The black silhouettes of handcuffed arms or contorted limbs take on affective dimensions when they are not seen just as graphic abstractions, but as records, documents, of observed and experienced pain.

Léonid Nedov, Prisoners, 1963, enamel on metal Courtesy of the Archive of Modern Conflict

            The authenticity in Velo’s work is matched by that of Leonid Nedov whose drawings on scraps of enameled ceramic fragments are also artfacts of prison life and scenes—eating, reading and so on. Nedov’s drawings show his fellow prisoners involved in the activities of their lives. His story involves a correspondence with Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the distinguished dissident writer also sentenced to a gulag. Nedov was eventually freed through the efforts of Solzhenitsyn whose portrait the artist had inscribed on one of his fragments. The small scale renderings and observed details on the enamel surfaces are modest and unpretentious. The material properties of this work show how it was made within limited circumstances, under constraints. The same is true for many of the works in this exhibit which make use of improvised materials—wax, tea, ground pencils, dyes and pigments created from various sources. The creative resilience of human beings in the face of adversity is evident, and thus the “transcendence” of the title, the capacity to survive. But of course, we are seeing the work of those who could, did, manage this, not those who did not or could not.

Gil Batle, Time Killer, 2016, carved ostrich egg shell Courtesy of the artist and the Ricco/Maresca Gallery

Sometimes the materials raise curious questions. Gil Batle’s set of elegantly, exquisitely, carved ostrich eggs, their shells drilled into low relief depictions of aspects of prison culture—where did they come from? In my life, I have never encountered an actual ostrich egg, let alone possessed one. Were the contents scrambled for a cafeteria breakfast buffet? Seems unlikely. But they are as perfect as any object in a high-end boutique, so how did it come about that the artist has these in his hands? In another example of innovative media production, death row inmate Obie Weathers made powerful canvases with prison materials and bits of birch bark, their impasto surfaces thick with scarring and pain. Weathers is not innocent, and acknowledges his past crimes, but he raises questions about rehabilitation and redemption as indeed, all of these works do. How is incarceration made to serve a social purpose? Do terms of accountability and punishment need to be rethought, even leaving aside the issues of unjust or wrongly imprisoned persons? What are we doing with the carceral system as it currently exists? The historical examples amplify the need for ethical consideration.

Every selection of work in this exhibit is worth more critical discussion than I can give here. Shepard Sherbell’s documentary photographs of Soviet boys’ prisons where the children exercise in a caged yard where they are not allowed to look at the sky, Tamás Urbán’s extended photographic study of Hungarian prisons, their guards eating lunch, sitting with rifles across their legs, poised on a one-legged stool to keep them alert as they surveil the men in the work routines are all images worthy of sustained analysis. A series of illustrations for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead, done by Leonid Lamm while he was himself imprisoned, pull observed scenes into the imagined compositions, merging the artist’s experience with that of the author.

As the exhibit progresses through the sequence of bays, the work moves into the present and the theme of detention broadens to include the experience of immigrants detained in camps, held in a system in which they have little control or choice, for no crime other than movement across a border. The final images were made by unhoused persons, their condition, paradoxically, one that might be termed out-prisonment, being sentenced to no walls, no enclosures, no evident constraints except for the complete lack of protection or security. Calling attention to this inside-out of detention is an interesting move on the part of the curators, Joes Segal and Emma Diffley, who demonstrate an admirable ability to create coherence across a body of materials that begins in Soviet and Communist regimes and ends in the streets of America.

            More could be said—there are objects, things used and crafted within prison walls, an interview, notes, glimpses into the culture of incarceration, even a canvas celebrating release. The work is thought-provoking and affecting, the exhibit respectful and informative without being didactic. This exhibit merits a visit, preferably with a companion willing to talk about the complexity of the exhibit and issues it presents—as well as the aesthetic dimensions of the works as an integral and essential aspect of their effect.

Check website for hours, admission is free: https://wendemuseum.org/

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[1] https://wendemuseum.org/about-the-wende/