Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (7 page)

Let’s get one thing straight - ruin porn is at least 200 years old. When the romantics encountered the freshly rediscovered Roman and Greek ruins of towns like Pompeii and trips to Rome became a favorite activity of romantic poets, there was nothing more trendy than a pensive ruin contemplation; English gardens had randomly scattered “ruins” and fake ancient architectural fragments purposely built in around for trysts and contemplation. Painters since classicism have relished in plotting architectural riddles, as different as Canaletto and Piranesi. There was in this a longing for the lost past, for the “golden age”, that was never to come. Interestingly, Tarkovsky probably also believed in the idea of an irretrievably lost golden age.

Tarkovsky has a reputation of a pensive, sinister, gloomy prophet-saint, famous for three hour films full of endless contemplative scenes fixated on nature, the rural and antiquity as opposed to industry, cities and modernity in general. Yet despite saturation with symbols and obsession over nature, if you examine the films closely, something quite modern emerges. Of the four most quoted films in the West - that is:
Andrey Rublev, Stalker, Solaris
and
Mirror
- two of them are starkly modern, futuristic, and adaptations of SF literature; the two others, most notably
Mirror
, are usually quoted to prove Tarkovsky’s love for obscurantism and dismissal of everything later than JS Bach and the old masters, like Breughel or Leonardo.
Andrey Rublev
sits uncomfortably as a portrait of an artist, who is critiqued for his innovation: a clear alter ego self-portrait of Tarkovsky himself and his ambivalent relations with the communist authorities, which did not begrudge him money for usually extremely opulent and expensive productions. It is enough to quote one scene from
Solaris
, when the characters have a videophone
conversation, one sitting in a bucolic little hut in paradisiacal forest surroundings, while another is in a car, which turns out to be on an extremely high-speed highway around a grim, menacing metropolis. The sequence that ensues is one of the most mysterious in the whole of Tarkovsky’s career. Right from the heavenly greenery we’re taken on a crazy ride through the never-ending flyovers and tunnels, Brutalist skyscrapers, slabs and blocks, accompanied only by an uncanny noise, which turns out to be an extremely futuristic, now cult soundtrack by electronic composer Eduard Artemiev. What is this city and does Tarkovsky look at it with fascination or repulsion? Probably both, and this is what makes it such a thrilling scene still today.

1.5 Eye to eye with history, Budapest’s cemetery of communist sculpture, Szoborpark

The universality of
Stalker
and the source of its ongoing inspiration regardless of nationality has several reasons. One is its status as a universal image of decaying, post-industrial civilisation, a sinister glimpse of the real cost of industrialization in terms of people and climate, where the happiness and comfort of some is
paid for by the poverty and crumbling lives of others. Is it though a critique or a complete rejection of it? Tarkovsky was neither a liberal intellectual, nor purely a “yurodivy” - a holy fool or a shaman, living only on spiritual values. He was an uncanny mixture of both, applying his westernized doubts to the (according to some), incurably “crazy”, irrational part of the Russian soul, necessarily in love with despotism, tsarism and nationalism, and his fanatically spiritual part was undermining the possibility of seeing anything positive in late Western civilization. This wasn’t, importantly, a stance of any of the authors of the novels he adapted: Stanislaw Lem of
Solaris
famously rejected his novel’s adaptation, while the Strugatsky brothers’ novella
Roadside Picnic
adapted for
Stalker
is significantly more rigorous and less inclined to existentialism than Tarkovsky’s view.

It’s a strange candidate for a patron saint of hipster land explorers. And paradoxically, this mixture gave a very coherent, at least on film, worldview, in which neither is true: we see clearly that neither the cynical, self-pitying, hollow Poet’s reasoning, nor a fanatical conviction of the Professor, is correct. The Stalker himself, an incurably melancholic, unhappy creature was by many compared to a Gulag prisoner, not only because he famously says the enclosed Zona is nothing in comparison to the “prison that is the world”. Geoff Dyer, an English essayist and author of the latest book-length interpretation of the film,
Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room
, confirms this by giving us a rather sentimental quote from Anne Applebaum’s
GULAG
on the never-ending “zone behind the barbed wire”. Dyer’s shot-by-shot analysis, despite its over 200 pages, seems strangely abortive in how little of the essence of the film it delivers. Everything becomes obvious: Zona is USSR, Stalker is a victim of the regime, the regime is eternal, there’s no escape.

And yet, the Zona fascinates: fascinates the characters in the film and now the scavengers, who want nothing more than be in it. Why? Slavoj Žižek suggests that its popularity is prompted exactly
by its prohibition: its properties are augmented by the fact they are somehow wrong, bad for us. Lacanian interpretations of the Real as an area of exclusion prompting its power aside, the ex-communist area, as possessive of dark forces is for that reason precisely popular among the Westerners. The bad thing is that what they do, the money they leave in the former East is based on this place staying toxic: remaining forbidden, radioactive, sick. And the guarantee this world can remain sick is that where we come from remains safe and healthy. This has an additional touch of the macabre, in that this film had a number of “victims”, a true chain of corpses behind it. It was not shot in Russia, but in Estonia, near Tallinn, at two deserted power plants on the Jagala River and several other toxic locations, like a chemical factory, which was pouring toxic liquids. At least three people involved in the production, Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Larissa Tarkovska and Tarkovsky himself, died of cancer in the aftermath.

This perception of the former East as a constantly sick place, needing our help/advice/political intervention is enduring. It also prompts the specific kind of nostalgia after communism, Ostalgia. The neoliberal governments of the ex-communist countries, like Estonia or Ukraine, are only too happy to exploit this for their perhaps irrational yet profitable interest. Estonia based even its cultural offer for the film-makers and other creative industries as a “land of
Stalker”.
Toxic ruins keep influencing the imagery of the natural catastrophe in new generations of films, like Hollywoodian blockbusters
Chernobyl Diaries
or
The Darkest Hour.
Another example of this mutual misunderstanding is Baikonur, formerly Leninsk, in Kazakhstan, the city of the Soviet space programme still launching Russian satellites, which people usually think is a dead, abandoned area. The deserted post-nuclear landscapes of
Stalker
were recalled even during the recent tragedy of Fukushima by a
Guardian
journalist. Yet there is little Western interest in contemporary cultural and political issues in these places, not only because in the situation of civilisational and economical
weakening, the ex-Bloc was left with the choice between the manipulation of oligarch-driven economy or death, abandoned by the state support. The recent Euro 2012 tournament in Poland and Ukraine saw the England team and its fans visiting the reactor, alongside Auschwitz in Poland.

The wisdom of Tarkovsky’s films was that they offered a kind of post-religious, post-spiritual consolation in the empty world “after God”, in a way that was neither simplistically existential nor devoid of a kind of higher moral stance. It’s the mystery of Tarkovsky how he understood so well the awkward spiritual side of the seemingly mechanical process of industrialization, a legacy of the Bolshevik regime he no doubt hated. Like Kafka, who worked in a gigantic insurance company and got an insight to bureaucracy as a universal model of the modern world, Tarkovsky saw through the USSR and the strange ambiguity between the system and the modernization, the tension between Western capitalism and supposed socialism; as a director and visionary, he understood their strange interdependence in the world pushed by mechanisms of history, man’s striving for perfection and cynicism of politics, creating a world balancing between utopia and hell on earth. Yet as Putin’s Russia recently strives towards a nationalistic orthodoxy, tourism based on seeing the former USSR as a toxic Disneyland ceases to be as innocent as it may initially seem.

Situated 450 kilometres from the Russian mainland, Kaliningrad is an isolated territory created by the Soviet Union. Carved out of the German East Prussian city of Königsberg and its hinterland after the war, bordered by southern Lithuania and northern Poland, it sits on the edge of the Baltic Sea, geographically separated from Russia but officially still part of the country, a hangover from a bygone era of empire. With its neighbors now part of the EU and NATO, as well as the Schengen zone, the city’s detachment from Russia is only growing. Kaliningrad’s extraordinary position in
Europe has inspired strong responses in adjoining countries, and particularly in Poland, not only from politicians, but also from artists. In January 2012 a simultaneous exhibition,
Enclave
, was held at Warsaw’s Center for Contemporary Art and Kaliningrad’s National Center for Contemporary Art. Artists from Poland and Russia were asked to reflect on the idea of an enclave, with regard to Kaliningrad itself.

What are the principal associations of the word “enclave”? Mostly negative: isolation, xenophobia, alienation. Judging from many contributions to the exhibition, Kaliningrad is a reflection of exactly that condition, a museum of dead ideology, surrounded by the ruins of an old system. Yet look closer and the city tells a different story. Both economically (it was given Special Economic Zone status in 1996) and demographically, Kaliningrad is doing significantly better than most of the rest of Russia. So which of those two images — cultural obsolescence or economic progress — is nearer to the truth?

The Russian artists in the exhibition tended to respond more closely to the stated topic. Sound artist Danil Akimov produced the most ethereal work, a small room that became the city itself: a map was projected on the floor that was sensitive to footsteps and evoked the sounds of the respective parts of Kaliningrad. Art group Tender Bints (Nezhnye Baby) showed a video, Dirt, in which two women perform a strange ritual drowned in mud, telling a sad story of the women of the Curonian Spit, the enormous sandy peninsula which sweeps out from Kaliningrad towards Lithuania and forms an isolated enclave within an enclave. Some of the Polish works meditated on neighborliness and hospitality, kindness and the lack thereof. Karolina Breguła’s ‘Good Neighbours’, for instance, showed the artist walking around Kaliningrad knocking on people’s doors and introducing herself as “your nice neighbour from Warsaw”. For the most part, however, the Polish works in
Enclave
were Ostalgic - wistful portrayals of Kaliningrad that focus on the ruins of the previous system, and in particular on the most
devastated elements of post-Soviet reality. Franco-Polish photographer Nicolas Grospierre focused on picturesque Soviet relics: the Palace of Soviets (constructed on the site of a castle built by the Teutonic Knights); decaying tower blocks; government buildings and courtyards; and, as an epilogue, a library in an abandoned school, replete with endless heaps of ruined books.

Maciej Stepiński’s ‘Exclave’ series contemplated wistful trash: one of the most typical features of Kaliningrad seems to be abandoned rusty cars. As always, the problem with aestheticizing socialism like this is that it not only annihilates any potential positive uses of this project, declaring it as dead, but also provokes a melancholy longing for it. Other works not only took a maudlin look at the city, but also criticized it. In a film by Polish group ZOR the narrator, increasingly unimpressed by the concrete architecture of the city, says, “It’s a terrible city. The ugliest city in the world!” Ryszard Górecki’s ‘You Can Scream Here’ is a sign, hung on the Timber Bridge in Kaliningrad, which reproduces Edvard Munch’s famous image with the invitation, in German and in Russian, to replicate that scream. Why would anyone want to scream there? “There could be many reasons,” says the artist. “Germans can scream from grief for the city they lost. Russians — while looking at the city they have built. And tourists — from the disappointment of Kaliningrad.” Little wonder that the sign was removed by vandals after only a week.

Enclave
was only one of several major shows on Russian art in Poland in the last ten years. It’s as if enough time has passed now that Poles and Russians are no longer afraid of each other. But that trauma clearly remains strong. Many of these exhibitions still manifest signs of fear and distrust. The banner made for one Russian-Polish show by artist Anna Witkowska read, “BEWARE, ENEMY!” One might ask whether art is the right tool for overcoming these differences. But it is, at the very least, a good barometer of cross-border emotion. If there’s a show about a mutual friendship, you can bet that there are deep-running discrepancies
and inequalities. But in
Enclave
we also see Poles looking at their neighbors with a certain fascination that might just transform into closeness. If anything, this show was a reminder of colonial interdependencies. Poles, at least on the political right, like to see Poland as a besieged, poor, betrayed country where things suddenly got better, at least by comparison. Now at last there’s someone worse off than them.