The Drama Machine (2013 – 2015)

Soft Machines

by Irene Calderoni

“When you look at a bridge, you see what might be aleap frozen in metal movement, that is, not something static. The tension in the bridge is the main thing, not the decoration of the guard-rail. It’s the same with directing.”

Vsevolod Meyerhold

“I don’t want to photograph catastrophically failed spaces, partly because that has become a sentimental genre, and also because it is not that interesting artistically. What is interesting is this zone in which attempts to create a world are in process, have not been completed, probably cannot be completed, and at the same time are being encountered, affected by other forces. So there is some element of failure, there is some element of success,and there is some element of indifference.All those blend to create the picture’s atmosphere.This is the photographer’s good fortune—we need neither urban success nor urban failure. As an architect, you don’t have that freedom.”

Jeff Wall

The city of Rostov-on-Don is a recurring yet mysterious presence in the images of Sergey Sapozhnikov. The artist’s hometown is represented through its absence, evoked by a suburban landscape that has no coordinates and no identity, just another no-man’s-land, a rural space that has turned into a dump for building waste. In a process that apparently inverts this mechanism, the artist picks up these relics and turns them into a performative grammar, a generative process whereby the recombination of ingredients produces ever new configurations, a landscape that takes shape before our very eyes, an unsteady yet powerful architecture, full of vital force. The extreme dynamic energy of these spatial compositions is multiplied by the photographic act, which emphasizes the performative quality, the unstable nature of the construction, and its exuberance, through unrealistic framings, eccentric tones, and multiple exposures.

Knowing the aesthetic vision of Sapozhnikov, I was surprised when he announced that the project he was working on was about a building in his city—first of all because, unexpectedly, he was moving to the middle of the urban space, and also because he was focusing on an architectural object. I found both the subject and the method of architectural photography to be unusual compared to the subjects addressed by most of his works. Yet as I will try to explain, quite on the contrary, this project can be regarded as a true manifesto of Sapozhnikov’s photography, because here the artist gives a conceptual and metaphorical definition of a series of essential themes of his artistic practice.

The Gorky Drama Theater is a symbolical building in the city of Rostov-on-Don, an iconic object in the urban landscape. Its unusual shape, inspired by a mechanical imagery, is highly representative of a historical period in which the most advanced research was invested with the task of aesthetically expressing the project of the emerging Soviet society. Seen in this perspective, the construction condenses both an exceptional formal quality, an image which in and of itself prompts us to look beyond it, and a strongly symbolic value, as the product of an age that saw a particularly intensive interaction between art and politics.

A first reading could be to identify it as a Constructivist-inspiredwork, although at the time of Constructivism, the designers of this project were already being criticized for paying too much attention to form at the expense of functionality, which was the primary, founding principle of Constructivist aesthetics. On the other hand, the Constructivist movement was certainly not united, and its plurality of theoretical viewpoints resulted in a variety of approaches and practices. The designers of the Rostov theater, Shchuko and Gelfreikh, were closer to a Classicist vision, blending their avant-garde heritage with eclectic elements. When, in the mid-1930s, the Soviet revolution evolved into Stalinist totalitarianism and the avant-garde aesthetics was replaced—predictably—by a return to order in the form of plain Classicism, the Gorky Theater, which had just been opened, proved to be fully ensconced in the zeitgeist already inasmuch as it was the product of a hybrid, Janus-faced aesthetics, a blend of styles, visions, and ideologies.

However, as often happens, History had other plans in store for this building, which in 1943 was razed to the ground by retreating Nazi troops. In the 1960s it was rebuilt, its rooms resized and the entire plan redesigned. The passing of time and events have modeled what is a powerful generator of images, which has existed not so much in the particularity of these historical moments, but in the flowing of one into the other, in a constant ambiguity of form and meaning that always leaves it open to new readings. I believe that what seduced the artist is precisely this ever-changing identity of the Gorky Theater, which inspired him to develop a multifaceted project, beginning with the building’s current appearance and the events relatedto it, to develop a sophisticated narrative, a dramaturgy capable of evoking the spirit of this space and its poetics, as a place of representation that is itself, simultaneously, a mirror of utopias, dreams, failures, and rebirths.

The approach the artist chose is indeed peculiar if we think of the popularity of documentary-style architectural photography, particularlythe recent interest in the architectural heritage of the Soviet era.In this sense, it is worth mentioning Richard Pare’s germane Lost Vanguard. Russian Modernist Architecture 1922–1932 exhibition, one of the most wide- ranging overviews of the topic. One of Pare’s aims was to expose the poor conditions of so many important buildings, and which would therefore require preservation work. Pare’s rigorous, factual gaze is in stark contrast with more recent works, which share a rather controversial tendency to attribute aesthetic value to decadence, in a contradictory approach that combines splendor and misery, celebration and social criticism. A photographic fascination for ruins was born with photography itself, yet these images betray a voyeuristic taste for disintegration which says very little about the aesthetic and ideological rationale behind these works, or about why they should be preserved and valued. Which is precisely what Sergey Sapozhnikov’s project does.

The starting point is a form, an envelope, a (sur)face. How, the artist wonders, can a building be designed to look like a tractor? Industrial and machine imagery then dominated experimental art, providing a major leitmotiv from the very inception of Constructivism.

An interesting comparison could be made with the work of the artsists Georgy and Vladimir Stenberg, two Russian brothers of Swedish origin who helped to pioneer the first Constructivist group and were included in the celebrated OBMOKhU show in 1921. This exhibition introduced ground-breaking “spatial constructions,” a new conception of artwork that definitively broke with the tradition of painting and sculpture and took space itself as its expressive material. The Stenberg brothers’ works used industrial materials such as iron, glass, and wood, and deployed industrial construction and assembling techniques. These objects included engineering structures, figures shaped by forces in static tension, and visualizations of the most advanced civil engineering theories from bridges to cranes to towers.

The Stenbergs’ approach was considered problematic for reasons similar to those put forward for architects Shchuko and Gelfreikh a decade later—that is, for expressing an idea of construction that was more iconographical than “deductive or procedural.” In fact, as has already been noted, their structures were not just experiments in form, but were also conceived as exploratory work for the construction of real buildings. Seen in this perspective, abstraction pertains to the object of representation itself rather than being a procedure for building the image. This ambiguity has generated a broad area, a field full of suggestions that Sapozhnikov sets out to explore in all its complexity, adopting a plethora of different points of view and roles.

The eye of the artist cautiously approaches this narrative, with the help of a stylistic filter, a linguistic mediation that is intended as a homage to another protagonist of that period, Alexander Rodchenko, who was also featured in the 1921 exhibition with his spatial constructions. Sapozhnikov evokes Rodchenko through the latter’s well-known use of unusual framing techniques, oblique lines, and light manipulation—a linguistic toolkit that was indeed the product of his sculptural experiments, an aestheticof dynamism which rejected the classical view of “photography from the belly-button” in favor of a visual perception that responded to the stimuli of contemporary urban space. “The contemporary city with its multistory buildings, specially erected factories, plants, etc., two-to three-story- high windows, trams, automobiles, light and space advertisements, ocean liners, airplanes—[...] all of this [...] has shifted the customary psychology of visual perception.” As if he were looking through the eyes of the great Constructivist artist, Sapozhnikov portrays the Gorky Theater by constructing hermetic views, which prevent a clear “reading” of the building, an overall glimpse of its formal unity as well as the context itis placed in.

The photographic language, on the other hand, emphasizes the fragmentary aspect, the geometric component, the “engraving” of volumes in space through lines, the play of reflections and the dialectics between opaque and transparent, full and empty, and light and shadow. Sapozhnikov therefore seeks to achieve temporal and aesthetic harmony with the object of his observation, in a sort of philological approach to documentation whose purpose is simultaneously contradicted by the strongly abstract quality of the image. It is as if the artist, in these photographs, were looking for the answer to a riddle that the building asked him, and yet only ended up reenacting its magic, its irreducible mystery.

In a way, this is precisely what distances Sapozhnikov from the object of his quest and leads him elsewhere, to experiment with a form, inspired by theater architecture, which allows him to further develop his enquiry. Thus a process starts, a story that unfolds in pictures. The ensuing actis an architectural, or, rather, a theatrical gesture. The artist builds a set, an ideal stage, in the middle of which stands a sharp silhouette of a structure, which is nothing but a double of the theater itself, an old tractor, on whose sides we see an apparently random heap of various recycled materials, mostly wood and fabric. This mise-en-scène is typicalof Sapozhnikov’s practice, which is always characterized by a strong sculptural/installational component that he organizes especially for his photo shoots. This procedure is not directly aimed at questioning the assumed truthfulness of the photographic medium, as is the case with artists who portray, in an apparently documentary-like style, what is in fact a manipulated reality, created specifically for the camera. This is a major research trend in more artistically-oriented photography. Though pursued since the 1980s by American artists belonging to the Pictures Generation, from James Casebere to James Welling, it is also central in the poetics of other contemporary photographers, from Jeff Wall to Thomas Demand. However, there is no illusionistic intention here—the “made-up” quality of the scene is evident, the artifice on display in both subject and expression. In fact, what the artist does is create a richer reality for himself in order to explore it visually, to build and rebuild it in the form of images, througha play of perspectives, a variety of textures and colors and, not least, through performance. All these elements come together to generatean image that maintains some distance from its referent—the point is not to recognize an external reality, however artificial, but to build internal relationships, constantly renegotiating, even within the same photograph, the notion of abstraction.

This becomes evident if we go back to the series we are examining, where the initial aim is to give concrete shape to the metaphor of the tractor, developing an installation that manipulates elements of Constructivist grammar, and deliberately does so in a way that is more visual than conceptual. A black-and-white shot adopts a more documentary- style approach, providing an unmediated reading of the building that stands in the middle of a rural landscape and is silhouetted against it. But here distance is already being reduced: the camera approaches and the vision becomes more complex, the landscape more chaotic. The initial apparently formal readability of the structure, itself an abstraction, is contradicted by a reality where relics accumulate chaotically, forming a heap of materials upon which the nimble bodies of the performers move smoothly.

What comes to mind is, once more, images from the above mentioned 1921 Constructivist exhibition, where the overall view of the hall, full of spatial constructions made it very difficult to identify single works—which appeared more like skeletal, angular structures—thus resulting in a rather chaotic, tangled general view. Similarly, a photo by Rodchenko of his constructions dating from the same year is evoked by the accumulation of wooden structures, grids, and various overlapping compositions of lines and planes. What makes a difference, and adds complexity to the works, is the fact that the compositional elements Sapozhnikov uses here are already partly constructed, mounted, used, and discarded. They are pallets, parts of interior architectures such as mullions decorated with moldings, recycled beams, parts of crates, and boxes still bearing written signs of their previous use. These are not neutral materials, but everyday objects with their own history and symbolical value. They are complemented by textiles and fabrics—drapes, carpets, terry cloth—whose central function in the composition is to provide a counterpoint to the stiffness of the wooden planks, add curves to the straight lines, and also introduce new textures and hues to interrupt the optical homogeneity of wood. The use of these materials allows the artist to perform specific formal actions while building his image, and it is these procedures (such as folding, wrapping, or throwing away) that in turn become the subject of photography. At the same time, the iconographic element is also significant, if we consider, for instance, the association of fabrics with the home on the one hand and of curtains with the theater on the other. Yet while the iconographic reference seems to take us back to the domain of representation, the latter is undermined by a look which focuses instead on purely physical qualities, and on the various ways in which these can be turned into images.

This architecture, then, which in the artist’s imagination was inspired by the shape of the theater, offers itself as a set, a stage space ready for representation. Constructivist experiments in stage design are therefore necessary referents. As has been noted, in the 1920s in particular, theater gave avant-garde artists and architects the opportunity to build microenvironments, thus creating, albeit on a smaller scale, spacesand constructions the real world was not yet ready to accept. A highly representative example (and an iconographic reference) are the projects of Liubov Popova, such as the set of The Magnanimous Cuckhold, directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold in 1922 in Moscow. Here the set becomes a scene machine, a huge skeleton-like apparatus that reveals its structure, a tangle of platforms, staircases, and scaffolding inspired by urban imagery. However, what is most noteworthy is the relationship between stage apparatus and stage action, as revealed by Meyerhold, who admitted that the Constructivist set had influenced his own direction.

This close interdependence between installation and performance is a central element of Sapozhnikov’s poetics. The way he works with performers, and these in turn establish a physical relationship with the space that has been prepared for them, are essential in this work. Typically, the actors are young dancers, and their movements are drawn from contemporary dance, breakdance, and the pop and underground aesthetic. As the artist explains, one of the first reference points when working with models was skateboard culture, in particular what is referred to as figures, or tricks, in which the skater’s movement are frozen in a particular configuration, turning the body into a sign, as in a film still, or indeed into a photographic shot that interrupts and halts the body’s dynamism. What characterizes the performer’s figures is their being artificial, “antinatural” gymnastic virtuosity, which forces their body into bizarre postures. In a well-known passage on the subject of Gestus, Jeff Wall observes that whereas in the past, especially in the Baroque period, bodily gestures were infused with a strongly dramatic expressiveness, in Modern times, on the contrary, the body expressesa relationship with machines and the mechanized space of cities.“The ceremoniousness, the energy, and the sensuousness of the gestures of Baroque art are replaced in modernity by mechanistic movements, reflex actions, involuntary, compulsive responses. Reduced to the level of emissions of biomechanical or bioelectric energy, these actions are not really ‘gestures’ in the sense developed by older aesthetics.”

These considerations obviously take us again back in time, again to Meyerhold. He had developed an acting system which he had dubbed biomechanics, where psychological realism gave way to an impersonal, scientific, and mechanical approach to interpretation. The physical qualities of the actor were given more importance than words or the script.

Meyerhold used gesture to present movement: movement that signified, movement structure to present a possibility, a virtuality, an idea. This is a social act. Two gestures are involved, and the primary one is the gesture of presentation: the act of indicating and defining the gesture as gesture. It is this doubleness that defines theatrical gesture: the primary gesture surrounds the secondary one with a stillness in which it is figured forth with lambent clarity. How is that stillness created? By structuring gesture; presenting it in space, but in a moment removed from time; presenting it, that is, in a tableau: a moment clearly part of a flux but perceived as being outside of it, no matter how briefly. Time must therefore be articulated within space in a way that permits the possibility of slowing time, to the point of making it stand still.

I have quoted this passage in full because I think it contains several clues and suggestions on how to read Sapozhnikov’s works. Writing about him some years ago, I talked specifically about his incessant search for equilibrium, his effort to balance structures that are perpetually on the verge of collapsing, and the artificiality of human bodies holding poses full of supple energy and dynamic tension. Moving from theater to photography, Schmidt’s words on Meyerhold are particularly significant, acquiring a certain materiality, especially in regard to the notion of decelerated, frozen time, effected by the photographic shot that halts the performer’s gestures as in a tableau, thus staging the paradoxical status of photography, poised as it is between “live evidence” and “deadening artifact.” In the works of Sapozhnikov this paradox is emphasized especially by the disintegration process the artist sets in motion, through which the dismembered, disjointed bodies of the performers plunge into a state of indefiniteness between organic and inorganic, animate and inanimate, living and dead. The photographer’s gaze thus metamorphoses the event, subtracting it from the flow of time and distilling it into a series of tableaux, where movements become figures which, however, are always unsteady and never definite.

This procedure emerges with the greatest clarity in the night shots series. Here the artist employs very basic theatrical equipment—floodlights and fog machines—to create a surreal, vaguely disquieting atmosphere evocative of narrative suggestions. The style is overly dramatic and the tone emphatic; the artist displays his skill at manipulating perspective, light, and color effects, using them with a painter’s mastery. The actors pop up, ghostlike presences or fleeting apparitions, while the stage is dominated by the tractor—transfigured, mysterious, almost mythical. The tension inherent in the performative scene reflects onto the photographer, whose relationship with the subject translates into multiple viewpoints, emphasizing the dynamic nature of the photo-shooting process. The Sapozhnikov’s gaze is directed within the scene, inhabiting it, moving around it. It moves in closer and then steps away, its style decidedly cinematic. This dizziness of vision reinforces the constructed nature of the image, its being a representation, a language, a mediation: in shaping the indeterminate space between reference and abstraction, narration and formalism, Sapozhnikov experiments with all possible combinatory properties, and ultimately with the very nature of the photographic image.

The following series, created the day after the night shots, developsa visual exploration that centers on structure, definitely veering towards abstraction. The actors have left the stage, a thick blanket of snow has covered the building, whose vibrant colors stand out like expressionist brushstrokes amid the dazzling whiteness of the landscape. The photographer–artist engages in a duel with the sculptor–artist, vivisecting the work in a sequence of shots that seem to multiply to infinity the expressive possibilities of the object, showing “what the eye does not see,” to cite Osip Brik’s famous formula. Observers are encouraged to drift among these images, gradually discovering their details, stepping inside their dizzying perspectives, and appreciating their different material substance, the play of volumes and lines.

Yet while this group of photos seems to accelerate the process of moving away from the photographic referent, the production of several series in succession emphasizes the narrative quality of the work, its connection with a specific temporal dimension. The passing of time, from night to day, from winter to summer, becomes a central metaphor that pertains not only to the relation between photography and memory but also, more specifically, to architecture and its existence in time and History. It is as if the artist, by expanding his project beyond the customary, coming back to it over days, months, and seasons, wanted to convey an idea of growth, aging, and transformation. This is why he stopped working on his construction for such a long time, letting it live its own life, change, even fall to pieces and go to wrack and ruin, thus simulating the process which all human artifacts must naturally go through. After the winter shots, he resumed work on a new chapter in the summer, beginning with another sculptural–installational intervention. What Sapozhnikov came up with was a composition made of wood fillets, strongly inspired by spatial Constructivist compositions, although this language is cross-fertilized with one of his typical materials, the inflatable multicolored mattresses that crop up in so many of his works. It would be very hard, maybe even pointless, to try to describe this composition, abstracting from the multiple forms it takes through the various stages of the photo-shooting. The structure is indeed subject to change, mobile, and the artist uses it to create a series of situations, performative scenes, and temporary configurations of reality for photographing purposes. In some of the photographs the new form “melts” onto and over the previous one or, rather, lands on it, enwrapping it, taking on the appearance of a parasitic organism. The sheer abundance of volumes, lines, colors, textures, lights, and shadows makes these images an inexhaustible visual source. The thick, wild vegetation that has grown out of the solid-white layer of snow is a new element in the scene, which the artist highlights through a subtle, painterly use of light. It is as if Sapozhnikov were staging an unlikely encounter between Romantic landscape painting and Constructivist world reconstruction, ironically combining easelism and productivism. He plays with historical references, stylistic registers, and genres, while constantly bringing to the fore the theme of the image as the result of linguistic articulation. The choice of unusual perspectives is also hyperbolic, thanks to the use of a platform that allowed him to photograph the scene from a height of over ten meters. An impossible, nonhuman gaze from above, emphasizing the artificial, performative nature of the photographic act as well as the theatrical quality of a world that only exists to be photographed, and never ceases to remind us of this.

A crane—yet another machine—lifts the construction up into the air, making it hover above a pool. The structure is now moving, free to dance, and its physical substance is made increasingly volatile and evanescent by the play of lights and refraction, the luminous intensity of a summer sunset. We get a strong impression that this ghostlike apparition is about to vanish, or that it is decomposing, turning into an undifferentiated mass of forms and colors. The artist constantly emphasizes the transitory nature of the event and the immediate nature of these images, the fact that they record a specific moment in time, a fleeting event.

Sapozhnikov especially explores this particular aspect with Polaroids, which he uses alongside other photographic media. He often uses Polaroids to document the preliminary stages of set designs, to keep track of the process, and to experiment in view of the definitive shot. In some cases, however, these Polaroids acquire the status of finished works in their own right, while retaining their factual quality as irreducible, nonfalsifiable records of a past moment. A couple of photographs take on sepia tones, clearly a reference to the idea of obsoleteness, nostalgia, and outmodedness. But the main series consists of a new set of night shots, where we are once again offered stark contrasts and a pitch black background from which emerge silhouettes and immaculate forms that are sometimes backlit, as if we were looking at an X-ray. If Polaroids can be seen as documents, then these are documents of dreams, visions, and disturbing apparitions.

A similarly disquieting atmosphere pervades the Polaroids the artist took inside the Gorky Theater during the final stage of his project. It is as if he wanted to go back to his starting point, the object of his desire, but look at it from the inside, or perhaps even look through it. His eye sets on details, interior decor, and design. The small format suggests a miniaturized world, full of suspense or desolate foreshadowing. These photos are fragments of a potential story, but they are also real clues that point to a conflicting past and a disturbing present. Although the artist mostly assigns a documentary, serviceable function to these images, at the same time they sum up the whole process quite accurately, showing the peculiar approach that Sapozhnikov adopted to portray the Gorky Theater. Confronted with an iconic image, he chose not to create a new one, in the form of a perfect, finished photographic image, but to dismantle the presumed unity of the icon, fragmenting it into a variety of visions, versions, and senses. This process is perfectly suited to the object of inquiry, an architectural work which, ever since its conception and throughout its entire existence, has found itself in the middle of a conflicting field of forces—aesthetic, political, and historical. This dynamic interaction—which still manages to fascinate us as the work is still alive and under way—is transfigured by an aesthetic method that relies on multiplicity, complexity, and a constant redefinition of the very status of the image. On the one hand, photography is subject to constant hybridization with other genres—architecture, sculpture, theater, performance, painting—a contamination that concerns both the working process and the language used; on the other hand, the artist never ceases to reaffirm the specificity of the photographic medium by working exhaustively and rigorously on its techniques, processes, and codes, giving life to myriad diverging, or even apparently irreconcilable, forms. Sapozhnikov’s project lives within this contradiction, and even reclaims it as a condition that is peculiar to the art image, whose aim should be to critically investigate and explore what we do not understand rather than to reassuringly celebrate what we think we do.