Museology, Kazakh-style

The cover of A. Nakov's "Avant-garde," 1991, through which I'm currently making my way.

I spend at least one day a week at the State Museum of the Arts named after A. Kasteyev (a direct translation of the name from the Russian); in exchange for some translation work, the museum staff allow me to poke around their vaults and library. This is how I’ve been doing my art historical research.

What I love second-most about working in Almaty’s libraries and archives are the old Soviet books. First, there is the feel and look of the books. Like everything else, paper was scarce throughout the USSR, and no one had much spare money with which to buy books anyway. Therefore, books had to be made as cheap as possible by printing in small fonts, reducing the margins to all but nothing and using thin, poor-quality paper. Today, these books feel so light and so dry in my hands; if I turn a page too quickly, I’m libel to rip it; and in many books there is an overwhelming volume of teeny-tiny language squeezed onto each page.

Second, there is the language. Unfortunately, a majority of the books I’ve read – and this is true even of all but the best of post-Soviet publications – recycle ideas, arguments and vocabulary in a very formulaic and uninteresting way. However, every so often I stumble across incredible Soviet ideological tracts. Contemporary local art historians don’t even bother with these books anymore, disregarding them as Marxist-Leninist garbage. But to me, these are fascinating windows into how the Soviet system worked (or was at least meant to work, according to Moscow).

For example, I was reading Methodological Questions regarding the Planning of Exhibitions in Regional Art Museums (M. Gorelov, 1967) and found the following passage regarding how to “deal” with art from the Soviet 1920s (by way of brief background: Soviet art in the early 1920s was very radical and progressive. It became less so throughout the decade and, in the 1930s, was rejected as “formalist.” Art of the 1920s was subsequently almost never shown or researched, which is why Nakov’s 1991 book about the avant-garde was a breakthrough study, despite being 70 years late):

The question of whether it is necessary, in exhibitions of the 1920s, to show the works of the formalist school alongside the fundamental creations of [Soviet] realism should be addressed. Such a question belongs in front of art historians. Before curators of this department [Soviet art] lies a different task: to realize mass aesthetic education about the world’s most pioneering and progressive art – that is, Soviet Socialist Realism.

This is entirely in keeping with the Soviet conception of the role of museums. They were buildings solely devoted to propagandistic education, and as such, had to answer all questions instead of asking them. To this end, museums couldn’t leave gaps. Another author relates that in the early 1930s, when many Soviet museums lacked sufficient holdings to cover all relevant events, the museums were instructed simply to resort to text to get the message across. That’d be like walking through a book.

For his part, Gorelov goes on to suggest that the space devoted to the 1920s in any chronological exhibition of Soviet art should be filled either with non-controversial forms of art, such as wartime propaganda posters, or with art from other decades by artists who “captured the sense” of the 1920s or “began to realize their potential” in that decade. He sums it up:

In this view, the date of a work’s creation may accent time in an exhibition, but should not pretend to be the only criteria by which one is permitted to divide artists by period.

Really? That is some contorted logic, although I guess it should come as no surprise that Soviet museums were big on re-writing history in their own vision.

The cover of "Methods," 1967.

You might be wondering what I love most about working in the museum. I offer you a description by way of explanation: last Friday I arrived, as usual, around 10am. I went straight the library and began to read. Around twelve-thirty, as usual, the library closed for lunch for an hour and a half. But don’t worry, I wasn’t left with nothing to do: upon going back to the room in which I have a desk, I discovered it was a co-worker’s birthday, and she was setting up a birthday lunch. Of course, I was invited to join, and within fifteen minutes we had a lot of food and drink on the table: savory pies, Korean salads, biscuits, tea – and wine and cognac.

As far as I know, it is obligatory at birthdays for everyone to toast the birthday boy or girl (man or woman) and then drink. Regardless of my protests that wine and cognac would put me to sleep, I was plied with both and scolded when I didn’t clean my cup after each toast. As the only man at the table, the women wouldn’t drink unless I was, and I didn’t want to spoil the birthday celebrations.

We finished the meal around three and washed up. I should say they cleaned up, though, because (again), as a man, I am not really permitted to clear or clean any of the dishes. Instead I went back to my desk and, unsurprisingly, fell asleep. I woke up about half an hour later, no one else appeared to be doing much work, so I decided it was time to leave. It was, after all, a Friday afternoon.

"The Reading Girl," by S. Kalmikov, 1940, in the Kasteyev's collection.

But this repeated itself on Monday…

I should note, however, that I have the utmost respect for many of the staff at the Kasteyev. They are grossly under-paid and manage an impressive collection with minimal resources (the museum doesn’t even have an electronic catalog). Despite holding PhDs in art history or theory, many of the staff also works at least one job outside of their full-time employment. On birthdays they drink not because they are lazy, but because, I suspect, at times the museum simply can’t fund more activity.

Clearly, I offer this as the “aspect I love most” about working at the museum ironically. The Kasteyev is probably my favorite place in Almaty both because of the people and it’s intellectual and artistic heritage. The history of the collection and those of almost each and every one of the paintings in it are fascinating. (I’m working on a longer piece about this for publication.) It is therefore sad to discover how besieged the museum is with financial and political problems, leading the staff to turn to drink…

Washingtonskii Obkom

Zhirinovsky

With the Russian presidential elections just around the corner and Putin appearing weak, the opposition candidates are really up in arms and out in full force. One of my favorites to watch is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a bulldog of a man and the leader of the Liberal-Democratic Party… which, to judging from his pronouncements, really doesn’t deserve either of those adjectives. He’s a fairly outspoken racist and Greater Russian irredentist, once even calling for the re-annexation of Alaska as a place to which to deport the Ukrainians. Yeah. It’s him Sarah Palin should be watching for.

Zhirinovsky (via nightly news coverage) also introduced me to my new favorite term: “Washingtonskii obkom” (“вашингтонский обком”). “Washingtonskii” is the adjectival form of Washington, referring of course to the American capital, and “obkom” refers to the “oblastnoi komitet” (областной комитет or county committee). These were the fundamental building blocks of the Soviet political structure – each oblast of the Soviet Union was run by a committee of bureaucrats organized in a hierarchy depending on the importance of the county or city, the Moscow obkom being the most important of all.

As you may have guessed, the phrase is a pejorative reference to what some Russians believe is Washington’s interference in global affairs made possible by its all-seeing, all-knowing totalitarianism in the post-Cold War world order. Zhirinovsky recently hurled it at two of his presidential-race opponents after they were seen having a meeting with the US ambassador in Moscow during the anti-Putin protests there. I think it’s very humorous, and perhaps an apt metaphor for certain offices of the US federal government. The DMV in Hamden, CT., at least, might be the closest one can get these days to a simulacrum of Soviet life under Brezhnev.

China “and” Eurasia?

Photo of a young Mugat man taken by Sema Balaman. For more of her work and those of her collaborators, I've provided a link below.

In the American imagination, China is often considered linked to, but separate from, Eurasia. Hence the title of one relatively well-known academic international relations journal: The China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly. That “and” joins two discrete entities.  By tradition, Eurasia includes Central Asia, Mongolia and Russia (what Russian’s consider Eurasia – essentially the boundaries of the Soviet Union), while others might also include the Persian world (Iran and Afghanistan. British adventurers and novelists of the 19th century primarily meant Afghanistan when they spoke about Central Asia). The ambiguity reflects the fact that “Eurasia” – as a place, as a political possibility and as an idea – remains poorly defined and understood.

But geographically, at least, China is part of the Europe-Asia landmass, and with time, it is expanding its interests and activities into the more definitively Eurasian countries. It isn’t hard to find mention of China’s pipelines, roads and railways linking it to both Mongolia, Asiatic Russia (Eastern Siberia) and Central Asia. China may even be stealthily funding a pipeline connecting itself to Iran via Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. But what is more striking to me is that China is also more or less literally expanding into Central Asia by both obtaining land-use rights and the outright acquisition of more territory through concessions.

In the last year, China has twice gained land from neighboring – and very poor – Tajikistan. In the first instance, China and Tajikistan finally resolved a long-standing land dispute such that the smaller country conceded 1,000 sq km of mostly unexplored and potentially mineral-rich land to the larger; then, just a few days ago, Tajikistan’s parliament leased a further 20 sq km to Chinese farmers. Although initially  only Tajiks were to be permitted to work the Chinese-leased land, the government in Dushanbe subsequently reversed that decision and will allow Chinese to farm directly.

The Chinese proposed a similar arrangement in Kazakhstan several years ago: Beijing wanted to lease 10,000 sq km from Astana for 99 years. Uncharacteristically, Kazakhs took to the streets in response, and the government backed away from the deal. Therefore, China is quite concretely, if slowly, becoming a Eurasian country.

In other ways as well, China’s presence is increasingly felt throughout Eurasia. The bazaars of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are flooded with cheap Chinese-made goods, and Chinese laborers build and rebuild roads, pipelines and other infrastructural projects throughout the region. Moreover, now that Kazakhstan and Russia are joined in a tariff-free Customs Union and Russia has joined the WTO (similarly, WTO-member Kyrgyzstan may soon join the Customs Union), it seems the Chinese goods may soon gain easy entry into Kazakhstan – and capitals as distant as Kiev and Minsk. Therefore, China is also expanding economically – and notionally – across the corpus of traditional Eurasia.

I am unaware if modern China has ever thought of itself as a Eurasian empire or whether there is a Eurasian school in China as there has been in Russia. Russian Eurasianism, for all its Russian exceptionalism, was and is rooted in a Euro-centric mode of thinking. Its aim, as I understand it, was to alter Russians’ perceptions of themselves as European by reorienting their sense of place vis-a-vis neighboring countries and cultures. By contrast, a Chinese Eurasianism would naturally be anchored in the East and urging the Chinese to shift their identity towards the West. The important question is: if so, is Chinese expansion into Eurasia imagined as conquest or collaboration?

On the one hand, although Genghis Khan’s Mongol conquests were undoubtedly brutal, they created a massive Eurasian empire that stimulated trade and movement across great distances and many cultures; certainly the influences of the Central Asian and Persian worlds were felt in Eastern China. One material example is the import of lapis lazuli, with which Ming dynasty ceramicists were able to achieve the stunning hues of blue-and-white pottery. One imagines that this fundamentally transformed East Asians’ sense of their placement on the globe and tied them much more to the cultures to their west. Much later, in the 1920s, Chinese reformist thinking also looked very much to recreating China in the image of the Euro-American West.

However, I feel it is perhaps too optimistic to imagine that a Chinese Eurasianism advocates a syncretic harmonizing of different cultures, of East and West, that one finds in the mystic (if patronizing) elements of Russian Eurasianism. The logic of “the Middle Kingdom,” China’s control of McKinder’s geopolitical “pivot” (Central Asia and Tibet) and contemporary nationalism each in their own way suggest the expansion of China’s political and cultural influence is likely to be conquest.

Which is why many Central Asians (although far from all) are afraid of China’s growth. Not everyone here is convinced they have a place in China’s potential Eurasia.

And finally, here is a link to more of Sema Balaman’s work on the Mugat people of Central and South Asia.

Lenin’s Saying

We not only “removed heads”… we also enlightened them.

- Lenin,  said to Klara Tsetkin in a 1920 interview.

"Listening to the Gramophone," N. G. Karakhan, 1935. Karakhan, an Uzbek, painted this work during a severe famine in Central Asia and after a similar catastrophe in Ukraine. It hangs in the Tashkent museum of fine arts.