1994 'Ten Years of Uzbekistan'

A review by Charles Hall, Art Review, June, London

Ten Years of Uzbekistan

Suddenly everyone's making and showing Artist's Books. They may represent the year's hottest movement - but what exactly are they? Charles Hall reads 'Between the Lines'. The marriage between artists and books hasn't always been a happy one. Bibliophiles still shudder at the recollection of one piece of celebrated performance art, in which John Latham took a copy of a book by Clement Greenberg, the influential American critic, chewed it up, spat it out, and returned the fermenting residue to the St Martin's Library in a bottle.

You might say this was simple vandalism, but it certainly lodged in the mind - Greenberg's book, originally just the thoughts of one fallible individual, had become a classic, not to be read, but to be swallowed whole. Given Greenberg's hostility to less conventional forms of contemporary art, Latham's performance was a rather more coherent protest than might at first be imagined. The book itself, in it's new form, neatly distilled two utterly immiscible attitudes to art. Maybe it's our Protestant past (In the Beginning was the Word), but the British remain an unshakeably bookish lot. But a book (even a dictionary) is much more than a lot of words crowded between two covers. So many decisions have gone into its production that it's quite possible to extract disturbing amounts of information about its purpose, status and history long before you do anything so obvious as to read it. Is it a size to slip into a pocket, or to be dis- played on special table in a college library? Is it printed on vellum, hand-made paper, or recycled newsprint? Is the cover adorned by a purplish illustration of a woman in dark glasses, complemented by the author's name in raised gold italics? Each of these decisions relates not to the apparent content of the book so much as to the way its makers imagine it being received in the culture at large. And all of us know, almost automatically, how to read these signs in focusing our attention upon the kind of book we imagine ourselves enjoying - be it the airport novel, the satirical romp or the heavyweight political biography. But this cross-over between the literary content and physical substance of the book opens up a fascinating field of activity for the contemporary artist. It is, of course, nothing new to find artists bringing together their work (or reproductions of their work) in Handsome Volumes, but now we are seeing increasing numbers of artist making books which are to be considered art works in their own right. The conventional art world is only just waking up to the fact that there is in this country a whole population of specialist artists, printers, publishers, dealers and collectors, about whom it knows practically nothing - but which enjoys a world-wide reputation for the beauty, breadth and sophistication of its production.

Breadth is, in fact, one of the problems confronting any new convert to the cause. The Book attracts artists from right across the aesthetic spectrum, from the letterpress craftsmen, painstakingly fashioning works which, in text and image, reflect affection and respect for things done well and slowly, to the photo-copying deconstructionists, for whom all things are so laden with potential significance that no bus ticket or sweet wrapper is too humble to find a place in the documentation of nervous, urban lives. Some, like Julia Farrer, produce works of astonishing visual beauty, which use the act of turning the page to control our discovery of different aspects of her ambitious compositions, and the relationships between the component parts; others, like the artists promoted by Book- Works, tend to make their understanding of the act of reading the very matter of their books. For them, life is a matter of Making Sense, and the texts and images they produce, and the tenuous relationships we discern between them, lead us obliquely into narratives in which, rather than falling in and out of love, the protagonists seem to be fading in and out of earshot.

One recent book, though, seems to me to crystallise the complex possibilities and attractions of this new and sometimes chaotic art.

'Ten Years of Uzbekistan' is like so many of our best Artists' Books, a collaborative work: here the text is contributed by David King and the images by Ken Campbell. The result is that one feels both partners have been able to edit the other's contribution down to the least necessary, allowing the viewer to recon- struct something powerful and beautiful from the remnants. And reconstruction is at the very heart of the book, of its subject matter and its technique. We find our way into the book rather slowly. The first pages are all-but blank, dominated by rich colours (notably a beautiful, deep but somehow acidic purple), mottled and marbled with other, as if corroded or polluted, each page dominated by broad, flat frame, which simply emphasises the emptiness of what is surrounded; it's a little like being confronted with a precious silver photo-frame, still testifying to the preciousness of an image which has long since faded into blankness. Even the title, when we eventually reach it, is hard to read, printed in almost the same colour as the background, and partially obliterated by dark rectangles, like the stickers sometimes used by censors; we can just read the impression, coming through from the next page, of the ominous phrase 'Here we die for it". As yet, we have no way of making sense of what is, in fact, a sardonic Russian comment on the dangers of poetry.

David King's text is largely given over to the subject of memorials of one kind or another - though he never makes explicit the link he is hoping to make between Tamerlane's pyramid of 70,000 skulls and the monument to KGB founder 'Iron Felix' Dzerhinsky. They, like the interpolated fragments of de-scription of the torture of political prisoners in Soviet gaols, begin to suggest the way in which actions or objects which ought, on the face of it, to be clearly legible, can take on wholly new meaning s over time: Tamerlane, once an epic leader, is now simply a monster; Dzerhinsky's monument was among the first to be toppled with the end of Communist power in Russia - the plinth is now adorned with crosses; and the purge of dissidents yielded, at this distance in time, undeniable evidence of the shoddiness of the regime which enforced it.

Which brings us to the inspiration for the book. In 1934, Rodchenko, one of the heroic figures of that period when the Soviet revolution inspired and tolerated an equally radical avant-garde art, was barely clinging onto the margins of accept- ability (not a healthy position in Stalin's Russia). He was, nevertheless, commissioned to produce a book celebrating the achievements of ten years of Soviet rule in Uzbekistan, but by the time his compendium of mug shots of local luminaries and cheering but doubtful statistics was completed, the artist found to his horror that many of his sitters were now persona non grata (one was convicted of "putting nails in the masses' butter with a view to undermining Soviet health"). Realising the danger he was in, Rodchenko embarked on a little orgy of self-censorship, using thick black printer's ink to obliterate the unaccept-able faces.

This has been Campbell's starting point, and many of the images in the book derive, more or less directly from these startlingly defaced images - King, we are told, visited Rodchenko's studios (where his family still live, in drastically reduced circumstances), and found them lying amongst untouched papers. Often, in the book, the obscured head is printed with a biographical note, detailing the individual's accomplishments and fate; sometimes the sense of loss is compounded by the blankness of the entry 'Exact Fate Unknown". Sometimes we begin to suspect that the same head has appeared more then once, with different names. Karimov's blacked-out face creates a black hole so profound that we feel almost anything could be projected onto it, and this begins to emerge as the dominant theme of the whole publication - the one photo has appeared as a symbol of all that is good, and then becomes the repository (with equal lack of justice) of all that is unforgivable. Each individual is forced to accept some ludicrous crime, often re-writing a whole life's work - one is said to have been "a Tsarist agent since 1911". And Rodchenko's desperate self- censorship, an act of supreme obeisance and homage to the truth of the system, becomes a poignant document of the ghastliness of a predicament so profound that even Stalin's own 'On the Opposition' was no longer a safe possession.

Towards the end of the book, it is Stalin's own silhouette which dominates, before we fade away again into blankness - only now, with our newly anxious eyes, we no longer see these blank pages as innocently empty, Photographic details, shadows of features, seem to float indecipherably, irrecoverably in the depths. The melancholy experience of turning the last few sheets, when we are told nothing new but still find ourselves saturated in the atmosphere of what has gone before, is something akin to the feeling of walking out of a theatre after a truly exceptional production, when no-one in the audience can quite bring themselves to break into conversation.

This, like many other contemporary Artists' Books, is a stunningly beautiful physical object. But it is more than that. The controlled disruption of words and images, the effort of restoring some kind of sense to them, is a recurrent theme in the genre - it forces us to recognise the Word, once the beginning and end of our culture, the highest source of authority, as an object, as subject to the vicissitudes of interpretation as the most wilfully obscure of abstract images. But 'Ten Years of Uzbekistan' is rare in unearthing, in this intellectual concern, the pathos of our attempts to impose some kind of stable truth upon our experience. Our struggle against the erasure of meaning and identity is as natural, as touching, and in the end as inevitably fruitless, as is the battle against death itself.

Charles Hall
Art Review, London June 1994