The flesh is a full, profuse safari. Its substance is meatier then mere muscle and skin. Beneath all the layers, connective tissues coerce a structure of exploration for what is deeper; what lies inside the human body. Such things are made of concepts and explorations. In Bill Durgin’s Figure as Ground, up through October 29th at New York’s Station Independent Projects, there live ideas and realizations of what the body, and photography, are capable of. Parts and tools are bigger than themselves and in the hands of Durgin they become advanced discoveries. There is a consumption of colors and qualities, hypnotic façades. Men and women are not obliterated—they are repurposed.

The grips of misdirection besiege the fine constructions of Durgin. Gender is a gesture; in his work it is superseded by collage and construction. Tools of craft are catered in the complex act of simplifying his compositions. The body has consumed Durgin for a great portion of his life, as has photography. He builds stuff, suited for various forms of consumption, reflection, and visual literacy. There is a balancing benefit of reward and work for viewers to engage. Can color erect an adaptive narrative? Not without realizing that all the answers are in the frames. There is a push of difference between looking at something as opposed to taking the time to see what you realize in it. Durgin’s work is personal, not solely for himself. There is no outside of the frame, inside is where the challenge of fantasy and focus call attention.

Looking at Durgin’s photos it’s possible to feel where your eyes go. Gravity is a habit broken by the sight and form of his work. The tip of understanding is only on the tongue if you can feel a reaction to something within. Perception is only part of reality. Implements of photography obscure the parts of nudity to make a mosaic that grapple the desire of understanding. Everything is brought together by building and contortion, coupled with a great deal of improvisation. Mixed in with all these choices and trying, the recognition of the body’s potential is inaugurated. The unrecognizable is still somehow familiar. The capacity to develop into something in the future is cast by the endorsements of the past. Durgin plays in all these places.

Oftentimes opposites touch. Sexualized and desexualized, right on the line of attraction and repulsion. All things are balanced on a thin border. That boundary is danced and sculpturally configured. And all the while the photographs push towards the side, the center, up and down. Parts fold into one another layering intimacy and touch, magnetic and peculiar. The world is a stage. Durgin’s work falls somewhere in the realm of hunter and explorer. The strange fruits of newly formed shapes and faces flood the fury of delight and detail in the show. Limbs and torsos, concocted in new ways trigger realizations that outside understanding there is new room, always more, always new ideas. Figure Ground pushes against complacency.

Jon Feinstein: What does it mean to be a New Yorker?

Ruben Natal-San Miguel: A "New Yorker" means a native or inhabitant of New York. It also means the pride and resilience of what most inhabitants possess to make this city one of the most diverse, tolerant and best cities in the world to live in. It is a state of mind.

Feinstein: What does "resilience" mean to you in the context of this work?

Natal-San Miguel: Living here is a constant rollercoaster and a joy ride, just like a subway ride: fast, relentless, 24/7 and you need to know when is time to stop or continue.

Feinstein: You've been photographing all over the city for as long as I've known you. What drives you to certain areas, people, or communities?

Natal-San Miguel: I go to photograph in New York City where nobody dares to go and document people, their most familiar and genuine environment. I like to create environmental portraits in which the people are most comfortable without any pretense and pressure -- the most real and comfortable setting. I never stage my portraits, they are created right at the same exact moment, time date and place where they are found by me. Even the temperature and time are documented.

Feinstein: Have you photographed in all boroughs?

Natal-San Miguel: Yes, I had been photographing all the five boroughs of New York City for over fifteen years and had been in every street and corner of the whole city by now. I go back to most areas year after year to document their changes. It's a lot of work and takes a lot of discipline and dedication but, someone it's got to do it!

Feinstein: You've had several solo shows in New York over the past five years. How does this compare in the work thats included, and in its curation?

Natal-San Miguel: I think this show is a turning point in my work -- the photographs documented become more abstract, more bold, a different aesthetic. I also incorporate different ways to represent the photography as an art media, including photographs with embellishments, silkscreened on fabric, light boxes with backlit photographs and the use of textual signage and name plates to convey and manifest the current times and themes that we are living at the moment in New York City and most of the United States.

Feinstein: The press release describes this exhibition, among other things, as acting as a form of "rebellion." What does that mean to you?

Natal-San Miguel: I'm a rebel. I refuse to be labeled or pigeonholed as a "street photographer ." I do not consider myself one. Yes, I photograph on the streets but, my approach is not of the moment, I do not photograph crowds, my interest is more of the larger environment. Photograph and tell story with images. I'm not looking for that "aha!" or happy accidental moment that most street photographers do.

Feinstein: What path do you think New York City and New Yorkers are signaling to the world?

Natal-San Miguel: We are the most diverse, tolerant, expensive, interesting and one of most densely populated city in the World. We have it all and 25 years later still pinch myself to be part of it. I love New York.

What do you look for in artists when considering representation?

Quality of work, originality, and professionalism. When I planned the gallery roster the artists I chose are all making work that is part of a contemporary art dialogue, yet seems to add to this dialogue rather than be derivative. One specific example is William Crump (appearing in WTP Vol. V #9), whose work reminds me of French painting from the turn of the century, though his is of an utterly contemporary hybrid of painting, collage, drawing, sculpture, and installation. I was looking for classic work that still pushed boundaries in some manner, and his seemed fresh.

What is the core aesthetic that the gallery is founded on?

My aim is to present a variety of work from mid-career artists who I think have a fresh take on their media and themes. The core aesthetic of the gallery is based on work that is classic yet innovative and that pushes boundaries within visual and thematic dialogues. I have to be a big fan of their work and be interested in collecting their work too. I have to believe in their vision completely. I also want to offer the space to guest curators whose work I respect.

Do you promote a particular focus or specialty?

I find that galleries that have a more “narrow” vision can get boring over time on a visual level. I like to be jolted once in a while by art, as well as surprised and delighted. Some galleries focus primarily on minimalist work, painting, photography, or conceptual work, as examples of how galleries plan their programs. I prefer to work with a variety of mediums and themes in art.

What makes your gallery a desirable venue for both artists and art enthusiasts (i.e. art buyers)?

Station Independent Projects is a welcoming environment where the gallery staff actually talks to visitors and where the work is both excellent yet challenging. Each exhibition brings visitors from the press, curators, collectors, and the general public, and if people have questions, we are ready to chat. One summer, I had a couple visit who were from Spain, and they were in New York to collect art. They had visited one of the blue-chip galleries where the staff was not too helpful, so they passed on a $10,000 painting. Then a famous actor stopped in while they where there and he got full attention. Anyway, they stopped by my gallery and thanked me for a completely different, more personable, experience. Mind you, we have had a few famous folks come by Station Independent Projects, but we try to treat visitors equally. One never knows who is making the rounds, whether or not they are looking to collect, so best not to make assumptions. And it is always fun to talk about art with visitors, which we are happy to do.

As a curator, what do you see as differentiating your gallery?

As a curator, I am not necessarily most interested in selling the works; I am equally focused on concepts and themes, and on how different works can play off of one another. I think of each show as a large-scale installation where I am working with other artists to achieve the best possible exhibition. For example, when l am hanging a show, I can mull over how a sculpture may play off and interact with a photograph or a painting, and within the context of a group show, how work can be enhanced or diminished in contrast to the other works. With some works the strengths or weaknesses can be attributed to size, execution, theme, or just to the power of the work. The curator’s job is to establish an optimal exhibition layout. It’s all in the details, as the saying goes, and with group shows, a major detail is the actual installation—the install can make or break a show even if the work is good.

Do you represent emerging or established artists, or both?

More often mid-career artists. My focus has been mainly solo shows for artists who have not had a solo show in New York City yet or who had been shown mainly only in group shows.

What is the cost range of works for sale?

$500–$10,000.

As a curator, what do you want to convey about your gallery, to other artists and art enthusiasts?

When people visit Station Independent Projects we’d like them to feel welcome and at ease and have an enriching visual and intellectual viewing experience. And Station Independent Projects fully supports its artists and independent curators. Some galleries in New York charge a fee for an exhibition and all the cost associated with a show or for public relations work, while Station Independent Projects operates on the old gallery model of fully-funded shows with gallery support.

Nelson: You are an artist who works in a wide range of mediums, from painting, drawing, and weaving to public art installations. Please comment on how you approach each medium, and when you use one versus the other. Morph Installation Daniels: My self-directed projects in the studio are instinctual and inspired by materials, ideas, or spaces. I’ll get an idea and work on it until it grows. I’ll have an awesome ceiling so I want to create a hanging sculpture, or I want to weave a large-scale piece so I’ll find deer netting to make it. It’s very physical, which is why I think I moved into sculpture in the first place. I love working small with beads and sewing and then growing them into forms that take a lot of movement to make. It is satisfying to build a piece out of a seed of an idea then nurture it into a whole body of work. For my public art and installation projects, there is usually a site that presents a physical problem to be solved that directs my approach conceptually and influences the materials I choose. It is fun to imagine what I can do to fill a space in an engaging way. Then I have to figure out what to use to achieve that vision. That’s where supplies like rope and fencing come into my toolbox. I get my materials at hardware stores and bead shops more often than art supply stores. Nelson: In your weavings, you ornamentally blend colored beads, thread, and ribbons into netting or fencing, what can seem contradictory choices for “weft” versus “warp”—the forgiving of, for instance, ribbon, in contrast to the less forgiving of metal. Can you elaborate on these choices?

Daniels: My weavings usually use fencing as the warp, so they are actually grids. The chain link fence is on a diagonal, deer fencing is square, and the garden fencing is rectangular. The ribbons, plastic or cloth go in and out of them. When I was first asked to propose the “Fence Embroidery with Embellishment” piece in 2010, I had to figure out how to scale up my work to fill six hundred feet of fencing. I figured out how to use commercial privacy fencing for weaving and industrial spool flanges zip-tied to the fencing like beads. Then I developed a method I could use at other sites and with the leftover supplies, I started making more intricate works in my studio. That was the start of my weaving into grids.

Nelson: Can you also comment on how you came to weaving, as well as quilting, as in the “Three Spoke Pink” and “Lace Spiral”? Both traditionally fiber arts?

Daniels: I grew up in West Virginia with my mother sewing and knitting, and seeing rugs, lace, and needlepoint that my grandmother, great-grandmother, and aunt made. So I knew that craft language first hand. In high school, I wove baskets and made quilts. I continued to quilt into college. Now every once in a while, a piece calls to me that needs to be sewn.

Nelson: This year, you exhibited Morph at Station Independent Projects. The exhibition featured beaded sculptures of various colors suspended from ceiling to floor, as well as table-top sculptures with intertwined and interlocked beads of various weights and structures. Where did you draw your inspiration from this collection?

Daniels: For this show, I made beaded sculptures that had a sense of movement and change. Half of the show was suspended sculptures that fill up the space from above your head or somewhere between your waist and your toes. Physically it’s satisfying to make and view them. Their compositions move from small to big, ascending or descending, and thin to thick. You really have to move around them to see them. The other half of the show was sculptures that were small enough to hold in your hands sitting on a table. They all had core shapes with organic growths of beads overwhelming the forms. The gallery is a small, long, and narrow space so that shape became part of the installation with nothing on the walls, pendulous hanging sculptures and a long table full of compact pieces. I titled the show Morph because it means form in Greek, and contemporarily, “morphed” means to undergo a transformation.

Nelson: Your public arts works include beautifying park fences, college stairwells, and elevator cages using ropes, plastic ribbons, and beads. In Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx, your large-scale weavings Ornamental Paths reflect brick and mosaic Art Deco patterns found in the neighborhood’s architectural landmarks. Can you comment on how you approach a public arts work project, and what you consider as you plan your proposal?

Daniels: For my public art pieces, I take pictures of the site and draw by hand on top of the print out to imagine what I can do with the space. I research the neighborhood to find something that connects me to the place and helps me develop a design that can connect to the audience. Then I need to consider practical things like the budget and safety and durability of materials. I adore finding a narrative for a piece, a compelling design and then transforming a space.

Nelson: You’ve described your artwork as “eccentric abstraction.” Can you elaborate on how your art is reflected in this concept?

Daniels: I saw the term “eccentric abstraction” on an exhibition label for Mind and Matter: Alternative Abstractions at the MOMA in 2010 and thought “Oh, that’s kind of what I do.” It is a term coined by Lucy Lippard for the title of an exhibition she organized in 1966. I never cared if I fit into any category, but sometimes it helps to find artistic families you relate to as a resource to study and as a way to find the words for what you do. There is a book in the New York Public Library called Ornament and Abstraction: Dialogue Between Non-Western, Modern and Contemporary Art that I’ve been checking out for years whenever I need to get inspired or write a statement. It helps me find the language of my artistic lineage.

Nelson: How has your MFA in Painting impacted your artwork?

Daniels: I did a non-traditional, low-residency MFA program at Johnson State College, which is affiliated with the Vermont Studio Center. That path gave me structure and feedback while I also worked full-time. It was a supportive and challenging program and I graduated with no debt. My work grew by leaps and bounds, when I started sewing as a form of drawing then sewing into my paintings, which was the beginning of what I do now. After I graduated, I quickly got an NYFA fellowship and a Sharpe Foundation Studio, which gave me more time, space, encouragement, and financial support to keep going.

Nelson: You worked for many years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Can you elaborate on how this experience may have influenced you in developing your themes?

Daniels: Working at the MET has been like being in a never-ending art history course. I see something I haven’t seen before and learn something new every day. I handle art there, which is like being an art librarian and a stagehand. It gives me a caretaking and physical relationship with the art, which influences my work conceptually and materially. I can see the connections between eras, mediums, and geography in a way that feeds what I make and the way I name my work, title a show, and develop an exhibition or installation.

Nelson: Which artists have influenced you the most, and how?

Daniels: Kiki Smith was the first contemporary artist I saw use beads. I remember being thrilled seeing her work in my teens. Judy Pfaff’s big flowing installations are like walking into a Tiepolo painting. Her compositions are so intense and intricate, she is a virtuoso in my opinion. Lee Bontecou’s exploration of how to make forms in different materials and scales informs my way of making sculpture.

Nelson: Can you describe a typical studio day, and what are you working on now?

Daniels: Typically, I like to have a few pieces going at the same time. That way I can look at one out of the corner of my eye while I’m working on another. My mediums are so time consuming that I end up working outside of the studio, too. I walk around with a bag of beads and wire to string when I have a chance or I’ll sew pinned pieces or string beads at home late at night then take them into the studio to incorporate into a bigger piece. I end up working anywhere and everywhere.

My solo show just closed and I moved my studio, so I’m at the beginning of starting my next body of work. I like to organize my art supplies after a show or studio move, because it helps me see what I have, think about what I can do with them, and what I need to get. It’s a little like cooking: you see what you can do with the ingredients you have. I have some beaded forms I started a while ago that I pulled out and have strewn across the table to start playing with. I have finished pieces up so that I can think about what I’ve done and what I want to do next.

At first blush, Gregory Sholette depicts art activism in dark tones because these are dark times. He gives chiaroscuro’s gravitas to drawings of GULF, Standing Rock, and Occupy Museums protests, such as at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, among others. But there’s more to the darkness in these scenes. Sholette is offering a new metaphor to discover: dark matter from outer space as an analogy for activism amidst the plight of our age.

Dark matter describes all of the matter we can’t see in the universe. Astrophysicists know it’s there because of math. They can calculate and pinpoint gravitational pulls upon apparent matter from this invisible matter, which doesn’t reflect light from the sun or other stars.

What if we thought of activists — often left in the shadows by the mainstream media, but changing hearts and minds on the ground — as dark matter?

What if we thought of the individuals who buy museum memberships, show up at arts events and panels, and read art magazines — providing a form of support outside of the spotlight — as dark matter?

What if we thought of MFA students — taking on debt, rarely getting shows, and then supporting art institutions in low-paid, often hidden administrative positions — as dark matter?

Sholette developed this cosmic metaphor as an art writer in his books and other writings to articulate the often hidden influence of activists and people whose participation undergirds the arts economy. What’s exciting about his exhibition Darker at Station Independent Projects is how dark matter is visualized and activated in mixed media works that explore recent moments of protest.

When Sholette depicts the protests at Standing Rock in dark tones, the intent is not only to acknowledge the bleakness — it’s also to celebrate activists as hidden forces operating in the dark, making a big difference anyway. Prior to the protests, many people in the country were blind to the implications of the Dakota Access Pipeline. Standing Rock proved that activists — many of whom are not known by name — could make a collective impact.

In one drawing, Sholette depicts the October 2016 Decolonize This Place action at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Despite the radical advances in the field of anthropology since the time of Margaret Mead, most of the wall text at that institution perpetuates racist, essentialist, and colonialist narratives. The refusal to update deserves to be called out. How this action influenced decision makers and curators at the museum is hard to tell. (Some progress has arguably been made with David Koch leaving the board.) But once again, many of the effects of this action in years to come will be undetectable and outside the spotlight. So dark matter becomes an appealing metaphor for the hidden gravity and pull of such actions.

In another work, “Preparing for War” (2016), Sholette shows a scene from the May Day occupation at the Guggenheim in 2015, organized by GULF (Global Ultra Luxury Fashion). A woman entered the museum in a wheelchair, sitting on and concealing a large banner. She later stood up and unfurled the banner with other protestors in an action that took over and shut down the museum. Once again, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact effects of the action on the Guggenheim leadership or staff. Most likely, they will unfold in the dark and behind the scenes.

Cynics might criticize the comparison to dark matter as a stretch. Is it overwrought to project a metaphor from the cosmos onto our terrestrial political affairs? Well, there is actually a major precedent for such astral borrowing with that word “revolution.”

To condense history, revolution gained a new meaning in 1542 when Copernicus demonstrated the earth’s revolution around the sun. In the late 1600s, England’s intellectuals were searching for a new word to articulate the dramatic political shifts of their times, which involved messy power transitions and usurping, executing, and restoring kings. So those intellectuals appropriated “revolution” to express how politics, like the stars, seems to work in cycles. One hundred years later, everyone knew to call the storming of the Bastille the start of a French Revolution. Centuries later, we use revolution unaware of its cosmic etymology.

Dark matter is a compelling analogy for how activism influences decision makers and changes scenarios in ways that are often hard to detect and see. The entire debate over political art’s efficacy often degenerates into bickering over “preaching to the choir.” What is often lost is how everyday people — often outside the spotlight — find their minds changed, and act, decide, and cast votes differently after witnessing activism. Developing a richer understanding of activism in the dark is crucial as we galvanize and mobilize for 2017.

Les monde des arts et de la culture et de l'éducation ont choisi d'accueillir le nouveau président des Etats-Unis par un “acte de refus”. En guise de protestation : fermeture de nombreux musées, théâtres, salles de concert, galeries ou écoles d'art dans tout le pays, absentéisme autorisé dans les facultés… la mobilisation s'organise, en attendant la vague de manifestations du samedi 21 janvier.

Il n'y a pas que le cinéma qui est en colère contre Donald Trump : le monde des arts et de la culture prépare au nouveau président une investiture dont il devrait garder un amer souvenir. Depuis le 9 décembre dernier, un appel lancé sur Internet par un mystérieux collectif invite à la réalisation d'un « acte de refus » massif dans tout le pays le 20 janvier 2017, jour de son investiture.

A peine publié, il a reçu l'accueil positif de plusieurs artistes, qui n'a cessé de croître. Citons, parmi les signataires (et même si beaucoup sont peu connus du grand public ici) le vidéaste et activiste Paul Chan, l'artiste conceptuelle Louise Lawler, la sculpteure et vidéaste Joan Jonas, engagée auprès des féministes américaines, le géographe Trevor Paglen qui photographie depuis plus de dix ans les bases militaires secrètes éparpillées aux USA, l'artiste plasticien Walid Raad, la star de la sculpture Richard Serra, la photographe new-yorkaise Cindy Sherman ou la romancière américaine Lily Tuck… Au total, plus de cinq cents artistes et plus encore de critiques et de personnalités diverses (architectes, designers, journalistes, éditeurs, scientifiques, publicitaires, philosophes…) ont choisi d'accueillir leur nouveau président par cette « grève de l'art ».

“Shutdown culturel”

Conséquence : de New York à Los Angeles, plusieurs institutions américaines, des musées aux fondations en passant par les théâtres, salles de concert, galeries ou écoles d'art, conserveront porte close vendredi : ainsi du Musée national des Indiens américains et de la Galerie Renwick à Washington D.C., ou du Queens Museum à New York. Un engagement rare, dans un pays où les institutions culturelles majeures sont privées et où les liens entre milieu de l'art et milieu des affaires sont parfois ténus. Le Musée national des femmes dans l'art (Washington) sera également fermé, mais pour des raisons étrangères à la grève artistique, et offrira l'entrée aux visiteurs pendant tout le week-end (21 et 22 janvier).

Dans d'autres établissements, les modalités sont encore à définir ; on sait d'ores et déjà que le Whitney Museum (New York) restera ouvert au public, avec un système de pay-what-you-wish (contribution libre) à l'entrée et une journée d'échanges libres avec les visiteurs ; idem pour le Musée des arts et du design (New York), l'Institut d'art contemporain (Boston), le New Museum de New York et le Musée d'art contemporain de Denver. Les entrées du Musée d'art contemporain de Los Angeles (LACMA), du Walker Art center de Minneapolis et du Musée de l'école du design (Rhode Island) seront gratuites.

Certains n'ont pas prévu de fermer, à l'instar du Musée d'art moderne et du MoMA PS1, du Guggenheim et du Musée juif de New York. Le Studio Museum à Harlem, Le Broad à Los Angeles ainsi que le Musée d'art du comté de Los Angeles resteront également ouverts. « Les œuvres de la collection Broad et de tout le musée sont l'expression d'une liberté essentielle et le reflet des problématiques sociales, culturelles, raciales et politiques qui traversent notre pays, a indiqué le musée Broad (dont l'entrée est toujours gratuite). Nous voulons que le public puisse toujours les admirer ».

Les galeries d'art et les fondations ne sont pas en reste. Depuis la semaine dernière, un site se propose de recenser toutes les fermetures prévues à New York : elles sont déjà une cinquantaine.

MANHATTAN — A collection of local art galleries will close Friday as Donald Trump is sworn in as the nation's 45th president — a form of silent protest against the candidate and a show of solidarity with nationwide marches occurring over the weekend, organizers said.

The participating galleries, falling predominantly in Chelsea and the Lower East Side, are part of a larger movement called the "J20 Art Strike," which calls for galleries, theaters, museums and academic institutions to close their doors on Jan. 20 as an "act of non-compliance" to protest the president-elect.

"We consider Art Strike to be one tactic among others to combat the normalization of Trumpism—a toxic mix of white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, militarism, and oligarchic rule," reads a letter published to the movement's website, signed by dozens of artists and critics.

Like any tactic, it is not an end in itself, but rather an intervention that will ramify into the future. It is not a strike against art, theater, or any other cultural form. It is an invitation to motivate these activities anew, to reimagine these spaces as places where resistant forms of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting can be produced."

While 19 art galleries and a handful of nonprofit groups and academic centers will shutter altogether Friday, some museums will provide free admission and special programming.

Admission for the The Whitney Museum on Friday is "pay-what-you-wish," and the museum will offer special tours of an exhibition called "My America," exploring immigration, race, ethnicity and identity.

Local gallerists who answered the call to close their business in protest said they were moved to stand in solidarity with those who fear a Trump presidency.

"We are a gallery of many women, a gallery of many people who are non-white, we are a gallery of conscientious people," said Alissa Friedman, partner and director at Lower East Side gallery Salon 94 at 243 Bowery.

"It's almost like a quiet kind of symbolic gesture, but it's something we felt was important to stand in solidarity with."

Another Lower East Side gallerist said she saw her space's shuttering as a first step in what she hopes will be a larger movement to resist perceived injustice in the coming years.

"It's a first step, just like the marches," said Leah Oates, owner of Station Independent Projects. "I think it's just a first, initial reaction to show we're not just going to sit back and be quiet."

The art strike is also a show of solidarity with protest marches planned for Inauguration Day, according to organizers — many observers plan to attend special programming at the Whitney or other museums before gathering at Cooper Union to create protest signs in preparation for a "NYC Stand Against Trump" march that will convene downtown in Foley Square at around 5 p.m.

On the occasion of Yevgeniy Fiks’s new book, Soviet Moscow’s Yiddish-Gay Dictionary, and his recent solo exhibition Pleshka-Birobidzhan, which recreated an oral story about a group of Soviet gay men who traveled from Moscow to Birobidzhan in 1934 and imagined a Utopian Soviet Gay and Lesbian Republic, Fiks and historian Galina Zelenina discussed contemporary and historical interconnection between Jewishness and queerness in a Russian context.

Yevgeniy Fiks: Galina, at a conference in Tallinn last month, I learned with much interest about your research and was very happy to learn that I’m not alone and there is another person, a proper researcher, who’s working on the issue of interconnections between LGBTQ history and Jewish history in a Soviet and Russian context. Of course, this issue is not an easy one. On one the hand, all things openly and even not-so-openly LGBTQ seem to be under assault in the Russian Federation. On the other hand, the official Jewish organizations in Russia seem to be in support of the government policies, including the focus on “traditional values.” What are the LGBTQ-Jewish dynamics and politics in Russia these days, and how are they connected to history?

Galina Zelenina: Speaking of the present, I’ve just finished an article on so-called “symbolic resistance” to Deputy Mizulina’s [Chairwoman of the Russian Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Affairs] legislative activity — her bills and draft bills advancing ultraconservative reforms in family law, including the ban on “nontraditional sexual relations propaganda” among minors enacted in 2013. Symbolic resistance flourishes in a society that is practically denied all means of active and productive resistance, at least meetings of protest, and includes all possible channels of expressing one’s discontent with official politics, anger or critique, from long and sophisticated articles to jokes, parodies, demotivators, and memes. The funny thing is that while the Western public and a small part of the Russian public (first of all, the LGBTQ community) knows Miluzina best for her homophobic efforts and her continuous work at the re-enslavement of women, the most visible part of anti-Mizulina folklore on Russian internet is masculine and has nothing to do with either women’s or LGBTQ rights defense. Mocking Mizulina’s draft bill to prohibit oral sex (seen as a “nontraditional” way of sexual contact) seems to be the most popular thing. When, nonetheless, it comes to “nontraditional sexual relations,” the “Jewish question” appears. LGBTQ (we may call them, for these purposes, “the younger minority”) tend to compare themselves with “the older minority” — that is, with the Jews. Perhaps the most famous example is Yevgeny Kharitonov’s assertion in his Leaflet: “Our question is in some respects like the Jewish question.” But he was far from alone in promoting this idea.

YF: It’s interesting that you mentioned my namesake Yevgeny Kharitonov and his Leaflet, written in the late 1970s, which is perhaps the first openly gay piece in Russian post-WWII literature. It’s interesting that some of his other writings are also openly anti-Semitic, although some critics tend to downplay his anti-Semitism, explaining it by the so-called “literary style” or “postmodernist posturing.” After all, he’s the only openly gay writer in postwar Russian literature and must be saved at all costs. Don’t you think it’s ironic that the only openly gay post-WWII Soviet Russian writer is also openly anti-Semitic? Another icon of Russian gay literature, Mikhail Kuzmin, writes in his post-1917 diary about a “kike-woman with a little kike son” who moved into Kuzmin’s apartment as a result of post-revolutionary housing shortage. As a Russian-Jewish gay man, I’ve always felt uncomfortable with Kuzmin and Kharitonov as icons of Russian gay culture, while sadly realizing that I have to deal with them because they are irreplaceable in the Russian gay canon. Don’t you think that the Russian-Jewish/Russian-gay divide is historical and wide, and before we get to solidarity we need to sort out anti-Semitism within the Russian gay milieu and homophobia in the Jewish community? I think the present-day comparisons by critics of the plight of Russian LGBTQs to the plight of European Jewry or Soviet Jewry is quickly done for political convenience and doesn’t critically address the historical breaks of solidarity between the two communities.

GZ: Today’s anti-Mizulina texts often mention anti-Semitism. One of the most effective, or, at least, the easiest ways to criticize something you disagree with is to compare it to something unanimously condemned as bad, backward, inhuman, etc. So, when dealing with any of Mizulina’s initiatives, the most popular method to defame them seems to be a comparison with the Middle Ages, while homophobia, anti-Semitism, and particularly the Holocaust appear as additional reference points. The best-known example is Stephen Fry’s open letter calling for a ban on the Winter Olympics in Russia by comparing them with the Berlin Olympics in 1936. He writes there that he is gay and he is a Jew whose mother lost half of her family in the Holocaust, and now, with homophobic law and practice in Russia, he weeps at seeing history repeat itself. On Russian internet there are quite a few similar assertions (for one, that Deputy Mizulina is sending gay people to gas chambers), though they are a bit less authoritative. And so Russian Jewish speakers, including celebrities of Jewish origin like Iosif Kobzon or the leadership of the Federation of Jewish communities of Russia (a Chabad Lubavitch organization that had proclaimed itself the representative of Russia Jewry), had to respond, and they responded with indignation, saying it is an insult to the memory of Holocaust victims. It demonstrates that the older minority, which is now relatively in favor in Russia, as you’ve rightly observed, is not particularly happy about being compared with the younger one.

YF: I can also add to this the deeply disturbing statement by Moscow Chief Rabbi Adolf Shaevich, who said in his interview with journalists Ksenia Sobchak and Anton Krasovsky in 2015 that he, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, wouldn’t hang gays himself but he would have supported those who did.

GZ: Speaking of queer-Jewish coincidences and parallels in the past, we can go back very far, to the very beginning, which is obviously the Bible, and proceed with Talmudic masculinity profoundly analyzed by pioneering Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin, who has introduced a gender approach to Talmudic studies. Narrowing the field to Russia, or the Soviet Union, we shall begin with the rise and development of hostile rhetoric and oppressive politics toward gay people in Soviet legislature and journalism of the 1930s, including dialectics of the concepts of race or ethnicity, sexuality and class consciousness, or political views. This provides much fodder for a so-called intersectional analysis of social attitudes and state systems of domination and discrimination. It’s well known that it was customary for official Soviet rhetoric to voluntarily label various groups as Fascist or bourgeois, and that later it was used to conflate ethnic categories with social or political ones, as in the infamous cases of “traitor nations” or the campaign against “rootless cosmopolites” predominantly of Jewish origin. Interestingly, this intersectional discourse addressed the subject of sexuality as well. It began with an authoritative statement by Maxim Gorky in his article “Proletarian Humanism,” which appeared in May 1934 and was much approved of by Stalin, or possibly even commissioned by him. Relying on The Brown Book compiled by European communists and translated into Russian, which stigmatized Nazis for their “wretched inclination,” Gorky condemns the destructive and corrosive influence of Fascism on European youth. He is proud to assert that in the country of the triumphant proletariat, “homosexualism” is considered socially illicit and punishable, while in the “cultured” country of great philosophers and musicians — that is, in Germany — it remains free and unchallenged. And next he sees fit to continue the comparison by addressing Jewish question. He says that the outstanding Semitic race that had produced the proletarian messiah Karl Marx is being expelled by the Fascist bourgeoisie of Germany, while the Soviet Union has established a self-governing republic for working Jews. Gorky wrote this article in the wake of the legal transformation of Birobidzhan district into the Jewish Autonomous Region.

In this context, your vision of the JAR as an LGBTQ republic is really controversial and very, very interesting, both if it is based on personal stories, like oral history materials or other sources, and if it is a pure fantasy. Because obviously, in those early Soviet decades, in the interwar period, there was a strong potential for recreating everything anew, and all those changes were supposed to create a new man. In particular, Birobidzhan was an attempt to create a new Jew, a Communist version of a “muscular” Jew, who almost simultaneously appeared in Israeli kibbutzim. And given the liberality of earlier Bolshevik gender policy, some 10 years before that it could have been an attempt at making a new gay man, an ardent Communist and farm-worker. At least as a fantasy, it is quite legitimate. Just imagine that in 1913 Stalin wrote not “Marxism and the National Question” but “Marxism and Queer Theory.”

YF: Yes, precisely. One of the foundations behind my Pleshka-Birobidzhan show is the figure of the founder of the American gay rights movement, Harry Hay, who was a communist activist in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. In the late 1940s, he left the American Communist Party and founded the first gay right group in the US: the Mattachine Society. In his memoirs and speeches, he always stated that he got the idea for gay liberation from reading Stalin’s “Marxism and the National Question.” Particularly, he was influenced by Stalin’s definition of a national minority (common language, territory, economic relations, psychological makeup/culture), and one day Harry Hay had a revelation that this definition applies to American gays and that they also constitute a minority in the US, just like African Americans or American Jews. It was a revolutionary realization, and the rest is history. And since the support of the Birobidzhan project in the Soviet Union was one of the important activist causes for the American Communist Party in the 1930s, there is no doubt in my mind that Hay knew about Birobidzhan. When I read his visions of a gay autonomy and of the “new gay,” to me it sounds very much like Birobidzhan.

Maybe it’s a controversial statement, but for the context of the Russian Federation, the solution of the LGBTQ question perhaps lays in the acknowledgment that LGBTQ is a nazional’nost (nationality) in its old Soviet definition — as a folk, a nation, an “ethnic” group. And I think the Russian state and society, which is an extremely multiethnic country, can understand this language. I’m not sure if the concept of LGBTQ as nazional’nost will lead to a true liberation, but at least it will lead to a certain level of normalization.

Thirteen years ago I had the good fortune to review a documentary titled “L’Chayim, Comrade Stalin” by Klezmer musician Yale Strom that served as an introduction to the Jewish Autonomous Region of the USSR that Stalin declared in 1934. My review began:

When he was a young boy, Yale Strom noticed two “sidukah” (charity) boxes in his father’s shop. One was the omnipresent blue Jewish National Fund box intended for Israel that my own father kept in his fruit store. The other was targeted for Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region that Stalin decreed in 1932. His curiosity about the lesser-known Jewish homeland became the seed for his documentary “L’Chayim Comrade Stalin,” now showing at the Quad Cinema in NYC.
Based on interviews with current and past residents and archival material, including a altogether charming Soviet feature film of the period promoting settlement, the film not only sheds light on an under-documented aspect of Stalinist rule, it also inspires a variety of reactions to the “Jewish Question.” (Strom utilizes a graphic of these two words writ large in red repeatedly through the film as a kind of leitmotif.)
Most of the older veterans of Birobidzhan make clear that the project tapped into youthful idealism. Combining a belief in communism with a desire to create a cultural homeland for the Jews, they came to the Siberian hinterland with great hopes. Despite the fact that anti-Semitism prompted Stalin to create the settlement in a geographically remote area, the settlers did not necessarily view this as a kind of internal exile. Stephen F. Cohen points out eloquently in his biography of Bukharin that Stalin’s despotic “revolution from above” did not preclude a kind of egalitarian zeal from bubbling to the surface. Despite repression, many people felt that they were on a great adventure to build a new society, including the Jews who came to Birobidzhan.

Clearly, Birobidzhan continues to grip the imagination of filmmakers, artists and scholars based on recent works I have had a chance to examine.
A few days after I reviewed “Finding Babel”, the film distribution company Seventh Art Releasing got in touch with me and asked if I would be interested in watching “Birobidzhan”, a film made by Belgian director Guy-Marc Hinant in 2015. Hinant is also a poet and music producer specializing in the avant-garde. As such, it is clear that he approaches the material from a different angle than Yale Strom whose film was much more conventional despite sharing the same passionate engagement with the subject. Much of “Birobidzhan” consists of evocative images of the region that are not directly related to the history such as the blurred images of a speeding freight train or an ominous and unexplained burning field. As is the case with most art films, and this certainly qualifies as one, such devices are evaluated on the basis of whether they help to lend emotional weight to the film and Hinant succeeds on this basis.
Like Strom’s film, we see the efforts of the dwindling number of Jews still living in Birobidzhan today trying to reconstruct a Jewish identity both culturally and religiously. Unlike the Hebrew-speaking Zionist entity, the Jews of Birobidzhan are devoted to Yiddish, the language that was blessed by Stalin with official status. Watching young kids in a classroom learning to read and write Yiddish is a moving experience as is seeing a somewhat older group rehearsing a musical play in the local theater that looks like a production from Second Avenue in the 1920s, and finally a chorus of septuagenarian women singing “Hava Negila”, a song that we sang in Hebrew school in the late 1950s. It is worth noting that the song has an iconic status in Israel as it is the first modern folk song to use Hebrew lyrics and is as almost as well-known as the Israeli national anthem. Somehow it seems less threatening in this context.
In some ways, it would have been better for the Jews to have made Birobidzhan their homeland rather thn Israel since it truly was a land without people that could accommodate a people without land. The film notes that long before 1934, Jews were settling in the remote and desolate territory in Siberia simply to escape the anti-Semitism that persisted in the USSR after the October revolution. Unlike Israel, where Yiddish was practically banned as a language linked to the ghetto and victimhood, Birobidzhan was devoted to Yiddish culture and even created the Sholem Aleichem library that contained more than 35,000 Yiddish titles. During his campaign against “bourgeois nationalism”, Stalin had all but 4,000 of them burned.
When Stalin launched the great repression of the 1930s, Birobidzhan was swept into the bloody whirlpool. Like Isaac Babel, some of the leading intellectuals and journalists who had migrated to Birobidzhan were charged with supporting Leon Trotsky and executed, including Joseph Liberberg—the first chair of the Jewish Region’s Council of People’s Deputies. An article on Liberberg shows the promise of the early USSR:

The mid-1920s were an exciting time to be involved in Jewish culture in the fledgling Soviet Union, where—for the first time in history—Yiddish culture and scholarship received state support. Liberberg left his university to post to head a new Jewish culture department at the All-Ukrainian Ukrainian Academy of Science.
Liberberg along with Nokhem Shtif organized the Jewish division, a scholarly institution specializing in Jewish studies. The initiative for its creation came from high party circles who supported the work of scholarly institutions in minority cultures throughout the Soviet Union.
The department evolved into the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture in 1929. This became the leading Jewish cultural institution in Ukraine and attracted scholars and cultural activists from around the Soviet Union and throughout the world. A charismatic and ambitious director, Liberberg was not afraid to employ people who had previously held non-communist political positions.
As director of Ukraine’s most elite Jewish cultural institution — the republic with more than 60% of the Soviet Union’s Jews — Liberberg found little time for his academic work. He did get around to publish An Economic and Social History of England in 1927, co-edit October Days: Materials on the History of the October Revolution, also in 1927, A Dictionary of Political Terminology and Foreign Words, in 1929, The Bibliological Miscellany, in 1930, and a later addendum to that volume.

When I think about the murder of people like Liberberg and Babel, I never regret my decision to have become a Trotskyist in 1967 no matter the sectarian baggage this entailed. “Birobidzhan” is a glimpse into a what truly might have been described as “A different world is possible”. With all of the terrible things that took place in the USSR, we should never forget that in its youth it was a symbol of freedom, social justice and the possibility of a life lived outside of capitalist exploitation.
Seventh Art has told me that the film should be available on home video in January 2017. My advice is to check http://www.7thart.com/films/Birobidzhan in a couple of months to see if it has become available.
The one thing that always struck me about those Whitney Biennial Exhibitions is that the conceptual art that dominated the show was missing a key ingredient: a concept. That has never been the case with my friend Yevgeniy Fiks who I regard as America’s most accomplished conceptual artist. As someone who tackles the big topics of our day–the persecution of gay people, Jewish identity, the legacy of the Soviet Union and the power of big corporations among them—Fiks has the eye and the hand that can render the concepts into memorable art.
Last Saturday I attended the opening for his show Pleshka-Birobidzhan, 2016 that imagines Stalin having created a Homosexual Autonomous Region after the fashion of Birobidzhan. (Pleshka is the word for an area where gays “cruised” in Russia. The Bolshoi pleshka was the most renowned.)
Fiks explains his goals on his website:

The exhibition Pleshka-Birobidzhan engages the relationship between identity, fiction, and history by recreating an oral story about a group of Soviet gay men who travelled from Moscow to Birobidzhan in 1934 into an art installation. The oral story is set in 1934 soon after homosexuality was recriminalized in the Soviet Union and after the Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region, of which Birobidzhan became the capital, was established.
The exhibition reenacts this Soviet gay oral story in a series of artworks that comprises the exhibition. This includes a series of 17 collages titled Pleshka-Birobidzhan which starts the narration. The collages depict gay men at several gay cruising sites a.k.a. pleshkas in 1934 discussing the recriminalization of homosexuality under Stalin as a failure of the October Revolution, the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East, and a dream of a gay Soviet utopia. The collages also depict the journey of a group of disillusioned gay men in fear of persecution to Birobidzhan, where upon their arrival found themselves in the middle of the Gay and Lesbian Autonomous Region — which appeared to exist alongside and at times overlapped with of the Soviet Jewish Utopia there.

This is a brilliant concept that 30 seconds after entering the Station Independent Projects gallery at 138 Eldridge Street, Suite 2F had my head spinning over the connections between being gay and being Jewish. As the ultimate outsiders in Soviet society in its Stalinist phase, all the two groups sought was to live in peace and freedom in urban settings where tolerance was the norm. Even if the Jews made the best they could out of life in Birobidzhan, most certainly would have preferred to enjoy the life of “rootless cosmopolitans” as Stalin referred to them in the post-WWII purges.
Like Hitler, Stalin had an atavistic hatred of Jews and homosexuals that was part of the Great Russian backwardness that swept across the USSR in the late 1920s as the dictator was pushing for social norms having more to do with Czarism than the socialist dreams of the earlier period.
If you are based in NYC, I strongly urge you to visit the gallery since there is no substitute for seeing the works rather than images on the Internet. If you can’t do so, check out http://yevgeniyfiks.com/section/441807-Pleshka-Birobidzhan-2016.html for a sample of the work including this stunning collage that mixes what I assume to be idealized portraits of Jewish workers or farmers in Birobidzhan with a dancer I surmise to be Vaslav Nijinsky.
birobidzhan
This is not Fiks’s first engagement with Birobidzhan. Two years ago he had an exhibition titled “A Gift to Birobidzhan” that I wrote about here. An excerpt from the press release explains the concept:

In 2009, artist Yevgeniy Fiks originated a project called A Gift to Birobidzhan. Established in the Soviet Union in 1934 as the Autonomous Jewish Region of the USSR, Birobidzhan was for a time considered a rival to Israel. Although located in a remote area near China, Birobidzhan caught the world’s imagination. In 1936, two hundred works of art was collected in the United States by activists as the foundation for the Birobidzhan Art Museum. The collection included works by Stuart Davis, Adolf Dehn, Hugo Gellert, Harry Gottlieb, and William Gropper among others. The collection was first exhibited in New York and Boston, and in late 1936, it was shipped to the Soviet Union. The collection never reached its final destination in Birobidzhan. By late 1937, Stalin had purged the leadership from Birobidzhan at which time the collection vanished into government or private hands.
Taking this microhistorical narrative as his starting point, Fiks invited 25 contemporary international artists to donate works of their choosing to the existing museum of Birobidzhan. After initially agreeing to exhibit and accept the works into its collection, the museum in Birobidzhan conditionally retracted the offer, in part to avoid confrontation with a conflicted past and the fact that Birobidzhan now consist of a small Jewish population. Granting Fiks the role of steward, the artists agreed to let Fiks store the collection until it could reach its intended destination.
A Gift to Birobidzhan of 2009 was an attempt to repeat and complete — seventy years later — the gesture of “a gift to Birobidzhan” in 1936. As of 2014, it remains still a rejected gift and a “state-less collection,” packed in boxes in Fiks’ apartment in the Lower East Side. A Gift to Birobidzhan evokes the utopian promise of Birobidzhan — a Socialist alternative to a Jewish state — as a point of departure for discussions on broad 20th century’s impossible territorial politics, identity, national self-determination, and a common “seeking of happiness.” At present, we find that many of the same questions from the early 20th century have resurfaced again.

You can take a virtual tour of “A Gift to Birobidzhan” here.
Finally, I should refer you to Masha Gessen’s newly published “Where the Jews Aren’t: The Sad and Absurd Story of Birobidzhan, Russia’s Jewish Autonomous Region”. Gessen, a lesbian, is the sister of Keith Gessen, an n+1 editor who along with Fiks was introduced to me by Thomas Campbell, an activist based in Russia close to the radical art movement.
Gessen, like Fiks and her brother, is an astute analyst of Russian society and politics as well as an emigre. This is an excerpt from the book that will once again remind you of why Stalin was one of the 20th century’s greatest criminals. Although Hitler killed far more people, the overthrow of Soviet democracy made it all the more difficult for those of us trying to make a better world and consequently led to the deaths of millions in the Third World who could not count on true solidarity from a Kremlin far more interested in short-term deals with imperialism. If Russia has continued to live up to the ideals that Birobidzhan writer David Bergelson held dear, the world would look a lot more different today and a lot better.

The man who made Birobidzhan famous had the gift of knowing when to run. That he lived into his late sixties is testament to his outstanding survival instincts. On his sixty-eighth birthday, he was shot to death, a final victim of the century’s most productive executioner. He had been a writer who preferred to leave his stories ragged and open-ended, but his own life, which ended on what became known as the Night of the Murdered Poets, had a sinister rhyme and roundness to it.
David Bergelson was born on August 12, 1884, in the village of Okhrimovo, a Ukrainian shtetl so small there might be no record of it now if it were not for Bergelson’s association with it. Three and a half years before his birth, Czar Alexander II was assassinated by a group of young revolutionaries that counted one Jew, a woman, among them. Five persons were hanged for the crime, but it was the Jews of Russia who bore the brunt of the national rage. After some years of acquiring greater rights and freedoms, as well as hope, the Jews found the law closing in on them, herding them back into the shtetlach. Pogroms swept through the Pale, brutalizing the enlightened modern Russian-speaking Jews along with their traditional parents. Into this bleak, dangerous world came the surprise ninth child of an older couple.
The parents were rich and pious. Bergelson’s father, a grain and timber merchant, spoke no Russian; he belonged to the last generation of Jews who could achieve wealth, success, and prominence entirely within the confines of the Yiddish-speaking world. His wife was younger and of a different sphere: a cultured woman, a reader. David Bergelson’s education was an unsuccessful attempt to merge his parents’ worlds. He was tutored by a maskil—a product of the Jewish enlightenment movement—who taught him to speak and write in Russian and Hebrew, in addition to his native Yiddish, but not, as the young Bergelson found out later, well enough to enable him to be admitted to an institution of higher learning. His father died when David was a little boy, his mother when he was fourteen, and David’s wanderings commenced. Losing one’s anchors—and any sense of home—is essential for developing an instinct for knowing when it’s time to run.
The teenager left the shtetl and stayed, by turns, with older siblings in the big cities of Kyiv, Warsaw, and Odessa, subsidizing their hospitality out of his share of the family inheritance. He had a home, and a family, only so long as he could pay for them. This is another good lesson. One always has to pay to belong, and to have a roof over one’s head.
One thing Bergelson seems to have always known about himself was that he was a writer. Any young writer must find his language, but rarely is the choice as literal—and as difficult—as it was for Jews writing in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the cities between which Bergelson was moving, he was surrounded by Yiddish, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Lithuanian speech. His command of these languages ranged from poor to limited. Then there was Hebrew, the language of his father’s prayers and a new movement’s dreams; as a teenager, Bergelson went through a period of fascination with the work of Nachman Syrkin, the founder of Labor Zionism. (Syrkin himself wrote in Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, German, and English.) Bergelson tried writing in Hebrew and failed—it may be that his command of it was insufficient for writing, or it could be that the language, in his hands, did not lend itself to the modernism he was attempting. He switched to Russian, but this expansive language failed him, too, perhaps because he wanted to write stark, sparse prose and Russian demanded flowery vagueness. He finally found his voice in his long-dead father’s living language, Yiddish.

Station Independent Projects is presenting their second solo exhibition with photographer Miles Ladin. Supermodels at The End of Time consists of black and white photos of the legendary supermodels of the 90s accompanied by satirical captions by author Bret Easton Ellis.

The name of the exhibition truly captures the supermodel era. The 1990s modeling industry can be compared to the golden age of Hollywood, an era of such glamour that generation after generation looks back to it, but an era that is impossible to recreate. The models of the time turned to legends and just their first names, Kate, Naomi, Claudia and Christy, are enough to instantly bring their faces to mind. They are the Marilyn Monroes of modeling and together they have come to represent both their time and the end of the century. It is like one of Bret Easton Ellis’ captions read on a photo of Kate Moss “Even though we’ve never met she looks eerily familiar, as if we’ve known her forever”.

On its own the photos portray these women with such an ease that it demonstrates the very unattainability of their lives that so many looked up to. But more importantly, together with the captions these photos scratch the surface of that very unattainable glamour and reveal pieces of reality: the hypocrisy of the industry, and thus of our society. The caption under a photo of Naomi Campbell reads, “You do fur ads and donate money to Greenpeace”. It also highlights a harsh world for women, a world run by contradictions and ideals that can’t be achieved. Under a photo of Helena Christensen one can read “I’m twenty-six. That’s a hundred and five in model years.” The ageism of the model industry reflects society’s demands on women and is certainly still as relevant today. Just like Marilyn, these personas represent another, more tragic, side to the glamour. Not necessarily for the female models themselves but for the society that praises them. With all its nostalgia, the exhibition ultimately raises the question of where we are today. How far have we come almost 20 years later when it comes to impossible ideals that bring harm to so many women? Not very far it seems.

Photographer Miles Ladin is gearing up for his second solo exhibition at the Station Independent Gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Entitled “Supermodels at the End of Time,” the exhibition presents itself as a jab at the fashion industry’s “hollow glamour”; and includes candid, backstage photos of supermodels Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, and Iman, among others. Many of the photos were taken at high-profile fashion events during Ladin’s assignments for Women’s Wear Daily and W magazine in the 1990s.

Alongside the photographs are text selections from American Psychoauthor Bret Easton Ellis’ 1998 novel Glamorama, which also focused on the excesses and underlying darkness of the fashion industry. Together, the text and images document high fashion’s collusion with, and impact on, American celebrity culture.

The images in Ladin’s exhibition—backstage moments at runway shows, dinner table conversations, the suffocating media presence—aren’t so much satirical in 2016 as they are journalistic, which Ladin himself seems to realize. “The decadence of those days,” he told The New York Times, “now almost seems quaint.”