Garikovich & Black: “Scars on the Body of Freedom”

On war, Vladimir Putin, the marketplace, “Madame Butterfly,” and other torments

It's a mistake: Alex Garikovich's Russian "Idol," central panel

If you’re an artist disgusted by the parlous state of civil society, you’ve got four moves on the table. All four come with perils. You can do as Jersey City creators have done and meet aggression and unpleasantness with a smile and a bouquet of flowers. You’ll be modeling a nobler way of being, but you’ll probably be called a bringer of a plate of cookies to a knife fight. You can give into his despair and indulge in acts of escapism, but you’ll win no badges of courage that way. You might resolve to exaggerate and satirize the threat and court the risk that his audience will miss the point and think you’ve capitulated to your adversaries.

The artist can also confront the problem directly by making the critique on his canvases unambiguous. He can capture the ugliness of what he’s seen, and mirror it back in a manner that anyone can catch. He can get into specifics, and, if he’s really feeling feisty, he can even name names. That’s definitely the bravest thing to do, but it’s also the most perilous. Autocrats are not known for their senses of humor or perspective. More problematically, dramatic representations of oppression impart evil grandeur to dull oppressors who don’t deserve that sort of treatment. Dramatic portrayals of grim dystopian societies tend to make their despotic leaders look badass.

Alec Black's "Madame"

It is hard, for instance, to know how Vladimir Putin would react to “Idol 2,” an incendiary triptych by Alex Garikovich that’s now hanging on the north wall of SMUSH Gallery (340 Summit Ave.). Well, I’m pretty sure Garikovich would be put on a train to the nearest Gulag-equivalent in no time. But the tough part is guessing how the explosive acrylic image would work on the dictator’s psyche. As a veteran propagandist, Putin would surely recognize the utility of an image as horrific as this one. There’s no hope for a better day in this painting, and no chance of escape, either. The completeness of Garikovich’s totalitarian hellscape might really appeal to a totalitarian’s taste for absolute control. 

“Idol” is the centerpiece of Garikovich’s half of Scars on the Body of Freedom, a two-artist show that matches the Russian-born painter with work by the clever cultural critic Alec Black. Its refusal to indulge in subtlety is its strength. Soldiers are stapled and sutured directly into the barren environment. The blank face of one of them is impaled on a branch. Other twisted figures, tangled in bare and leafless bramble like breastwork wire, drive their exposed knives through a white flag. Needles, twigs, razorblades, nails, and other dangerously pointed objects jut out in all directions. If these eyeless wretches aren’t getting stabbed, they’re consuming each other.

On the left panel, a great bird is skinned; on the right, a naked combatant with a bloody cross-shaped scar where his facial features should be gets sutures across a gaping wound. The men who are in charge of this infernal sphere are, if not Putin himself, visibly Putinesque. They’re trapped in this violent reality too, but at least they’re upright.

Bomb in a birdcage: "Trauma Zone"

Like his other paintings in this show, “Idol 2” radiates painterly erudition. There are hints of Francis Bacon-style body horror in Garikovich’s human-animal amalgams, and the breath of Jacob Lawrence’s “War” series in the splayed and twisted limbs of the combatants. If “Idol 2” reminded you a bit of “Guernica,” you wouldn’t be too far off base. There are also a few allusions to Soviet agitprop posters and the Socialist Realist aesthetic — physical, muscular, agonistic, and very, very male, full of phallic symbols and vicious penetrations — in his canvases. Those who’ve seen the Katyn statue at Exchange Place will know what I’m talking about. Sure, he’s subverting the conventions of that style. But it’s made an impression on him.

Eastern European gloom rolls through his other Body of Freedom pieces. “Censorship” features a quintet of bald men with pallid faces, heavy hands clasped over their mouths, and wide and frightened eyes. Even the colors Garikovich chooses are suggestive of a drab, oppressive state: tank-camo green, dirty gray, and the deep and dirty red of an old brick building. “Trauma Zone” is even more brutal. Human beings are depicted as the prisoners trapped in the ribcage of a man in a trenchcoat. A spying eye stares out from the place his bellybutton should be. We don’t see the top of the man’s face. Nevertheless, he, too, is indisputably, unmistakably Putinesque.

Speaking sub rosa: "Censorship"

This corroborates our impression of the Russian autocrat, who, in and out of these paintings, stands in for the Russian state. Three and a half years into the exercise in bloodshed that he continues to call a “special military operation,” hopeful reports of his impending fall have given way to a grudging acceptance that he isn’t going anywhere. From the American perspective, Putin’s Russia seems to have an unlimited capacity for delivering and absorbing punishment. Dissidents have not stopped the Ukraine war, and those who’ve tried to stand in the way of the invasion have been silenced or flattened. Garikovich, like Komar and Melamid before him, has come to these shores with a warning about what is at risk for us should we give oppressive authoritarians any quarter. 

Many in the United States would argue that the word of warning has come too late. As our homegrown artists constantly remind us, we’re already in hot water. Alec Black’s oil paintings don’t howl as fiercely as Garikovich’s do, but there’s still plenty of pain and uncertainty inscribed on these wood panels. The bluntness and rude vigor of Black’s brushstrokes make that discomfort manifest.

Then there’s the subject matter: elements common to Asian art given an urgent American consumerist makeover. That means pagodas, arch bridges, traditional Chinese medicine, the yin/yang taijitu yoked to the service of advertising and sales. “Madame,” a long rectangular panel, turns Eastern flowers into the stars on a makeshift version of Old Glory, with a “Made in the U.S.A.” written in the mock-Chinese font associated with chop suey palaces. “Yelp Review,” a similarly shaped — and similarly rough — oil painting drops five online stars on acupuncture and shiatsu, as if an ancient healing practice is just another spa treatment to be evaluated by customers in the marketplace.   

Leave a five star review and I'll leave you one, too: can't knock the hustle of the "Yelp Review"

 Surely Scars on the Body of Freedom is not drawing an equivalence between assimilation to American imperatives and the war in Ukraine. One is an uncomfortable but survivable consequence of mercantile capitalism while the other is an example of outright butchery. It’s best to see the exhibition as a kind of dialogue, with Black slyly answering Garikovich’s cry for refuge from despotism. If Garikovich is desperate for shelter from a murderous and censorious regime in Russia, Black is here to throw some cold water on the idea of the United States as an escape hatch. Coercion, Black’s paintings suggest, is less overt and less injurious here, but it’s constantly happening on the dark side of the bright lights of the marketplace — and things are trending in the wrong direction.

Yet Alec Black’s panels, rough and energetic they are, make commerce and the pursuit of the American dream feel like a grubby but worthwhile pursuit. That may not have been the artist’s intention, but the excitement of the marketplace and the dream-making industry is a real thing. Marx and Engels called capitalism the force that batters down all Chinese walls, and that wasn’t entirely a condemnation: exhibitions of strength and purchasing power do appeal to the most idealistic of us. As for Garikovich, his vision of Vladimir Putin is absolutely monstrous, but as recent history has taught us, we’re drawn to the charisma of monsters. That the “Idol” is trapped in an abbatoir of his own creation is no obstruction to our appreciation of his diabolical powers. It merely makes him a literary villain headed for a spectacular literary downfall. Any day now. Annnnny day. 

(Scars on the Body of Freedom will be on view at SMUSH from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. The show closes on December 13.)