As I remember it, in 1983 I was 16 years old and visited the Soviet Union in an Argentine Communist Party-organized tour. Both the Argentine dictatorship and the subsequent elected government sold plenty of wheat to the hungry red masses. I went on a secret mission with my grandmother Berta Yusem, who was a secondary-market art dealer in Buenos Aires. She was to retrieve and smuggle out a Chagall drawing from a Jewish family in order to help them escape to Israel or Argentina, aided by the proceeds of the sale. What struck me the most was not Lenin’s corpse at the Red Square, or the Hermitage, which we dutifully toured, but the fact that there were no stores or advertising. I thought it beautiful and it allowed me to daydream passionate Dostoevskian scenarios. Those Soviets I could talk to when evading the low-level apparatchik assigned to our group, and who spoke any Latin language or English, begged to differ. It turned out that the lack of available commodities was their major political grudge, and around the state-run hotels where we stayed there were gangs of potential buyers for our jeans, to be resold at a profit – another secondary market. For them, an autonomous Western fetishized commodity epitomized individual subjecthood. Little did they know.
“As He Remembered It,” Stephen Prina’s piece exhibited at Capitain Petzel’s socialist glass box in Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, hinges on the effect that rendering an architectural built-in into a freestanding commodity has on its possible meanings. In the artist’s words: “Clearly, this desk that had once been built-in had been pried out of its surroundings with the attempt to render it freestanding. However, it appeared to us as an amputated limb.” [1] The piece was originally conceived for the Vienna Secession and subsequently presented at LACMA; the amputated desk in question was part of a Schindler House in Los Angeles. Prina’s large installation comprises the reconstruction of built-ins from two houses built by the Viennese architect in LA in the 1940s and later demolished, installed in a somewhat orderly yet de-hierarchical fashion reminiscent of a mid-price-point furniture store; the placement or dimensions of the original rooms cannot possibly be inferred from the accumulation of objects.
To read the full article, please click here or download it below.
