ALINA AND JEFF BLIUMIS :::: WORKS :: BIO :: CV :: PUBLICATIONS :: PRESS :: CONTACT

To cross a border or boundary, as we do so often in this age of heightened security, is to claim as one's own a range of individual and collective identities. Most obviously, whenever asked to show identification, we are indicating our name, our residence status in a state or province, and in a nation. Such daily reaffirmation of membership is also required in workplaces, when completing basic transactions like buying groceries or gas, or when getting student or member discounts at museums, theaters, or the like. In fact, the daily demands to show identification could be seen as an ongoing process of defining and redefining who we are - or having that definition thrust upon us by the cards we happen to hold in our wallets. Day by day, year by year, the success and tenor of our interactions is predicated on our voluntary and involuntary group memberships, whether they be social, economic, political, or professional. The installations and photography of Alina and Jeff Bliumis draw attention to the work and tension inherent in navigating the limits of such membership, and to the simultaneous process of building and tearing down social barriers, the constant dismantling and reconstructing one's identity, that is the hallmark of survival in human society.

Alina and Jeff Bliumis' latest work, Language Barrier / Lower Manhattan (2008) explores the unique confluence of diverse communities, as well as the confrontation between past and present that is found in lower Manhattan. Building on their own experiences as expatriates and native speakers of Russian, they engage the ongoing problem of communication across linguistic and cultural divides. For this series of five installations, they have stacked "dictionaries" in various public places around TriBeCa, sometimes blocking the physical navigation of space, as in the work's installation in Duane Park, which extends across the main pathway. The books, actually cast foam replicas of books, each with its own cover image applied through a heat transfer ("iron-on") process and hand finished with acrylic paint, clearly reference language. Their almost innumerable international cultural sources reference the wide range of possibilities for language-based communication. However, the fact that we cannot open or read the books - even their covers bear few or no words - suggests the ultimate difficulty in bridging the gap of human understanding. Simultaneously a means of communication and a hindrance to it, they point out the staggering limitations of language, even among those who speak the same mother tongue. As a system of abstract signs and sounds it is only by consensus that we can agree that it has any meaning at all, and as so often even when we believe that we are "speaking the same language" or "on the same page", each person's perspective inflects the meaning and interpretation of those signs and sounds differently.

New York's legendary diversity offers as many opportunities as challenges, as demonstrated by the installations at the Patel News Stand, Jin Market, and Express Shoe Repair and Barber Shop. Designed to be suggestive without interfering with the smooth running of their host businesses, these installations point out that it is necessity which presses us to surmount language and cultural barriers. Each of these businesses is of a type the city has seen almost since its inception. Providing access to news, food, basic supplies and services, these immigrant-run shops are the latest in a long historical vein through which runs the city's lifeblood, and like their forbears each has made accommodations to the community it serves. East Indian-Run Patel News Stand offers language as commerce, providing the information that we all need to make reasoned decisions about our daily lives. So many news stands like it offer this information in languages other than English, ensuring that the dominant culture and innumerable foreign-language subcultures alike are served. It is also a way station in the travels of many commuters between home, work, and leisure activities, or a midday pit stop for mental and physical refreshment that eases the burden of the afternoon's work, regardless of one's background. The Bliumis' signature books are installed among actual reading material and beverages, pointing to the hundreds of cross-linguistic and cross-cultural convergences that occur here every day.

Time and history, too, play a role here, as neighborhoods evolve, and their demographics shift with changes in the economic tides of development and real estate speculation. Lower Manhattan was once home to a large and vibrant community of eastern European Jews like the gent who runs Express Shoe Repair and Barber Shop. Improvising strategies for survival, they founded creatively symbiotic businesses like this one, where you can have your shoes fixed while your hair is cut. The extra service of convenience provided to the customer might seem small, but in a neighborhood which was once home to so many industrial businesses with employees that often worked more than one shift, the expediency it offered was a crucial selling point. Now its future is threatened by the building's sale to a condo developer, its original working class clientele largely gone, but it remains a link between the communities of the neighborhood's past and those of its present.

If the Language Barrier works seem so far inextricably related to the fabric of the city, it is only because the books' remarkable ability to act as signifiers with almost infinite possibilities for significance allows them to be inserted meaningfully into any number of situations. Alina and Jeff Bliumis have installed the barricades around their studio near Andes, NY, a small town in the Catskills. Here, language is tied directly to the land in a way that suggests the connection between a territory and the tongue spoken there - a joint notion of a geographic location and the cultural identity of those who inhabit it: in short, nationhood. That national identity and language are linked is clear in the very formulations we use to describe them: Say, a German speaks German, to put it simply. We know, of course, that the Austrians also speak German, as do some Swiss, and if you speak to those Germans born in Germany, you'll learn that the others speak "Austrian German" or "Swiss German", identified as separate by national borders and spoken inflection, and distinctly different from the German of Germany. However, beyond the obvious link of language group to country of origin, the Andes installations, experienced by most at a remove through photographs, betray a deeper awareness of human territorial impulses, and the social and political tensions they create. They also point to our ability to choose key features of our own identities. The walls built by Alina and Jeff form a nearly continuous line as they wind through the landscape. Even when they appear to break, as in the image of the wall straddling the road, they are actually continued a short distance away as they join an old stone farm wall or extend up a path cut through a grassy field. They often join with existing physical features or transform into new versions of them, as seen in the photograph of the books tucked under the tree limb that seem to join the distant hill to form a shallow valley, or in the case where books are heaped at left and form a cleft together with the mountain descending to meet it at right. Alina and Jeff thus define their own territory, carving out their parcel of reality, and linking themselves to land they have chosen, rather than a land into which they were merely born by chance. They may speak English, Russian, or a language of their own devise in this newly demarcated land, where the language barriers could be seen as a protective cordon rather than an unbreachable wall.

Itinerancy seems to be a primary characteristic of the present historical moment. Whether couched in economic terms like globalization and outsourcing, social terms like immigration and relocation, or political terms like cross-border disputes, we all experience its effects in some fashion. What the Bliumis' have done is to claim this movement as a creative force rather than to experience it as a side effect. Their own frequent travels back and forth between Manhattan and Andes take them across city limits, rivers, county lines, and lonely highways, as well as from one way of life to another. They have effectively broken down language and cultural barriers as they adjusted to life in their adopted country. Now that they have accomplished this, they have the freedom also to raise them up again, to create a piece of territory after their own design. When their books connect with and complete the old fieldstone wall that once served as a farm's boundary, one feels that this demarcation is not a limitation, but an assertion of identity, a choice. They have translated the centuries-old American vernacular architecture of the wall into their own visual language, using new materials inflected with new meaning, to claim the space as their own without burdening it with the need to perform a duty. They have freed it from the requirement of signification.

In linking their work to the landscape, Alina and Jeff Bliumis touch on an often dangerous aspect of national identity, which is the hazard of falling prey to a mystical strain of propagandistic nationalism. "From sea to shining sea," to pride in a Fatherland or Motherland of mythic proportion, positive national identity and pride often devolves into arrogance, and even imperialism. The challenges and dangers of group identity formation are wryly addressed in A Story with Two Ends (2008). Here, a beaver-chewed stick is used as a rod to bear the pennants of two teams. Gnawed from both ends, it suggests a perverse kind of competition, a game where the main object is perhaps to eat, to build, or just to reach the center first. Like a group of Young Pioneers (something like ideologically-inflected Boy and Girl Scouts in the former Soviet Union), the beaver-masked competitors march in lockstep on an abstract sunburst field, heroic images of the landscape at their backs. The beaver masks serve as emblems of connection to the land, and also work to subsume personal into collective identity. When you join a "team" or take a side you sacrifice a part of your individual identity in order to take on membership (voluntarily or not) in a group identity. The propaganda-inspired triangular flag forms are no accident. If you want to indoctrinate people into following your ideological notion of nationalism, you'd better start early. In fact, the two teams, with their opposing flags waving, are like emblems of ideological positions competing for hegemony. The mixing of abstract design and photography calls to mind the constructivist propaganda placards of the Soviet Union in its infancy. But when one learns that the models for the figures depicted on the flags are friends of the artists, the work takes on a more personal dimension. While this is certainly a wry commentary on the hard work of nation-building with which Soviet youth were indoctrinated, still the choice of their friends to participate reflects their denial of the very ideological position they appear to be supporting. Like the artists, several of the people depicted have chosen their surroundings and company, and approach their identity within society and across cultural barriers with a sharp critical awareness. But there is clearly humor here, too. It's hard to call to mind anything much more absurd than a group of grown people marching about in the woods with fake flags wearing beaver masks and pretending to compete in a game with no real objective. Or is this just another version of paintball?

Mounting the barricade, its arm thrust high into the sky, a somehow familiar figure holds aloft a crooked standard as a beacon, glancing over its shoulder and encouraging comrades to follow. This strident call to arms, an apparent act of revolution, is made by a beaver - wait, a beaver?!

A symbol of connection to the land, as well as a metaphor for the hard work of asserting oneself, its actions in the work Dam Lines (2008) mirror its revolutionary stance. Destroying the old - the woods, a given territory - in order to rebuild anew, the beaver is the ultimate rebel. He also marks territory and conceives of land in terms of demarcated space, in a way akin to human ideas about private property. For students of art history, this particular beaver carries ironic humor as well, as it adopts the stance of Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, as well as referencing Vera Mukhina's colossal stainless steel Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (2400cm, about 79 feet tall), immortalized when it was placed atop the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World's Fair of 1937. By calling to mind such icons of revolutionary imagery, Alina and Jeff imply that utopian idealism and a desire for progress, coupled with hard work and the will to destroy in order to start anew, are the basic preconditions for the production of both good art and a just society. The books that comprise all of the installations include many images of revolution, beginning with the French July Revolution referenced by Delacroix, but including American and Latin American revolutions, the Russian revolution, but also more contemporary revolts like the Paris and Prague student protests of 1968, the actions and propaganda of the Black Panthers, feminists, and most recently Ukraine's Orange Revolution. Cultural revolution and cultural imperialism, in the form of works by Malevich and Duchamp, but also images of Mickey Mouse and Japanese anime figures are also referenced. Further, Napoleonic imagery is included. If the necessity and desirability of a revolutionary perspective is their point, then why use images related to commercially-driven cultural invasion and revolutions that have failed by devolving into fascist and / or imperialist regimes (images of Marx, Mandela, and Che are found alongside those of Castro as well)? Every utopian aspiration is threatened by the naivete of its own optimism, and its corporate cameraderie threatened by outside influence that will ultimately contaminate it. Revolution and its promise cannot be an end in itself, but like the beaver's work it is a constant process of tearing down and building up - an evolution rather than a revolution. The constant shifting of one's subject position in order to adapt to circumstances outside ourselves is ultimately an effort to survive. Communicating, navigating barriers, and recognizing when they must be removed, repaired or rebuilt is nothing less than the protean struggle to find our own niche in the ecosystem of human society. The work of Alina and Jeff Bliumis invites us to openly embrace this work of discovering and constructing our own individual and collective complexity.

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