EASYREEDER

BOMB Magazine (write-ups)

Danzig Baldaev’s Drawings from the Gulag

(02/01/2011)

FUEL, 2010

There were three kinds of prisoners. The common criminals: thugs, thieves, murderers, prostitutes, pimps, and drug smugglers. The “enemies of the revolution,” the political criminals: academics, artists, radicals, conservatives, and people who ended up on the wrong side of the Communist party, some by no more than an anonymous phone call. The third were the prisoners of the nation: these prisoners weren’t held in gulags, they weren’t beaten or physically tortured. Their lives were spent in a long tunnel of conscience, and their suffering was that of brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, who had lost their dearest loved ones. Russia, in the throes of Joseph Stalin’s purges and famines, lost 20 to 40 million people, according to Russian historian Roy Medvedev. In mass murder, Stalin is second only to Mao Ze-Dong.

Danzig Baldaev (1925–2005) was the third kind of prisoner—a prisoner of tyranny. As a child, he was brought up in an orphanage for the children of political criminals. As a man, he was a warden of the State. After World War II, the 23-year-old Baldaev was enlisted to direct St. Petersburg’s Kresty Prison, an institution known for its brutality. In the service of the NKVD (the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), Baldaev observed the tattoos of the prisoners, and replicated them in illustrations. Baldaev was reported for his activities, but the KGB immediately saw a usefulness to a catalogue of the tattoos, a complicated series of symbols and images employed by the Russian underworld as identification, rank, and dossier of deeds. For 50 years, Baldaev traveled the Russian penal system, archiving the tattoos and their meanings. The works are available in the three volumes that comprise the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia…

Josephine Meckseper

(01/23/2003)

The candidate’s qualifications were these: she had two grandfathers in the SS, an uncle who was a radical leftist and a member of the West German Communist Party, and an aunt who at 16 became involved with the ill-fated Baader-Meinhof gang. She also has a graduate degree from the California Institute of the Arts and a radical impulse as strong as her disillusionment.

Josephine Meckseper’s 1998 poster campaign for a US Senate seat did not get her elected, although winning votes was never on the agenda. In 2003, Meckseper, a native of Germany, continues her subversion of political thinking—replacing it with creative thinking—in three solo shows: in New York, at the Elizabeth Dee Gallery (April/May); in Frankfurt, at the Kunstverein (May/June); and in Nuremberg, at the Kunsthalle (December/January)…