COLD WAR MEMORIES:

Sasha Chavchadze’s Museum of Matches

By Merrell Hambleton

Columbia University

 

In his memoir, Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov recounts a game of matches that he played with a general from the Russian Army. The general places the matches end to end to represent “a sea in calm weather.” He shifts them into a zig-zag pattern and they become “a stormy sea.” Remembering this game, Nabokov writes, “what pleases me is the evolution of the match theme. Those magic ones that he had shown me had been trifled with and misled and his armies had vanished and everything had fallen through.”

 

Nabokov’s autobiography is an artifact in The Museum of Matches, an off-shoot of the Proteus Gowanus gallery in Brooklyn, NY, and this passage is quoted in wall-text at the entrance of the gallery. Its display suggests the centrality that the book and the story of the matches hold in the exhibit. Sasha Chavchavadze, the artist and curator behind The Museum of Matches, draws on the literal and abstract themes presented in this moment between Nabokov and the general, to explore the Cold War through a unique, if scattered, lens.

 

The Museum of Matches, like Nabokov’s match game, incorporates matches in a literal sense, but is not ultimately about matches at all. And although the exhibit is made up of a number of artifacts, it is hardly a museum. The wall text at the exhibit entrance describes The Museum of Matches as a “one room museum founded by an individual to better understand an historical moment.” The historical moment in question is the Cold War, however it is not the goal of the Museum of Matches to leave the viewer with even a superficial understanding of the conflict. Chavchavadze draws on Nabokov’s themes of personal history, emigration, cross-generational relationships and war to explore her own life through quotes, artifacts, books, photographs and art. The Cold War is evidently an important element of the artist's exploration, but it is difficult to understand exactly why the show hinges on this event and what its goal is in doing so.

 

The first piece upon entering the gallery is one of Chavchavadze’s own works: two cylinders, bristling with matchsticks, are welded together by a metal handle. The top faces of the cylinders are painted with representations of the American and Soviet flags, respectively. Chavchavadze is commenting on the pointless stalemate in which the US and the USSR are caught, but the incorporation of matches seems inscrutable and incongruous. One traces Nabokov’s war and match theme, but to what end?

 

The show makes an awkward transition into the next display. Chavchavadze’s art is replaced by a collection of Cold War artifacts that illustrate parallels in American and Soviet symbolism and art. What begins as abstract commentary on the Cold War suddenly becomes utterly didactic. Travel to the next display and one is in new territory once again, this time the relationship in question is between Chavchavadze and her father, who was an agent in the CIA. While Chavchavadze seems to drop the Cold War theme here, she does make an effort to reintroduce the match game, as David Chavchavadze used to play a version of it in his youth. This portion of the show is also without any of Chavchavadze’s own art but relies instead on more wall text and artifacts that reference her father. Though difficult to place in the larger context of the “Museum,” this portion of the show is unexpectedly moving. In a wall text, Chavchavadze tells a story from her youth, of seeing her father unexpectedly on the subway to Brooklyn. He is working undercover, holding a sandwich bag, trying to look nondescript. When he notices Sasha looking across at him, there is a moment in which he deliberates, deciding whether or not to speak to her. In this small instant, Chavchavadze successfully plays to her most central themes. Her father, uncomfortable and furtive in the American landscape, seems caught between identities: he is at once the accomplished and diligent CIA agent for the American government and a Russian displaced from his home. The Cold War, in which he is bound up, heightens the tension between these two selves. This moment, caught between America and Russia, illustrates the central problem that the artist seeks to address.

 

Unfortunately, the territory that Chavchavadze is interested in exploring is too general to allow her to present any more profound commentary on the Cold War and its impact on her life as a Russian immigrant. She works to fashion a three-dimensional memoir made up of art, books, images and words, but her various mediums fail to coalesce. The show is at its most interesting when it is personal, but it becomes less and less about Chavchavadze as it progresses. She shows us more books on the Cold War, then books about the CIA and the Russian revolution, then books on war in general In many ways, it is an impressive and fascinating collection, but only by virtue of the works themselves. Chavchavadze’s art is interspersed amongst the various collections of books, but it is overshadowed by all of the other objects on display. One has the feeling of having stepped into someone’s private study and so the art-work on the walls becomes mere décor.

 

The Museum of Matches seems fixated on looking, in none too deliberate a fashion, at a series of basic, large parallels and ideas. On one wall, Chavchavadze has posted a sheet of paper that reads, “Relationships to Explore,” which lists such topics as Cold War/ Personal History, US/ USSR, Cold War/War on Terror, Khrushchev/Kennedy, Past/Present, Russian Revolution/Cold War, Communism/Capitalism, Our Enemy/Ourselves, and finally, Father/Me.

This look into the artist’s thought process excuses her lack of focus, since the show is visibly an exploration, a work in progress. Chavchavadze is a Russian immigrant in America and the Cold War represents something symbolic of her personal experience. She seeks to understand it through her father, Nabokov, books, and artifacts. She makes art about it. But at a certain point, the viewer has to ask, “so what?”

 

As if in defense of this challenge to her project, Chavchavadze includes a quote which reads, “This story has no beginning and no end; it is a sequence of images, snapshots of reality, loosely, sometimes arbitrarily, strung together along an open continuum, yet inextricably connected.” To an extent, Chavchavadze’s awareness of the nature of the show makes it hard to critique. At the same time, there is no getting around the fact that The Museum of Matches fails to coalesce. At best, we can use the quote as advice for seeking out the good in the show – and it is there, in the personal stories that she shares, both her own, her fathers and Nobokov’s. While Chavchavadze’s inclusion of artifacts does flesh out the stories she tells, the overwhelming number and variety of objects become clutter. The look offered into the mind of the artist is interesting and unique, but ultimately too much work is left up to the viewer. One wishes that Chavchavadze would make the “inextricable connections” between her various images more apparent.