Ideological Optics

Using confirmation bias as a medium.

A test from Óptica Bronstein: Leon Trotsky to the left, Mikhail Kalinin to the right. ©Yevgeniy Fiks/Pablo Helguera

In the mid 2000s when I published my first book (The Manual of Contemporary Art Style), a satirical social etiquette manual for the art world, I received many comments from readers. One was from a non-art acquaintance in Mexico who told me: “I am so glad you ridiculed contemporary art, which so much of the time it is total bullshit.”  My book is a satire and critique of the socioeconomic dynamics of the art world, primarily for a readership who already is informed about, and values, contemporary art practice, but in no way did it question the value or relevance of contemporary art itself. Yet, on the mind of this acquaintance I was on “his” side and my book, in his mind, was an “exposé” of the art world as a fraud. I became concerned that my satire was serving the wrong purpose by conspiracy theorists. It bothered me because I did not want to give ammunition those who launch old-fashioned, ignorant and nonsense attacks against things that are settled arguments.

Obviously, artists, writers and any content generators have no control of how their ideas will be absorbed in the public realm once they go out into the world. I have written in the past of how artists, poets, and even political commentators are often quoted in selective ways in order to make the case for a particular viewpoint that they might have not necessarily shared, and there is not much the author can do about it. But it is most dispiriting for a maker to see one’s work become quoted, misused, misconstrued, misappropriated or misread in ways that might go against one’s very own ideas and ideals.

To be clear: wishful misreadings are not intentionally malicious or even conscious. As the 19^th century Spanish poet Campoamor states, “todo depende del color del cristal con que se mira” (“everything is depending on the color of the class through which it is viewed”): when we look at something, we bring with us a life baggage of biases. In psychology this is described by the term “motivated perception”, referring to how our perception is governed by our desires, needs, and motivations— in other words, we see what we want to see.

Artoon collection of Ellen Grenley McKernan

But of course having a conservative opinion about art is rather harmless when compared to holding political views that translate into votes that, in turn, bring demagogues and authoritarians into power. Prime (but unfortunately not only) example is the  current degraded political discourse in the United States, which has turned almost entirely emotional and irrational, and into a “us versus them” dynamic that gives us identity by negative association as in “we are not like them” rhetoric that is almost reaching infantile levels à la Dr. Seuss’ “The Butter Battle Book”. In these contentious times, it is hard to consume any information (visual or otherwise) with any open mind. We live at a time where we cope with social isolation and uncertainty through confirmation bias— either by biased interpretation of information, biased memory recall or biased search of information, which are the three categories under which this phenomenon falls.

What we need to pay close attention is to our own state of mind when we make meaning of information, and how this state of mind might be playing a role in the interpretations we are making.  Or as sociologist David Berreby once put it in his book “Us and Them: The Science of Identity”: “When you understand your own kind-mindedness, then, you don’t just see yourself more clearly; you also see how ethnicities, nations, and all the other kinds can come to be. And you start to ask what it is about the mind that makes us see these human kinds, and believe in them, and fight about them.”

But how can art works help bring out this critical awareness? A few years back, artist Yevgeniy Fiks and I conducted a small experiment in this regard.

I have known Yevgeniy for more than two decades. Born in Moscow during the last years of the Soviet era, he came to New York in the 1990s. His work has often reflected on Soviet history, the Cold war, and homophobia and antisemitism in Russia. In 2005 he did the deliciously ironic project Lenin for your Library?  which consisted in mailing  a copy of Lenin’s book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, to 100 major transnational corporations around the world including, Coca-Cola, General Electric and IBM.

With Yevgeniy Fiks at the Trotsky House Museum in Coyoacán; Trotsky's private studio, office, and his glasses

For many years Yevgeniy and I had developed an interest in collaborating to do a project at Trotsky’s House Museum in Mexico City, where he lived in exile from April 1939 until August 1940, when he was brutally assassinated. The Museo Casa de  León Trotsky in Coyoacán is a peculiar and odd place—  mostly a frozen-in-amber house that preserves Trotsky’s belongings, such as his furniture, books and personal items exactly as he left them, such as the study where Trotsky was meeting with Ramón Mercader, a Spanish communist spy who had posed as a supporter and mortally wounded him on the head with an ice axe.

Doing research on the house museum we learned that prior to it becoming Trotsky’s residence the building had housed a center for optical research led by the Italian ophthalmologist Antonio Turatti.  This gave us the idea that linking eye tests to political/ideological vision could be a fruitful approach. We titled the project Óptica Bronstein, in reference to Trotsky’s birth name (he was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein from a wealthy Russian Jewish family; he changed his name to a revolutionary name taken after one of a prison guard he had met in Siberia).

Photos 1-4: Óptica Bronstein in Mexico City, photos by Abigail Enzaldo; 5-6, VAC foundation, Venice, 2017

We had the idea of turning part of the museum into an optics establishment of sorts where visitors could get eye exams by a Trotsky look-alike. The tests—which I describe further down — were not the typical optometrist services, but rather a series of exercises that would help “assess” a visitor’s political views. Initially developed for an exhibition in conjunction with the Venice Biennial, we primarily wanted to do the project at the Trotsky Museum in Mexico City; curator Julieta González, who was then director of the Museo Jumex, enthusiastically embraced the idea and offered to help produce it.

When we first met with the Trotsky House Museum staff in Coyoacán, it became very clear that nothing much could be done at the museum —and even less something as odd as what we were proposing— without the approval of the museum’s founder and director, Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov. Volkov, who was 14 at the time of Trotsky’s assassination and the only surviving witness of that event, was as active and hands-on as ever in the museum’s operations in spite of being in his 90s (he passed away last year at 97).  He would  regularly give museum tours and lectures about Trotsky’s life and ideas.

Yevgneniy and I had to return to New York after that meeting so it was Julieta’s mission to present our crazy idea to Volkov. He had a reputation of being cantankerous and difficult, which made the task daunting. As I recall, when Julieta presented the idea to him, he gave her an earful about our project being nonsensical and not art,  on which he went on an on. However, at the end, he completely surprised her by saying: “whatever— go ahead.”

Hiring a Trotsky look-alike for the two versions of the project (Venice and Mexico City) was most interesting. We first contacted an American artist in Brooklyn that Yevgeniy knew who practically looked identical to Trotsky; he, however, was not interested unless we allowed him to show his own sculptures within our project; we said no to that matryoshka (show-within-a-show) counterproposal. The Italian Trotsky we got for the Venice version was a bit unreliable, often showing up late to work and taking overly long breaks and lunches (too rebelliously revolutionary for our taste). The best was a young Russian-Ukrainian actor in Mexico City who looked just like Trotsky in his youth, who, at the interview, when we asked him how he ended up in Mexico, he turned red and said: “because of a woman.”

We devised multiple tests for the project. One of the simpler ones was a puzzle of a portrait of Trotsky. The pieces, however, were intentionally mixed with the puzzle of a portrait of yet another, lesser known, Soviet leader, Mikhail Kalinin. Kalinin was the titular head of the Soviet Union from 1919 to 1946, even during the rise of the Stalin era (he held little real power). Kalinin had a certain physical resemblance to Trotsky (goatee, glasses), and for the uninformed viewer it would be easy to mix up both. As it is well known, Stalin had all his enemies —particularly Trotsky— erased from all photographs documenting the revolution for propaganda purposes, it is particularly striking to see many photos of Kalinin and Stalin together as at first glance they would appear to show Trotsky instead.

The more significant test, which specifically dealt with “political vision”, involved giving a questionnaire to participants  with quotes (without attribution) by 20^th  and 21^st century politicians which ranged from Trotsky himself to Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, to modern autocratic aspirants like Trump to progressive/liberal leaders like Martin Luther King and Barack Obama.  The statements included famous phrases like “it is better to live one day as a lion than 100 as a sheep” (Mussolini), or  “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic” (Stalin) to much less identifiable statements about power, democracy, or freedom, often expressed in ways that did not necessarily betray a particular ideological point of view. After taking the test, we would go through the responses with the participants and share with them the extent to which they had agreed with various leaders. It was fascinating to see the reaction of surprise and embarrassment  of those who tested agreeing with the likes of Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini.

I asked Yevgeniy the other day on his takeaways regarding Optica Bronstein, now in retrospect. He shared: “I feel we definitely made Trotsky a bit too cute in that project, certainly we domesticated him a bit too much. Maybe we should've shown more revolutionary brutality.” I agreed with him, although I did share that to me the project was less about Trotsky and more about ideological bias. At the time, Trotsky’s story served us as something of a springboard to us to make sense of a period in the US when we were confronting issues of veracity and renewed Cold-War intrigue (this was the time when the “Russian Hoax”, the Steele dossier, and Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian interference in the US elections were at their height, and also the preamble to the Russian invasion of Ukraine).

Certainly our tests had no scientific basis, nor were we really attempting to accurately “diagnose” the participants’ world views. It was merely a provocative way to turn the process of traditional confirmation bias on its head and show how what is said, when extricated from a context with which we already have strong views, can produce very different responses. If you agree with something that Hitler said, it might not reveal anything about your politics, but it might make you think, first, of how we sometimes accept certain ideas without giving them enough critical consideration; and second, that how we feel about someone or something colors whether we agree with it. If you hate someone, you might be more prone to disagree with anything they say, and if you are seduced by someone, you might be prone to accept anything they say.

Cults do that to us, whether they are political or spiritual.  Richard Dawkins often argues that even if one were to present irrefutable evidence of the inexistence of a personal god, most religious people would remain believers because their commitment to their faith cannot be challenged by reason. We see what we want to see, and that is that.

But perhaps if we abandon the realm of politics and religion and go back to the humbler realm of art, we may be able to see the possibility of how it can help us in the difficult process of temporarily suspending judgment. Perhaps then, wishful misreadings can be over. But maybe this view in itself is a wishful misreading?