The Wende Museum: Valuing the Valueless

by Tucker Neel
 
Artillery Magazine May/June 2021 

In the midst of the Revolution of 1917, fiery Bolshevik Leon Trotsky warned members of the Menshevik party that their moderate methods in the revolutionary world would relegate them to history’s “dustbin.” In an ironic appropriation six decades later, Ronald Reagan declared that Marxism and Leninism were destined for the “ash heap” of history. These two historical figures were, of course, speaking metaphorically about what happens to outdated ideology; they weren’t necessarily referencing the physical junk that collects with time. But ideology isn’t far removed from the everyday stuff it creates, the things it leaves behind. It’s in the places where these things are disposed of, neglected and hidden away, that history rests most authentically. And if you make the hour drive from The Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley to The Wende Museum of The Cold War in Culver City, you can see that while The Gipper was correct about the end of 20th-century Marxist Leninism as he knew it, there’s a lot of inspirational potential in history’s dustbin waiting to upset rigid systems of belief that linger with us today.


The seeds of The Wende Museum began in the 1990s, when its founder Justinian Jampol began scouring basements and flea markets in Eastern Europe, seeking Soviet-era relics, particularly from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), essentially rescuing material culture from landfills. As people east of the Iron Curtain prepared for an uncertain future, many were quick to dispose of the state-sanctioned art, party memorabilia, outdated appliances and recorded remembrances that made up their previous lives. Everyone had their own reasons for the purge. Most simply wanted to make room, supercharged by promises of freedom, democracy and worldwide commerce. For oligarchs-in-the-making, the documented past was potential kompromat, evidence of the socialist safety nets that free-market crony capitalism wouldn’t supply. As the shiny hope of a ration-free future dissolved into authoritarian kleptocracy in countries like Russia and Hungary, proofs of the not-too-distant past threatened to become resonant reminders of what state-sponsored repression could—and often would—come to look like in the 21st century.


The seeds of The Wende Museum began in the 1990s, when its founder Justinian Jampol began scouring basements and flea markets in Eastern Europe, seeking Soviet-era relics, particularly from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), essentially rescuing material culture from landfills. As people east of the Iron Curtain prepared for an uncertain future, many were quick to dispose of the state-sanctioned art, party memorabilia, outdated appliances and recorded remembrances that made up their previous lives. Everyone had their own reasons for the purge. Most simply wanted to make room, supercharged by promises of freedom, democracy and worldwide commerce. For oligarchs-in-the-making, the documented past was potential kompromat, evidence of the socialist safety nets that free-market crony capitalism wouldn’t supply. As the shiny hope of a ration-free future dissolved into authoritarian kleptocracy in countries like Russia and Hungary, proofs of the not-too-distant past threatened to become resonant reminders of what state-sponsored repression could—and often would—come to look like in the 21st century.

Now The Wende Museum houses the most extensive collection of Soviet-era art and artifacts outside of Europe. With over 100,000 objects in its collection, this unique institution, whose name derives from a German term referring to the change that occurred up to and following the fall of the Berlin Wall, stands as an invaluable resource for historians around the world, and an innovative educational destination for younger visitors who only know a post–Cold War life. As an art venue, The Wende hosts rotating exhibitions from its collections and works made by artists inspired by its archive. It’s a uniquely confounding and informative place, empowered by contrasts and contradictions that would probably piss off Ronald Reagan and his Evil Empire label-making progeny.


I met Jampol and Joes Segal, the Wende’s Chief Curator and Director of Programming for a private, socially-distanced, masked-up tour of the museum and its current exhibition, “Transformations: Living Room->Flea Market->Museum->Art,” which re-articulates the journey objects undertake as they enter the institution’s archives. It’s unlike any exhibit I’ve seen before: Guiding the visitor through the very process that makes the museum, the exhibition employs a vulnerable transparency and a self-criticality that has come to mark many of its public offerings.

Visitors start in a domestic space, a small apartment decorated with period wallpaper and framed artworks, a dining room table surrounded by sleek modern chairs with kangaroo-like legs, and various toys scattered about on the floor. As I peered through the suspended windows modeled on Cold War housing, I found myself thinking about the value attributed to mid-century modern design today, transmitted through the lens of tastemaker enterprises like Dwell Magazine and HGTV. While “form following function” reads more like a cliché sales pitch these days—a salve for conspicuous consumption—the Wende’s exhibit makes clear that many of the things on display look the way they do because they were designed to make the most of the materials and technologies available at the time. The chairs, for example, are plastic because other raw materials were in short supply.


Staring at all these objects activated in me a desire for things made to last, and I was reminded of one of their many online talks The Wende has hosted since the COVID pandemic, particularly one about Private Space during the Cold War. During the talk Prof. Susan E. Reid, historian of material culture and everyday life in the USSR, noted that after the ’50s, during a state-sponsored turn to modernized noncommunal apartment housing, there were debates about where people would put all the new consumer products that would furnish their living spaces, with, “some architects and designers arguing that people shouldn’t have cupboards because they just shouldn’t have all this stuff …to put away,” so as not to encourage “accumulating things just for the love of things.” As the Wende exhibition makes clear, there was no shortage of things or people willing to buy them.

From the exhibition’s Home section, visitors move to the Flea Market, a facsimile including folding tables filled with objects like radios, textiles and teddy bears, walls displaying flags and surveillance equipment, and a clothing rack lined with military uniforms. As we pause and flip through a fascinating scrapbook of photos, postcards and written memories made by a cooperative of workers, Jampol notes, “If we (The Wende) weren’t here, a lot of these things would have disappeared …it’s endangered material.”

Jampol and Segal point out that the museum actively collects things perceived to have little to no market value; once a certain kind of Cold War collectible becomes popular, they tend to move on to pursuing something else. The two men, bouncing ideas and observations back and forth with ease, tell me they actually get disappointed when the monetary valuations of things in the collection rise because “insurance costs and security costs go up.” Segal notes that developing their collection as a search for unearthed historical value is like a “secret sauce” that enables the museum to grow in a way that might be impossible for other institutions. It’s quite an accomplishment how they model the value in valuing the valueless.

We then move into the exhibition’s Museum section, a simulacrum of museological space with Soviet realist paintings and sculptures of proud workers and model comrades accompanied by official-looking wall text, velvet ropes separating viewers from art, and even a fake colonnade attached to the wall. These particular formalized elements look conspicuously designed to make the viewer aware of how the things surrounding a work of art create auras of authority. It echoes The Wende’s 2016 exhibition, “Questionable History,” which discussed art and artifacts through conflicting didactic labels stating interpretive positions in opposition to one another. For example, a pink bust of Lenin could be both pro and anti-socialist, a spontaneous reaction to the falling Berlin Wall and/or a nostalgic joke made in the last decade or so. In the end, the viewer is left to live in the uncomfortable space of uncertain “truths.”


From there, the exhibit transitions through a mix of scientific machines on loan from The Getty with the word “ART” placed hilariously on the wall above them. These instruments, which measure material characteristics like tensile strength, sit as transitional objects—devices used to authenticate and stabilize artifacts as they make the journey from personal to public, ephemeral use into historical preservation. But things don’t end there: The exhibition then gives way to a selection of freshly made contemporary art inspired by items in the collection, the implication being that things in the archive start new journeys as catalysts for creative production after they find a home in the museum’s vaults. The inspirational potential is clear, for example, in Ken Gonzales-Day’s large photo mural composed of a collage of statues of leaders like Lenin and Stalin, recontextualized to reflect contemporary debates about what to do with monuments to the Confederacy in America today.


Warmed by a fire pit in the museum’s sculpture garden, next to what will soon be a new community center, Joes and Jampol indulge my obligatory questions about how the museum positions itself within America’s politically polarized climate. Joes notes that some people get upset that the museum doesn’t demonize the GDR enough, while others want the opposite: “Other museums have the problem of getting people to care; ours is that often people care too much.”

The museum responds to these demands to take sides with critical neutrality, which itself acts as a looking glass, a reflection of the biases—latent or not—in its visitors. It’s a tricky balancing act that deftly challenges dualistic thinking. “Complexity can scare people off,” Jampol admits. “But it’s a worthwhile endeavor.” Joes adds, “If someone says ‘I get it,’ we’ve lost. Our success is in the confusion.”