“Give the ones you love wings to fly,
roots to come back and reasons to stay”
(Dalai Lama 14)
1. The end of one empire…
The USSR was largely a self-sufficient empire. I mean the ability and desire to independently form the ideology and symbolic values and even impose them on others at the global level. This empire, of course, had an entirely self-sufficient art world with its own institutions, leaders, “saints” and martyrs, periphery (where almost all the republics of the empire were situated), the market, etc. There were some artists, of whom the ruling party “took care”, there were those, who earned foreign currency abroad, accomplishing monumental projects in third-world countries, as well as those, who lived on official procurement to public collections. Certainly, there were those, who did not fit into the framework of acceptable Soviet art, but they were known (both to the functionaries of the art world, and its supervisory bodies), they were allowed to organize home exhibitions and sell their works to foreigners and their existence was even politically acknowledged – when the exhibitions were closed or broken up (as, for instance, in 1962 in Manege and in 1974 at the open air in Moscow).
The “unofficial” were also known abroad. In 1984, a young curator of baron Thyssen-Bornemisza’s art collection in Lugano Simon de Pury (later the director of the auction house “Sotheby’s”) and the chief curator of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Jean-Hubert Martin visited Illia Kabakov and his friends’ studios (sometimes the same Russian “khokhols” i.e. natives of Ukraine, although that was irrelevant at the time) and realized that in the Soviet Union there is an art, similar to the western one, and most importantly, similar to Russian avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. The only problem of the unofficial artists was limited opportunity either to exhibit their works in the USSR or abroad, or to sell them (what is meant here is official sales and not a sort of “underground exchange” of works on foreign currency, as traditionally occured).
And then came Gorbachev and the party announced “glasnost”, “perestroika” and all sorts of other initiatives that had to liberalize stagnant society of the late Soviet Union. The Russian art world, often joined by immigrants from other republics, quickly responded to the changes. In 1986, the Moscow Artists’ Union was to review the works of the young Soviet authors typically, but due to the new political trends organizers allowed Danyil Dondurei, a famous researcher of Soviet art, to experiment – to exhibit the so-called alternative. One of the reasons was that viewers responded sluggishly to the Artists’ Unions’ exhibits, because there was nothing new – almost only the artists themselves came to such a public showing, who later bought the works from themselves through official bodies. The famous 17th youth exhibition MOSKh succeeded at least insofar as it was
In 1985 he organizes the first exhibition of Kabakov in the West, though his specialty will be still not East European or Russian (Soviet) art, but post-colonial problems of modern art. closed, not for ideological reasons, but due to excessive public interest in young art. For the first time organizers tried new PR strategies for Soviet art and created the possibility to buy the artists’ works directly from the exhibition without waiting for official purchases. “Iskusstvo” (“Art”), the official journal of the Ministry of Culture, the Union of Artists and the Academy of Arts of the USSR, published a special issue in 1988, prepared by young curators and artists, and where for the first time a Kyivite, Oleksandr Soloviov, tried to outline the nature of the programme of the painting “Cleopatra’s Sorrow” (1987) by Kyiv artists H. Senchenko and A. Savadov. Later, that work would be called the “extreme manifestation” of Ukrainian postmodern art, but back then, everything was only beginning. A serious player of art did not delay: the auction house “Sotheby’s” managed to negotiate with the government of Moscow to hold an auction in 1988, which broke all the price records of Russian and Soviet Art (by the way, the sale was held in pounds sterling and with the issuance of an export license that enabled many happy authors to immediately emigrate from the USSR). Artists of the “old” avant-garde were represented as well as new unofficial artists who, thanks to the lobbying of foreign curators, or personal connections with Soviet officials, were able to get shortlisted as members of the auction. Prices were outrageous, but soon the interest in the art of the USSR (not least because the country itself ceased to exist) faded and many of those who successfully shone at the auction as the representatives of new Soviet avant-garde, emigrated to Europe or the US to make career in the world market of contemporary art. Those who could not or did not want to emigrate began to create new artistic waves, but in new national pools.
2. Moscow traces of new Ukrainian waves
The so-called new Ukrainian art starts only from the mid to late 1980s, which is firstly represented in Kyiv at the republican exhibition “Youth of the Country” (1987), however nothing similar to the youth exhibition in Moscow happened here. In general the Ukrainian public and critics reacted to contemporary art cautiously and with fear, which is why artists chose to exhibit abroad. Oleksandr Roitburd – one of the pillars of new Ukrainian art – recalls that artists realized that they had to have an exhibition in Moscow, and were “pushing” this idea through the mediation of the famous Russian artist Leonid Bazhanov (he is now an artistic director of the NCCA). I think this is quite natural, taking into consideration the status of Moscow as the capital of the empire and the peripheral status of its colonies. Marat Helman, a young curator from Moldova who lived in Kyiv for some time, became the initiator of a vast project engaging young Ukrainian artists. The painting exhibition at the Palace of Youth (Dvorets Molodezhy) in Moscow was called “Babylon” but the pieces presented there, were later outlined by a term that had to be comprhensible to Russian viewers and buyers – “South Russian Wave” (“yuzhnorusskaya volna”) (analagous to the topic from 2 National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Russian Federation the history of the Russian Empire, where so-called devotees of the “South Russian Artists Society” had existed). Helman felt the situation, because of the works of Kyivites and Odessans (Oleksandr Hnylytskyi, Oleh Holosii, Valeria Trubina, Oleh Tistol, Vinni Reunov, Yana Bystrova, Pavlo Kerestei, Serhii Panych, Stepan Riabchenko, etc.) stood out against the background of the official Soviet and unofficial Moscow art. Helman formed a kind of “platform” for his own gallery from these artists, which still exists in Moscow and is active in the Russian art market. Some of the Ukrainians migrated to the camp of the Russian underground, such as a Kyivite Oleh Kulyk, who began his “doggish” performances in Helman’s gallery in 1993, whereas others later became artists of “new Ukraine”.
Moscow criticism, which was traditionally focused on conceptualism, was somewhat shocked by the pictorial aggressiveness of this exhibition, but in general the idea of the “South Russian Wave” was adopted. Such geographical terms, on the one hand, allowed Ukrainian artists to be included in the new Russian (no longer Soviet, but still imperial) art in the status of selfothers, and, on the other hand, manifested (post)-imperial discourse toward young Ukrainian art. In 2000, Marat Helman granted his collection of “South Russian Wave” to the Russian museum after the major exhibition in St. Petersburg under the title “Art against Geography”, but the project did not stop at that point, and if you visit the website of the gallery, you will find that this “Wave” is still alive. On the Ukrainian side of the phenomenon the “Wave” is constantly reinterpreted. The National Art Museum of Ukraine’s project called “The New Ukrainian Wave” (which took place in 2009 on the occasion of 110 anniversary of the museum) became a landmark in this process. Paintings, photos and videos from the late 1980s and early 1990s (curator Oksana Barshynova, among other authors of articles in the catalog were Halyna Skliarenko and Oleksandr Soloviov). As we can see, the “wave” theme for the exhibition was borrowed by Ukrainian curators and artists from the vocabulary of Russian experts, but without the “South Russian” location.
3. Warsaw roots of the Ukrainian steppes
The peculiarity of the construction of the pantheon of Ukrainian art of that period was that this periphery of a recent colony (I mean Ukraine) has two attraction poles – Moscow and the West. In the euphoria of gained independence in 1991, a biennale of Ukrainian fine art “Lviv-91. Revival” was organized in Lviv, the weakness (in interpretation, and in conceptualization) of which prompted the Polish-Canadian artist and curator Jerzy Onuch (who came to the exhibition to have a performance) to make a great overview of Ukrainian art project in Warsaw. This project took place in 1993 at the Center for Contemporary Arts “Zamek Ujazdowski” and became another significant project to the introduction of Ukrainian art outside Ukraine. Yevhen Leshchenko, Sehii Panych, Oleh Tistol and Mykola Matsenko, Asren Savadov and Heorhii Senchenko, Oleh Holosii, Hlib It is believed that the term was introduced by Kostiantyn Akinsha.This group was also called “new wave”, “hot post-modernism”, “new south”, “trans-avant-garde neo-baroque” or “southern alternative”. Vysheslavskyi, Serhii Riabchenko, Vasyl Bazhai, Andrii Sahaidakovskyi, Valentyn Raievskyi and others fell into Onuch`s focus, although all the project’s stress was on Kyiv artist Oleh Holosii (a representative of the new “wave”) and Lviv non-conformist Sahaidakovskyi (according to Onuch’s own words – the representative of Lviv as “European province” school). Like Helman in Moscow, the curator also chose a geographical name “Steppes of Europe”, but this time it marked the Europeanness of Ukraine and did not treat Ukraine as a part of the “Russian world”. Jerzy Onuch tried to show Poles (of the West?) that Ukrainian art has not been rustic, Soviet or Russian for a long time, and that it is created in the context of European paradigms (but in the province, in the culture and godforesaken steppe), and the creative work itself is close to the creativity of the state, which Ukrainians should have begun. An important aspect of this exhibition was its diversity. If in Moscow, Ukrainian art was mainly represented by paintings, in Warsaw many installations and videos were shown.
Both exhibitions – in Moscow and in Warsaw – consolidated the list of names of Ukrainian artists, who are now considered the classics of art of the late 1980s and 1990s. Both exhibitions imposed on Ukrainian art certain perspectives: that it was the “hot” painting of the South versus the conceptualism of northern Moscow groups, or it was the provincial art of Europe, which is created if not in cities, then somewhere off in the steppe. This art kind of “sags” between different centers and represents to its best advantage what can be born in the conditions of a colony-province, which in most cases does not see itself (well, and does not contextualize).
In Ukraine in the 1990s there were no such broad overviews of Ukrainian art. And where were they to take place? Old art institutions didn’t suit new art, and nothing new was born. From June 1994 the Center for Contemporary Art came into play in Kyiv, which became a part of a network similar to George Soros’ centers, which were established in the newly liberated Soviet republics. In fact, it was the main institution of Ukraine that dealt exclusively with contemporary art before the oligarch Pinchuk’s arts center in Kyiv appeared. This CCA became a place where Ukrainian media art “was born”, the so-called REP group, the festival of performances etc., here artists learned how to think in projects and had the opportunity to communicate with like-minded creators from other countries. Not least because of this Center, many artists began to perceive themselves as “Ukrainian artists” and critics and researchers began to talk about the need to create a national (preferably public) Centre for Contemporary Art.
4. Stockholm and the art after the fall of the wall
Another exhibition, which was intended to show what happened in Europe after 1989, took place in Stockholm, in Moderna Museet. The exhibition was planned as a great observation project and was held under an eloquent title “After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe”. The curatorial team led by Berliner Bojana Pejic, Swedish Briton David Elliott and German Iris Müller-Westermann conducted substantial research, which was largely based on the activity of Soros’ Centers for Contemporary Art, and tried to trace how the art in this part of Europe changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Artists from countries, which would have been recently called socialist, made it here: from Albania to Berlin or from Latvia to Ukraine. Certainly, such an exhibition might seem anachronistic at that time: why would we again construct some oriental “other”, when there are such universal pan-European projects as Manifesta or the Venice Biennale – a contemporary might ask?
The exhibition had a large catalogue, where Bojana and a famous Polish historian of art Piotr Piotrowski tried to draw attention to the fact that the major European art institutions include postcolonial discourse in their work, but rather in relation to Africa, the Arab world or Asia, but completely forgot about the internal European colonies. Multiculturalism and globalization did not elucidate those cultural and national differences (not only in art) that existed in Europe at that time. As Piotrowski asserted, we (Eastern Europeans) and they (Western Europeans) were brought up onmthe same knowledge, we have a common episteme, that’s why it is more correct not to treat us as the “other” (an Arab or a Chinese), but rather – as a “close other”. The exhibition did not show that the art of the East and the West was different or similar, it rather felt that there was the problem of post-communist or post-socialist identities. The artists represented in this project (I mean the representatives from different countries), often tried to “reach” those trends that were offered/accepted by western art market or the so-called “art world”.
The exhibition became significant for Ukraine, since it firstly put Ukrainian art on the same level as Russian and Polish art (i. e. there was not a scornful look at us as at “borderlands” on the one hand or like the Russian periphery on the other), and secondly, the art of this country was inscribed into the context of Central and Eastern Europe. If Romanians, Poles, Hungarians and other national art schools of the socialist bloc crossed during the time of the “iron curtain” and could mock being marginalized by Europe (as a kind of integrity) and invisible on its background (except for those artists who fit into Western trends off art), then artists of Ukraine or Moldova were three times more marginalized both from the Moscow side and from the side of the West, but they were “not allowed” by so-called Eastern Europeans either. Such a project became possible only from the perspective of Stockholm, according to which Ukrainians and Bulgarians were treated as being part of a common symbolic space, the space of the “close other” in Piotrowski’s terms.
Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. (1 Corinthians 7:20) Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you. Although if you can gain your freedom, do so. (1 Corinthians 7:21)
Has something changed today? Ten years after the exhibition in Stockholm in 2009, there was no Soros’ CCA in Ukraine, but the Pinchuk Art Center functioned, art Arsenal in Kyiv has loomed on the horizon of expectations, private art centers appeared (or disappeared). Great art institutions in Kiev are aimed at attracting “important” artists from abroad, to show the “colonized aborigines” real artistic values of the art world. At last year’s Arsenal (First Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art) the curator David Elliott (one of the curators of the exhibition in Stockholm) asserted that the “discovery” of the project was a provincial artist from Lviv, who was once pulled from the underground by Jerzy Onuch – Andrii Sahaidakovskyi. He was already a “discovery” in 1989, 1990 and at the “Steppes of Europe” in 1993 in Warsaw, to become the “discovery” once again in 2012 at the international biennale in Kyiv. Of course, the works of this author are not represented in the official collections of Ukrainian museums and in oligarchs’ collections. Warsaw’s Centre for Contemporary Arts “Zamek Ujazdowski” in 2013 attempted to repeat the “Steppes of Europe” 20 years later. The curator Marek Goździewski made a winning sampling – the participants of the “Wave” and the “Steppes” were represented among the young artists of so-called social criticism, that rather reflected the “Polish” view of avant-garde art in Ukraine. The artists of the REP group, who were once “launched” in the great artistic voyage by Jerzy Onuch (as a chief curator of the CCA in Kyiv), in Poland (and often in the West) are perceived as representatives of the artistic Left, and in Ukraine they take money from oligarchs without any serious internal conflicts, which, at least, undermines their leftism.
This situation in the Ukrainian art world Onuch himself recently called schizophrenic. For me and my colleagues it rather still resembles the unsolved problem of identity: young Ukrainian artists do not replicate Western art discourses or get involved in them, but rather cleverly imitate them (of course, this is a brazen generalization). They can speak well or explain their work according to the requirements of various art festivals, are well oriented in the art world and can point out what is current and what is “over”. But often we are left with the feeling that, as in the past, when Soviet artists created art for the system and individually made “creative” works from themselves or for themselves, so it is with the young, they create various symbolic values for the Ukrainian market and for export. It reminds me of the Ukrainian feminist group “Femen”, whose events are mainly attended by journalists, or, on the contrary, their actions are held, where the journalists cameras are going to be, the rest does not matter.
It seems this situation will last until our own field of values in the contemporary art of Ukraine is formed: until public and private institutions of art start acting in parallel (and not merely exist), collectors and, what is the most important, the institute of art critics and connoisseurs, who often form the meaning around the “signs of the times”, developed by artists. Until this happens, the value of Ukrainian art will be formed by western auction houses, large museum institutions of Europe or America, or oligarchs with their own advisors or neighbors, whose colony Ukraine was in the past. The abovementioned Piotr Piotrowski, who published the monograph “In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989” in English, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and another one – “Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe” – last year, continues the trend established in the past. He is consistent in that we need to defend the peculiarity art of Central and Eastern Europe (in English language), and in that he deliberately marginalizes Ukrainian art. He says almost nothing about the art of Ukraine in his books, paving the way of the secondary marginalization (Piotrowski says that the West marginalizes the art of Eastern Europe, meanwhile he does the same with the art of the Soviet bloc, which he pushes even further to the East). You will not find Ukrainian artists on the page www.eastartmap.org either, which was initiated in 2001 by Slovene artists of IRWIN group and which states that ‘history is never given – it is always constructed”. In the mind of former “socialists” we are still “communists”, who belong to different space (like the CIS), but not to Central and Eastern Europe. I can feel it even on summer holiday in Bulgaria, where Poles, Czechs or Germans keep slightly apart from the Ukrainians, Russians or Moldavians.
This situation seems to affirm the internal postcolonial visions in Europe as well as the identity problems for young Ukrainian artists and art historians. What can be done here? I think one should pay attention to what Piotrowski “preaches”, who after Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak affirms that “any method is good if it is directed against the center”. What does it mean for us? Probably, both Western Europe, and the concept of East Central Europe should be marginalized (in the artistic sense) from the point of “intersection”, “borderlands” and “region”. If the “West” or “Central East Centre” were marginalized, they would become the provinces as we are. If Kyiv, Warsaw or Moscow were marginalized, they will be just as muddy provinces, as Lviv or Kharkiv, Lublin or Ljubljana. But for that we must learn to see ourselves, to see the core, hidden behind the “Potemkin’s facades” of capitals or major art centers. We must learn to recognize regional peculiarities, and the individual characteristics of the artist, consider the world history of art as a totality and personalized art as entity. Until that happens, we will continue to be not a sea but an estuary, where “good” fish do not live and where major vessels do not sail. In this context I recall Taras Shevchenko, who might just as well be perceived by different generations of Ukrainians, who was a consistent and uncompromising anti-colonialist. He criticized the Russian Empire for turning its individuals into slaves (in terms of postcolonial studies – the transformation into the “subaltern”) but steadily criticized the West, seeing it as the cause of the colonial world, the model adopted by Russia. Shevchenko speaks ironically that the Germans (a generalized image of a European colonialists) tell us who we are – Mongols or Slavs – and we are not able to see ourselves. Once Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak wrote about this situation in a famous essay “Can the subaltern speak?”, referring to the inability of the colonized to see themselves. Spivak affirmed (entering into an argument with Foucault and Deleuze) that since the “dependents” or “dejected” cannot talk, they need to be represented by someone, for instance by an intellectual or an artist. But in the situation of the representation the question often remains, who the artist represents – the dejected ones or those who deject? The offer of a romanticist Shevchenko sounds quite relevant for the younger generation of Ukrainians too: “If you had studied as one should, then the wisdom would be your own”. The indifference of the center (Kyiv) to the inner periphery (I mean the Ukrainian regional art schools) led to the creation of alternative projects of regional contemporary art in Ukraine in the last decade. The new generation of artists has grown: those who were born when the Berlin Wall was falling have become graduates of art schools. The young don’t only look at Kyiv, Moscow or Warsaw any more, they are free to choose any place in the world to study and are informed about the latest trends in the world of art by means of digital networks. For some the Berlin scene is closer, to others – the Moscow in-crowd and there are those who go across the pond to search for their destiny in the international art world.
And for those who remain, it is worth comparing art at the provincial level – it will be a chance to understand the internal processes that occur on the borderline and then to understand ourselves. Namely with this end in sight (provincialized on every hand) the curator from Lviv holds an exhibition of Ukrainian (post-colonial) art in Lublin (in European and even Polish provinces) rather than in Wroclaw or Warsaw. Poles have traditionally invited Ukrainians to visit them. Invite them to enjoy the local fish and to bring along their own. Of course, the carp in Poland is the same as in Ukraine, but they are prepared in a different way and they taste different. Perhaps precisely this process will help us deal with our identity and fall in love with our art as if for the first time, without conditions and complaints – easily and truly.
Biba Shulc,
Galician historian of art, June 2013