January of 2016
Instead of an intro
This article was written following the two events characteristic (to my mind) of the Ukrainian art life. In November of 2015, my colleagues and I congratulated Sergiy Petlyuk (an Ivano-Frankivsk artist working in Lviv) for winning the first prize at the contest held in the UK by the newly created Firtash Foundation [1 See «Firtash foundation назвав переможців міжнародного конкурсу молодих художників uk/raine»]. It was the third time that this institution organized an art project at the Saatchi Gallery, an exhibition pompously titled UK/Raine. Days of Ukraine in the UK, to promote Ukrainian art and culture abroad [2 See the Foundation’s website]. The independent (as usual) committee were Johnson Chang (a co-founder of the Asia Art Archive), Nigel Hurst (Saatchi Gallery CEO), Nick Mitzevich (Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia), Olga Sviblova (founder of the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow), Prof. Dr. Apinan Poshyananda (Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Culture, Thailand), and Oleksandr Soloviov (Ukrainian author and curator). Those famous and even powerful people chose to award Sergiy with 20,000 British Pounds. I hope he’ll use the money to create new media pieces and even have something left to finally fix his apartment. His winning installation was Limit of Comprehension, it explores the interaction between human psychology and the physiology of urban space, mixes collective feelings with individual empathy.
In December of that same year, the other big foundation, Pinchuk Foundation [3 pinchukfund.org] that runs its own art center of the same name in Kyiv, gave its main award to a group of young Western Ukrainian artists who had happened to get together in Lviv and work on joint projects a couple years before. Those young men (I can’t remember whether there were any female group members) from Zakarpattya (Transcarpathian region), namely Yurko Biley, Pavlo Kovach Jr., Anton Varga, Stanislav Turina et al organized Vidkryta Grupa (The Open Group) in 2012 and were awarded with UAH 250,000 (about 10,000 Euro at the time, though the exchange rates are extremely volatile these days and art foundations issue the money quite slowly). The ideology of Vidkryta Grupa combines collective action with neo-dada aesthetic: the group searches for artistic manifestations in daily-life contexts and cares to preserve the air of collective creativity. The international jury were Bart De Baere (Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp (M HKA), Belgium), Bjorn Geldhof (Artistic and strategic director of Yarat, Azerbaijan), Martin Kiefer (Curator, contemporary art section, Louvre, France), Yuri Leiderman (artist and writer, Ukraine/Germany), and Anna Smolak (Chief curator, BWA SOKÓŁ Gallery in Nowy Sącz). The jury explained, «We want to express our appreciation for the way in which collectives take position within the Ukrainian art scene and there with point out that art is not an individualistic business but an engagement for society at large. We feel that the project of Open Group, exclusively for internal use, enacts this on many different levels. It connects Lviv with Kyiv, it connects the people they encounter on the trip with an artistic project and it allows the visitors now to become a part of this mental journey. We are aware that what we see is not the work because the work is essentially a performative process, and that the different forms, video, photograph, book and the theatricality of it all are relative» [4 Open Group wins the Main Award of the Pinchuk Art Centre Prize 2015] (the citation is precise, I only highlighted certain parts in italics). Sergiy Petlyuk and Vidkryta Grupa are the young faces of Ukrainian contemporary art that, as we can see, draws attention of Ukrainian oligarchs.
What do we have here? I believe here are the three elements essential to present-day Ukrainian culture: young artists in search of the substance, Ukrainian kitsch politics (of private and institutional level) and international legitimation (by means of international juries or panels). Kitsch politics and searching for the substance are the things I’d like to discuss here.
I’ll start with kitsch. As a concept, it reminds of people pretentiously collecting all those sweet little things, sentimental memories, banalities produced massively and understood by everyone, everywhere. Some researchers agree that kitsch is somewhat similar to disposable tableware – it lacks aesthetic sense and is quite mundane in terms of its purpose. Kitsch provokes a variety of reactions, from a sarcastic, condescending grin to guilty pleasure or even ecstasy. In his Kitsch and Art [5 Tomas Kulka, Kitsch and Art (Penn State Press, 2010).], Tomas Kulka explains that kitsch signifies something immediately identifiable. Kitsch is usually charged in terms of emotions or topics neither of which can enrich our – already established – associations connected with similar or even same topics or things. Thus, kitsch can’t be regarded as something aesthetically attractive or artistically valuable. Nevertheless, analyzing kitsch may help us understand the nature of delight delivered by art in general. Moreover, kitsch is quite mobile and complex and it won’t disappear. Matei Călinescu [6 Matei Călinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987).] wrote that in our post-industrial and culturally postmodern time kitsch is so omnipresent that practical and theoretical issues touched by it are not simply topical, they almost mesmerize their researchers in a bad way. As a product of capitalism, communist legacy and present-day consumerism, kitsch plays the central part every second of our life. Especially nowadays when ‘high’ and ‘low’ art are indistinguishable from each other (think of the sculpture by Jeff Koons in Florence [7 http://www.musefirenze.it/jeff-koons-in-florence/]).
Back in Soviet era, Kitsch was almost an official artistic doctrine of some sort, and it’s still rooted deeply in Ukrainian official culture. Take, for instance, the fact that Ukrainian Minister of Culture paid an official visit to a completely kitschy gallery established by a sentimental and honest MP where he looked deeply touched when inspecting photo-reproductions of masterpieces [8 http://life.pravda.com.ua/culture/2015/10/23/202242/]. The ‘collection’ belongs to the founder of the ‘gallery’, an entrepreneur and politician Ashot Melikbegyan. For some reason the Ministry even published a press release dedicated to his visiting [9 See: http://mincult.kmu.gov.ua/control/uk/publish/article?art_
id=245006099&cat_id=244913751] the ‘extraordinary’ event. His taste for kitsch and performative sentimentality are among a few reasons why I like to call him ‘Komsomolets’, although he imagines [10 See: http://ua.112.ua/video/kyrylenko-vse-shcho-proslavliaie-komunizm-i-natsyzm-bude-zaboroneno-159904.html] himself fighting against communist legacy in Ukrainian culture. Minister of Culture is a typical soviet hybrid of Komsomol values and Ukrainian nationalism. Such hybrids were produced by the inconsistent soviet ideology extremely successfully.
Years ago in his famous essay on avant-garde and kitsch, Clement Greenberg noted that communists seemed to like kitsch. In Stalinist times, Soviet films flooded the cinemas of the Eastern Block. Those films were touchingly innocent. Kundera wrote that the greatest conflict a viewer could see in a Soviet film is usually a personal conflict between two Russian characters who were or were going to become lovers and were put through a series of disappointments and doubts before finally falling into each other’s arms and crying with happiness [11 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, ed. Michael Henry Heim and Richmond Hoxie (Faber & Faber London, 1984), 133..] Outside cinemas, there was a background of Stalinist terror, repressions, mass killings and poverty. No wonder that Soviet kitsch worked as a cover for death [12 Ibid., 134.] Theodor Adorno saw ideology [13 Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard D. Leppert, trans.] Susan H. Gillespie (University of California Press, 2002), 502. as a producer of kitsch: its social function was to embellish the reality, turn it into a fairy tale, an illusion. Friedrich Engels called it false consciousness, and Nikita Khrushchov used another metaphor to describe it – varnishing of reality.
To explain Soviet kitsch, Greenberg referred to The Soviet Cinema (Partisan Review, 1939) by Dwight Macdonald. To quote Greenberg, «Dwight Macdonald points out that kitsch has in the last ten years become the dominant culture in Soviet Russia. For this he blames the political regime — not only for the fact that kitsch is the official culture, but also that it is actually the dominant, most popular culture, and he quotes the following from Kurt London’s The Seven Soviet Arts: «…the attitude of the masses both to the old and new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature of the education afforded them by their respective states.» Macdonald goes on to say: «Why after all should ignorant peasants prefer Repin (a leading exponent of Russian academic kitsch in painting) to Picasso, whose abstract technique is at least as relevant to their own primitive folk art as is the former’s realistic style? No, if the masses crowd into the Tretyakov (Moscow’s museum of contemporary Russian art: kitsch), it is largely because they have been conditioned to shun ‘formalism’ and to admire ‘socialist realism.’» [14 «…the attitude of the masses both to the old and new art styles probably remains essentially dependent on the nature of the education afforded them by their respective states» ] According to Greenberg, it was the lack of education that made people prefer Soviet productions like Jolly Fellows, 1934 (Vesyolye Rebyata) even when Soviet experimental productions were also available on rare occasions. One could argue that it was a matter of taste, and people have the right and possibility to chose between various artists. However, Greenberg saw here the substantial problem: people do not negate Picasso in favor to, let say, Michelangelo; they reject him in favor of kitschy illusions and delusions.
Thus, Greenberg believes that mixing up kitsch and art is a matter of education: when we tell children about real art and teach them to think, we enable them to avoid kitsch. But things don’t work like that. The USSR invested in education generously, but nevertheless kitsch held its positions. Perhaps we can explain this futile work of education by proposing that kitsch and inconsistency were the cornerstones of Soviet ideology. Taste for kitsch was nurtured in Soviet primary schools (and later the same thing rook place in independent Ukraine). Education in Ukraine is still compulsory and ideologically charged – its objective is to train robots, not free people. A child brought up on traditional embroidery patterns in textbooks and such examples of ‘true art’ as Kateryna by Taras Shevchenko (wearing an embroidered vyshyvanka, too) will be programmed to see true art in such dubious pieces as the memorial of Andrei Sheptytsky in Lviv. Even worse, kitsch will become legitimate at all levels (secondary school, college, university) and will be strengthened by the monsters of television and politics. Constantly bombarded with kitsch symbols and tropes, children form and comprehend a kitschy version of reality and acknowledge this reality as a true one. Please, don’t think that Ukrainians are alone in this game – kitsch rules everywhere [15 Catherine A. Lugg, Kitsch: From Education to Public Policy (Psychology Press, 1999), 8.].
In societies where different political trends can co-exist peacefully, and where competitive influences limit or cancel each other out, people are able to avoid kitschy situations with certain success and have the chance to preserve their individuality. And yet, when one political power becomes dominant, people find themselves surrounded by totalitarian kitsch. Totalitarianism means that everything that conflicts with kitsch should be extinguished or banned; individualism, irony, or doubts will be censured or even prosecuted. Kitsch often wears a serious mask and has recently become quite religious for some reason. Possibly since church has always been a kitsch champion. On the other hand, I must admit that kitsch has a therapeutic function, too. Kitschy images help us to calm down; they are so delightful and relaxing. Alike to illustrated brochures of Jehovah’s Witnesses, kitsch promises salvation from fears and doubts, we just have to embrace it and let it into our hearts. And stop thinking.
In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera wrote that Sabina, one of the characters, protested against communism for mostly aesthetic, not political reasons – she detested totalitarian kitsch in all its forms. She despised the ugliness of communist paradigm where churches could be turned into stables, but she also couldn’t bear the system’s attempts to cover its ugliness behind a mask of beauty. Masking the reality was not only a manifestation of kitsch – it was a manifestation of totalitarian, communist kitsch. According to Kundera, the problem with kitsch is that it is «the absolute denial of shit» [16 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 130.]– it conceals, masks, adorns and beautifies the reality. Kundera’s Sabina was not alone in her aesthetic protest; in the USSR, protesters against kitsch shot alternative films and painted ‘worthless’ pictures. Still, pop-folk bands like Pesnyary or Vatra [17 In the 1970s, home collections of Soviet pop music lovers featured mostly rock albums; nevertheless, in the cultural context official and ethnographic kitsch predominated over all other paradigms.] had more fans than those playing alternative. Has something changed after totalitarian kitsch ceased as an official doctrine in Ukraine? It certainly has: this time we have national kitsch (or performative ethnographism, as I sometimes call it). National kitsch is everywhere – daily life, museums, television, politics, etc. Its images decorate the walls of ministries and private homes. Apart from that, kitsch is the core of Ukrainian national protest; among other things, it mobilized people in 2004 and 2013 [18 Think of all the masquerades, travesties, Cossack impersonations and pop music used as a media weapon during protests of 2004 and 2013. National kitsch empowered, fueled and explained the reality and simultaneously concealed it.].
Political kitsch
In Ukraine where oligarchs with ‘cheerful and positive attitude’ won the politics, private art institutions wear serious masks similar to those worn by kitschy art objects. For instance, Mr. Firtash – the founder of the Firtash Foundation – is quoted on the official website of his institution, «Education and culture are the most important factors that drive social and economic development of every individual and the country in general. This is the road to the future, this is our perspective. We have to take advantage of all the opportunities that present themselves nowadays. I’m a strong believer in Ukrainian talented youth and its great potential. All you have to do is learn, develop yourself, expand your professional and personal worldview – and you will succeed.» [19 FIRTASH FOUNDATION] We will succeed! No doubts whatsoever. He humbly calls himself a businessman, although everyone at least slightly interested in kitschy Ukrainian politics and controversial businesses knows that this ‘businessman’ has always been close to corrupted state officials in Kyiv as well as in Moscow [20 See «Спрут Дмитрия Фирташа. Агенты влияния на Западе»]. Since March of 2013 Firtash has been under house arrest in Vienna (he’s been temporarily bailed out for 125 million Euro) and is about to be prosecuted as a member of a criminal association that bribed Indian officials to get license for mining ilmenite needed to extract titanium and sell it to the Boeing Company. Obviously, his cooperation with the Saatchi Gallery is a scheme to become part of Western elites and launder his money stained by Kremlin and corruption.
Another art institution founder, Viktor Pinchuk, also features emotional quotations on his website, «We believe that the future has to be addressed now and that each of us has the power to act. We believe that empowered future generations can be a major driver of change. We believe that long-term and large scale social investments can create a favorable environment enabling people to take their destinies into their own hands.» [21 See the Activity section of Pinchuk Fund’s website] Isn’t it a facade to conceal billions stolen from future generations of Ukrainians by means of unfair privatization (especially when Mr. Pinchuk became President Kuchma’s son-in-law)? One more art-loving billionaire, Rinat Akhmetov, stopped investing in art projects after the armed conflict in Donbass, but nevertheless he claims that «The purpose of creating such a foundation is to take part in addressing the causes of social problems of the Ukrainian society, to move from acts of good will to a consistent strategy of social development.» [22 See the website of Rinat Akhmetov Foundation] The original is in Ukrainian and, if translated word for word, it features, for instance ‘social development of society’. It would be interesting to hear from Akhmetov what exactly is that thing he calls ‘social development’ and how exactly he aims to develop the society socially. The Ukrainian text looks like a kitschy nonsense to me. A colleague of mine once said that for Pinchuk art is a means of advertisement (and his relations with art really look instrumental), and that for Akhmetov art is kind of redemption (he had a reputation of a really bad guy in the 1990s). Obviously, art for this two is not an ultimate value; it’s a cover for sad reality in Ukrainian politics and business.
The only difference between these Ukrainian oligarchs and their communist (or Nazi) predecessors is the very subject of concealment. The latter created happy images against the background of mass killings and repressions for the sake of utopian happiness for all (or the nation). The former aim at self-enrichment and power under the cover of ‘social development’ or ‘enabling people to take their destinies into their own hands’. We hear about their objectives from the media already owned by them (the same with oligarchs [23 See: «Більшість українців дізнаються новини з каналів Коломойського й Фірташа»] as with communists). Both groups, oligarchs and communists, try to conceal, according to Kundera, the real shit. They don’t like it. But who likes it, then? Surprisingly, the artists.
Shit and searching for substance
In this context, the Artist’s Shit by Piero Manzoni successfully sold at Christies and Sotheby’s may well serve as a metaphor. Is Ukrainian contemporary art able not to be a beautiful screen for shit when it is supported by the same shit, be it capitalist or communist? This is a good question. Especially for a country where the Ministry of Culture could well be renamed to the Ministry of Kitsch and where artists have no ways to support themselves but take money from institutions established by oligarchs. Interestingly enough, oligarchs never demand obedience or ideological maturity from their protégées. They’re just trying to be European! These people can afford to pay famous curators, buy really expensive pieces of art and employ experts. The latter are usually from Western art schools or independent institutions. It is only natural that art and aesthetics they support are also Western. Piotr Piotrowski once said that Eastern Europeans should join their efforts to ‘marginalize Europe’ (and its pressure onto local arts), resist the influence of powerful European institutions and find their own voice. But how can one marginalize ZKM or Pompidou when they’ve got only Pinchuk Art Center in Kyiv and Firtash Foundation in Vienna? There’s no answer to this question.
While Eastern European art (or some of its practitioners) aim to uphold its identity against the background of European art in general, Ukrainian artists are, on a large scale, still searching for the substance and the grounds to stand on. What is Ukrainian art? What are its features? Who are Ukrainian artists? These and numerous other questions arise when young artists face the issues of national kitsch and universalism. The project I’m writing this for is curated by Vlodko Kaufman; he also has certain issues with national kitsch because he selects artists who think that they’re «creating art on their land» [24 An interview with Vlodko Kaufman and Lida Savchenko in Ukrainian ]. He says that after Maidan (2013–2014) Ukrainian art scene has been polarized: there’re artists who claim that they’re working in the state of Ukraine and there’re those who think of Ukraine as just a ground. Lida Savchenko agrees with Kaufman and notes that now «artists were forced to decide and identify their relationship with this country». Why such questions should still bother a 40 million European nation? Is it possible to create non-Ukrainian art in Ukraine?
Ukrainian art as a historical phenomenon has been forming since the middle of the 19th century by means of searching for its national substance; the same way as politically minded (svidomi) Ukrainians were shaped. Artists created and consumed the products of their national imagination. Back then, Mykhailo Grushevskyi found a method of historical imagination that worked with Ukrainian history; anthropologist Fedir Vovk described a method for imagining Ukrainians as a group; composer Lysenko invented the image of Ukrainian music, etc. But Ukrainian national imagination is not the only possible imagination in Ukraine. We had no such thing as a national state (and for this reason some historians call Ukraine «a laboratory of transnational history»), which – thank God, Marx and Lenin – allows us to include all artists who worked on this territory to our national pantheon. Therefore, Cossacks with their Turkish aesthetics, Polish gold-brocaded tapestry from Buczacz, Armenian manuscripts and Jewish songs, Malorossiya’s literature in Russian, an enormous park in Uman funded by a Polish landlord, Chinese varenyky, Orthodox hymns – everything belong to ‘us’. Ours are Kazimir Malevich, Oleksandra Ekster, Sacher-Masoch, Debora Vogel, Joseph Roth, and Bruno Schulz – to the same extent as Lesya Ukrayinka, Ivan Franko, Hrygoriy Skovoroda or Oles Murashko. But for some reason we’re often ashamed to appropriate Ukrainian Jews or Poles in general; we eagerly use only certain names like Masoch or Lukacevych to attract tourists to Lviv, and tourists never bother us with questions about those authors’ works. Why are Ukrainians so ashamed of their past? One of the reasons is colonial kitsch rooted in our culture.
Tamara Gundorova argues [25 Тамара Гундорова, «Микола Гоголь і колоніальний кітч,» Гоголезнавчі студії (Інститут літератури ім. Т. Шевченка, Національна академія наук України), Гоголезнавчі студії, no. 1 (18) (2009); Тамара Гундорова, Кітч і література: травестії (Київ: Факт, 2008)]. quite convincingly that Ukrainians were both creators and victims of the colonial kitsch. Since the 18th century, ethnographism has been a conscious choice for Ukrainian people-oriented political activists known as narodnyky who searched for national substance, and an instrument for representing oppressed nations. To control its territories, the empires needed means to identify its subordinates, to describe them visually and textually, and to keep them at a safe distance from power. Since then ethnic peculiarities (ethnography) have become the means to control Ukrainians, among other subordinated nations, and Ukrainians used this imperial ethnography to build their own identity. Differences have become exotic features which, in turn, could be sold to the metropolitan state, as Mykola Gogol did with Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Taras Bulba. In his comic travesties (since Eneyida was for him a playful experiment), Kotlyarevsky ‘dressed’ colloquial Ukrainian language as a literary one. Quite unexpectedly, the Eneyida’s language of folklore and burlesque humor became an example to follow. Shevchenko, a slave-artist, wrote his (allegedly, initially Russian) dumas in language of Kotlyarevsky, turning a colonial toy into a highly dangerous weapon of Ukrainian national liberation.
It is only natural that Ukrainian modernism of the 20th century had to react to colonial kitsch: artists searched for the national substance and found it in the past, in customs and traditions, or even in natural landscapes. People who were brought up in towns or cities, came from Russian-speaking or Polish families and identified themselves as Ukrainians, chose history (Grushevskyi), Orthodox Byzantine tradition (Boychuk) or folk art (Malevich) to decolonize themselves. Futurist Semenko urged his fellow artists to dump Shevchenko’s Kobzar and reach for the stars, while modernist Dovzhenko once again tried to find the substance in the national landscape and Ukrainian history. It was Dovzhenko’s aesthetics (often kitschy as well), that helped young Ukrainian cinematographers of the 1960s to artistically discover territories (Carpathian Mountains) that were annexed by the Soviet state from its Western neighbors. They also discovered people who lived and still live there – Romanians, Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians as well as indigenous Ukrainians (who would often identified themselves as Rusyns).
Paradzhanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964), the Ukrainian film by Armenian director from Georgia, looked astonishingly exotic not only due to ethnographic backgrounds and fantastic Carpathian locations – it was built on a dialogue with the past that suppresses the present and prevents it from escaping into normal life (read – modernity). No wonder that the film became a hit among those who identified themselves as Ukrainians – it showed a way to create national and modernist poetical cinema under Soviet circumstances. Thus, digesting Dovzhenko’s modernism with its respect to a little man and land as a landscape, Ukraine gave birth to poetic cinema which, similarly to European cinéma d’auteur, marked the post-war identity crisis. In Ukraine, the identity crisis was evident. Ukrainian art that had only recently started to form its national canon (the only multi-volume research on the history of Ukrainian art was published in 1968), was to meet another challenge – unlimited russification of urban population and the new modernist easthetics from the West. The newly found national substance was disappearing before their eyes – Ukrainians, as well as Belorussians, were quickly becoming Soviet people, and their national art was becoming Soviet Art. Post-war denationalization combined with the long story of colonization gave birth to a new generation of culturally traumatized Ukrainians. The pain of loss, resentment, and constant search for the national substance were characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s’ art.
During the period of relative freedom (the Khrushchev Thaw in the 1950s to 1960s) the issue of the national identity and national belonging became even more evident in later years. It came back in the late 1980s and then again in the middle 2000s. Sometimes it seems that Ukrainian art won’t break the vicious circle of internal conflicts and metamorphoses until the national issue is eventually done with. The national identity is usually supported by a recursive process where the present is perceived as an extension of the past while the past is constantly reinvented in the present. Therefore, the mission of a so called national artist is to show that the present is a kind of reiteration of the past and that the result visible in the present is a direct product of the past. That is precisely the reason why an identity must be
constantly and continuously rearticulated and reinvented. Some philosophers believe that cinematography may be used to deterritorialize the national identity and to connect it with different imaginary realities. Some call such identity-making cinema «peripheral» or «marginal». According to Deleuze and Guattary, peripheral cinema happens when marginalized and colonized subjects try to find a new identity by means of visual arts; they argue that such cinema emerges from hybrid images when national mainstream art undergoes a crisis.
Peripheral films are often produced by the nations that are marginal to modernity (like Ukrainians), or emerge inside bigger groups within collectives whose existence is marginal compared to the dominating national or cultural narrative (minorities of all kinds). They usually incorporate non-linear stories to deterritorialize or reterritorialize the dominating narrative, and thus create new identities [26 In this context, Dovzhenko’s films consistently aimed at reconnecting Ukrainian past and present in a joint image, and implicitly stated, «It doesn’t matter who owns this (Ukrainian) land, because the land itself and the peasants on it will always remain ‘ours.’»]. French philosophers explained such non-linear stories (time image) by post-war crisis of modernism where deterritorialization meant the loss of the (allegedly) natural bonding between culture and social reality (or territory, in case of migrants), the deep break between cultural experience and certain local substance. Local (peripheral) experience, according to Deleuze, means not only depletion of cultural interaction – it’s a certain cultural transformation often connected with deployment of transnational media-landscape which triggers the transformation of local experience. Here, ne may note urban experience of Ukrainians in the 1970s and 1980s – they had to be modern and Russian-speaking, and at the same time remember about Cossacks and ethnographic vyshyvankas. The gap between live social reality and imaginary history and culture became more and more evident in the 1970s and 1980s, deepening under the influence of such transnational phenomena as rock music, punk and hippie movements.
For people who are part of larger group (Ukrainians of Soviet empire) and doubt the so called pedagogical narrative of national (or other) identity of this larger group (e.g. the myth of joint Soviet nation) such crises becomes permanent. Thus, it is only natural that in the 1960s Joseph Beuys tries to reveal the post-war crisis differently than Dmytro Pavlychko. All in all, their aims and fears are different. While the search for substance in national issues constantly locks Ukrainian artists in a continuous dialogue with the past, nationalists tend to regard the shift to pure universalism as conformism and cosmopolitism. For instance, Vlodko Kaufman’s shifting to performance from painting in 1993 was regarded as a treason by many of his colleagues. For them, it was a treason for the sake of something foreign and unknown which can never become theirs – that is, Ukrainian. Paradoxically, the ‘foreign art practice’ like performance and installation brought Kaufman back to the native, so nowadays he looks for Ukrainian substance in the same shit which already doesn’t need any «beautiful» cover.
So what’s with the shit?
Here, the history of the nation might come in handy for Ukrainians, again. Ukrainian art stands out amongst European arts for its transnational character and constant need to react to omnipresent kitschy myth-making. The issue of searching for substance might actually become a joy! Ukrainian artists love searching for substance, you know. Anyway, they’re doomed to search for it. Where is it? Alas, it’s elusive like Eco’s structure, it’s lost somewhere in the midst of national kitsch, non-national kitsch, vyshyvankas, local landscape, the land and its little men, and daily human pain… It is lost like Ukrainian refugees in Poland and IMF’s tranches.
Again, according to Kundera, kitsch tries to beautify the reality, paint it pink, sugar-coat it and pay less attention to shit which is a constituent part of life. Then, if art is the antinomy of kitsch, and its mission is to indicate the fullness of life, should an artist primarily focus on social shit? There’s no easy answer to this question, and perhaps Kundera knew better when he wrote this. He’s still alive so maybe we should go ask him about it. This context needs another reference, from Boris Groys this time, who claims that an artist primarily deals with the paradoxes of being, which is usually most evident in language. [27 Борис Гройс. Коммунистический постскриптум. – Москва, 2007, 19.] That is, the discovery of a paradox is the way to reveal the shit-truth concealed under sugar coating. We all know that the main method of Socrates was attacking the consistent and continuous narrative of his opponent. By unveiling of the paradox in sophist’s language, Socrates showed that despite the sugar coating of the nice speech the inner logic of narrative and language is as dark and dubious as life itself. He was against fine rhetoric in opinions for he thought that rhetoric was a product for sale. «You compose your speeches for money,» he said. The same is true for kitsch in art and politics whose aims are money and pleasure. While cognition and artistic creation should aim at uncovering the paradoxes of being (later they’ll call it dialectics), because paradox is logos.
Naturally, uncovering the paradoxes of being and finding truth by means of dialectics are not the only mission of art. We all seek peace, occasionally – humor, and want everything to be just fine. Dalai Lama and Jesus Christ teach us to respect our neighbors and total strangers. Especially when the war is on. Especially when the issue of identity and search for substance is burning, again.
On a brighter note, the next Ukrainian pop music festival Chervona Ruta will take place in Mariupol, the capital of Rinat Akhmetov’s metallurgic empire – just a few steps from the territory of a new transformation on the «eternal Ukrainian borderland» [28 See: «В этом году “Червона рута” состоится в Мариуполе»] Perhaps, it will be opened by our Minister of Culture and start with an indispensable liturgy for all confessions. Will this kitsch bring peace to Ukraine? Truly said Kundera, «the brotherhood of man on earth will only be possible on a basis of kitsch». [29 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 132.]