"Brand 'Ukrainian'" examines values (02/10/02)

"Brand 'Ukrainian'" examines values

by Halyna Skliarenko

KYIV - For the first time in several years we are presented with an actual curatorial concept: to look at art as a means of recognizing national cultural values relating to new or traditional images and, in this way, to raise one of the most painful issues of contemporary Ukrainian culture - the truthfulness of these values and the authenticity of national accomplishments that are being so boldly manipulated by various political forces in Ukraine today.

Independent Ukraine has found itself in a difficult situation: a young state with a rich historical past that demands not only understanding and critical assessment but has become a tool for the building of various, often conflicting, models of the "Ukrainian space." Where does contemporary art fit in?

Jerzy Onuch, director of the Center for Contemporary Art (CCA) and the curator of the exhibit, reasons that contemporary art exists at the intersection of cultural processes and complex marketing strategies where art tendencies, laws of the market, and social forces determine the advancement of a work of art in the realm of culture, giving it value and significance.

Therefore, it is not surprising that, for his version of the "Ukrainian brand," Mr. Onuch invited artists who have already received recognition both inside and outside Ukraine, although this recognition is not necessarily seen in Ukrainian social consciousness as a "national accomplishment" because of the distinctiveness of their artistic expression.

Some of the artists, thanks to their artistic persona, have become their own "brands." These include Oleg Kulik, a Kyivan who lives in Moscow, famous for his creature-centered performances; Ukrainian Canadian Taras Polataiko, whose "bad-boy" attention attracting artistic actions have been a hit both in Canada and in New York; and American Alexander Roytburd from Odesa, a participant in the recent Venice Biennale.

In addition, the exhibit features work by Tiberi Silvashi, Ihor Haidai, Maksym Mamsikov, Illia Chichkan, Viktor Marushchenko, Serhii Bratkov and the artists of the Lviv-based Masoch Fund Ihor Podolchak and Ihor Dyurych, well-known in Ukraine for their extremely provocative works.

The selection of artists is itself revealing: it points to the question that is widely discussed in Ukraine: Who can be called a "Ukrainian artist"? The complex collisions of Ukrainian "history and geography" have interwoven individual destinies in strange ways and dispersed their subjects far and wide. What should determine an artist's belonging to Ukraine's culture - place, language, nationality or tradition?

It is no coincidence that the installation "Portrait of Taras Shevchenko" by Messrs. Dyurych and Podolchak has become the center of attention at the exhibit. Shevchenko is the principal myth of Ukrainian culture, its personification, its sacred figure, the expression of national spirit and the heart of traditions but, at the same time, the object of constant ideological manipulation that has appeared throughout history on both nationalist and communist banners.

Shevchenko has been transformed into a permanent "Ukrainian brand," which is constantly enveloped in a dense mythological aura. Exhibited at the CCA, his portrait, painted in a simple realistic manner, serves only as an occasion for reflection. More interesting is the story that surrounds the painting: the work has been borrowed from the private collection of an anonymous person in Prague for the duration of the exhibit. It was painted in New York in 1924 by perhaps the most famous Ukrainian avant-garde artist of the beginning of the 20th century, the émigré David Burliuk.

Is this the same old story about human conformism in which the former futurist, in need of money, paints a transitory commercial "brand," or an expression of Kozak-Burliuk's nostalgia for the Ukrainian shrines he left behind? At the beginning of the 1960s, when Burliuk offered a collection of his works to the Kyiv Museum, he was rebuffed. Now there are discussions about the feasibility of "returning the portrait of Shevchenko to the Fatherland." Of course, some people believe that the portrait was painted by the Masochists themselves, who are famous for all kinds of tricks - but who knows ...

In a neighboring room there is another portrait of Shevchenko, less intriguing but no less striking. It appears on an old kylym, sending viewers back to the traditions of Soviet times when the portrayal of important people on kylyms, vases and plates was widespread. Mr. Sahaidakovsky's Shevchenko is a partially erased mask, a dead patchwork of a face, a transformation of an authentic portrait into a decorative ornament for some "ideological" interior. What is Shevchenko? Not only a "national brand," but a great man who remains a mystery to his countrymen to this day.

But "Brand 'Ukrainian'" also touches upon other themes: the myth of Ukrainian vitality, visualized in Mr. Roytburd's video-film, in which the rhythms of the avant-garde cinema of Dziga Vertov transform sublimated erotic energy; or the myth of the picturesqueness of Ukrainian traditions, interpreted ironically in the installations of Messrs. Silvashi and Haidai.

The artists don't answer the questions that are raised, but only invite the viewer to reflect, to look around carefully. They construct an artistic space, saturated with unexpected associations, parallels, metaphors and paradoxes. In Mr. Polataiko's performance, one sees the juxtaposition of a quote from a Vermeer painting, a copy of a work by the neo-avant-gardist Mr. Fontana and a live guardswoman from the National Museum of Visual Arts in Kyiv embroidering the Fontana copy on linen. Thus, the artist presents his own reading of the history of art in which the classical and the modern, the elite and the folkloric intersect and alludes to the paradoxes of art's progress, recalling the early 20th century when avant-garde women artists in Ukraine designed embroidery patterns for the women artisans of the village of Verbivka.

The exhibit "Brand 'Ukrainian' " turns out to be larger than itself. It raises questions that extend far beyond the boundaries of the presented works, each one of which is only a stimulus towards reflection on the complex history of Ukraine and the paradoxes of social consciousness in which some things are readily deleted from memory and other things are mythologized.

The art exhibit has turned into an ironic "exploration of the true values" of Ukrainian culture of which the copyrights are being contested by various socio-political forces in Ukraine today. So far, these values are not well-defined. Hence, everyone wants to impose his own artificially created standards. Artists appear to be wiser; they don't discard but collect everything that has been created in the realm of culture. They deserve to be heard.

(Translated by Oksana Zakydalsky)

Halyna Skliarenko is a senior research associate of the visual arts section at the Institute of Fine Arts, Folklore Studies and Ethnology in Kyiv. She holds a graduate degree from the Kyiv Institute of Arts, was awarded a Union of Artists prize in 1989, and the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine prize for young artists in 1985. She is the author of more than 40 articles on art that have appeared in various Kyiv publications.

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