Greatness is seen from afar: Artist Andriy Boyarov*
Artist Andriy Boyarov is interested in the properties of the image, which is why he experiments with photography and video. As a researcher and curator, he focuses on blind spots and the periphery of the history of Ukrainian art, its connections with the history of global art.
Biographically and historically, Boyarov could be considered a modernist or, at the very least, a postmodernist. He earned an architecture degree at Lviv Polytechnic. From 1987 to 1989, he hung out in a squat on Furmannaya Street in Moscow, where he traveled with Andriy Sagaidakovsky to exhibitions of Rauschenberg, Bacon, Twombly, and other stars of world art. From 1989 to 1991, Boyarov was an auditor at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn and at the University of Arts and Design in Helsinki; during the same time in Tallinn, he worked in radio and newspapers. In 1991, he lived in Warsaw.
Boyarov started with painting, but in the large-format paintings typical of the late 1980s and early 1990s, he primarily saw a photographic nature. The interaction of painters with reality usually involves copying it by means of painting — Boyarov, on the other hand, chose the camera and video camera as his tools. Thus, his creative path turned somewhat toward the Picture Generation and took the form of what art historian Hal Foster later called the “archival impulse.”
Boyarov’s video works, which he began creating as soon as he gained access to the equipment, are based on the fundamental critique of the mass-cultural media flow on television screens pioneered by international media art in the 1960s. The act of appropriating the television broadcast for the artist takes the form of deconstruction, breaking down into frames, re-editing accompanied by eerie stretched sound.
But in the work “Once and Now-2” there is a significant aspect related to cultural memory. The artist used footage from the film “Vallatud kurvid” (Naughty Curves), one of whose directors, Kaljo Kiisk, played a major role in the cultural life of Tallinn — an important city for Andriy Boyarov. Thus, through private biographies, a connection arises between cities, countries, and historical narratives. By appropriating an image (moving or still) that has authorship, Boyarov not only reconstructs its meaning in a certain historical context but also asserts his right to use this image.
The Blue Box
At the end of the 1980s in Tallinn, Boyarov found a box of negatives belonging to an unknown amateur author in the trash. These photos tell the story of a child’s growing up, from birth to adolescence. The artist reprinted the photographs in various ways, studying the history of a family unknown to him. This was the first act of image appropriation, which later became an important component of Andriy Boyarov’s artistic method. He named the series “The Blue Box” and returned to it from time to time over two decades before showing it at an exhibition at the Closer art center in Kyiv in 2015.
Individual fragments of the series were presented at several group exhibitions. Each time, Boyarov, choosing how the presentation would be (varying the printing method and base, sizes, images duplicated and overlaid), changed the narrative. The artist explored the private archive of a family unknown to him through the concept of individuation, one of the fundamentals in Carl Jung’s teachings: it means the process of personality formation, a psychological development in which individual talents and unique human traits are realized.
The work provokes discussions about authorship. Critic Vasyl Lozynskyi notes: “A particular feature is that we do not receive any message about the author of the photos, details of the find, or the method of selecting the photographs. Such an approach would already be curatorial, and this can be explained by the fact that artistic practice today lacks such an approach, and artist Boyarov thematizes this lack, becoming a curator-artist who exhibits a total installation.”
The series “The Blue Box” illustrates how over twenty years his creative method crystallized, based on appropriation and reuse of images, with photography or video most often serving as the object.
Sensation of Reality
In the series “Flora,” Boyarov rephotographed images of flowers from magazines and other printed media and reproduced them using silver gelatin printing. With this artistic gesture, he transformed photography, which had an illustrative function, into an image, a picture. That is, if the flower was objectified by the camera, Boyarov objectified the photograph itself, depriving it of its primary purpose, color, and gloss. He demonstrated all its graininess, noise, and blur.
At the COPY/PAST exhibition at the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Boyarov again used this method, but the focus was no longer on photography as a “bare” medium, but on the problem of studying and preserving the archives of artists who worked in Lviv in the first half of the 20th century. He turned to archival photos of pre-war figures, including Yanina Mejecka, Witold Romer, Noe Lissa, and Vladyslav Bednarchuk. The gesture of giving voice to forgotten names was reinforced by scaling — Boyarov enlarged the images, emphasizing the importance of these works not included in the history of Lviv art.
From this principle grew Andriy Boyarov’s research and curatorial activity. Since 2017, he has acted as organizer, curator, co-curator, and consultant for several exhibitions and programs. These include the exhibitions “Montages. Deborah Fogel and the New Legend of the City” at the Sztuki Museum in Łódź, which received the highest museum award Sybilla; Knowns — Unknowns at the Zamenhof Center in Białystok; “Experiment! Masters of Lviv Photography of the Early 20th Century and Their Followers in Ukraine and Poland in the 20th–21st Centuries” in Łódź; the program “Culture (without) gaps — Avant-garde Days in Lviv, dedicated to the anniversary of Tommaso Filippo Marinetti’s visit”; the exhibition “Futuromarennya” at the Mystetskyi Arsenal; and a number of solo exhibitions. Boyarov consistently sought the roots of local Lviv art, exploring multidisciplinary connections in culture, tracing influences and biographical coincidences.
Andriy Boyarov’s creative output is coherent, free from situational, reactive works; all contingencies are fully controlled by the artist. He returns to some series for decades, consciously not putting a full stop.
Thus, Scopic Regimes is assembled from works created from 1993 to 2013. The title appeals to the concept of the “scopic regime,” proposed by film theorist Christian Metz. It primarily concerns the peculiarities of visual perception and the distance between the image and the viewer. The reference to this term provides a key to understanding what exactly Boyarov did with the images in his series. Repeatedly rephotographed, recopied, borrowed from numerous media, detached from a specific moment, political, historical, and cultural contexts — he shows them to the viewer so that the distance becomes visible. The artist achieves this by “cleansing” the image of connections to a certain reality, bringing it almost to abstraction. Thanks to this, he gives the viewer the opportunity to build their own version of reality around the images and their combinations.
“An important aspect of Boyarov’s creativity,” noted art historian and curator Bohdan Shumilovych, “is the attempt to sense reality, which is constantly realized in reconstructing the past and anticipating the future, a reality that flows (like a media stream) or exists (like a photo album or book) in the observer’s time.”
*Malykh K. Greatness is seen from afar: Artist Andriy Boyarov [Electronic resource] / Kseniya Malykh // BIRD IN FLIGHT. – 2021. – Access mode: https://birdinflight.com/uk/pochemu_eto_shedevr-uk/velike-bachitsya-na-vidstani-hudozhnik-andrij-boyarov.html
Comment type: Summary
Author: Kseniya Malykh
