Andrey Kovalev Flight of a Rare Bird Interrupted ‘Kyiv Art Meeting’ Andrey Kovalev Kyiv is a wonderful and marvelous city, especially the young ladies fluttering out of the windows of the luxurious Stalinist monsters on Khreshchatyk on a moonlit night. But everything looked quite simple and ordinary, especially at first. The young energetic Kyiv curator Valeriy Sakharuk decided to play, as is now fashionable, the geopolitical card on the contemporary art table with the nearest sworn neighbors Rus and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Obviously, contemporary art is extremely cosmopolitan and easily removes ancient spells from excessively wild and unreflective ancestors. A person is quite flexible and sensitive, Sakharuk invited very radical representatives from both the Polish and Russian sides. Thus, the Moscow part, because of which the fuss flared up, was represented by the XL gallery, the most energetic and advanced of all the marginal institutions of the Moscow artistic establishment. (It is wonderful that the choice did not fall on Marat G., who tends toward the official establishment and historically lobbies the southern party in Moscow.) Polish artists work with Marta Tarabuta, the owner of the Krakow gallery Zderzak, playing the role of a dynamic catalyst on the Polish scene, just like XL in Moscow. So, Valeriy Sakharuk put forward a fashionable idea, gathered competent co-curators, found a charming place — the so-called Ukrainian House, that is, the former Lenin Museum of delightful late Brezhnev architecture — printed a very good catalog. But the main thing — and this is the primary function, feat, and merit of any curator — was finding money, both local and global: the fourth and inevitable instance in the threefold arrangement was the mysterious and omnipresent Grandpa Soros in the form of three Soros contemporary art centers. (The catalog, by the way, is printed in two languages — Ukrainian and English). Be simpler, and people will come to you: the exhibition turned out very good, despite many organizational inconsistencies. All is well, my dear Marquise. Except, however, for a trifle — it did not open. Firstly, the exhibited works were decidedly disliked by the management of the Ukrainian House — the agency preserved since the Lenin Museum times. They were especially agitated by political art, as well as light hints of eroticism and pornography. In this regard, the comrades are great specialists. But ours are no less experienced in sacred conversations with gentlemen-comrades since the heroic actions in the post-Komsomol Moscow Youth Palace. In the end, the bosses even agreed with the very expressive photographic works of Oleg Kulik, in which he performed debauched acts with characters from Russian history from the St. Petersburg wax museum. And everything would have been fine, touching and nostalgic, if a new acting figure had not appeared on the scene. At the same place and time, the Ukrainian National Guard, famous for its combat traditions, held its annual cabaret. And this is a terrible force; in Ukraine, everyone fears them, trembling in their knees, like our Dolgoprudnenskaya RUOP brotherhood. The valiant National Guardsmen without much talk removed and confiscated the poster of Anatoliy Osmolovsky hanging from the balcony. On this highly progressive and politically correct work of exclusively anti-fascist orientation, from afar, a certain resemblance to a swastika was seen. Whoever has what pains, talks about that — on the chevrons of the valiant defenders of the local Fatherland under the mandatory trident of Chernomor was a strange stylized braid, clearly related to the complex problems discussed in Osmolovsky’s work. For the same reasons, the piece by representatives of the International Masochism Fund, Ihor Podolchak and Ihor Dyurich, ‘The Last Jewish Pogrom,’ continuing the action started at the M. Gelman gallery, was removed. Finally, the work of the Pole Piotr Wizhikovsky, which was something like an agitation point with scattered election posters of various Polish political parties, was also repressed. 06.06.2016 www.ualberta.ca/~khineiko/segodnia_93_95_98_99/1118131.htm http://www.ualberta.ca/~khineiko/segodnia_93_95_98_99/1118131.htm 2/2 Moscow curators Elena Selian and Sergey Khripun showed extraordinary resilience and political vigilance, promptly removing their part of the exhibition, built with colossal efforts. After a long fuss and scandal, the exhibition was officially recognized as not exhibited, Osmolovsky’s work was secretly stolen from the National Guard’s location by some benevolent policeman. Of course, one can endlessly declaim that art is politics, study politicians’ (or military’s) reactions to art, and attribute artistic ambitions to them. One can explain art to a dead hare, show conceptualism classics to prisoners or visitors of Sanduny baths. But one must, however, know the measure, separating flies from borscht. Of course, some artists gained certain capital from the public scandal, but one wonders why Elena Selian and Sergey Khripun, and ultimately the ill-fated Sakharuk, who finally ruined his career, spent so much energy for such a result? Well, I also lacked the space and energy to talk about what this generally very good exhibition could have been. For this reason, as an illustration, I propose not the repressed and politically unreactive work of the Polish artist. P.S. I hope that the politically incorrect polemics expressed will not lead to a nuclear conflict between some independent states. 14.11.1995 Newspaper “Segodnya”
[Kovalev A. Flight of a Rare Bird [Electronic resource] / Andrey Kovalev // Newspaper Segodnya. – 1995. – Access mode to the resource: http://www.ualberta.ca/~khineiko/segodnia_93_95_98_99/1118131.htm]Comment type: Published comment
Author: Andriy Kovalov
