Exhibition “Artists of the Paris Commune” is the first held within the framework of the “Marathon Blitz” idea, conceived by a group of Ukrainian art historians as an attempt to present their versions regarding various, but primarily the most interesting (both from the perspective of “healthy” and “unhealthy” interest) directions, trends, groups, as clearly present in today’s Ukrainian art (albeit not as widely and prominently as desired), as well as those still in a state of, so to speak, precursors.
Of course, the exhibition’s title and content have no relation to historical parallels, let alone (God forbid) revolutionary-political nature. There is no slightest hint of an attempt to stun with the loudness of wordplay. Nor is there any indication of the existence of some artistic-communal brotherhood, say, living and creating according to some renewed statutory model of traditional underground – the artists are mostly engaged, like all normal people, harboring dislike for communal apartments and together not by their own will.
In this case, everything is very simple and conditioned by the ordinary (as well as dear and charming) Kyiv geography. However, also history. Too. Already. Because there are two words: “Paris” and “commune” that do not exist on today’s map of Kyiv. But they were taken as a designation of a common roof-shelter for a number of young artists who found temporary refuge in apartments adapted into studios in houses awaiting major repairs, on nearby streets: Irynska, Sofiivska (formerly Kalininska), and Mykhailivska (formerly Paris Commune, including being such at the time of adaptation). Something similar was recently on Furmanna, and today there is on Chystoprudnyi and Trokhprudnyi lanes in Moscow. There was a similar precedent in Kyiv. A couple of years ago, in a somewhat different neighborhood than here at the exhibition, they awaited major repairs in a house on Lenina (formerly Fundukleivska). And nothing: they waited, and painted many pictures. True, all somehow without changing the truly “first love” (and even from the “first glance”) for transavant-garde painting, in the sunset rays of which (after its boom in the late 70s – first half of the 80s) some of these artists managed to “shine”. And for some critics, including the author of this note, it gave a convenient reason to mark the mastered territory with self-evident identifying signs such as: “postmodern neo-Baroque,” “new Ukrainian wave,” with its adherence to the “hotline,” genetically persistent code of “vitality,” “soulfulness,” and “plastic poeticism” as a kind of relic (isn’t it nostalgically pleasant?) in the coming “new ice age” of non-authorial art, etc. in this regard. This allowed saying: “Its name is region,” meaning some direction close to the general postmodern mentality and still not devoid of specific national-regional features.
However, surprisingly, as a result of that very “shining,” today I find it impossible, pardon the vulgarism, to define the collective work of many of the recently exhibited “vitalists,” “deconstructivists,” “new expressionists” as a more or less distinct direction. Which cannot but please, but let it not seem contradictory to the overall idea of the “Marathon Blitz” stated at the beginning. One way or another, but in the sanatorium-sanitary zone of Kyiv, its artistic space, generally alien to orientation towards any radical experiments in the spirit of, say, absurdist, conceptualist, or pseudo-conceptualist traditions and more inclined either to moderately aestheticized formalism or to unrestrained fund illusionism, the artists around the Paris Commune differ in their predisposition precisely to this “alien” and can be perceived by a lover of beauty, for example, a good hand of a Kyiv painter or a tamed viewer almost as craftsmen of a far native archipelago.
Moreover, this exhibition is hardly limited to the role of self-destruction of some, if not established (time, despite its current compression, has still passed too little), then a familiar image. So it is no coincidence that now and then a familiar burp appears – a consequence of a peculiar transavant-garde dyspepsia. Although overall this self-destructive role as the leading one here is also not accidental. Because, perhaps, it is precisely this that allows “to knock down the fly” regarding previously attractive but already outdated common and degenerated postmodern painting attitudes, in particular such as “radical (turned rough) eclecticism,” “newly wild” brutality of form, straightforwardness of associative “breaks,” obsession with secret meanings despite the obviousness of concealment mechanisms, boring deconstructivist citation, huge canvas sizes, etc.
This exhibition, even in its largely funny, spontaneous, precisely blitz variant, can in some way evoke a premonition of the emergence in the “experienced” era of “fundamental indifference” (B. Groys) of a general need for some adequate passive languages, soft and light, purely private psychedelic gestures, in some relaxed, sluggish attitude towards everything. When the desire to build something for the sake of a hypothetical Common Cause, however noble and important its heralds make it, is asleep. When one does not want to fight with anyone or serve any ideology – only the logic of the ideas of art itself, increasingly striving to be that non-art, which, obviously, “is destined to become part of the more general end of Reality itself in the kitschy world of endless simulation” (J. Reichmann).
In the fog of today’s timelessness, in which this exhibition also happened to take place, when there is no such global aesthetic will that subordinates and determines tastes, directs movement in one direction, etc., a state of no-will and at the same time will as an illusion of ultimate freedom – isn’t this the “short but wonderful time”?Comment type: Published comment
Author: Oleksandr Solovyov
