The second Ukrainian project for Venice
No. 7, April 2003
At the 50th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art, Ukraine will be represented by artist Viktor Sydorenko. First and foremost, he is a colorist. His sense of color allows him to endlessly vary the saturation of canvases while maintaining a certain counterbalance of measure.
It seems that subconsciously, through his own painting, the artist flips through the historical pages of tradition in search of a space adequate to his inspiration. Interestingly, chronologically Viktor Sydorenko moves from the painting forms familiar to us towards archaic ones. Modified colored objects occupy the territory of his paintings. Thus, Sydorenko’s contemporary painting gives the impression of a mutating organism, intriguing the viewer with an unexpected result of transformation.
Are your public activities internally acceptable or forcibly necessary?
– I am the vice-president of the Academy of Arts of Ukraine, director of the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems. Its creation was my idea, and acting as an organizer, I brought it to life. The difficulty was that the institute of contemporary art had to arise on the basis of the academic art structure. I assumed the situation would be painful because the tasks of the Academy and contemporary art are essentially different: on one hand – careful preservation of traditions, on the other – their conscious violation. Having decided to combine opposite tendencies, I defined the structure of the scientific base for an experiment that, under laboratory conditions, should produce some optimum. I don’t know how successful it will be; the institute has existed for less than a year. We have just started our work. It is purely a scientific institution, created with state support, funded by the budget, it does not engage in exhibitions, competitions, or any creative work. The money is allocated only for science. The institute has its own plan, in which every researcher participates, like, for example, at the Maksym Rylsky Institute.
Why did modern art concern you, a fully established artist in the official hierarchy?
– In the context of Western cultural policy, contemporary art occupies quite a large niche. If you imagine a traditional chart – a circle divided into segments – then in European countries, for example Germany, contemporary art would occupy a large part of it. In our case, such a scheme would have a very small segment. And if we talk about state policy towards this sector, it simply does not exist. But one of the main tasks of contemporary art is the declaration of a free society; it is by definition opposed to any totalitarianism. Freedom is to express even unacceptable, unpleasant, and indigestible views through art. All states with developed democracy give this factor a prestigious role; this dependence can be traced by the example of Germany. There, there is almost no place left for traditional art; it was pushed out by the Germans’ fear of returning to classical forms cultivated by the Third Reich.
Do you see yourself more as a traditional artist or a representative of contemporary art?
– It’s hard to say. Until the 1990s, I worked more in traditional painting: women, flowers, watercolors, landscapes. I never worked in a purely realistic manner. Compared to the heritage of socialist realism, my painting is somewhat different; you could say avant-garde. For the last 10 years, I have been making realistic works, large cycles of canvases “Citochronisms,” “Amnesia” – traditional in my understanding. I generally believe that everything depicted on a plane is, one way or another, tradition.
As experience from the previous Venice Biennale shows, the vast majority of presented artifacts are works made with new technologies, primarily video. Do you admit that despite all the modern content, this is a traditional approach to work: canvas, oil? Are you not afraid that it will look a bit old-fashioned if the dominance of media art in Venice continues?
– At the end of January, I was in Moscow, where the largest curators from around the world gathered, and this problem was discussed. It is difficult for the viewer to perceive, say, 100 media projects at one exhibition, each lasting 15 minutes. People simply leave or pass by many. The director of the visual section of the current Venice Biennale, Francesco Bonami, speaks precisely about wanting to see the traditions of the countries that will exhibit at the forum. He expressed a wish to see Eastern Europe and China in this key. We do not surprise the world with the fact of a multimedia project – we come into the global cultural sphere where this has long been developed. But painting in my project will also be exhibited not simply; it is an element of the system. Here you can invent a kind of game with Venice into some classic, attract neo-academicism with a new rational equipment of painting. Yes, this is our tradition; we have our edges. We try to combine some incompatible things. Maybe this is contemporary art, its own authenticity.
Tell us about the project itself, of which you are the curator and main author.
– Its working title is “Millstones of Time,” and it is quite complex. You need to work with space and with living authentic things as documents of time. In my team, the co-curator is art historian Oleksandr Solovyov, the curator’s assistant is art historian Viktoriya Burlaka. The main idea is a large canvas consisting of equal segments of canvas. The matrix of the painting is taken from the plot of “The Last Supper,” and there are 13 characters on it. This plot is eternal like motherhood, and for me, a circle of like-minded people is already “The Last Supper.” In general, the 20th century was a century of soldiers, war, prisons; there were two world wars, and my painting’s plot breathes this time. The characters were taken by me from an old album with anonymous photographs and an unknown story. Prisoners or soldiers in a hospital with homemade orthopedic devices, with which people corrected their fractures after the war. The photographs capture the training of individual joints, and the objects resemble either torture instruments or healing means; it is unclear whether they are intended for good or evil. All figures are engaged in mysterious manipulations. Each turns its own millstone, performing other strange movements. Everything seems subject to demonstrating the destructive infinity of monotony. The millstones of time relentlessly turn, grinding everything to dust: both people and objects. The painting is a texture, and the canvas is also subject to the destructive action of time. Even human memory is subject to its influence. The image will be similar to medieval manuscripts, on which, thanks to the action of time, another image seems to appear. Here is the situation of a ritual I love. I submitted two projects for consideration to the Expert Council at the Ministry of Culture and Arts, which held a competition for participation in the Venice Biennale. The rejected one is called “Ritual Dances,” based on a 23-meter-long canvas, but the implementation of such a project would be too expensive for Ukraine today. But let’s return to the “Millstones.” The project should be located in a semi-dark room; glowing cones made of polymer, a glass substitute of different sizes, made, by the way, using a unique Ukrainian technology, will carry a separate semantic and visual load here. Famous Ukrainian director Les Sanin and international competition prize-winning cameraman Serhiy Mikhailyuk are preparing a film version for the project. A specific sound range will complement the effect of an animated film with an old film effect.
Your comments on the main concept of the Biennale, defined by Francesco Bonami as “Dreams and Conflicts. The Dictatorship of the Viewer.”
– The theme “Dreams and Conflicts” for me is like a realm of utopia, where futuristic, avant-garde, and many other ideas are actualized. Regarding dictatorship, I can say that this is the theme of the artist and the viewer, the perception of art. Whatever we do, even inscriptions on walls, graffiti – this is the dictatorship of the viewer. They write on frescoes too. And the fact that frescoes perish is also the influence of the viewer, the consumer of art. What is not a global dictatorship of the viewer – the Taliban’s actions to destroy Buddha sculptures that stood in the Afghan mountains for 5,000 years? How did the Parthenon end up in the British Museum, the Cheops pyramid in the Metropolitan Museum? Nowadays, you can hold a wedding in a museum, take photos by the sphinxes – also the dictatorship of the viewer! In a crowd, of course, you always need to distinguish the viewer from the visitor. There are people who visit museums because they are in guidebooks, and there are people who love it.
Francesco Bonami speaks of an ideal viewer who understands art. Contemporary art is understood by artists and critics constantly traveling from biennale to biennale – such people may number about 600. We can invent an ideal viewer, but we count on the one that exists. In contemporary art, shocking moments are important because it is better to shock a person in the hall than in Afghanistan or any other real combat actions.
Francesco Bonami presents the biennale as a map of an archipelago, each island of which is identical and independent in its own way. How will Ukraine be represented on this map?
– The curator most likely means his project, which he is doing in the three-kilometer space of the Arsenal. Co-curators will oversee these islands. For everyone, this is a purely commercial process, and there is no influence of the curatorial line. We could rent a space for the presentation in a customs warehouse or rent a palazzo with Tiepolo frescoes. In this case, for Ukraine, participation itself is important. Better to leave all dreams and conflicts aside and realize that we are people participating in contemporary art forums. There are no coincidences at such forums; art strategies and ways of representing art of certain regions are predictable: some for states with traditionally developed contemporary art, others for countries of the East, African continent. And we belong neither to the first nor the second. But we exist in this world; we need to show ourselves, and sooner or later something will come out of it. In Andrei Tarkovsky’s film “The Sacrifice,” a boy on the beach watered a dry tree, which eventually blossomed. If you persistently do something every day, something must definitely happen. Anyway, when our tree blooms, we need to water it. Now, perhaps, we are just water carriers; others will come to replace us. I think the process is important here.
Venice Biennale
Existing in Venice since 1895, the International Art Exhibition is the most important forum of contemporary art in the world. Demonstrating progressive, innovative ideas and technologies of art at the Venice Biennale is a matter of state prestige and a guarantee of increasing ties with the outside world. The application for participation is sent by the government, which also appoints the commissioner of the national presentation. And the national vision of contemporary art is judged by the project they present. This refers not to art in general, not to the material world with its familiar and established aesthetic laws, but to the world of ideas and relationships between ideas. Such is conceptual art, using the newest media and called by the English term contemporary art.
Ukraine at the Venice Biennale-2001
Natalia Smirnova
The 49th Venice Biennale worked for about half a year. For the second time in a row, the director of its visual section was Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who outlined the concept of the art forum in the spirit of cosmopolitanism and globalization: “The Plateau of Humanity.” The 2001 exhibition became a record in the number of participating countries, and Ukraine was among its debutants.
Six Ukrainian artists created an ambiguous installation for the national presentation of Ukraine funded by 800 thousand hryvnias from the state budget. Thanks to a grant from the International Renaissance Foundation, Ukrainian critics, contemporary art curators, and journalists were able to see it with their own eyes and evaluate it in the context of other national presentations of the biennale.
Of course, Ukrainian artists had exhibited at the Venice forum before. But since participation is at the state level, the word Ukraine had never been heard there before. At the 1924 biennale, in the pavilion inherited from the Russian Empire, the USSR exhibited works by Kazimir Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, Alexandra Exter. In the 1970s, Ukrainian classic of Soviet fine arts, painter Halyna Neledva, participated in the Venice biennale. Repeated participant of post-Soviet biennales, Russian conceptual art master Ilya Kabakov was also born in Ukraine.
Finally, the Ukrainian government considered participation in the biennale a worthy event for the 10th anniversary of our Independence. In August 2000, then Minister of Culture Bohdan Stupka appointed his advisor, Kyiv gallerist Yevhen Karas, as commissioner of the Ukrainian national presentation at the 49th Venice Biennale. In September, he approved the curator of the artistic project of the presentation – director of the Center for Contemporary Art at NaUKMA, funded by George Soros, ethnic Ukrainian from Canada Jerzy “Yuriy” Onukh. But this decision was challenged by a group of Ukrainian artists led by Valentyn Rayevsky. Among Rayevsky’s supporters were prominent Ukrainian contemporary art artists Oleh Tistol and Arsen Savadov. For the latter, this was already the second attempt to get to the Venice exhibition: he participated in the national presentation project of Russia at the 48th biennale in 1999, which was not accepted by the Russian government.
In December, Jerzy Onukh announced his choice – the first in history Ukrainian national presentation at the Venice Biennale should include artists-creators of the Mazokh Foundation Ihor Podolchak and Ihor Dyurych. They are known in Ukraine and Russia for artistic-social actions that caused a loud public resonance. For example, the “Mausoleum for the President,” when a portrait of the first (and then acting) President of Ukraine Leonid Kravchuk was placed in a jar of lard.
However, in February 2001, the National Union of Artists of Ukraine sent a letter to Minister Stupka demanding Onukh’s removal. The Vice Prime Minister for humanitarian issues in Yushchenko’s cabinet, Mykola Zhulynskyi, appointed a new commissioner of the Ukrainian presentation – art historian Oleksandr Fedoruk, on March 13, and the commission of the National Union of Artists and the Ukrainian Academy of Arts approved Valentyn Rayevsky’s project. New York critic and journalist Konstantin Akinsha sees not only an artistic background in this decision. In the American “Art News,” an international magazine on contemporary art issues, he writes: “In post-Soviet states, aesthetic decisions often become hostages to political ones, and this case was no exception…” However, since representation at the Venice Biennale is state-based, national presentations there are inevitably politicized, as they demonstrate art corresponding to the understanding of political correctness by the authorities of a particular country. The question is only what these authorities perceive as contemporary and how liberal their aesthetic views are.
The Ukrainian presentation created by Valentyn Rayevsky’s team looked ambiguous in the context of the biennale. It caused opposite assessments by international critics, while Ukrainian ones were almost unanimously skeptical. Here are some opinions: “I clearly see that this is a new country with its own vision of the world…” – French critic and contemporary art curator Pierre Restany. “This is outside the contemporary context,” – curator of the São Paulo biennale Ivo Mesquita. “There is no coolness in this pseudo-cynical move. In the context of the biennale, our tent looks pathetic,” – Ukrainian contemporary art curator Natalia Filonenko. “I think it’s a great idea to present not the work of one famous artist but the landscape of Ukraine. The presentation, in my opinion, is successful – many people visit it,” – Harald Szeemann.
The Ukrainian presentation was arranged behind the fence of Giardini di Castello – the official territory of the biennale. It was a canvas military tent, evoking thoughts that someone can sleep peacefully. On the tent walls, video monitors broadcast projects of the participating artists, among which were works that had previously sounded not only in Ukraine. Principally apart from the exhibition spaces of “The Plateau of Humanity,” the tent was perceived as a symbol of the border of the civilized world. Inside – an installation on the theme of national artistic stereotypes and the symbol of the lesson of death – the Chernobyl reactor: a diorama of the Ukrainian landscape with high-voltage transmission towers, a reactor, artificial sunflowers, and dry branches. The international jury did not note the conceptual move of the Ukrainian presentation.
However, Ukrainian artists at the 49th Venice Biennale were heard not only in the national presentation. In his project – the central artistic event of the biennale – Harald Szeemann invited to participate former Dnipropetrovsk native and now US citizen Ilya Kabakov with the installation “Not Everyone Will Be Taken to the Future”; then New York-based ideologist of Ukrainian conceptual art Oleksandr Roitburd with the video installation “Psychedelic Invasion of the Battleship “Potemkin” into the tautological hallucination of Sergei Eisenstein”; Kyiv photographer Viktor Marushchenko with a cycle of Chernobyl reports “Forbidden Zone.” And in the national presentation in Montenegro participated former Kyiv resident Oleh Kulik, whose works from Marat Gelman’s Gallery collection in 2001 were transferred to the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, which elevated them to the status of national heritage.
As for Jerzy Onukh and the Mazokh Foundation, fragments of the project they created for the Ukrainian national presentation were seen in October 2001 at London’s “Lux Gallery,” whose curator Gregor Muir was interested in the intrigue around Ukraine’s participation in the biennale. The level of Mr. Muir’s gallery for connoisseurs is sufficiently characterized by the fact that works by Gilbert and George – successful British gay artists, recognized classics of 20th-century art – were exhibited there before the “Mazokhists.”
Oleksandr Solovyov
co-curator of the Ukrainian presentation
at the 50th Venice Biennale, art historian
– In the very fact of Ukraine’s participation in the Venice Biennale, I see greater relevance than purely artistic. Ukraine ceases to be terra incognita. One can discuss how much the Ukrainian presentation corresponds to the prevailing ultra-modern trends in the world, and whether such exist today, how much the exposition reflects the situation of contemporary Ukrainian art. But first, it needs to be realized. The project is still in the process of formation. It is important how it will look in the context of the polyphony of art of more than 60 countries participating in the biennale. Viktor Sydorenko is an artist for whom realism exists as a method, not as an ideology. Viktor’s style is closer to verism – tending towards plausibility, looking into reality, but without doctrinal processing and pathos. From detailed realism, Sydorenko returns to a generalized form, resorts to more local color and graphic line. He has already passed several stages in his work and now tends towards neoclassical traditions. The neoclassical tendency of our presentation is from the arsenal of modern artistic means. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, returns to classics were repeated several times, but these were things of a different order, related to conceptual art. Let’s see how our exposition fits into the space, as it will consist of two parts. In one hall – the painting-installation part, in the other – film animation. My participation in the project is primarily art-historical support: collecting materials, creating a catalog, and also creative moments. The catalog will be quite dynamic, probably broader than the project itself – a kind of research, collage, and lively. I am responsible for the informational block and, to some extent, the representational one. But as an invited co-curator, in this case, I am more led than leading.Link
