Garbage Wind
Geography has a strange property; it is full of temptations. One is tempted to describe the exhibit, Found Objects: The New Art of Ukraine, opened at the capital’s modern Art Center, as Odesa Landing in a trivial journalistic manner. Or perhaps Southern Expansion. Which would inevitably turn out wrong, because, frankly speaking, there is nothing specifically Odesa-like about this exposition, except the place of residence of most participants. Modern art centers scattered across Ukraine deserve all possible praise for perseverance in pursuing their creative course; Odesa’s experimenting community really keeps a sensitive finger on the pulse of all the most fashionable ideologies and technologies. Thus the seaside topical art-product is essentially cosmopolitan and principally no different from that of Kyiv.
Erased geographical fixation was accompanied by the absence of personalities. Of course, Odesa’s Myroslav Kulchytsky, Andriy Moskvychov, Borys Hodzhulov, Oleksiy Katashynsky, Viktor Maliarenko, Vadym Chekorsky, and Kyiv’s Illia Chychkan and Kyrylo Protsenko are battle-hardened participants in the gallery movement, each with his own name and character. Yet at such presentations, where, instead of the customary old canvases and sculptures, one finds murmuring monitors and clicking processors, flashing photos, and s’reaming soundtracks, it is not anyone’s self- expression which is important, but that notorious concept, most clearly defined in the title.
The organizers succeeded in conveying the foundling, accidental nature of the artifacts on display. Series of photos as though random-picked from family albums, faded many times magnified scenes from bad copies of foreign films, immaculately ringed video fragments devoid of any dramaturgy or plot, huge sheets oozing out venomous flashes or gasoline colors — all this made one aware of being a chance spectator, of one’s presence at the gallery and in the exposition space as such being totally unnecessary. It was precisely in the masterful destruction of the slightest hint at originality and individuality, in the complete absence of bright outbursts and revelations that the Found Objects proved so convincing. Hence the message, completely negative and destructive by its very essence. No separate names, as though all the items on display had been made with the same pair of hands. Moreover, there are no artists; the exposition left one with the impression of something purely mechanical, something made by a technician on the Modern Art Center’s payroll after spending a couple of hours at the computer. Finally, there was no art as such, because in that waste made from wastes, that extract from mass culture, one could find nothing worth being referred to as an independent artistic value.
And that was why a very solid image emerged from an oblique mass, a litter of fragments found God knows where or by whom. By and large this is how a modern individual regards the world and small or big-time art — fleetingly, through a dusty monitor, glancing at the television screen or from the car window, chewing on a burger. Even the verb explore does not fit here; one finds something without trying to find anything. One just grabs something one stumbles on, exposed to the garbage wind of civilization.
If one is lucky, one finds something more or less interesting. And forgets it as quickly.
A sad picture.
