VIOLET AND ULTRAVIOLET

I thought about this while viewing the Violet Velvet show in Odesa, organized on the initiative of Ms. Ute-Victoria Kilter. A well-known art critic, curator, and Kulturtrager, she has considerable experience in staging such events when artists are given carte blanche with whatever projects they may have. More often than not, the concept of each such show is formulated in a round-about manner to provide maximum "creative freedom," but phrased using hundred dollar words to get grants. As for maximum creative freedom, it does not seriously stipulate the demonstration of works by artists. The fine arts are no longer in vogue. One should not even mention them to avoid condescending looks from the audience. Instead, modern art is the watchword (although few will explain its exact meaning coherently). Very likely, in trying to remain artistic, art will get increasingly automated. Of course, an artist may just hang a picture on the wall, but even this simple gesture will be regarded as a kind of performance, and the canvas, together with the wall and the nail driven into it, will be qualified as an "installation." I am not trying to sound like a Green-peace zealot defending traditional creativity, the more so that every artist must have a keen sense of topicality, and yet I am not sure that modern art can guarantee its being really abreast of the times.

Shows like this one turn into an amusement park for a bohemian, elite gathering. They have no aesthetic, existentialistic, emotional, or communicative sense, seemingly even without a mercantile touch. Here some strange, compelling Kafkaesque mechanism is at work, forcing such people to get socially organized in their own special way. Here something is happening because it cannot help happening; mass eyesight aberration acquires hallucinogenic symptoms, the ritual has a hypnotic force that paralyzes one's will.

And yet there is some sense in all this. Art has no place to hide from the destructive embrace of culture. Even golden silence, an empty, scorched canvas or its absence are registered as "cultural." Thus by imitating itself art finds a chance to exist and perhaps survive by making itself obscure. The innermost sense of art is the need to transmit a signal. However, the overabundant information characteristic of our day turns into a deafening turmoil in which cries and silence remain equally unnoticed. So one is left no choice but to open one's mouth and pretend to shout. Or shout in one's mind. Perfect camouflage, but it does not solve the problem, because such imitation will be followed by an imitation of this imitation, the endless pursuit of one's own shadow, toward the eschatological horizon beyond which one's own essence is lost irretrievably.

Let us hope for the inscrutability of the Beautiful which we can suddenly face anywhere, anytime. Let us remember that there are colors outside the visible spectrum, that music has overtones inaudible to the human ear, and that the Holy Spirit is like the wind blowing in whichever direction it likes.