Ukrainian conceptual art under US embassy patronage
The Museum of the History of Kyiv continues its dialogue with modern art. Its branch, the Cultural Heritage Museum, after the Women’s Business exposition making headlines, hosts the one-man show , Crucified Buddha, by Alexander Roitburd, one of the leading Ukrainian conceptual artists , which opened on Saturday, October 29. Roitburd lives and works in New York and his first museum exposition in Kyiv is sponsored by the US Embassy. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary Carlos Pascual has repeatedly stressed the creative roles played by US artists of Ukrainian origin, their contribution in America’s ability to dream and form American realities with such dreams.
The creative legacy of Ukrainian American artist Alexander Roitburd embraces almost all the genres of modern art, ranging from pictures to video to prints to installations to performance. Each, taken separately, is a component of Roitburd’s movement toward overcoming the acute problems of survival, searching for new values and expressive cultural mutations at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Roitburd’s canvases form a most individual phenomenon of the so-called Ukrainian wave of postmodernism. The notion appeared under the Soviets, after the Moscow Manege. At the time, the Ukrainian artists’ creative and emotional thrust made critics talk about a sudden alternative originating from what was called the hot south and manifesting the appearance of a new art school, in contrast with the cold north of Moscow postconceptualism that tended to bar access to innovation. Alexander Roitburd is acknowledged as not only an outstanding representative, but also one of the stars of what was called the South Russian School. Post- Soviet critics noted a special Roitburd effect easily identifiable in color saturation within each subject-oriented work of art.
In Roitburd’s pictures at the start of the century the universe is slowing down. The colorful surface pulsates owing to the flawless precision of tonal interrelationships and the optical pattern of base strokes producing inimitable overtones. Yet there is none of the dynamism characteristic of the pictorial style. Instead, all of creative energy is focused on the picturesque surface of the canvas. The characters are self-centered as though fast asleep and watching fantastic dreams. Their actions are not logically complete as the subject would seem to warrant; the author does not build them a world of their own and deprives them of psychology. With his experience as curator of large-scale art projects, Alexander Roitburd is also the curator of his artistic ideas. Most of his works are untitled, and he denies links of subject and image along the vertical force lines of composition in the conceptual demonstration field of notional actualization and transformation. One is reminded of Jan Vermeer, Rembrandt, even of icon-painting and mosaics. Whether or not his works have myths or creative secrets is not the point. The point is how much contact they make. This contact is achieved by the pictorial aspect, making up for the character’s estrangement. Communication and aesthetic enjoyment take place on the surface of the canvas, albeit perceived somewhat dually.
In the 1990s, Roitburd took up installations, performance, and video. The latter won him international acclaim. His video project “The Psychedelic Invasion of the Warship Potemkin in Sergei Eisenstein’s Tautological Hallucination” was first displayed at Odesa’s Art Museum, part of the Cold Academy exhibit the curator of which was Roitburd himself. In 1999, it was purchased by the MOMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in 2001 submitted to the 49th Venice Biennial as part of the project “Mankind Plateau” curated by Harold Seeman, head of the visual section. That same year Roitburd’s video installation, “Exercises for Two Bodies and a Monument,” was shown at the New York Spencer Brownstone Gallery. Both are currently on display in Kyiv.
In the second half of the 1980s, Roitburd was an ideologist of independent creative search, an attempt to build a socially integrated community of modern artists in Odesa, his native city where he would live until 2000. In 1997, the effort resulted in the opening of the Soros Modern Art Center in Odesa and Roitburd was elected chairman of the SMAC supervisory board, serving as curator of a series of artistic projects and writing numerous program articles. However, because there were no strict selective criteria and because of snobbish and ambitious public relations, for the center never became more if than a provincial cultural event. In pursuance of his independent artistic quest, Roitburd moved from Odesa to New York. His works are housed in three US modern art museums, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, St. Petersburg Russian Museum, Kostaki collection, two Ukrainian art museums, and in other prestigious collections.
At last, Roitburd’s daring art that forces the viewer to reflect is being displayed in Kyiv. This is an event of cultural as well as social import. Ambassador Pascual said that changes in American political culture were caused by the revival of American art. Despite the Great Depression, US artists were able to study form and experiment with it as well as with functions and emotions, building a window on the world, helping their fellow Americans see the world through their own daily hardships. In the end, this vision changed reality. Fortunately, Ukrainian businesspeople are coming to realize such possibilities of art, as evidenced by the Roitburd exposition being sponsored by the Ukrhazkontrakt (Ukrainian Gas Contract) Corporation.
