Masterful wordplay

Two almost-titans are reaching to each other with their hands. The one on the left squeezes a few banknotes in his fist. Leonid Voitsekhov’s works To Give or Not To Give and To Take or Not To Take are both classic and modern. It can be said about Odesa Conceptualism as such as well, although this school is hard to describe. After all, these artists work not only with images, but also with words, and their choice of words is so apt that one is afraid to spoil this aphoristic style with descriptions. The exhibition at the National Art Museum has been formed on the basis of the Odesa Museum of Modern Art’s collection, while gallery owners and private collectors also lent a hand. The works are placed in chronological order from protoconceptual creations of the 1950s to works done recently.

The main feature of the Odesa Conceptualism, which saw its heyday in the 1980s, is wordplay, which involves using puns, funny slogans, and neologisms. “I think it is so because Odesa is, first of all, a literature city, and it prefers literature of small forms at that. Our authors like short capacious phrases and have the supreme sense of language,” project coordinator Semen Kantor told us. “Odesa artists are just fated to see the language as much more than a service means for the arts. The best approach for a serious person on a serious business is to talk about important things lightly. Otherwise, it becomes very boring. The Conceptualists have demonstrated it.”

Human shapes rise from the sea. Their bodies seem to vanish into water, and rising sun replaces their heads. This painting by Serhii Anufriiev is called Rising On, which sounds simply and profoundly, even ridiculously. Voitsekhov’s work, a huge poster entitled On Which Side Are You, Masters of the Renaissance? looks to Kantor to be an epitaph for Soviet communists of the 1960s through 1980s. God, hidden by heavy clouds, declares: “I Declare War on Russia” in a scandalous painting by Yurii Leiderman. A funny series by the Martynchyky group, called A History of the Russian State, plays on historical cliches. It shows Ilya Muromets saving aborigines, Prometheus presenting boyars with a rooster, and Perun rebuking Prince Volodymyr for the baptism of Rus. “This subject is commonplace enough now, but the series was done in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” Kantor remarked.

The ENFANT TERRIBLE exhibition documents many performances staged by Odesa artists. For instance, Yurii Leiderman and Ihor Chatskin investigated ways of killing people with a flag, while other artists came out en masse to confess to the crimes that were never committed, at the request of Oleksandr Roitburd and Chatskin again. The 1990s works on display include a lot of videos, recorded mostly by Myroslav Kulchytsky. Importantly, this artist was the first curator of the ongoing Odesa Conceptualism exhibition at the National Art Museum, but he suddenly passed away in February this year. Therefore, the staff of the Odesa Museum of Modern Art has dedicated the project to Kulchytsky.

Artist Ihor Husiev created One Country – One Song painting a few years ago. It shows a map of Ukraine divided in half with the painter’s tape. Each part of the image features a screen broadcasting a male canary singing in a cage. The chirpy creature is called ptakh in one of them and ptitsa in another, both words meaning “bird” in Ukrainian and Russian, respectively. They sing the same way, reminding the spectator of the artificiality of many borders, including linguistic ones. However, while it is easy to remove the tape border from Husiev’s painting, people cling to the conventions in their life, which are confusing matters. Here again, we are reminded that important things need simple presentation. The Odesa Conceptualists have mastered this art well. We can learn from them at the ENFANT TERRIBLE exhibition, which will stay at the National Art Museum of Ukraine till September 20.