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"The Formation of the Field of Ukrainian Contemporary Art: The Artistic Identity as Accommodation of Cultural Displacement and Marginality"
by Pablo Markin*
Presentation of Research
Current research is needed to develop further that part of Ukrainian studies that deals with civil society in contemporary Ukraine, and with Ukrainian élites. The field of Ukrainian contemporary art is seen to represent a special nexus of praxes that contains elements that, on the one hand, connect it to the upper classes and, on the other, to the institutions that in most cases have been providing infrastructure to the nascent civil society in the newly independent states of Eastern Europe.
The discipline of anthropology that makes use of the methods of multi-sited ethnography allows us to construct an interpretative context around an event that marks an important stage within the development of the Ukrainian contemporary art as a field taken in the sense that was developed by Pierre Bourdieu. This event is presentation of Ukrainian art at the Venetian Biennale in year 2001. The preparation of this presentation was conditional upon the state financial support. The fact that the field of Ukrainian art has come under the purview of bodies that exercise political power has little new to it, given the past of total control of the sphere of culture by the state. The less expected side of this event was that the candidacies for state support representing Ukraine at the international cultural event of Venetian Biennale were selected from the field of contemporary art, despite the fact that the latter frequently adopt a critical attitude to the present and past realities of Ukraine. Ukrainian contemporary art, on the level of its subversive intentions, has many traits in common with the art and culture of the "underground": a counter-establishment that was severely repressed in the years of Soviet rule, and an anti-communist movement that gathered under its banners writers, painters, poets and singers. However, on the level of the social strategies of functioning that are observable among the main players within the contemporary art field, there is a radical rupture within the orientations of the "underground" movement. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the withdrawl of state financial support for the field of art and culture has definitely pushed the former cultural élites into a playing field with rules still unknown to the players in it. Much fiercer competition for the drastically reduced part of the existing state funds has only added to the general disorientation that was observable during the first years of Ukrainian independence. This disorderly condition, compounded by the lack of any articulated cultural policy on the part of the government of the independent Ukraine, has made room for greater diversity within the field of art, where the role of art collectors from abroad and the influence of international charitable foundations was steadily growing. Contemporary art, as a field of artistic production distinct from the art canon that was in currency up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, at that point in time had the minimal necessary conditions to start to take form. The field of Ukrainian contemporary art has an extremely exclusive character that is due to the actual absence of infrastructure of education in arts that would teach young people the principles that contemporary art, as it is internationally conceived, is built upon. The amount of cultural capital necessary to enter the field of contemporary art further restricts the number of players active in it. Much of the intellectual content that enters into the repertoire of strategies of interpretation and action that are indirectly referred to as cultural capital, has come to be dedicated to the post-modern and post-structuralist theories of art and interpretation that these artists include in the structure of their works, as implicit or explicit references.
The developments connected to the events that preceded the participation of the Ukrainian team of artists in the 2001 Venetian Biennale has proved that social capital &endash; in the form of the ability by certain players in the field of Ukrainian contemporary art to use their connections to the bearers of political power in order to achieve certain outcomes within the field of art &endash; complements other types of capital that various agents in the field of contemporary art must have, in order to successfully compete for the scarce resources of recognition and remuneration within the field. Moreover, the Ukrainian political field has proven to be able to independently decide the outcomes of struggles specific to the field of art. This pattern is continuous with the dependent mode of functioning that the field of art had in the time of the Soviet authoritarian regime.
Through intensive immersion in the artistic environment of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, I have collected a body of in-depth materials that allow me to create a map of the different types of capital that are unevenly distributed among the players in the field of Ukrainian contemporary art. The focus of the research that I have done is on the narratives that surround the works of the artists that are unofficially recognized as having the greatest importance in the field of Ukrainian contemporary art. These narratives include interviews with a carefully composed sample of the representatives of Ukrainian contemporary art, of newspaper coverage of the activity of the centers that exhibit works of contemporary art, of the texts that have accompanied the exhibition of Ukrainian contemporary art in Ukraine and abroad, of the press-releases issued by the bodies that make up the institutional infrastructure of Ukrainian contemporary art, and of the articles in periodicals pertinent to the topic of the research. The use of this body of materials will allow me to produce an analytic account of the struggles that were taking place over the course of development of the field of Ukrainian contemporary art.
My original intention was to approach the field of Ukrainian contemporary art from the phenomenological point of view. Fieldwork is a method that allows me to amass a body of material that would lead me to the relational map of the fields of social activity from the perspective that the world of Ukrainian contemporary art provides, as a site of struggle for socially defined stakes. My analysis would have been based on the set concepts developed by Pierre Bordieu, who himself is grounded within a wider context of sociological thinking to which I will be referring as well. The phenomenology would have entered into the picture at the level of the juncture between the fieldwork and the interpretative narrative that I will have to produce, in order to avoid the most glaring pitfalls of the objectifying attitude and essentialist illusions that could have obtained were I to believe that a method can transparently capture a piece of "reality".
From the art-history part of the academic guidance that I receive, there is an understandable "pull" towards the "things themselves": the works, the artists and the institutions that are laden with their own situated histories, whether composed in inter-textual terms of interpretative accounts of the artistic movements, or in terms of sequences of events that lay in the background of the factual constitution of a personality or a work. This downplays the "postmodern turn" within art criticism that denies the assumption that there are enough uncharted territories for art history as a discipline to venture into in order to redeploy the research techniques that proved effective at earlier stages that have led to the postmodern re-appropriation of the whole of the art history, or at least of its modernist period. In this context, I experience the tension of being placed between the terms of western art history discourse, with its universalizing tendencies that downplay the regional specificity of a work of art; and the terms of the discourse of regional studies.
As a consequence of bringing up the above point, it was proposed to me that I follow a line of inquiry that would attempt to put Ukrainian contemporary art (1.) in a historical perspective to its past that could be found in an artistic canon of plastic arts that was accepted in Soviet times, and (2.) in the context of the accepted critical discourse that would be connected specifically to Ukraine, or to Kyiv. The line of investigation could be enriched or substituted by figuring out which Ukrainian dissident artistic movements could be comparable to the "underground" movement that was mostly associated with the ethnically Russian or Russian-speaking (so to say "assimilated") artists. Alternatively, it may be that bringing into the research the issue of the Ukrainian diaspora's relationship to Ukrainian culture and art, will shed a different light upon recent developments in the field of Ukrainian contemporary art. Ukrainian Diaspora members had the opportunity to preserve the record of Ukrainian artists who were expelled from the Soviet Union, yet still represented points of historical development of distinctly Ukrainian principles of painting, sculpture and other forms of art, as in the case of the avant-garde figure Oleksander Arkhypenko. Thus, the Ukrainian Diaspora has become a comparative ground for research into the relationships between the discourses that ground the Ukrainian ethnic identity and the personal; narratives of the members of the field of Ukrainian contemporary art. By drawing upon the trope of the field I am intent on re-inscribing it as a set of analytic rules of building a map of a space of play/game, where there are specific stakes to be contested, into the body of the research paper I am preparing. The complexity of the task is sufficient to draw my awareness to the fact that I have to be ever more sensitive to the nuances of the subject matter.
An additional important aspect of the definition of the field, which will aide me as I organize the research materials that I have accumulated, is that to construct analytically a field &endash; actually any field of social practice &endash; one has to effect a cognitive rupture on one or many lines of transition between it and other fields of social play. Otherwise I would have to speak of Ukrainian art in general. The effects of such conceptual blindness, effects that stand in the way of the application of the notion of the field to the research practice, are readily seen when looking at the catalogues of the "Soviart" center, located in Kyiv. These catalogues fail to distinguish the traits that would induce the preparers of the catalogues to put Ukrainian contemporary art into a different interpretative, and hence representational, frame.
Another basic concern I have is to fend off the dismissal of Ukrainian contemporary art as a derivative phenomenon. My second art history supervisor from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I study, has been pointing out that the works of Bevza, Silvashi, Tistol, Zhyvotkov, Hnylytsky and Savadov bear the clear signs of the post-modern play of inter-textual citations between a multiplicity of discourses, where works of other modern/ modernist/ classical artists tend to figure as so many texts, even if visual, or discourses that constitute horizons of creative reference and interpretation that are reflexively taken into account within essentially any field of contemporary art. In this case, Ukrainian producers of contemporary art are turned into representatives of the periphery of international contemporary art, contending for the attention of the international art market. The latter assertion turns my attention to the constellations of global domination in other spheres, such as the economic, cultural and political. In each of these spheres, the relationship of the periphery to the center is structured as a configuration of distribution of positions within the given sphere. These positions vary in their capability to successfully claim the stakes particular to their respective field. Counter-intuitively, the outcomes of the power struggles in these spheres influence the peripheries more than the centers, precisely because of the dominated status of these peripheries. Needless to say, in many cases the poles of different sorts of power tended to concentrate in a sole location. As Ukraine gradually enters into the sphere of influence of other cultural and political formations than those of the post-Soviet area &endash; formations that are continuous with the previously dominant ones &endash; the pattern of cultural alignment of Ukrainian contemporary art undergoes changes that transform it into a distinct phenomenon that has meaningful correspondences to the postcolonial status of the Ukrainian state. Thus I see the field of Ukrainian contemporary art as deserving a close investigation that would prepare the ground to going beyond the subject of just contemporary art, to revising some views of Ukrainian art in general. The major challenge would be to uncover the genuinely local context of emergence of an array of artifacts, the contemporary art objects in the case of Ukraine, as correlates of the analytically reconstructed spaces of national or diasporal contemporary art. I aim to highlight the "otherness" of Ukrainian contemporary art that would not be liable to assimilation by the schemes of artistic appreciation characteristic of Western contemporary art. On the side of "pro" arguments that support the claim for the distinctive character of Ukrainian contemporary art, there is Ukraine's prolonged and forcible isolation as a social space in the Soviet period that allows to see in the period of 1991-2001 the observable &endash; in terms of the scarcity of key moments that have apparently swayed the course of the events in a particular direction &endash; span of time that has witnessed the emergence of the institutional infrastructure of the Ukrainian contemporary art. The pre-1991 and post-1991 periods represent two qualitatively different conditions of the operating of Ukrainian culture and of its art, that if set off each other, could produce important interpretive insights. For example, it would be next to impossible to build a sustained discussion of the works of Oleh Tistol without calling attention to the Moscow period of his activity before and after 1991, when the Ukrainian state was formally declared. Whatever the outcomes of the battles over the boundaries of the field of Ukrainian contemporary art and the definitions of Ukrainian contemporary art as a practice are, the players, within this field represent, in their personal, privately recorded narratives, the history of development of the Ukrainian contemporary art, articulated particularly in terms of the field's narrative reconstruction of its constitution over time, and the battles within it over defining the criteria of group membership. Through this combination of the subject matter and research methodology, the current inquiry will find an integral place within Ukrainian Studies.
It because of the above considerations that I have decided to include the personal narrative accounts of the condition of the field of Ukrainian contemporary art that I have been seeking throughout the time of my limited stay in Kyiv.
My stay in Ukraine has left me with a lasting feeling that I should do something that would help to publicize Ukrainian contemporary art. It is by setting up an informal Internet project that I would like to serve the community of Ukrainian contemporary artists. The Web site that I am going to launch will be a bridging link between the international Ukrainian community, and possibly Jewish as well, and Ukrainian contemporary art, broadly conceived.
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Note: This modest article was written under the supervision of Dr. Don Seeman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose encouragement has helped me to start my current research project on Ukrainian contemporary art. The present state of this text owes many improvements to the editorial suggestions of Alexander Dillon, Harvard University.
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