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8
No.1 JANUARY 16, 2018
TIMEO U T
WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA
Malevich: the second death
Photo from the website WIKIART.ORG
KAZIMIR MALEVICH, SELF-PORTRAIT (1933)
By Dmytro DESIATERYK, The Day
Ukraine rightly counts the genius of avantgarde
Kazimir Malevich (Malevych)
among our own artists. He was born in
Kyiv in 1878, and spent his childhood in
Podillia (Yampil), Kharkiv (Parkhomivka,
Bilopillia), and Chernihiv (Vovchok, Konotop)
governorates. The artist began to paint in Kootop,
inspired by folk embroidery and decorative
paintings. He studied under Mykola Pymonenko at
Kyiv Art School (1895-97). In 1927-30, he taught
at Kyiv Art Institute, where the faculty then
included Mykhailo Boichuk, Viktor Palmov, Fedir
Krychevsky, Vadym Meller, Oleksandr Bohomazov,
and Vasyl Kasiian.
At the same time, Russia, too, is entitled to
consider him as one of its own, as it was there that
he created most of his paintings, including the famous
Black Square, and his exhibitions took place
there. Malevich died there as well in 1935. The urn
with his ashes was buried in the village of Nemchinovka,
Odintsovo District of the Moscow Region,
near the oak where the artist liked to rest. A
wooden cubic monument with a black square was
erected above the grave.
During the war, the grave was lost. Later, its location
was identified by a group of enthusiasts in a
collective farm arable field, so
the commemorative sign, erected
in 1988, had to be placed on
the edge of the forest, approximately
two kilometers from the
actual burial place. It is a white
concrete cube with a red square
on the front side.
However, what the communists
began, the Putin-era
“capitalists” have successfully
completed. The field, the forest,
and Malevich’s burial place
have all been repurposed for
property development. Construction
of the “elite” (of
course) residential block Romashkovo-2
is already close to
completion. The developer denies
all accusations, arguing
that he did not know anything
about the grave. Whether he
knew or not, Malevich’s burial
place was not a protected site at
the time of him obtaining a
building permit.
So, we can state that Malevich
died the second death in
Russia – under road rollers and
bulldozers, under cubic meters of concrete and
bricks. In the end, Moscow’s parasitic bourgeoisie
needs somewhere to live. Why should a grave be out
of bounds?
It brings to mind another scandal that happened
in the beginning of 2015 and had to do with the famous
philosopher Immanuel Kant. A photo then appeared
online of the ruins of a house in Kaliningrad,
Russia (formerly Konigsberg), where the author of
Critique of Pure Reason once lived, carrying an inscription:
“Kant is a loser.”
Is not he? Well, really? For the Putinist regime,
which thinks nothing of human individuality, value
of personality and equality of rights, both Malevich
and Kant are losers, that is, stupid, unnecessary
people. One can pour a layer of concrete over
their graves, why not?
Coming back to Ukraine: in fact, we do not
have much to boast about either. Yes, Kyiv does
already have Malevycha Street (renamed as late as
2012), and a non-descript commemorative sign was
erected in Volodymyro-Lybidska Street of the
capital in 2008, which is collapsing little by little,
and that is all. We have neither a museum nor special
tours, nothing.
And now the former imperial center offers us an
opportunity to look decent, even if only by contrast.
All that is needed is a bit of money and desire.
Photo by Mykola TYMCHENKO, The Day
KYIV DOES ALREADY HAVE MALEVYCHA STREET (RENAMED AS LATE AS 2012), AND A NON-
DESCRIPT COMMEMORATIVE SIGN WAS ERECTED IN VOLODYMYRO-LYBIDSKA STREET OF THE
CAPITAL IN 2008, WHICH IS COLLAPSING LITTLE BY LITTLE
The magic of kindness
Emma Andijewska’s painting poses a real
esthetic mystery to many spectators
By Roman YATSIV
Illustration courtesy of the author
The uncanonical painting of Emma Andijewska
(Andiievska), invisibly tied up with the willful
whirlpools of the author’s existence, poses a real
esthetic mystery to many spectators. A
commonplace person may find it totally
impossible to interpret every subject or symbol of her
pictures. Searching for a “grain of truth” in the
outlandish and grotesque imagination world of a
unique painter and poetess, anyone may well get lost in
the unusual surroundings and ask other wayfarers to
help trace the sources of this metaphorical road.
Emma Andijewska, one of the most brilliant artistic
individualities of today, is really “merciless” as well
as candid. The mistress has been nominated for the
Shevchenko Prize for the books Cities-Jacks, Clockless
Time, Landscapes in the Drawers, Marathon, and
Everyday Life: Periscopes.
Andijewska is undivided in her passions and categorical
in her judgments; she is a bold pioneer on the paths
of verbal and visual forms that shape her inimitable disposition;
she continues to captivate and surprise, creating
painting cycles with an unheard-of speed. For Emma, the
very strategy of painting radically differs from the methods
of the vast majority of artists who plan, sketch, and
sometimes rack their brains over the choice of formal instruments
to implement a pre-considered idea. This path
would run counter to Andijewska’s inner nature. She has
been painting since she began to write poems and short
stories, stubbornly overcoming stereotypes and the
slightest hesitations about any “academic rules” in art.
She paints when the reactor of her existence generates
a great deal of energy which is to be put into a structured
poetic or painting form. Therefore, Andijewska has been
revealing her own world-view for many decades in two
concurrent dimensions, which shapes her integral poetic
and philosophical image.
It is rather difficult to systemize Andijewska’s artworks
(thousands of pictures and drawings) in terms of
genres and formal expressive means. It is a good idea
to scrutinize her art in the dynamics of the author’s passion
in general, when certain associations were being
born, senses were forming, new ways of mental organization
were being sought. From the first solo exhibit
in Munich (1956) until the next one in New York
(1989), poetry and prose books were outrunning paintings,
but that period saw the birth of a large number of
allegoric characters which filled the mystifying author’s
subjective reality all over the space of her artistic experiences.
By the late 1980s the ratio of painting had
risen so much that Andijewska began to produce not only
poetic books, but also what can be called “visual poetry
albums,” with due account of the genres and
themes of those publications.
What are these books about, why are they important
to the authoress, and how can we qualify Andijewska’s
painting canvases? To answer these questions, one
should abstract away again from customary approaches
to other artists’ painting practices. The motivational factor
for the artist is not setting a certain professional goal
but expressing something that is immanent, specific, and
typical of the author’s existence, of a certain emotional
condition, or irrational in the metaphysics of time or
place. Undoubtedly, the world order in Andijewska’s
artistic space derives from her mythological thinking and
is kept afloat by a specific poetic world-view and a sharp
visualization of the invisible.
Whenever you want to systemize the themes and
genres of Andijewska’s paintings, you face the following
problem: where, when, and how did the basic form
emerge – the form that gave birth to characters, objects,
and some quaint creatures with which the authoress
models certain mythological plots? Naturally, fictional
images are neither concretely emotional, nor decorative,
nor provocative. And their symbolism is also entirely
different from the classical interpretation of this
historical art term. The “population” of Andijewska’s
imaginary world is, above all, kindhearted (the mirror
reflection of the authoress’ value-oriented imperative).
The artist “describes” with a shade of humor her
daily routine and hyperbolizes secondary (by the hierarchy
of meanings) details. In the 2001 issue of the Munich-based
publication In Bild, prepared together with
German photo artist Lisa Pfahler-Scharf, Emma shows
self-portrait-style paraphrases with her own pictures,
which proves organicity of the cherished poetic world
with her personal lifestyle, character, self-irony, and
burlesque. It is not necessary to call all the elements of
this plastique syntax skillfully designed in both light
and color. Round shapes developed into the formless
masses of figures and heads that featured “wrongly” set
kind and sorrowful eyes. Hermetic dynamic structures,
reinforced with an expressive color, became the
“banquet” of the painting temperament of Andijewska
as a self-sufficient poetess and artist who is frank in her
judgments and creative manifestations.
At the same time, Andijewska changes the structure
of a metaphysical environment in another group
of pictures, expressing more complicated philosophical
senses. It is particularly noticeable in the “Crucifix” cycle
of drawings (2014-15), where a New Testament subject
is treated in a rather unexpected way, and in “The
1,001st Night” (2008-10). Yet, regardless of the thematic
factor in painting, graphic artistry, and carpetmaking,
which the artist also turns to, one can always
see the sign of magic which combines the various
states of her existence, the different levels of reacting
to life, the different intonations of joy and sadness that
accompany the life path of a great Ukrainian lady. By
conceptual indications, the art of Emma Andijewska
draws remote formal parallels with abstract expressionism,
lyrical abstraction, and informalism (art informel),
but none of these art trends in the second half
of the 20th century comprises a concentrated poetic component
which is the quintessence of the phenomenon of
Andijewska – an inimitable and unsurpassable person
on the all too complex platform of world perception.
Roman Yatsiv is a pro-rector of the Lviv
Academy of Arts
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