I need to refocus
“Everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the the cruel wheel of a restless morbidly lascivious conscience; everywhere dumb torment, extreme fear, the agony of the tortured heart, convulsions of an unknown happiness…One no longer protested against pain, on thirsted for pain: more pain! more pain!”(Lacan)
Pulling quotations like this is the direct result of finding books that are terribly interesting but not the most helpful to my immediate work and falling in love with them, reading them until it’s too late and there is no time left for anything else.
Yesterday, I attended a lecture given by Dr. Vita Susak at the Ukrainian Academy of Arts & Science (206 W. 100th St. at Amsterdam Avenue). She’s a curator at the L’viv Gallery of Art and is in New York for a year on Fulbright. Although her speciality is Alexander Achipenko and other Ukrainians of the avant-garde in Paris at the turn of the century, she gave a lecture on contemporary art in L’viv. It was like a breath of fresh air. It was nice to see works by Kaufman and Sahajdakovskii, artists I have met and gotten to know, up on the screen. Many of the artists, all from L’viv, I had never heard of before. Artists who look back on tradition and “the masters” were the main focus of her talk and an exhibition she curated in 2007 entitled “ReAnimation”.
Generally knowing the parameters of the “scene” about which is spoke was very satisfying. Ahhh my work does have meaning in a greater context! It was obvious that no one in the audience (mostly babushkas and dedushkas, average age 65, all who took a great interest in me) knew nothing about contemporary art, let alone art being made in Ukraine today. Before I chatted with Susak personally, I did ask her a couple of questions: comparing and contrasting the scene in L’viv with that in Kyiv and whether or not she can confidently say there is (isnue) such a thing as “Ukrainian” art. She did talk about the museum as an institution and as a space, bringing up the very Groysian idea that museums are necessities. They are what store history and serve as a comparison when judging contemporary art aesthetically and monetarily.
1 year ago