A Little Injection of the Contemporary World

In the summer of 2020 the sleeping beauty of Belarus was suddenly awoken by a series of unforeseen events. The contemporary broke into Belarusian society and burned it, a burning comparable to the dramatic processes that led to the formation of European nations. Despite two and a half centuries of living together, first within the Russian Empire, then within the USSR, the Belarusian historical and cultural landscape is very different from the Russian one. Before the tripartition of Poland in the second half of the 19th century, and its annexation by Russia, Belarus was part of large trans-European formations: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and, later, of Rzeczpospolita, i.e. of Poland. Since the Middle Ages the present territory of Belarus has served as a “pendulum” between Russia and Europe. Historically, this has been an unstable and tragic situation, but it has produced a cultural palimpsest, with very curious, constant interactions, sometimes a paradoxical intertwining of East and West. The relationship between Modernität, the contemporary and Belarusian art is contradictory. To claim to be contemporary, our contemporary, is a slogan, a call, rather than a given that can be grasped rationally or sensitively. At the end of the Soviet period a particular topical approach, born out of the aesthetics of the 1960s, dealt with the “contemporary”. During the period of the détente, art first aroused the tremor of a “now” in the timeless world of Sovietism and Stalinist baroque.Then this poetics of the present was replaced, at the end of the Soviet era, by calls for criticism to “be contemporary”, and this became a criterion for judging the value of artistic creation. However, with few exceptions, this sincere appeal to the contemporary ended up as mere rhetoric. The ‘contemporary’ became the subject of a confrontation between the two ideological systems, that of the West and that of the USSR. The question of who was “more contemporary” was central, and the Soviet art critics, disconcerted, appeared in their theses more “contemporary” than the art they described.

In Belarus, modernism developed intermittently, passing through moments of paroxysm. With independence after the collapse of the USSR, new themes and strategies were introduced into the creative process, but there was no intensification or temporalisation of perception, nor a radicalisation of artistic vision, as occurred in the

Baltic states between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. On the contrary, in the aesthetics of the sleepy Belarusian reality, in the waves of late modernism, subtle, often profound nuances of 20th century modernist codes appeared. At the end of the Soviet era, Israel Basov created a lyrical, deeply subjective world, that of the New Jerusalem, comparable in the austerity of the plastic gesture to the masterpieces of the 20th century. His art marks the transition from the Soviet to the post-Soviet era. And at the end of the 1980-1990 period, Ludmila Russova and Igor Kachkurevich in Minsk, Alexandr Maley, Vassily Vasilyev, Galina Vasilyeva in Vitebsk initiated the Suprematist Resurrection in the legacy of Malevich and Unovis, the movement he had founded a hundred years earlier, precisely in Vitebsk.

TURMOIL AND HARMONY

At the same time, the photographic art of Sergey Kozhemyakin and Igor Savchenko proved the incredible power of the silent representation of facts, notably in the cycle Echo of Chernobyl; while the subtle figuration of Valery Slauk and Yuriy Yakimenko demonstrated the inexhaustible potential of an imagination rooted in Belarusian archaism. Finally, the experimental lyricism of Irina Loban, Natalia Rachkovskaya and Matvey Basov corresponded to an experience of Western modernism in the 20th century that Gorbachev’s perestroika had finally allowed. This modernist line is expressed above all in sculpture (Dmitry Oganov, Maxim Piatrul), in the new trends playing with the border between the real and the virtual (Anton Snt). I would like to shed light on the way in which a transgression of modernist codes is taking place in Belarusian contemporary art. Ten years ago Ales Rodin (b. 1947) became a reference in Berlin’s Tacheles. (1) Thousands of visitors passed through his top-floor studio day and night. In this whirlwind Rodin remained unperturbed, dressed like a hippie, working, moving from one monumental canvas to another.

Giorgio Agamben compares the so-called contemporary to the light of galaxies that are moving away from us at an unimaginable speed, the light of which we cannot perceive from our terrestrial situation. In this he agrees with Roland Barthes’ thesis that “the contemporary is the untimely”. To be contemporary means that one strives to be irreversibly in one’s time, while being aware of being at a distance from it; for a perfect coincidence with our time stops us seeing it.This reasoning applies perfectly to Rodin’s painting. The swirling, bustling crowd was inscribed in his painting, which at first sight was composed of millions of intertwined lines, forming shimmering surfaces. This maelstrom of micro brushstrokes could really make one think of wandering crowds as well as whirlpools in the universe. However, an attentive eye couldn’t fail to notice the harmonies of colours built in a complex assembly of shades of purple, turquoise, grey... To understand the origin of this refined colourism, we need only recall the masterpiece of Rodin’s teacher, Natan Voronov, October Morning (1957, National Museum of Fine Arts, Minsk), where the mud in the foreground, the smoke, the fur coats and the soldiers’ boots come into play in a complex polyphony, which can be compared to the paint in paintings of “grey days” by Monet and Sisley. Rodine’s painting is at once at the centre of contemporary tumoil, while maintaining an Agambenian distance in its peaceful harmony of colours. Nothing in it can refer to recent events, but while critically reflecting the random flow of the days we live through, it reveals its harmonic structures.

The achievements of the architect Boris Shkolnikov (1949), who shaped the new imagery of Minsk, do not open up a radically new horizon, but they do bring the greatest sophistication to the plastic solutions of European Modernität. With him, the architectural space rolls up like a spiral in the belly of the city (see, for example, the Cascade complex, 2008-15), or, in the spirit of Peter Behrens and the architects of the Secession, the parallelepipeds become softer. In a dynamic development, the architect opposes a plastic gesture to the rectangular, dull layout of Minsk. While remaining within modernist thinking, Shkolnikov brings to the surface emotional layers that modernism generally pushes aside.

URBAN IMPROMPTU

The four liner buildings of the health centre, with adjoining public and commercial facilities, on Victors Avenue in Minsk (2012-16) appear as a dance to four beats, a saraband, and introduce a kind of frivolity into the city’s austere context: Boris Shkolnikov’s urban impromptu appeals to our imagination, awakening childhood memories, but with the irony that Joseph Rykwert spoke of in connection with Hans Hollein.Through slight, unexpected nuances, he draws a world of feelings and moods for which strict modernist architecture was not intended. [...] But it is in the work of VladimirTsesler (1951) that the empire of the concetto, of paradox, really takes hold. His metamorphosis, that of one of the great masters of contemporary art, characterises our time. From 1980 to 2010 Tsesler developed his own language, using puns and metaphors, so that unexpected meanings emerged from dense, paradoxical combinations of elements of reality. His style is one of unique precision that imposes itself as an element of reality.Tsesler used this unparalleled art in his political work in 2020, the year of the awakening of political sentiment. He has taken events that have arisen in reality and put them together in such a way that new meanings are revealed. Here the contemporary is captured in a face-to-face encounter, in the manner of Baudelaire. The posters created by Tsesler since 2020 provoke an enhanced experience of the unbelievable reality, they are an injection of the contemporary into Belarusian art. His works, as well as those of Antonina Slobodchikova, have entered the open social space and have become not the object of an artistic cult, but elements of today’s life.

1 Squat and alternative cultural centre in Berlin, 19902012.

Igor Dukhan is a doctor of letters, curator, contemporary art theorist and professor of aesthetics.

Vladimir Tsesler, Segey Voytchenko. Project of the Century (12 from the XX). 1999-2000. Collection d’oeufs of eggs. Au premier plan foreground oeuf egg Victor Vasarely