Odesa without myth: Oleksandr Lisovsky on contemporary art

From Oleksandr Lisovsky 's Odesa studio, one does not hear the noise of the street, but the voice of time - sharp, ironic, and sometimes uncomfortable. The artist, whose works are in museums and private collections around the world and who is generally considered to be a contemporary artist, paradoxically remains one of its most consistent critics.

He dialogues with the authors of his generation, such as Igor Gusev and Sergei Anufriev, destroys the established canons and revisits the figures of the new Odesa myth without sentiment: from Kira Muratova to Alexander Roytburd.

This conversation is about memory and time, about war and emigration, about the price of works and the price of choice. It is about why Lisovsky did not leave, what he considers to be real art, and why the "last Mohicans" are not the last at all. This is a dialog without distance or posture: direct, sometimes harsh, but alive and necessary.

Sasha, in your works there is often a sense of time stopped on the verge of disappearing. What role does memory play here?

"The Story of a Spoon" for the exhibition "Artifact". PHOTO courtesy of the author

For example, there is a family spoon hanging under glass behind you. This is a reference to a work from the time of the Soros Foundation, when contemporary art was active in Odesa. Back then, I participated in an installation called Artifact. It was a game with logic-with an object as a carrier of memory.

Roytburd, for example, made an installation about Gagarin, which was also about an era, collective memory. Mine is about my own life, about my family history.

I built the installation as follows: in a box, under glass, on a pea-colored rug, there was a silver spoon. Around it were photos of my grandmother, her brothers and sisters. Below is a table with a glass of vodka on it. The glass was illuminated from the inside, with a slice of black bread and a sign stylized as a museum annotation on top.

The text said that my grandmother, Anna Nikitovna Popova, was born in Lebedyan, Tambov Province, into the family of the keeper of the weight measure of the Lebedyan market. There were five brothers and two sisters in the family. And of the few things that have survived from the family to this day, only a spoon has survived. I made a pseudo-museum description for it: silver, numbered stamp, inventory number, dimensions. In fact, it is a relic.

Which contemporary Odesa artists are important to you? With whom do you have a creative dialog?

"Composition with a cactus". PHOTO courtesy of the author

I maintain a dialog with Viktor Khokhlenko. I had a dialog with Yurii Plisse, and I communicate with Zhenia Holubenko.

The artist Mykhailo Kovalskyi lived in Odesa, and later he emigrated to Europe. He was fond of antiques, and firefighters issued him a certificate: under the pretext of checking fire safety, he could enter any attic.

When he left, I inherited things from his collection, including fragments of an old ballet tutu. The workshop was in chaos at the time, and a piece of chiffon accidentally covered a photo portrait of a girl from a vintage Polish magazine. That's how I got the idea to combine these things. This is how my objects with chiffon began. By the way, it is also in the installation "The History of the Spoon".

Do you have a feeling that the "last Mohicans" are leaving? Voitsekhov, Roytburd, Shevchuk, Dulphan, Maryniuk?

Object "Voitsekhov." Photo courtesy of the author

No, they are not. These are not the last-they are the penultimate. There are always new ones. I see this at exhibitions: someone leaves, someone comes, and talented people come.

Take Stas Zhalobniuk, for example. He's talented and loves money. He paints still lifes, makes series, and works technologically with the format. The background takes up two-thirds of the canvas. The Dutch also had water and sailboats, and two-thirds were clouds. This is not the issue. He simply understands the market: a small work costs a hundred dollars, a large one is three times more expensive.

There is Vladimir Kozhukhar, Polina Zinovieva - I like some things. The main thing is that a new generation is still emerging. I have no sense of decline.

Rembrandt is not dead. Petrarch is not dead. They are with us.

Let's talk about the new Odesa myth. Roytburd became a part of it. And Anufriev?

PHOTO courtesy of the author

Roytburd has done a lot for his mythology. He is a talented artist, no one can argue with that. His early works are so pasty, something close to Yegorov, plus a Jewish element.

I'm not against a career-it's great. In the 90s, Roitburd consulted Konstantin Akinsha, a Kyiv art critic who was close to the Soros Foundation, about fashion trends in art.

Sergei Anufriev is a different story. He is certainly a talented person, but above all, he is a brilliant talker. He can talk endlessly, beautifully, complexly, ornately. But in fact, he often juggles words and concepts. This is a special kind of demagoguery.

I have known Sergei since he was fifteen. I was friends with his mother, Rita Anufrieva. He spent a lot of time in Moscow with his first wife, Masha, where he joined the conceptual community: Bugaev-Africa, Pepperstein, Leiderman, Prigov, Kabakov. For me, it's all too far away. I'm not a scientist, I haven't studied this deeply. But when I read Pepperstein, it's like Sergei: a continuous weave.

Leonid Voitsekhov told me that at one exhibition in Europe, Leiderman had wallpaper hung in the gallery on which he spilled borscht. Then it dried up, and the wallpaper was cut up and sold. This is, of course, spectacular. But this is already an art performance, where the main thing is presentation and packaging.

Anufriev is a witty man. One of his last exhibitions at the Museum of Western and Oriental Art, where he sat with a stuffed animal on his head, was funny.

Did you know his deceased son Timofey, a fighter in the Russian Volunteer Corps?

No, I didn't know him well. I saw him when he and his sister were children. I used to visit the Anufrievs when they rented an apartment above the sea. Tymofii was very similar to Serhii. Especially like Sergei in his youth.

Anufriev, by the way, borrowed Kovalsky's objects from me, my works for a group exhibition. And his children even wrote resumes for them, in a childish way: "This is a girl, she is sitting in a frozen window, she is cold...". I still have these descriptions somewhere in my studio.

How do you feel about the work of the military artist Ihor Husiev?

An object for the exhibition "Phantom Opera". PHOTO courtesy of the author

Husiev does his job professionally: both painting and objects.

I know how contemporary art in Odesa began. In the nineties, Sergei Anufriev's mother Margarita Anufrieva-Zharkova, Felix Kohricht, and then Roitburd took it up-it was a whole system.

Felix met two businessmen who had a company and sponsored the lease of the Shah's Palace, where artists exhibited. Roitburd gathered a party around this, and then applied to the Soros Foundation.

Ihor Husiev was then friends with the artist Vadym Bondarenko. They started with performances. But to be honest, I didn't really understand them. This action, when two men were walking with a baby carriage, was a reference to the Battleship Potemkin. I understand cultural references, but the form itself didn't convince me.

And then Gusev had an exhibition at the museum, and I liked it. Young people in the dark, glowing phones, such modern coloring, almost neo-Karavajism-very professionally, strongly done. It resonated with me.

But his war pornography - the birch trees, some strippers in uniform - all this is deliberately shocking. It looks like Dadaism, when you just annoy the bourgeois.

It's interesting that you used to participate in joint exhibitions, but now you've all parted ways...

Oleksandr Lisovsky. PHOTO: Vasyl Ryabchenko

We were not very close with Gusev. I participated in the exhibitions he organized. One of them was at the Starokonnyi Market. Sergei Anufriev was also there. I was offered to participate, and I did.

Mostly I talked to Vasya Ryabchenko, Roitburd, and Dima Dulfan. It was one environment.

Sasha, let's touch on another hypostasis of the Odesa myth. Let's talk, for example, about Kira Muratova. There is a lot of controversy today: the renaming of the street, its Soviet past. Who is she to you?

I've known Muratova for a long time. Her husband Zhenya Holubenko and my friend Vitya Khokhlenko were on the same course at Hrekivka. Her first films were good: "Long Farewells" and "Short Encounters"-they were very powerful. I liked them.

And then, after perestroika, the theme of female hysteria and repetition emerged. This is, of course, the Sixties, the influence of Fellini, and something else.

Tanya, my wife, acted in one of her films, where a corpse is carried in a suitcase. The script was written by Sergei Chetvertkov. Everything is very fancy. Muratova may be a part of Odesa, but personally, the topic of female hysteria is not close to me. These repetitions-"I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming..."-how many times can you do it?

For example, Zhenya Golubenko is very creative. He is different. He is very interesting as a long-breath artist, he painted for almost all of Kira Muratova's films. Zhenya is a very productive person in general: today he paints, tomorrow he takes pictures, then he makes collages, then some abstract structures - everything is in his spirit.

Do you have any sense of the future of the project now? Do you have any idea of a new cycle of exhibitions?

PHOTO courtesy of the author

I am constantly working. I have some ideas.

Will it be in the Museum of Modern Art or in some private gallery?

An installation. PHOTO courtesy of the author

I don't know yet. Maybe a gallery. What kind of galleries do we have now? I liked Olena Marakhovska's gallery "Thin Matter". There was a lot going on there-we used to meet there all the time. My works, Pliss's, Khokhlenko's, and Biletina's hung on the walls.

For Marakhovska, it wasn't about commerce-it was about pleasure. She invited me to exhibitions, commissioned works, and was a patron of the arts.

Could you have left when the war broke out?

"Odesa-Holovna, the facility.<span><span><span><span><span><span> </span></span></span></span></span></span>Photo courtesy of the author

I don't know. It's not really my thing. If I had some other internal state, maybe I would have gone. The stars have to align like that.

For example, Vitia Khokhlenko is currently in Germany. He is a bit "in exile". He made friends with some Germans there, creative people who run a non-profit gallery. There are exhibitions there all the time, very different ones, from normal to completely frozen. And suddenly they had a window for four days. Vitya brought his works there. The German intelligentsia came, looked, and admired it-"beautiful, beautiful." But when he asked how to monetize it, he was told to marry a rich woman.

Several of my friends, Jewish artists from Odesa who went to New York, have never come to Odesa. And they are not going to.

For example, I was offered to stay in Denmark: "Stay, you'll be an illegal." I thought, so what? How will I earn money? I could, of course, do something like restoration. But I had my mother and wife Tanya here. They didn't want to go anywhere.

What do you think Ukraine can contribute to the global artistic process today?

Light object "On the Ruins of Empire". PHOTO courtesy of the author

You know, in England, English artists are the most expensive. In Denmark - Danish artists. A country has to raise its own artists. The state and society have to present it to the world. It's not like an artist with a bag goes around asking: "Hello, I am your aunt." The art market is a system.

And what is happening now?

"The Lord of the Flies. PHOTO courtesy of the author

The war changed everything. Orders have dropped. There are fewer exhibitions, almost zero sales. Collectors are in the red. People just don't have money.

I saw this even before. I used to live in Denmark, in a rather peculiar gallery, half antique. It was in the town of Herning, eight kilometers away, with a pavilion and apartments. They sold rustic furniture, Dali lithographs, and Andy Warhol's works.

And suddenly Desert Storm began-the war in Iraq. It would seem that Denmark has nothing to do with it, but we go to a hairdresser's shop and they pour us drinks and say: "The war has started. Everything will go down. The whole business."

And so it was. Everything in the world is a connected vessel.

What is your most expensive work?

Three thousand dollars. It was Roitburd who invited a Kyiv gallery owner to visit me over ten years ago. She came and bought many works at once. I had this happen several times. The works lay around for 20 years, and then they 'shot up'.

And the cheapest work was thrown up by the Odesa poet and writer Ihor Pavlov: "Sasha, I have a client who needs a square decimeter of fabric tinted in a flesh color." "What for?" "He's a lover of women, he needs something to stick on his body. I said: "Igor Ivanovich, the body has a different color, a different life!" And he: "Anything!". I thought: what is this? For intimate dates? What should I put on it? Later I asked some people and told this story. Back in the 80s, I was paid four Soviet rubles. And then someone said: "There must have been some kind of a fast tattoo. There was Dasha on the shoulder, but it was Masha" (laughs).

What is success for you?

PHOTO courtesy of the author

Success is when your works are not a fiction. When they are bought for love, to give you the freedom to do what you want.

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