OLD IMAGES, NEW MEANINGS
At the beginning of the twentieth century Walter Benjamin wrote that, in the age of reproduced images, art would focus not on the making of images but on the practice of exhibiting. The aura which surrounds the making of and the exhibiting of the work fades in to the background. The artist is now not so much the maker of new images as a collector of images supplied in abundance by visual culture; a collector and exhibitor showing their finds in new contexts. Arranged in new ways by their artist-exhibitor and discovering in themselves new combinations, these old images start to sound new, inventing new meanings and simply becoming new images.
Sergei Chaika is just this type of contemporary artist, collector and exhibitor. His interest as a collector ranges across various clichés of print: book illustrations, including those from art books; newspaper and magazine photography; and amateur snapshots. His approach, a flirtation with various painterly aesthetics and the combination of conflicting images, is not original and is undoubtedly a characteristic of the art of the new age. That said, Chaika works only in oil. All possible parodies and reminiscences of ready-mades on the flat surface of the picture are achieved through painting. The artist neither makes collages nor directly satirises a particular historical period but creates an independent history.
For the exhibition ‘Previous Work’, Chaika has brought together fragments of earlier projects. They question the heroics of both the media and the artistic image of recent decades. However for the artist, as for many others, the fundamental theme is not the interpretation of his work but his method of painting. One of the closest and strongest examples with which to compare Chaika is Eric Bulatov. For this patriarch of the contemporary Russian picture it is important to take a deliberately false and deceitful media image (propaganda or advertising) and to build it in to the structure of the picture, with its diagonals and parallel lines, its horizon and space. Then, through the film of the resulting deceiving image, a metaphysical authenticity becomes apparent and starts to send out signals. The competition with ready- mades also links Chaika with Bulatov, an artist who paints slowly and over a long period of time, methodically applying paint with a small brush. Bulatov, however, focuses on the particularities of composition, regulated in the same way as the Constructivists, and on a specific spacing of small brushstrokes which change nothing in the colouring of the original material but serve to exaggerate its non-painterly nature. For Chaika, unlike Bulatov, colour composition portrays meaning and over the years his palette has gradually moved towards the monochrome and the play of tones. ‘Flaki’, first shown seven years ago, is the earliest project included in ‘Previous Works’. ‘Flaki’ is named after a Polish dish of tripe and vegetables which is simple, delicious and filling. The works in this series demonstrate a certain coarse expressiveness, brightness and, one might even say, something of the Rabelaisian carnival. For the exhibition at Triumph Gallery Chaika has selected those paintings which recollect the gluttony of Rabelais’s heroes: ‘Sharpening Knives’, ‘Swinishness’, and ‘Portrait of a Dictator’. This project can be compared with ‘Rockets’, in which the artist already uses less colour, applying it as an upper, almost transparent layer. In the later project ‘Independence Day’ Chaika opts for a monochrome palette.
‘Flaki’ is a project in which the heroics of the war theme, sacred to post-war society, are transformed in to legends. The project touches on the global problems of totalitarianism, including the totalitarianism of the media which overwhelms people with insistent, shouting images. It also broaches the common themes of war and violence, with something erotic in the mix, but there are notable regional accents - Soviet, western Ukrainian and even Austro- Hungarian. Many of these works are parodies on war paintings. One of the main works in ‘Flaki’, ‘The Partisan’s Mother’, shows a woman in peasant dress and a Nazi officer standing opposite each other. Their figures are marked out by faint lines, like those which teenagers draw on posters in the street. The viewer sees a washed-out, drawn-over image which appears to be the work of more than one person and looks somewhat like an old wall-painting or fresco. This mode of viewing removes the illustrative from Chaika’s work. The parody and perverted sexuality of the works in this exhibition transforms them to contemporary lubok prints. Text, or writing on walls, is also found in ‘CO2’. It is a series of images borrowed from war chronicles about German pilots, gunners and bombers. The documentary aspect of the historical trauma of modernity was defined during the Second World War. In ‘CO2’ Chaika first painted phrases and, on top of these, pilots. The way in which the figures are outlined removes any sense of monumentality. The entire project is made up of fragments gathered together. In these works the artist distances himself from the expressionism and bright palette of his earlier works. His drawing is spare and very close to the source image and the colour is restrained, almost monochrome. ‘Previous Work’ includes only one painting from this project, which shows a German pilot. However the painting ‘Anya’ works very well together with it. ‘Anya’ is the only work in the current exhibition made as a stand-alone painting, with no connection to a project. It is a portrait of a smiling girl, made like an amateur snapshot. She is almost naked, with a pilot’s jacket thrown over her shoulders. Her nose is bleeding. Here the stress is on realism, which differentiates ‘Anya’ from other works in the exhibition.
‘Rockets’ is a play on sots-art, both in the painting style and in its expressive mood. A murky and threateningly undefined body flies through a thick, hazy space, an enraptured girl gazes upwards and a person covers their face against approaching danger. The project is not about the possibility of the distinct visualisation of those mighty, concealed forces of danger unleashed by our civilisation, the civilisation of space conquest and ballistic missiles, but about the inadequacy of our subjective, emotional reactions to disturbing images of these hidden forces. The works in the project ‘Independence Day’ show a characteristic monotone both in the sense of a media image and of its verbal re-telling. ‘Independence Day’ comprises pictures for which the source material was documentary photography. But the crowd of the pre-television era, listening to an announcement via loudspeaker, the guy with a newspaper under his arm with a headline about the death of a president; the view of the city through a gun-sight; and finally the Lenin monument in Minsk are not so much an illustration of an event which shook the world but a reflection of the mood of the era. Other works from this series, not shown in the current exhibition, strengthen this thought. They are all non-narrative and mainly monochrome shots. However if some of the details of this project tell us about history as seen by a photo-journalist, others are simulations of a person’s idea of terror, which is undoubtedly formed by the mass media. The grenade, which is the only image taken from a military textbook, the window, the sniper’s position and the terrorist on a balcony – all of these pictures are stored in our heads although we are unlikely to have seen them in real life. The work of snipers, and the capture of terrorists is so thoroughly described that the notion of the hiding place of a sniper or a terrorist is as firmly lodged in the collective memory as if
they were real events. Once again the artist plays the role of observer. Whether or not this is a genuine witnessing of history or serial simulations is a separate question. The fact remains that today people are more traumatised by the serial multiplication of visual-event information than by real, historical events. For an artist such as Chaika, painting is the only suitable means of dealing with this trauma.
Returning to the comparison with Eric Bulatov, it should be noted that every one of his works stands alone, despite the fact that each is part of a series. This is a fundamental aspect of Bulatov’s oeuvre. Can the same be said of Chaika? He has never been satisfied with a single approach to images. For Chaika it has always been important to arrange whole rows, virtually sequences, of picture-images. All of his works were brought together under one name and each featured as broad as possible a range of image avatars on one common theme. The last project, shown at Triumph Gallery, was ‘Eternal Flame’. It comprised a visual catalogue of images on this eternal theme. The artist aimed to get close to the aesthetic and traditions of the Old Masters and a number of works are literal quotes from the history of art. At the same time, all of the works in the series are seen through the prism of the mass-media age. In other words, Chaika saw the motifs of classical painting in the form of news reporting. In one way or another each motif shown, whether groups saving the wounded, female portraits, landscapes and still life, ending with a burning house, variously revealed the theme of the mutual exchange between the eternal and the ephemeral, between old art and a new artistic vision.
In the exhibition ‘Previous Work’ the artist once again tackles the theme of eternity and, to be more precise, the theme of renewing the old. He does this in a relatively radical way, that is by not doing anything. By this I mean that he does nothing as a painter. In this case Chaika’s creative act is as collector and re-exhibitor. He is the collector of his own works, each of which has already been exhibited according to the logic of individual projects. In relating to them as a type of ready-made, the artist is distancing himself from his offspring. They are ready-mades twice over, both because in terms of content they are already part of a visual production and because they have been made in the literal sense of the word and could be taken and used as building material for a whole new project.
Yes, they have already been made but are they actually prepared to serve as building blocks in a new artistic structure? Or are Chaika’s pictures not simply segments of his visual history, which he calls projects, but stand-alone works? Or do they combine authenticity with interactivity to such an extent that they can exist separately from the project as a whole but simultaneously become one with works from other projects? In fact the artist dares to exhibit together very different paintings. The only thing which links them is that they were made some time ago. Chaika calls these ‘old works’. Here it’s worth mentioning that the artist is only just 30. The norms of the old school of painting are eternally contemporary for him and, it appears, he considers that rapidly-changing artistic innovations quickly lose their freshness. Duchamp’s pissoir is considered to be the main artifact of modernity. The focus on ready- mades was accepted as a basic rule of contemporary art and painters were defined by the phrase ‘stupide comme un peintre’ (as stupid as a painter). Many predicted the end of painting but plenty of people disagree, including Sergei Chaika.
Georgy Litichevsky