“And if, God forbid, someone did dig it up—well, that was a mystery better than on TV!” [Both women laugh a moist feminine laugh, low and deeply felt, as if they’d forgotten why they’d come together in front of the camera.]
[Two ladies in full bloom, well-kept, Mediterranean-tanned, and boutique-dressed (Morgan and Laura Ashley tops, silk Versace scarves, and Armani skirts, nothing showy, heavens no—not a speck of conspicuous consumption, none of the Moscow-edition Cosmopolitan brand of fashion that makes one look like an expensive whore—just pure class and apparent simplicity, the understated style of working women who know their worth and don’t need to advertise anything) with instantly younger, clearer faces and that radiant reticence in their eyes, the inwardness that women can preserve even when their souls find the most intimate concord, so that they resemble two young mothers adoring their offspring—as if watching, from the distance of many years, their children rather than themselves, or, even more than that, two suddenly ageless friends who just entered a pact over a secret, enacting an unspoken rite of sisterhood to which boys are not privy. This gives the boys at the scene—the director and the cameraman—an instant and suspiciously unanimous urge to take a break, smoke a cigarette, change the tape, do something to turn down the heat and announce their existence, to restore order to the world—as one does at home when one’s wife is too engrossed in a phone conversation with a friend, and one feels the need to let the wife know, in sign language, that she’s not the only one who gets to use the phone or, more desperately, by letting a plate crash to the kitchen floor. Take a break, girls, take a break.
After the break, which, like it or not, does drain some of the passion from the women’s inopportune lyrical exaltation, the interviewer—like a trotter that broke stride, loped off, and had to be brought back into the race—regains form, returns to her businesslike tone, and unleashes a compensatory flood of erudition to make up for lost ground, like the straight-A student suspected of not having done her homework (although no teachers are found in the picture) and determined to restore her sterling reputation.]
“Vladyslava, what you said makes me re-evaluate the European reception of your show Secrets—and we remind our viewers that, before coming to Switzerland, the show was mounted in Germany, at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, as well as at a private gallery in Copenhagen...more on that later.... I’ve read the reviews in Süddeutsche Zeitung and Neue Zürcher Zeitung, and I was surprised to find that the writers hailed, as they put it, your ‘innovative use of Byzantine icon-painting techniques,’ as if it were the most remarkable thing about your work. I’m no art historian, of course, but I know enough to know that any really innovative uses of icon-painting techniques ended with Boychuk—when he and his students were executed and their works destroyed—and it’s difficult to classify you as a new-Boychukist. Your works can be said to trace their origins to Dubuffet, with whom you’ve also been compared, but your collages on silver and gold, in my opinion, are more interesting.”
“Thank you.” [The painter smiles, with a professional dose of skepticism.]
“Another artist who comes to mind is László Moholy-Nagy and how he pioneered the technique of layering surfaces to give a painting a third dimension, depth.” [The reporter realizes she’s monopolized the conversation and, possibly, having run out of her straight-A student zeal—now that she’s had a chance to show off—apologizes to the painter with an earnest, almost childish smile that offers a wordless plea, but the painter obviously does not register such subtleties: she is focused on the ideas and waits for the next question.] “Basically, it seemed to me that Western reviewers really didn’t have a context into which they could readily fit you: they don’t know much about Ukrainian art; Russia is their closest reference, hence all this Byzantine talk. But, on the other hand, maybe they could see something we don’t because we see your works from our inside point of view—namely, this mystifying kinship between children’s secrets and icons?”
“It’s really not all that mystifying, the kinship.” [The painter leans forward again, jutting out her pugnacious chiseled chin like a small clenched fist.] “Personally I strongly suspect that the game, when it first appeared, imitated something that adults were doing—burying icons.”
[The interviewer gasps, opens her poppy-red mouth, and forgets to close it.]
“Really, I mean it. Early thirties. We forget one thing about collectivization: when those food brigades came, they didn’t just clean out pantries or take valuable goods—shearling coats, rolls of fabric, stuff like that. Displaying icons in the home was instantly incriminating. They were either destroyed on the spot or taken away, if they had any value: gold plating would be stripped off and the boards themselves burned. So, if you had any foresight at all, you’d simply take yours down and bury them in a secret spot; it had to have been a popular practice—and there you have your secret.”
“That you couldn’t tell anyone about.”
“God help you, no! Not a word. It’s not that far-fetched: our mothers must have spied our grandmothers secreting icons into the ground, and imitated them when they played, as all children do. With time, our generation inherited only the seemingly pointless manipulations with found shards of glass, a fading echo, a sound without a message. And, by the time we had kids, even that was gone, so it’s done, forgotten!”
“Grandma told me,” the reporter begins thoughtfully, “that they buried Great-Grandfather’s entire library then, a stash of pre-revolutionary books: Vynnychenko, Hrushevsky, a history of French literature in Petliura’s translation—enough that they were afraid, you know. And then they couldn’t find the spot where they put it, and their house burned down in the war...so it all must have just rotted away underground.” [She blinks when a new idea brushes past her and then leaps after it like a hound on a fresh track.] “Don’t you think this burying of treasure can be seen as a sort of a recurring motif in all of Ukrainian history? Again, look at folktales and how many tell of buried treasures, from the Kozaks, the Opryshkis, all those other rebels. And a whole stock of dark magic goes with them: how the treasures come close to the surface and burn, appearing as wandering flames above ground, and the Devil guards the treasures, so you have to know how to handle him and what to throw at the burning treasure to make it turn into coins. I don’t know if you find this stuff anywhere else in Europe, except maybe in the Balkans. What if our secrets date all the way back to those older myths? The ones about cursed treasures?”
“Nope, uh-uh,” the painter shakes her head. [She’s already considered this and rejected the idea.] “And you know why not? Precisely because secrets was a girls-only game. It was women who buried the icons—it was their job: one, because they were safer from the authorities—if they got caught, it was no big deal, like what else would you expect from a stupid broad.”
“No class consciousness,” the interviewer pipes in with the vintage Communist-speak.
“Exactly, and who took the cattle back from the kolkhoz in the early thirties? Again, mothers and wives, and that’s how they managed to keep them. Had their men tried to get their horses back, that wouldn’t have gone so well; they’d be shipped off to the Solovki the same day. It’s like when the women riot, it’s not for real. And two—and this is more important—a home’s icons have always been a kind of Di Penates, deities of the hearth, and of course, all things domestic constituted the woman’s sphere of influence—the man’s began outside the door. So when our grannies went digging to bury their icons, they weren’t intent on preserving our artistic heritage, but simply protecting the spirit of the home, as good wives and mothers have always done—‘While the icons hang, the home stands,’ as the proverb went. It was women’s work, Daryna, I’m telling you, and that’s why two generations later it turned into a girls-only game. That’s the only explanation.”
“That’s astonishing,” announces the brunette, triumphant. [Now she could really use a break to digest the new ideas, but since they’ve already had a break,
albeit not of her own devising, she soldiers on.] “And what about for you, personally—is being a woman something that you feel is important to your work? Do you draw a distinction between men’s and women’s art? Do you see yourself as an heiress to a uniquely female artistic tradition? Can you name any female artists you consider your predecessors?”
“That’s a good question, Daryna, thank you. I feel that with Secrets I finally found a style that’s truly my own, and I don’t just mean the technique of mixing things into a collage, against a patchwork background—all my touched-up photographs and padding with glued-in car visors to create bulk—although this also constitutes a very feminine approach to media. I’m like the woman who makes her borsch by mixing whatever is slowly rotting in her fridge.” [The painter pauses, searching for words, and at that moment a sudden gust of wind whips her hair back, extracting her small pale face out of its shaggy gilded frame, leaving it naked and defenseless, and she looks like a serious gray-eyed boy, thoughtful beyond years—an acolyte soon to take his vows, whose entire presence is threaded with a cold, otherworldly light of estrangement, an uncanny, unsettling moment, a hush, as if someone invisible has stepped into the frame. A sudden chill ripples through the interviewer, but that could be the air, maybe a door opened and closed inside the building, or simply the first breath of the imminent autumn; it is, after all, the end of August.]
“I’m sorry,” the painter says. [She looks baffled, and attempts to smile, haplessly.] “I lost my train of thought.... Oh yes,” [Her voice gradually regains its self-possessed tenor and flows evenly, stumbling only occasionally over the most treacherous twists and shallows of thought.] “it’s not just about technique. I work with objects that have been in everyday use, or, rather, what’s left of them. The pieces of china that form a mosaic on the canvas are shards of actual dinnerware and figurines. The same goes for the car visors, and the pieces of fabric, burlap, knitting—I rarely use anything new; things that have been in use have a special feel to them, they’re warm. So, if you want to talk about my sense of a female legacy, I’m kind of inverting, mirroring something women had done since ancient times—decorating their everyday lives. Traditionally, it is the applied arts, and not studio painting, that has been the feminine domain, especially here in Ukraine, where all ornamental painting has always been done by women. That’s the tradition all our primitivists come from—Prymachenko, Sobachko-Shostak—where else if not from the world of painted stoves and sideboards? Even Aleksandra Ekster in the mid-1920s designed patterns for artisan carpet-making co-ops around Mykolaiv, until the government sent them all packing.”
“Really?” the reporter croons. “I had no idea...”
“So yes, there you have it. And I do the opposite—I work with what’s ruined, the wrecked home, so to speak—trying to build something new, but different, out of it.”
“And succeeding,” says the interviewer. [Her sudden response has an unintentional reverence that instantly erects an impenetrable glass barrier between her and the object of her admiration. The painter squints.] “Contents of a Purse Found at the Scene of the Accident is, in my opinion, absolutely brilliant.” [The painter mumbles incomprehensibly.] “Really, I mean it; it’s a postmodern classic! Who bought it?”
“The Lausanne Hermitage.”
“Well, how nice for them—they could just go and buy themselves a Vladyslava Matusevych!” [She turns to the camera emphatically, so that no one could possibly miss this. A few sparrows blow off a table nearby, startled by the dramatic pronouncement.] “And we are too poor even to put together a national museum of contemporary art! It is a splendid piece, truly splendid.” [She slows her pace to a luxuriant purr, as if savoring the painting’s every detail in her mind again.] “And now we’ll only have the slide to appreciate.” [She looks down and reads from prepared notes.] “The painting visualizes a complete drama, composed of small fragments of evidence that usually go unnoticed. In its own way, the work is highly cinematographic, like a montage in which each cut speaks volumes, so one can spend hours reading it, frame by frame—the broken glasses, the receipts, a customs declaration, a picture of a husband and a child tucked into a notebook, a bronzer with a shattered mirror, and those horrific bloody smears on top of...”
“That’s lipstick, Daryna!” the painter interrupts, laughing. [She is visibly relieved to have the conversation move off the laudatory and on to the technical track.] “The smudges on the mirror—that’s actual lipstick, Revlon, I just fixed it with varnish.”
“No kidding? Finally, I have a chance to ask—I’ve been dying to ask you this: Didn’t it scare you to make this? Wasn’t it unsettling—to compose, literally, a still life?”
The painter shrugs. “I was curious,” she says after a moment’s hesitation. [The word is like a clear spot she’s found on an icy sidewalk.] “I’ve had this idea since that Swissair flight went down over Halifax, remember, back in ’98, and for a week divers fished personal belongings out of the water to help identify the victims—what if all that’s left of you is your purse? What will it tell people who never met you? And then one day my own lipstick came uncapped and smashed all over my compact in my purse, and that’s when I saw what it should look like on canvas. But to say I was unsettled? You should tell me—you’ve seen the whole series in my studio before it went to Switzerland—did it feel unsettling to look at?”
“That’s the amazing thing—it’s a radiant piece! It’s got this easy energy, like it emanates light—all your Secrets do, despite the chaos they portray. It’s as if you tamed death, domesticated it.” [The interviewer falters, unsettled a little by where the train of thought has carried her, and instantly hurries to explain herself.] “I don’t mean it in the way Hollywood horror flicks would have it; there’s not a whiff of fright in your work, but—How do I put it?...There’s your elegant composition; the warmth of your incredibly vivid, sun-drenched Southern-steppes palette; and your delicate ornamental touches, so sweet and so domestic—it all makes you forget that the whole series is about death, ruination. A piece like your Contents would look fine in a living room—not just a museum!”
“And you’d put it there? In your living room?” [The painter leans in, intently, in an upward motion, again like a cat about to leap into a tree, her gleaming eyes wide and expectant, and her lips parted slightly, ready to lap up the words that drop.] “Honestly—would you?”
“Oh my God, are you kidding? I’d kill for it! Only I’m sorry, Vlada, who has the money for such luxury?” [The brunette giggles lightheartedly, electrified like a woman in a jewelry store, giddy at the mere chance to look, touch, even try things on.] “I certainly don’t make enough to afford a Matusevych.”
[She says this with a clear note of pride—the kind of pride easily recognized by any first-generation career professional in a country where to identify specifically what you cannot afford (a BMW 6 Series, a Tiffany necklace, a Matusevych) is to draw a wide circle around scores of less-exclusive possessions that you can in fact afford, unlike the vast majority of your compatriots, and with the same naïve, neophyte pride of a global provincial dropping the name Vladyslava Matusevych, as meaningfully as the world’s art-loving bourgeois utter Picasso or Matisse—the pride of a teenager who feels at home among the grown-ups. The painter, however, is not flattered by this intonation—she appears to occupy a different store altogether.]
“Thank you, Daryna,” she says simply. “This is very important for me, what you’ve just said. I’ll give you a painting, no worries, as a present. Not Contents of a Purse, of course, a different one, but from the same series, from Secrets. You’ll come over and choose one, okay?”
[Even under the thick layer of makeup, one can see the interviewer’s face grow suddenly darker as she blushes with a breathless thrill—all the way past her ears.]
“Don’t shoot this!” the brunette cries out, laughing. [She turns her entire body to the camera to block the shot. The sudden motion makes the silk Versace scarf wound carelessly arou
nd her bare neck slip and begin to slide off, and she pins it with both hands against her collarbones. This looks comical in the frame—like an ingénue actress in her first role as a simple-hearted provincial maiden who’s just cried out in joy and clasped her hands to her bosom.]
“Vovchyk,” she pleads. [The interviewer is now consciously playing the part, sensing she’s being adored.] “What did I say? Stop the camera right now! You monkeys, what are you thinking? I’ll cut it anyway—the last thing we need is to air a pronouncement like that, I’d never live it down, they’ll say Goshchynska takes kickbacks for her interviews!”
[Men’s voices rise from behind the frame in a low mutter:]
“Yeah, especially from politicians!”
“Hey, she’ll take her men where she can get them!”
“Ha-ha-ha!”
[And that’s when the camera stops rolling—at last.]
***
You’re a doll, Daryna Goshchynska, a stupid painted doll, she tells herself, having found much to detest, if not altogether abhor, about her bubbly on-screen persona, having pressed the stop button on the control panel and lowered her head onto her arms in the darkness. You’re a good-looking woman to be sure; people look at you and think, she’s got it. Blowing sunshine all over and up whose ass? You want a medal or something? What the fuck? You forty-year-old bird, compulsive valedictorian, peddler of eye candy and book smarts, you doll, you stupid, stupid doll.
***
Vlada, Vladusya, so small and so indomitable, as if held up by an iron rod—once I caught her working in her studio, her hair tied back with a bandana, in threadbare overalls crusty with paint and chalk, and felt stunned: where was my grand dame, the star of fashionable salons and glamorous receptions? She looked like a teen at a construction site, the flunky sent down the scaffolding to fetch buckets of drywall mud; the studio stank ferociously of varnish (I was instantly lightheaded); Vlada was even paler than usual—her lips bluish-lilac as if with cold, and she gulped milk straight from the torn corner of the carton that stood open on a table, breathing and snorting like a sweaty peasant; her brow and nose were speckled with gold dust—and it was a strange realization that this backstage, dirty, and calloused proletarian existence was her real life.
The Museum of Abandoned Secrets Page 7