ARTISTIC REARGUARD AS A PHENOMENON OF CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN ART

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to define the concept of «artistic rearguard», its phenomenon and role in contemporary Ukrainian art, and to study why the artistic rearguard became a separate trend in the late eighties and early nineties of the twentieth century. The term «artistic rearguard» emerged in the late 1980s as a counterweight to postmodern art. There have been no fundamental art historical studies of this trend in the work of contemporary Ukrainian artists, so it is important to define the terminology, outline the features of the trend, and identify the artists who worked in this direction. Despite the fact that the history of the artistic rearguard in Ukraine covers a period of more than thirty years, there are few studies devoted directly to the Ukrainian artistic rearguard, and the available sources provide only a general description of the creative formation of this movement. The term «artistic rearguard» was coined by the Ukrainian artist Matviy Vaisberg and defined by the critic Andrii Mokrousov, who was then the editor of the literary and artistic almanac «Novyi Krug» and is now the director and executive editor of the «Krytyka» Publishing House in Kyiv. The first mention and explanation of the trend is in the article «Anabasis of Four in the Space of New Art,» which Mokrousov wrote for the catalog of the «Anabasis» exhibition in Kyiv in 1993. This was followed by another article for the exhibition of Matvіy Vaisberg «Time of the World. Painting and Graphics» in 1995. The publications about the artistic rearguard also include the material by art historian Inna Bulkina for the large catalog «Matviy Vaisberg» published in 2019 in Kyiv. Andriy Mokrousov insists that the new trend emerged as a counterweight to the total reorganization of artists from socialist realism to postmodernism. According to the critic, the «rearguard,» which was lively discussed by artists and critics in workshops and exhibitions at the time, was not widely documented in the media or in scientific research. The term «rearguard» is used by Mokrousov and Inna Bulkina to refer to the works of a group of artists who worked at the time and did not label their a rt as avant-garde or postmodernism. The object of the study is the artistic rearguard as a phenomenon in the context of the development of contemporary Ukrainian art. In fact, we have the first reminder of this trend in the catalog for the 1993 exhibition «Anabasis», which was held at the Kyiv Art Gallery, which was then called the Museum of Russian Art. The rearguard was actively developing in the 1990s, a time when society underwent great changes, and art was responding to these changes. The novelty of the research: the study is the first to analyze and clarify the terminology of the «artistic rearguard».