Permanent Revolution. Contemporary Art
and Politics in Ukraine 1987-2017
“… Donbas-Chocolate became Arsen Savadov’s calling card in the mid-1990s. The photo documentation of the 1997 performance is a component of the Deepinsider project, which from its creation has provoked viewers with its frankness and powerful aesthetic expression. Savadov found the basic expressive elements of his work in the video project Voices of Love that he made with co-author Georgy Senchenko; in 1994 the artists shot 90 minutes of video on the military ship Hetman Sahaidachniy with sailors dressed in ballet tutus. In the Donbas project, real miners from the southeast part of Ukraine participated in the performance.
The Donbas-Chocolate series became on of the main artistic statements of the new Ukrainian art. In part its astonishing success is explained by the fact that Savadov’s traditional hyperaestheticism and his paradoxical aesthetic, based on the absurdist dressing up of male performers with their subsequent brutal incursion into the insouciant fabric of the real, this time was activated in the context of one of the most acute social boils on the body of post-Soviet Ukrainian reality. By the mid-1990s the Donbas was the source of constant social instability and criminality, and the miners, previously hailed by Soviet propaganda, had become a symbol on permanent localized rebellion, for they were periodically used by Kyiv politicians for various types of blackmail. The conflicts that turned into a large-scale national tragedy in 2014 were brewing in the region then. The tense realization of one’s meaningless and hopeless existence, the filth, sweat, and danger (news reports of mass deaths in mine collapses had become common then) is heightened by the counterpoint of the delicate and vulnerable tutus, which were also a familiar visual symbol of the collapse of a mighty empire. Swan Lake was broadcast on national television during the coup of 1991.
Savadov’s unique gift for suggestive immersion of his characters into the space of aesthetic experiment in a radical performance, documented in Donbas-Chocolate, here reaches its apogee. What did it mean for the miners, this experience of totally overcoming conventions, disrobing for the camera, mixing with a group of immoral performers, and the homoerotic dressing in tutus? The seeming impossibility of the event is what fascinates viewers so powerfully; and this event is also a marker of the era, for probably it was only then and there—the Donbas in the mid-1990s, on the ruins of the Soviet Empire in a space of total anxiety and uncertainty could members of one of the most closed male communities so easily be transformed into the psychedelic agents of Arsen Savadov’s performance art. The edginess of the situation turns an absurdist action in the mines into a mystery carnival built on the play of opposites: male vs female, the above-ground world vs the cosmos of underground nonbeing, real vs imaginary, and so on. Despoiled innocence, symbolized by the dirty tutus, enters into an alchemical interaction with the majestic energy of the male collective and leads to a powerful transgressive experience that is felt by both participants and viewers.
Savadov’s Collective Red Part 2 begins as a performance invasion into the space of a real May Day demonstration by Communists on European Square in Kyiv. Savadov’s by-then traditional performers in tutus take bizarre poses in front of the rally, underlining the absurdity of the event. The Communist Party of Ukraine by the late 1990s was a strange relict of the past, a simulacrum that had lost all ties to reality. Ukrainian society was suffering through a painful and multilevel transformation in those years. The post-Soviet euphoria coincided with the arrival of the postmodern aesthetic, leading to formation of a hedonistic, apolitical, and very vital generation. The fin-de-siècle spirit was strong in the late 1990s. Collective Red Part 2 captures the friable existence on the border of eras, when the collapse of the totalitarian system with its cruel mechanisms of oppression led to a sexual and psychedelic revolution, leaving the young decadents a legacy of void symbols and vague memories of red as the emblem of the terrible terror and the most long-lived utopia of the twentieth century.
The pictures taken during the demonstration are filled with tension and suspense. Getting ready, the performers are prepared to deconstruct a recently powerful mythologeme by their actions. On the square, they begin their strange movements. Some passersby look bewildered, but basically the crowd in the background seems totally indifferent and does not register the artistic provocation. The performers’ role is one of strange beauty, which in the best traditions of the genre, is meant to save the world from the rule of dead signs of a bygone era. The conflict between Soviet and post-Soviet is presented here as an aesthetic contradiction between apolitical youth in the person of beautiful actors radiating erotic energy and the faceless indifferent extras on the stage.
The second—staged—part of the series is distinguished by intentional compositional overload. This conglomeration of bodies, slogans, and flags is a reference to the late-Soviet totalitarian theater of the absurd and to the tradition of countercultural Sots Art, which mocked the aesthetic of power during the last decades of the USSR’s existence. But in Arsen Savadov’s transmedia theater, the Soviet artifacts are used as an effect backdrop for the traditional author’s spectacle with costumed ephebes. The homoerotic youths in tutus seem to have completely corrupted and demoralized a group of ordinary citizens of the USSR. This unbridled psychedelic action triumphs over the totalitarian seriousness, the elderly veterans pose wearing ridiculous mushroom hats, and at some moment it becomes clear that they all, including the performers, are but part of an endless blood-red hallucination.”