Weapons and their uses

Ukrainian artist meditates on the art of war

When Anton Skorubsky Kandinsky grew up in Ukraine in the 1960s and 1970s, he studied and painted in the socialist realist style the country's totalitarian rulers mandated for its artistic community.

Now he lives in New York City, where he uses the patronage of fashion designer Marc Ecko to pursue his career as a visual artist.

The voyage from Eastern Bloc to the capitalist wonderland that is the contemporary United States is evident in "Meditation of Weapons," an exhibit of Kandinsky's work currently on display at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, 2320 W. Chicago. And it is this personal history, according to Roman Petruniak, curator of the program, where the merit of his work lies.

"On the one hand we have his totalitarian upbringing, having lived through all of that in Ukraine," Petruniak said. "And now he's come here and he's working on almost the highest ends, the brilliant ends of capitalism."

The exhibit is mostly paintings, many of which mesh together the artist's past life and current one-historical symbols from the Eastern Bloc are sprinkled throughout the canvases, side-by-side with contemporary references to war, violence and American popular culture.

His paintings are mostly large, often in diptychs or triptychs and often center on a weapon, like a machine gun or grenade. The weapons and the people who hold them-Woody Allen with a sniper rifle and three of the Christendom's archangels dressed as American soldiers with M-16s-are masterfully rendered. But it is not socialist realism, with idealized workers and blunt political messages.

Rather, Kandinsky is a proponent of "gemism," an artistic school he has founded. Visually, the style is obvious. Gems, rubies, diamonds and other precious stones bedeck the painting's grenades, AK-47s, M-16s and in one painting, the helmets of what appears to be U.S. soldiers on convoy in the Middle East.

Gemism, according to a statement on the artist's Web site, "[resemble] the kaleidoscope with its ability to infinitely generate new effects that move with the speed of visual information around us."

Conceptually, the gems are more than a decorative affect, though they can make the weapons appear absurd, like a child's toy. The precious stones change the nature of the weapons, perhaps suggesting viewers in countries without pitched battles in the street consider more subtle weapons aimed at them.

In "M-16, 2007," an approximately 5 by 9 foot painting included in the exhibit, the faces of Donald Trump, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paris Hilton and Dick Cheney appear in stones that cling to a gun, as if summoned by a magician. It is a cultural weapon.

"What this is saying is that culture, insofar that it is mediated on the highest end, can be a weapon, can be a weapon to affect imagination," Petruniak said. "When a machine gun if fire or a grenade is used, that's never something we see or hear but when Paris Hilton is instrumentalized so to speak, that's something we see and hear all the time."

Other paintings recall a personal history of life under Soviet rule and contemporary Russia's influence. In "Forever Kalashnikov," Kandinsky paints two AK-47 machine guns symmetrically across the three canvases.

On one side, the weapon has the traditional wooden stock and points toward the Soviet colors, a representation of the old red-and-yellow hammer and sickle. The other gun, a new model, points toward the red, white and blue of the contemporary Russian flag.

A Russian imperial eagle sits in the middle of the painting with gems as eyes. Phrases on either side in Russian mean "Big Money Likes Silence" and "Control Shot." The latter refers to the shot KGB officers made to the temple of those marked for assassination. Notably, it is on the contemporary Russian side.

Ukraine became independent from the Soviet Union in 1991.

"Whether or not we're talking about the USSR, whether or not we're talking about contemporary Russia, this idea of the Kalashnikov, that physical weapons have been critical to the foundation and maintenance of hegemony, it's something that can get glossed over," Petruniak said.

What are weapons for if not for coercion and control? Kandinsky's paintings beg the question.

This article was published in The Chicago Journal on April 30, 2008

By MICAH MAIDENBERG
Staff Reporter