WHEN ALL ARTISTS ARE AVANT-GARDE

Words Cameron Mcgrath

“What Russia should do with Ukraine”, is an article by Kremlin news site RIA Novosti that speaks of total “liquidation”. Erasure, not just of land and people, but culture. For Russia, Ukrainian identity is a fiction, bringing language, music, and art into the battlefield. Everything that ties Ukrainians to Ukraine has come under fire.

Pen America keeps a list of the cultural dead, some killed in battle, others executed for non-collaboration. The conductor Yurii Kerpatenko is one. Shot in his Kherson home for refusing to conduct a concert organized by the occupiers. In this war, all artists are avant-garde, because any act defying Russia, and any creation which is Ukrainian, is an act of resistance.

Walk the streets of Donetsk in 2014, the covert beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and you’d find ghostly figures stalking the streets. Skull-headed soldiers wearing the Novorossiya flag, the Kremlin’s replacement nation for Ukraine, are painted on walls along with Russian officers holding guns to their own heads, “Just do it” tagged underneath. Serhiy Zakharov was the artist responsible, his work haunting militia patrols, attempting to keep the alien from becoming settled. He was abducted and tortured for his designs.

The tactic of haunting the invader through street art persists into Putin’s “Special Military Operation”. During the occupation of Kherson, activist-artists of the Yellow-Ribbon movement tagged Russian passport offices and propaganda billboards with Ukrainian flags and the letter “Ї” (yee), which is distinct to the Ukrainian Cyrillic alphabet. Instead of the soldiers themselves, Kherson’s guerrilla artists subsumed tools of conversion; billboards declaring “One Russia”, and offices replacing Ukrainian passports for Russian.

Elsewhere, the ruins of war become a canvas. In occupied Nova Kakhovka, graffiti artist Maxim Kilderov tags intricate, interlinked patterns on the burnt husk of a Russian armoured vehicle. Ukrainian and English words woven into the design, “Occupied”, “Kakhovka”, “Ukraine”. He emblazons similar designs on spent RPG-18 rocket tubes and anti-air IGLA systems. The destroyed and cast-off Russian weapons absorbed by the very language they came to burn.

This strange resistance art does something unique. When we think of avant-garde, we think of “disrupting the status quo”. But, in Ukraine, activist-artists are disrupting disruption. Slowing the formation of a new status quo, keeping an old one alive; Ukraine. It’s language, music, and art. A cultural identity one thousand years in the making, and distinctly – not Russian.