SLIT YOUR THROAT IN A SEMI-FICTIONAL FOG
Alex Fisher
5th May 2020
Kharkiv-based contemporary artists Andriy Rachinskiy and Daniil Revkovskiy are ubiquitous in Ukraine nowadays—not only for their extensive inclusion in survey and solo exhibitions, but in the way they bend their audience’s view of the country’s citizens, streetscapes, and relationship with armed aggression.
Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy, who transliterate their names from Russian to English rather than Ukrainian to English utilize post-Soviet collective memory as the activating agent in their total installations. Their latest installation, Mischievous (2019-2020), is part of the ongoing, albeit temporarily shuttered 2020 PinchukArtCentre (PAC) Prize exhibition. Mischievous not only appears in the show, it has been ordained the fan favorite, receiving the Public Choice award.
Mischievous is a trademark work for the duo—a logical furthering of a pseudo-historiographic methodology they have been fine tuning since initiating their partnership in 2012, frequently in consultation/collaboration with Ksenia Malykh, a Kyiv-based curator who has staged many of their exhibitions and written a long piece about their practice for the Ukrainian culture platform Your Art in addition to managing PAC’s Research Platform.
Mischievous, which occupies a rectangular corner room in PAC’s labyrinthine space in Kyiv’s central business district, has two parts. The first, which visitors enter onto, is the imagined headquarters of an imagined gang of blood-hungry criminals wreaking havoc in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia in the final decades of the 20th century. There is a punching bag, a cushioned mat floor (which, I can confirm, the numerous high heel-wearing visitors to the vernissage found difficult to navigate), a wall-hanging of well-worn weapons (brass knuckles, shanks, sawed-off shotguns, and something which looks an IED), a turf map, a herald, a carved creed, four biker vests, and a motorbike with a sawfish-like saw tread protruding straight out from its handlebars. The second, which visitors face after pivoting away from the très-West Side Story gang HQ is a wall-high, three-panel police message board, painted in mega-crisp blue, yellow, aquamarine, red, and gold. On the central panel of the message board are twenty-six photos purporting to show two members of the gang being busted by a uniformed police officer. The two ne’er-do-wells are Rachinskiy, dressed in a fatigued leather bomber, and Revkovskiy, wearing a shimmery track jacket. The cop is Ksenia Malykh.
Accordingly, one half of Mischievous represents the pursuit of hedonism and the other represents the pursuit of justice. Alas, the verifiability of each pursuit is spotty. The fresh-painted flames on the herald haven’t accumulated the patina one would expect the herald of no-holds-barred street bruisers to have. And I can’t figure out the gold tassels hanging from the police message board. I know the ‘authorities’ are trying to proclaim their superiority, but with gold tassels? This isn’t showjumping.
The photographs nudge at the seriousness of the situation, giving the installation its pulse. This should perhaps come as no surprise as Rachinskiy is one of the sharper-eyed street photographers operating in Ukraine today, posting pictures via his eponymous Instagram handle. His faded film aesthetic permeates the Mischievous images, depicting Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy recreating their crimes. The landscape they occupy is worn, rusty, and drenched in thick grey fog. Scrub covers the steps leading to a concrete drainage pipe on the territory of Запоріжсталі (trans. Zaporizhzhia steelworks) and obscures tombstones in a cemetery. Most of the time, the culprits are static and sluggish, pointing to this, walking towards that while the cop scribbles notes, watches from the edge of the frame, and trails a couple steps behind. But a few are farcically blunt, as when Malykh is seen aiming a gun at Rachinskiy while he is preparing to kick the head of a cowering Revkovskiy. For those clued into the fact that Malykh is herself a curator and a staffer at the institution exhibiting the work, the images raise compelling questions about who moulds who, who reprimands who, who has the capacity to handcuff who, and so on. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Keep your friends close and your curators closer. Keep your friends close and your artists closer.
(It’s worth emphasizing that not one of the twenty finalists in the exhibition are exhibiting still pictures. In the two installations in which stills appear, Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy’s Mischievous and Studio 12345678910’s A concrete block is heavier than a person (2019-2020), they are only one ingredient in a multimedia installation. The absence of attention-grabbing stills is particularly pronounced given that the main exhibition preceding the PAC prize show was a knockout retrospective of Kharkiv master photographer Boris Mikhailov.)
Mischievous is stated to be inspired by turf wars between gang members in Kryvyi Rih, another southeastern industrial city, in the 1980s and 1990s. Anecdotes of lawlessness and rumors of morally-corrupt power-grabbing in the 90s like that gestured towards here are many, and they are regularly cloaked in a fog as thick as that in the photos. True to form, factual details of those turf wars are not relayed in the wall text, so the reference functions more as a launchpad than a through line. The semi-fictional Mischievous adapts the story, and by extension the era, to immersive theatre. The production put on during this theatre’s opening night, the aforementioned vernissage, became especially symbolic when one of the main victors of the 90s, PAC’s billionaire oligarch founder Victor Pinchuk, whose main assets are steelworks in the same oblast as Zaporizhzhia, was photographed in the installation in deep conversation with Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy. This interaction cemented this installation’s status as a total installation—the duo’s semi-fiction is stranger than fiction.
In any case, there is something schoolyard about the roleplaying in Mischievous. While the weapons on the wall are imposing and I couldn’t imagine a museum in, say, pacifist Switzerland having the guts to exhibit them, the affair is stagey, preserving an archetype of banditry and brutal buffoonery. The non-fictional reality beyond PAC’s walls is less foggy, yet equally, if not more, finicky. Outside, the widely-distrusted national police are zipping around in a fleet of European Union-funded Priuses. The same police have contracted hip advertising agencies to rebrand their look with billboards showing their officers when they were naïve horseback riding children, as superheroes, and as savers of cute corgis. And the A.C.A.B (All Cops Are Bastards) tag which appears on countless Ukrainian facades found a horrifying new home last week as a member of the much-hyped Euthanasia Sport crew tattooed the acronym inside his dog’s ear, leading to a torrent of online criticism.
In other words, Mischievous’ artifice is that—an artifice. A not insignificant portion of the work’s appeal lies in the fantasy of being a bad boy like the characters they play, slitting the throat of the system and then venturing upstairs to the top floor cafe for a cappuccino. In this way, Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy are cousins of all sorts of raised-on-the-internet edgelord artists.
Last fall, I wrote about another of Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy’s installations for the Tbilisi-based Danarti, whose editor, Elene Abashidze, has previously been interviewed by TransitoryWhite. That work, Darkness (2019), had the brazen attributes of Mischievous, but was grimier, seeing as it was hidden away in a basement closet near a stash of cleaning supplies. The mops could not scrub away the rot they created, and so their nauseous depravity seized the day.
What this is to say is that the closer Rachinskiy and Revkovskiy get to ‘wrong,’ the closer they get to a ‘right.’ Of course, brinkmanship is a dangerous game and binaries ignore the vast middle ground. Alas, if the duo is going to reach towards a molotov cocktail, they might as well grab it, throw it, and watch our expectations go up in flames.
The 2020 PinchukArtCentre Prize exhibition is curated by PinchukArtCentre Junior Curator Alexandra Tryanova and is scheduled to run through May 2020.
Alex Fisher is an art historian from Buffalo, New York, based in Kyiv, where he is researching developments in Ukrainian Contemporary Art as a Fulbright Scholar affiliated with Mystetskyi Arsenal and IZOLYATSIA. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he has worked in the Studio of David Levinthal and in the Office of the Deputy Director at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in addition to leading the digitization of the Ana Mendieta Documents and Photo Materials Archive via Galerie Lelong & Co., curating Yoko Ono’s “Wish Tree for Peace” (1996/2018) and coordinating Benoît Lachambre’s “Fluid Grounds” (2017-) at Wanås Konst.