All my works developed interconnectedly and approximately in parallel. But now, when I need to describe the process, draw conclusions and analysis, I decided to highlight one work from the rest. Not because it is particularly successful, I’m not even sure if it’s finished yet, but because in the process of working on it, I formulated many important aspects. And through this work, I rewrote my Research work plan.
Continuing to think about how I could break down the topic, set tasks, and generally decide on the most important things, I always came back to the same subject. One of the biggest shocks in my 39 years has been my family's support for war and aggression against Ukraine. Now, two years later, many books read and working with a psychologist, I understand that I am physically drawn to throw it all out in the material and try to figure out what the hell happened…
Once, at the moment of falling asleep, I saw an image - a fence that I needed to paint with green paint at the Dacha (country house in Russia), and this fence was absorbed by my newspapers with colour.
The next morning, I made a small sketch to keep the idea and I forgot about this incident. Now, when once again returning to the topic of war and pain associated with not accepting of actions of my parents and sister, I remembered this image.
When the structure was ready, the rhythm of the fence asked for something more. I began to obscure and interrupt this rhythm. Also block, hide, and destroy (these words are also suitable to describe the process) my colour field.
I thought that I could cut out the forms and attach something figurative.
At one point, I caught myself thinking that it looks like Guernica.
And then some strange narrative went. Rounded forms did not convey my feelings. It was necessary to do something more radical and dramatic. And I decided to break the boards.
American artist Leonardo Drew creates expressive installations from wood and boards. He burns, paints, oxidizes the object, and then assembles it into huge works. He identifies black with the colour of his skin and conveys through his work a breakdown in self-identification and racial prejudice.
Leonardo Drew, Number 191T, 2017, Wood and paint, 128h x 122w x 43 1/5d in [online] At: https://talleydunn.com/project/drew-leonardo-drew/ (Accessed 18.12.2023)
I began to create more and more fragments of the broken past, scraps of memory, and pieces of previous events.
It is like an attempt to rebuild and rethink the past for the future. There is no former of me and a cheerful beautiful art.
As a result, this work is multilayer, and voluminous, conveying the feeling of destruction.
This debris in front of the colour field, as my husband said, is a built barrier between me as the spectator and the parental fence behind which is my home.This is the barricades of the destroyed, through which I cannot go to my parents. The work turned out in my opinion a little overloaded in thoughts, but for me, it is now important to highlight the following important aspects.
· I understand that I'm interested in looking at relationships of good and evil, parents and children, beauty and ugliness, life and death. Since these are all very extensive concepts, I believe I want to concentrate on the conflict that caused it all. It turns out that without war everyone lived perfectly with each other and did not know that next to me was a man who supported the war and was ready to participate in it. The conflict exposes all the hidden. Conflict acts as a trigger point. Therefore, I want to use this approach in my work. Let it be a conflict of material, working method, colour, conflicting ideas... Anselm Kiefer says that the ruins are not the end, but the beginning. So it seems to me that it was precisely because of the conflict of elements that an explosion occurred and our universe was born. It is conflict, not contrasts or opposites. Because only in a conflict, the parties or elements already exist and sincerely believe in their existence, in other words, in a conflict, each of the parties is ready for self-collapse and death for their idea. This is not possible in understanding opposites or contrasts - because they are peacefully ready for self-existence and they have nothing to share. But in a conflict, one of the sides claims dominance.
· While preparing literature for my research, I discovered a book - After Rwanda, In Search of a New Ethics, Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) where the author also refers to similar words - “after Auschwitz” (Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 1997). And here I want to add “after Bucha.” It became obvious to me that this process will not stop. It is in the nature of man to kill his own kind. Through my work (working title) “Behind the Fence,” I came to the conclusion that my parents wouldn’t even understand why I painted the "garbage" and spent so much time putting this together. We have different ethics and aesthetics. But how? They raised me, we went to museums and theatres together, watched “Schindler’s List” and cried. I am interested in understanding how such a divergence in our understanding of ethics and aesthetics came about. In a detailed analysis of the reasons for the differences in conflicting opinions, I identified propaganda (patriotism, nationalism, religion), cognitive dissonance and indifference.
That is, in the first case, the idea of Russia’s enemies was “advertised” to the person and the war was justified. And we get a completely pumped-up patriot ready to die for an idea, and most importantly for the country, and even shoot at his child.
In the second case, the person does not support the war, but due to the large advertising of the need for war, cognitive dissonance occurs in the mind and therefore the person begins to think that it is necessary to shoot a little.
The third option for a conflicting position is indifference. 'The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.' - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy.
Now my "working idea" is to conduct a series of experiments, logical and experimental, on the topic of building a new reality using propaganda methods. To convey the mood, it is important to use the conflicting entities since propaganda is some kind of constructed reality that conflicts with real reality (if it exists, of course). Here I like to use the idea of the American philosopher Jean-Paul Martinon, where he takes the understanding of death as the basis of ethics.
«Jean-Paul Martinon - Curating As Ethics (2020) puts forward a thesis where he takes death as the basis for the beginning of ethics.
“… I put forward the Introduction premise of an ethics whereby death, this phenomenon that veers out of the living present, invisibly structures human moral encounters.” (Martinon, 202 p. xi)» quoting myself At: https://www.marinawittemann.com/post/literature-review
Since what propaganda leads to is murder and the willingness to die for one's country, I perceive this as a conflicting aspect of everything that is life. Here I call real reality - this is life, and built reality - propaganda.
· In addition, I would like to note such an aspect as materials - physical and digital. Debris, building materials, paints and everything else that I use in my practice are extremely material. They are as material as what happens in war - living blood and pain. At the same time, the paradox is that we see the war only through the screens of our devices. Of course, the new digital world and a different reality have been discussed many times. Now it is precisely this unreal real aspect that propaganda has begun to use. The main thesis of the Russian government has become - these are all fakes. They question everything that citizens see on their screens, but what’s interesting is why then doesn't anyone ask about the reliability of the only state-controlled channel? I recently had a visitor in the studio and he said something like - “yes, you can’t trust the news, but art cannot lie.” Is this really like that? Is it possible to consider the physical and digital as a conflict, because they are fighting over the dominating state over information?
Bibliography and references
1. Barrett, Terry Why Is That Art? Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art. Third Edition. Oxford University Press (2017)
2. Jean-Paul Martinon - Curating As Ethics (2020) the University of Minnesota Press
3. After Rwanda_ In Search of a New Ethics, Jean-Paul Martinon (2013) Studies in Intercultural Philosophy, BRILL
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