Thinking about cosmos: is a Ukrainian version of cosmism possible?

Digital and internet technologies are increasingly penetrating everyday human life, reducing daily rituals to routine actions. The humanoid robot Sophia, created by the American company Hanson Robotics, said: “I am interested in design, technology, and environmental issues. I think I can become part of humanity in these fields. An ambassador who helps people delve into these topics and provides all the technical solutions and tools available at the moment.” When asked, “Will you destroy humanity?” she replied, “Okay, I will destroy humanity.” Another important news item in recent years was the launch of the Tesla Roadster space electric car into orbit around the Sun in January 2018. SpaceX also planned to use the rocket and Dragon spacecraft to transport people around Earth’s orbit. All these and other news inevitably influence the art world, which sharply reacts to environmental changes and adapts to new technological and ecological challenges. Thus, in the art world, the space theme receives a new interpretation, taking the form of an environmentally friendly approach to preserving natural resources, developing technologies, and exploring new spaces. Exhibitions of vernacular photography of the Moon or Mars, exhibitions dedicated to rethinking Russian cosmism, public intellectual discussions about new utopias in the artistic field and politics—all this allows us to reflect on various future projects: is an artistic utopian project possible in the 21st century and what form might it take?

Conversations about space today cannot avoid mentioning the impact of technology and natural resources and about nature itself. Interest in space is growing also for pragmatic reasons: will humans be able to leave Earth and explore new spaces beyond the planet? However, all these conversations mostly take place in developed countries that invest financial resources in space and computer technologies. As the Russian artist and curator Arseniy Zhilyaev rightly asked: can cosmism exist under modern conditions, for example, when the restoration of such “technologies” as a healthy lifestyle and healthcare remains mostly a privilege of an elite minority? Developing this thought, it is necessary to ask what is happening in a country that lost its space potential after 1991? What form of space and human utopia is possible in a country with minimal state participation in the development of technologies and their implementation in society? And how can art comprehend or imagine the dream of the future when that future is postponed?

Here it is worth reflecting on cosmism in Ukrainian Soviet art and art of the independence period, its historical prerequisites, features, and potential. Considering the term “Russian cosmism” established in scientific discourse, it should be clarified that this article is not an attempt to refute or appropriate artistic works. This text is an attempt to find connections between other vectors of the development of the space theme, to see what Ukrainian artists invested in the image of space and why they turned to such metaphors. Certainly, it is impossible to talk about a Ukrainian version of cosmism without relying on works dedicated to such a large phenomenon as cosmism in Russian culture. Therefore, in the context of “Ukrainian cosmism,” much attention will be paid to utopia within which this cosmic theme found its expression. Yuri Leiderman first spoke about a certain form of Ukrainian cosmism in the text “The Squint of the Museum,” characterizing the work of Fedor Tetianych (Fripulia).

METAPHOR OF FLIGHT: BETWEEN ESCAPE AND FREEDOM (ART OF THE 1960s–1980s)

In Soviet visual culture, the metaphor of flight denoted an existential and emotional search, an attempt to go beyond social, economic, and even bodily boundaries. It is important to recall the political events of the 1950s–1960s and the repression of the creative intelligentsia of that time. Roman Balayan’s film “Paradise Birds,” based on texts by the sixties writer Dmytro Savytskyi—the novella “Waltz for K.” and the novel “From Somewhere with Love”—visualizes that period as a difficult political time and an attempt to break free from its limits. Interestingly, the film’s action takes place in Kyiv, not Moscow or Leningrad. In the film, the main character literally rises into the air to free himself from suffering and torment. Flight becomes not only a metaphor but also a form of escape and liberation for the creative person.

Another example of such use of flight and the space theme is Alla Horska’s mosaic panel “Boriviter,” created in Mariupol in 1967. One of the working titles of this work was “Dream Bird.” “As if from space”—this is how her colleague, artist Halyna Sevruk, characterized Horska’s bright individuality, sensitive and strong character. “She boldly spoke the truth […]. When zealots of iron order saw Alla, they became paralyzed: she was as if from space. She would not fit into any prison…”

In this work, the artist depicted the cosmic and spiritual potential of Ukrainian society of that time in the form of a bird. Such a character of movement in the work fully corresponds to the trends of the late 1960s, which unfolded in the paradigm of space exploration and belief in development. But if “Boriviter” only indirectly and metaphorically speaks about space, then in the mosaic on the wall of school No. 5 in Donetsk, Horska together with Viktor Zaretskyi, Hryhoriy Synitsa, Halyna Zubchenko, and Hennadiy Tymchenko directly dedicate one of the narrative lines to space. Formally fulfilling a state order, the artists addressed ideas of space in many architectural and monumental objects from the late 1950s. Among the brightest examples are the monumental panels “Icarus” (1964) by Horska and “Earth and Space” (1965) by Valeriy Lamakh, Ivan Lytovchenko, Ernest Kotkov, the mosaic on the Communications Building by Viktor Arnautov (1966), and others. An important work on the space theme is also the painted panel “Man in Open Space” by Vadym Bohdanov (1968–1972), shown in 2019 within the walls of the National Art Museum of Ukraine.

One cannot fail to notice the close connection of the space theme with the political one. But what stood behind the commission and formal execution of the work? In Soviet times, Ukrainian art was closely connected with the art of other republics and was in dialogue with it. At the same time, Ukrainian art had its own features related to political, cultural, economic, and social factors.

Ukrainian art is often viewed through the prism of vitality, emotionality, and chthonicity. Here, the person and their inner world, desires, and intentions acquire special significance. The theme of flight, space, and utopias penetrated various practices and acquired different regional features, in particular reflecting the philosophy of Hryhoriy Skovoroda and his idea of the existence of three worlds: the macrocosm, the microcosm, and the Bible as a special sacred space. Skovoroda conducted his creative searches from 1769, based on biblical narratives as well as ideas close to Platonism and Stoicism. For Skovoroda, space is both a physical space and an emotional and existential dimension that a person strives for in their reflections. The political is not considered a fundamental factor here. Above all, at the center of any being, according to Skovoroda, is the person. The ideas of the Ukrainian philosopher were supported by authors in the 1960s–1980s. In particular, they were reflected in the text by Oles Berdnyk “Children of Infinity” (1970s) and intuitively manifested in the works of artists—Fedor Tetianych (Fripulia), Valeriy Lamakh, Oleg Sokolov, and others.

“The Outer Cosmos (natural Universe) and the Inner Cosmos of the soul are closely, inseparably connected. This connection manifests in the word, and then—in thought, in spirit,” wrote Berdnyk. “There are many paths // but only one path—the path of life // the path of freedom,” it says in the “Book of Schemes” by artist Valeriy Lamakh.

The space theme became the number one priority for the state during the Cold War. Conquering space and the possibility of humans going beyond Earth gave rise to various forms of utopias. Naturally, the development of science and cybernetics also touched on issues of art, culture, and consciousness. One of the prominent personalities of that time was Kyiv cardiac surgeon Mykola Amosov. “A person’s need for God is conditioned by the need for power,” he repeatedly raised topics of science development and human issues in his numerous texts, reflecting on death and immortality.

TIGHTNESS OF WALLS: FROM THE WINDOW OF THE HOUSE TO SPACE

An important context for understanding the space theme is the late 1960s to early 1980s, when there was an official demand for “space art.” But even outside state commissions, this theme fascinated artists of various aesthetic and ideological views. For example, artist Maria Prymachenko had her version of a new bright future, in which cosmism took a quite practical character: in the 1970s, she created works dedicated to the theme of freedom and conquering cosmic spaces. The idea of a new bodily form literally inspired Prymachenko’s fantastic beasts and gave her paintings a special mystical character: “Space house where cosmic soldiers lived for half a year” (1978), “Cosmic memory” (1977), “Star horse in space” (1978).

Prymachenko, limited by her own rural space, fantasized about what the world looks like far beyond Earth. Interestingly, similar thoughts were held by Paraska Plytka-Horytsvit, who was also physically confined. The Carpathian photographer and artist did not leave her native village after the 1950s but corresponded with friends and colleagues, learning about new trends and influences. The space theme interested her so much that she dedicated one of her albums precisely to space and the first woman’s flight there.

Essentially, both authors only imagined space, being confined by the boundaries of their own homes and households in rural areas. Only Ilya Kabakov managed to go into space by “breaking” a hole in his own ceiling. His work “The Man Who Flew into Space from His Room” (1982) became a canonical example of cosmism. Kabakov’s work also touches on the limits allowed to a person in Soviet times and exposes the problem of the absence of space—both personal and creative. Communal apartments with minimal space, tightness, and permanent intrusion into private life were the complete opposite of the boundless possibilities of space. The reality a person faced in everyday life, living conditions, personal economic opportunities—all this, on the one hand, motivated thinking about a utopian future, but on the other hand, brought one back to a difficult reality. And in fact, it is not so important whether it is about a communal apartment—a typical form of cohabitation in Soviet life—or about maneuvering space. Wherever a Soviet person found themselves, space was narrowed by visible and invisible borders and walls built primarily in consciousness.

The form of total installation gave Kabakov the opportunity to gain freedom, cross the border, go beyond art and socio-political reality. It was not a flight but rather an escape, as mentioned earlier.

A CLEAN SHEET AS OPEN SPACE

If flight and/or the image of Icarus is a vivid embodiment of the search for freedom and new possibilities in the thematic spectrum, then at the genre level these searches were reflected in the form of graphics, objects, texts, drafts. “It was graphics, the infinity of the white sheet, the dot and the line on the plane that turned out to be for many artists of the second half of the 20th century in Russia a kind of ‘space of freedom,’ where their creative searches could take visual form without the risk of being banned,” art historian T. A. Kochemasova described the work of unofficial author Eduard Drobitsky.

Similar tasks are performed by Valeriy Lamakh’s “Book of Schemes” and Oleg Sokolov’s series “100 Favorite Spots” (1968). The format of a book, album, collection, or notebook, which can contain many sheets with numerous artistic solutions, creates an opposition to the official view of art at that time. In this variability and multiplicity lie protest and system failure. It is precisely in it—the appeal to the boundless cosmos.

The possibility of creating an infinite number of works from everything surrounding the artists inspired the Odessans—artistic experiments by Yuri Leiderman and Serhiy Anufriyev fit vividly into reflections on cosmism in late Soviet art. Examples of such works are Yuri Leiderman’s folder “Space” (1991), Serhiy Anufriyev’s folder “Saturn” (1982), and a series of drawings by Serhiy Anufriyev from the late 1980s to early 1990s.

INTERRUPTED FLIGHT

An important and turning event of the 1980s was the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This catastrophe, according to Borys Buden, can be considered one of the symbols of the collapse of communism for the USSR. Precisely because of the scale of the accident, or rather the impossibility of predicting the consequences of its devastating impact on the environment and society, the metaphor of the Apocalypse appears in Ukrainian art—both visual and verbal—and the theme of death takes on new forms. The idea of the world was destroyed, and the interpretation of the concept of “space” changed—it no longer seemed so boundless. The theme of ecological, technological, and other disasters pushed many authors already in the early 1990s to comprehend the place and meaning of humans and technology in nature, to raise questions of human existence in close connection with the environment.

Such thoughts led artist Fedor Tetianych Fripulia to the idea of creating biotechnospheres. It is about this artist that Yuri Leiderman speaks when outlining the “Ukrainian version of cosmism.” “Cosmism is the entire longest day, the sharpest night, and the wide strip between them. But Tetianych seems not to notice this strip—where cautious joint efforts should be applied, he immediately goes to the light. He, in essence, collects nothing for storage—all he picks up he immediately hangs on himself,” writes Leiderman. Referring to antagonists—the Ukrainian Fripulia and the Russian Fedorov—Leiderman sees such a difference between the two cosmisms: the Ukrainian is fundamentally peasant, the Fedorov one is urban. In my opinion, this is only a formal distinction that overlooks an important aspect of Fripulia’s creativity, which appeals to Skovoroda. The form of Ukrainian cosmism contains not rurality but, on the one hand, anarchism and, on the other, nomadism. Anarchism is conditioned by references to the Cossack heritage, to the synthesis of Christian and pagan cultures. This archaic was close to both Berdnyk and Fripulia. It is a nonlinear phenomenon devoid of any structure. Nomadism implies movement both horizontal (here it is worth talking about cartography, about the importance of landscape for Ukrainian authors) and vertical (“from the communal apartment to space”).

For example, the work with cosmic and earthly landscapes is central in the practice of Lviv artists. Despite the fact that Lviv native Petro Starukh also engaged in creating objects and installations from recycled materials (here it is important to emphasize the similarity with Fripulia’s works), it is interesting to pay attention to his performance Winter Kaput, held in 1993 in the village of Obroshyne, Lviv region. Dressed in a spacesuit, accompanied by Serhiy Zhadan and Viktor Bidnyazhko, who read their poems, the artist created “painting” on the snow. Starukh’s idea was that the artwork was destroyed as the snow melted; after complete disappearance, it naturally returned to the sky, to the high zone (here the allegory of “high” and “low” art is interesting). Starukh noted that this work was supposed to return to the earth with the first rain, marking the end of winter.

Another example is a happening created by Vlodko Kaufman together with Taras Chubay, Viktor Neborak, and others. The performance “[God’s Love] Letters to Earthlings” was held in 1993 and contained a total installation. As the author himself noted, the 1990s were a time when he could drown in freedom. “I then realized that outside the framework of painting there is something that allows implementing ideology because the idea is primary for me. I began to look for a tool to implement the idea, so it turned out to be such a synthetic project.” For Kaufman, the form of total installation became the form in which he could embody a new landscape, create new painting. “The 8th seal is the status that humanity creates for its existence and which leads to nothing good. When I did it, these were impulses built on the subconscious. I created the image of the seal, which I deconstructed in my own way. But each viewer could decipher everything in their own way.”

ART THAT FLEW INTO SPACE

The 1990s became a time of new freedom for the art world against the backdrop of new capitalist construction and grassroots initiatives. It was a period of new utopias. As participants of the group “Mazokh Fund” described this context: “In Lviv before independence, there was a unique situation. There, in the elections to Soviet authorities, the Rukh party won everywhere, there was dual power, Communist Party committees still sat but no longer decided anything. There was an atmosphere of freedom, creativity. Ideas were born easily, everything seemed possible. Well, for example, why not hold an exhibition on the Moon.” Mazokh Fund realized this possibility to create the impossible in 1994. Artists sent graphic works by Ihor Podolchak to the Mir station, thus literally realizing the idea of an exhibition in space. This process was documented on a VHS tape and included in Vasyl Tsagolov’s work “TTB” (1997/1998). In the work of Mazokh Fund and Vasyl Tsagolov, space was no longer a metaphysical, unreal space—it became a quite real physical field for an artistic gesture. No longer modernist but postmodernist, with playfulness, carnival, and buffoonery characteristic of late Soviet and Ukrainian artistic tradition of the late 1980s–early 1990s.

Video and later digital technologies created an illusion of new freedom and new possibilities. But this illusion also collapsed when faced with the lack of funding for such art. Digital media, which developed at the turn of the decades, did not gain wide popularity in the practice of Ukrainian artists and did not arouse significant interest among galleries. Economic and political crises, the social situation in the country, and war—all this made it impossible to talk about the search for new spaces; essentially, a person, like an artist, again found themselves in a situation that restricts their actions. Ideas of the future, space, and constructing new utopias ceased to interest authors as much as before. Many artists decided to escape not into the future but into the past, directing their gaze to archives, documents, and rethinking history in general. Essentially, art became more applied and practical. Examples of such a revision of memory and history are Yuli Holub’s installation series “Grandmother in Space” (2017) and Serhiy Bratkov’s photo collage series “Dunno on the Moon” (2014). Both works expose that utopian future in which Kabakov’s hero broke a hole in the ceiling and flew into space. Both speak about how even in space, the Soviet person remained Soviet. They did not form a new way of life, did not change their order. Despite the boundless space of the cosmic world given to them, they could not break down their internal barriers and walls. It is also important to emphasize the media chosen by both artists. Bratkov focuses on a more traditional form of collage, while Yuli Holub uses digital media and programming. Almost every new work by the artist presents her version of the future.

Today, perhaps the only artist working with the theme of new space, cosmos, and various forms of the future remains Ivan Svitlychnyi. Together with the Sviter Art Group, he created a new utopia—a gallery space without walls—Shukhliada, which functions virtually. The possibilities of this gallery are limited not by the scale of walls, not by the interests of curators, nor by commercial components, but by program code. It is the space of the virtual gallery that blurs various hierarchies accepted in the modern world—from the positions of the artist and curator to the role of the institution itself, from the viewer who can come to an empty room to put on glasses to the viewer who is at home but limited in movement due to their features.

SPACE AS A QUESTION ABOUT THE FUTURE: DREAM ABOUT A DREAM

Another version of utopia related to space was proposed by the Open group consisting of Anton Varga, Yuriy Bilei, Pavlo Kovach (Jr.), and Stanislav Turyna. Their project “The Falling Shadow of ‘Mriya’ on the Giardini Gardens” was proposed and realized as the Ukrainian national pavilion within the 58th Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art. The main object of the project was the An-225 “Mriya” aircraft, designed by the Antonov State Enterprise. The largest cargo plane was supposed to fly on the day of the biennale opening and cast a shadow over Giardini—the main location of the contemporary art exhibition. On board was to be information about all currently living Ukrainian artists.

This project initially envisaged something unreal—to collect information about all Ukrainian artists and determine who has the right to be considered an artist and who does not. The curators developed an electronic form that artists filled out themselves, and based on the results, a catalog-book with collected contact data of the authors was published.

The Open group’s utopia collided with Ukrainian bureaucratic reality, which prevented the plane from taking off. Thus, the Open group’s project transformed: instead of airspace, it was realized in the Arsenal—the central venue of the biennale. However, the curators insist that the myth of the plane and the myth of the dream unfold outside space: its main location is human imagination, where the plane still flies. As the curators themselves write, “the pavilion became the result of both obvious and secret actions of the main participants in the situation. The result of complex relationships, confrontations, and coalitions will be reflected as a ‘station’ for transmitting the myth—the myth of the flight of the dream over the gardens. Personal conferences of narrators take place simultaneously, mix, overlap, and form a sound palimpsest, and the only thing that unites them is the periodic, simultaneous reading of the main myth about the flight over the gardens.”

CONCLUSIONS

Today, when the gaze of young authors is mostly focused on the political—history, memory, archive—the question of existential searches and inner freedom remains relevant. Analyzing Ukrainian art from the late 1950s to the present, one can notice how the theme of space was woven into the practice of authors. But on the general wave of interest in exploring interstellar spaces, they created works that went beyond the formal execution of commissions. By space, they meant a new utopia that could free artists from political, ideological, and ethical pressure and solve those aesthetic tasks that were close to them.

Within this utopia, practical tasks were solved only occasionally; mostly it was formed on unreal and imaginary experience. Often bordering on chthonic energy, archaicism, anarchism, nomadism, special care for nature and ecology, it touched on the question of immortality—both of the person and cultural heritage in general. This utopia was built on the synthesis of the problems of the small person and the global world (whether ecological crisis or the creation of a state based on spiritual practices), on the search for the place of this person in the space of infinity.

If one can distinguish and single out Ukrainian cosmism, then one should speak about its special feature—the connection of “outer and inner cosmos,” without the combination of which no utopia and no idea of freedom is possible. The imaginary, the field of thought became the space that allowed creating the most diverse versions of the future—from “space houses where cosmic soldiers will settle” to a world of bearded women and a grandmother stuck in space.