Cats vs China Queering

Stas Volyazlovsky treats his works as self-therapy through art. It is his reaction to the weariness of the peripheral reality, disenchantment with politics and a life limited to the banal entertainment offered by television. The area of his studies is his hometown of Kherson in the south of Ukraine, which is both geographically, and mentally remote from the centre. The artist’s frustrations, translated into the language of the absurd, are directly vented in the dynamic video made in the convention of a music clip. Cats vs China Queering is a hopelessness-driven commentary on the condition and work circumstances of artists from provincial parts of the country: no art market or institutions, no place for intellectual reflection.

The video shows a series of performances held in the artist’s flat. Their formula stems from the irrational activity the artist once performed at home in a moment of boredom: dressed in a woman’s clothes and a fur hat, he kept jumping on a chair from which he would immediately fall. Caught by his mother, who was slightly taken aback by the way he looked and behaved, he tried to explain that he was making contemporary art. In response, he heard his mother say, “I spit on art due to which the furniture has to be screwed back together.” The use of the illogical visual gabble seems to be an act of desperation. In light of no chance for a constructive dialogue, the artist creates a work which copies the popular opinion about the newest art – neglected, treated with disdain, and associated with scandal.

In the work Cats vs China Queering, scenes of the vulgar treatment of the body are intertwined with shots of figurines of pop culture heroes and embroidered folk wall rugs. These objects are very reflective of the coarse esthetics of daily life, incompatible with modernity. The important motif present in the video is the penis, or actually a vibrator, fighting its way through the cluttered flat, popping out of a gas stove or playing around with the figurines of the Teletubbies. The penis had already appeared in Volyazlovsky’s earlier works, if only to mention the ornaments of his pottery objects. For Volyazlovsky, the use of phallic motifs is a trick which is misleading, embarrassing and shocking, hence awakening in the sluggish life of a provincial town.

Izabela Kopania