Domesticated Enemy

In his work Domesticated Enemy, Nikita Kadan refers to the participation of Ukrainian artists in the avant-garde movement of the 1920s and their fortunes during the Stalinist era and the subsequent political thaw under Nikita Khrushchev. At the centre of Kadan’s reflections is Vasyl Yermilov (1894–1968), a leading representative of Ukrainian modernism, painter, architect and designer. During the Stalinist period, when the state stigmatised avant-garde artists, Yermilov assumed a conformist stance and retreated to safe positions, turning to applied art and the study of folk artistic traditions. In the early 1960s, after the relaxation of state cultural policy and the partial acceptance of modernism, he returned with visionary designs for monuments stylistically reminiscent of 1920s constructivism. In his work, Kadan referenced one of those, the never executed Monument to the Lenin Era (designed 1961).

Kadan paired a model of this monument reconstructed in plaster, with its hammer, half-circle and solids related to El Lissitzky’s prouns, with a buffet made in the Czech Republic in the early 1960s. This type of furniture – in the “Brussels style”, made of plywood, laminates, glass and aluminium, with rounded corners and a light colour palette – was seen as a softened version of modernism. Together with the East German ceramic services and albums with reproductions of conservative, non-modernist art that were customarily displayed on them, these pieces of furniture represented the prosperity and social position of the citizens of the USSR. In Domesticated Enemy, Kadan sheds light on the state-controlled cultural mechanisms of taming the once antagonistic legacy of the avant-garde.

In revealing the political and social determinants of writing art history, Kadan also signals the need to retrace the history of modernism. He urges a fresh look at the Ukrainian avant-garde, free from the imperial perspective of Russia and the Western viewpoint from the position of the centre. He also highlights the uneasy situation of this formation, snared in political and ideological entanglements both in the past, when it was destroyed by the Stalinist regime, and in the present, when after 2014 it found itself targeted by Ukraine’s decommunisation policy. Under the dictates of the latter, traces of socialist modernism were removed from the public space, destroying the avant-garde achievements of the local art scene.

Izabela Kopania
translated from Polish by Klaudyna Michałowicz