Vlada Ralko - The Quiet Zone (2019)

Series of paintings, works on paper, special object

When I look at Ralko’s works from The Quiet Zone series, what comes to mind is the words “the Institute of Nutrition.” In this series, Vlada seems to address values and the kitchen as the site of blood and a women’s site, a kitchen as a locus of materiality and flesh. It is more than likely that it had nothing to do with “the Institute of Nutrition” until I saw it (although who knows). And now I cannot unsee the “institute.” When I first heard this term as a child, I saw no other possible explanation for it than that it’s an institution where they teach how to eat people. (Larysa Venediktova)

Other projects

Kindly light! Light clear and glorious!
Light untrammeled, free, victorious!
Say, why did they, light my Brother,
In Thy good warm house so cover
You with fetters, set walls round you
(The All-wise is thus confounded).
(Taras Shevchenko. From the poem “O bright light! O gentle light!,” 1860,
transl. by Vera Rich)

Traditional values are protected like crystal silverware that stood untouched in Soviet cupboards while the owners ate off chipped plates. Thoughtless adherence to a set of rules is unquestionably believed to be a virtue, a time-hallowed custom. At the same time, the multitude of miraculous ways out of trouble, produced by the development of digital technologies, resembles the domain of deus ex machina. The unexpected mechanical appearance of a deity in a trite play, intended to solve plot conflicts (classical theatre resorted to stage machinery), is hiding a new and singular kind of violence behind the semblance of freedom. “If anything is possible, then nothing is interesting,” H.G. Wells wrote about the deus ex machina trope. Paradoxically, the freedom to access available information has born something like willing blindness. The refusal to wander the dark spaces of meaning enacts desperate moral repudiation. Values could show us the way, but they have long since become something akin to a ritualistic incantation. Bibikhin has noted that official and shamanic languages are similar in that both avoid naming things and transform into an abstract verbal combination where meaning gives way to conventions. Therefore, once the official discourse has appropriated humanist values, discussing them has become almost indecent, because language risks slipping into pathos-laden clichés. Additionally, values are sacralized and kept out of reach to ensure that they would remain prioritized over human beings. This produces a vicious circle, the dumb infinity where changes in social or political life are replaced by alternating impositions of a mere semblance of a new order introduced “from above” (by deus ex machina?) over the established order of things. The latter apparently cannot be changed because it has existed “since forever.” The will of individuals seems to be pushed out of the picture, because this is “none of their business.” In essence, discussions of values usually take the form of a predefined incantation that starkly highlights the dearth of speech as it unfolds.

“Quiet Zone” signs on Chernecha Mountain in Kaniv, enforcing silence on the territory established for official veneration of Taras Shevchenko, seem to map the gaping hole in the place where the poet’s word should have acted. This fairly symbolic command eloquently attests that the understanding of the artist’s role hasn’t changed much since totalitarian days, despite some changes in external trappings. Due to its singular status as a territorially remote repository of the state mythology and national spirit enshrined in Shevchenko’s cult, Kaniv, unlike big cities, remains mothballed in all-encompassing ritualistic silence. The very structure of the town and its outskirts is deeply symbolic in that it is defined by empty spaces: the empty Palace for Celebrations in the city center, the empty new pier not used for its intended purpose, the empty zone surrounding Chernecha Mountain, the empty Shevchenko Museum, where the codified veneration of the national poet must make up for the virtual absence of authentic artifacts, and, last not least, the empty Dnieper disfigured by dams.

During the “hot phase” of work on our projects The Quiet Zone and Inscription, Volodymyr Budnikov and I reflected on the humanist component of artist’s work, and came to the conclusion that mindful art practice is a key to understanding the circulation of values in human communities. Things or values are owned by those who can realize them, or, to put it more idiomatically, to do the deed. The deed sends us back to Goethe’s Faust, or, more precisely, to the fragment where Faust fumbles when translating a Biblical line about the origins of the world, wavering between the triad of Thought, Word and Deed; eventually it’s the notion of Deed that he chooses. Additionally, the Czech homophone for the Ukrainian word for deed, dilo, denotes an artwork, and the dual understanding of dilo/deed as both an object and an action or an effort is awesome beyond belief. It is this very doubling (or tripling even!) in our understanding of how to recognize what is real, actual, or indeed existent, that produces a lurking danger of a specific mistake: the moment we begin to act with confidence in the name of any given value, we risk to slide right past the deed and hit emptiness, as if deceit always skulked behind the predetermined value we have mistaken for the goal.

Artist’s speech in totalitarian society has been falsified so radically that it has lost its basic trait: the universal optics that allow it to appeal to the human in humankind. Soviet citizens have been inculcated with certain thought patterns “hypodermically,” so to speak, learning to broadcast the values of the current system as their own in their personal speech. It’s as if they have voluntarily let the Alien in, allowing it to command them from within and letting the system to take care of their values, transforming them into a construct for exercising its power. The values in art meanwhile were defined by the socialist realist canon, where artificially constructed reality outlawed what was human. In essence, “human” came to be associated with “degenerate,” while moral laws flew off to the stars. Everything has gone topsy-turvy, and, instead of a pressing human need, values have become a locus of outdated boredom.

After Ukraine gained independence, the tradition of appropriating values has been taken over by commercial and political advertising, trading in value judgments like “authentic,” “honest” and “just.” Therefore, despite a semblance of social change, the nature of values kept being defaced. The notion that each individual has personal values, which made them universal not in the simplifying sense, but as a phenomenon that let individuals feel their belonging to humankind, was consistently ignored. On the one hand, mass culture represses the human by substituting truly valuable notions with empty clichés; on the other, the canon of “ancestral” European, family, national or divine commandments does not presuppose revisions or verifications. Both sides exert unceasing external pressure so intolerable that people refuse to choose and plunge into the state of indifferent silent torpor, going numb and mute. The problem seems to lie in the splitting of language, which blurs the line between responsibility for one’s words dictated by our inner humanity, and the responsibility that the system or individuals understand as discipline. Therefore, we have trouble distinguishing the internal need to act in a certain way from the necessity imposed from without, not necessarily recognized as such.

It might seem at first glance that this muddle, where inner commandments are displaced by external scriptures, produces an obvious opposition of the internal and the external. But the situation with the seeming primacy of internal intentions over the readiness to obey external values is not that simple. In my new works, the image of a kitchen inverts this internal process. In Ukrainian, the word “kitchen” can serve as a metaphor for the non-public stage of work on a project that will subsequently be made public. I was interested primarily in comparing the active and passive elements as a manifestation of the blurred line between what is independent, and what is controlled. I offered various juxtapositions of active persons and the material they control by focusing on food and the hands cooking it. Scrutinizing yet again the illustrations from the book Polish Cuisine from the 1950s, which I have often used as my work material, and watching the cook of a Kaniv restaurant at work, I felt the air of quotidian violence, which hasn’t been recognized as such for a long time, in routine kitchen tasks. At the cooking stage, the bodies that will soon become food often keep their appearance, and the choice to preserve this insensate shell enacts an awkward demonstration of suffering, its enforced repetition; the eye seems to watch the suffering of that which can no longer suffer as time stretches out the way it does in dreams. Musil’s Man Without Qualities seems to constantly devour Artaud’s body without organs. The first undefined body seems to imitate society, and is juxtaposed to the second body, which, to the contrary, haunts society in all its incarnations, marking its boundary. The kitchen quotidian carries literal violence inherent in its recipes. “Cut off the head,” “extract the brain,” “disembowel the carcass,” “pull out the inner organs,” “skin the carcass,” etc.: the violence of these advice is so familiar that it no longer inspires horror.

Another reason for my interest in cooking scenes lies in the fact that this activity is seen in our culture as a predominantly female daily duty, subconsciously linked to women’s nature. Women, traditionally associated with bodies and blood, seem better suited to deal with other bodies and blood, and due to being suited to the task, they automatically fall under the repressive effect of purity, which they are obligated by their very nature to lose. Therefore, guilt is lain on women from the very beginning as their fate. It is interesting that women’s work and “natural” obligations are not usually seen as unbearable or unjust: both are treated as a conventional norm. And yet, instead of the codified feminine self-sacrifice, I wanted to draw attention to the quotidian mutual consent when the cult of prosperity and home comfort rigorously mask the manifestations that may be a prerequisite of life.

At our house, daily,
a puddle of blood drips onto the kitchen tiles
from under a kitchen knife
stuck into the doorframe of the kitchen door;
the puddle isn’t big, no larger than a saucer.
My wife, who wakes up first in the morning,
notices the mess
and wipes up the puddle with a rag,
so that when we get up for breakfast,
we never notice a thing,
everything has been cleaned up with a loving and caring hand.
(Vasyl Holoborodko, from the poem “Viburnum at Christmas,” 1986)

Creating the part of the project constituted of 40 images of the cooking process was something akin to fulfilling my own feminine duties; I appended the star of “the eternal flame” and the twining dancing bodies to a number of these paintings. I have made the flames look like flesh and introduced a sort of “dehumanization” to another composition, transforming human figures into a generalized abstract ornament that looks like a mysterious ready-to-cook meal. This attempt to forget that I’m looking at human beings was both a metaphor and a trick from the classical realist school. Something similar, I think, is occurring in the society where the human is placed outside the game of endless propositions by indifference to human needs, and the possibility of simple choices is off the table forever. Human beings are forced out of circulation, alienated from themselves, and becoming unrecognizable. So, instead of clinging to this apparition that looks like a human being, we should peer carefully into the new unknown, and find within ourselves the courage to wonder that directs one straight towards ignorance as a way to refine one’s vision. The only strategy we have left is to start sorting through valuable things anew in the despair of the encompassing dark, checking in solitude whether they could become the foundation for our own rickety existence.