1. Introduction
Since the turn of the millennium, against the background of the active spread of "post-ethnic" processes, criticized by Hans Belting in particular "for art's globalization as an economic project" with "dangerous de-contextualization of art"
| [6] | Belting, Hans. (2009) Contemporary art as Global art: A critical estimate. In The global art world: audiences, markets and museums, p. 38–73. Ed. Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. |
[6]
Ukraine, a passionate elite of artists and scientists has been attempting to reinterpret some of the signatures of national identity. In the process of this reinterpretation, there is, it seems, a chance for an indigenous Ukrainian doctrine of cordocentrism to become one of the main representatives of the ethno-national paradigm. Not only is cordocentrism, as it might be argued, something central to the decolonial regeneration of collective memory, but it also resists the aggressive instrumentalization of civilizational culture by transnational corporations. Overall, it could be said that the notion is best reflected and explained through the epistemic cluster "archetype – chronotope - signature", thereby deepening the nation-building effect of self-identification, which became important around 1991, after Ukraine gained its independence. At least, it was then that Academician Serhiy Krymsky, rethinking the concept of Martin Heidegger, proposed a trans-historical archetype-structure of ethno-national mindset, known as "House-Field-Temple", that is, the basic patterns of Ukrainian habitus, which trace the agricultural sacred core of the national worldview, and where Ukrainian steppe could quickly turn into a battlefield thanks to the messianic "phenomenon of the Cossack khutir"
| [15] | Krymsky, Serhiy. (2008) Under the signature of Sofia. Kyiv: "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy". |
[15]
. In the same way, Professor Volodymyr Lychkovakh, head of the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies of Chernihiv National University, defined the ethnohorizon of the nation's consciousness (artistic cognition in that regard) as the Ukrainian Sacrum, where the mytho-poetic existence of the worldview acquires a meta-religious character. Inasmuch as "The natural conditions of social existence form the specifically national world image, evoking the peculiarities of experiencing space and time and ethno-cultural chronotope" and an artist is aware of being rooted in their native land, their artistic works "ripe on the soil of their homeland"
| [17] | Lychkovakh, Volodymyr. (2010) Sacred horizons of Ukrainian culture: Archetypes — chronotopes — signatures. Art culture. Actual problems: Scientific Bulletin / Modern art research institute of National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. Kyiv: HIMJEST, 187-194. |
[17]
. The rector of the Ukrainian Free University in Munich (Ukrainische Freie Universität) Volodymyr Yaniv, is convinced that Ukrainian art promotes "happy coexistence in harmony and peace", because "only on such a basis can a spiritually united Europe with all its traditional values emerge"
| [34] | Yaniv, V. (1987) Ukrainian art on the cultural and historical background of Ukraine in connection with its geopolitical location. Trans. Lydia Kachurovska-Kryukov. Munich: Ukrainian Free University, 6-10. |
[34]
.
However, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, many Ukrainian artists perceived the destruction of the "Iron Curtain" as a symbol of the democratization of the transnational art space and uncritically adapted pan-European models of visual practices. Consequently, conscious self-identification was nullified due to the spread of globalized benchmarking forms of contemporary art. The situation of the next 20 years after the millennium corresponded to the conclusions made by the Bulgarian analyst Alexander Kiossev, who, defining a similar manic post-Soviet declaration of one's own "Europeanness" in the form of manifestations of total fascination with Western patterns of cultural creation, offered to call this uncritical adoption of European and, more broadly, Western art practices, "The Self-Colonizing"
. This latter indicates not as much on the desire of creative elites for democratic values as on hidden uncritical servility towards economically developed donor cultures, reinforced by a sense of inferiority, which was rigidly instilled during the seventy-five years of Soviet propaganda and ideology. British-American historian Tony Judt also states that after gaining independence at the end of the 20th century, such post-Soviet countries as Moldova, Ukraine, and Armenia, "these post-imperial orphan states”, as Judt puts it, "looked at another "imperial" capital - Brussels"
| [10] | Judt, Tony. (2023) Postwar. A history of Europe since 1945. Kyiv: Nash Format, 806. |
[10]
. Therefore, a bifurcation took place in the cultural space of Ukraine, as with the collapse of the USSR, "the European-centric colonial asymmetry was irreversibly cemented in the collective imagination"
; which, according to Ukrainian researchers, resulted in hypertrophic capitalization against the background of fears of "zombie socialism" as a mixture of anti-communist sentiments and neoliberal hegemony, making "some of the post-socialist countries "more" capitalist than countries with a long history of capitalist relations", which is too "noticeable when comparing, for example, Ukraine and Sweden"
| [8] | Dronova, O. L.; Nahornyi, T. V. (2021) Napriamy rozvytku Ukrainy za riznymy stsenariiamy hlobalizatsiinykh protsesiv. Ukrainskyi heohrafichnyi zhurnal. Vyp. 2(114), 23. https://doi.org/10.15407/ugz2021.02.020 |
[8]
. Nevertheless, with the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war by the Russian Federation in 2014, and its escalation in the form of a full-scale invasion in February 2022, which some scholars qualified as, if not the beginning, then the spread of the Third World War
, some representatives of Ukrainian creative elites made what seems to be an attempt to return to the archetypes and signatures of ethno-mentality, in particular in the aspect of cordocentrism, which is "dominant of the "heart" in the Ukrainian cultural mentality", "due to the superiority of the emotional-volitional principle over the rational one, the primacy of the "heart" over the "head". This does not mean the absence of discursiveness in the Ukrainian soul, but “thinking” here becomes the kind of process that affects all aspects of human subjectivity, merging with the ideal of "whole knowledge"...", where "thoughts, feelings, will, faith come to unity, which reproduces the organically syncretic state of the soul, the integral universalism of the spirit, the cult of "holiness" and "salvation". In the Ukrainian national character, cordocentrism is connected with its emotionality, sensitivity, lyricism, romanticism, sentimentalism"
| [17] | Lychkovakh, Volodymyr. (2010) Sacred horizons of Ukrainian culture: Archetypes — chronotopes — signatures. Art culture. Actual problems: Scientific Bulletin / Modern art research institute of National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. Kyiv: HIMJEST, 187-194. |
[17]
.
One might hypothesize, thus, that the peculiarities and nuances of Ukrainian nation’s self-expression through art – the ones that transformed the globalized contemporary "doxa" within Ukraine into something different – are now being manifested more explicitly and overtly in the finest works by Ukrainian artists. To give just one example, Anatoliy Kryvolap, a famous abstract artist, also known for his mysterious landscapes of the steppe Ukraine, in 2023 began to paint non-canonical empathic icons, in which he combined various painting and mosaic techniques. They were demonstrated to a broader public in the spring of 2024 at a personal exhibition at the M17 art gallery in Kyiv. What's more, now the artist paints icons on the walls of the churches of the Kyiv region destroyed by invaders, such as the Church of the Intercession of the Holy Virgin in the village of Lypivka.
Meanwhile, as Dmytro Chyzhevsky noted, the architectonics of thinking of each nation is connected with its natural environment, and determines the peculiarities of the system of values (theoretical, religious, ethical, aesthetic), correlating feelings, as a characterological value of epistemic experience, with "the internal regularity of cognition, as a theoretical-cognitive criterion of ˂...˃ nations", which is unique in each nation, tending either to a rationalist or to a romantic worldview, and this original individuality "has an eternal, universal meaning" on a civilizational scale
| [7] | Chyzhevskyi, Dmytro. (1991) Narysy z istorii filosofii na Ukraini [Essays on the history of philosophy in Ukraine]. New York: Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, 7-12, 17-19. |
[7]
.
It is definitely worth mentioning that it is this very "natural environment" from the definition above that, in Ukraine, has faced twofold danger: the natural habitat of the South and East of Ukraine, as well as its northern territories (in 2022) have suffered a lot due to the military operations of the enemy, who is burning and poisoning, plundering and devastating Ukraine’s nature, while the country on the whole has suffered as a result of merciless neocolonial exploitation of natural environment by transnational corporations, which have been making money on ruthless industrial deforestation and illegal development of protected areas, to name but a few examples.
This problem touches on the de-colonial problems of all indigenous nations (including their "survival strategies, structural violence, local way of life" as an indigenous vision), which in the 21st century faced with the wars of commodified worldview paradigms. As a result of these conflicts, the natural environment of indigenous nations is criminally destroyed by transnational corporations’ technoculture
.
Returning to the apt definition by Chyzhevsky quoted above, it should be said that, regarding Ukrainians, this researcher lists such their features as: "emotionalism and sentimentalism, sensitivity and lyricism", although stating that "individualism and striving for freedom" is in dynamic balance with the first point of aesthetic harmony, thus providing opportunities for "deeply positive forms of creativity and activity". In addition, the artistry of nature is complemented by the ambivalent mental trait of "restlessness and mobility", which is open to new forms, such as "Hellenistic influences", but also to the "destruction of one's own and other people's life forms", since "historical trends left their mark on those mental properties of the Ukrainian people", where the steppe, forest, sea and mountains, as a form of nature's being, contributed to the historically determined feeling of the cultural greatness of the nation, "the feeling of the boundless-and-powerful", which relates Ukraine to Western European landscapes.
"The features of the spirituality of the Baroque remained in the Ukrainian national type until now", as well as the "philosophy of the heart" (Pamfil Yurkevich), "because in the "heart depth" of the abyss lies everything that is in the whole world", and "the ideal of internal harmony is the highest ideal of ethical consciousness"
| [7] | Chyzhevskyi, Dmytro. (1991) Narysy z istorii filosofii na Ukraini [Essays on the history of philosophy in Ukraine]. New York: Ukrainian Congress Committee of America, 7-12, 17-19. |
[7]
.
In conclusion, we tend to believe that for Ukraine, which is undergoing a full-scale invasion by an aggressor country, which commits the genocide of Ukrainians in the 21st century in the eyes of European states, the re-actualization of its indigenous cultural memory is the main issue of the survival of a sovereign nation in a democratic country. This might be reflected in a shift that we tend to describe as a certain kind of appeal (not always and not necessarily conscious) of Ukrainian artists to the aesthetic traditions of cordocentrism, called in the historical past by Hryhorii Skovoroda and Pamfil Yurkevich "the philosophy of the heart" or "the joy of the heart". In turn, these developments and changes in Ukraine correspond, from our perspective, to the pan-European focus of modern research on the philosophy of memory as a separate field of humanitarian knowledge, since "the blurring of the boundaries of basic humanistic values threatens the loss of modern man's ability to preserve, honor, revitalize the experiences of his heritage and broadcast his identity", which is why in Germany and France during 2017–2019 alone, a number of important international conferences was held with the support of the newly created Center for the Philosophy of Memory (Centre de philosophie de la mémoire)
.
2. Analysis of the Latest Research and Publications
In 2010, Volodymyr Lychkovakh noted that Ukrainians' artistic creativity, as well as religious consciousness or mythology, ideally "rest on the sacred horizons of the "holy-relationship", which are revealed through archetypes, chronotopes, and signatures of Ukrainian culture. The archetypes contain "primordial ideas" or "protosymbols" of ethnoculture. Chronotopes summarize the time-space characteristics of ethno-national existence and its perspective on the world, as well as its typical artistic imagery. Signatures, on the other hand, symbolically denote deep meanings, spiritual principles of the organization of the ethno-cultural space, the experience of higher values as sanctities"
| [17] | Lychkovakh, Volodymyr. (2010) Sacred horizons of Ukrainian culture: Archetypes — chronotopes — signatures. Art culture. Actual problems: Scientific Bulletin / Modern art research institute of National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. Kyiv: HIMJEST, 187-194. |
[17]
. Thinking about cordocentrism in the context of cultural memory, V. Lychkovakh expresses an opinion similar to the position of D. Chyzhevsky regarding the correlation of cordocentrism and baroque. Namely, he stated that "the archetype of the heart and the principle of cordocentrism are embedded in the cultural soul of Ukrainian baroque — the only nationally perfected style in the cultural history of Ukraine. It is not by chance that H. Skovoroda labeled baroque as "strange and mysterious", thus emphasizing its connection with knowledge through the heart, with the mental traditions of Ukrainians. And baroque, in turn, became an indispensable attribute of Ukrainian artistic thinking"
| [17] | Lychkovakh, Volodymyr. (2010) Sacred horizons of Ukrainian culture: Archetypes — chronotopes — signatures. Art culture. Actual problems: Scientific Bulletin / Modern art research institute of National Academy of Arts of Ukraine. Kyiv: HIMJEST, 187-194. |
[17]
.
Tetyana Vlasevich supports the position of researchers of Ukrainian cordocentrism, and emphasizes that the structure of the spiritual space of culture represents the sacred quality of national identity, which is important to preserve in the conditions of prevailing horizontal one-dimensional globalization: "Unification of culture means the death of humanity, therefore heterogeneity must be cultivated. Under these circumstances, it is natural in the conditions of globalization to grow solidarity and, first of all, on the basis of national culture and religion. At this level of solidarity, a new identity is formed, which is structured as a single fractal whole, which includes not only individual self-identification, but also is integral in relation to the nation as a full member of the planetary community. In this context, the role of historical memory, a return to spiritual sources, national ideals is growing"
| [33] | Vlasevich, T. (2016) Sacral signatures of Ukrainian mentality as representatives of national identity Visnyk of the Lviv University. Series philosophical science. Issue 18, 138–150. |
[33]
.
Scientists of the Modern Art Research Institute of the National Academy of Art of Ukraine Maryna Protas and Natalia Bulavina in the article "Cultural habitus of art: The aletheia of self-identification versus the post-truth of postmodernity"
| [28] | Protas, M., Bulavina, N. (2023) Cultural habitus of art: The aletheia of self-identification versus the post-truth of postmodernity. American Journal of Art and Design. Vol. 8, Issue 3, September, 87–98. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajad.20230803.12 |
[28]
noted that the ideals of transcendental aesthetics in the conditions of the ongoing full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine might be seen as coherent stratagems of the nation's cultural habitus as a self-identifying multiplicity of the metamodern evolution of civilizational cultural creation. Cultural habitus, according to Pierre Bourdieu, as a synesthesia of cognitions and archetypal patterns — ethical and aesthetic evaluations, acquired skills, preferences, that is, a holistic experience adapted by an individual or communities in certain social conditions — forms a new civilizational experience during the change of fundamental paradigms, expanding the gestalt of actions based on transformations of the existential value system. Each nation has a unique habitus of cultural identity, and – this very habitus being something visual practitioners are at times unaware of – this determines the style of thinking, the manner of behavior or the reflections of contemporary artists on external challenges. Therefore, in the globalized world, cultural habitus can fully manifest itself only through the multiplicity of national habitus, and these latter, in turn, manifest themselves through generated individual habitus. That is, habitus combines conscious and unconscious dispositions of variable and permanent structures. The authors state that cordocentrism formed the cultural habitus of Ukraine, becoming a marker of the Ukrainian mentality, which determines the desire of Ukrainians to spiritualize the surrounding living space on the basis of beauty, love and justice. The uniqueness of the philosophical doctrine of Ukrainian cordocentrism lies in the fact that it opposed the New European Enlightenment rationalism, aiming to preserve the spiritual existence of man. Therefore, when a full-scale invasion took place, the Russian-Ukrainian war touched the depths of the collective soul of the people, bringing up ancient spiritual energies (according to H. Skovoroda, this common heart of all is the "abyss of waters and heavens", a strong-willed spirit that seeks truth in self-development and existential cleaned). The war spontaneously activated the essential aesthetic aspect of the philosophy of cordocentrism, an example of which was numerous exhibitions where artists presented the confessions of their own hearts, resonating with the experience of pain by the nation at war. Therefore, this phenomenon requires further research, because it seems to be more than a coincidence that contemporary visual practices during the state of shock of the first months of the invasion gave way to the aesthetics of sincere empathy, with the dominant stylistic features of modernism, symbolism, and an expressive version of Byzantium. The cultural memory of the "pan-indigenous vision" suddenly manifested holistically as an instinct for self-preservation with unconditional depth as an essential national identity.
In this respect we have to mention the approach to the research of memory introduced by Jan Assmann, the author of the theory of the disjunction of communicative and cultural memory popular in the late 1990s, who argued that communicative collective memory, the concept introduced by the French social philosopher Maurice Halbwachs
| [11] | Halbwachs, Maurice. (1992) On Collective Memory [1925]. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: Chicago University Press. |
[11]
, has no stability since "Communicative memory is non-institutional; it is not supported by any institutions of learning, transmission, and interpretation; it is not cultivated by specialists and is not summoned or celebrated on special occasions, it lives in everyday interaction and communication and, for this very reason, has only a limited time depth which normally reaches no farther back than eighty years, the time span of three interacting generations"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
. Since Halbwachs interpreted the concept of collective memory separately from the sphere of cultural traditions, Assmann insisted on the mandatory inclusion of a holistic cultural experience in the study of memory, since recent past, which looms large in interactive communication, recedes, as time goes by, more and more into the background
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
.
In this regard, the reflection of the visual practices of the world on the full-scale invasion and genocide of Ukrainians, when murals of high empathic energy appeared in European cities, is indicative. For instance, in March 2022, in Prague, the Chemico Wall Mural group dedicated a mural to the theme of war through the eyes of a child, at the same time in Paris, Christian Gemi creates a portrait of a Ukrainian child, and in Gdańsk, the Ukrainian-Polish artist Nata Lenyo reproduces a meme spread on social networks, how a mother with a machine gun on her back leads her child to safety, while the enemy is dropping aerial bombs above them. There were many such murals at the first moment, when the Russian-Ukrainian war occupied the front lines of news agencies, with the world’s attention shifting to other news over time. Nevertheless, regardless of the extent to which the invasion is covered on the media, the enemy continues to systematically destroy Ukrainians. Indeed, "interactive communication" is not permanent. Instead, cultural memory institutionalized by society goes beyond individual memory and time frames, encompassing the culture of spiritual and empirical skills from time immemorial, preserved in ceremonial rituals, myths, sacred texts, historical and cultural monuments. Therefore, it is responsible for the identity of a nation since "synthesis of time and identity is effectuated by memory". This, in turn, means that cultural memory, being more comprehensive than collective memory, "is shared by a number of people and that it conveys to these people a collective, that is, cultural, identity"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
.
If we analyze Assmann's theory in the context of episteme transformations of modern visual practices, which since the middle of the 20th century, having declared medium-specific modernist aesthetics illegitimate, still consider the position of the postmodern paradigm to occupy the leading role, then the discourse on memory turns out to be important as, according to M. Halbwachs, in a bourgeois society, collective memory in its distribution essentially "loses in depth", therefore its transformation is accompanied by distortions and deformations
| [11] | Halbwachs, Maurice. (1992) On Collective Memory [1925]. Ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: Chicago University Press. |
[11]
. It is no accident then that contemporary art easily rejected the historical experience of cultural memory, being satisfied with the current communicative memory, although "the durability of memories depends on the durability of social bonds and frames", and the rejection of historical and cultural depth makes it obvious that the permanent "change of frames brings about forgetting"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
, which is very dangerous in the conditions of war.
However, contemporary "communicative genres", cultivating the "phatic" communication traditions of the aesthetics of social networks, which is encouraged by the globalized benchmarking strategies of the art business, according to Assmann's theory, confirm the relevance of Maurice Halbwachs’s ideas, who showed that "our memory depends, like consciousness in general, on socialization and communication, and that memory can be analyzed as a function of our social life"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that in the field of art history, Abi Warburg, working on the project "Mnemosyne", although he did not use the term "cultural memory", was the first to apply the traces of memory, studied by Richard Semon, to creative cultural objectification of images of social memory in the form of iconic memory (Bildgeddchtnis). For example, Polish viewers had the opportunity to see an example of iconic memory (the so-called vytynanka, a traditional Ukrainian shirt) performed by the Ukrainian artist Daria Alyoshkina, in particular in Krakow and Gdańsk. Alyoshkina’s monumental paper curtains combine ancient archetypal symbols with a modern vision of the signatures of national identity: images of the tree of life, beregynia-mother, zoomorphic amulets and geometric symbols might be perceived as the ones that embody the aesthetics of cordocentrism. Ukrainian analysts wrote about this metaxy of aesthetic experience: "The aestheticization of the border between the external and the internal is the pinnacle and goal when a person becomes an individual creator, a measure of establishing the limits of sensory knowledge of the world. This makes it possible to choose an aesthetic experience that determines involvement in the universal"
| [22] | Marchenko, O.; Pushonkova, O.; Gladun, O.; Kolomiiets, O.; Protsyshyn, V. & Pianzin, S. (2023) «Expansion as a Culture-Creating Principle of Post-Modernity: Semantic Contexts and Aesthetic Practices». Journal of Education Culture and Society. # 2, 57-77. |
[22]
.
Such types of cultural memory, as Assmann underlined, "could be applied to every other domain of symbolic forms as well", whereas scientists started paying attention to this concept only at the end of the XXth century. Consequently, "only since then that the connection between time, identity, and memory in their three dimensions of the personal, the social, and the cultural has become more and more evident"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
. In the chapter titled "Culture as Memory" Assmann emphasized: "Cultural memory is a kind of institution. It is exteriorized, objectified, and stored away in symbolic forms that, unlike the sounds of words or the sight of gestures, are stable and situation-transcendent: They may be transferred from one situation to another and transmitted from one generation to another. External objects as carriers of memory play a role already on the level of personal memory. Our memory, which we possess as beings equipped with a human mind, exists only in constant interaction not only with other human memories but also with "things," outward symbols". – In the context of this observation by Assmann, it makes perfect sense that in the first weeks and months of the full-scale invasion Ukrainian artists all of a sudden rediscovered the stylistic traditions of icon-painting, boychukism, Ukrainian school of battle painting. Assmann also states that "˂...˃ Things do not "have" a memory of their own, but they may remind us, may trigger our memory, because they carry memories which we have invested into them, things such as dishes, feasts, rites, images, stories and other texts, landscapes, and other "lieux de memoire." On the social level, with respect to groups and societies, the role of external symbols becomes even more important, because groups which, of course, do not "have" a memory tend to "make" themselves one by means of things meant as reminders such as monuments, museums, libraries, archives, and other mnemonic institutions. This is what we call cultural memory (A. Assmann). In order to be able to be reembodied in the sequence of generations, cultural memory, unlike communicative memory, exists also in disembodied form and requires institutions of preservation and reembodiment"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
.
It should be noted that it was during the war that UNESCO recognized the regional features of wickerwork and Ukrainian borscht (which the Russian Federation had appropriated along with the entire history of Kyivan Rus, together with Queen Anna Yaroslavna or Grand Duke Volodymyr) as intangible heritage. The world's attention to the cultural heritage of Ukraine also activates the deep cultural memory in the middle of the country, strengthening resistance to the enemy's constant efforts to call Ukrainian artists such as Repin, Kuindzhi, Malevich, Tatlin, Archipenko – Russian… Ukrainians continue debunking myths of imperial propaganda even now, during the war, and the Russian Federation distorts history, replacing facts with fakes, manipulating the collective memory of Europeans: this is how, at the beginning of 2024, the Ukrainian Institute in France refuted the narrative of Russian propaganda, which took root in the Catholic University ICES in La Roche-sur-Yon, which was preparing the conference "France-Russia: 1000 years of history and culture" to be held on the 30th of January of that year without checking the fact that such a city as Moscow did not exist for another 100 years when Anna, the daughter of Yaroslav the Wise, was born. Before that incident, the Italian city of Modena had canceled a propaganda exhibition about the alleged revival of Mariupol under the Russian occupation. The appalling truth is that Mariupol was razed to the ground by the very country that participated in its so-called "revival".
This allows us to conclude that Assmann was right: "The difference between communicative and cultural memory expresses itself also in the social dimension, in the structure of participation. The participation of a group in communicative memory is diffuse. Some, it is true, know more, some less, and the memories of the old reach farther back than those of the young. Nonetheless, there are no specialists of informal, communicative memory. The knowledge which is communicated in everyday interaction has been acquired by the participants along with language and social competence", whereas "The cultural memory always has its specialists, both in oral and in literate societies"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
. It thus becomes clear that it is possible to manipulate the nation that has lost its cultural memory and operates only with its communicative memory. And that might be part of an answer to the question why rashism, so consistently and even stubbornly, keeps destroying Ukrainian museums and sights protected by UNESCO. For instance, on the 1st of January, 2024, in Lviv, as a result of the enemy’s missile strike, the UPA Corporal General Roman Shukhevych Museum was burned down, which means that the enemy is deliberately destroying "places of memory", which, according to Pierre Nora, are important as foci of the formation of the nation's collective identity, where not only geography, a memorable historical event of the struggle for freedom and independence, but also works of art performed the function of storing and reproducing identity within the gravity field of the interaction of history and cultural memory. At the same time, it is important that "Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer"; "Memory installs remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again"
| [26] | Nora, Pierre. (1989) Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire. Representations, № 26. Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring), 7-24. |
[26]
.
Therefore, the enemy destroys Ukrainians not only physically, but with no less fury also on the mental, ethno-cultural level. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, from February 24, 2022 to February 25, 2024, 1,946 objects of cultural heritage and infrastructure were destroyed or damaged, although Western statistics provided by Le Monde and repeated by ARTnews in February 2024 speak of only 341 damaged cultural monuments, relying on the official report of UNESCO, which for its part estimated the cost of damages at 3.3 million euros
.
"Where the danger of death, suffering and pain, loss and neediness are constant guests, there almost involuntarily a philosophical instruction is brewing. ˂...˃ This is the true birthplace of transcendence, the eternal one that outlasts earthly existence. In this way, we come to the original source of creativity, but also to the divine, which is hidden in a person as the beginning of those values that become more valuable for a person than physical life..."
| [34] | Yaniv, V. (1987) Ukrainian art on the cultural and historical background of Ukraine in connection with its geopolitical location. Trans. Lydia Kachurovska-Kryukov. Munich: Ukrainian Free University, 6-10. |
[34]
.
But in the end, the future is realized and exists only in the integrity of the nation's self-identifying consciousness, because "in the context of cultural memory, the difference between myth and history disappears". Furthermore, as Paul Ricoeur rightly believed, the myth that the Sacrum-code is the core of historical development might be eternal and might last for as long as human civilization exists. Eurocentrism, understood as a form of cultural perspective, thus, should be very cautious in its attempts to superimpose its own mental structures onto other cultures, especially since the importance of Western philosophy in the cultural sense has been clearly exaggerated
| [29] | Ricoeur, Paul. (1995) The creativity of language. In Richard Kearney (ed.), States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers on the European Mind, pp. 216-245. Manchester: Manchester University Press. |
[29]
.
3. Cultural Memory as a Code of Self-Identification of the Nation's Art-Consciousness
The Russian-Ukrainian war in the context of the image creation of Ukraine becomes a serious test of the creative endurance of self-identification paradigms in extreme conditions, when war spontaneously sharpens the signatures of cultural memory, stimulating the formation of modern war mythology in fundamentally new systems of art expression, where artistic symbols, aesthetics of the image, the artistic consciousness itself are revealed in a different light, somewhere tangential to deviant attacks, so that the deep empathy of cordocentrism is suddenly interrupted by a harsh brutal-invective joke, an apt critical sentence, where every word and image become eloquent, like a poster, expression of national identity. Indeed, Prof. Evgeny Onatsky, referring to the research of Dr. O. Hrytsai, defined Ukrainian Serapism as the worldview of a crusader, which has ambivalence: "on the one hand, it is a monk of the Pechersk Lavra, and on the other, a Zaporozhian [Cossack], advancing on Sinopa and Trebizond, kneeling before the Zaporizhian Sich altar of St. Shrouds of the Most Holy Mother of God"
| [27] | Onatskyi, E. (1965) Ukrainian small encyclopedia. Book XIV. Buenos Aires: UAPC in Argentina, 1719. |
[27]
. It is the power of righteous anger and the spirit of struggle for European democratic values, combined with juicy satire, that becomes the protection against the inhuman crimes of the invaders against humanity, which protects the Ukrainian heart and cultural creation from cruelty, turning the horror of the philosophy of death-suffering-pain with Ukrainian metaphysics into a laugh at the politics of terror, triumphantly proclaiming the spiritual ideals of a free person, since "non sum, sed sursum", I do not exist, yet I rise
| [34] | Yaniv, V. (1987) Ukrainian art on the cultural and historical background of Ukraine in connection with its geopolitical location. Trans. Lydia Kachurovska-Kryukov. Munich: Ukrainian Free University, 6-10. |
[34]
.
Among the many art invectives, by the way, there are many anonymous public objects, moreover, exclusively professionally made with eloquent "gestures" in the spirit of satirical caricatures of the popular magazine "Perets". Or yet another example: a painting on a sanitation truck of communal workers driving around the suburbs, with a portrait of the enemy president at the point of loading the contents of cesspools. Indeed, during the war "aestheticization extends the aesthetic experience to all spheres of human existence"
| [22] | Marchenko, O.; Pushonkova, O.; Gladun, O.; Kolomiiets, O.; Protsyshyn, V. & Pianzin, S. (2023) «Expansion as a Culture-Creating Principle of Post-Modernity: Semantic Contexts and Aesthetic Practices». Journal of Education Culture and Society. # 2, 57-77. |
[22]
.
Likewise, since the beginning of the full-scale war, social networks, galleries, and exhibition halls have become places where the art of political poster has flourished, and this creative breakthrough was noted by the jury of international competitions, where Ukrainians have repeatedly received prizes. Here, we have to mention the success of Dasha Podoltseva at the Poster Biennale that was held in Warsaw in 2023, as well as the fact that on April 18 of 2024, Yulia Kochetkova's project "War Is Personal" won the World Press Photo 2024 in the Open Format Award category
, while in 2023 the award was given to Evgeny Maloletka for the series of pictures "The Siege of Mariupol", which was analyzed by Ukrainian scientists
| [28] | Protas, M., Bulavina, N. (2023) Cultural habitus of art: The aletheia of self-identification versus the post-truth of postmodernity. American Journal of Art and Design. Vol. 8, Issue 3, September, 87–98. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajad.20230803.12 |
[28]
.
As domestic analysts rightly noted: "Culture was placed in the center of civilizational and political confrontations during the Russian-Ukrainian War from the very first days. Alongside the massive destruction of Ukrainian cities, Russian attempts to annihilate Ukrainian identity and history, erase the Ukrainian language, and destroy cultural heritage in occupied territories transformed the conflict into a true culture war as well as an existential war for the Ukrainian nation. The tragic events caused by the Russian invasion and the significant challenges for millions of Ukrainians in its wake not only mobilized the government and civilian population to resist the invader but also boosted the creative and expressive potential of Ukrainian cultural elites, triggering deep transformations of existing cultural, epistemic, and value paradigms as well as shifts in the perception of the self and the other. Some researchers even consider that the Russian aggression against Ukraine served as a catalyst for creating a new system of artistic symbols and images, calling it a new mythology of the war"
| [14] | Kot S, Mozolevska A, Polishchuk O, Stodolinska Y. (2024) The Discursive Power of Digital Popular Art during the Russo-Ukrainian War: Re/Shaping Visual Narratives. Arts. 13(1): 38. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010038 |
[14]
.
In the difficult conditions of the struggle for the sovereignty of Ukraine, today scientists and creative workers face the important question of rethinking the fundamental role of cultural memory as the basis of national identity. Therefore, the scientific and theoretical discussions that have been going on since the turn of the millennium among Western European analysts regarding cultural memory are now subject to revision in Ukraine in the aspect of a modern solution to the consequences of the hybrid Third World War, and, at the same time, as an effective solution to internal cultural challenges. It is precisely here that the doctrine of Ukrainian cordocentrism could play its role, offering alternatives for global market-oriented culture, which cannot but fail when trying to address the issues of Ukraine under the conditions of the ongoing war. As academician V. Skurativskyi said at the conference of the Institute for cultural research of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine, "What should we do next here in Ukraine with our historical specificity of suffering – we have seen oceans of plebeian, democratic, and totalitarian tears. As it began somewhere at the end of the 16th century, so it continues up to now... How should we treat the artistic past of Europe in this situation... And at the same time, in order to stop the Apocalypse, Armageddon, which is constantly approaching us from the East, we just have to conduct normal cultural work", as "we have and always had the resources to create in the mode of revenge in the modern Ukrainian culture" and artists will find the strength to get rid of the secondary nature of contemporary "eccentricity, this very postmodernism — and everything else, all these phenomena, positive phenomena in our culture must be duplicated in new social conditions"
.
Therefore, even now, in the process of planning the rebuilding of a peaceful post-war Ukrainian existence, along with sociopolitical, economic, and environmental issues, optimal solutions for the reconstruction of material objects of national cultural memory (in particular, damaged museums, theaters, churches, memorials, historical monuments) are being considered. Measures that are being implemented are dedicated, among other things, to regeneration of forgotten patterns of historical memory with the addition of the corpus of annals with the latest narratives about the events and fates of modern heroes. Such a multi-level task requires a clear understanding of nation-building art-epistemes from the standpoint of essential self-identification, which requires an updated cognition of already known theories of cultural memory. After all, as numerous instances of manifestations of Ukrainian art demonstrate, it is not only the mental activity of the community that is being manifested, but the empathic-sensual aestheticization of the collective and individual ethno-pattern, the basis of which is the spiritual actualization of the Sacrum-code. At the same time, the structural hierarchy of art-epistemes of modern visual practices requires a substantive analysis involving a complex approach of consideration of both socio-communicative and cultural memory. Today, we already have examples – provided, in particular, by public sculpture – of reinterpretation of the Western contemporary experience by visual practices according to the national specificity of empathy.
To give one yet unusual example, there is a case of a public space monumental "accumulation", still unusual in Ukraine, which was invented at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s by the French-American sculptor Armand Fernandez, when he introduced the projects "Accumulations" and "Poubelles / Garbage cans", which were spread by other "Nouveau Réalisme" artists. Now, a similar container accumulation has appeared in the new square of the town on Irpin (a satellite city of Kyiv that suffered a lot in the first months of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine) named after Serhiy Blyzniuk, a policeman who died during the evacuation of the townspeople. And this is not only "another proof of our spiritual belonging to the West", as noted by V. Yaniv, it is more of an evidence of the transformation of the philosophy of death by Ukrainian metaphysics into a laugh at the philosophy of horror, which was once again sown by the enemy. In the end, the work manifests a victory over fear, because "non existere sed esse/ not to exist, but to be" is translated into "non sum, sed sursum/ I do not exist, yet I arise", into true life and perfect reality
| [34] | Yaniv, V. (1987) Ukrainian art on the cultural and historical background of Ukraine in connection with its geopolitical location. Trans. Lydia Kachurovska-Kryukov. Munich: Ukrainian Free University, 6-10. |
[34]
. The installation accumulates deadly artifacts collected from the streets and homes of the hero city of Irpin, as well as the neighboring Makariv, Borodyanka, and Buchansky district (remains of rockets, shells, and other objects from February-March 2022), and that according to the idea of the author, a tax official Mykhailo Ogeruk, Ukrainians demonstratively packed it into a garbage container, since a Ukrainian is "a person who breaks metal." Ceremonially opened this year at the end of March on the occasion of the second anniversary of the liberation of Irpin from the Russian occupation, the monument "Will" – a symbol of indomitability and eternal memory of the fallen civilians and defenders – bears the inscription: "All metal is not enough to break our will". In other words, the concentrated formula of death, which the Russian regime used against Ukraine, radically eradicating the "Ukrainian question", was "documentally" noted with a specific sculptural vocabulary, where feelings of horror and pain transform the mind, so that a person realizes the inadmissibility of war, changing the worldview in this opaque zone between thoughts, words and actions (according to D. Agamben); where the contemplation of the object, as Sam McAuliffe from Mannix College (Monash University, Australia) believes "teaches us to engage with the world in vital ways many of us have forgotten, overlooked, or ignored" as "Through good art we learn how the world might be understood differently to how we understood it before. Engaging with art thus illuminates new or different ways to think, do, and be... In this way, art offers lessons in a mode of thoughtfulness distinct from the scientific method"
.
Commemoration of fallen Ukrainians — soldiers and civilians alike — by means of public sculpture began last year, when, for example, on July 2 at the entrance to the city park of the hero city of Bucha, a memorial wall with the names of the dead and tortured by the occupiers was erected. As the mayor of the city, Anatoly Fedoruk, emphasized at the time, the memorial must also draw the attention of the world community to the crimes committed by the aggressor country in the city, purposefully committing genocide of the nation, and therefore, to convince the democratic world of the need for a military tribunal. A month and a half later, the complex was moved to a permanent location on the territory of the Church of St. Apostle Andrew the First-Called, since it was there that the mass grave was located, where after the de-occupation of Bucha, bodies of murdered residents of the city were found. In terms of stylistic typology, the Buchan complex is related to the restrained aesthetics of the 1982 Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. Then its author, Maya Lin, for the first time used only 2 long planes of black granite masonry with the names of the dead. In 1984, however, at the request of the military, a bronze group of three soldiers by the sculptor Frederick Hart was added to the complex. However, the laconic and restrained symbolism of the Bucha Wall of Sorrow does not need a plastic replica, perhaps due to the fact that the place itself emanates powerful emotions and meanings, and any additional explanation of the apocalyptic events will seem superfluous. An example of a different kind could be Borys Krylov's sculptural composition "Resistance", opened in Irpin in the fall of 2023 in honor of the townspeople who stopped the movement of Russian troops. The monument is perceived as too theatrical in terms of its polyphony: the dichotomy of the symbolism of meaning, on the one hand, and the genre narrative of anatomically accentuated plastic vocabulary from with a dubious proportional cut of half-figures, on the other hand, translates deep sorrowful empathy into purely rational considerations, noticeably reducing its aesthetic effect.
Meanwhile, it might be argued that in the conditions of the hybridity of the Third World War, as Giorgio Agamben stated back in 2022, Western civilization is in an amorphous state of cultural, intellectual and political exhaustion. Therefore, precisely during the crisis, in the course of the planetary world war, the end of which cannot be seen, since it continues paradigmatically, at the level of language and consciousness, it is exactly in Ukraine that a "white world war" ("una guerra mondiale bianca") is being waged, unlike the previous World War II, where evil fought evil. Consequently, in order to avoid a "planetary civil war" as the ultimate war of everyone against everyone ("alla fine e l'atroce guerra civile planetaria che conducono è la forma della loro fine"), the civilizational paradigm must be transformed right now
. Despite the time when he is making this philosophical argument (this time being the end of the 20th century), Agamben advocates the scenario of the self-realization of the transcendental Homo Sacer, the sacred man, as a way out of the current collapse. Regarding this latter, the researcher, answering the question "How can we effectively change modern society and culture?", noted in 2024: "We must try to rethink what we do when we speak, and to enter this opaque zone, asking ourselves questions not about grammar and vocabulary, but about how we use our bodies and voices when the words seem almost to come out of our mouths by themselves. Then we will see how this experience becomes the discovery of the world and our relations with other people, that is, the experience of language is in this sense the most radical political experience"
. Similarly, during the war, nations must transform the art-lexicon not through a formalized grammar of expression, but through the essential expression of aletheia, in the context of responsible metaxic-expansion of consciousness (collective and individual). Furthermore, many Ukrainians now share the opinion expressed by Siobhan Lyons, according to whom "unhappiness is in fact the antidote to existence purely as it opens facets of human psychology and thought otherwise neglected as unnecessary", another point being that "... unhappiness, is an invaluable element of life, and must be embraced as a catalyst of human triumph, insight and critical self-reflection". Whereas biocolonial servility, which produces spiritual bankruptcy, cultivating the "utter bliss or contentment removes the need to critically explore ourselves and life, and thus disrupts the very foundation on which our humanity is built, on which our cultural existence is based"
.
To some extent, this complacency explains the sweet dream of Western democracy, and it is due to this complacency that Ukraine has found itself in a catastrophic situation, trying to wake up the global West from oblivion, including art projects that demonstrate the criminal acts of genocide that have been and are committed against Ukrainians by the aggressor country, in exact accordance with its ancient definition by Herodotus – the country of "androphages", that is, "those who eat people". Nonetheless, Ukraine's resistance to the forces of the invader, the resistance that, according to Agamben, refers to homo sacer's self-defense in the "white world war", is now being reconsidered by many Ukrainian artists. For example, the metaphysics of national consciousness in the context of the Christian iconographic traditions of Byzantium is embodied by the Ukrainian craftswoman Emily Miller, working in Ravenna in the oldest restoration workshops "Gruppo Mosaicisti Ravenna" on sacred images of Christian saints, using pine instead of traditional cypress boards, that is to say, she creates ready-made objects from ammunition covers and lids that were used on the frontline. And in March 2024, she brought her unique mosaic works to Kyiv, where, in the gallery space of the Zaborovsky Gate next to the Cathedral of St. Sophia of Kyiv, she presented them at the personal exhibition "And the Light shines in the darkness..." (according to the Ukrainian translation of the Gospel of John (1: 5) by I. Ohienko). Also, among the various contemporary exhibitions of Ukrainian visual practitioners in Italy, a lot of Italian attention was drawn to the re-modernist sincerity project of the Kyivan Oleksandr Zhivotkov (his work Anno Domini (2016) was donated to the Vatican in 2019) "The Sacred Tablets of Ukraine. Oleksandr Zhivotkov", which was exhibited during March 2024 in the Galleria Civica Cavour of Padua, which included works that were shown in particular in January 2023 in the Ukrainian House by the art project "Altar" (Kyiv), and which was analyzed by domestic art critics in the context of metaxic thinking
| [28] | Protas, M., Bulavina, N. (2023) Cultural habitus of art: The aletheia of self-identification versus the post-truth of postmodernity. American Journal of Art and Design. Vol. 8, Issue 3, September, 87–98. https://doi.org/10.11648/j.ajad.20230803.12 |
[28]
.
Now that these exhibitions have become a much-discussed cultural phenomena, it might be stated that Europeans have discovered a completely different Ukraine, which has gotten rid of the disadvantages of the post-Soviet syndrome of inferiority in relations with the West, and boldly produces a conscious cultural and artistic identity – a Ukraine’s version of "indigenous vision", which resonates in the hearts of Europeans. That is why Mr. Andrea Colasio, the cultural assessor municipality of Padua, said with noticeable empathy at the opening of the project: "With this exhibition, we want to express the empathy of our municipality and our city towards the Ukrainian people, hoping that through culture, conditions can be created for the return of peace and the restoration of respect for international law"
. Thus, all abovementioned and other, similar to them typologically art projects by Ukrainian artists might, from our perspective, showcase the actualization of the essential pattern of the "aísthēsis" aesthetics.
4. Aesthesis as an Aesthetic Aspect of Cordocentrism
In the millennium, the socio-political turn of contemporary globalized art radically replaced the art episteme with performative activity, due to which disturbing publications and conferences were spread around the world stating the death of art and art criticism. Accordingly, in all the multiple nations that are, just like Ukraine, the "donors" rather than "producers" of global contemporary art paradigm, many artists have been more or less blindly following the clichéd benchmarking fashion of the biocolonial matrix rather than trying to feel the pulse of transcendental truth in the absolute "messianic" time (W. Benjamin). We would argue in favor of those artworks, whose creators are closer to what Lyotard called aísthēsis Anima Minima, or the subtlest feelings of our soul, which for Ukrainians is, essentially, the foundation of cordocentrism
| [20] | Lyotard, J.-F. (1997) Anima Minima. Trans. G. Van Den Abbeele. In Postmodern Fables (pp. 235-249). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. |
[20]
.
Art’s refusal to deal with the essence of "sensory feeling", according to J. F. Lyotard played an evil joke on artistry as the art vocabulary expanded, and the artist's thought and imagination became poorer and more limited, causing deskilling. This was also mentioned in a warning by Jan Assmann, who emphasized the importance of the effective activity of a holistic memory: "Not the past as such, as it is investigated and reconstructed by archaeologists and historians, counts for the cultural memory, but only the past as it is remembered. Here, in the context of cultural memory, it is the temporal horizon of cultural memory which is important. Cultural memory reaches back into the past only so far as the past can be reclaimed as "ours." This is why we refer to this form of historical consciousness as "memory" and not just as knowledge about the past. Knowledge about the past acquires the properties and functions of memory if it is related to a concept of identity. While knowledge has no form and is endlessly progressive, memory involves forgetting. It is only by forgetting what lies outside the horizon of the relevant that it performs an identity function <....> Whereas knowledge has a universalist perspective, a tendency towards generalization and standardization, memory, even cultural memory, is local, egocentric, and specific to a group and its values"
| [4] | Assmann, Jan. (2008). Communicative and Cultural memory. In: Astrid Erll, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.). Cultural Memory Studies. An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin, New York, 109–118. |
[4]
.
It is not by chance that Lyotard, criticizing the fixation of culture on the informational surface, proposed to return to the mystery of the depths of sensations, first imagining that there are no rational concepts – instead, what one needs to start with is to immerse oneself in the perception of sounds, smells, colors, in all the affects of the matter of feelings. Lyotard believed that only in this way the soul would wake up, that is, it would wake up in the realization of the sensual, avoiding self-destruction by postmodern aphasia under the slogan of actualizing the problems of sociopolitical existence. Therefore, the affect of feelings, according to Lyotard, is transformed into a spontaneous effect of return, which is beyond time and space, beyond what is conscious and what is a recollection, and it is the main argument of the mission of art, since the physical manifestation of the work of art itself has the stamp of the disappearance of the essential meaning, "that is why such a gesture always evokes nostalgia and leads to anamnesis"
| [20] | Lyotard, J.-F. (1997) Anima Minima. Trans. G. Van Den Abbeele. In Postmodern Fables (pp. 235-249). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. |
[20]
.
Hanna Arendt might be trying, in the following quote, to explain the same point: "this reification and materialization, without which no thought can become a tangible thing, is always paid for, and that the price is life itself; it is always the "dead letters" in which the "living spirit" must survive... This deadness, however, though somehow present in all art and indicating, as it were, the distance between thought's original home in the heart or head of man and his eventual destinations in the world, varies in the different arts"
| [3] | Arendt, Hannah. (1998) The human condition. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 3, 168-169, 170-171. |
[3]
. Accordingly, due to the artist’s appeal to the aesthetics of aísthēsis, known to the ancient Greeks, the human soul and creative powers feel connected to a full-scale life of feelings and senses: an artist or a philosopher must interrupt the very process of thinking in order to turn his work into a material form as this process (as opposed to cognition) concerns the very existence understood as cultural memory: "The activity of thinking is as relentless and repetitive as life itself, and the question of whether thought has any meaning at all constitutes the same unanswerable riddle as the question for the meaning of life; its processes permeate the whole of human existence so intimately that its beginning and end coincide with the beginning and end of human life itself"
| [3] | Arendt, Hannah. (1998) The human condition. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 3, 168-169, 170-171. |
[3]
.
As the nihilism of technocratic existence, indifferent to identity, tolerant of imperial consciousness, which entails the loss of values and the death of God, hinders the metaphysics of the Ukrainian habitus, it is our firm belief that such reflections of Lyotard and Arendt should remain on the agenda even more so in the conditions of the war, as it is precisely in the returning aísthēsis that some pundits and scholars see a way to renew and overcome the global cultural collapse. Indeed, "the aistheton tears the inanimate from the limbo in which it exists, it pierces its vacuity with its thunderbolt, it makes a soul emerge from out of it. A sound, a scent, a color draw the pulsing of a sentiment out of the neutral continuum, out of the vacuum"
| [20] | Lyotard, J.-F. (1997) Anima Minima. Trans. G. Van Den Abbeele. In Postmodern Fables (pp. 235-249). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. |
[20]
.
Accordingly, it is no coincidence that in the first days and weeks of the full-scale invasion, the globalized contemporary art expression was not specific due to the lack of an empathic component in it, whereas Ukrainian artists actively worked precisely with the aesthetics of aísthēsis. At the same time, it should be noted that those artists who, after the start of the war, moved to Western countries, mostly continued to speak in the usual grammar of visual art practices, the result of which being that the globalized art expression of ratio in those works of theirs came across as indifferent, insincere, detached from the reality of the pain and suffering of Ukrainians, which clearly proves the validity of Hannah Arendt's warnings about technocultural thinking: "there is no reason to doubt our ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction, and this question cannot be decided by scientific means; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians"
| [3] | Arendt, Hannah. (1998) The human condition. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 3, 168-169, 170-171. |
[3]
.
In this sense, Sam McAuliffe is also right, for it could be argued that "Whatever your passion – music, dance, sculpture, poetry, architecture – do yourself and the world a favor, and take a lesson or two in thinking from art"
. So it turns out that precisely when guns and rockets destroy the life of a European nation, when the globalized vocabulary of art turns a person into a political being devoid of any qualities, then comes the time of artistic appeals to aísthēsis, in order to tell the truth by means of art vocabulary, the language of culture, warning civilization against the state where we would "indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, not matter how murderous it is."
| [3] | Arendt, Hannah. (1998) The human condition. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 3, 168-169, 170-171. |
[3]
.
Accordingly, during the escalation of another world war, the ideas of returning of civilizational consciousness to a coherent cultural memory become urgent, because it was precisely the technocratic stratagems of the consumer society that led the world to its apocalyptic condition. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, sensing a planetary catastrophe, called on humanity to return to sincere feelings in the book "What's these worlds coming to?" co-written by him together with the astrophysicist Aurelien Barrot, where he emphasized that today humanity lives in a pluriversal world, creating nothing but the accumulation of clutter from what has already been de-constructed
| [25] | Nancy, Jean-Luc & Barrau, Aurelien. (2015) What’s these worlds coming to? Trans. Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain. New York: Fordham University Press. |
[25]
.
Another French philosopher, Bernard Stiegler, founder and head of the Institute of Research and Innovation at the Center Georges Pompidou, suggested a return to the search for independent ways of thinking, the search for the authentic, true meaning of life. In 2019, Stigler publishes his book "The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computer Capitalism", where he proves the need to oppose the manipulative actions of digital superpowers in transforming the culture of "hypercontrol societies" with the help of AI into a state of new barbarism and "dis-identification" of colossal scale, as people's thoughts, actions and feelings are increasingly modulated by capital and corporate interests against the interests of nations. Thus, digitalization, apart from facilitating a person's existence, at the same time steals cognitive abilities and attention, and the overload of information flows reduces critical thinking, lowers its quality and distorts the actual content of knowledge, annihilating the will and inhibiting the transfer of true knowledge between generations, encouraging the "intellectual laziness" of academic institutions and creating chaos of fundamental disorders
| [31] | Stiegler, Bernard. (2019) The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computer Capitalism. London, UK: Polity Press, 187, 229, 272. |
[31]
.
Thus, since the 2010s, when the concept of metamodernism spread and there was a certain discourse about oscillation, or metaxy, between the art epistemes of PoMo & Mo, both of which lost their legitimacy, independent analysts have offered the episteme of re-modernism as a lifeline to overcome the cultural crisis of the postmodern era. It became known as "New sincerity"
| [9] | Fitzgerald, J. D. (2012). Sincerity, not irony, is our age’s ethos. The Atlantic. Is. 20. |
[9]
. At that time, scientists had already raised the issue of organizing the critical methodologies of indigenism, and thanks to metaxis, they were reviewing the role of cultural memory in the modern experience of nations. However, they also focused their attention on issues related to the self-identification of nations, in particular, regarding the rethinking of "pain and suffering as nourishment for the soul and mind" in the process of catharsis, which was covered in the columns of the publication "Philosophy Now"
. And in 2015, Siobhan Lyons, an Australian researcher, rightly stating that the growth in society of consumption of the distorted "happiness industry" has a negative effect on the critical ability of contemporaries, with a lot of skepticism assesses the uncreative metaxy between the ideas of PoMo & Mo although stating a possibility of a perspective in an empathetic and sincere rethinking of traditions
.
When the world found itself in a state of apocalyptic changes in the conditions of the Third World War unfolding at all levels of existence – with the level of mental "paradigm wars" being the most fundamental one – then, concept-constructs, widespread during the period of the three-phase agony of postmodernism in the 1980s-2020s, lost their dominant position to sincere human feelings, which make up the meaning of the aesthetics of "aísthēsis", which since antiquity has been associated with empathy and the ability to perceive the essence of the phenomenal world, known in Ukraine as cordocentrism. This change might help us to understand why works of sincerity public art appear in different countries. In Great Britain, for instance, between 2018 and 2021, the famous sculptor Laura Lean toured various cities, countries and locations to support her public sculpture in the form of a bronze John Lennon, which rests on the symbol of peace. Such a non-commercial peace action by the artist was motivated by a sincere desire to "inspire a new generation and restore the mission of John and Yoko for peace"
.
For Ukraine, which has undergone a full-scale invasion by an aggressor country, the re-actualization of indigenous cultural memory is a key issue for the survival of the nation while preserving the status of a sovereign democratic country. Therefore, the powerful conscious appeal of Ukrainian artists to the aesthetic traditions of Cordocentrism in the conditions of a harsh hybrid war might be seen as a matter of honor, something that might reflect the inner call of the soul of every citizen.
Share This Article
Twitter
Linked In
Facebook
Copy
Download