The Unlimited Space of Oleksandr Aksinin

«Let the Empire move forward, and we shall close the door, and get to the top of our ivory tower, to the highest step possible, closer to heaven. It might be cold out there, isn’t it? Not a problem! At least, the stars are brighter, and you can’t hear the fools.» Flaubert, Letters (1830-1880)

«We are endowed with the world at birth, and we are destined to have it, we are thrown into it. The others could be fantasized.» Engelina Buriakovska

Writing or reading about Oleksandr Aksinin is a certain way of meditation, whispering, overlaying of mantras, where you might not find any rational answers but keep getting deeper into the magic indefinite world. Even the distracted view, lack of nostalgic shade do not allow us to objectively analyze his creativity, since the deeper you delve into the artist’s world, the better you realize the illusionary attempt of this penetration. Moreover, certain responsibility for touching the legend adds up.

Since creativity is a context, in a big sense, then what do we have over the 35 years of the life of Aksinin, the known and the unknown, and over the 34 years of making the story about him? Oleksandr’s graphic works and his diary, a mysterious and tragic biography, multiple memories of his friends and colleagues also contributed to the making of Aksinin’s glorious halo. On top of it all, there is a city(cities) and time(s) that made out of a “Soviet person” a medium for the illuminated, and the cult unachievable personality, hardly possible to analyze. However, a touch of the artist’s biography and creativity may inspire us to ask some important questions to ourselves, and search for the answers.

To understand a certain origin, you do not need to wander around the labyrinth but be above it, be beyond the density and pettiness of the city, and move further on. You start watching from above through the cinematic shots, realizing the complexity of the precise location of the artist in time and space: Planet, Europe, Eastern Europe, Ukraine, Lviv, as a starting point that is hiding a needle (formally and figuratively), which creates its own mythology in the set time for it (for the needle).

The active years of Oleksandr Aksinin and the making of his halo fall onto the 1970s and early 1980s, when many processes, including also artistic ones, came from the underground setting and largely escaped the ideological pressure. But this sort of release and lack of political component caused the aggravation of artistic language with the help of internal intellectual pressure, which turned out not less complicated. Oleksandr’s search showed that any questions arising to this world (not to the government) may end up in conflict, but internal, rather than external. He was one of the first few people who felt the important component that might be worth working with. Although Aksinin was the eye-witness of the epoch but only crossed it fleetingly since he built his world and searched for the questions and answers beyond the suggested historical context.

The only suggested references at the time were the absurdity of life in the late Soviet period of “stagnation,” the collapse of belief in the possible crucial changes (after the bright ideological resistance to the system by the 1960s artists), and the delayed adaptation of post-modernism in this territory. As a result, the 1970s generated a new type of artists who spoke against the personality neglecting policy, but the manifesto was silent, beaming from the inner worlds of artists to the inner worlds of viewers.

Experiments and searches were taking place in different places of Ukraine where their own legends, names, and phenomena appeared. The first signs that were most relevant to postmodernism in Ukraine may be attributed to Odesa street action-making, Kharkiv photography, trans-avantgarde of Kyiv. In all the cities, the most important factor was getting into circles (communities, squats, groups) of like-minded artists around the idea of free expression of thought in various forms.

As to Lviv, in the 1970s and early 1980s, artists were mostly loners. But even the loners generated another form of being, a “legend-centered” form. It is something that happened in the group of fellow thinkers attracted to Oleksandr Aksinin, like a guru. As to formal searches, they reduced down to the plane of the painting or a graphic sheet. Aksinin found himself in the graphic art of small formats, and in producing repeated symbols, avoiding the crucial postmodern views on reality. However, with his classic but still released practice, he paved the way for the new chapter in Lviv underground of the 1980-90s, when he impacted the processes and names. The influence was halo and biography related, rather than formal. As soon as in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, the Lviv arena was entered by those who we might most probably call the «Lviv postmodernists.»

Among the prevailing chaos and the “timelessness,” Lviv as the city that fell to the lot of experiencing Aksinin’s life, turned out to be the opportune scenery for his long penetration, the city as a closed system to escape from the problems of present-day into the world of creativity, for self-isolation and fixation on one’s self in the world, not in the city.

It is an interesting phenomenon when an artist avoids an artificially imposed construct of the national, the regional, despite the lack of information. He addresses the all-encompassing themes and tries to find something within himself or to find himself in the Universe. Even though folklore and mythology are a strong point of Ukrainian art, Aksinin did not use it but conceived his own mythology; he took a cosmopolitan approach to make use of the achievements of various cultures. It is the case when we can speak of the practice of post-modernism with the artist since the phenomenon is synthesizing rather than analyzing. On the other hand, it is typical of Aksinin to have the play of postmodernism with the incomprehensible trifles that are quickly becoming popular. Aksinin plays with the history of mankind; he documents certain flow of life with the help of graphics; he keeps quoting the world, integrates texts into the visual field, which creates an effect of postmodernist multilayers of the infinite library of decontextualized phrases.

Aksinin included not only Lviv but also “My cities” (early series of 1965). He absorbed the cultures of those cities, their religious trends, philosophic views, literary plots. However, in his search, Oleksandr was not choosing anything, he did not set any limits that would be decisive in his worldview. It is a very progressive position since development happens in the ongoing search. But in his progress and his openness to the world, Aksinin steadily remained painfully serious and cast away the important element of the postmodernist epoch such as irony and self-irony, which helps communicate with the world and possibly de-escalate the dramatic degree of the official narrative that was nowhere near the artist.

Whatever we associate with Aksinin’s works, such as the firmness of the method, elaborate details (as a way of elaborating the reality), a saturation of space with minor details, repeated signs, puzzling images, the code of his works, the recognizable aesthetics – all of it is a projection of subjective human will for subjective reality. That is why it does not seem possible to understand. However, the game of decoding is interesting in itself. The illusory nature of the deciphering process is captivating – when we are scrutinizing into the graphic works to escape not beyond, but to escape inside, a-la Kafka. Aksinin is mystically visualizing the complicated world with the help of an inner worldview. Like a child, he decomposes it into small details to be further composed back into the configurations comprehensible to him only, without flattering the viewer. Nonetheless, we can only do the guesswork. We can only make use of the available information, and try to test the Aksinin method and create our interpretations of his works, peering through, reading carefully, and getting deeper therein, sometimes speaking to the author with his own words: “stop sending the insights into my tired mind at least for several days” (O. Aksinin).

As it often happens in the history of arts, we wish to find Aksinin’s roots in Lviv, and own him, with all good intent. In this case, we need to own his position of staying outside the culture, too. We need to own his multiplicity, his “all in himself,” his openness to the world that Oleksandr often wrote about. The post-modernist montages of the artist’s conscience were also taking place due to his possible relocation from point L to points T, M, another L, a.o.: from West to East, and back to the West, he expanded the labyrinth where he came across (according to the Aksinin’s meta-language table) his ZE – “a couple of similar pointwise multiplicities divided by distance.”

For Aksinin, Tallinn was the second “homeland” where he would come every year with his works, in search for links with Estonian graphic art, especially with Tõnis Vint, one of the key figures of Estonian art life of those times. Aksinin found a kindred spirit in him. They were perceiving reality together and went into deep artistic and philosophic traditions. In 1979, it is where Tõnis Vint organized the first Oleksandr’s solo exhibition. Moreover, Aksinin spent his last days in Tallinn, which added more mysticism to this city in the context of the artist’s life.

In 1981, the second solo exhibition of the artist took place, not again in Lviv, but in Lodz. It was the city that officially recognized Aksinin’s talent, where his eau-fortes were awarded the Honorable Medal at the International Biennale "Small Graphic Forms."

In the search for the truth, Aksinin was related to Moscow and Leningrad. Since he was all-encompassed in history, he never fixed on one period only. In the specific point, he would take everything possible for him: he was inspired by the talking of the avant-gardist Velimir Khlebnikov when he was reading his texts, interestingly, he was reading them in Polish (as good a reason to take it as another sign of fragmentary postmodernism where we can feel in one language, hear in another language, and speak in the third language). Besides, the artist was getting closer to Moscow conceptualism, as far as he was interested in it; he engaged in extensive conversations and found “nests in others’ souls” with Illya Kabakov, Dmytro Prigov, Erik Bulatov, Oskar Rabin, a.o.

Aksinin had a special connection with the mystically non-existent Leningrad, where Viktor Krivulin organized the apartment art exhibitions for the artist. It was for Krivulin’s essay that Aksinin wrote his laconic, somewhat ironic autobiography, that uncovers for us the artist’s self-perception from the first person: 

In 1949, a supposedly Russian person was born in a supposedly European city of Lviv.

An Orthodox Christian.

1972 – diploma of Polygraphic Institute, specializing in graphic art.

1977 – 1st revelation with the accompanying perception of time.

1981 – 2nd revelation with the accompanying perception of eternity.

1979 – the first solo exhibition in Tallinn.

1981 – the second one in Poland.

That’s it.

In all of these cities, specifically, the same as in Lviv, the square meters with the like-minded people were closer to Aksinin than some of the places in his native city (such as the official circles of Lviv who never accepted the artist). He found “own” and “alien” in many cities where he felt “the return of the world to himself.” In this respect, an important point for Aksinin’s existence is Rostov-on-Don, where a large part of the artist’s heritage is currently held, as well as many other geographic points where the “Aksinin's circle" traveled, and where they are actively functioning and disseminating the legend about the Artist.

In the current situation, we are explaining Aksinin’s views to the West and the East as the crossroads, since the crossroads are obvious for us in the present, but has it ever existed for the artist? It seems that the time and place of Oleksandr Aksinin are not the points of intersection of meridians and parallels, while certain circles of intellectuals, starting with the “Aksinin Circle” (Yuriy Charyshnikov, Henrietta Levytska, Halyna Zhyhulska, Engelina Buriakovska, Nadia Ponomarenko) and on to his intense introduction to contemporary art of Poland (Stanislaw Fialkowski, Andrzej Stumillo, Wojciech Jakubowski), the tender relations and cross-influence among artists from Lithuania and Estonia (Tõnis Vint, Volodymyr Onusaitis, Stasis Endrihiavicus, Vello Vinn), apartment exhibitions in Leningrad (Viktor Krivulin), discussions with Moscow conceptualists (Illya Kabakov, Vsevolod Nekrasov) and others.

Here, an unpopular opinion creeps in – that the point is not about the time, or the space, not in the national component, but in the multilayered structure, in the multitude of human experiences, in the cosmopolitical nature, in the selected circle of intellectuals, in his environment that Aksinin could find or build. These are the contacts with non-conformists who were grouping in various cities, in various times; they build various sociocultural stories that managed to be encompassed within the Ukrainian, Lviv, Soviet, European (underline as applicable) artist Oleksandr Aksinin, a broad range man who did not wish to play by the rules of society or its boundaries in his own imagined world.

From time and places, Aksinin only took what he was interested in. Lviv was not his main axis, but an eternal return, a city that had not penetrated the person and through the person. It is the return to the closed world wherefrom one managed to break away but never managed to return. When we score the “points” (“scores”) for different cities for the right to be considered a city (place) of Aksinin, we can only dream of his special sentiments for Lviv, and more importantly, of filling the modern city with the presence of Oleksandr A.

Tetyana Vuyeva, art critic, Lviv National Museum

And whenever you submerge into your own self, you find the invariants of relations – certain intentions. You stop caring about the world because you are wrapped in these possible structures (intentions) of the attitude to the world. It is not possible to see from the outside, it is happening only within you. Then you notice that they are available in the world, even though they might not be actualized in the world. On the next stage, you notice a fixed number of the invariants (for example, I discovered seven intentions within myself, the association is with seven colors). There comes a moment when you are not moving along any of them, but only watching the possibilities of these intentions. And here you realize that it is inherent not to an individual, to you as such, but it is a certain universal property of a living man. You are standing in front of them (intentions) and can control them. Then, there comes the moment of reclaiming the world to yourself. You can suddenly realize that all problems of the relation with the world in this place or another, in that time or another (the possibility to master the time) have been actualized. You start differentiating the yet invisible nature of things, more precisely, the picture of the world (not understand, but rather see). It means that the world is getting back to you. There is also the third stage. The position beyond culture – position zero. It is a universal moment, not divisible intention-wise; it is an integral world that is presented before you, and you can view EVERYTHING.

Images from the collection of Urban Media Archive, Center for Urban History. The artist's works from  Aksinin.com .

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