The Brooklyn Rail

The Phantom Museum is one of the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw’s (MSN Warszawa) debut pieces in their new building—a large round table on the ground floor of Poland’s new cultural flagship, designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners, topped with small, precious objects by Ukrainian artists. Artworks at The Phantom Museum are reconstructed versions of Ukrainian items looted by Russian soldiers, now on view at museums in Russia. The show was guided by artist Olya Gaidash, who commissioned Ivan Bazak, Oleksandr Koshchei, and Violett e a to reconstruct Scythian gold earrings, a figurative vessel in the form of a leg, gold funeral eyelets, glass cups, and other ephemera previously sited at museums in Kherson and Crimea, now on display in various Russian venues. According to Daša Anosova, writing in PIN–UP, the show’s concept is derived from “phantom pain,” and the recuperative, therapeutic act of recovering from a lost limb, that of using a mirror to see a body part you no longer have in order to lessen the pain. “The Phantom Museum recommissions historical artifacts without access to the originals, instead asking artists to reconstruct these objects based on their memories or imaginations, building shared ideas through conversations among The Phantom Museum team members,” Anosova said.

War robs peoples of life, possessions, and memories. Art history becomes a battleground: How should we spell this artist’s name? Where did they come from? How do we talk about Constructivism after Mariupol? This dynamic has become more openly discussed in recent years, especially in relation to conversations surrounding Great Russian Culture™, and the extent to which culture itself is levied as a tool of soft power of the Foucauldian variety. A new retrospective indebted to Constructivist Volodymyr Tatlin—often known for his Monument to the Third International (also known as Tatlin’s Tower) and “flying machines”—masterfully, delicately, and creatively explores these antagonisms at New York’s Ukrainian Museum in a show curated by Peter Doroshenko and Iryna Tofan, not unlike the work on view today at MSN Warszawa.

Tatlin: Kyiv features journals, models, drawings, furniture, and exhibitions designed by Tatlin when he lived in Ukraine between 1925 and 1927, but also works made by his students at the Kyiv Art Institute, where he directed the Theater, Film, and Photography Department. (These works are on loan from the National Art Museum of Ukraine; the Dovzhenko Center; the Museum of Theatre, Music, and Cinema of Ukraine; the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine; and the Adamovskiy Foundation.) Original copies of avant-garde journals Кино (“Cinema”) and Нова ґенерація (“New Generation”) and other artifacts speak to Tatlin’s peripatetic and sometimes bewildering story, from the time he was born in Kharkiv in 1885, ran away from home, moved to Penza, found work as a sailor and amateur boxer (where he was paid to lose fights), established himself as one of the twentieth century’s leading artists, went to Moscow, only to later die in destitute poverty. “He flew too close to the sun,” Tofan told me one afternoon at the Ukrainian Museum while touring the show, like Icarus.

The retrospective takes up two rooms of the East Village museum’s ground floor. One section, where the walls are painted in red, features what one may expect from a show about Tatlin’s Kyiv years: drawings, magazine covers, chairs, photos of the artist himself. These pieces are beautiful in their own right, but where things truly get surreal and delicious is the central room, lacquered in a powder green that curators contend was the interior color of Tatlin’s actual Kyiv apartment. The central room is a work of parafiction: two contraptions made of pussywillow branches hang from the ceiling, studies of Tatlin’s flying machines reconstructed using methods true to Tatlin’s own approach, while a small bed with a video of a white stork projected onto it sits nearby. A bandura (Ukrainian guitar) and mask are pinned to the wall.

A small tin water bucket with lily pads is next to the bed, not far from a desk like the one Tatlin worked from. Upon visiting the room, one can’t help but ask: Why the lily pads? And the stork? What are these things doing in a show about the late-great Tatlin? “One day in Kyiv, Tatlin found a white stork, which he took home with him,” Tofan said. “To feed the stork, he kept frogs in a bucket in his apartment. His landlord ordered him to get rid of the frogs and the stork because, when it got bigger, it began poking holes in the floors with its beak. But Tatlin refused. His landlord really hated him.” Tofan described Tatlin’s time in Kyiv as his “dreamer” years. “His mother was Ukrainian, he spoke Ukrainian, she spoke Ukrainian, he played songs in Ukrainian with a bandura. He had freedom, support, and the ability to interact with students, giving him the opportunity to develop ideas,” Tofan said.

Tatlin: Kyiv’s curatorial approach hearkens back to MSN Warszawa’s The Phantom Museum. In both instances, curators and artists dealt with loss, and both reconstructed objects and moments based on their own informed intuition. When pouring through canonical texts about Tatlin, like those by Norbert Lynton (Tatlin’s Tower), it’s easy to forget that in fact the founder of Constructivism was a very weird person, and, oh yeah, Ukrainian! Tatlin was a stowaway-turned-sailor-turned-amateur boxer who kept birds and frogs in his apartment. This was a man who really, really believed he would someday build a flying bicycle that would deliver him above the streets of Kyiv, like the figures in Marc Chagall’s Over the town (1918). Tatlin: Kyiv does an amazing job humanizing this great artist whose story has, for so long, been often flattened and de-humanized by stuffy art history Ph.D.s, who sadly overlooked Tatlin’s Bushwick DJ with no bedframe days in Kyiv before finding fame, glory, and repression in Moscow. Tatlin: Kyiv ultimately reframes a canonical figure in a new light, masterfully avoiding the dull and colonial pitfalls past curators and writers have fallen into, offering a brilliant case study moving forward when talking about Constructivism, all while honoring the movement’s truly radical roots. In other words, Tatlin: Kyiv is really weird, and that’s how it should be.