Flight

It is widely believed that outstanding events can only be understood at a distance, and that evaluations should not be undertaken unless a span of time has elapsed. But what does this distancing from the blinding occurrence signify? How do we treat the experience we accumulated as the distance increased, overlaying our vision of the event and changing our perspective? Which perspective is more authentic: the one borne of the unmediated proximity to the event, or the distanced view transformed and defused by layers of time, memory and knowledge? Other than the accumulation of information, what else transpires between “the hot phase” and the emergence of the new knowledge? Could the initial knowledge be destroyed by information?

It is likely that, as an event grows more distant, accumulated knowledge corrupts, defuses or suppresses the initial perception, but it is also likely that it might heighten and clarify the vision.

Be that at it may, it is definitely a movement, and a large part of it is firmly obscured. The road from the initial idea to the end result inevitably contains detours, disorientation and circuitous routes, so the end point, while neither a product nor a summation of earlier stages, might be the most precise equivalent to the starting point. Calculated and logical steering might lead one onto a false path, and those tracking the route, too, can be led astray. Sometimes I start to think about one thing, only to stumble across something else entirely while working. The road seems to lie through a blind zone, so to speak. It is a complicated, arcane maze suitable for one person only: the walker.

Obviously, one might map out a clear progression from the source (an idea or a question) and follow all the rules, but this logical course is an object of ceaseless surveillance from without, and always leads astray; something is always off. Imaginary responsibility foisted from without seems to obstruct free movement by suppressing responsibility coming from within. The hidden movement in the depths has many beginnings and endings, repetitions, overlays, U-turns and pauses. One might say that actions find room for themselves in the movement towards things, between a word and a thing. Only the start and end points, the thought and its embodiment, remain relatively visible, while everything between them is obscured and unclear, outside the range of the external surveillance camera.

In my unrealized project, The Emancipation Act, I considered an omnipresent image of a kind, a boundless painting presenting itself wherever I chose to show it. This time I would rather consider the plane of a canvas as an obstacle I continuously encounter on my way from an idea to an object, an obstacle in the sphere of actions. I make manifest the objectless nature of an action freed of things on the plane of the canvas. Work of this kind is a risky balance between a yes and a no. I ignore the visible in favor of freedom, which always lies outside what is shown, outside presentation. I seemingly avoid the visible, only to meet it halfway.

“The first question one has to answer is whether to speak or to remain silent, to say yes or no to the world. It is not existence that tells one whether one should say yes or no to existence, to stay silent or to speak; each individual is a seismograph that can switch himself on or off freely, but go figure why he is free, or why he is using this freedom in this or that way. Freedom cannot be grasped from without, it is a mystery.” (V.V. Bibikhin, The Inner Form of the Word, p.367).

To confront the blank canvas time and time again is to celebrate the culmination instead of recording it after the fact. I confront the obstacle of the canvas and make gestures visible by interrupting (transmogrifying) free movement (unfreedom). Silence becomes a word that “is not a lie, and neither is it exclusively symbolic. The word is reality because the entirety of reality is a word. The new realism has to approach nature as a sign” (V.V. Bibikhin, The Inner Form of the Word, p.328).

I grasp nature before it is obstructed by things.

* * *

The clash between the abundant freedom in thoughts and the freedom of movement in reality prompted my reflections about the conditions under which freedom can be realized. Is the initial idea bound before its implementation, only to be emancipated in its embodiment, or vice versa? By leaving the process of implementation in the dark, I highlight the start and end points.

Actually, when reflecting on freedom, I often thought about the possibility of free flight. I remembered the utopian statements of Tatlin, who called for the subjugation of an eye to touch, tying art to life. (Dadaists celebrated his works as “machine art.”) Unexpectedly, his flying machine provided a sort of key to my question. It turned out that the flying apparatus that, Tatlin believed, would “enter the quotidian life of the Soviet masses as an object of mass consumption,” could not soar. Meticulous calculations and designs for this object of “intimate aviation,”* therefore, belonged to the zone of freedom in a completely different sense: the freedom of art. The utilitarian logic of purposes and objectives made way for the fundamentally different logic of an artwork.

The main obstacle to free flight, it turned out, was its literal rather than figurative biomorphism: Tatlin’s artificial wings recreated those of a bird. The apparatus that was supposed to give humankind the freedom of movement through space took the form of bird wings, and this literal similarity became an obstacle.

In a sense, I turned this similarity in the opposite direction in my works. While keeping Tatlin’s formulae and designs in mind, I eschewed their rigid functional necessity in favor of unconstrained drawing, shaking them free of concrete practical meanings. As the example of wings unfit for flight demonstrates, the embodiment of the idea of free movement may differ significantly from the original notion; moreover, it might turn into its opposite. Tatlin’s flying machine acquired the properties of a free object due to this disconnect. Despite its utilitarian conception, the objectification of an idea in ideas-turned-objects, as suggested by constructivists, became a purely artistic act. When criticized for the fact that his teakettle could not be used to make tea, Malevich noted that this object was not intended for a tea party. Only artistic actions manifest the unerring progression of freedom, impossible outside thoughts, from the initial idea to its implementation, even if reality differs radically from the original spark.

Taking stylized outlines of wings and other constructive elements of planes and earlier flying machines as my starting point, I focused exclusively on free combinations of forms and lines. Ignoring their pragmatic function, I ostensibly reinvented real objects in the process. Reflecting on the theme of free flight, I produced freedom as constrained only by the plane of the canvas and the choice of an almost monochrome palette instead of expanding the freedom of movement by proffering practical solutions for overcoming gravity. I could not realize the initial idea of emancipating movement in flight unless I cultivated the specific state of thoughtful discipline and meticulous precision when working. My freedom found embodiment through a series of limitations, and discovered itself in difference, if not in its exact opposite.

Volodymyr Budnikov. Kyiv – Kaniv, May – August 2018
* Anatolii Stryhaliov

The Optics of Flight

The propensity for free movement under any circumstances is the primary defining characteristic of Volodymyr Budnikov’s character, and is, without a doubt, one of the most accurate descriptors of his art. In the Flight series, he addressed the topic directly, exploring it meticulously and often from unexpected angles. Adopting the freedom of flight as his key motif, Budnikov uses it as foundations for a system of meditations on freedom as such, or, more precisely, on the conditions that make it possible. Budnikov explores flight as the freedom to resist predetermination and limitations imposed on humankind by nature, society, historical traditions, and more. The artist proceeds from concrete plans to conquer the air and individual attempts to become airborne in the primeval yearning to peek past the edge of the transcendental towards conclusions about the impossibility of acquiring freedom just by building wings. Imagery associated with flight lies on the very surface of these works, and simultaneously serves as a key to the crucial, ancient and perennial question of what art is, and how to recognize it. In Flight, Budnikov juxtaposes the idea’s original speculative status with its realization, and analyzes the artist’s journey during work. Essentially, the artist equates the preconditions of freedom and the circumstances under which an artist’s work comes to bear on an artistic act.

The main works of the series were inspired by reflections on Leonardo da Vinci’s and Tatlin’s designs for flying apparatuses. They interested the artist precisely because these flying machines were intended for individual movement through the air and, accordingly, for literal personal freedom: the muscle power of one person was expected to suffice to bring each of these models into movement.

Budnikov began his work on Flight with almost non-narrative drawings that offered glimpses of chaotic natural forms which gradually fell into order, arranging themselves from drawing to drawing into structural elements similar to Tatlin’s blueprints for wings. The artist began, it seems, by procuring airworthy forms for the natural chaos. And yet, the moment the images in given works transformed into a semblance of objects and risked becoming recognizable, the project changed direction, backpedaled and plunged back into abstraction. During these transformations, the line of horizon—the only recognizable spatial feature in the works—takes on the main form-bearing function, occasionally disorienting the viewer, changing its slant and becoming an axis around which the provisional landscape glimpsed during a breathtaking free fall revolves.

Budnikov literally turns Tatlin’s “programmatic” quote—“to seek neither the new nor the old but the necessary”—on its head, lending it poignant clarity. Tatlin, it seems, formulates with his entire artistic output a fairly sophisticated question regarding the understanding of a notion as self-evident as necessity in simple words. It might seem at first glance that, enamored with the prospect of a new order of things, Tatlin and other Constuctivists sought to introduce some as yet unseen utilitarianism and justify art, despite its marginal position, by harnessing the artist to the good of the system. Volodymyr Budnikov meanwhile affirms this attempt to “reeducate” artists into taking on a more productive métier as a free artistic act, but does so through a singular research stance. He transforms the expediency of drafts, calculations, designs and engineering constructions into an expediency of an altogether different kind, namely, the expediency of an art act no longer understood as movement predefined by its goal. To the contrary, Budnikov ascribes separate and primary value to the energy of movement as such, which has its font in the dark, obscure and shifting powers of the process. The moment work on a project starts to slow and get bogged down by itself, “it pulls itself out of the bog by its own hair,” finding strength where it was seemingly at an end. Therefore, the artist’s toil consists of endless “revisions,” redraftings and repaintings naturally supporting and literally embodying the reframing of the initial idea in the process of implementation. Budnikov transforms a practical engineering project into a projection looming in the future as a ghostly emanation, impossible to grasp and use as an object.

In some works, Budnikov makes a conscious and daring choice to approach freedom that only children can afford: namely, to make public the actions that are not yet limited by experience. Paradoxically, he liberates gestures, turning blueprints and documentary descriptions of objects of private aviation, with their engineering and constructive restrictions, into free drawings. This is somewhat similar to Budnikov’s work on the Objects project (1999), where he imitated the actions of a carpenter and a house-painter, sawing up planks, hammering in nails, painting and installing the structures he created. He did so with a twist though: the artist ignored the final pragmatic goal (the construction of something “necessary,” like a picket fence or a house) and built something “unnecessary” instead, thus questioning the importance of results whose materiality in their “utilitarian incarnation” inevitably exhausts itself with the flow of time, becoming obsolete or deteriorating. The Flight project ridicules the very idea of finitude in a range of art exercises. Budnikov affirms an art act not as a document but as a deed open to the next leap. For Budnikov, an act is a demonstration of a gap, incompleteness, energy as a core value.

Flight might be the most abstract of Budnikov’s Kaniv projects: the theme of the place where the main body of works was created is bracketed out. And yet it was the mythological component of Kaniv as the dreamland and a ritual site of the presence of “Shevchenko’s shadow” on the political map of Ukraine that pushed the series to depart from a fixed notion of space and to soar in imaginary flight right from Kaniv cliffs towards an undefined horizon, the original boundary of freedom. This site became an “explosion zone” for Budnikov: e.g., in his Shelter project (2015) a nuclear mushroom cloud appears as a protective umbrella. Attuned to avant-garde ideology, the artist rejects the illusory protection of flimsy constructs that accumulate layers of familiar meanings of various shapes, and sets out on his own investigation in something similar to complete darkness and zero gravity.

Budnikov constructs his own provisional wings as a living form dependent on nothing but the arbitrary movement of the artist’s hand (the heavy iron Wings from the Heat project of 2010 come to mind). Much like in the Brechtian comparison of a trembling human hand to the trembling hand of a compass, Budnikov tracks the direction of thought with a high degree of precision, and uncovers it in each case at an unexpected and unpredictable phase. He never knows in advance where he’ll stop, and as the result the trajectory of each movement and touch to the surface of a work during the entire process seems to be under high voltage, naked and sensitive to the most fleeting impulses radiated by the concealed black eye of the idea’s “projector.”

Vlada Ralko
Kaniv – Kyiv, August - October 2018

*The project was supported by ChervoneChorne Art Group