Oleg Tistol

Ukrainian artist Oleg Tistol was born  in Vradiivka, Nikolaev region,Ukraine, in 1960
Graduated from the Kyiv Republican Art School in 1978
Graduated from the Lvov State Institute of Decorative and Applied Arts in 1984

COLLECTIONS
Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Norton Dodge collection, USA; Museum of Moscow history, Moscow; Ministry of Culture of Turkey, Ankara; Christoph Merian Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland; Gradobank collection, Kyiv; Ukrsocbank collection, Kyiv; Va-bank collection, Kyiv; Alpha Capital collection, Kyiv; private collections in Switzerland, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Ukraine and Russia


LINKS

Wikipedia

OLEG TISTOL’S “KHUDFOND”:
SOMETHING ABOUT THE BEAUTY OF STEREOTYPE

by Galina Sklyarenko

The art of Oleg Tistol belongs to such phenomena that ever since the «perestroika times», have defined the main trends in contemporary Ukrainian art. It is clearly illustrated by his regular participation in international art forums (San Paolo Biennale in 1994, Venice Biennale in 2001), as well as by the steady interest in his works by galleries and museums in Russia, Norway, Switzerland, France, and Great Britain. Moreover, despite the fact that, since the late 80-ies (when he began exhibiting), the new Ukrainian art has undergone many changes in the means of expression and artistic strategies, Tistol’s works (paintings, large-scale installations, photos, sculptures, and art objects) have always been in the centre of the Ukrainian artistic process. Furthermore, they were indicating not only the changing of the course of Ukrainian art, but also the milestones of its development.

Among them, there was a concept of “the new stereotype”, pronounced by Oleg Tistol and Konstantin Reunov in the text “A Resolute Edge of National Post-Eclecticism”. At that time (in the late 80-ies) it was considered as a way of modernization (or, more exactly, postmodernization) of Ukrainian art, which was still firmly trapped between folklore and socialist realism. However, over time, the attempts to conceptualize the unfolding post-Soviet epoch run into the problems of national history as well as into the difficulties, connected with the creation of the independent Ukraine’s new cultural project. In this situation, the concept of “the national stereotype” not only had acquired a new meaning, but also broadened in its significance and relevance. The way of “a subjective study of the national context” introduced by Tistol successfully associated with the dialogue between “the local” and “the global”, that is one of the most important and trendy tendencies in contemporary art.

In Ukraine “the construction of a new artistic contexts” (Boris Groys) co-exists with the urgent necessity to reconstruct its own regional context, which is complicated nowadays by the contradictions in the country’s socio-economic, cultural, and political spheres. After all, Ukrainian artists have inherited from the imperial-colonial and soviet-totalitarian past the repressed local history. Therefore, before voting down traditions, they should at first be marked, defined, formalized and brought to a certain “norm”. That was probably the reason of the popularity of the word “normal” in the present culturological and political discussions in Ukraine. Clifford Geertz, in his research, not in vain titled “The Interpretation of Cultures”, compared “the new States” to “the young artists”, who hardly and painfully seek for the personal artistic identity, while choosing between “the routine ways of existence” and following “the spirit of the times”. In this situation, it was namely “the actual art”, which unexpectedly and quickly emerged in Ukraine at the end of the 1980-ies and turned out to be a space of the cultural reflection, where the old and new mythologies, the post-Soviet reality and the search for national identity have found certain “visualization” which does not illustrate, but rather artistically analyze “the Ukrainian subject matter”.

For Oleg Tistol the theme of “stereotype” was formed at the end of 70-ies, when he was studying in the Lvov Institute of Applied Arts and was working as “a type designer for the Khudfond (Art Fund) in Nikolayev. Exactly at that time, while practicing “the art of graphical propaganda”, he discovered for himself the notion of “the simulacrum” - the copy with no original – such a paradoxical self-sustainability of propaganda as substitution for the non-existing items, which unexpectedly unite propaganda with pop-art. Indeed, both the Soviet aesthetics and pop art tend to simplicity, clarity, and legibility using repeated cliché images. The difference lays in the meanings and symbols of ideology and the market. In contrast to the Russian conceptualists, who worked with propaganda images, specially emphasizing the contradictions between the image and its meanings, Tistol was primarily interested in its formal aesthetic aspects (stencil plates, color backing-ups, smoothly painted surfaces) and its material (carton board and tile) which he would later include into his art works. He was also attracting by the principal magic of art - its “ability to visualize and affirm the non-existent” (Alain Вadieu). Oleg Tistol’s art has the roots in the Soviet epoch, and hence comes his distrust to straightforward statements and evident truths as well as his acute sensitivity to situational grotesque, image-bearing expressions and the unexpected “positivity” of Tistol’s irony as a mean of overcoming an ideological pressure. Tistol’s art, that emerged at the edge of the Soviet and post-Soviet epochs, combined both a critique of Soviet culture with re-evaluation of its clichés as well as the vital, joyful and playful atmosphere, which largely defined the look of “the Ukrainian new wave”. Mixing in his works national and Soviet symbols, myths, and utopias, the artist demonstrated his personal vision of reality where the acceptance of life and keenness by the metamorphoses of art gets on with a sense of “defeat”, which is an eternal destiny of contemporary artist who is inescapably bound to reuse the pre-existing forms of visual expression.

Oleg Tistol’s early works, such as the large-scaled paintings “Zinovy Bogdan Khmelnitsky”, “Reunification”, “The Farewell of Slavyanka”, “Exercise with Maces” demonstrated the main features of Ukrainian “new wave” – free game with symbols, the bright expressive colors, and emphatic “exaggeration” of the artistic devices. “New wave” firmly connected Ukrainian art with the theme of “national Baroque” which, in many ways, had defined its tendencies in first half of the 90-ies. Harmony of Baroque art with post-modernist aesthetics and its propensity for mystification and production of illusions not only linked the national historical experience to the contemporary artistic practice, but also allowed to comprehend the paradoxes of the tradition going back to the times of Zaporozhskaya Sech, Liberation wars, and the hetman Mazepa. That closeness to the general artistic problems encouraged many art critics compare the “new Ukrainian wave” with Italian trans-avant-garde.

Meanwhile, the “Neo-Baroque” had played, to some extent, in Ukrainian art the role, which Moscow’s “Sots-art” had. Still, if the Moscow artists subjected “sots-realism” to analysis by taking its conception to its logical conclusion, the Ukrainian artists chose as their “object of study” the national tradition, which often identified as the “Cossack baroque”, with its concentration on long-outdated models and the impossibility to advance to new levels of comprehending reality. This led to ambiguity of stereotypes as well as to the mythological nature of the native world-view and the retrospective glance of its orientations were presented as a drama of culture, traditional features of which did not always preserve exclusively its positive meanings.

In 1984, Oleg Tistol began to work on the project “Ukrainian money” which, without exaggeration, marked a new stage in contemporary Ukrainian art. In the project, which was in progress until 2001 (at the beginning of the 90-ies, it was realized in collaboration with Nikolay Matsenko) Tistol moved from small drawings and etchings to big panel paintings and large-scale installations. Having started at the end of the Soviet epoch with its mythology, where money was a temporary category destined to disappear in the new Communist society, the project “Ukrainian Money” stepped into today’s – capitalist – period when money had become life’s most decisive operating lever. In Tistol’s project, money appeared as a cultural-symbolic category, which not only marks the history of national independence (in 1918 the design for “Ukrainian karbovantzy” was developed by such famous artists as G. Narbut, M. Boychuk, and A. Bogomazov), but also anticipates and reflects the main problem of the contemporary Ukrainian reality: the choice of values, both genuine and false. Combining in this project Ukrainian “historical brands”, such as the legendary Roksolana (a Ukrainian slave girl who eventually married the Ottoman Sultan), Cossack horsemen, hetmans, and pseudo-baroque décor read through the Soviet aesthetics of stencil plates and clichés, the artist introduced the phantoms of national mythology into the explicitly of “marked spaces” of today’s market.

Simultaneously, starting from the middle of the 90-ies, Oleg Tistol and his fellow artist Nikolay Matsenko began to develop the concept of “Natsprom” (“National Industry”), or a study of the national stereotypes fixed in the surrounding environment. Their projects: “The Museum of Ataturk”, “The Museum of Architecture”, “The Museum of Ukraine”, “The Mother of Towns” - which combined painting, photography and art objects - are a perfect example of clarity and adequacy of the concept, as well as strictly determined authors’ position. Architecture appears in this series, as a certain decoration, set capable of providing décor to most surprising life performances. At the same time, after having passed through the filters of artistic vision, both famous and ordinary buildings – the embodiment of gone-by styles and social ambitions – appeared as visions and ghosts, that at any moment are ready to relinquish their place to new architectural fantasies. In this way, the artists’ works drew the Ukrainian public’s attention to an extraordinarily important theme of manipulation with historical heritage marked by the popularity of “architectural re-constructions” which fulfilled many Ukrainian cities, having the traditional layouts, with the stylized fake buildings. It is evident, that in these projects “the Ukrainian myth” had arguably reached its' most grotesque and apologetic finale, having reflected the paradoxical nature of the Ukrainian situation, where the necessity of analysis of still unstudied history was easily substituted by the latter mythological versions.

The theme of “stereotypes” was continued by Oleg Tistol in his painting series “National Geography” where he combined “the local” and “the foreign”, the authentic and the borrowed, the ethnic and the global problematic. The sources of this series were the old illustrated magazines with ethnographic photos of “different tribes”. National exoticism was viewed here as the contemporary strategy of “selling local brands in the global market” (Boris Groys). However, in these works, the artist primarily appealed to the internal Ukrainian situation, to its cult of “the national”, which paradoxically coexist today with the declared European orientation.

In the meantime, the author’s conception of the stereotype acquired some new features, coming from another medium – the photo- and TV-picture, which today are the main operation factors of the visual. Tistol created his own version of “post-media picture”, based on the screen image. In many ways, he was influenced by the events of the Orange revolution of 2004 when the entire country for hours was mesmerized by what it saw on a TV-screen, following the latest developments on the Independence Square. At that time, Tistol produced a series “Television” where he depicted the “screen-shots” of the major news programs by different TV-channels, such as RTR, INTER, and DEUTSCHE WELLE. The artist was interested here in metamorphoses, which the image underwent on the TV-screen, turning the human individuality into a flat media image.

In 2005, Tistol painted the series “Telerealism,” adverting arguably to one of the most important problems of contemporary culture, that of the television’s ability to manipulate situations and characters as well as attaching importance to any kind of image. Transferring TV pictures to canvas, Tistol treated them as ready-mades, objects capable of assuming new meanings in new contexts, or, even more important, of becoming doubly illusionary through the imposition of painting’s illusiveness onto the illusiveness of the TV screen. Transferring a TV screen shot into the format of a painting, the artist connected the former to the tradition of genre painting, and use the new conditions to attract attention to the possibility of reflecting reality (not without reason recent criticism had noted the influence of the screen epoch on the “return to narrative” tendency in contemporary art). Besides, using in these works frequency’s resolution, visually marking pixilation of the media image, typical for photography and cinema, he in fact moves in the direction of traditional painting by constructing canvas’s coloristic space according to the classical rules.

Tistol’s latest project “U. B. K” (the abbreviation for “Southern Coast of Crimea”), on which he had been working since 2007, features a new stereotype as well. As Tistol explains: “Palm trees for me, just as for all other people, are the symbols of paradise. Moreover, in our tradition, the fir tree is a substitute for the palm. Therefore, I always perceived the palm as our ‘national tree’. One can also add here the summer, the Yalta seafront, and the holiday-like feeling of light-heartedness…” However, if, on the level of subject, Tistol’s “Palms” attract with their pointed out simplicity, the real artistic meanings of their figurative ambiguity let one speak of some representative trend. Even more, in contrast to his earlier works, here the irony changes into gentle humor, the grotesque - into lyricism, and the depicted object’s interpretation – into rather exquisite aestheticism. In this series, one can find neither complex design nor intricate historical-cultural reflections nor that collision of meanings, images, and spaces that were characteristic of his earlier works. Here, the artist comes to the peculiar “trivialization of the exotic” and poeticizing of the everyday life, where the banal turns into the festive and the unusual. However, the uncommonness here looks like vacations promising a pleasant rest in the midst of well-known landscapes. It is not accidental that the project includes several cycles of prints made against the background of the pages from school notebooks.

In his “Palms”, Tistol again enters the territory of pop art surprisingly demonstrating the closeness of contemporary perception to “the acceptance of life in all its fullness” formulated by Tom Wesselmann in the 60-ies. However, the impossibility for the artist to transcend stereotypes in the media epoch enables him to create new works through their mutual collision in artistic context and through their assumption of unexpected meanings.

Oleg Tistol’s painting series “Mountains” perhaps most consistently demonstrates his method of work with the stereotype. Begun in 1987, it has included such series as “Landscape”, “Sinai”, “Caucasus”, “Kazbek”, and “Ararat” (2002-2008). All the works in the series are made according to one principle: they feature realistically depicted mountain peaks overlaid with stripes of one-color, with some ornaments stenciled over them. According to artist’s conception, this series has originated from the image on package of “Kazbek” cigarettes, which bare in turn a well-known picture by E. Lancere. In contrast to Lancere, Tistol inverses the process – he brings the image from a non-artistic and profane space into the space of a new picture. However, he does this not through adequate repetition but by a metaphor, that contains both artistic and non-artistic meanings, which results in quotations being imposed on quotations, and conventionality – on conventionality. Still a certain neutral distancing of these paintings reminds one of the well-know Zen parable. Before the Buddhism study, I believed a mountain to be a mountain. After some study of it, I had realized that a mountain was not a mountain, and now, after I have studied Buddhism at length, I have understood that a mountain is a mountain… The quite “simple” “Mountains” by Oleg Tistol are full of ambiguous play of meanings and of that precise and complex correlation of proportions, elements, and signs that give the paintings a special inner life. They possess an enigma and mystery and that is called The Art.