The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

don’t need to advertise anything) with instantly younger, clearer faces and that radiant reticence in their eyes, the inwardness that women can preserve even when their souls find the most intimate concord, so that they resemble two young mothers adoring their offspring—as if watching, from the distance of many years, their children rather than themselves, or, even more than that, two suddenly ageless friends who just entered a pact over a secret, enacting an unspoken rite of sisterhood to which boys are not privy. This gives the boys at the scene—the director and the cameraman—an instant and suspiciously unanimous urge to take a break, smoke a cigarette, change the tape, do something to turn down the heat and announce their existence, to restore order to the world—as one does at home when one’s wife is too engrossed in a phone conversation with a friend, and one feels the need to let the wife know, in sign language, that she’s not the only one who gets to use the phone or, more desperately, by letting a plate crash to the kitchen floor. Take a break, girls, take a break.
    After the break, which, like it or not, does drain some of the passion from the women’s inopportune lyrical exaltation, the interviewer—like a trotter that broke stride, loped off, and had to be brought back into the race—regains form, returns to her businesslike tone, and unleashes a compensatory flood of erudition to make up for lost ground, like the straight-A student suspected of not having done her homework (although no teachers are found in the picture) and determined to restore her sterling reputation.]
    “Vladyslava, what you said makes me re-evaluate the European reception of your show
Secrets
—and we remind our viewers that, before coming to Switzerland, the show was mounted in Germany, at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, as well as at a private gallery in Copenhagen...more on that later.... I’ve read the reviews in
Süddeutsche Zeitung
and
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, and I was surprised to find that the writers hailed, as they put it, your ‘innovative use of Byzantine icon-painting techniques,’ as if it were the most remarkable thing about your work. I’m no art historian, of course, but I know enough to know that any really innovative uses of icon-painting techniques ended with Boychuk—when he and his students were executed and their works destroyed—and it’s difficult to classify you as a new-Boychukist. Your works can be said to trace their origins to Dubuffet, with whom you’ve also been compared, but your collages on silver and gold, in my opinion, are more interesting.”
    “Thank you.” [The painter smiles, with a professional dose of skepticism.]
    “Another artist who comes to mind is László Moholy-Nagy and how he pioneered the technique of layering surfaces to give a painting a third dimension, depth.” [The reporter realizes she’s monopolized the conversation and, possibly, having run out of her straight-A student zeal—now that she’s had a chance to show off—apologizes to the painter with an earnest, almost childish smile that offers a wordless plea, but the painter obviously does not register such subtleties: she is focused on the ideas and waits for the next question.] “Basically, it seemed to me that Western reviewers really didn’t have a context into which they could readily fit you: they don’t know much about Ukrainian art; Russia is their closest reference, hence all this Byzantine talk. But, on the other hand, maybe they could see something we don’t because we see your works from our inside point of view—namely, this mystifying kinship between children’s secrets and icons?”
    “It’s really not all that mystifying, the kinship.” [The painter leans forward again, jutting out her pugnacious chiseled chinlike a small clenched fist.] “Personally I strongly suspect that the game, when it first appeared, imitated something that adults were doing—burying icons.”
    [The interviewer gasps, opens her poppy-red mouth, and forgets to close it.]
    “Really, I mean it. Early thirties. We forget one thing about collectivization: when those food brigades came, they didn’t just clean out pantries or take valuable goods—shearling coats, rolls of fabric, stuff like that. Displaying icons in the home was instantly incriminating. They were either destroyed on the spot or taken away, if they had any value: gold plating would be stripped off and the boards themselves