Using museums to shape the public’s perception of the past and the present is far from a new idea. This is especially true when it comes to governments with authoritarian streaks. And we are seeing it again with Russia concerning their current military endeavors in Ukraine. Everyone involved in the ongoing conflict understands that art and culture play an important role in the war’s trajectory and the world’s perception of it. Now, Russia’s government is trying to use museums to push its narrative of the conflict.
Over the past two years, Russia’s armed forces have been responsible for the destruction and appropriation of Ukraine’s culture and national heritage. Cultural organizations have spread themselves thin trying to protect Ukrainian works of art, going as far as to smuggle truckloads of works out of the country for safekeeping in Western Europe, ranging from ancient artifacts to paintings by contemporary artists. Many Ukrainian museums in Russian-held territory now have new staff. These museums are now being repurposed to suit Russia’s needs, including a new museum in Mariupol.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the city of Mariupol came under siege. For nearly three months, the Ukrainian defenders kept the Russians at bay. About 90% of the city was destroyed in the process, while two-thirds of the population fled the area. Many of the city’s museums and galleries were damaged or completely destroyed. Even though the loss of the city to Russia was one of the major early defeats for Ukraine, the amount of time and effort it took for Russia to take the city and the subsequent humanitarian disaster cost Russia dearly on the world stage. However, Russia’s government intends to view Mariupol’s capture not as an invasion but as a liberation, which is the focus of the new museum in Mariupol. According to Russia’s culture minister Olga Lyubimova, the museum will be dedicated to “the modern history of Donbass and Novorossiya”. ‘Novorossiya’ literally means ‘New Russia’, and is a czarist term for southern Ukraine that has been dusted off and used by Putin and pro-Russia groups to refer to Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine.
This new museum in Mariupol is just one of several museums the Russian government is establishing. A document drafted by Russia’s culture ministry specifies what these museums should have on display, including children’s toys stained with blood, ammunition provided by NATO, and knives decorated with swastikas and other Nazi symbols. This last addition serves as a reminder of the Kremlin’s absurd claims that Ukraine’s government constitutes a neo-Nazi state committing genocide of Russian-speaking people in the country.
Russian authorities plan on opening the “liberation” museum this summer… that is unless they lose the city to Ukrainian forces before then.
In the 20th century, more than 3,500 philosophy programs—featuring the likes of Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, and Gilles Deleuze—aired on French television, giving writers and philosophers a certain cultural cachet and a broad footprint. “Lacan, the exhibition. when art meets psychoanalysis,” a show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, charts the impact of one such philosopher: Jacques Lacan, who was also a writer and psychoanalyst. His influence is widely felt in France and abroad, and in 1974, one of his 27 seminars, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” aired on national television.
Among the artworks Lacan engaged in his writing, where they often helped illustrate his philosophical ideas, is Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). In his 13th seminar, Lacan analyzed this piece—shown in Metz as a digital projection—at length, charting out a complicated schema as to how deeper realities emerge through reflection and projection. In this painting, Lacan points out, Velázquez shows the king and queen indirectly, reflected in a mirror at the far back of the scene.Near that projection hangs Velázquez’s painting Infanta Margarita Teresa (1659), loaned from the Louvre, where wall labels focus on the “secret object” that Lacan claimed to have found in that painting, referring to the slit in the middle of the Infanta’s dress. He saw this slit as visual evidence of Spaltung, or splitting, a concept originated by Freud. Lacan elaborated on this concept by claiming that language is what splits us into two parts: our unconscious and our ego, adding that language is thus insufficient to fully communicate who we are.
And of course, there is a section dedicated to the phallus. It contains mostly sculptural abstractions that beg phallic interpretations: Constantin Brancusi’s Princess X (1915–16), Man Ray’s Presse-papier à Priape (1920/1966), and two works by Louise Bourgeois: Janus Fleuri (1968) and Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968–69). There are breast and shit sections too. For Lacan, these were all signifiers of desire, and the phallus especially signified what Lacan termed jouissance: the excitement associated with pleasure or pain. In the “jouissance” room, we see an excerpt from Andy Warhol’s film Blow Job (1964)—a close-up of a young man’s face as he’s fellated—near Bourgeois’s sculpture Arched Figure (1993), which depicts a headless male body lying supine with an arched back.
