Why Provocation Matters: featuring Masha Luch
Updated: Oct 28
Girl Tears. Analogue digital rendering by Masha Luch.
Provocation and bursting the bubble of commonality is essentially what makes an artist experimental and avant-garde. As a result, there are few artists who can match the provocative levels of Masha Luch, both conceptually and literally. Masha Luch is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans moving-image, motion-graphics, photo collage, installation, textiles, printmaking, and book-making. With a background in fashion design, she is originally from Siberia and eventually found herself residing in Montenegro, where she exhibits her work across Europe.
Sometimes the provocations in Masha Luch’s works are subtle and other times they are literally overt. She deals with themes such as provocative sensuality, cultural criticism, cultural satire, conceptual irony, and institutional criticism. Her works can be as in-your-face as glorifying genitalia or abrasive sexual innuendos or personalized seduction to more subtle overtones such as depicting girl tears as a collection in a physical installation or a goldfish trapped in a balloon to depict the entrapment, cynicism, and pleasure from popular culture. Some of her works can be more somber, such as a carpet textile she weaved depicting a cropped scene from her childhood memories in Siberia. At first the carpet may seem abstract, but is in fact a silhouette of the top of an empty chair covered in linen against a window sill.
As the world has become more censored and authoritarian with the role of institutions locking their grasp on nearly every aspect of ‘acceptable discourse’, artists who are provocative, such as Masha Luch, are critically important in advancing avant-garde principles. These principles entail artwork which is honest and challenges dominant narratives and commercialized gatekeepers with conceptual provocations. Much like performance artist Fina Ferrara, Masha Luch also shares a desire to treat the visual arts as a sort of playground to mold to their personal imaginations and conceptual musings.
There was a brief time when I quit Instagram (I currently have a private account) and maintained only my Linkedin account. Masha Luch followed me on Linkedin to keep in touch with my updates and created an account. She found Linkedin to be insufferable and discussed how she found the corporate environment to be cold and bland. I have to agree with her, Linkedin is a trash website just like Instagram, but at least on Instagram, you have better access to your colleagues when you want to share content. Masha eventually stopped becoming active on Linkedin and resided on her usual Instagram presence, this made me decide to create a private account to stay connected with the artists I have published. The point of the story is Masha Luch is not interested in the ‘polite society’ of art and business, she creates art because the process is fun, liberating, and gives her a chance to push boundaries and buttons.
The realm of provocation allows a conceptual artist such as Masha Luch to reassess our value systems. For example, Masha will often deal with the themes of sensuality and sex. What exactly is our collective attitude towards sex? On the one hand, segments of our society try to suppress notions of sex at all costs, while at the same time encouraging the behavior as long as being sanctioned along certain lines. Almost as if society regards sex as a closely guarded secret which must be regulated to only certain circumstances and instances. This contradiction of constantly suppressing and glorifying sex at the same time is what Masha Luch challenges in her works. She in essence portrays sensuality as a pleasure which should be indulged for the sake of spontaneity, enlightenment, and challenging conventional norms. In other words, she views sensuality as perfectly normal behavior.
The variety in Masha’s works also go beyond sensuality into isolation and despair. For example, she sometimes will portray video footage of her neighbors doing their laundry, superimposing their mundane tasks onto the galaxy, a disco ball, or even on a luxury mirror. Masha Luch will also deconstruct common objects into pure absurdity to express bored nihilism, such as a pile of teacups with no pouring or sipping capacity, essentially sealed off.
With provocation, whether subtle or apparent, we relieve the subtle tension which stifles collectives and individuals to be heard. Provocation matters because we are essentially forced to rethink how we interpret and deal with various subject matter, such as the relevancy of institutions in institutional criticism or the absurdities of a society which both suppresses and glorifies sensuality and sexuality.
In the end, the established gatekeepers have limited power. Their bark is bigger than their bite. Once we deconstruct the supposed value systems of institutions in the conventional art world, we can collectively realize the avant-garde can establish themselves as the enlightened realm to share knowledge, experiences, and provocations. As long as the avant-garde can learn to stick together, the commercialized art world cannot compete with us, because we are the ones who hold the truth and enlightenment with a genuine intention to advance the arts towards an organic path of expanding critical discourse. In other words, the present and future belongs to us, not them. They are living in the past.
