Just playing: Valera and Natasha Cherkashin

The paper outlines the game preconditions of artistic creativity of the artist Valera Cherkashin (Valery T.Cherkashenko, was born 1948 in Liptsy village, Kharkiv region, USSR) during the 1960s–1980s, as well asthe first period of his collaboration with Natasha Cherkashin (Natalia S. Polyakova, born 1958 in Damascus, Syria). From the first half of the 1960s to the 1980s, V.Cherkashin organized a number of art events in Kharkiv, using elements of Soviet and Western mass culture. Cherkashin’s artworks blur the boundaries between traditional genres and styles in the visual arts. While experimenting with the art form, Cherkashins in addition to the language of art action have been using the language of photography, of cinema, painting, graphics and video. Artists continue to create art in different media. Currently, Cherkashin’s artworks are in the collections of the leading museums and corporate collections around the world. The aim of the research is to reveal the ontological, methodological and axiological bases of Cherkashin’s artistic creativity. During the analysis the playing preconditions in Cherkashins’ creativity. Feelings of tension and joy, as well as sense of otherness are inherent in all the artistic work of the Cherkashins. V.Cherkashin creates a new conceptual meaning—the image of the “other” in the early photographic series of 1965–1966 and the image of a social outcast who is between two worlds in 1972. During Cherkashin’s play, the seriousness is eliminated, it becomes funny. The funny side of Cherkashins’ artworks is rooted in harmless nonsense. Artists turn ideological and verbal codes and images into “funny nothing”. Joyful life-affirming laughter in the Cherkashins’ works is the second “actor,” along with the ‘new plasticity.’ Biographical, conceptual, descriptive-phenomenological methods of analysis, comparative studies and hermeneutics were used during the research.