Khidekel ââåitã¢ââ¢s the Real Thing Soviet and Postsoviet Sots Art and American Pop Artã¢ââ
Материалы
Action Art: Performances, Actions, Happenings
Objects, Installations and Ready-Mades
Conceptualism and Sots Art
The Thaw and the 1960s. The Nativity of the Underground
Socialist Realism
Artistic Life in the Soviet Union after the Oct Revolution of 1917
Russian Avant-garde
Russian Modern
Акции, перформансы, хеппенинги
Искусство действия от футуристов до Павленского
Объекты, инсталляции, реди-мейды
Почему искусством стали кучи мусора и меховые чашки
Концептуализм и соц‑арт
Всё про Илью Кабакова, Эрика Булатова и Комара с Меламидом
Оттепель и шестидесятые: рождение андеграунда
Как Хрущев дал жизнь неофициальному искусству
Соцреализм
Какой стиль живописи создал Сталин
Искусство после революции: художник и власть
Как и когда появилось новое советское искусство
Русский авангард
Что придумали Малевич, Кандинский, Татлин и «бубновые валеты»
Русский модерн
Как Дягилев, Бенуа и Бакст изменили русскую действительность
Conceptualism and Sots Art
Here's Stalin, in generalissimo uniform and striped trousers, enjoying a drink with a scantily clad Marilyn Monroe. A huge calico brawl is floating down the river Klyazma, with lots of inflated balloons and one ringing electrical bell inside it. And here's a public toilet – but with Soviet apartments backside the doors to the Ladies' and the Gents'. All of this is Russian Conceptualism.
It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that about all gimmicky art descends from Duchamp's ready-mades. From his work Fountain, to be more than specific – an ordinary urinal exhibited every bit a work of fine art. This 1917 object tin can besides be considered the outset piece of Conceptualism, a movement that had not yet been formalised as a phenomenon and had not yet been given a proper noun. This would happen much later, in the 1960s.
American artist Joseph Kosuth would become the real father of the already articulated Conceptualism. In 1965, he created his major piece One and Iii Chairs. This is an installation comprising a chair, a photo of the chair and a dictionary entry with the definition of the word 'chair'. The chair is presented as one in iii entities. Moreover, every fourth dimension the work is exhibited, only the dictionary definition remains unchanged – the chair and its photograph are different each time. Kosuth has reprised this piece with several other objects – a shovel, a mirror, a hammer, a saw, and so on.
At the age of 24, Kosuth wrote an essay titled Art subsequently Philosophy, in which he claimed that traditional fine art, and modernist art in particular, was coming to an end, and that it was now fourth dimension to study the nature of art rather than to create it. The main thesis of the piece is "Art is the power of an idea, not a cloth." Any object can go a conceptual object, likewise as whatever documentation on the object: a text about the exhibit itself replaces the showroom. A conceptual object can't exist sold and is excluded from the commercial field, because there is in fact nothing to sell – there is no craftsmanship in its execution, no aesthetics, and no novelty. This is art defended to how art is organised: that is the tautology.
Conceptualism was built-in out of disappointment in the quondam film of the world broadcast by traditional art. What is traditional art? It is a kind of art more or less based on the principle of mimesis, the imitation of something that exists in reality. The artist depicts something that can be compared with its epitome exterior the picture – a painted chair and a real chair. We can approximate the skill of the creative person based on this correlation; nosotros can estimate it in different ways: one person might see great skill in the exact replication of the natural world, while others, on the contrary, might run into this in the expressiveness of conventional artistic language. This measure of evaluation does be, it is objectively possible. Of course, modern art tries to overcome mimesis, and it succeeds – abstruse art doesn't direct correlate to anything exterior itself, for example. Merely this is the point where artistic ambitions take off: a sure gesture of primacy, the manifestation of ane'due south self. Just who gave the creative person the correct to manifest their Self? This is i of the main issues for Conceptualists.
For Conceptualists, the very necessity of the presence of the author in a piece is compromised. Personal presence is a matter of having a singled-out style, a signature, or a single discussion uttered in the showtime person, all of which is interpreted every bit a totally unfounded claim to power. To the ability that is manifested in the statement: "I am the author, this is my space, I created something that didn't exist earlier." This unfounded claim to power is denied and exposed to ironic disparagement and playful deconstruction. Since the initial thesis is that everything has already been said and created, the task is now to deal with the private pieces that reality has cleaved into, agreement the possibilities of fine art, its boundaries, and its context.
There are many words in Conceptualism – this is, after all, a class of art that speaks well-nigh itself, and with no less articulation than a paper past an art historian. In literature, Conceptualists strive to free language from credo. They work with hackneyed phrases and with linguistic clichés alienated from the man beingness – for examples of which nosotros might recollect Vladimir Sorokin's prose, Lev Rubinstein'due south poetry on index cards, or Prigov's poems written in the person of a character by the proper noun of Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov. As for the visual arts, the central outcome of Conceptualism is that of words and images.
On the 1 mitt, here the image of an artist or a poet loses its usual romantic connotations. On the other, Boris Groys writes of "romantic Moscow conceptualism" in his 1979 commodity. Permit's move on to the Soviet Union of the 1960s and '70s to understand this contradiction, and at the same time identify some key differences between Russian and Western Conceptualism.
One of the start works of Russian conceptualism is Answers of the Experimental Grouping by Ilya Kabakov. This looks like a picture (rectangular, hanging on a wall) but instead of an image in that location are scraps of mundane texts with signatures that form an absurd polyphonic unity. Kabakov created other pieces in the form of stands – including the most famous example with the fly. A dingy surface, a barely visible fly, and various remarks about it. "Whose wing is this? This is Olga Leshko'southward fly." The poor fly, presented every bit an exhibit, is enclosed in people's words and can't exist outside of them, without belonging to someone – because there is nothing but language. And this Soviet language of slogans, figures, reports and schedules, route signs and official documents invades the life of the private in an aggressive fashion.
In the 1980s, Kabakov once again picked upward the leitmotif of the wing with an installation entitled The Life of a Fly. In this, representatives of various different sciences argue about the fly and their speech is commented on. But the creative person'due south main theme shines forth most prominently in his before piece about the wing – it is the topic of Soviet communal living, the forced community of people. This is covered in many of his works, as for example in his 1989 installation Communal Kitchen. Western Conceptualism had no such topic – it but had nowhere to grow from. On the ane hand, the question of the fly's ownership is poetics of Dadaist absurdity. On the other, the issue of a subject's ownership is a legitimate and vital question for the globe of a communal flat.
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Ilya Kabakov. Anna Yevgenyevna Korolyova: Whose fly is this? 1987
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Ilya Kabakov. Ride on a diesel boat. 1970–1971
The kommunalka or 'communal apartment' was the essence of a Soviet person's world, a space which paradoxically combined the collective and the most sacred. Kabakov said: "The kommunalka is a good metaphor for Soviet life, because it is impossible to live at that place, but there'south no other way to alive either, as it is virtually impossible to exit a communal flat." So he nails the simple objects of Soviet life, like a grater and a mug, onto blank painted panels, exhibiting them just similar the fly. He draws bunny rabbits with carrots, combining them with obscene texts written in the exemplary bang-up letters of a kid. He creates installations out of the notes and phrases that the residents of a communal flat leave for each other. A schedule for taking out the trash written for six years in accelerate, from 1979 to 1984, becomes the topic'due south climax.
In the early 1970s, Kabakov's showtime albums come out – Vshkafusidyashchy Primakov (Primakov Sitting-in-a-Cupboard), Poletevshiy Komarov (Komarov Who Flew), and and then on: they are shown to those who come up to his studio. Each anthology represents the story of a Soviet eccentric, unremarkably living in a communal apartment. These are strange solitary characters, often artists, who endeavour to somehow protect their lives from the unsafe outside earth. Primakov refuses to leave the closet and sees the world through its doors, while the decorator Malygin is afraid to go into the middle of a room and hides in its corners. The story nigh e'er ends the same manner – accessing the irrational: the hero disappears, dissolving into the mystical whiteness of the album sheets. Kabakov would then open all the albums in an exhibition space, making an installation out of them, with each character and their story given a compartment in a communal residence. One from which they would be able to fly off once more into whiteness and emptiness. The Homo Who Flew into Space from His Apartment is an installation that was made in the 1980s; it shows the remains of a catapult in a room, and a gaping hole in the ceiling.
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Ilya Kabakov. In the closet. From the Sitting-in-the-Cupboard Primakov anthology. 1972
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Ilya Kabakov. Female parent's Room. From the Sitting-in-the-Closet Primakov album. 1971
The subject of whiteness, emptiness, and radiance informs the metaphysical dimension of Moscow Conceptualism. Though an important component of Soviet Conceptualism, this subject never came up among Western Conceptualists. Viktor Pivovarov's albums reverberate this likewise. The texts accompanying Pivovarov's drawings are written in the language and handwriting of impersonal safety notices, similar to Kabakov's. For example, his 'rules of life' institute in the album Projects for a Lonely Person resemble the fume or radiation hazard notices of Soviet signage. The same theme is developed in the album Sakralizatory (or 'Sacralisers'). Since every isolated person's life goes by in an alien outside environment, i needs means with which to protect oneself from it. Pivovarov therefore suggests using 'sacralisers', a term he applies to everyday objects that are tied to the body. A coat hanger, for example, or a roll of toilet paper on one'south nose.
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Viktor Pivovarov. From the album Projects for a Lonely Man. 1975
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Viktor Pivovarov. From the album Projects for a Solitary Homo. 1975
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Viktor Pivovarov. From the album Projects for a Lonely Man. 1975
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Viktor Pivovarov. From the album Projects for a Lonely Homo. 1975
The topic of emptiness was an important ane for Andrei Monastyrsky, the founder of the group Commonage Deportment and one of the most important figures of Moscow Conceptualism. The group'southward Trips out of Town, volumes of information on the group'southward performances, also figure among the almost important things that happened in this circumvolve. The Conceptualist term 'empty action' is connected with deportment where zippo happens and the time spent waiting for something to happen is itself filled with significant. The actions are completely absurdist, simply they are absurd with a smack of Taoism or Zen Buddhism – something alike to the sound of one paw clapping.
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Commonage Actions group. Sphere activeness. 1977
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Collective Actions group. Sphere action. 1977
Take the action Appearance. An invited audition appears on the edge of Izmailovskoye Field. On the other side, beyond the field, two figures are moving towards the audition; on approaching, they hand out pieces of paper confirming the holder's presence at this outcome on a certain date. That'south the minimalism of information technology. The members of the audience are also the participants, and may be unaware that the walk out of the wood and across the field was the action itself and zero more. The artistic work consists of pure time – the journey to the coming together place – every bit well as documentation: the piece of paper, and photography. According to Andrei Monastyrsky, the field was the stage for minimal actions, the purpose of which was to empathize the linguistic categories of near, far, long, and fast.
Or consider the ii acts entitled Lozung ('Slogan') of 1977 and 1978. People come into a forest and see a banner with a text in red and white stretched between the copse, maxim "I don't mutter and I like information technology all, despite the fact that I accept never been here before and I don't know anything about this place". A year later at the aforementioned place there is a banner with a different text that refers to the commencement one: "Information technology's strange why I lied to myself that I had never been hither earlier and didn't know anything about this identify. In fact, it's the same hither equally everywhere else, simply you experience it more acutely and don't sympathise it any more deeply."
The most radical version of working with time was the 'Tot-Art' of Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, 2 other pioneers of Moscow Conceptualism. 'Tot-Fine art' stands for 'Total Art'; back in the mid-1960s the artists announced their lives to be fine art, documenting and conceptualising the events which made them up. Appropriately, their master work at a certain betoken in fourth dimension was the nativity of their daughter Eve.
Russian Conceptualism is often referred to as Moscow Conceptualism, and it really is tied to Moscow. Moreover, the members of the movement were always protective of its borders and personal composition. But within the circle there were a variety of versions and strategies, and Conceptualism was far from homogeneous.
Ivan Chuikov, for example, explored the scope of traditional painting. His serial Windows involved painting with elements of assemblage. Chuikov took airtight window frames, covered the glass with white paint, and so painted an exterior landscape on top of the white. And then the movie is not a 'window to the world', but the screen onto which something is projected: the images might fifty-fifty spill out onto the wooden frame or appear in distorted perspective.
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Ivan Chuikov. Window Twenty. 1981
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Ivan Chuikov's Self-portrait at an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Mod Art. 2009–2010
Erik Bulatov also worked with the concept of limits of pictorial space. Allow's have his early painting, Skier. A skier in a sports conform is retreating deep into the picture, but the viewer is unable to follow him: a ruby-red grid, painted over the unabridged surface, reminds u.s. that the motion picture is only a plane, and if there is some kind of metaphysical reality behind it, access for the viewer is denied. Then in that location's Krasikov Street: Muscovites are walking in the street, and a poster Lenin from a street banner is moving towards them, simply they are non meant to meet. Or in that location'due south the painting named Horizon, in which the line of the horizon turns out to be a medal ribbon or a red carpet; the official narrative is invading nature. Information technology barges in through the accompanying text as well; in the painting Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the titular phrase covers the sky.
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Erik Bulatov. Krasikov Street. 1977
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Erik Bulatov. Slava KPSS ('Celebrity to the Communist Political party of the Soviet Union'). 1975
Erik Bulatov is frequently considered to be an artist of the Sots Art movement considering he uses Soviet ideological clichés and quotations. He denies it; all 'real conceptualists' dislike Sots artists for their mockery and don't want to mix with them. But at the heart of Sots Fine art is the same conceptualist deconstruction of the claims of the government – except the authorities are understood here more specifically and narrowly as referring to the Soviet regime. Its language, its rituals, its art – all are deconstructed through playful parody.
Its name suggests that Sots Art is a Sovietised version of Pop Art. On the one manus, Pop Art in American culture was a reaction to the self-centredness of such abstractionists every bit Jackson Pollock, who poured paint onto the canvas as if he were pouring out his unique soul. On the other hand, Pop Art was a reaction to images that had become painfully familiar – in the American case, the clichés in advertising. There was no over-advertizing problem in the Soviet Spousal relationship, but ideological clichés were tiresomely ubiquitous.
Sots Fine art was invented by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. They came up with the new style while they were making murals at a children'southward summer camp for money – painting Lenin and heroes of state of war and labour, workers and collective farmers. Hither's a quote:
"So, we were drinking and thinking what bastards we were to become paid for doing this stuff. And at some indicate a drunken conversation started; 'What if at that place is somebody out in that location [...], who paints such things with sincerity? And for him it's a heartfelt cry. What does he pigment? Perhaps his own family in the mode of Soviet heroes.'"
And so it began: Komar and Melamid paint portraits of their relatives in the aforementioned way in which they busy the interiors of the summer camp. They make their self-portraits in the fashion of the mosaics in the Moscow Metro, and effectually their profiles there'due south a caption commemorating the heroes: "Famous artists of the early 1970s. Moscow". They paint traditional Soviet slogans on a red background with official-mode lettering. "Glory to labour!", "Forward to the victory of communism!" But each phrase is also signed by the author: V. Komar, A. Melamid. They make a cubist portrait of the dog Laika. Finally, now in exile, they would parody salon paintings in the Socialist Realist style. They might, for case, pigment a picture show showing Comrade Stalin, sitting upward at night with a lantern by marble columns, being visited past a half-naked muse. They would name this painting The Origin of Socialist Realism.
They also staged acts and performances. 1 of these was called 'Pravda' Cutlets - Komar and Melamid fabricated minced meat from the main Soviet newspaper. In exile, they organised a performance Purchase of Souls, in the course of which even Andy Warhol sold them his soul on receipt, estimating its worth at nix dollars. This receipt was transferred to the Soviet Matrimony for resale of Warhol's soul at auction; this was another performance. The soul was to be purchased by a frontman and and so to exist returned to Komar and Melamid. However, Mikhail Roshal, an creative person from the group 'Gnezdo' and a trusted friend of Komar and Melamid, failed to continue runway of the bidding, and Warhol's soul went to the artist Alyona Kirtsova - and is yet in Russia.
As for the grouping Gnezdo (meaning 'Nest'), they nowadays a skillful instance of how illusory the boundary was between Conceptualism and Sots Art. Mikhail Roshal, Victor Skersis and Gennady Donskoy became famous afterward the functioning they staged at a VDNKh exhibition in 1975 – ane of the first and few legal exhibitions of undercover art. They built a large nest (from which they took their name) and proceeded to hatch an egg, causing disapproval from 'senior' Conceptualists, who regarded this as tomfoolery. The artists of the Gnezdo grouping belonged formally to the Conceptualist circle, but allowed themselves some Sots Art mockery. Roshal's portraits of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, made respectively out of carbohydrate and salt in reference to the surnames of these ii prominent dissidents, were confiscated during a search of his apartment. So, in the era of Perestroika, he tried to get his work back, just to no avail – plain, the carbohydrate had melted and the salt had scattered during their captivity.
For Sots Artists, any sense of humour, even the most risqué, was 'permitted'. There are some hilarious art works past Alexander Kosolapov, where the clichés of Soviet credo and American consumer civilisation are mixed together: Lenin, Mickey Mouse, Stalin, Coca-Cola and and so on. Some of these works made in exile would enrage religious fanatics in Russia – for instance, the caviar icon or a chemical compound image of Christ with the McDonald'due south logo. The works of Leonid Sokov testify the same direct and mocking clash of contexts – Stalin drinking with Marilyn Monroe, Lenin shaking hands with Giacometti'due south modernist Walking Man sculpture. This art is very direct and has no second or third meanings – but information technology'south lively, fun and compelling.
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Alexander Kosolapov. Mickey and Minnie, worker and female collective farm worker. 2004
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Leonid Sokov next to his work Meeting of Ii Sculptures (1994) at the "Leonid Sokov. Visual Angle" exhibition. 2012
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Alexander Kosolapov's work Hero. Leader. God at the "Mail-Pop: East Meets W" exhibition. 2014
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Works by Alisa Zarzhevskaya K Shalt Not Make unto Thee any Graven Image (left) and Alexander Kosolapov This is My Blood at the "Beware, Religion!" exhibit. 2003
Equally has already been mentioned, the Conceptualists were sceptical of the thought that an artist tin can limited himself through art and create something new. Hence, the practice of working through invented characters was widespread.
Komar and Melamid invented 2 singled-out characters and signed their works on behalf of them. One of these personas was the serf Apelles Zyablov, the world's first abstract artist. He had created the non-objective painting Portrait of Her Majesty Nothing in the 18th century, ahead of Malevich by a hundred and fifty years. The other was a realist painter named Buchumov, who lived and worked at a time when the Advanced prevails. Raging futurists knocked his heart out, merely he stayed faithful to the truth of life and the principle of "I paint what I see", and so all of 'his' apparent paintings have a slice of his nose on the sheet.
While Komar and Melamid had merely two imaginary co-authors, Kabakov had a whole range of them. 'Charles Rosenthal', for example – a native of Kherson, a student of Malevich and Chagall, who emigrated to Paris and died nether the wheels of a car in Montmartre. In the installation Culling History of Art, Rosenthal is the indirect teacher of another character named Ilya Kabakov, who had the same name as the artist. Another of these fictional authors was the unknown creator of posters for the Housing Office. As Kabakov put it, "before becoming a graphic designer at the Housing Part, he had lived a difficult life, and his art is a strange mixture of shoddiness, lack of skill, and bright flashes, guesses and insights." For many years, Kabakov signed his works together with his married woman, "Ilya and Emilia Kabakov", another collective graphic symbol.
This escape from the clearly defined 'self' would even come to receive a special proper name in the Conceptualist dictionary – Kolobkovost, referring to the Russian version of the Gingerbread Human being. It would besides take an impact on the personal behaviour of the artists. As a rule, Conceptualists didn't bring together protest initiatives; merely Melamid and Komar participated at the Bulldozer Exhibition in 1974, hosted by clandestine artists and broken-upward by the regime. They didn't count on foreigners buying their work. At the time, such work could not become 'dip-art', or art to be sold to international diplomats resident in Moscow – its aesthetic value was questionable, hence the absence of commercial value. Many artists had jobs at publishing houses, particularly in illustrating children's books – including both Kabakov and Pivovarov, and Bulatov with his co-author Oleg Vasiliev. Their books are of high quality, so there was no painful gap between what was done 'seriously' and what was done 'for money'. Yet, this wasn't always the case. There is a wonderful story, possibly non entirely truthful, of how either Komar or Melamid had once tried to brand portraits for coin. They received a commission for a portrait of a distinguished worker, a man with magical hands. The creative person made the portrait with all the care of hyperrealism. But in the terminate he couldn't resist; he painted the human'southward hands gilded – and, naturally, didn't get paid.
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Cover of the book Scandinavian Fairy Tales. Artist Viktor Pivovarov. 1982
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Cover of Genrikh Sapgir's book Forest Wonders. Artist Viktor Pivovarov. 1967
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Embrace of Yuri Kushak's book Hither Comes the Boat. Artist Ilya Kabakov. 1979
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Embrace of J. M. Barry's volume Peter Pan and Wendy. Artist Ilya Kabakov. 1968.
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Comprehend of Valentin Berestov'due south book Cat is Coming for a Visit. Artists Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev. 1985
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Cover of Charles Perrault's book Cinderella. Artists Erik Bulatov and Oleg Vasiliev. 1985
We have simply touched upon the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, merely the movement had a long history. The conceptualist idea was besides potent not to affect the art of the post-obit decades.
Crash Grade #ane
Russian Art in the 20th Century
Lecture 6 of viii
Crash Form #1
Russian Art in the 20th Century
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