International Journal of Sociology ISSN: 0020-7659 (Print) 1557-9336 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/mijs20 The Artistic Development of Soviet Emigré Artists in New York Janet Kennedy To cite this article: Janet Kennedy (1985) The Artistic Development of Soviet Emigré Artists in New York, International Journal of Sociology, 15:1-2, 121-155, DOI: 10.1080/15579336.1985.11769883 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/15579336.1985.11769883 Published online: 18 Nov 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=mijs20 The Artistic Development of Soviet Emigre Artists in New York Janet Kennedy Soviet emigre artists in the United States, although they differ greatly in their view of art and in the type of work they do, may be divided roughly into two groups. The first, consisting of the younger, more avant-garde painters and performance artists, has received a warmer welcome from the Western art world than the second group, whose art is more traditional. Recognition from Western colleagues does not necessarily mean that the first group enjoys greater success in worldly terms, but it does have psychological benefits. By contrast, the more "traditional" emigre artists, whose art was highly esteemed in the Soviet Union, now find themselves dismissed by Western critics as dated or conservative. In the end, the artists of neither group retain the moral authority they enjoyed as unofficial artists in the Soviet Union. As they themselves point out, this would be impossible in an American context, where artistic free-thinking is the rule rather than the exception. Nonetheless, neither group has adapted in any noticeable way to the American market or to American tastes. Virtually all of the emigre artists have continued to pursue, with little change, artistic goals that were formed in the Soviet Union. Some work in isolation; others have discovered an artistic advantage in their anomalous situation 121 122 JANET KENNEDY between two cultures: they deliberately choose "to speak Russian in an English speaking society." 1 The first unofficial artists who came to the attention of Western audiences worked in a refined and elegant style, expressing themselves in complex and introverted images. Their art, as it has continued to develop in the United States, has a strong surrealist flavor, and at times it explicitly pays homage to surrealism. Hard on the heels of this first group, however, came another group of emigre artists whose inspiration was drawn from "life," that is, from advertising, from social ritual, and from real objects. These artists-if they practice painting at all-do not consider painting a "fine" art but use it as a means of examining social conventions. Among the first group are Mikhail Chemiakin (illus. 1), Lev Meshberg (illus. 2), Oleg Tselkov (illus. 3), and Igor Tulipanov (illus. 4); among the second are Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid (illus. 5-6), Rimma and Valery Gerlovin (illus . 7-8), Vagrich Bakhchanyan (illus. 9), and Alexander Kosolapov (illus. 10) . It would be possible to describe the two groups as representing two generations within the Soviet art world, but the age differences are surprisingly small: Chemiakin and Tulipanov are no older than Kosolapov and Bakhchanyan. City of origin may be more important than chronological age. Chemiakin, Thlipanov, and Tse1kov lived and worked in Leningrad; Komar and Melamid, the Gerlovins, Bakhchanyan, and Kosolapov in Moscow. Refinement of technique and nostalgia for the past have characterized the St. PetersburgLeningrad school since the turn ofthe century, whereas Moscow has tended to be more "modern" and experimenta1. 2 Artists in both cities have been influenced to some extent by artistic events in the West, but each center developed in its own way, paralleling without exactly reproducing Western art movements such as surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop, and conceptual art. The difference in outlook between the two groups of emigre artists is an acute one. In the first group a surrealist sensibility prevails, but the basic tone of their art is in many ways deeply conservative. They are dedicated to painting as craft; they believe in the enduring artistic values of beauty and harmony, even though ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 123 these coexist in their art-uneasily at times-with a taste for the grotesque and fantastic . When Chemiakin arrived in Paris, his art was received with admiration by critics there, not because of its surrealist qualities but because it seemed an embodiment of "culture" and refinement: "Russian by nationality, French by his place in art . . . [Chemiakin's] message is a message to cultured society and his mission, however hieratic he may become, is not unlike Cocteau ' s, to give pleasure and surprise."3 Or as Wolfgang Fischer wrote in 1980: "The impulse is to paint new icons, instead of peppering canvases with dadaist blank cartridges." For artists of the ' 'younger" generation, dadaist buckshot (not necessarily blank cartridges) has been an irresistible weapon. For this group , 'cui ture" is not a timeless realm of beauty, but something with a specific social context; their anarchic humor has been aimed equally at the official pieties embodied in Soviet art, at American commercialism, and at problems that afflict both societies. Yet, certain common opinions are voiced by both the' 'younger" and the' 'older" groups. Condemnation of Western formalism is not a theme limited to the Soviet press, but one that can be heard again and again from Soviet emigres. Mikhail Chemiakin speaks for a great many of his fellow countrymen when he says, "I prefer the art of my own country, because I find much more humanity and soul in it. What I see in France is much colder and seems dead to me despite the often extraordinary technical ability." 5 Chemiakin has since moved from France to the United States, but these sentiments still apply. He calls abstract and conceptual art just' 'the other side of the coin" from socialist realism, equally lacking in spiritual content. Those emigre artists who practice some form of conceptual or pop art are less likely than their older compatriots to launch a frontal attack on contemporary Western art, but, like Chemiakin, they are aware of their Russianness as something that sets them apart from their Western colleagues . Rimrna and Valery Gerlovin, organizers of the "Russian Samizdat" show at the Franklin Furnace, a nonprofit gallery in Manhattan's Tribeca area , stress that their art has ties with the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. They believe that a desire to make art that interacts with life is characteristically Russian: 124 JANET KENNEDY In our opinion, a characteristic trend of modern art, the emphasis on the ideological aspect, was always a basic one in Russian art and prevailed over all others, including the aesthetic dimension (it suffices to compare the peredvizhniki [Russia's realist painters] with the impressionists) .... Most Russian art was founded on the desire to solve moral, religious and social problems on the basis of the artist's philosophical views, the latter frequently of an intuitive nature. Typically, artists showed a certain indifference to the formal quality of a work of art. The above considerations lead us to believe that conceptual art finds its most favourable soil in Russia and, despite the State's rejection of it, it is a very important and vital phase in the Russian creative effort. 6 Komar and Melamid, who make "Sots art" (an analog of Pop, using socialist cliches instead of American advertising images), express the same opinion in a different way. They argue that American art has' 'lost touch with subject matter," that it has lost touch with reality, just as the American auto industry-their comparisonhas lost touch with real life. Their recent painting in a "socialist realist" style restores to are, or so they say, both subject matter and contact with real life. To discuss a number of diverse personalities in a single essay on Soviet emigre art tends to perpetuate an already uncomfortable situation. The first publicity devoted to emigre artists lumped together the work of many artists of very different persuasions under such broad titles as "unofficial art" or "dissident art. " Indeed press coverage of exhibitions, whether the works were by artists still in the Soviet Union or by emigres, tended to emphasize politics to the exclusion of any serious discussion of artistic goals . This was distressing to artists who had left the Soviet Union to escape a situation in which any artistic statement was automatically subjected to a simplistic political interpretation. Almost without exception the emigre artists who now work in New York deny that their work is "political," although this claim may seem perverse in view of the political slogans, the images of Lenin and Stalin, and the allusions to American advertising that appear in works by the younger generation of emigre artists. However, the word "politics," as ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 125 they generally employ it, carries connotations of compulsion and narrow-mindedness. The actual political content of their art, to the extent that it does exist, is subtle and satirical rather than prescriptive or dogmatic: it explores the function of images in public life, be it Soviet or American; it attempts to expose myths rather than to create them. No Soviet emigres have led lives that are free from conflict; however, the story of Mikhail Chemiakin' s struggle to exhibit his art in the Soviet Union and then to leave the country is unusually dramatic and arresting. The son of a general in the Soviet army, Chemiakin took a job as a handyman at the Hermitage Museum after he had been expelled from the Repin School of Painting for "formalism." In 1964 he was one of the participants in an exhibition of paintings by the staff of the Hermitage. Instead of a harmless display of amateur painting this exhibition proved to be a spectacle at odds with the optimism and" civic-mindedness" of official Soviet art. The director of the museum lost his position, as did Chemiakin. For the latter this was the beginning of a career that included sojourns in psychiatric hospitals, an attempted escape from the country via the Black Sea, and numerous brief exhibitions, some of which were closed before they even opened. In 1971 he finally obtained permission to emigrate, and after a period of some years in Paris , he has now settled in New York. Chemiakin's sympathy lies as much with past art as with the art of the present: his interests embrace, with almost obsessive completeness, the entire history of forms. One wall of his studio is covered with shelves that hold black-bound boxes of carefully arranged didactic material-each box is devoted to a specific motif, such as the circle, the abstract figure, or vertical and horizontal forms. Photographs of ancient ritual objects are mounted on large sheets of paper side by side with modern color field paintings in order to demonstrate not only the constant reappearance of basic forms but also their ceaseless transformation at the hands of the artist-creator. In Chemiakin's view the ancient example is almost always more vital than the modern. "Transformations," a series in which Chemiakin offered his own reworking of these materials, was shown at the Wolfgang Fischer Gallery in London in 1980; however, all of 126 JANET KENNEDY Chemiakin's art is based on similar principles of metamorphosis and deliberate complication of form. A first look at Chemiakin' s painting (ill us. 1) might lead the viewer to label it as surrealist. The forms are alternately playful and grotesque. Images form and then reform: a human head is also an animal, a saddle, a botanical drawing. From time to time one finds open acknowledgment of an established master like Max Ernst, Paul Klee, or the seventeenth-century fantasist Archimboldo, but Chemiakin's art has its own distinctive flavor expressed in its bright but refined color harmonies, its elegant curves, and its nostalgic delight in the dainty artifices of eighteenth and early nineteenth century art. Chemiakin himself would like to distinguish his own work from surrealism. Early in his career, in a manifesto entitled "Metaphysical Synthetism," he and another author accused the surrealists of intellectual laziness, of copying the images of their subconscious without attempting to reach a universal truth: " Freedom of the imagination turns into demonic tyranny. Idolization of the subconscious . . . the incestuous introduction of the naturalistic principle into imagination." On an earlier page he had written: "The tension of Being in this world cannot be conveyed by simple mirror-like reflection. In reflection there is no tension. The job of the artist is to lift form and color to the highest degree of tension. In analytical art this is called the principle of wholeness.' '7 With a characteristically Russian desire for universalism, Chemiakin proclaimed that the artist can achieve a kind of Godmanhood: In the twentieth century the birth of a new type of creative consciousness is taking place: those processes which earlier played in the subconscious and the superconscious regions of the soul are now-thanks to the power of the "I" -boldly introduced into the realm of the conscious. The artist is no longer a holy fool. He is a creator, a friend of God. The degree to which he is permeated by Christ's impulse determines the degree of consciousness in his work.s This credo echoes the writings of the nineteenth-century religious philosopher Vladimir Solovev, who argued that human beings could ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 127 Mikhail Chemiakin 1 1978 (Detail of triptych). Mixed media, 36" x 12". Photo by Jacqueline Hyde, Paris. Collection of the artist. PHILOSOPHY OF THE SEA 128 JANET KENNEDY become Godmen by participating in the divine creative power represented by Christ. While there are no specifically religious images in Chemiakin's art, the desire for a synthesis of ancient and modern, human and manufactured forms manifested in his "Transformations" expresses the artist's faith in a universal creative principle. Despite the dogmatic tone of his pronouncements on art, Chemiakin's artistic sympathies are quite liberal. Among American artists of the recent past he admires Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, Theodore Stamos, and Clyfford Still. However, when Russian art is in question he does not share the general enthusiasm for the avantgarde of the 1920s. Instead he stresses the importance of such artists as Tyshler, Falk, and Neizvestny, whose "individuality" seemed to the young Chemiakin like an "oasis" in a desert of socialist realism . Among the emigre artists now living in New York, it is Lev Meshberg whom Chemiakin singles out as a "a genius. " Meshberg's career shares few of its external circumstances with that of Chemiakin. Born in Odessa in 1933, Meshberg studied drawing and painting at the Odessa Art College. In 1960 he was accepted as a full member of the Union of Soviet Artists, and he participated in more than forty one-man and group exhibitions in the Soviet Union, winning prizes at two All-Union Art Exhibitions (in 1965 and 1967) for best painting of the show. Meshberg' s works are represented in a number of prestigious Soviet collections, including the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Russian Museum in Leningrad. He emigrated to the United States in 1973 and he now lives in New York. For Meshberg the contrast between the laurels he earned in the Soviet Union-even though his work did not fit the socialist realist mold-and the indifference that has greeted him in the United States is both extreme and disappointing. His art is not calculated to make a striking impression. It is intimate and reflective, small in scale, and personal in content. Many of his current works are still lifes in which certain objects-all possessing a patina of history-appear again and again: worn leather-bound books, candlesticks, a lantern, a model ship. Frequently the central motif is either a bird in a cage or an aquarium. These real objects (which are actually present in ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 129 Meshberg's studio) acquire an elusive symbolic quality: the halfseen caged bird (illus. 2) and the enclosed aquarium suggest not so much the pathos of captivity as a deliberately restricted world of poetic reflection. Meshberg' s technique of thickly built-up, heavily worked layers of near monochromatic paint imparts a timeless quality to his paintings; the faded surfaces seem to have been created by a slow process of sedimentation rather than by a brisk application of the brush. Certain of Meshberg's works use other images. A pair of canvases, which can be placed together like altarpiece and predella, shows the weathered facade of an arched building above and a vigorously primitive reptilian creature on the smaller canvas below. A small triptych with an arched central portion was inspired by an actual event, the death ofthe artist's fish . The dense white suface of the canvases is almost unmarked except for the ghostly presence of a small graceful fish in the upper part of each panel. Themes having to do with the passage of time appeared in Meshberg's work at an early stage of his career: a townscape from the early 1960s, for example, contains architecture and costumed figures from three different epochs- ancient, medieval, and contemporary. In 1966 Meshberg visited the town of Bukhara in Soviet Uzbekistan. The town became the subject of a series of austere, dimly lit panoramas based on archaic architectural forms-simple blocklike buildings with occasional hemispherical domes. Curiously enough these works, given their severe geometry of form, are more "abstract" than Meshberg' s later paintings. In fact he now claims that his painting is "post-abstract," that is that he uses abstraction as a tool rather than viewing it as an end in itself. In short, Meshberg's emigration to the United States has not led him closer to modernism. His quiet and lyrical art is unlikely to find a place on the current New York art scene. The scale and color of his paintings do not catch the eye of an observer trained on color field painting, and their subject matter is "old-fashioned." Like many emigres Meshberg does not hesitate to condemn American art as materialistic. He finds American artists poorly educated, obsessed with making money, and lacking in "heart." This does not mean, however, that he condemns all modern art; his admiration does 130 JANET KENNEDY Lev Meshberg 2 STILL LIFE WITH BOOKS AND BIRD 1979 Oil and wax, 36" x 40". Collection of the artist. ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 131 extend to the work of Leon Golub, whom he once arranged to meet, to the early works of Mark Tobey and Willem de Kooning, and to Henry Moore's drawings. Without a doubt a prospective audience for Meshberg's art does exist in the United States, but it is not the audience that visits Manhattan art galleries. Meshberg's problem in finding an audience is in fact similar to that of many American artists, whose work is not in step with current trends; however, they are spared the irony of his transformation of status from a leader of the new art in the Soviet Union to a man with no artistic country in the United States. A number of artists among the "older" generation of Soviet emigre artists are, or have been, represented by Eduard Nakhamkin Fine Arts. Nakhamkin has exhibited the work of Neizvestny, Chemiakin, Meshberg, Tulipanov, Tselkov, and many others (Elya Peker, Ilya Shenker, Mikhail Aleksandrov, Shimon Okshteyn), artists who differ considerably from each other in style. Neizvestny's vigorous semi-abstract bronze sculptures have little in common, for example, with the finely wrought Netherlandish technique of Tulipanov's paintings. However, the artists who have exhibited with Nakhamkin do tend to have certain things in common: a nostalgia for the technical perfection of past art, a tendency toward the grotesque in their imagery, and a distinct seriousness, or weightiness, of content. Tselkov and Tulipanov both studied at the Theater Institute in Leningrad, and like other Leningrad artists they employ images that inhabit an uncertain territory between the beautiful and the grotesque . Although Tselkov was expelled from two art schools on the grounds of "formalism" (the Minsk Institute of Theater Art in 1945 and the Academy of Arts in Leningrad in 1955), he states his artistic purpose in terms of content: a desire to communicate "the most profound emotional idea" in a simple and intelligible form. In fact the masklike faces that appear in his paintings translate an abstract idea into nonabstract form. Tselkov writes: [I]n 1960, for the first time, I painted a canvas with two strange, pinkish-white faces. Suddenly I had a feeling that there was something in those faces, that I had found a path I could continue to 132 JANET KENNEDY travel. In 1958 I had seen a large number of Malevich's pictures in the storage cellars of the Russian Museum in Leningrad, and I was very much influenced by him .... One has the feeling that it is as if he subsumes all his emotions into an apparently very simple formula .... Malevich taught me simplicity. Later, when I was searching for my own path, I chose, or at least tried to choose, simplicity. I made every effort to discard what artists generally term painting, everything that was so noticeable in Cezanne and the Impressionists-complex, obscure use of color and a generally impressionistic, indeterminate attitude towards the subject of the picture . ... But I never tried to make any specifically social comment, in the way Rabin does, for instance. I tried to make my social attitudes "universal." ... The people in my pictures are indestructible .... They have small foreheads and heavy jowls. Those are signs not of feeble-mindedness but of brute force and firmness. 9 The objects in Tselkov's paintings, familiar and domestic, have the same dumb firmness and ambiguously threatening quality as the faces (illus. 3). In many ways Tulipanov's approach to painting would seem to be the opposite of Tselkov's. His compositions are complex rather than simple: constant shifts of viewpoint and spatial perception create an effect of calculated irrationality. One can hardly avoid noticing certain disturbing images, for example, a man crouching fully clothed in a glass bottle. The artist himself stresses that, despite this, he sees his paintings as "harmonious." His colors are bright and clear rather than heavy and dramatic. His detailed and illusionistic style of painting closely imitates Netherlandish painting of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Indeed, love of the past has been characteristic of many Leningrad artists, who find more to please them in the Hermitage than in any contemporary art, whether it is produced in the East or the West. A similar "retrospective" attitude prevailed at the turn of the century among the artists of the "Mir iskusstva" (World of Art) group, who found in past art an alternative to the mundane realism of their immediate predecessors. Among unofficial artists in the Soviet Union, meticulous attention to detail has in 'the past been something of a rebuke to official art. ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK Oleg Tselkov 3 1979 Oil, 64" x 40". Private collection. PACKAGED PERSON 133 134 JANET KENNEDY However, since the end of the 1970s the younger generation of official painters has brought this aspect of unofficial art into official favor, replacing the broad , streamlined forms of the sixties socialist realism with minutely detailed and static forms.lo Tulipanov's painting lends itselfto imaginative exploration rather · than to precise explanation. His images derive from a variety of sources-from children's toys, art reproductions, artificial flowers , and, most of all, the artist's own peculiar fantasy. Contradictions abound: in the painting reproduced here (illus. 4) there are suggestions of change, motion, and metamorphosis (the disembodied face, the eroded stone ledge, the aggressive cyclone of flowers), but the style of painting is precise, even frigid . Aware of the difficulty of fathoming his paintings Tulipanov has written an essay about his art in which a number of speakers attempt to explicate one of the artist's paintings: each one contributes a partial view, none is entirely persuasive, but each strives earnestly for his own form of truth. One can, however, take advantage of a hint dropped by the artist in connection with an earlier painting, The Mystery (1976). He described the hidden theme of this painting as the weighing of good and evil. 11 In a subtle way this motif of weighing good against evil pervades all of Tulipanov's works; in them the beautiful outweighs the grotesque, but it just tips the balance. Reality-notwithstanding the artist's illusionistic style-remains elusive and all but impossible to discover. One might assume that there is something inevitably Russian in the pre-occupation with questions of good and evil that pervades the paintings of Tulipanov, Tselkov, and Chemiakin. However, there is another side of Soviet unofficial art to consider as well: this is a lively and ironical art that takes the form of games, artists ' books, performances, posters, and even re-creations of Stalin era painting. The artists who make art in this fashion recognize that the search for universal truth is a massive undertaking and quite likely to lead to negative results. Rimma Gerlovin, for example, comments that Russian "spiritualism" is often closer to sickness than to health. On the other hand art can reveal small truths instead of large ones-and it wields its own absurd and illogical authority. Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid began their careers as ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK Igor Thlipanov 4 BEING FLOWERS 1980-82 Oil , 36" x 32". Private collection. 135 136 JANET KENNEDY "dissident" artists in 1972, when both were expelled from the Union of Artists for" distortion of Soviet reality and nonconformity with the principles of socialist realism." In the same year they met Melvyn Nathanson, an American mathematician in Moscow on a postdoctoral fellowship, and he began to make their work known to other Americans. Nathanson has given a vivid description of one of the works Komar and Melamid created in 1973: In spring of 1973, Komar and Melamid managed to find a room in an empty apartment in Moscow, a remarkable feat since the housing shortage is severe, and they turned the room into an environmental work called Paradise. The walls, floor, and ceiling were painted and covered with sculpted figures and bizarre electrical light effects. Soviet radio played in the background. A river of blue cloth flowed under a wooden bridge, while a hideous Stalinlike figure sculpted in a corner of the ceiling dripped blood, and a gold Buddha along the wall was covered with licelike miniature soldiers, planes and tanks. To experience the work, one was thrust into the room alone and locked inside. 12 Other visitors to their studio encountered Young Marx (1976), a "portrait" of an awkward bespectacled lad painted on a dishtowel; Color-Writing (1974), a translation ofthe twenty-ninth article of the Soviet constitution into coded color squares (the article guarantees freedom of speech); and Quotation (1972), rows of small white squares on a red background, a reference to the political slogans that dot the Soviet cityscape. In another work, which was documented photographically, the two artists passed a copy of Pravda through a meat grinder to create a hamburger shaped patty-presumably an aid to easy digestion. This picture of Komar and Melamid is incomplete, however. Not only politics but other contemporary phenomena as well were subjected to their perverse logic. A series of Scenes from the Future (1975) updated the genre of ruin painting by placing a crumbling and overgrown Guggenheim Museum in the midst of a romantic landscape. In another series of paintings, entitled Post-Art (1973), paintings by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Indiana appear as charred and pitted remains. Finally, Factory for Produc- ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 137 ing Blue Smoke (1975) offers a solution to the problem of industrial pollution: a factory that emits clear blue smoke into the gray atmosphere. With characteristic enthusiasm the two artists made their idea known in letters addressed to several world leaders including Prime Minister Karamanlis of Greece. In 1976, while Komar and Melamid were still in Moscow, some of their work was shown at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. The success ofthis exhibition is testimony to a rather surprising convergence of Soviet unofficial art and Western "postmodernism." Komar and Melamid's appropriation of an existing artistic language, whether it be realism or pop art, which alters its meaning when it appears in a new context, suited the ironical tone of the New York art world of the late 1970s. In the words of Jack Burnham, "the art of Komar and Melamid is eclectic in a special sense of the word. The very mixture of influences-Byzantine icons, Renaissance and Baroque painting, capitalist advertising, Soviet posters and documents, nonobjective art, plus the subtle confusion of bureaucratic prose with an undercurrent of Judeo-Christian mysticism-give it a special disjointed sense of ludicrous absurdity. "13 As Burnham points out, this "schizoid consistency" is, to some extent, characteristic of all contemporary Western culture. Komar and Melamid themselves insist that they are' 'not political, but professional emigres." They point to the large numbers of foreign artists working in New York as proof that their situation is to some extent a normal one. They are of course, well aware, of their position between two cuI tures. In Russia they did "American art' , art that was closer to pop art than to anything then being produced, officially or unofficially, in the Soviet Union-while in New York they feel acutely aware of their Russianness, and even express a nostalgia for socialist realism. Their response is deliberately to "speak Russian" in their new American setting. A witty example of deliberate confusion between the Soviet and American cultures is their projection of Soviet political slogans into an American context. The Poster Series exhibited at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1980 consisted of a handpainted American flag and seven posters honoring the American family, the American worker, the American farmer, and so forth, by means of typical 138 JANET KENNEDY Soviet slogans. One of the posters (illus. 5) shows a well groomed model in a dinner jacket holding an American flag and accompanied by the words' 'Onward to the Final Victory of Capitalism. " Concerning their poster dedicated to the American family, Komar and Melamid explained that "just as we saw the process of Russian families trying to look like the 'ideal' Russian family portrayed in Soviet propaganda, so American people try to look like the families in advertisements." Another way of "speaking Russian" to an American audience is to re-create the socialist realism of Stalin's day. For Komar (born in 1943) and Melamid (born in 1945) this is the art of their childhood, and they boldly proclaim socialist realism as one of the "best" art forms ever invented. Certainly they revel in its theatricality. Stalin and the Muses (illus. 6), in which the muse of painting presents the submissive Clio to a smiling Stalin, recaptures the academic surreality of Stalinist art. Prior to this Komar and Melamid used the same heroic style for a series of Ancestral Portraits (1980). Each canvas depicts a dinosaur (Protoceratops, Allosaurus, Plateosaurus) posed with dramatic lighting against a red drape. As Komar points out, the dinosaur without the drape, a standard prop in official portraiture since the Baroque, would be merely a dinosaur. With a change of background, the creatures change their identity. Lest the American observer feel that these dinosaurs walk only the halls of the Kremlin, one should note that a portrait of our current American leader as an aging centaur-an allusion, no doubt, to his fondness for being photographed on horseback-is included in the series. At the end of his introduction to Komar and Melamid' s work, Jack Burnham speculates on their possible fate in the West: "What is the artistic future of Komar and Melamid if they are deprived of the abrasion and suppression of Soviet dogma?" On the whole this worry seems to have been unfounded. Komar and Melamid feel that their art has changed little since their departure from the Soviet Union, except that they are now able to create projects on a grander scale. They have found the necessary abrasion even in the West. The New York art world, normally tolerant of extremes, was recently jolted by a colossal Hitler portrait that Komar and Melamid exhibited in the fall of 1981 at the Monumental Art show. A faithful replica ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 139 Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid 5 ONWARD TO THE FINAL VICTORY OF CAPITALISM 1980 Detail, poster series. Photo by Eeva-Inkeri, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. 140 6 JANET KENNEDY Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid 1981-82 (The Muse of Painting Presents Clio, the Muse of History, to Stalin) . Oil on canvas, 72" x 55". Photo by D. James Dee, courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York. STALIN AND THE MUSES ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 141 of the standard Hitler portrait produced by Nazi artists, the painting was displayed on an easel, flanked by pots of flowers. Komar and Melamid argue that they have a right to show Hitler because they are Jewish. Also, the image has a more complex resonance for a Russian than it does for an American. Such reasoning, however, did not prevent the painting from being physically attacked: "People identifying themselves as members of the JDL threatened the artists, their gallery and the show's organizers." The painting was finally slashed through the heart by an individual presumed to be from the JDL, but who later identified himself as a member of a left-wing group and' 'tired of irony." 14 As will be seen below, other emigre artists have been equally quick to discover some of the spoken or unspoken taboos of American culture. Komar and Melamid work together as a team, and their art has a social character; in fact, they call themselves not artists but "conversationalists." Viewer response to their provocative assertions is what gives their art its subtle shadings of meaning: "We want people to start talking after they see our paintings, just as we talk to produce them. "15 The desired response is an active, not a passive one; it is a teamwork that involves the viewer as well as the two artists. Another example of artistic teamwork is that of Rimma and Valery Gerlovin, who have lived in New York since 1980. Valery began his career as a theater designer, Rimma as a concrete poet. Theirs, too, is a gregarious art and engages the spectator in active response. Their books, photographs, and constructions abound in exquisitely logical absurdities, but their work is not without its serious side. Rimma's first "games" involved verbal play of various kinds; for example, she inscribed lines of poetry on a set of cubes which could be manipulated to produce new poems. Another construction consisted of sixty cubes, each one bearing the name of a famous person, so that Plato, Picasso, Catherine II, and Stalin, for example, could be assigned, at the viewer's discretion, to their proper place within a framework that contained three zones: Heaven , Hell, and Purgatory. Interchangeable Man (illus. 7) was conceived in 1976, and a new version was produced in New York in 1981. (These cubic 142 7 JANET KENNEDY Rimma and Valery Gerlovin INTERCHANGEABLE MAN 1981 Plywood and fabric, 72" x 77" x 4". Photo by Valery Gerlovin . Collection of the artists. ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 143 constructions are based on Rimma's ideas, but since she and Valery work together on most projects they say they are all by "the Gerlovins." 16) Interchangeable Man consists of fifty-seven cubes in a six-foot armature. Each cube bears six descriptive words, one per side, for example "intelligent, profound, brainless, normal, sensible, superficiaL" The colors of each side of the cubes vary, and the qualities named are numerous, although every cube has the word "normal" on one of its sides. By turning cubes the viewer can create his or her own "ideal" personality, but an element of chance and surprise is always present, since one cannot control the final outcome with absolute certainty. It would be possible, if one wished, to turn all the cubes to "normal," producing, as the Gerlovins say, "nobody." A variation on this theme of participatory creation is the Dog-Sphinx Calendar for the Next 100 Years (1982), in which every cube has six different prophetic interpretations for a specific year-always with "chaos" as one of the possibilities . The spectator creates his or her own calendar by turning the cubes (soft foam covered in acrylic painted cloth) and replacing them in the dog-shaped frame. Over the years Valery's projects have utilized a variety of materials such as mecchano sets, bread dough, and discarded hypodermic syringes . A series of photographs made in Moscow documented the adventures of a "spermatozoid," consisting of mecchano pieces, as it travels around the city. The Bread Tree Insects, molded from dough, make up an imaginary community, now said to be extinct. These tiny insects are enshrined in the Gerlovins' studio in a "mass grave" with a commemorative inscription that details their habits and suggests the necessity for biological control by means of warmblooded animals and people who eat them. At times the Gerlovins' projects take on-at least in imagination-a massive scale, for example, their 1977 proposal for a global birthday celebration: "Each day approximately ten million people celebrate their birthday with their friends, relatives, or alone. Many do not celebrate at all. We propose that all people born on a single day gather on this day on a single (endless) spot on the globe. Each day 365 (or 366) times a year men of all races, religions, and ages can gather 144 JANET KENNEDY in a single designated spot, under a single symbol: Born under one and the same star." The Gerlovins propose the founding of an international organization to provide information and material help in realizing this scheme for global brotherhood. Given the sociability of their art, it is not surprising to find that the Gerlovins engage in many collaborative projects involving other artists; they have organized several exhibitions of "Russian Samizdat Art. " 17 With Vagrich Bakhchanyan they edit a handmade quarterly magazine, Collective Farm. Each issue consists of a series of envelopes bound loosely with string. Collaborating artists from all over the world (Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Yugoslavia, Poland, Argentina, Mexico, and the United States) utilize these envelopes as miniature exhibition areas, and mail the results to the Gerlovins. Both the exhibitions and the magazine have been well received. The exhibitions, in particular, received considerable press coverage both in New York and in Washington, D.C., although some New York commentators objected to the use of the term "Samizdat" to refer to artists' books produced in the United States. They believed the term should be limited to the product of a specific political situation and should not simply apply to any self-published artists' books, even those by Soviet emigre artists. The show at the Franklin Furnace consisted of books and similar materials by over thirty emigre artists. One striking feature of the show was its installation, with books dangling from the ceiling, strewn on the floor, and hung from ladders. At the opening the Gerlovins showered the audience with books, tickets, and other scraps of printed paper. The book, the Gerlovins say, is a satisfying form of expression because it does away with the usual hands-off relationship between the viewer and an art work: a book can be manipulated and provides verbal or visual surprises as each page is turned. "A book," the Gerlovins write, "is both a portable object and a mass-production item capable of an intimate relationship with the readers, and it is one of the best examples of collaboration between extroverted and introverted ideas of the history of Russian art." 18 ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 145 Unlike Komar and Melamid, who advertise their ties with socialist realist art, the Gerlovins see precedents for their art in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s. (They also consider themselves more "international" than Komar and Melamid.) The Gerlovins are particularly drawn to Alexander Rodchenko, not only because he worked in various media (sculpture, photography, poster design, and furniture design) but also because of his "acceptance of the world as an environmental space." However, constructivism had little place for humor, and humor plays a major role in the Gerlovins' art. Their wit, which has a dada character, might be linked, Rimma suggests, to the work of the oberiuty, absurdist writers of the 1920s. 19 All this notwithstanding, the Gerlovins point out that there is a visible tension in their work. Their most recent work, for example, is a series of syringe " mosaics" (illus. 8). These are paintings studded with syringes filled with oil paint (one of the couple has diabetes, so used disposable syringes are readily available). The subjects of the syringe mosaics include Soldier, Dove, Man with Dog, and Face on the Ladder. Face on the Ladder was made for a show at the abandoned Pier 34 on the Hudson River and was to be left behind in the abandoned space. Soldier, which can be alternately read as Soviet or American, was shown at the Monumental Show already mentioned above. The Gerlovins' claim that the syringes , 'give a flexible imitation of speci.fic structures like hair, fur, and grass, " while simultaneously having something ofthe heaviness and overbearing quality of large mosaic tesserae. The syringe paintings project a threatening monumentality. Their overbearing quality has been noted by the artists, who ascribe this to "the human similarity with animals subjected to experiments . . . when behavior is controlled by external eventsreinforcement and punishment." They note, too, that in New York the use of syringes has an element of actual illegality because of the association of syringes with narcotics use. According to Valery the syringes signify an attempt at "self-affirmation outside society as well as a means of self-destruction. " Rimma tells of one confrontation with the police at a show of syringe paintings in a storefront gallery. Apprehensive neighbors called the police, who checked 146 8 JANET KENNEDY Rimma and Valery Gerlovin SHADOWS 1983 Acrylic, syringes , canvas , and artist's body, 96" x 48" x 12". Photo by Francis Hauert . Collection of the artists. ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 147 Rimma's arms for needle marks before dismissing her with a warning. Although it is true of course that this incident has not prevented the Gerlovins from continuing to work, Rimma believes that, differences between the American and Soviet systems notwithstanding, there is always some form of expression that is subject to censorship. While some of their themes and materials have changed, the Gerlovins, like most other emigre Soviet artists, continue to practice their art along more or less the same lines as they did in the Soviet Union. This is true also of their friend Vagrich Bakhchanyan., although Bakhchanyan is an artist who delights in creating a hybrid world where images from East and West meet in incongruous ways. The familiar image of Stalin makes various unexpected appearances in new, American contexts, for example in advertising or as the subject of a half-time show at a football stadium (illus. 9). Almost any printed matter provides grist for Bakhchanyan's mill. He produces, for example, a magazine entitled Arm News (cf. Art News), each page of which shows an arm in some different position or situation. Bakhchanyan was born in 1938 and came to the United States in 1974. In the Soviet Union he was active for more than a dozen years as an artist and graphic designer, working for a variety of pUblications (lunost', Znanie i sila, Literaturnaia gazeta) since design and illustration allowed him greater freedom than painting. Bakhchanyan acknowledges without hesitation his debt to dada and offers such cheerful inventions as the newspaper masthead "PRAVDADA" and the slogan "Bozhe Tzara khrani" ("God save Tzara"-a slogan in which the dada poet's name neatly takes the place of the word tsar in the more traditional "Bozhe Tsaria khrani"). Bakhchanyan has no New York gallery, but he claims this is not a matter for great regret. His public consists largely of other artists, whom he reaches through the medium of mail art, including the publication Collective Farm which he edits with the Gerlovins. Famous personalities attract his attention, in part because of their immediate recognizability. In "One Hundred Namesakes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn" he presents an array of photographs with bilingual captions. These are gathered from various sources, some 148 JANET KENNEDY Vagrich Bakhchanyan 9 STALIN TEST 1982 Photomontage. ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 149 of them antique. Each one, whether it is a nineteenth-century lady in fancy dress or a modern couple on a beach, is said to bear the name Solzhenitsyn, although some have changed their names since their famous namesake emigrated (these photographs are surrounded by a black border). The bilingual captions lead to further confusion: the couple on the beach are Elizaveta and Leonid Solzhenitsyn in the Russian caption and Liz and Richard in the French (the photograph; not of the famous Liz and Richard, vaguely resembles them).20 Bakhchanyan's appropriation of Solzhenitsyn's name aroused the ire of more conservative members of the emigre community, but Bakhchanyan explains that he chooses names not for any political statement but simply because they are familiar to both Russian and American audiences. He might use Tolstoy's name, for example, but not that of an author unknown in the West. Like the Gerlovins and Komar and Melamid, he plays on social taboos and expectations: this is more vital than any specific point about the personality whose name or image is used. It would be difficult to assign a specific "political" significance to Bakhchanyan's Home Delivery ofStalin (superimposed on a Time magazine subscription coupon) or to his portrait of Lenin in thirty-six small stapled booklets. When arranged in proper sequence, the covers of these booklets form a posterlike image of Lenin, but on the interior they contain small rectangular pieces randomly clipped from the pages of Playboy. In a similar portrait of Stalin, the booklets contain newsprint from Pravda. One more group of artists who work together will serve to round out this discussion of Soviet emigre art. The group, which includes Alexander Drewchin, Alexander Kosolapov, Victor Thpitsyn, and Vladimir Urban (the last an American of Russian descent), calls itself the "Kazimir Passion" and specializes in performance art. Kazimir Passion has staged such events as a mock funeral for Malevich (in front of the Guggenheim Museum at the time of the Costakis exhibition and a "Twenty-Seventh Party Congress" at SoHo's Kitchen Gallery (produced with the aid of a small grant from the gallery). The Party Congress included a showing of the film Lenin in New York, made by the group, ideological speeches, and "two dances-the first a pas de deux featuring Lenin and a ballerina 150 JANET KENNEDY and the second a shamanistic flutter of Brezhnev [a heavy-set actor in bathing trunks] holding a hammer and sickle. "21 In retrospect the artists found it fateful that Brezhnev' s death was announced a few days after the performance took place. The Kazimir Passion artists practice their own form of "Sots Art. " Like Komar and Melamid they combine Soviet political slogans with American images, and in their new context the slogans often appear two-edged; for example, in the film Lenin in New York the words "Workers of the world unite" appear against the background of lower Manhattan skyscrapers. To whom is the message being addressed? When the film was shown at a theater at St. Marks Place in Greenwich Village, some of the audience accused the makers of procommunist sympathies, an accusation the makers found somewhat bizarre. According to Victor Thpitsyn, the film has been given opposite political interpretations, depending on the perceptions of the viewer, but he says that he and his fellow artists are in fact' 'cynical about politics." Indeed, he distinguishes himself and his colleagues in the Kazimir Passion group from other emigre artists, such as the Gerlovins, saying that they are "too serious" about their art. Kazimir Passion draws its material both from socialist realism and from the art of the 1920s. In the film Lenin in New York, the example of Dziga Vertov is clearly reflected in the dynamic camera angles and assertive "documentary" flavor of the action. 22 Thpitsyn, a poet and an articulate spokesman for the group, defines the performances of the Kazimir Passion group as "Sots Art." He explains this as a combination of two impulses: (1) nostalgia for the post World War II period of Russian culture (the time of their childhood) and (2) irony toward Soviet culture, but an irony of the affectionate kind that a child might feel for its parents. Alexander Kosolapov, another member of Kazimir Passion, makes liberal use in his paintings of past monumental traditions (Egyptian, Early Christian, Renaissance), but injects these with a formal and hieratic socialist imagery. An "Egyptian" mural, for example, finds pharaoh's head replaced with Lenin's, and the hieroglyphs transformed into small Soviet tanks, hammers, and sickles. In Kosolapov's The Final Step of History (illus. 10) human progress ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK Alexander Kosolapov 10 1983 Detail of triptych. Oil on canvas, 62" x 240. Collection of the artist. THE FINAL STEP OF HISTORY 151 152 JANET KENNEDY from caveman to Soviet astronaut and ballerina unfolds with lurid academic pomp. Kosolapov says he feels a stronger kinship with European artists like the German Anselm Kiefer than with American artists, since Americans-he claims-lack the experience to deal with "ideology. " On the other hand it is American advertising that provided Kosolapov with the same type of exploitable archetypes he finds in socialist realism. In his poster Symbols of the Century , the Coca Cola emblem (in white on red ground) enters into harmonious union with a portrait of Lenin. In fact, in the Soviet Union, the latter image, stenciled in white on red, enjoys public visibility on approximately the same scale as Coca Cola in other parts of the world. Not only do the two symbols, Lenin' s face and the Coca Cola trademark, combine in one seemingly unified image, but the accompanying slogan-"It's the real thing"-acquires a teasingly ambiguous meaning from its new context. The Lenin-Coca Cola image has been produced as a postcard and in poster form. News of its distribution was not long in reaching the Coca Cola company, which has vigorously objected to Kosolapov's use of its trademark. However, Kosolapov can cite previous casesAndy Warhol's paintings and Robert Rauschenberg's Coca Cola Plan-in which the company's emblem has been used . Like the Gerlovins, he has managed to discover some of the forbidden fruits of capitalist society, but so far he has not been persuaded to abandon his five-year program for distribution of the Lenin-Coca Cola image via postcards, silkscreens, posters, billboards, buttons, Tshirts, and so forth. About this work Kosolapov writes that it is above all, an artistic conception, and it is a mistake to consider it outside this plane. "It poses no commercial or political questions, although it is based on methods of ideological influencing. This design, "Lenin-Coca Cola," is structured on the juxtaposition of Lenin, the symbol of communism, and the trademark of the Coca Cola company, which I conditionally use as the symbol of capitalism. Use of the color red for the two structures is not a major issue. In a broader sense, this is an exposure of a certain ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 153 common character of methods in the propaganda of ideas and goods by means of mass information, which has the goal of influencing people. As an artist I believe that artistic irony frees a person from the power of ideology and propaganda, and that this is the main premise of any work. In the process of work it is possible to discover other similarities and differences in the two systems." Artists like Kosolapov, Komar and Melamid, the Gerlovins, Bakhchanyan, and Thpitsyn have found an audience among their professional colleagues and the art public of New York. The avantgarde audience to whom their work appeals is concentrated in New York, and this makes rapid communication and feedback possible. Their art thrives on the high-pressure world of contemporary urban life; this was the case before they emigrated from the Soviet Union and it has facilitated their transition into a new setting. In fact, they enjoy the chaotic matching and mismatching of phenomena belonging to different cultures and different artistic languages. Humor is another protective device. As a response to political repression it is a well developed reflex in Eastern Europe; in the hands of Soviet emigres it has proved to be a medium readily translatable to the tension-filled West. Ironically, those artists of the' 'older" generation who aspire to transcend time and place in their art have faced greater difficulty in finding a sympathetic audience after emigration. The aspiration to universality presents a difficult goal in itself, and it is certainly a handicap in appealing to a young and urban audience. However, it should be noted that moral seriousness, even a didactic bent, is not absent from the work of conceptual and performance atists. The convenient division of Soviet emigre artists into two different camps-one dealing with weighty and serious themes, the other favoring the absurd-is, in the end, not fair to either group. Chemiakin, Tulipanov, and Tselkov are fully aware of the absurdities of modern life-and this is part of their strength; while the Gerlovins, Komar and Melamid, Kosolapov, and the others-disclaimers aside-take their games seriously. 154 JANET KENNEDY Notes 1. Interview with Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, May 22, 1983. Unless otherwise noted, direct quotations derive either from interviews or from written materials provided by the various artists discussed in this chapter. 2. Janet Kennedy, "From the Real to the Surreal" and Norton Dodge, "Conceptual and Pop Art" in New Art from the Soviet Union, edited by Norton Dodge and Alison Hilton. (Washington, D.C.: Acropolis Press, 1977). The artists involved support this observation. Igor Thlipanov, for example, says that Neizvestny's powerful abstract sculpture could not have been created by a Leningrad artist. 3. Alexis Rannit, cited in The Stanford Daily (August 10, 1982). 4. Wolfgang Fischer, Mikhail Chemiakin: Transformations (Exhibition cata, logue: Fischer Fine Art, London, 1980), p. 6. 5. Mikhail Chemiakin: Interview with Playboy Magazine (typescript in the possession of artist). 6. Statement by Rimma and Valery Gerlovin in A-Ya, No.1 (1979), p. 17. AYa is a review of unofficial Russian art, covering work by emigre artists and by artists living in the Soviet Union. Its editors are Alexei A1ekseev and Igor Chelkovskii; the American representative is Alexander Kosolapov. 7. Mikhail Chemiakin and Vladimir Ivanov, "Metaphysical Synthetism: Programme of the Petersburg Group, 1974" in Igor Golomshtok and Alexander Glezer, Soviet Art in Exile, edited by Michael Scammel (London: Seeker and Warburg, 1977), p. 156. 8. Ibid., p. 157. 9. Ibid., p. 159. 10. This phenomenon is well documented in recent volumes of lskusstvo, the art journal published by the Union of Artists, and also in recent books on the younger generation of Soviet painters. See Anna Dekhtiar's, Molodye zhivopistsy 70-kh godov [Young Painters of the 70s] (Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1979). 11. New Art from the Soviet Union, pp. 17,39. 12. Komar/Melamid: Two Soviet Dissident Artists, edited by Melvyn B. Nathanson. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), p. x. 13. Ibid., pp. xvii-xviii. 14. Jamey Gambrell, "'Monumental Show' des Refuses, Gowanis Memorial Artyard, " Artforum 20 (October 1981), pp. 80-82. 15. David K. Shipler, "Impish Artists Twit the State," The New York Times (February 6, 1977) . 16. The syringe project, which originated with Valery, is also exhibited jointly. 17. Variants of the Russian Samizdat show have been exhibited at the Visual Studies Workshop, Rochester, N. Y.; Chappaqua Library Gallery, Chappaqua, N.Y.; Washington Project for the Arts; Anderson Gallery, Richmond, Va.; Western Front Gallery, Vancouver; 911 East Pine Street Gallery, Seattle; and the Hewlett Gallery, Pittsburgh. The show continues to travel. ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT IN NEW YORK 155 18. Rimma and Valery Gerlovin, "Russian Samizdat Books," Flue (Spring 1982), p. 10. Flue is published periodically by Franklin Furnace, a non-profit gallery specializing in artists' books. 19. See George Gibian, Russia's Lost Literature of the Absurd (Ithaca, N. Y/: Cornell University Press, 1971). 20. Vagrich Bakhchanyan, "Sto odnofamil'tsev Solzhenitsyna," Kovcheg: Literaturnyi zhurnal, No.5 (1980), pp. 46-56. 21. Margarita Thpitsyn, "Painting History and Myth," American Arts (July 1983), p. 30. 22. A. Kosolapov, "Lenin in New York," A-fa, No.5 (1983), pp. 58-59.