After a long enforced hiatus caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Zimmerli Museum in New Brunswick (NJ) is resuming active exhibition activity with a retrospective exhibition of legendary Maverick artists Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar.To the bayonet equaled the absurdityThe exhibition Komar and Melamid: A Lesson in History is the largest exhibition of these artists, bringing together more than a hundred exhibits, including paintings, photographs, graphics, installations, as well as documentation of their famous performances and their first exhibitions.“This exhibition offers a new generation of art lovers a fresh look at the work of Komar and Melamid,” said Maura Riley, director of the Zimmerli Museum, during the opening of the exhibition. “Their dissident art, openly attacking the repressive practices of the authorities, official history and the silence to which Soviet citizens were forced, today acquires a new topicality, while highlighting the shortcomings of an American capitalism. sometimes uncontrollable.In addition to Zimmerli’s own collection, the exhibition features works from the Center Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the University of Michigan Museum of Art, the Ulrich Museum of Art from Wichita, Kansas, as well as from private collections.
At the start of the exhibition. Photo: Oleg Sulkin
Komar and Melamid worked together for over three decades, from 1972 to 2003. Both are from Moscow, where they began their journey in art. It turned out to be tricky from the first step – their conceptual designs did not correspond to official Soviet culture. In the 1970s, they imagined and developed an effective means of artistic reflection on the Soviet authoritarianism of the era of Brezhnev stagnation. This direction with their light hand was called “Sots Art”. They wittily used irony and absurdity as the main tools for understanding being “socialist”.Komar and Melamid managed to smuggle some of their works out of the USSR, which were presented in 1976 at their first exhibition in the West. The party censors recognized in their exercises the worst sedition and interfered in every possible way with their creative self-realization. They were prevented from leaving for the West and were not immediately released from the country. They emigrated first to Israel, then to the United States. Soon, they open a studio in Manhattan, on Canal Street. The mainstream American press did not deprive them of attention, the main newspapers and magazines wrote about them, they appeared on television. In the 1980s and 1990s, Komar and Melamid became popular and iconic figures in New York’s cosmopolitan art community. Their exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the Dia Art Foundation have attracted critical and public interest.”It’s important to realize that they live longer in the United States than they lived in Russia,” Maura Riley wrote in a press release for the exhibit, adding that Komar and Melamid “created statements incredibly powerful policies in response to a repressive totalitarian regime.”
In one of the exhibition halls. Photo: Oleg Sulkin
The Zimmerli Museum, located on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, is the repository of the Soviet Union’s richest collection of Nonconformist art from the mid-1990s, amassed by philanthropist and economist Norton Dodge and his wife Nancy and donated by Rutgers University. Among the most important pieces in the collection are the works of Komar and Melamid.Attack on tablets”The art of Komar and Melamid criticizes the totalitarian regime and ridicules Soviet idiosyncrasy and propaganda,” said Yulia Tulovskaya, curator of the exhibition and chief curator of the Norton Dodge Nonconformist Collection, during the opening. “They are distinguished by a pluralistic view of the world, whereas many other artists have chosen a recognizable style, they have adopted a whole range of ideas and perspectives.”Introducing the performers to the crowd, Tulovskaya noted with a smile that they “remain the same cool guys they were in the 70s”.“Pop art was generated by the overproduction of consumer goods and Western consumerism, while Sots Art was generated by the overproduction of Soviet ideology and agitprop,” Vitaly Komar said in a previous interview. with the author of these lines. “But in their artistic manifestations, these two movements are remarkably similar.”Komar and Melamid’s exhibition at Zimmerli is organized chronologically and is divided into two distinct sections.
Eco-collaboration project. Painting with the elephant René. 1995 Credit: Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar
The first section is devoted to the Soviet period of their work, marked by a bold frontal attack on the tablets of socialist realism using such effective tools as irony and parody. We are talking about the “paintings” of Apelles Zyablov, the character of the artistic hoax of Komar and Melamid, who is said to have lived in the 18th century in the Russian Empire and was the inventor of abstract painting. A series of sarcastic portraits captured the outstanding thinkers of the past Karl Marx, Hegel, Dostoyevsky and others.The second section presents the work of the tandem created after their move to the United States in 1978. In a new reality for them, they brought their perspective back to a critical reflection on American capitalism, in which they found common traits with the Soviet system.Their first American project was the concept “We buy and sell souls”, for which they created a company, created advertisements and invited personalities like Andy Warhol and Norton Dodge to sell their “souls” to them. Another project aimed to create works of art “with animals”, including monkeys and elephants, which was supposed to indicate the artists’ uncomfortable attitude towards the very principle of cooperation.The scoffers did not spare such a hallowed figure in American history as George Washington. In the ironic series American Dream, they portrayed him in the style of “socialist realism”.15 minutes and eternityIn addition to joint creativity, the artists had the opportunity to show solo works created by them after 2003.Vitaly Komar, a Ukrainian through his father, who spent the summer months in Kiev as a child, of course could not help but react to Russian aggression against Ukraine. It presents a series of five new paintings. One of them, created quite recently, depicts a bear attacking a bird.“I see this war not only as an attack on generally recognized borders, but also as a dangerous attempt to destroy visual symbols of social and political balance,” said Komar, who through his solo work has responded to other cataclysms of our time. , including the September 11 attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic.“You ask me if this exhibition is a summary? – said Vitaly Komar in an interview with the correspondent of the Russian service of “media”. – For me, each work is a summary. Of course, a lot has changed in my attitude towards art over these decades. Scandalous as motivation has disappeared. But before, we considered ourselves as irritants of public taste, the heirs of the Dadaists. Today, what I do, I prefer to call anarchist eclecticism.As for Alexander Melamid, he presented in the solo section the series “Alex Melamid and the Incoherent: Shadows, Puppets and Politics”. He was inspired by the works of the Incoherents collected at Zimmerli, a group of Parisian artists from the end of the 19th century, who distinguished themselves by a satirical irreverence for everyone in the world.
“Proletarian and Madonna” 1972. From the series “Sots-Art”. Fragment. Credit: Alexander Melamid and Vitaly Komar
In an interview with the correspondent of the Russian service media, Alexander Melamid recalled Andy Warhol’s statement that everyone is entitled to 15 minutes of fame.“In the halls of this exhibit you can see our 15 minutes of fame with Vitaly,” Melamid said. – Yes, we have not yet learned to go back in time. One day that time will come. But without us. I’m 77, Vitaly is 79. People have to die in time. It’s terrible to see old people determined to live forever. We were revolutionaries, idealists, we wanted to change the world around us. Today, the artist’s mission is to stop the madness.”Fontless PerformanceThe day after the opening, the museum hosted a conversation between exhibition curator Yulia Tulovskaya and art critic Robert Storr. Then Komar and Melamid’s performance “The Art Belongs to the People” was recreated. This performance first took place in Moscow in 1974 and was eventually dispersed by the police. Then it was repeated in New York at the avant-garde art center The Kitchen in 1984. In the current third repetition of the performance, ordinary visitors to the exhibition painted with paint on large canvases under the direction of Komar and Melamid.The organizers of the exhibition are planning a series of conferences with the participation of artists, curators and several workshops.
“KGB”. 1975 Photo: Oleg Sulkin
Thus, a meeting with Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of the Pussy Riot group is scheduled for March 9, which will be hosted by New York journalist Masha Gessen. And on May 21, artist Liz Leiser and medium Lauren Thibodeau promise to teach visitors how to summon spirits, and Laurence Krauser and Olga Okuneva will perform with Melamid dolls.”An inspiring new exhibition shows how two Russian artists used the state propaganda machine against the Kremlin.” This is the title of an article by art critic Jonathon Keats in the electronic version of Forbes magazine.Thinking about the historical purpose of the duo Komar-Melamid’s legacy as founders of Sots Art, Keats comes to the conclusion that decades later, absurdism and satire are seen today as a tool for reflection. very serious, both artistic and sociological. Treating their work as a joke won’t work anymore, Keats notes, because “they’ll always have the last word.”
