SOTS Art

Komar & Melamid

Yesterday was a long and wonderful day punctuated by a trip back to the Banya with my parents and 19 some odd participants and staff. We took over the banya and experienced the joy of an incredibly hot room, oak and birch brooms for whipping and the best kvas that a russian ex-con can make.

I was looking forward to taking everyone to a cafateria not far from the banya which is just up the street from the museum (house) where Dostoyevsky died but alas it was no longer there. Fortune being what it was, we stumbled into "sheenok" a Ukranian restaurant (means puppy in Russian), that served amazing dumblings stuffed with sour cherries (vareniki s' vishniy). We ate and found ourselves even more tired than before, but being the troopers that we sometimes are, we made our way down to the fontanka canal and up to the Mayakovsky gallery for a lecture by Vitally Komar, one half of the soviet SOTS art movement that was happening at almost the same time as pop art took off her in the states.

What's the deifference between sots and pop you ask? Well it has to do with the society in which its rooted: american consumerasim vs. russian propoganda culture. Does this mean that Americans live out of the shadow of ultra nationalistic propoganda? No, not at all, however, what is most prevalent in our world is advertising and media. Warhols images of the Campbell Soup Can stands out as that mass market comodified pop art that attacks the banality of labels and media and, almost reappropriating it from its consumerists roots and, denying the dollar, and at the same time, completely worshipping money by taking an every day image and saying that this is art and its price tag is ever so much higher than the actual object represented. Russian media was about the state, a state that Komar said was more paranoid than the west and very touchy about the messages that artists put out and tried to convey to the soviet people. Sots art is a response and mockery to that culture and paranoia. Komar took the Campbell soup can and painted it in such a way that it was a rusted hulk, what it might look like in a thousand years. The projection into the future is nothing short of the soviety agenda that said things are bad now, but communism will make them better and they are always improving. The future, albeit bright and shinning in terms of the rhetotoric, is shown ironically in Sots.



Komar and Melamid as Lenin & Stalin

Komar had a slide show going that started with a picture of himwith warholl. There was a dialogue between these two groups of artists. Along with his own work he linked the massive soviety architecture that was emblamatic of the huge government and the might of the soviet regieme to American nationalist symbols. A small town in Siberia has the largest "head of lenin" in all of the former soviet union outside its central government office. That head, in its enormity has a particular resemblance to the head of Washington on Mt. Rushmore. The end object may differ but the iconography and its application is quite similar between both cultures. The Rockefeller center has an image of two figures around one of the doorways, one with a sickle and the other with a hammer, this is a hallmark of 30's art, and here it is, soviety in nature, its an interesting link between two diametrically opposing regimes that have so much in common.



Another self portrait of Komar and Melamid paying homage to Stalin, but are they really?

So the rest of the night was the usual, lets get food and beer. We made our way to the Bronze horseman statue and a british pub called The Red Lion. After a bit of food and a few liters we walked along the ebankment and found a comfy beer garden from which we watched the bridges open, fireworks from a boat celebrating the graduation of the high schools, colleges and military academies are next, and then eventually home where I slept till 2 this afternoon, finally caught up on that damn sleep that I've been missing for so long... oh my god it was glorious. Next up on the agenda is a reading by George Saunders in the Theatre Museum and then who knows what. Tomorrow is the baltika brewery tour, 2nd larges in Europe, and then Sunday is glorious Peterhoff... I uploaded some more photos, I think some became corrupted, the damn wifi connection keeps dropping left and right... I have to find a damn coax line in this town or I will go insane, maybe I'll do a mass dump in a week or so when I get to Brussels.

Shislivo!