Komar and Melamid's Dialogue with History - Art

Since the 1970s the "two-man collective" of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid have used their paintings, installations, and performances to debate, negotiate, and critique the process by which governments and other power elites manipulate both history and art history in their efforts to achieve specific ideological goals. [1] In these works, they examine the central role images play in bolstering and validating systems of belief and power, and they interrogate the continual recycling and re-inventing of political, social, and artistic traditions, which are consequently revealed to be depleted of any authentic meaning. While they have identified the historical continuity of particular tropes of representation, they recognize the paradoxical process by which seemingly fixed categories such as nation and truth shift over time. Their work is also fundamentally rooted in a playful sense of irony apparent since their earliest efforts, in which they mocked the pretensions of official Soviet art to debunk the ideolo gies the works were meant to embody and promote.

Komar and Melamid actively deconstruct historical and art historical categories by mining and combining sources across temporal and geographical boundaries. The resulting pastiche of apparently disparate styles, images, and cultures reveals the fluid nature of the canonic narratives of history and art history, as they shift in response to the political, social, economic, and cultural agendas of various regimes. Their dialogic process invites the viewer's active consideration of these narratives, which, in combination with the artists' biting parodies of their original sources, results in art that is both thought-provoking and entertaining. Indeed, Komar summarized the essence of their art praxis: "I like this notion: art as entertainment that poses questions." [2]

The Return of the Father: Stalin

In the early 1970s Komar and Melamid founded a mode of conceptual Pop art in the Soviet Union known as Sots-Art. [3] They and other Soviet nonconformist artists produced work that challenged the rigid dictates of the official style of Socialist Realism. [4] While many of their contemporaries actively rejected direct references to official art, they chose to appropriate stock images and texts from high and low culture. Through works in various media and styles, they emphasized the repetitive and kitschy nature of their sources, underscoring the ironic condition of Soviet visual culture. These images and texts had become bankrupt tools of propaganda while remaining part of a shared social language as legible to Soviet audiences as Andy Warhol's soup cans were to U.S. viewers.

In the mid-1970s, they began to smuggle their work out of the Soviet Union, and in 1976 Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York mounted their first exhibition in the United States. They themselves arrived in the United States in 1978 and had to adapt not only to their new country, but also to a new U.S. audience. In the 1980s, they began a series of paintings entitled Nostalgic Socialist Realism, in which they assumed the guise of political satirists by examining and deconstructing the ironic contradictions inherent in myths of power, both historical and art historical. Emerging in part from their attempts to reconnect with their homeland, these works use Socialist Realism as their point of departure. Komar and Melamid have described this mode as "that grandiose manifestation of modernism ... not a style but a method of employing any artistic forms created by humankind." [5] This eclectic method afforded them the freedom to appropriate and juxtapose a variety of art historical sources and, in recontextualizing them, to humorously usurp the authority of the original artist(s). Because many U.S. artists were exploring similar issues at the time, they were able to skillfully locate their work within the larger postmodernist discourse. However, they distinguished themselves and their art through their selection of primarily Russian and Soviet subjects, as well as through their carefully crafted public personae as wacky, exotic Russians--the forbidden yet enticing Soviet Other to Western, and especially U.S., consumers during the height of the Reagan era and the Cold War.

By selecting subjects illustrating the conflicting accounts of Soviet history propagated by successive Communist regimes, Komar and Melamid identified the loss of a past that had been expunged from the collective national memory. In particular, they underscored the absent presence of Josef Stalin following his death in 1953 and Nikita Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" of February 14, 1956, in which he denounced Stalin. At this time, Stalin's role in Soviet history came into question, and the ubiquitous public images of him were removed from view. As Melamid has stated, "He was gone--everything associated with Stalin was bad." [6] They turned the spotlight onto the previously unspeakable subject of Stalin in paintings such as Stalin and the Muses (1981-82) (fig. 1). In this work, they combined a neoclassical formal language with the iconographic strategies of Socialist Realism, both of which confer an alleged seriousness and elevation to the subject matter, to simultaneously chronicle and humorously critique Stali n's role in the revision of history.