Word: melamid
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...Contemporary Art in the P.S. 1 Museum in New York City. Titled "Stalin's Choice: Soviet Socialist Realism, 1932-1956," it consists of around 100 paintings and sculptures exhumed from various Russian museums. Appended to it is a group of works and installations by contemporary Russian artists -- Komar and Melamid, Ilya Kabakov and others -- that reflect on the Socialist Realist legacy with more irony than bitterness: this was the formative art of their childhood, and they had little else...
...mock Stalinist socialist realism, done in the correct borsch-and-gravy colors of official Soviet art 30 years ago? But there is nothing that pluralism will not give us; and so it is with the exhibition by Vitaly Komar (a name that, in Russian, means "mosquito") and Alexander Melamid, which grandly fills the Ronald Feldman Gallery all this month...
Komar, 39, and Melamid, 37, henceforth denoted as K & M, are both "dissident" Russian artists, who started exhibiting their peculiar team form of Pop conceptual art in the U.S.S.R. in 1972; in the fall of 1974, they took part in the still notorious "unofficial" art show on a vacant lot in Belijaevo, a suburb of Moscow, which was flattened by police bulldozers. Soon after that, they were able to arrange their departure for the U.S.A., where all art is ipso facto harmless. Do you long for the days when the old left was new? Then head...
Sometimes a weird sort of yearning intrudes. As a child, Melamid lived on the Moscow street that Stalin's staff car reputedly took on its way from the Kremlin to his country dacha: If you look carefully, his elders told him, you might see him in the back of the car. Melamid never did, but a yearning for the ogre is commemorated in I Saw Stalin Once When I Was a Child: the red curtain in the rear window slides back, revealing the fleshy nose, the twinkling eye of the Dreadful Father. "To us," Melamid points out, "Stalin...
...emollient powers of Great Art to make them look like herbivores. Stalinist socialist realism was merely the end of this process, carried out by hacks. After it, the more intelligent of the Beloved Leaders would want radio and TV, not painting, to be their cosmeticians. We must thank Melamid and Komar for reminding us what towering heights of awfulness the great lost tradition could reach in pre-electronic days. -By Robert Hughes
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