Komar and Melamid

Komar and Melamid was the joint pseudonym of two Moscow painters: Vitaly Komar (b. 1943) and Alexander Melamid (b. 1945). Discarding all their prior professional experience and all their earlier work, in 1972 they invented a new, critical type of artist, whose influence spread to all contemporary art of the late twentieth century. The Komar and Melamid project lasted for thirty-two years; in 2004, the artists separated.

The distinctive characteristic of the joint artist Komar and Melamid was the total annulment of personal identity. The artists revealed no inner world of any kind in their works. They programmatically presented themselves as a single eclectic artist manipulating artistic and cultural contexts and making connections that were unthinkable for a stereotypical consciousness. In doing so, Komar and Melamid acted as the successors of dadaist assemblage and transferred to Soviet soil the appropriative practices of pop art.

The Komar and Melamid project with which they announced themselves to the world (at an apartment exhibit), and for which they received their first mention in the foreign press, was nothing other than an attempt to forge a Soviet pop art. It was called sots art (1972–73) and was conducted under the motto: “We are the children of socialist realism and the grandchildren of the avant-garde!” A female partisan, a cosmonaut, a worker, and a female collective farm laborer—all archetypes of the Soviet myth—were depicted in the styles of expressionism and cubism. Meanwhile, portraits of prominent dissidents were presented in the style of socialist realism. This infernal brew of socialist realism, the avant-garde, and elements of icon painting was an answer to Andy Warhol: the high (modernism) was united with the low, that is to say, Soviet visual propaganda, which Komar and Melamid likened to capitalist advertising.

The union of avant-garde and totalitarian aesthetics perpetrated by Komar and Melamid was perceived at the time as an act of cultural sacrilege: each of these movements existed separately, completely denying the artistic value of the other. After Komar and Melamid inaugurated this approach, many other artists embraced it. The project, modest in format, quickly exploded into a whole sots art style, which went on to inform the work of dozens of artists and, subsequently, also writers, filmmakers, and theater directors for many years. The sots art style united socialist realism and the avant-garde under a common aesthetic denominator, replacing Clement Greenberg’s schema of avant-garde versus kitsch with a bipolar history of art.

Komar and Melamid did not simply play with quotations. They reproduced them in an inappropriate manner, creating deliberately bad art, which recalled the grotesques of René Magritte’s période vache. Komar and Melamid turned everything into parody, remaining true to their other programmatic slogan: “What isn’t parody is kitsch.” In their rendering, the idealized rhetorical formulas of fine art turned into awkward and pathetic phrases. Malevich became a white, sloppily painted piece of plywood (the project Circle, Square, Triangle into Every Family, 1975, ZAM, 1999.0714.001-004); Pollock turned into the indiscriminate hackwork of random individuals (the performance Art Belongs to the People, 1974–84); and De Kooning ended up as smears left on a canvas by spit and twitching elephant trunks (the performance Collaboration with Renée, 1995). And pompous Soviet academicism, which Komar and Melamid parodied in their second sots art project, Nostalgic Socialist Realism (1982–85), was defiled by being associated with vulgar topics of an intimate nature (the masturbation of a young pioneer girl, Stalin picking his pimples before a mirror).

In the United States, where Komar and Melamid emigrated on the wave of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union in 1978, they expanded their parodying of art by exposing the apologetics of its “promotion”—by gallery owners, art critics, art therapists, and the like. Against the background of the supremely serious art of the 1970s, laughter became the distinguishing feature of Komar and Melamid’s poetics. But concealed behind their parodic techniques was an ideological stance against cultural authoritarianism. Developing upon Theodor Adorno’s thesis about authoritarian music, they extended this concept to socialist realism, then to the avant-garde, then to the “pure” art of underground culture, and then, finally, to Western contemporary visual art, and to its main idol—Van Gogh. In order to deride his popularity, Komar and Melamid toured Oceania in the guise of missionaries, forcing aboriginal people to worship reproductions of Van Gogh’s paintings and to pray to his self-portraits (Van Gogh Art Ministry, 1997–98).

Laughter and parody, which undermine the beauty of rhetorical stylistic constructions, were seen by Komar and Melamid as effective instruments for neutralizing the irresistible temptation of cultural models that had become hegemonic within one or another cultural nexus. They fought against the influence of authority as well, by creating alternative cultural trends. At the height of minimalism, conceptualism, and installation art, Komar and Melamid came out with the programmatic project Anarchic Synthetism (1983–85), which blended all the styles of European classical and American abstract art within the framework of figurative, museum-format painting. This series lent significant support to the postmodern rollback—then gaining momentum—toward Grand Art.

At the same time, Komar and Melamid also attacked the avant-garde mainstream from the rear: they developed a series of placards, in the mold of Soviet propaganda posters, with slogans and images glorifying capitalism (Glory!, 1980). This sampling of apocryphal officialdom was expanded into the Bayonne project (late 1980s), which included portraits of leaders of production, industrial landscapes, and ikebana made of weeds and rusty chainwheels, a kind of capitalist version of socialist realism.

An analogous strategy of supporting the alternative point of view was used by them in Russia as well, when at the height of perestroika, all Soviet officialdom was being anathematized: Komar and Melamid came out against the removal of monuments to Bolshevik leaders and organized an international exhibition to support their preservation (Monumental Propaganda, 1991). Lastly, the same strategy became the basis of the grand exhibition and art action entitled The People’s Choice (1994–97), in which Komar and Melamid investigated the artistic preferences of the populations of different countries and produced regional models of beauty in accordance with their expressed tastes. The unquestionable victory of kitsch revealed by this survey was displayed in a traveling exhibition. In this way, Komar and Melamid proclaimed the worldwide failure of contemporary art.

Virtually any conceit by Komar and Melamid assumed the form of an exhibition. This became clear already in the early work Paradise (1972, ZAM, 1999.1277.001-054), Komar and Melamid’s first project, in which eclecticism was declared to be the foundation of a new aesthetics. From then on, the exhibit/installation became the main genre of their work. Moscow lacked the necessary conditions for showing exhibitions, but after Komar and Melamid moved to New York, they produced over twenty-five exhibits/installations, eighteen of them at the Ronald Feldman Gallery. These exhibits/installations were always narrative-based. Usually, they recounted a fictitious event that had occurred in the art world. Such, for example, were the exhibits of newly discovered abstract works by an eighteenth-century Russian painter (Apelles Zyablov, 1973, ZAM, 1999.0716.001-008), or of American pop art masterpieces burned in a fire at the Guggenheim Museum (the Post Art project, 1973–74, ZAM, 1992.0317, D06301), or of the skeleton of the Minotaur, unearthed by archaeologists on Crete (Minotaur, 1978).

The works presented at an exhibit were usually attributed to some invented artist—a character in a narrative. Not infrequently, the exhibit also included their portrait and biography. Sometimes, there were many such characters. All of them were actors. The works created by them were nothing more than props for the performance. The true work was the exhibit itself. Through its parable-like narrative, it demonstrated—sometimes in metaphorical form, sometimes directly—some common stereotype pertaining to art. For example, that abstract art, like all the important achievements of civilization, was invented in Russia. Or that gallery owners are crooks, cleverly covering up the hackwork of minimalists.

Komar and Melamid themselves, however, preferred to remain in the shadows, to heighten the verisimilitude of the tale they had invented. They were the PR managers, exhibitors, and tour guides of their own exhibition. Their aim was to catch as many viewers as possible in their nets and to elicit a response of laughter, argument, indignation, joyous acceptance, support, outrage. The criterion for the quality of a work for them was not contained in its form, but rather, it was measured by the effect produced, that is, by the degree to which stereotypes had been destroyed and by the damage inflicted on figures of authority.

Andrei Erofeev

Translated from Russian by Ilya Bernstein 

Photo portrait: Komar and Melamid, The Essence of Truth (Grinding Pravda), 1975. 1991.0885.002