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Sots-Art, Conceptualism, and Russian Postmodemism An Introduction Nancy Candee Sots-art, the mock use of the Soviet ideological cliches of mass culture, originated in Soviet nonconformist art of the early 1970s. Perhaps most familiar to the reader from the paintings of Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, who derived the term from Andy Warhol's pop art, sots-art figures prominently in the work of Erik Bulatov, Leonid Sokov, and others. It first caught the attention of American intellectuals in the early 1980s, thanks largely to the writings of Margarita Tupitsyn, curator of the January 1984 exhibition at New York's Semaphore Gallery entitled "Sots-Art: Russian Mock-Heroic Style." Aleksandr Kosolapov's 1982 "Symbols of the Century" ["Simvoly veka"], juxtaposing Lenin's profile with the Coca-Cola logo and slogan ("It's the real thing"), became the most familiar symbol of this movement. In literature, sots-art stands out as one ofthe most distinct directions in late-twentieth-century Russian culture, both in its explicit aesthetic confrontation with Soviet history and in its capacity to integrate Russian literature back into the world literary process after many decades of socialist realism. While conceptualism is a vast international movement, sots-art (with its focus on Soviet cultural history) reworks more local artistic practices and ideological cliches. At the same time, in its reflection of the speCific cultural character of Russian conceptualism and Russian postmodernism as a whole, sots-art articulates the crisis of relations between contemporary Eastern and Western cultural models. Sots-art often engages a tendency in the Soviet canon toward excess and monumentalism, articulated in its mammoth architecture , paintings, and sculpture; its epic films; its lengthy novels and narrative poems-in essence, that aspect ofsocialist realism referred to with irony as "Grand Style." Sots-art has had a profound influence on contemporary Russian literature , figuring both as distinct texts and as a range ofcitational devices within larger, more diverse works. Despite its centrality, sots-art in literature has vii Nancy Condee not yet been systematically studied, either in Russia or in the West. The purpose of this volume is to begin that process with an examination of literary sots-art on several levels: the context and problems (part 1); poetry, including works by both established and lesser-known poets such as Prigov, Rubinshtein , and Kibirov (part 2); and the prose of Sorokin, Popov, Sokolov, and Pelevin (part 3). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the cultural process in Russia "after realism" underwent radical aesthetic changes that were completed in the early 1930s. At the end of the twentieth century, we are again faced with a cultural process "after realism," yet now it is after socialist realism. These revolutionary and postrevolutionary cultures constitute the aesthetic foundation on which the new literature is based and to which it refers, even as it seeks to create new aesthetic codes. Sots-art is at the very center of this cultural process. Both inside Russia, where the 1991 collapse of communism rendered the cultural landscape difficult to comprehend, and in Western scholarship, with its crisis oftraditional SOvietological matrices, the examination of emergent models structuring the contemporary literary process is a task central to an understanding of Russian culture since the collapse of the "Great Utopia." It will be readily apparent that this volume offers little agreement on the historical or aesthetic boundaries of sots-art. Most contentious for the scholars represented here is the relationship between sots-art and the broader category of conceptualism. The latter term is often favored not so much for its accuracy as for its familiarity, for its multiple allegiances to the international art world, its stylistic felicity, and its broader historical sweep. The contributors differ as to whether the two categories are distinct but hieJ:archical (Epstein), overlapping and interpenetrating (Groys), a discernible binary (Balina), or closely related phenomena (Janecek), to mention only a few variants . Rather than impose a unified view by editorial decree, we have sought to present a spectrum ofviews in this ongoing debate, the diverSity of which we will address passim in these introductory remarks. In the first part, "Sots-Art: Between Socialist Realism and Postmodernism ," four contributors theorize on the broader issues associated with a discussion of sots-art and contemporary culture. The first contributor, Mikhail Epstein, is perhaps the best-known emigre theoretician of Russian postmodernism . Here, as elsewhere in his writings, he is concerned with the historical flow from totalitarian consciousness to postmodern consciousness-from the cultural expression of the former...

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