In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Boris Grays Text as a Ready-Made Object Translated from the Russian by John Meredig AT THE BEGINNING of the 1970s, in the context of Moscow's unofficial art-which is to say, art practiced outside official Soviet cultural institutions-there arose an artistic movement that is often called either sots-art or Moscow conceptualism. Both names refer to Western artistic movements of the 1960s and 1970s: sots-art to American pop art, and Moscow conceptualism to the Anglo-American version of conceptualism as it was represented, let us say, by works of Joseph Kosuth or the group Art and Language.1 The very duality of the names points to the fact that artists of this movement were interested not so much in the purity of speCific artistic methods in the context of the general evolution of artistic styles, as in the application of these methods to the speCific Soviet cultural context. And indeed , when the Moscow art world became acquainted-through journals and books that were then reaching Moscow-with the new art movements of the time, it discovered the possibility of working with its own social and cultural context by those same methods with which these Western, mostly American, artistic movements worked, using their own American material. This gave rise to the combination ofthe 'Western" and "Soviet" in the names themselves: sots-art and Moscow conceptualism. The term "sots-art" emphaSizes the use of visual and textual material of Soviet mass culture, just as American artists ofpop art used material from American mass culture. The term "conceptualisI!l" refers chiefly to use of the text in the visual space of art-primarily in the space of a picture. The specific convergence of these two terms in the context of Moscow art at the beginning of the 1970s is undoubtedly linked to the extreme literariness and text orientation of Soviet mass culture, in contrast, let us say, with American culture of the same period. Western commercial mass art aims above all to influence the imagination of the viewer, creating a visual image with which he or she could spontaneously identifY. A commercial advertisement operates by means ofthe already formed structure ofdesires oriented on specific visual objects: Coca-Cola or Marilyn Monroe. Mass art of the Soviet period, in contrast, fulfilled a mainly pedagOgical function: it demanded that view32 Text as a Ready-Made Object ers or readers sacrifice their own personal desires in order to obtain the goal that surpasses all desires and may be discovered only theoretically and conveyed only through a text-the goal of achieving communism. Ofcourse, the desire for communism continues to be a desire and mobilizes first ofall the archaic desire for paradise-with all its well-known erotic connotations. In this sense, the ideology ofcommunism continues the ambivalent game that all religions of the past conducted with the structure of desire by means ofprohibitions, sublimations, and, at the same time, promises of the imminent coming ofan incomparable, absolute blessedness. These archaicerotic connotations of Soviet ideology were constantly employed in the works of Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, who played a decisive role in the stylistic formation ofsots-art. In the New York period ofKomar and Melamid's work, these tendencies were strengthened even further by the identification ofthe iconography of Soviet socialism with the iconography ofWestern commercial culture as different manifestations of the same structure of desire. The same is true for other artists of sots-art who in the 1970s exchanged Moscow for New York: Kosolapov, Sokov (Tupitsyn 4-15). Correspondingly, the role of the text in the works of these artists from the very beginning was relatively minor, and decreased even more in their New York period. Accordingly , their influence on literature proved to be a minor and thematic one. A clear example of this influence--or rather, perhaps, parallelism-is Sasha Sokolov's novel Palisandria, which also interweaves the erotic and social utopian . But many other texts of new Russian literature also adopt the sots-art theme of utopian-erotic desire. A more direct influence on the development ofnew Russian literature, however, was exerted by those artists associated more with the term "Moscow conceptualism" and who used text directly in their artwork. It was specifically this new, uncustomary use of text in the context ofvisual art that forced even some writers to look on the text with new eyes and correspondingly to change their own literary practices. Here the conceptualist artists from the very beginning reacted most of all against...

Share