***** Gregory Freidin, "Transfiguration of Kitsch: Timur Kibirov's Sentiments, A Farewell Elegy for Soviet Civilization"
...Double Exposure: A Found Object
The enormity of the Soviet stylistic legacy and the epoch-making break with communism suggest that contemporary nostalgia for Soviet aesthetics cannot be accounted for by an appeal to either fashion or the subculture models.7 The paradoxical return of this aesthetic, indeed, the phenomenon of Soviet nostalgia as a whole, was prefigured by the practitioners of sots-art (Grois; Andreeva) in the late Soviet era. Its extension into post-communist Russia may be seen as a continued unfolding or, as Freud might have put it, a working through by the former Soviet citizens of their "Soviet complex." This is a process by means of which the individuals and groups, shaped by Soviet experience, come to terms with and assimilate the break with their Soviet past and the ever-revised revisions of their collective and personal Soviet histories.
For the original sots-artists, this process began in the early 1970s when the Soviet Union appeared alive and, considering Afghanistan, kicking but, in fact, was beginning to cave in, especially, in the area of the legitimating ideology. By contrast with the earlier generation of the critically-minded artists and intellectuals, who tended to see in socialist realism an aesthetic alien both to "true art" and "the people's" notion of the good and the beautiful, the sots-artists were keenly aware not only of the deeply problematic nature of such terms as "true art" and "the people," but also of the deep affinity between the official aesthetics and the average Soviet citizen's taste (see Fig 1, with the word "culture" silk screened onto a folksy pattern of a mass produced Soviet rug). In the eyes of the more traditional intelligentsia, the area where the affinity between the socialist realist aesthetic and popular taste reigned supreme was the other side of the moon of Soviet culture. By contrast, members of the sots-art movement found it staring in their face, and they set out to map it with great humor and relish.
Since the early 1970s, much has been done by these artists and their fellow-poets to demystify the convergence of the political-aesthetic agenda of the party-state and the cultural horizons of the semi-urbanized masses of Soviet citizens (Clark; Dobrenko; Bonnell). Part of the international Conceptualist8 movement (cf. pop-art, sots-art9), the sots-artists employed modernism's time-honored device of foregrounding the hidden springs of aesthetic experience -- in this case, what might be called the Soviet "political unconscious" (Jameson) -- that included the folkloric, literal conception of communist utopianism, and the dependence of propaganda art on middle-brow urban taste with its mass-produced, artless displacement of desire (Dunham; Boym). What distinguishes this art from its modernist parentage is not only its focus on the mass-produced, the popular, the ubiquitous and the quotidian, but, more important, the implicit crossing of the line between the auratic high art, which includes modernism, and the world of aesthetic objects without aura that reach their public only by means of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin).
This taste for objects evocative of Soviet civilization had been made evermore popular by art exhibitions, both retrospective10 and sots-art,11 and a whole variety of museum and gallery installations.12 One of them, The Lenin Museum Exhibition (Summer 1992) was even held in one of the most sacred shrines of Soviet civilization, Moscow's Lenin Museum. However brief, this promiscuous propinquity of Lenin memorabilia and sots-art works demystifying the cult forever transformed the museum into an involuntary sots-art parody. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the immediate influence of sots-art in contemporary Russia consists of the implicit parodic frame that imposes itself anachronistically on all and every object associated with the Soviet grand style. This is so not only in the eyes of the educated public, familiar with the sots-artist legacy, but among media consumers at large, so much has the parodic voice, pioneered by the sots-artists (known as _stiob_...), has penetrated television, the press, and colloquial speech.
It is in the imperfect fit between, on the one hand, the meaningful sentimental nostalgia experienced by an average post-Soviet citizen and, on the other, the sots-art aesthetic game that Kibirov's poetry has found its unique niche in modern Russian culture. But perhaps, the game of life-imitating-art has been played all too successfully in Russia, with the consequences all too lethal even for the players engaged in what Stephane Mallarmé called the supreme game.
Indeed, the very thought that the pendulum of today's taste may get stuck in Soviet-era retro and somehow bring back the bad old days has caused even some of the keenest ironic manipulators of this legacy to strike a note of caution. Timur Kibirov was among them. What makes his position particularly piquant is that he has come to enjoy a considerable following and public visibility precisely because he himself has greatly contributed to and capitalized on this demand for the aestheticized Soviet kitsch of both the sentimental and sots-artist variety. No other contemporary Russian poet -- not even Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov, whose poetry is more a verbal calque of sots-art visual conceptualism -- has been more successful at weaving from the shards of Soviet monumental sculpture and pitiful family heirlooms his own nest on the tree of modern Russian poetry. But now, confronted with the tidal wave of Soviet nostalgia, Kibirov has grown alarmed. "The majority has recalled with great sympathy and nostalgia the Soviet times," he told an interviewer in April 1997, "and the authorities are doing all they can, in my opinion, to encourage such feelings and make possible the victory of the communists" (Kibirov, "Vozrast"). The lyric chronicler who has mastered the art of double exposure, superimposing sots-art irony on a nostalgic snap shot of Soviet times, has begun to lose confidence in his own sense of balance.
The Big Picture
No matter how fantastic it may appear in retrospect, the late Soviet universe...existed for generations of Soviet citizens as the sole proverbial "common place" [obshchee mesto]; a space of common, public use; the communal, communicating place such as the communal bathroom; or kitchen in a communal flat (as in many Il'ia Kabakov's installations); or the place of communion with the state and its spirit of communism, such as the ultimate Soviet common place, the All-Union Exhibition of the Achievements of the People's Economy, a bright picture of which shimmers behind the propaganda-red Welcome! [Dobro pozhalovat'!] in Erik Bulatov's eponymous masterpiece. Kibirov refers to these over-inscribed places with a haunting tautological succinctness:
These are commonplaces, Our common places....
7. The authoritative and highly professional weekly _Itogi_ has a permanent rubric for articles dealing with this subject matter, entitled, not surprisingly "Nostalgia." 8. See Grois's seminal essay ("Moskovskii"). Among the most recent works on the period and the genre, see especially Rosenfield and Dodge, which contains a collection of authoritative essays, including Margarita Tupitsyn's "On Some Sources of Soviet Conceptualism" (303-05), along with over 300 illustrations. See also Bobrinskaia; Tupitsyn, _After Perestroika_. 9. The term was coined by the artists Komar and Melamid in 1972 as a hybrid of socialist realism and pop-art. See Andreeva 14. 10. Perhaps the most famous and comprehensive exhibition of Stalinist art, "Agitation for Happiness: Soviet Art of the Stalin Epoch" ["Agitatsiia za schast'e: Sovetskoe iskusstvo stalinskoi epokhi"] was held in 1993-94 in the Russian Museum (St. Petersburg) and Cassel (Germany). See Gassner. Most recently, during the celebration of the 850th anniversary of Moscow, an "art action" [khudozhestvennaia aktsiia] "Red Moscow," including among its participants Timur Kibirov, was held at the Manezh Exhibition Center. Among other things, it included an exposition "Crimea: Muscovites' Favorite Vacation Spot (Paintings from the 1930s and 1940s)," organized by the Foundation "Novaia Gallereia," known for its collection of "lyrical socialist realist art." 11. The history of these sots-art or conceptualist exhibitions, originally held "underground," goes back to the 1970s, if not the 1960s. See Andreeva; Tupitsyn, _Sots Art_. 12. E.g. Il'ia Kabakov. See Barre....
(<http://www.stanford.edu/~gfreidin/Publications/kib_sem99.pdf>, pp. 6-9) ***** -- Yoshie
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