El actual escenario y el rol de la información y conocimiento

A further category that requires our attention is that of conceptualism, since it figures prominently in virtually all discussions of Russian postmodernism, exhibiting a playful, at first sight superficial character. Russian or Moscow conceptualism can be described as a school whose membership numbers, among others, the poets Lev Rubinshtein (born in 1947), Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007), Timur Kibirov (born in 1955) and Vsevolod Nekrasov (born in 1934). Conceptualists strive to remove the author from the aesthetic and literary process by using the language and style of other writers, or an aesthetic system, such as socialist realism, rather than their own. As a result, the writer or poet remains an outsider to the language and discourse which he uses. Epstein defines Russian conceptualism in the following words:

[a] concept [kontsept as a unit of conceptual art] is an idea attached to a reality to which it can never correspond, giving rise, through this intentional incongruity, to alienating, ironic or grotesque effects. Conceptualism plays with perverted ideas that

have been lost or distorted [...] Conceptualism is a poetics of de- nuded notions and self-sufficient signs that has been deliberately detached from the reality it is supposed to designate.54

Russian conceptualism is broadly synonymous with sots-art,55 _{which com-}

bines the designations of sots-realizm and ‘pop-art’. The term was coined as early as 1972 by the two Moscow artists Vitalii Komar (born in 1943) and Aleksandr Melamid (born in 1945). Sots-art is often regarded as the first original Russian art movement since the avant-garde of the 1920s, and uses Soviet signs and discourse and socialist realisttopoi, estranging them by means of alienation or irony. It seems to be informed by nostalgia as much as by a spirit of deconstruction, often directed at Soviet socialist and utopian myths.56 Epstein definessots-artconcisely in the following way: it is ‘entirely oriented toward socialist realism and reproduces its models in exaggerated mystical and simultaneously ironic manner’.57

According to Andrei Erofeev, sots-art

appropriates and subverts propaganda images and slogans to transform them into something that is both playful and grotesque. Through its irreverent use of symbols which, in their original context, were intended as a means of dominating the individual,

54_{Mikhail Epstein, ‘Theses on Metarealism and Conceptualism’, in Epstein, Genis, and}

Vladiv-Glover,New Perspectives, pp. 105–110 (p. 107).

55_{Lipovetsky,Dialogue with Chaos, p. 312.}

56_{Cf. Sally Laird,Voices of Russian Literature: Interviews with Ten Contemporary Writ-}

ers (Oxford, New York, Athenset al.: Oxford University Press, 1999) pp. 126, 149; Gol-

ubkov, pp. 78–79; Andrei Erofeev andLa maison rouge,SOTS-ART/СОЦ.АРТ Political

Art in Russia from 1972 to today(exhibition prospectus), in<http://www.lamaisonrouge.

org/PDF/2007/sots-art-pk.pdf>[accessed on 1 May 2009], p. 5.

Sots Art had a genuinely liberating effect on Soviet minds.58

Erofeev argues that unlike Western pop-art which he views as conformist and opportunistic, sots-art is a form of political protest; it ‘emphasises the fragility and decline of ideological constructions which aspire to eternal sta- tus’.59 _{He points out something which would indeed place sots-art in the}

philosophical vicinity of postmodernism, in particular with regard to the ideas expressed by Lyotard and Baudrillard (see Chapter 1):

[t]he philosophical basis for Sots Art is nihilistic relativism. Sots Art rejects all belief in any dogma whatsoever. It is against all forms of worship [...] Sots Art refuses to tolerate systems that humiliate the individual [...] the weapons it uses are laughter, ridicule, travesty and mystification. [...] Sots Art responds not to reality but to its images. It believes there is no reality beyond the message. This is why its only enemy is the repressive message and the media that convey the rhetoric of power.60

To illustrate the matter further, we invite the reader to look at the pho- tographs of two exhibits displayed at a sots-art exhibition in Paris in 2007– 2008.61 _{The installation by a sots-art artist depicted below (Figure 4.1)}

shows Hitler and Stalin hitting planet Earth in unison with a hammer, as if the disastrous dictatorships and wars which they embodied had been planned

58_{Erofeev, ‘About Sots Art: The Style of Mockers’, SOTS-ART/СОЦ.АРТ Political}

Art in Russia from 1972 to today, p. 5.

59_{Erofeev, ‘About Sots Art: The Style of Mockers’, p. 7.}

60_{Erofeev, ‘About Sots Art: The Style of Mockers’, pp. 7–8.}

61_{I thank Valtteri Mujunen for allowing me to use these photographs which he took}

at the Sots Art, Art Politique en Russie `a partir de 1971 exhibition in Paris, La Maison

together in advance and carried through accordingly. History tells a different story, but the installations point to the fact that, even though Hitler and Stalin were enemies, they may well be viewed as related in their totalitarian spirit, as well as in the disastrous consequences of their leadership on the USSR and Germany and, of course, the wider world. A similar idea is ex- pressed in the works of Vladimir Sorokin, in particular his novelThe Blue Fat

(Goluboe salo), which shows Hitler and Stalin as ruling the world together (see the chapter on Sorokin).

Figure 4.1: Stalin and Hitler

Another exhibit from the same exhibition, shown in Figure 4.2, presents a reworking of Vera Mukhina’s monumental statueThe Worker and Woman Farmer (Rabochii i kolkhoznitsa), but the original figures are replaced by the Disney cartoon characters Mickey and Minnie Mouse. The seriousness and presumptuousness of the work by Mukhina, and with it its underlying social- ist realist discursive and aesthetic paradigm, are highlighted and criticised by its juxtaposition with a discourse of cheerful entertainment. Mukhina’s statue is mentioned and parodied in Vladimir Tuchkov’s story ‘Iraida Shtol"ts and her Children’ (‘Iraida Shtol"ts i ee deti’), and Soviet monumentalism is referred to in a similar vein in Sorokin’s The Blue Fat.

Figure 4.2: The Worker and Kolhoz Woman

These two examples of sots-art installations will suffice to show how cer- tain contemporary Russian artists employsots-art strategies: they take sym- bols, faces and slogans which represent a certain ideological point of view, and then re-arrange them hyperbolically and grotesquely by juxtaposing them with an entirely different, incongruous style or discourse (socialist realist monumentalism with Disney cartoons, for example), thereby provoking a comic reaction in the onlooker. This explains the relationship betweensots- art, conceptualism and certain aspects of post-Soviet literature later analysed in the present work, as well as the fact that a number of critics, Lipovetsky and Bogdanova among them, are at pains to emphasise that Vladimir Sorokin is first and foremost a ‘conceptualist’ writer.62

62_{Lipovetsky,Dialogue with Chaos, p. 181; O. V. Bogdanova, Kontseptualist pisatel" i}

Through such creative acts of critically highlighting specific, but univer- sally experienced aspects of Soviet culture, the reader and onlooker as much as the writer and artist are helped to come to terms with the nation’s past, including its impact on the individual. The strategies of defamiliarisation employed by sots-art may be seen as encompassing a moral purpose; super- ficial, tactical deconstruction serves a strategic, positive objective,63 _{that of}

Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Real Aufarbeitung has to address the level of ideas and their substance, of ideological indoctrination, which traditionally uses the means of language and aesthetics. It appears that this is precisely what sots-art, and with it segments of post-Soviet literature, are concerned to do.