artforum.com, May 23, 2006

“Artists Against the State: Perestroika Revisited”

Is the use of irony in the service of “political art” a weapon or a trap? This is a central question for many of today’s young American artists, but it also pertained to a generation of Russian artists making work under far more fraught conditions. The so-called nonconformists of the ‘70s and ‘80s in Russia protested, both publicly and privately, the state-sanctioned vision of art, always risking persecution for subversive artmaking activities. This show continues the gallery’s tradition of showing the work of this underexhibited scene (Feldman first exhibited Komar & Melamid in 1976) with a packed show of exceptionally engaging work by more than fifty artists, some familiar (the aforementioned duo, Ilya Kabakov, Sergei Bugaev), most not.

“Artists Against the State” opens with a smart juxtaposition: an anonymous socialist realist painting imaging a fictive Russia of happy, healthy law-abiders and Vagrich Bakhchanyan’s abject, nasty Americans As Seen by Russians, 1983. Bakhchanyan’s eighteen-panel piece enlarges hilarious caricatures of Americans – sarges, cowboys, soldiers – cribbed from Moscow newspapers, and its juxtaposition with the undated, conservative painting underlines the public-image war Russians lived daily. Maria Konstantinova’s terrific sculpture Rest in Peace, 1989, a drooping, Oldenbergian soft red star set within a frame of stretcher bars and surrounded by bricks, allegorizes the exposure of the soft red underbelly of a political system whose infrastructure and ideological dominance were on the brink of collapse. Unsurprisingly, Komar & Melamid’s several pieces are smart, funny, and scathing, but the painting Quotation, 1972, is memorable for its terrible physical condition, an unintentional metaphor for a generation of artists for whom stability – even just tolerable working conditions – was as fantastical as any socialist realist canvas.

NICK STILLMAN