ARTnews, Summer 2006

‘Artists Against the State: Perestroika Revisited’

Perestroika, the period of political and cultural “restructuring” initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s, was a time when “underground” artists – those not sanctioned by the Soviet state – emerged into the open. Gallerist Ronald Feldman had a large role in introducing those artists to New York, and this show was a reunion of sorts. The title of the show was a bit misleading – several generations of artists were actually represented from Leonid Lamm (born 1928) to youngsters born in the late 1960s – and a number of the works were made long before perestroika.

In 1962, then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev promised his people that by 1980 they would be enjoying the delights of fully developed communism. By 1987, when Eduard Gorokhovsky painted We Will Live in Communism, showing Khrushchev and his cronies enjoying the delights of a well-stocked table, such statements were no longer made or believed, and it was possible for Gorokhovsky and others to express their feelings openly about the ideological food with which they had been stuffed all their lives. The painting has the look of a newspaper photo blown up so that the dot pattern blurs and the image approaches abstraction. One way of dealing with propaganda was to distance or objectify it.

Mockery also went a long way. Komar and Melamid were specialists in constructing new ideological myths, turning President Reagan into a red-draped centaur or substituting their own profiles for those of Lenin and Stalin in Double Self-Portrait (1973), painted to look like a mosaic plaque suitable for decorating the Moscow metro. Boris Orlov took on equally ubiquitous propaganda images of bemedaled leaders and generals; in his painted Group Portrait with Ribbons (ca. 1988), the “portrait is reduced to a pinhead and the ribbons bear the names of the artists’ colleagues.

The relationship of text to (un)truth, the construction of imaginary alternative worlds, and the encounter with the West were among the prevailing themes of the show. If official Soviet art was formulaic, restricted, generally technically proficient, and always on message, the art on view here was intensely personal, experimental, not always well made (quality materials were rare and technical perfection wasn’t a value), and sometimes completely obscure.

SYLVIA HOCHFIELD