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Komar and Melamid: works from the transition period in the context of Moscow Conceptualism

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Komar and Melamid: works from the transition period in the context of Moscow Conceptualism

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Content KOMAR AND MELAMID:
WORKS FROM THE TRANSITION PERIOD IN THE CONTEXT OF MOSCOW
CONCEPTUALISM

by

Irina Panasyuk

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
ART AND CURATORIAL PRACTICE IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

May 2013

Copyright 2013 Irina Panasyuk

ii
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments iii

Abstract iv

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 4
1.1 Soviet Underground Art Scene
1.2 Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid: Early Practice
1.3 Invention of Sots Art
1.4 First Encounters with The West and Emigration
Chapter 2 13
2.1 East To West: Art Of Transition

Color Therapeutics And Circle, Square, Triangle
Catalog Of Super Objects – Super Comfort For Super People
We Buy And Sell Souls
Chapter 3 33
3.1 Boris Groys Definition of Moscow Conceptualism
3.2 Komar and Melamid as Moscow Conceptualists
3.3 Komar’s and Melamid’s Style: Perpetual Irony, Historicity and
Conceptual Eclecticism
Chapter 4 42
4.1 Reception in the West
4.2 Komar and Melamid’s Role in the Cultural Cold War
4.3 Komar and Melamid: Later years
4.4 Art in Contemporary Russia
Conclusion 55

Bibliography 57

iii
Acknowledgments

I am grateful to John Tain for his help and guidance, and to Bruce Hainley and John Bowlt
for their time, and generative responses. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and
knowledge, providing valuable and timely feedback. I am very glad I had a chance to work
with you.

My gratitude also goes to Rhea Anastas, Noura Wedell, Cornelia Butler, the M.A. faculty,
for their cooperation, help and support not only with the thesis but with some other
challenges I had to meet while working on this topic.

Thanks to my colleagues for giving the opportunity to discuss the multiple ideas for this
paper. Special thanks to my editors, Marc Novac, Arman Demirjian, Katherine Bray who
helped me to proofread this paper.

Much love and gratitude goes to my family and friends for their love and support.

iv
Abstract

The Soviet-born American artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid formed
their artistic partnership in Moscow in 1965. Over the course of almost 40 years of
collaboration, they created various artworks commenting on power and popular culture
using a wide range of media. In this thesis, I analyze four works by Komar and Melamid
from the period of their immigration to the United States: Color Therapeutics (1974-1975),
Circle, Square, Triangle (1974), Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super
People (1975) and We Buy and Sell Souls (1978-1979). These four works exemplify Komar
and Melamid’s simultaneous criticality of ideological Soviet propaganda on the one hand,
and Western consumer culture on the other. I argue that these works were created in
accordance with the ideas and traditions of Moscow Conceptualism, as defined by Boris
Groys in 1979. Through my analysis, I show that the distinctive characteristics of Moscow
Conceptualism - romanticism and reference to the 20th Century Russian avant-garde
heritage - are fully present in Komar and Melamid’s practice of this period.
Further, this paper investigates the means and approaches that Komar and Melamid
used to work with the reception of Soviet dissident artists in the United States in the late
1970. It also attempts to measure the degree to which the reception was predicated by the
repercussions of political situation of the time and the Cultural Cold War between Soviet
Union and Western world. In the end, I conclude that the great attention Komar and
Melamid’s projects received within the social and political context of the late Cold War
years, might have contributed to the critical recognition of Moscow Conceptualism as a
newly formed art movement.

1
Introduction

In 1974-1975, Newsweek art critic and conceptual artist Douglas Davis made several
trips to Moscow to research the art and artists of the Soviet avant-garde movement. On one of
his trips, Douglas paid a studio visit to the Soviet artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander
Melamid, who, by that time, had been collaborating for nearly 10 years.
1
The artists showed
Davis their earliest works: red banners with communist slogans, signed by Komar and
Melamid. They introduced these as a Soviet version of Pop Art, implying that the slogans
were comparable to Coca-Cola advertising jingles in the West. According to the story, as told
by Valerie Hillings in “Moscow and Western Conceptualism in the 1970s,” Davis disagreed
with them. He asserted that their art was much more conceptually based than Pop Art. Komar
and Melamid conferred and decided to agree with him. They called all their subsequent work
conceptual art. The episode marks the pivotal moment in Komar and Melamid’s artistic
career, the moment of their first encounter with Western audiences' perception of postmodern
art developments.
This thesis examines a particular period in the oeuvre of the artistic duo of Russian-
born American artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, the body of work emerged
during the period of duo’s migration from Soviet Union to the United States, in the context of
Moscow Conceptualism. For the purpose of analyzing the developments and transformations
from this critical period in their career, I focus on four art projects that the artists created
between 1975 and 1980. The first three works I take up, Color Therapeutics (1974-1975),
Circle Square, Triangle (1974), and Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super

1
This amusing incident was mentioned by Valerie Hillings in “Moscow and Western Conceptualism in the
1970s,” in Moscow Conceptualism in Context, ed. Alla Rosenfeld (Munich/Berlin/London/New York:
Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University / Prestel, 2011), 265.

2
People (1975), comprise the artists’ commentary on Soviet ideology and materialistic
consumption of the Western capitalism. The final work I address is a performance based
project, titled We Buy and Sell Souls (1978-1979), which in my opinion signified a turning
point in Komar and Melamid’s artistic approach. In this paper I argue that Komar and
Melamid’s early engagement with the polemics of modernism, situated within the context of
Cold War politics, resulted in the exceptionally warm reception of the works from this
transitional period by the Western public. Additionally, I argue that Komar and Melamid’s
immediate success in the West implicitly contributed to the subsequent development of
Moscow Conceptualism as a recognizable art movement.
The thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter gives an overview of the
political, social and cultural developments in Soviet Union in the second half of the 20
th

century. It describes the Soviet unofficial art scene and surveys Komar and Melamid’s early
work. The chapter addresses the challenges the artists had to meet while producing art in their
own country and the circumstances that brought them to their decision to emigrate. It
concludes with a discussion of Sots Art, an eclectic mix of Social Realism and Pop Art with
elements of parody and satire. The second chapter is dedicated to an analysis of the four
works from the period of transition. The third chapter introduces the reader to the
phenomenon of Moscow Conceptualism. This chapter examines the artistic approach of
Komar and Melamid, as well as the references used in their practice in the years of
immigration that reveal their adhesion to the ideas of Moscow Conceptualism. The fourth
chapter offers an overview of Komar and Melamid’s reception in the United States and
analyzes the factors that contributed to the artists’ immediate success in the West. The final
chapter notes the changes in Komar and Melamid’s artistic approach in the later years of their

3
collaborative practice, and briefly summarizes the recent developments of Sots Art and
Moscow Conceptualism in the context of the rapidly changing art scene of contemporary
Russia.

4
CHAPTER 1

Soviet Underground Art Scene
A unique alternative culture was formed in the Soviet East in the second half of the
twentieth century. Soviet Nonconformist art referred to the art produced in the former Soviet
Union between 1955-1988; an art that served to resist the rigidity of the Soviet communist
system. In general it signified a style that did not comply with the official genre of Socialist
Realism, which at the time was a dominant style of painting in the Soviet Union. Other terms
used to refer to this phenomenon include Unofficial Soviet art or Underground art. Continuing
the idealistic traditions of the Russian avant-garde and distinguishing themselves from the
rigid official Soviet aesthetics, Nonconformist Soviet artists, while implying clandestine
content in their work, focused on the art form itself; form in which the artists could create in
complete freedom and independence.
2
According to the official doctrine of Soviet art,
detachment of form from content led to the loss of content. Thus unofficial art was defined as
formalistic and was persecuted.
3
Nevertheless, Nonconformist art morphed into a
heterogeneous movement that comprised greatly varied local and national subgroups.
The death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the denunciation of his crimes by Nikita
Khrushchev during his Secret Speech at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, resulted in the
so-called Khrushchev Thaw. This was a relatively short period of time when government

2
Vladimir Tatlin, influential artist and architect of the Russian avant garde, believed that materials are more
important than any representational project. Stephen Bann, “Introduction” in Global Conceptualism: Points of
Origin, 1950s-1980s, eds. Luis Camnizer, Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss, Lázló Beke (New York, Queens
Museum of Art, 1999), 9.

3
Soviet art theoreticians believed that the form in “normal” realistic art had to serve as an expression of
content, for which it had been created. In the case of formalism the form exceeded its "subordinate" position,
announcing its own meaning and aiming to come to the fore.

5
control was loosened over social and cultural spheres of Soviet life.
4
At that same Congress,
Michail Suslov, the Party’s chief ideologist at the time, not only criticized Stalin’s “cult of
personality,” but declared that under Stalin, “creative initiative had been inevitably stifled and
crushed,” and Soviet art had become “sweet and empty.”
5
As a result, the art establishment
began to re-evaluate Socialist Realism. Moreover, Khrushchev’s slogan, “Back to Lenin,”
allowed for the reinterpretation of long-tabooed avant-garde and modernist art, and their
reintegration with the national heritage.
The overall result for the contemporary scene of the late 1950s and 1960s was the
understanding that innovation in form and idiom was necessary, and a hope that art could now
originate from new, though officially approved, content. To signify the relevance of renewal,
the doors to Western art were partially opened. One of the major developments in this regard
was the Sixth International Youth and Student Festival, held in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in
1957, which brought together young artists from 52 countries who exhibited over 4,500
works. For the first time in over 25 years, Soviet audiences had the opportunity to learn about
the latest international developments. The works on display made lasting impressions on
those who attended, especially Soviet art students, who could watch and even paint alongside
foreign artists. Also in the summer of 1959, the American National Exhibition took place in
the same Sokolniki Park (along with the famous Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and
Khrushchev), introducing Western painting, sculpture and samples of American industrial

4
Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or
Premier, from 1958 to 1964. Khrushchev was responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union.

5
Elena Kornetchuk, “Soviet Art under Government Control: From the 1917 Revolution to Khrushchev’s
Thaw,” in From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton
T. Dodge (New York: Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University / Thames and Hudson, 1995), 44, 47.

6
design and other products of the capitalist consumer market to Soviet citizens.
6
Despite a few
setbacks, these liberating developments continued until the mid-1960s. This era was a time of
artistic independence and innovation.
However these social, cultural, and economic transformations ceased with the removal
of Khrushchev as Soviet leader in 1964. Under Brezhnev, many policies of the pre-thaw era
were reinstated.
7
According to Waltraud Bayer’s “The Unofficial Market: Art and Dissent.
1956 – 88,” the ideological net tightened, censorship was renewed, discipline and conformity
were imposed, and artists were threatened.
8
By the end of the 1960s, the young alternative
artists had retreated from public view.

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid: Early practice
Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were among the founders of Moscow
Conceptualism and initiators of the Sots Art movement. They were both born in Moscow, but
immigrated to the United States through Israel in 1978. Their creative partnership was
sparked while they were students at the Stroganov Institute of Art and Design.
9
Throughout
their joint careers, they collaborated on various conceptual projects, ranging from paintings
and performances to installations, public sculptures, photography, music and poetry. Their

6
Importantly, the American National Exhibition was the site of the famous Kitchen Debate between Richard
Nixon and Khrushchev. The Kitchen Debate was a series of impromptu exchanges (through interpreters)
between then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the opening of the
American National Exhibition. The debate was recorded on color videotape; it was subsequently rebroadcast in
both countries. Information source: “The Kitchen Debate,” last modified August 20, 2012,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Debate.

7
Leonid Brezhnev was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, presiding over the country from 1964 until his death in 1982.

8
Waltraud Bayer, “The Unofficial Market: Art and Dissent. 1956 – 88,” Zimmerli Journal. Nonconformist Art
from Soviet Union and Russian Art 5 (2008), 67.

9
Though Komar is two years older than Melamid, both graduated from the Stroganov Institute in 1967 as an
army stint after secondary school delayed Komar’s education.

7
first joint exhibition, Retrospectivism, was held at the Blue Bird Cafe in Moscow in 1967.
10

The strict censorship policies made precautionary measures for exhibitions at the Blue Bird
Café necessary: exhibitions stayed on view for only one night, and admission was by
invitation only.
11
After graduation from the Stroganov Institute, the artists joined the youth
section of the Moscow Union of Artists and found teaching jobs. Each continued to have his
own practice; occasionally they collaborated to make works of art.

Invention of Sots Art
In the first years out of school, hard–pressed for money, Komar and Melamid
frequently participated in advertising or, more precisely, propagandistic projects as freelance
designers. Forced to adhere to Socialist-Realist aesthetics in most of their projects, they
created multiple banners, ads, and brochures for different official celebrations and
anniversaries. This experience, along with the artists’ interest in principles and basic methods
of rendering conceptual ideas, fostered Komar and Melamid’s experimentation with an
eclectic mix of Socialist Realism and American Pop Art with elements of parody. Their work
contributed to an art movement, initially referred to as “Soviet Pop Art.”
In the cold winter of 1972, while drawing a banner with the socialist slogan “Glory of
Labor,” Komar and Melamid invented the method that underpinned the conceptual framework

10
The canvases displayed in the Retrospectivism exhibition offered pastiches of older realist and avant-garde
painting – the stylistic melding that came to define Komar and Melamid’s art ever since.

11
The Blue Bird Café was one of the Soviet progressive youth “bohemian” establishments in Moscow in the
1970s (along with Café Aelita and Café Molodyozhnoe) that provided rare, non-academic, public spaces,
where reasonably open discussions on contemporary music, art and literature could be held. Though, according
to Matthew Jesse Jackson, the Blue Bird Café was partially a place established by the Communist Youth
Organization, Komsomol (All-Union Leninist Communist Youth League) and functioned as a training ground
for KGB officers. Information source: Matthew Jesse Jackson, Answers of the Experimental Group: Ilya
Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2003),
151.

8
for their Sots Art.
12
Imagining what it would be like if an artist working on the banner took
Soviet propaganda very seriously, or moreover, personally, the artistic duo made a first
gesture towards establishing the future art movement. The gesture was simple but as
fundamental as Duchamp’s signing the urinal for his Fountain piece: Komar and Melamid put
their signatures under the Soviet slogan. Thus, at its very root, Sots Art was created as a
conceptual response to Socialist Realism, the art of stagnation. Komar and Melamid did not
really refute the methods of Socialist Realism; they extended it to such a degree that it became
self-parody. They took Soviet texts, slogans or visual ideological clichés and brought them to
the level of the absurd by adding converted elements of American Pop Art and commercial
advertisement clichés. When applied to Soviet life and reality, the result was hilarious and
satiric.
13

Delighted by their discovery, Komar and Melamid experimented with the idiom. As
Ksenya Gurshtein noted in TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of
Utopia, Sots Art announced two things: the artists’ dedication to the study of cultural signs
and the techniques of their utilization, and their fascination with semiotics as a discipline
“which came out of the study of language – a fact clearly signaled by the neologism summing
up the essence of the series.”
14
Later Gurshtein states that probably one of the most important
reasons for inventing Sots Art was “a desire to respond – with a mockery that nevertheless

12
Vitaly Komar (lecture, “On My Artistic Experience in Russia and Abroad,” Novy Museum, Moscow,
November 18, 2010) Accessed on February 2, 2013, http://www.snob.ru/selected/entry/27331.

13
The perfect example of intertwined ideological and advertisement clichés in Sots Art is the artwork Lenin –
Coca-Cola produced by Alexander Kosolapov in 1980. According to the author the artwork was “inspired by
media and addressed to the media.” It seems though that Komar and Melamid thought of juxtaposing these
particular images as two symbols of advertisement (commercials for consumer goods in the West and a steady
flow of ideological propaganda in Russia) much earlier as the reference to billboards with huge quotations
from Lenin instead of "Drink Coca-Cola” had been used in Ronald Feldman gallery press release announcing
Komar’s and Melamid’s upcoming show in 1976,
http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhknm76.html.

14
Ksenya Gurshtein, TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia (PhD diss.
University of Michigan, 2011), 158.

9
took seriously what others ignored altogether – to the relentless ideological realities of their
surrounding environment.”
15
In the aesthetics of mature Sots Art, political allusions
intertwined with information and linguistic theory. Characterized by an eclectic style,
photographic elements, as well as an ironic touch of pompous pseudo-classicism and symbols
of Stalinist Empire, Sots Art paintings represented the alienation of forms from Socialist
Realism. Even when the new trend was borrowed by other Soviet Nonconformist artists, Sots
Art’s main features inherently included a simplified color layout and Soviet symbols and
texts, all appropriated and subverted from propaganda images and slogans. The latter would
subsequently be transformed in a way that lost their ideological orientation and gained a
purely decorative one. The main drive of Sots Art remained the dethronement of Soviet
ideals.

First Encounters with the West and Emigration
The duo made their first appearance as dissident artists and anti-propagandists in the
Western media in March 19, 1974. Hedrick Smith, then Moscow bureau chief for the New
York Times, wrote about Komar and Melamid in an article entitled, “Young Soviet Painters
Score Socialist Art.”
16
The article introduced the artists to the American public, citing their
invention of Sots Art and the ideas behind it. They next appeared in the Western press later
the same year among the participants of the notorious Bulldozer Exhibition, which was held in
a park on the outskirts of Moscow on September 15, 1974. Being active members of the
Soviet Underground art scene, Komar and Melamid became involved in this event when they
supported Oskar Rabin’s organization of the outdoor exhibition, which included “unofficial

15
Ibid., 160.

16
Hedrick Smith, "Young Soviet Painters Score Socialist Art," New York Times, March l9, 1974.

10
works of art” that did not fit the style of Socialist Realism.
17
Such artists as Leonid Sokolov,
Vladimir Nemukhin, Evgeny Rukhin, and Alexander Zhdanov showed their work; there were
65 participants in all.
18
Eventually, the exhibition was shut down, and Komar and Melamid
suffered during the crackdown along with the other artists. Komar and Melamid’s Double
Self-Portrait, which depicted the artists as Lenin and Stalin, was destroyed in the bulldozing.
Due to the worldwide attention generated by the scandal, an unexpected result of the
Bulldozer Show was that the authorities eventually were forced into an unstated policy of
permissiveness. This détente made it easier for unofficial artists to exhibit their work, yet
harassment and censorship continued.
The relative weakening of official controls could have allowed nonconformist artists to
increase circulation of their works and ideas. However, another challenge that Soviet artists
faced, in addition to constant resistance to rigid ideology, was the absence of a market for the
art that they produced. There was interest in their work by art aficionados from abroad, as
well as random local buyers; mostly Soviet intelligentsia. Still, the sales to domestic and
foreign collectors remained occasional and insufficient.
19

17
Oskar Rabin is a Soviet nonconformist artist, who was one of the founders of the Lianozovo Group. He
emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1978, and has lived and worked in Paris since then.

18
The artists involved in this unofficial show, held in the outskirts of Moscow, had written to the authorities in
advance and asked permission to hold the exposition, but received no response. To make a point of
persevering against official hostility they decided to proceed with the show. Hours after the opening, the KGB
arrived with bulldozers to completely destroy all works of art present; some of the artists were beaten and
arrested. Fortunately for the participants, foreign journalists were present at the event, and not only witnessed
what happened, but were themselves attacked along with the artists. The scandal received worldwide coverage.
Eventually the authorities were forced to set the imprisoned artists free. and allowed a Nonconformist art
exhibition two weeks later at the Izmailovsky park in Moscow.

19
There is a point of view, shared by a few experts that Nonconformist art would not have survived without
foreign patrons. Norton Dodge was one of the most famous supporters of Soviet Unofficial art of the time. An
economics professor, in the course of several research trips to Soviet Union in the 1950s-1970s, he developed
a passion for Soviet underground art and smuggled to the West thousands of works of dissident artists, painters
and sculptors. His collection, the largest in the world of Nonconformist art, is now a part of the Jane Voorhees
Zimmerli Art Museum of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

11
Komar and Melamid were fortunate to have friends and acquaintances that believed in
the artists’ ideas and had ties to the Western Art world. In 1972 the artistic duo became
acquainted with an American mathematician, Melvyn Nathanson, who was in Moscow on a
post-doctoral fellowship. Nathanson was the first to introduce their works to an American
audience.
20
Later, he also became the author of the first monograph on Komar and Melamid,
published in the United Sates in 1979.
21

Alexander Goldfarb, a Soviet microbiologist who was Melamid’s cousin and a good
friend of the artists, played a seminal role in establishing Komar and Melamid’s links with the
West. Goldfarb was permitted to travel abroad to deliver his lectures. He met Douglas Davis,
then art critic at Newsweek, on one of his trips abroad, and used this acquaintance to arrange
Komar and Melamid’s first show in the Ronald Feldman gallery in New York. Goldfarb
arrived in New York after touring Canada to personally meet Feldman. Since Goldfarb could
not bring the actual artworks of the Soviet nonconformist duo out of the country, he presented
their ideas by literally sketching rough likenesses on a piece of paper. In a New York Times
interview with reporter (or art critic or whatever) Grace Glueck, Feldman stated, “He
[Goldfarb] sat down to explain it to me, drawing diagrams, since he didn’t have photos… I
was excited about it and decided to show it.”
22
Douglas Davis, who was a conceptual artist
himself, stayed on Komar and Melamid’s radar. In 1977, all three of them collaborated on a
project called, Where is The Line Between Us (1975-1978).
23

20
Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Soviet Emigré Artists: Life and Work in the USSR and the United States (New York
and London: M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1985), 136.

21
Melvyn Nathanson, Komar/Melamid: Two Soviet Dissident Artists (Chicago: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1979)

22
Grace Glueck, “Art Smuggled Out of Russia Makes Satiric Show Here,” The New York Times, Feb 7, 1976,
50.

23
Valerie Hillings describes and discussed this projects in political and historical context of the time in “Where
Is the Line Between Us?: Moscow and Western Conceptualism in 1970s” in Moscow Conceptualism in

12
Robert Feldman was an owner of a “risk-taking, aggressive”

gallery in New York who
had built his business on “hard-to-sell” art.
24
He later became Andy Warhol’s dealer,
representing an impressive collection of Warhol’s art. He took a great risk in deciding to
display Komar and Melamid’s works without having personally known, nor having met them.
The artists sought the means to deliver their artworks for their first show at the Ronald
Feldman. Several friends and acquaintances, diplomats and journalists among them, helped
smuggle the works through customs. Most of the methods they used remain unknown, but
according to one well-known anecdote, Soviet customs mistook the brightly patterned fabric
of Color Writing: Ideological Abstraction (1974) for a tablecloth.
25

Feldman’s gamble paid off: Komar and Melamid’s first exhibition sold out.
According to an article in the Hartford Courant, after the show, Feldman called the artists to
tell them that people were lining up to see their work.
26
The show’s success proved that not
only was there a market for Komar and Melamid’s works abroad, but that their artistic
practice had been noticed by the Western public. Moreover, the American audience seemed
interested in the conceptual ideas of Nonconformist artists from the Soviet Union. Having
lost their teaching jobs and freelance commissions by then, and relying only on proceeds from
their shows in New York, Komar and Melamid’s intention was clear: they wanted to have
more exhibitions abroad. In TranStates, Ksenya Grustein describes the impact that positive
reception in the West had on the artists plans: “For Komar and Melamid, who from the start
emphasized the social nature of their practice, the realization that they would need to leave the

Context, ed. Alla Rosenfeld (Munich/Berlin/London/New York: Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University /
Prestel, 2011). More information about the project can be found on p.42.

24
Andras Szanto, “A Business Built on Hard-to-Sell,” The New York Times, Oct 6, 2002, 35.

25
Carter Ratcliff, Komar and Melamid (New York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 21.

26
Colin McEnroe, “Russian Artists Present for Show,” Hartford Courant, Sep 29, 1978, 46.

13
USSR to have any kind of sizeable audience to appreciate their conceptual insights in an
exhibition context became inevitable by 1975.”
27

By the mid 1970s, the Soviet government changed their approach and tactics towards
dissidents and nonconformist cultural activities: some dissidents were forced to leave the
Soviet Union, while others “were enticed into organizations supervised, at least loosely, by
the state,” as noted by Matthew Jesse Jackson in his Answers of the Experimental Group: Ilya
Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes.
28
In the years that followed, a large
number of dissident artists were allowed to emigrate, Komar and Melamid among them. In
early 1977 they applied for exit visas. Though their first request was rejected, in October
1977 Melamid and his family were given permission to immigrate to Israel. Komar followed
later that year.

CHAPTER 2

East to West: Art of Transition
After the success of their first exhibition in New York, which happened to be their first
two-man show outside of the Soviet Union, Komar and Melamid concentrated on producing
works in English, for instance Light Station and Energy Problems Solution, 1975, as well as
performance and conceptual art that would not need to be physically transported;
documentation of which could be easily smuggled through customs. The works that were still
quite tangible were constructed from highly portable materials: the artists used canvas rather

27
Ksenya Gurshtein, TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia (PhD diss.
University of Michigan, 2011), 212, 215.

28
Matthew Jesse Jackson, Answers of the Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet
Avant-Gardes, (PhD diss. University of California, Berkeley, 2003), 222.

14
than fiberboard or tried to produce small-scale objects that Soviet customs officials would
never recognize as art. For example, for their 1976 exhibition at the Ronald Feldman Gallery,
they produced a composite work entitled Biography that consisted of 197 small wooden
panels.
29
This chapter is devoted to the examination of four works created by Komar and
Melamid before their emigration. These works mapped the artists’ experiments in the field of
conceptual art and attempted to establish a dialog with the polemics of some of the modernist
practices.

Color Therapeutics and Circle, Square, Triangle
Two of the projects created by Komar and Melamid on the eve of their emigration
contained multiple historical references that simultaneously dealt with the Russian avant-
garde’s legacy, critiqued Soviet official leaders, and also ironically introduced a concept of
the “healing power of art.” These two works are Color Therapeutics and Circle, Square,
Triangle.
Color Therapeutics (1974-1975), consisted of 25 wooden plaques, each painted in a
different color. It was exhibited during Komar and Melamid’s first show in the Robert
Feldman gallery in 1976. A series of colored tiles in rows ironically offered the public a
method for curing a variety of medical conditions. The palette ranged from multiple
gradations of green (dark green, olive green and turquoise) to various hints of yellow and
brown. Each color was correlated with a particular symptom and illness (for example,
“Drinking Problems,” “Impotence,” “Obesity,” “Insomnia,” “Inferiority Complexes,” and
“Pregnancy”) mentioned in the instruction panel installed beside the wooden plaques. The

29
The work was illustrated in New York Magazine, February 6, 1976, and the article was reproduced on the
Feldman Gallery website (http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/home_frame.html)

15
instruction panel was an essential part of the piece, as the viewer had to consult the panel to
learn which color to gaze at and for what duration to be cured from his ailment. The
instructions, entitled with the Soviet-derisive slogan “Color is a mighty power!” provided a
description of the curing mechanism: “A strictly definite light wave frequency corresponds to
each color. Upon reflection from the plaques, light acquires new qualities. Penetrating into
the organs of vision, the reflected light stimulates the light-sensitive retinal rods and cones
that transmit such stimulation through the optic nerve to the brain.”
30
In this matter the work
wittingly mocked the contrivance of Soviet medical science,
31
but it also half seriously
elaborated on the artists’ desire to return to a closer connection between art and society. As
Komar explained in an interview in 2002: “In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the most
interesting phenomena in art were inseparable from the ideas that excited society. Many
avant-garde artists sympathized with the ideas of socialism and based their rejection of
traditional realism upon the new discoveries of physicists. At the end of the 20th century, art
lost this connection with the intellectual life of society.”
32
Another historical reference in
Color Therapeutics is the work’s allusion to the monochrome canvases of Kazimir Malevich.
Malevich’s Black Square on a White Ground (1913) was one of the first artworks created
under the emblem of Suprematism, with the author claiming that his reductivism expressed

30
Reproduction of the work and instruction panel can be found in Carter Ratcliff’s Komar and Melamid (New
York: Abbeville Press, 1988), 83.

31
Soviet citizens were taught that Soviet medicine was the most effective and correct medicine in the world.
In reality, though Soviet medical school prepared skilled medical personnel, very often Soviet doctors lacked
pharmaceuticals and equipment, and had no idea of medical practice in other countries. The lack of medicines
and the inaccessibility of many treatments utilized abroad were partially substituted by alternative medicine
and inventions in the sphere of physical therapy that gained popularity and widespread application in Soviet
Union alongside traditional medicine.

32
Vitaly Komar, "Interview with Reba Wulkan, Contemporary Exhibition Curator, Yeshiva University
Museum," 2002. http://www.komarandmelamid.org/pdf/Wulkan.pdf.

16
subjective sensations untainted by contact with the external world.
33
The success of Komar
and Melamid’s work of art that conveyed a “scientific positivism” had been proved by the fact
that Color Therapeutics had been purchased during the show by Robert and Maryse Boxer.
34

While Color Therapeutics promoted the healing power of colors and offered patients
medical and psychiatric relief, another artwork of Komar and Melamid’s from their near-
emigrational period, exposed to public view at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1976, promised
to the afflicted additional “spiritual benefits.” The artists had started the Circle, Square,
Triangle (Figure 1) project in 1974 when they announced the opening of a “factory” to
manufacture geometrical figures. In 1976 the artwork was exhibited as a three-part wall
piece.

It included the scheme of the ideal shapes themselves, made from thin slabs of white-
painted wood, and a black and white photo print, which was printed from a negative proof
produced in the Soviet Union. The installation also included a notice advertising the benefits
of purchasing absolute geometric forms.
35
The notice certified the uniqueness of the materials
used to produce ideal figures and also emphasized Komar’s and Melamid’s selective approach
in choosing “virgin maidens” as their productive workforce: “eternal ideals linked a priori to
nothing, manufactured from the highest quality of domestic lumber and imported cements by
the hands of the virginal maidens.”
36
The fictional maidens, according to the text, were
employed by the “Renowned Artists of the 1970s,” – the wording Komar and Melamid used
to sign all their works produced during that period. The text of the notice was saturated with
pseudo-alchemical language of calculations and numbers related to the diameter of the moon

33
Suprematism is an avant-garde art movement founded by Kazimir Malevich in early 20
th
century Russia,
focusing on painting simple geometrical shapes and multi-color combinations.

34
Grace Glueck, “Art Smuggled Out of Russia Makes Satiric Show Here,” The New York Times, Feb 7, 1976.

35
Vitaly Komar, phone interview with the author, February 1, 2013.

36
Reproduction of the work and the accompanying notice can be found on Komar’s and Melamid’s website
http://www.komarandmelamid.org/chronology/1974_1975/pages/49A.htm.

17
and the length of the soul. The installation was complemented by posters demonstrating to
prospective customers domestic interior views with inscribed circles, squares and triangles,
and by the photographs of “virginal maidens” at work manufacturing ideal geometrical
figures. According to the artists’ statement, this artwork was supposed to become a “missing
link” in “the evolution of the Russian Avant-garde,”
37
i.e. a link between fine art painting and
the production and design of objects for people and their dwellings.

Figure 1. Komar and Melamid,
Circle, Square, Triangle, 1974
Black and white photoprint

37
Russian Avant-garde is a phenomenon in Russian art that appeared and developed in a ten year time frame
between the two Russian revolutions, characterized by artists search for new paths to follow and discovering
inconceivable liberties. As a consequence of these shifts and experiments, an art trend was born which changed
the history of Russian art for the next generation (ca. 1910–1930). The Russian Avant-garde was comprised of
different artistic movements and new art forms including constructivism, futurism, neo-primitivism, rayonism,
and suprematism amongst others. The differences in understanding among the artists were sometimes very
great as all of them were not only using various techniques but implying different intents and grounding.

18
Circle, Square, Triangle ironically commented on the Suprematist idealization of pure
form and its spiritual qualities, a part of Komar and Melamid’s satire was directed at the
modernist rediscovery of “ideal forms” such as the cube and the circle that facilitated the
globalization of art. This work reflected the artists’ ambivalent approach to the subject, as
through the duo simultaneously criticized the venality of the values of the avant-garde
heritage and expressed their regrets about the simplification of its sublime ideas. Making
geometrical figures a subject of trade, this piece could be understood as signifying the
transformation of the figurative and esoteric language of Kazimir Malevich, a transformation
that made this language available to the needs of mass consumption. Komar’s and Melamid’s
conceptual approach makes Circle, Square, Triangle one of their first works critiquing
consumerism. Consumerist critique later became one of Komar’s and Melamid’s favorite
topics for works created in the first decade after their immigration to the US. However, if in
this work they began ironizing about lofty ideals in the service of consumption, in their later
projects the artists switched to a criticism of the social system that raised consumerism to the
rank of dominant ideology. In Circle, Square, Triangle the artists also for the first time
brought up the idea of creating “objects for people,” the idea that would be developed in their
next work, Super Objects: Super Comfort for Super People.
Color Therapeutics and Circle, Square, Triangle were not simply a parody of “mass-
produced” ideals; neither were they limited to an allusion to symbolism in Soviet socialist
realist art and modern architecture. In their interviews with Ksenya Gurshtein, the artists
noted that they wanted to refer their audience to a more ancient symbolism – mystical healing
of the afflicted by symbols and idols conducted by biblical figures. In addition, they sought to
show a “mystical quasi-science to alchemical tracts and to Buddhist mandalas, both of which

19
use geometric figures to visualize an abstract and idealized order of the world.”
38
Playing
with the sacral meaning of symbols, and thereby implicating spiritual context, the artists
emphasized the divine symbolic nature that confirms an ability of the ideal forms to heal. The
artists would go on to refer to art that has healing powers in their later works, particularly in
Healing Power of Art (Van Gogh Ministry), a project they carried out in 1999 as a parody of
contemporary medicine and the deification of Van Gogh. The same concept had been used by
“Artist Healer-in-Residence” Alexander Melamid who in 2011 opened a storefront clinic in
Soho (New York), “where visitors would be “treated” through exposure to fine art.”
39

At the same time, Komar’s and Melamid's contradictory, ironic and nostalgic attitude
towards historical heritage and avant-garde ideas became a permanent part of their practice as
they continuously mocked the constrained aspects and idealization of avant-garde movements
in a series of their projects, while simultaneously celebrating the idealism and the avant-
garde’s allegiance to utopian principles.
40
Even amid gleeful nihilism, Komar and Melamid’s
rhetoric revealed their investment in the idea of personal liberation through art and certain
nostalgia towards avant-garde practices related to political utopian space.
41

Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People

38
Vitaly Komar’s statement quoted by Ksenya Gurshtein in her TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern
Europe and the Limits of Utopia, (PhD diss. University of Michigan, 2011), 226.

39
Charles McGrath, “Can a Picasso Cure You?,” The New York Times, May 24, 2011.

40
Komar argued in their joint interview Art is a diary in 1988: “Immediately after the Russian Revolution
avant-garde artists were saying that their own experience doesn’t matter anymore. It is not a purpose of art to
express that. Always, they propose a synthesis that will appear sometime in the future – the spiritual and the
material together. This is the generation of Malevich’s Suprematism, of Constructivism. Think about
communism as you make avant-garde abstraction, and one day these compositions with stupid squares will be
materialized. They will be plazas for the people.”

41
Ksenya Gurshtein, TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia, (PhD diss.
University of Michigan, 2011) p. 241.

20
Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People was one of Komar and
Melamid’s major projects created a year prior to the artists’ emigration in 1975 and
subsequently to New York. In it, they elaborate on the notion of political utopian space,
making the quest for utopia an ulterior motivation / one of the conditions for creating the
work. Anticipating a Western audience while still living in Moscow, Komar and Melamid
looked to create art that would reflect the processes of capitalist society and maintain the same
level of conceptual content as their previous works. Catalog of Super Objects – Super
Comfort for Super People appeared as a portfolio of 36 color photographs (each photograph 8
X 10 inches). Each photograph in the portfolio depicted a Soviet consumer product – newly
invented “essential devices” that had specific applications, but served absurd purposes. The
artists created these devices themselves, intending them to resemble advertisements in
Western home shopping catalogues. Catalogue of Super Objects had been developed from a
slew of American catalogues shipped to the artists by Ronald Feldman, with whom they
remained in close contact during their final years living in Moscow. The sample catalogs at
Komar and Melamid’s disposal ranged from Bloomingdale’s to Sears Roebuck.
42
An artwork
that was designed to generate interest among a Western public, the work was filled with
multi-layered irony and sarcasm aimed at different targets, and contained a number of
references. The Catalog was originally intended to look like a real mail-order catalogue, but it
was never bound to become a one-book artwork. The photographs exhibited in a 1977 show
at Ronald Feldman Gallery came with accompanying text panels that were originally
produced in Russian and later translated to English.
43

42
Grace Glueck, “Dissidence as a Way of Art,” The New York Times Magazine, May 8, 1977.

43
Vitaly Komar, phone interview with the author, February 1, 2013 noted that the original Russian
descriptions have been lost over time.

21
The objects presented in the catalog were divided into nine categories: “Prestigeants,”
“Sensationizers,” “Clotheables,” “Cultivatents,” “Defendibles,” “Auto-Probes,” “Energy-Loss
Abaters,” “Furniture to Wear,” and “Floorists.” The ironic mutilating language comes from a
translation of the peculiar Russian names concocted by the artists. The English category
names have slightly changed over time as well. That, according to Vitaly Komar, could also
be explained by the numerous versions of the descriptive panel translations over the years.
One of the show’s first reviews from 1977 in The New York Times Magazine by Grace Glueck
listed the categories as “Prestigious Things,” “Sensation Things,” “Wearing Things,” “Land-
Owning Things,” etc.

The article cites altogether 41 objects.
44
Komar asserted that closer to
one hundred negative prints for Super Objects were originally smuggled out of the Soviet
Union,.
45
The artists produced a limited edition of photographs from these negative prints
upon their arrival in the United States, but it was Ronald Feldman who selected the images for
the show. Each photograph was signed by the publisher, Ronald Feldman, and bore the
artists’ signature stamp.
46

In the first lines of the title descriptive page the artists smugly announced, “The wild
utopias of Marx and Corbusier, of the surrealists and socialists, have materialized.”
47
The text
further discoursed about the devastation of the “wise and well-ordered social hierarchy of
social life that emerged from the depths of Mediterranean civilization.” The authors continued
by announcing the contemporary task to “create a NEW ARISTOCRACY in place of the old
one which has destroyed the legacy of our ancestors.” The descriptive panel assured the

44
Grace Glueck, “Dissidence as a Way of Art,” The New York Times Magazine, May 8, 1977.

45
Vitaly Komar, phone interview with the author, February 1, 2013.

46
As far as I could identify it was indeed Ronald Feldman’s signature on the back of each photograph.

47
The original artwork of Komar and Melamid Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People,
New York, N.Y. : Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, 1977. The work is located in the Getty Research Institute, Getty
copy numbered 23/100. More information could be found in GRI electronic catalogue:
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cat917167

22
spectator that the objects for this new society had been produced by the “Celebrated Artists of
the End of the Second Millennium.”
48
In the closing paragraph of the introductory page,
Komar and Melamid declared that “price is no obstacle. Efforts to correct the existing social
situation are essential. They will, we hope, lead to a new Renaissance of Mediterranean
culture,” making a statement of a pure utopian implication. The new aristocracy was expected
to devise a new language, tradition, and culture, which would be “incomprehensible and alien
to the plebeians.” The isolated world of this mysterious and strange elite was structured
through a set of grotesque devices, bulky and uncomfortable, with an exotic or even absurd
function. The supercomfort objects in the photographs evoke torture machines, making this
“comfortable” life seem unbearable.
For instance, the photograph of the item called “Charog-15,” listed under the category
of “Defendibles,” showed a young woman with a metal lattice wrapped around her face
(Figure 2). The device was intended, as the descriptive text next to it states, to protect “the
purity of your thoughts” and provide “security against mass hypnosis.” In this photograph,
Komar and Melamid apparently mocked the Soviet Union’s pervasive propaganda and
political ideology.

48
This “modest” signature of Komar and Melamid evolved from “Renowned Artists of the 1970s” in their
Circle, Square, Triangle.

23
Figure 2. Komar and Melamid,
A Catalog of Super Objects –
Super Comfort for Super People, 1975
Portfolio of 36 color photographs published by
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 1977

Another strange-looking item called “Udam,” or the Auto-Auditor, was nothing more
than a rubber pipe with “gold-plated points” on both ends. One end was to be pressed against
the ear, while the other end was brought towards the chest. It claimed to help the user
“concentrate on [themselves] and bring out [their] creative potential.” The authors’ advice
was to use “Udam” “before work… before every important decision,” alluding to the
importance of retaining one’s ability to think and act independently. An item from the
category of “Clotheables,” called “Iy-Ediy,” appeared as homespun pants with the legs sewed
together, which limited one’s step and would certainly cause stumbling if one attempted a
longer stride (Figure 3). The description announced that this apparel item would restore the
best traits of a man’s independent personality and “put the brakes on the race along the Path of
Progress.” “Pira-Ediy,” a modification of “Iy-Ediy” for women, demonstrated a similar
concept implemented in the pants with sewed together legs, and also a shirt, saucily decorated

24
with a flower, but with stitched sleeves. An explanation promised that it would “epitomize
true femininity, for a woman who gives her hand and heart only to a worthy chosen one.”

Figure 3. Komar and Melamid,
A Catalog of Super Objects –
Super Comfort for Super People, 1975
Portfolio of 36 color photographs published by
Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York, 1977

An interesting device named “Olo,” designed as a “language ornament,” was actually
a tongue ring with a pearl; it helped to ensure that only appropriate words would be issued
from the mouths of their users. This product also referred to the famous Russian proverb
“Every word is a pearl.”The recommended application of this device implied that people in
the Soviet Union needed to be careful of what they said. While the Catalog openly satirized
the ideological burdens and limitations of Soviet society, it alluded to the price one had to pay
for having freedom of choice and freedom of speech.
Reference to traditional avant-garde ideas, an integral aspect of Komar and Melamid’s
work, was contained in Superobjects in the form of a parody of Production Art

25
(proizvodstvennoe iskusstvo).
49
The Productivists argued that distinctions between art and
industry were bourgeois and had to be abolished. They also thought that art should be
considered as merely another aspect of manufacturing. Osip Brik summarized the main idea
of Production Art in the 1920s: “the outer appearance of an object is determined by the
object’s economic purpose and not by abstract, aesthetic considerations.”
50
In Catalog of
Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People Komar and Melamid lampooned the
productivists’ idea of uniting art and industrial manufacturing promoted in the 1920s. A
satirical critique of another avant-garde illusion - the Constructivist idea to modernize Soviet
everyday life - was revealed by the apparent uselessness of the bizarre devices in this
portfolio. The full irony of situation was noticed by Margarita Tupitsyn in a 2008 Artforum
article, when she noticed that these idealistic modernist ideas were “swept aside by the next
decade’s popular call for “super people,”

referring to Soviet industrial utopianism and
ambitions for the realization of colossal projects.
51

As I noted earlier, the photographic series of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super
People manifested itself as a multi-layered conceptual art project. Besides its critique of the
ideology-obsessed Soviet East, it also implied a caricature of the West and its growing
addiction to consumption. The devices depicted in the photographs had been produced behind
the Iron Curtain, but were intended to address Western audiences haunted by metaphysical
ghosts and historical phantasms. The purpose of the artwork was not only a subtle critique of

49
Production Art or Productivism was formed as an art movement by a group of Constructivist artists in post-
Revolutionary Russia with the purpose of contradicting Naum Gabo's assertion that Constructivism should be
devoted to an exploration of abstract space and rhythm (partially from “Productivism (art).” in Wikipedia: The
Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 23 April 2009).

50
Osip Brik, “From Pictures to Textile Prints,” in Russian Art of the Avant-Guard: Theory and Criticism, ed.
John E. Bowlt (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1988), 249.

51
Margarita Tupitsyn, “Signs of the Times,” Artforum Vol. XLVI, no.7 (March 2008): 335.

26
Western consumerism, but also its main instruments - advertising and swindling - that helped
promote the American Dream of wealth and consumption.
52

The phenomenon of continuous consumption developed in American society after
World War II. The obsession with new things for purchase - televisions, air conditioners, and
computers – all those wonderful products created an illusion of a happier life for the ordinary
citizen. Lizabeth Cohen, in her book A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics Of Mass
Consumption In Postwar America, summarized a general tendency developed in the West in
the last 60 years as the situation in which economy, culture, and politics were “built around
the promise of mass consumption, both in terms of material life and the more idealistic goals
of greater freedom, democracy, and equality.”
53
In other words, American values, attitudes,
and behaviors became inextricably intertwined with mass consumption.

Bernard Stiegler, in The Decadence of Industrial Democracies, Disbelief and
Discredit, went even further by claiming that the adoptive process implemented by the United
States in the current condition of constantly increasing demands “no longer remains
democratic in this sense: it is consumerist.”
54
As if responding to some of Stiegler’s ideas,
Komar and Melamid, in their later projects created in the mid 1990s, elaborated on
consumerist society. The artists experimented with the idea of constructing the “authentic”
shopping image of modern America by organizing the “Searstyle Furniture” exhibition in

52
The term Consumerism is used to describe the effects of equating personal happiness with purchasing
material possessions and consumption or the tendency of people to identify strongly with products or services
they consume, especially those with status-enhancing appeal.

53
Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The politics of mass consumption in postwar America (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 7.

54
Bernard Stiegler, The decadence of Industrial Democracies, Disbelief and Discredit, 1 (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2011), 7.

27
New York in February 1992, where they explored the “visual and emotional heritage of
Sears.”
55

In Consumer’s Republic, Cohen distinguishes specialized production as one of the
sophisticated ways of meeting increasing demands of consumerist society. The fact that
Komar and Melamid, in their Super Objects, provided variations of products for different
market segments, i.e. male and female customers (Zig-Gims and Zig-Gims-420, Khaasha, and
Khaasha – 730) speaks of their work’s foresight in addressing the peculiarities of mass
consumption.
The baneful influence of Western consumerism also infected the seemingly
unsophisticated people of the communist East. Its social system, which originally was
oriented on conforming to the principle of "everybody is equal," had, along with the failures
of the command economy, led to a constant shortage of products; queues and deficits. This
contributed to the emergence of an elitist circle of people who either happened to be related to
the Communist party authorities and thus had access to desirable goods, or those who
befriended the sales people in a central supermarket.

We Buy and Sell Souls
The last work of Komar and Melamid from the period of the artists’ transition from
East to West that I will examine is We Buy and Sell Souls. It is one of the most conceptually
imbued artworks the artistic duo created in the late 1970s. The Souls project had the same
obvious purpose of humorously exploring the essence of Western consumerism as the Super

55
Patricia Leigh Brown, “Allegory Or Your Money Back,” The New York Times, February 13, 1992.

28
Objects series. For this piece, Komar and Melamid invented the ideal commodity to be sold
on a market with no competition.
Figure 4. Komar and Melamid, We Buy and Sell
Souls, 1978 - 1979
Photo offset poster

We Buy and Sell Souls (Figure 4) was a performance that started in 1978 as the artists’
response to the mysterious, dangerous and fascinating game of corporate business. This
included the world of the art market and galleries, which Komar and Melamid witnessed when
they first came to New York. Soon after their arrival in the United States, the duo established
a corporation, “Komar & Melamid, Inc. – Sale and Purchase of Human Souls.” The logo of
the corporation was an apple depicted above the skyline of Manhattan. In an allusion to the
biblical legend, instead of a worm, a snake emerged from the “Big Apple” hovering above the
city. In this work, the artists admitted complicity with a market where everything was for sale.
According to Gerrit Henry’s ad in ARTnews, Komar & Melamid, Inc. corporation records
“were open to the public on a microfiche machine,” and the show’s announcement literally

29
invited individuals to sell their souls, on consignment, to the two Russians.
56
In the following
years Komar and Melamid offered to purchase the soul of almost every individual that they
encountered.
57
The artists also placed ads and notices in newspapers and magazines to great
success; a real print ad campaign complete with mail-in forms for those who decided to sell
their souls. The project also consisted of advertising posters for Komar & Melamid, Inc. and
certificates confirming the purchase. An ad for We Buy and Sell Souls also ran on the
electronic billboard in Times Square in New York. As a result of the artists’ advertising
campaign almost one hundred people sold their souls to the duo. The souls of American
citizens eventually were “smuggled into the USSR” and sold at the First Auction of American
Souls in Moscow on May 19, 1979 in the form of certificates.
58
A number of certificates were
also sold at a Going Out of Business Exhibition at Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1979.
In We Buy and Sell Souls, the act of purchase took the idea of consumerism to its limit.
The act of commodifying a human soul and buying it for few cents (or, in some cases, for
free) while referring to Gogol’s 19th century narrative spoke of the general debasement of the
enduring values in an era of consumerism.
59

56
Gerrit Henry, “Komar and Melamid,” ARTnews, December 1980.

57
Vitaly Komar, phone interview with the author, February 1, 2013.

58
Information from Chronology Section on Komar and Melamid’s website
http://www.komarandmelamid.org/chronology.html.

59
Referring to “Dead Souls,” a novel by Nikolay Gogol published in 1842.

30
Figure 5. Komar and Melamid, We Buy and Sell
Souls (Andy Warhol Giving His Soul to Komar and
Melamid), 1979
Black and white photograph by Fred W. McDarrah
Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York

The purchase of Andy Warhol’s soul (Figure 5) was a feat that brought more attention
to the project. For many Moscow Conceptualist artists, Warhol’s art originally fueled a dream
of America as the land of freedom and free expression. Komar and Melamid had been
introduced to Warhol upon their arrival to New York. There are a few versions of how this
occurred. In some of their interviews, the artists recalled a casual encounter at Ronald
Feldman Gallery. Komar, however, claims that it was Andy Warhol who asked Feldman to be
introduced to Komar and Melamid. According to Komar, after Warhol saw their Post-Art:
Pictures of the Future series (Figure 6) in the Ronald Feldman Gallery he decided he wanted
to meet the authors: “This is how we came to know Warhol and do a collective work.”
60
The
works that sparked Warhol’s attention were produced in 1973-74. In this series of paintings,
Komar and Melamid copied Warhol’s soup cans, Lichtenstein’s comic strips, and other
American Pop art masterpieces. They then took a blowtorch to the copies and pasted the
charred fragments on canvas, implying that these Pop paintings needed only an aging process
to provide them with a proper historical place among the classics of art.

60
Hossein Amirsadeghi, ed., Frozen Dreams: Contemporary Art in Russia (London: Thames & Hudson,
2011), 136.

31

Figure 6. Komar and Melamid, Post-Art #1
(Warhol), 1973 From the Post-Art series
Oil on canvas
Collection of Ronald and Frayda Feldman

By the time Warhol participated in the Souls project, he had already reached the top of
his critical and commercial success. He was not only known worldwide as a creator of Pop
Art, but he had also already created his notorious Factory, and his films had gained
prominence and success. Warhol had befriended Feldman in the 1970s. By the 1980s Feldman
not only became one of Warhol’s prominent art dealers, he also advised Warhol on some of
his most commercial projects, such as a series of portraits of personalities and celebrities.
These would sell extremely well but also exposed Warhol to considerable public criticism
(such as Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century that was offered to Warhol by
Feldman after he spoke to a group of art dealers in Israel).
61
Warhol’s Myths series that was
exhibited in Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in 1981 explored the idea of iconic figures from
popular culture. Though excoriated for becoming a “business artist,” Warhol at the same time

61
Beth Schwartzapfel. “Warhol’s Tribe,” Forward, February 23, 2007.

32
knew the power that success and scandal have in art. It is unsurprising that he agreed to
collaborate on an infamous project with notorious Soviet artists.
The Komar and Melamid-Warhol cooperation on We Buy and Sell Souls provided
additional conceptual meaning to the purchase of this particular soul. For the Souls project
Komar and Melamid not only replaced products such as Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup with an
ironical spiritual commodity, but they implied a double meaning, purchasing the soul of the
man who pioneered an imitation of mass-produced images as a way of plugging into the
culture of consumerism. The deeper sarcasm lies in the fact that the very “Pop art soul” was
bought by the artistic duo that invented an ironic Soviet response to Pop art.
Some American critics were disappointed with the outcome of We Buy and Sell
Souls, stating that Komar and Melamid “did not follow through on the brilliant concept of
the sale of souls.”
62
They suggested that the artists should continue to consider and criticize
American society, as they had sometimes done in the past. “By continuing to rest on their
previous successes with their Russian material, they betray their own critical spirit, and are
likely to forfeit their right to place themselves outside the system.”
63
While We Buy and Sell
Souls subjectively might be perceived as potentially unresolved work, it proclaimed
probably one of the most utopian, though satiric ideas of Komar and Melamid’s practice of
the period – an attempt to unite Eastern and Western nations by the act of an international
exchange of souls, i.e. transcendental goods that could possibly build a bridge between
Russian and American artistic communities and in general help Soviet and American mutual
understanding.

62
Ellen Handy. “Komar and Melamid,” Arts Magazine, March 1984

63
Ibid.

33
Taken as a whole, Komar and Melamid’s works from the period of transition are
dedicated to a critique of the dominant social or political system and its instruments,
whether Eastern communist ideology or Western consumerism, propaganda or
advertisement. Besides that Color Therapeutics, Circle, Square, Triangle; Catalog of Super
Objects – Super Comfort for Super People, and We Buy and Sell Souls reveal the ambivalent
conceptual approach of Komar and Melamid towards avant-garde legacy as they reflect both
a critique and admiration of the Russian avant-garde lofty ideals. References to the rich and
controversial history of the Russian avant-garde attracted much media and public attention
to these projects. Eventually all four of these works became one of the main links from
Komar and Melamid’s practice to Moscow Conceptualism.

CHAPTER 3

Boris Groys’ Definition of Moscow Conceptualism
The influential underground culture gained a new beginning in the early 1970s, and
continued as a trend in Soviet art into the 1980s. Historically referred to as Moscow
Conceptualism, also sometimes referred to as Russian Conceptualism or the Moscow
Conceptual School, it was an art movement that attempted to subvert socialist ideology using
the strategies of conceptual art, where the concept or idea involved in the work itself became
the most important aspect of the work. The term Moscow Conceptualism originated in an
article by Boris Groys entitled, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” first published in the
typescript magazine 37 in Leningrad in 1979. It appeared later that year in the journal A – Z
printed in Paris. In this article, Groys aimed to characterize the new phenomenon in Soviet art

34
by putting it in an international context and comparing it to the Anglo-American conceptual
tradition, ultimately defining a distinctly Russian brand of conceptual art. To illustrate his
point, he pointed to Lev Rubinshtein, Ivan Chuikov, Francisco Infante, and the group
Collective Actions as examples of artists who created their works in accordance with the
romantic stance of Moscow conceptual art.
According to Groys, several factors contributed to the distinct nature of Moscow
Conceptualism. Besides the transparency that is essential for any kind of conceptual art, in
Russia the work is also characterized by “unity of collective spirit” and “mystical experience.”
Moscow Conceptualism was further contingent upon the special character of emotional life in
Moscow that in “forming a lyrical and romantic blend, stands opposed to the dryness of
officialdom.”
64
In order to comprehend what Groys meant by this phrase it is useful to
decipher his conception of “unity of collective spirit” and “mystical experience.”
The collective spirit, that remains “very much alive in the country” most likely applied
not only to the communist ideology but more importantly, to the circumstances of communal
living. Moscow Conceptualists very often provided a glimpse into the daily life of a Soviet
citizen, showing an environment completely unfamiliar to most Westerners: living in a
communal apartment surrounded by Communist propaganda that makes promises rarely
delivered. Svetlana Boym, in her book Common Places: Methodologies of Everyday Life in
Russia, described a typical Soviet communal apartment as a cradle of Soviet counter-culture.

64
Boris Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and
Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002),
162.

35
This collective spirit, a constant feeling of danger and co-conspiracy in something
secret and exclusive contributed to cultivating of an atmosphere of widespread critical
discussion.
65

The roots of the mystical spiritual component implied by Groys can most likely be
found in the strong historical religious tradition in Russia that caused people to see the non-
material world as central to their existence. Possibly relying on this assumption, Groys argued
that, “Romantic conceptualism in Moscow not only testifies to the continued unity of the
‘Russian soul;’ it also tries to bring to light the conditions under which art can extend beyond
its own borders.” However, Groys’ main argument might be hidden in the end of this phrase
“it makes a conscious effort to recover and to preserve all that constitutes art as an event in the
History of Spirit and which renders its own history uncompleted.” He further intermingled the
notions of spiritual experience and historicity in the conclusion of the article. After connecting
the lyrical and romantic quality in Moscow Conceptual art to the religious mysticism
throughout the text, in the last paragraph Groys mentioned that the artists he brought up in
“Moscow Romantic Conceptualism” were not religious at all, “yet they are able to
comprehend art in terms of belief.”

Finally Groys suggested that it is through History that the
“other world” manifested itself in “our world,” and after all perhaps this other world was not
another world at all, “but it is our own historicity, revealed to us here and now.”
66

Komar and Melamid as Moscow Conceptualists
Boris Groys did not examine Komar’s and Melamid’s practice in the context of the
new conceptual art trend in his ground-breaking article in 1979. But there was no doubt that

65
Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Methodologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1994)

66
Ibid., 164, 174.

36
Komar and Melamid were very active participants of something that later was established as
Moscow Conceptualism, and in some sense they could be considered among the founders of
this Soviet branch of conceptual art. Their significant role in the development of Moscow
Conceptualism could be traced throughout the years and proved by their practice.
Firstly, the form of collaboration in which Komar and Melamid worked since 1963
was itself an embodiment of the “collective spirit” of Moscow Conceptualism. In their artists’
statement they famously announced, "Even if only one of us creates some of the projects and
works, we usually sign them together. We are not just an artist, we are a movement." Through
the years of their collective work, they demonstrated commitment to this statement. Their next
announcement, “We are not artists, we are conversationalists,” was corroborated by their
imploring critics and audience members for dialog and participation. Further, when a vandal
slashed their work, Portrait of Hitler (1981), they announced the offender a “co-author.”
67

Secondly, Komar and Melamid’s searching for transcendental knowledge and freedom
of expression seamlessly overlapped with the “romantic” aspirations of the Soviet conceptual
movement. Groys’s theories could certainly be applied to Komar and Melamid’s practices, but
perhaps studies of other scholars, such as Margarita Tupitsyn and Ekaterina Bobrinskaia, who
in their articles examined multifaceted aspects of Moscow Conceptualism, could better help
us understand the artists’ works from the transition period in the context of the movement.
Because the Soviet Conceptual movement emerged under the influence of a few
specific factors, such as the lack of detailed information about contemporary developments in
the Western art world, linguistic divides, reliance on historical canons, Soviet rigidity and

67
Margarita Tupitsyn,"On Some Sources of Soviet Conceptualism," in From Gulog to Glasnost:
Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union, ed. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge, exh. cat. (New Brunswick
N.J: the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University and New York: Thames and Hudson,
1995), 303.

37
emphasis on specific political circumstances, suppression and the necessity to produce art
secretly, it may seem that the works produced under the label of Moscow Conceptualism were
addressing a very specific audience. Tupitsyn notes in her article, “About early Soviet
Conceptualism,” that in some cases, the condition would be the complete absence of an
audience. In her argument, the artists used their relative isolation as a positive condition for
production of work and reflected on “the prolonged absence of the beholder” by bringing him
into the artwork.
68

Komar and Melamid’s practice of addressing a specific viewer - an imagined
audience of consumers for their fictional products - developed when they were working on
Color Therapeutics and Circle, Square, Triangle. In Catalog of Super Objects – Super
Comfort for Super People they went further with identifying this audience as an elitist society
of “super people.” In Circle, Square, Triangle, Komar and Melmid deployed a range of
fictional characters, from those “virgin maidens” that they claimed to “employ” in
manufacturing the works, to those who were there to “consume” the products. These were
pictured as happy customers who already purchased ideal forms, as depicted on the Circle,
Square, Triangle advertising posters.
The duo’s selective choice of medium for realization of each project related to
Moscow Conceptualism and their adhesion to its traditions. While continuing to experiment
with subjects, the artists maintained photography as a medium to produce three of the four
projects from the period. Komar and Melamid explored this medium in Circle, Square,
Triangle, Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People, We Buy and Sell Souls.
Photography at the moment was a new but very exciting and promising medium for Moscow

68
Margarita Tupitsyn, “About Early Soviet Conceptualism,” in Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin
1950s-1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 99.

38
conceptualist artists. Part of the reason the artists favored this medium was because
photography had been perceived as a “form of ideological activity,” in the Soviet Union;
official photography was part of the influential system of producing visual propaganda.
69
By
reappropriating the medium, Moscow Conceptualists demonstrated their defacement of Soviet
official canons.
The devices depicted in the photographs of the Catalog of Super Objects in the
tradition of Moscow Conceptualism would be called “action objects.” Action objects as one of
the popular means of incarnating action poetry were of great interest to several artists and
writers around that time.
70
According to Komar, original “super objects” could not be
transported abroad, or even preserved in the Soviet Union, as they were constructed from poor
quality materials.
71
Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People had a
complex concept and stylistics and combined different medium. Bobrinskaia in her article
suggested that the work featured characteristics of both early Moscow conceptual art and
performance art.
Performance was an essential element of many conceptual works of Moscow
Conceptualism artists. Circle, Square, Triangle and Catalog of Super Objects were grounded
on performance actions similar to those of Ilya Kabakov, where the viewer was witness to the
unfolding of the “spectacle” conceived by the authors. We Buy and Sell Souls, a performance-
based artwork that took Komar and Melamid’s witty sarcasm about the commodification of

69
Elena Barkhatova, “Soviet Policy on Photography” in Beyond Memory: Soviet Nonconformist Photography
and Photo-Related Works of Art, ed. Diane Neumaier (New Brunswick/ New Jersey/London: Zimmerli Art
Museum at Rutgers University / Rutgers University Press, 2004), 47.

70
Ekaterina Bobrinskaia examined this interest and described action objects in several series of works of
Moscow Conseptualists in her article “Moscow Conceptual Performance Art” in Moscow Conceptualism in
Context, ed. Alla Rosenfeld (Munich/Berlin/London/New York: Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University /
Prestel, 2011), 157. Using the phrase “action poetry” I partially reference one of the series of action objects
created by Andrei Monastyrsky in 1975 called Elementary Poetry.

71
Vitaly Komar, phone interview with the author, February 1, 2013.

39
the Western world to extremes, engaged the viewer, making him a participant of the action.
The culmination of the Souls project, the auction of American souls in Moscow, was
conducted in cooperation with the Soviet conceptual artists of the Gnezdo group.
While it was a performance, We Buy and Sell Souls was also a remarkably literal
project. Moscow Conceptualist art in terms of its reliance on language was not different from
Western conceptual traditions; it was easy and natural for Russian Conceptualists to perceive
art in general as a visual language. As Groys stated in his publication in Total Enlightenment:
Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960 – 1990, “Conceptual art can be characterized briefly as the
result of putting image and text on the same level.”
72
The Moscow Conceptualists studied
language not only as proper speech, but first and foremost perceived it as a social language
with its rituals and myths, and its structure of social hierarchies.
Arguably, the main distinction of Soviet conceptual practices from Western ones, fully
reflected in Komar and Melamid’s works from their transition period, is the prevalence of
irony. Moscow Conceptualism marked irony among its most essential traits, distinguishing it
from other conceptual art movements. In his interview with Marek Bartelik, Komar once
divided Moscow Conceptualism in two camps based on the way they use irony in their
practice.
73
He affiliated himself and Melamid with the first group that used irony as a primary
expressive mode and a source for communication. The second group, according to Komar,
avoided irony in their works. Komar also voiced the idea that the strong ironic component was
what distinguished his and Melamid’s works from the work of Pop artists.

72
Boris Groys, “Communist Conceptual Art” in Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960 – 1990
(Madrid / Frankfurt / Ostfilden: Fundación Juan March / Schirn Kunsthalle /Hatje Cantz, 2008), 30.

73
Marek Bartelik, “The Banner Without a Slogan: Definitions and Sources of Moscow Conceptualism,” in
Moscow Conceptualism in Context, ed. Alla Rosenfeld (Munich/Berlin/London/New York: Zimmerli Art
Museum at Rutgers University / Prestel, 2011), 7.

40

Komar and Melamid’s Artistic Style: Perpetual Irony, Historicity and Conceptual
Eclecticism
Komar, in his 2002 interview to Reba Wulkan, attempted to give another description
of his and Melamid’s ironical philosophy when he imparted his belief that there were two
types of irony that the artist could implement in his practice, “divine and earthly, altruistic
and egotistical” or in Komar’s and Melamid’s case - contemplative or nihilistic.
74
In my
opinion, the switch from the first satire to a complete satire can be traced over the course of
Komar’s and Melamid’s oeuvre.
Nevertheless, beneath all their sarcasm and irony, Komar and Melamid seemed to be
devoted to dealing with the notion of the lost past in most of their art works between 1965-
1985. In the words of Amy Newman, “Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are two
artists with a heroic sense of history.”
75
The artists’ lectures and writings mention that from
the very beginning of their joint practice, they were concerned with the conflicted account
of Soviet history. More precisely, they were concerned with the interpretation made of
history in general and art history in particular by ruling parties, the governments and other
power elites.
76
By deconstructing histories, recreating them by offering their own historical
rendering, and interweaving different epochs, myths, and elements of utopia/dystopia, the
artists attempted to fill in historical gaps and deal with political imperfections.

74
Vitaly Komar, "Interview with Reba Wulkan, Contemporary Exhibition Curator, Yeshiva University
Museum," 2002. http://www.komarandmelamid.org/pdf/Wulkan.pdf.

75
Amy Newman, “The Celebrated Artists of the End of the Second Millenium, A.D.,” ARTnews, April 1976.

76
Vitaly Komar talked about the importance of historical rendering in their joint practice during his recent
lecture in Los Angeles (lecture, “Sots Art,” Wende Museum, Los Angeles, March 17, 2012)

41
With the gradual development of their practice, Komar and Melamid formulated a
unique and ambivalent artistic language, one of biting irony and mockery, yet expressing a
nostalgic and sincere hope for change. These contradictory, or arguably complementary,
languages are registered as they traced the history of mass culture in the Soviet Union,
produced historically nostalgic art pieces (Paradise and Legends series (1972-1973),
Pictures of the Future (1973-1974)), or created works under the umbrella of Sots Art (Don’t
Bubble (1974), History of the USSR (1975) and Thank You Comrade Stalin for Our Happy
Childhood (1983)), while experimenting with performance art, photography and
installations.
Reflecting on their oeuvre, Komar and Melamid in their recently published book,
Poems about Death, discussed the role of eclecticism in art.
77
The book started with a
paraphrase of Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto: “A ghost wanders about Europe, a
ghost of eclecticism,” then surprises the reader with a markedly eclectic content, varying
from reproductions of the artists’ works and ideas that have no obvious cohesion to ironic
statements and extended excerpts from their previously published articles. Justifying the
overall importance of the eclectic stylistic approach in art as it provides “liberation from
slavish repetitive manufacturing operations,” the authors conclude that the Sots Art
movement could also be called Conceptual Eclecticism.
78
According to their statement, Sots
Art was one of the “Russian historical discoveries” that combined conceptual initiatives of
Russian avant-garde with images and symbols of different historical epochs.
79

77
Komar and Melamid, Stikhi O Smerti (Poems about Death) (Moscow: German Titov’s Library of Moscow
Conceptualism, Little series, 2
nd
ed., 2011)

78
Idid., 87.

79
Komar and Melamid perceived Soviet visual propaganda as the only conceptual branch of Russian avant-
garde surviving under Stalin’s regime, “existing outside the museum walls, conceived on the street, when you
make the first revolutionary holidays, these red processions, banners, displays and slogans”.

42
Valerie Hillings, in “Komar and Melamid’s Dialog with (Art) History,” argues that
Komar’s and Melamid’s eclectic method not only afforded them the freedom to appropriate
a variety of historical art sources, but by juxtaposing and recontextualizing them, allowed
the duo to “humorously usurp the authority of the original artists.”
80
Hillings claims that
because many Western artists were exploring similar issues at the time, Komar and Melamid
“were able to skillfully locate their work within the larger postmodernist discourse.”

In
addition to Hilling’s argument, the duo pioneered the use of multi-stylistic images in the
1970s, in a way that prefigured the eclectic combination of styles in postmodernism. One
can certainly argue that this fact altogether proves Komar’s and Melamid’s claim that by
introducing the term “Sots Art,” they actually invented Conceptual Eclecticism. Komar and
Melamid’s eclecticism manifested itself in their easy alternation between, and occasional
synthesis of Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism in their practice.

CHAPTER 4

Reception in the West
Komar and Melamid’s first show at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in 1976 attracted
great attention and garnered impressive press coverage. When Komar and Melamid finally
came to New York, the public was awaiting their arrival. Daily newspapers and weekly
magazines - The New York Times, New York Magazine, Newsweek; local press - The
Hartford Courant, The Baltimore Sun; and feature art publications - Art in America, and
ARTnews were not constrained to the reviews for the artists’ shows at Ronald Feldman

80
Valerie Hillings, “Komar and Melamid’s Dialog with (Art) History,” Art Journal Vol. 58, No. 4 (1999), 50.

43
Gallery. Reporters related their back-story and charted the itinerary of the Russian dissidents
right up to their arrival in New York. They reported on the artists’ lives, the difficulties they
faced while they were still in the USSR, imparted how they smuggled art through customs,
and even celebrated the artists’ reunion in Israel.
81

Some journalists referred to Komar and Melamid as household names: “Regular
readers of the New York Times or the International Herald Tribune need no introduction to
the flamboyant and heroic Russian artists, Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid.”
82
Many
early publications took interest in the nature of the artists’ collaboration, exploring
explanations gladly provided by Komar and Melamid. These ranged from the ironic,
referring to the teachers in the art school often confusing the work of one with the other, to
the tricky statement, “we want to present reality with the maximum precision, and to do that,
we have to reject our individual perceptions.”
83

While the coverage remained generally positive, the journalist’s depth of
understanding of Komar and Melamid’s ideas and practices varied. The art sections in The
New York Times and The Hartford Courant confined their coverage to announcing the duo’s
upcoming shows, briefly mentioning their background and citing quotes, and did not aim to
view the artists’ oeuvre in the context of their historical and political references. One got the
impression that the major newspapers felt they needed to provide coverage on the activities
and events around Komar and Melamid responding to the public excitement for their
personas.

81
Such publications as “Dealer Says 2 May Settle in U.S,” The New York Times, Dec 21, 1977 or “Russian
Artists Present for Show,” The Hartford Courant, Sept 29, 1978.

82
Barbara Cavaliere, “Komar/Melamid,” Arts Magazine, December 1978.

83
Ibid.

44
A number of reviews that appeared in the press between 1977 and 1982 generated
great interest in Komar and Melamid’s Super Objects: Super Comfort for Super People. An
article in The New York Times Magazine acknowledged that this project exemplified “a
spoof of materialism and consumerism” while it also revealed a penetrating humor.
84
The
Baltimore Sun’s reporter, who called the artists “Pop-conceptualists,” seemed to conceive
the artwork as Komar and Melamid’s new attempt to subvert Soviet ideology as the “myth
of the classless society, by creating objects for the elite that are just too confounding for the
workers to buy.”
85
On the contrary, an observer in The New York Times in 1989 stated that
Komar and Melamid sounded like traditional American pitchmen, who would “try to sell
such devices as a pearl strapped to the tongue as proof of one’s ideal marriage with truth.”
86

A more in-depth response to Komar and Melamid’s practice in the major art
magazines quickly followed. Articles in Art in America from November 1979 and May 1985
provided a more profound analysis of the artists’ practice, recognizing a multi-layered
pattern of references and criticism in their works. Gary Indiana, in his article, “Komar and
Melamid Confidential,” characterized the artists’ style as a “theater of bizarre forms” in
recognition of the fact that “the world view described by K&M’s work is broader than what
most current art deals with, and the specificity of their subject matter is startling.”
87

Komar and Melamid’s Role in the Cultural Cold War
Hillings, in her article Komar and Melamid's Dialogue with (Art) History, analyzed
the origins of the duo’s popularity with the Western public: “They distinguished themselves

84
Grace Glueck, “Dissidence as a Way of Art,” The New York Times Magazine, May 8, 1977.

85
Pearl Oxorn, “Cries and Whispers from Soviet Artists,” The Baltimore Sun, Sep 21, 1980.

86
William Zimmer, “Five Photographic Portfolios,” The New York Times, July 16, 1989.

87
Gary Indiana, “Komar and Melamid Confidential,” Art in America, June 1985.

45
and their art through their selection of primarily Russian and Soviet subjects, as well as
through their carefully crafted public personae as wacky, exotic Russians - the forbidden yet
enticing Soviet Other to Western, and especially U.S., consumers during the height of the
Reagan era and the Cold War.”
88
Hillings pointed to two important components that
significantly contributed to their receiving extensive media coverage and an immediate
warm reception from the American public.
First was the artists’ deliberate construction of a specific public image, that of satiric
dissident artists. The rebellious and cynical tone the duo adopted in everything they did,
whether their artistic practice, performances, articles or interviews, provoked great interest
in their personalities. Komar and Melamid seemed to follow the principle in their work that:
“It is not enough to just create a project, it is necessary to do something, so it would become
known by millions.” It was as if in the remote 1960s at the Soviet Institute of Arts and
Design they had been taught a course on self-mediating and public relations.
According to Hillings, Komar and Melamid’s collaboration with a passionate art
gallery owner who had a heightened appreciation for controversial art increased their
popularity as well. Ronald Feldman knew how to intrigue the audience and how important it
was to cultivate extensive media coverage for success. Moreover, the gallery owner believed
that “the art critics who explained Komar and Melamid's work were crucial for the success
of the show.”
89
Working together with Feldman, Komar and Melamid prepped the audience
for their upcoming projects. These preparations involved lectures by people who had first-
hand experience of Soviet life. The lectures primarily presented impressions of Soviet
society and political propaganda. Melvyn Nathanson recounts in Komar/Melamid: Two

88
Valerie Hillings, “Komar and Melamid’s Dialog with (Art) History,” Art Journal Vol. 58, No. 4 (1999), 50.

89
Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Soviet Emigré Artists: Life and Work in the USSR and the United States (New York
and London: M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1985), 92.

46
Soviet Dissidents: “The advanced preparations of the exhibit were elaborate, and included
making available to art writers extensive information on Soviet society and the specific
setting of Komar and Melamid's work.”
90
These lectures aimed at clarifying the meaning of
Komar and Melamid’s work with regard to its social settings and lucidly explained the ideas
behind the artists’ practice. “The mass media, advertisements, popular idols, the
standardization of taste – all these are characteristics of life in the Soviet Union, just as they
are in the West. But Western mass culture is based on consumerism; while in Russia it is
idialogized. Instead of commercials for consumer goods, Russia has a steady flow of
advertisements of ideology.”
91
The theory behind Sots Art was accompanied by an
explanation of its relationship to Pop Art: “They wanted to frame and transfer into a
museum the elements of mass culture, just as Warhol did with the Campbell’s soup can and
Brillo boxes.”
92
Feldman later fed this information to art critics and writers who visited the
gallery; they disseminated it in many publications, until it implicitly became part of the
general interpretation of the artists’ work.
The Western press was clearly intrigued with the works of the boisterous Russian
nonconformist artists. The question is whether the second component that Hillings
mentioned in her article – the interest in a “forbidden yet enticing Soviet Other” in the
context of political rhetoric of the Cold War - might have been the major factor that
contributed to Komar and Melamid’s immediate success in the West.
By then, the Cold War between the Soviet and American world powers had been
raging for 30 years. In this cultural war both mass culture and high culture were employed

90
Ibid., 119.

91
Dorothy Seiberling and Alexander Goldfarb, “A Russian Life: Tiny Pictures at an Exhibition,” New York
Magazine, February 9, 1976.

92
Ibid.

47
as instruments of communication and manipulation against the adversary. The ideological
and cultural opposition resulted in aggressive propaganda against Capitalist values in the
USSR and Eastern Europe; and on the contrary, massive media campaigns in the West to
promote these ideals. Literature, performing arts and fine arts were used in a competition of
cultural achievements. An unwritten policy of welcoming Russian dissidents in the West
and, as a consequence, an increased curiosity about Soviet Unofficial art in the United States
were additional outcomes.
93

In the 1970s Nixon’s policy of détente opened some channels of communication
between The United States and Soviet Union and fostered a nominal cultural exchange.
Within only a few years, when the Soviet government began their tactic of forcing
undesirable citizens to leave the country, America became a refuge for a number of
prominent cultural exiles. Soviet dissidents were treated very kindly in the States and were
able to develop brilliant careers. The famous dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov remained in the
United States after touring in 1974. He successfully continued his dancing career and
eventually became one of the most famous refugees. Joseph Brodsky, who was convicted in
the Soviet Union for “sloth and immoral appearance,” was exiled in 1972. He settled in the
United States and found worldwide fame as a poet and scholar. America welcomed
dissidents with open arms not only with the intention of promoting culture; it also
championed American freedoms by pointing to the artists and writers defecting from the
USSR.
While Brodsky and Baryshnikov, along with other luminaries of literature, dance
and music, such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Rudolf Nureyev, Galina Vishnevskaya,

93
The fierce cultural competition between two superpowers during the Cold War and the methods used for
achieving cultural supremacy are described in David Caute’s book The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for
Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)

48
Mstislav Rostropovich, enjoyed a warm welcome, some immigrant artists received a cooler
reception. For instance, Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who became notoriously famous
after his confrontation with Khruschev at the Manezh exhibition in 1962, came to America
the same year Komar and Melamid left the Soviet Union, in 1976.
94
Neizvestny, who
produced pompous expressive sculptures and large-scale installations, was lightly regarded
by his new public. As Marilyn Rueschemeyer states in his Soviet Emigre Artists: Life and
Work in the USSR and the United States, some of the dissident artists who began exhibiting
their works in American galleries were disappointed by the lack of excitement for their art.
According to Rueschemeyer, the artists swiftly blamed the narrower interests of American
intellectuals as compared to those in the Soviet Union as an explanation for the reaction.
95

At the same time as with most every kind of art, different styles of dissident art appealed to
the audiences differently. One of the most favorable reviews in ARTnews read, “Children of
détente, Moscow’s Melamid and Komar are making a new kind of dissident art. There is
nothing polemical, nothing tortured or pathetic.”
96

Besides pleasing the public with “making a new kind of dissident art” and having the
luck of pitching their artworks at the right time in the right place, Komar and Melamid
worked on educating and preparing their audience to respond to their art un the context of a
particular political situation. Ronald Feldman once again seemed to be partly responsible.
Various publications from the period mentioned that Feldman was in active communication
with the artists while they were in Moscow, that he encouraged them to prepare works for

94
When Khruschev, in the middle of the Thaw, visited the Manezh exhibition in Moscow in 1962,
Neizvestny’s sculpture displeased the Soviet leader. Khruschev asked Neizvestny the infamous question,”Why
do you disfigure the faces of Soviet people?”

95
Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Soviet Emigré Artists: Life and Work in the USSR and the United States (New York
and London: M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1985), 89.

96
Amy Newman, “The Celebrated Artists of the End of the Second Millenium, A.D.,” ARTnews, April 1976

49
the exhibitions in New York, and possibly consulted them on the choice of topic and
medium. In a phone interview Vitaly Komar recalled that Feldman even visited them in
Jerusalem in 1977.
97
It could be suggested that Komar and Melamid’s projects circa 1974-
1979 were to a certain degree influenced by Ronald Feldman’s guidance. Under Feldman’s
pressure and desire to capitalize on rising interest in Soviet-American relations after The
Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, Komar and Melamid, in cooperation with Douglas Davis,
created Question: New York Moscow, Moscow New York and Questions: New York Moscow,
Tel Aviv New York (Figure 7).
98
The project consisted of seven photo collages taken
simultaneously in New York, Tel Aviv and Moscow between 1976 and 1991. It included a
text presented by the artists in both English and Russian that voiced the conceptual question
behind the project, Where is the line between us?. Though later in his interview Melamid
expressed discontent with this project, at the moment when it was conceived it was
supposed to symbolize an interrogation of political and cultural barriers between Americans
and Soviets. It also implied that art was the universal language through which Komar,
Melamid and Davis could converse.
99

97
Vitaly Komar, phone interview with the author, February 1, 2013.

98
The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project was the first joint U.S.–Soviet space flight conducted in 1975; it was
symbolic of the policy of détente.

99
Vallerie Hillings, in her article, “Where Is The Line Between Us: Moscow and Western Conceptualism in
the 1970s” in Moscow Conceptualism in Context, ed. Alla Rosenfeld (Munich/Berlin/London/New York:
Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University / Prestel, 2011), expresses that this collaborative project
suggested a direct link between what was then known as Conceptual art in the West and what a few years later
would be called Moscow Conceptualism.

50
Figure 7. Komar and Melamid and
Douglas Davis, Questions: New York
Moscow / Moscow New York (Where
Is the Line Between Us?), 1976
Black and white gelatin silver prints
Collection of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York

The question of finding a common language that would erase cultural barriers
between Americans and Soviets brings us back to Komar and Melamid’s transitional period
works. They corresponded to one of Groys’ major principles of Moscow Conceptualism, i.e.
historicity, through the saturation of the works with avant-garde references. Komar and
Melamid’s long-time fascination with history and interest in the avant-garde legacy paid off
when it contributed to a greater attention to their works from the public. The Western art
world had shown its long-repeated interest to the modernist developments of the early 20th
century. Vladimir Tatlin, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, El Lissitsky and
Alexander Rodchenko were considered to be classics of modernism, but most examples of
their work remained in the Soviet Union, inaccessible to the show. The fact that the Western
public remained isolated from these works of Russian avant-gardists spurred even a greater
interest to this section of modernist art history.
David Caute, in his book “Dancer Defects,” mentioned a curious fact: in May 1979,
in cooperation with the Soviet Ministry of Culture and major Soviet museums, the Centre
Pompidou in Paris opened an exhibition Paris-Moscow 1900-1930, signifying the sudden

51
rehabilitation of the Russian avant-garde by the Soviet authority. This unofficial recognition
of the avant-garde legacy as an important part of Soviet art history strangely coincided with
the publication of Groys’ article, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” in both Leningrad
and Paris in 1979. Although in his article Groys left his reader assuming the meaning of
some of his broad hints, he named historicity (i.e. lively connections to Russian
modernism’s legacy and references to the avant-garde heritage) as the main defining aspect
of the newest brand of conceptual Soviet art. It is questionable to what extent the warm
reception and popularity of Komar and Melamid’s works in the West during that time had
contributed to this recognition. But the fact is that by the time the Soviet Union was ready to
rehabilitate the Russian avant-garde legacy, the American public was showing appreciation
of the works of Soviet rebel artists whose practice revisited classics of modernism.
Moreover, the better-prepared part of the audience was able to notice and appreciate that
instead of simply rebuilding avant-garde traditions the artists engaged in a dialog with the
polemics of modernism. In general terms, placing the works of Soviet dissident artists in a
more familiar historical context made it easier for Americans to understand Soviet
nonconformist art. And in this regards the works of Komar and Melamid, who at that
moment were arguably the first members of unofficial Soviet culture to rethink the Russian
avant-garde, contributed to the Moscow Conceptualism brand awareness in the West.

Komar and Melamid: Later Years
The last decades of their collaborative career evidence a shift in Komar and
Melamid’s artistic approach. The artists professed that during their almost 50-year long
practice they were not able to find “the artistic freedom” they sought in any of the existing

52
political systems. Hence they became “native agents in a foreign environment,” criticizing
all existing political structures, and never completely identifying themselves as citizens of
any state. Symbolically, it is difficult to identify their later works with any reputed traditions
they used in their early works and conceptual projects. The sharp ironic representation of
society in a way disappeared form their practice. Not integrating fully with the American
conceptual discourse, neither they could reflect any longer the character and processes of
modern Russia because in order to do so you have to witness all the changes and new
processes form within the country. It can be stated that while in the works of the transition
period Komar and Melamid established themselves as ironic observers of contemporary
behavior, without an existing suppressive political apparatus to actively resist, their witty
humor and ironic critique lost its sharp edge.
While irony remained Komar and Melamid’s credo, their projects of the last 20 years
had lost their conceptual stand and political relevance and became either nostalgic or bitterly
satiric. I would also state that the latest artists’ works seem to have lost the romanticism
intrinsic to Moscow Conceptualism as well. We Buy and Sell Souls was perhaps the last
project Komar and Melamid conceived and implemented that truly reflected the romantic
ideals of the Moscow Conceptualists. In their later years the artists tried to elaborate on
Soviet aesthetics, using some of the Sots Art ideas, and mingling it with new symbols and
historic references (such as repeatedly overused image of Lenin and Stalin in Nostalgic
Social Realism, Anarchistic Synthesis, Symbols of the Big Bang series) or used the legacy of
their highly conceptual early works by revisiting them (Paradise/Pantheon and Biography
of a Contemporary) or restaging previous performances (Art Belongs to the People).
Continuously “speaking Russian” to an American audience didn’t prove to be helpful in

53
heating the interest for their practice at that time. The artistic team of Komar and Melamid
ceased to exist in 2003.

Art in Contemporary Russia
Ironically Komar’s and Melamid’s invention, Sots Art, always a critical mockery of
Soviet culture, became the last remnants of this culture with the collapse of Soviet system
and ideology. In its surviving form it is now reminiscent of a new national folklore. Many
artists who employed Sots art in their practice created their own Sots Art styles. In the
contemporary version of Sots Art, reinvented by young artists who began working in this
tradition in the last decade in response to the demand of newly arrived wealthy Russian
collectors, Soviet aesthetics are very often exploited in a redundant way. To generations of
Russians who grew up under the Soviet system, this art remains a light nostalgic reminder;
for the younger generations – more of a joke.
The culmination of Moscow Conceptualism’s formation as a self-declared art
movement of the 20
th
Century Russia could be correlated with the registration of the Club of
Avant-gardists in 1987, which united several generations of the Soviet conceptual artists.
The last years witnessed the decline of the Moscow Conceptualist movement and the decay
of dissident circles throughout the 1990-2000s.
100
Nevertheless, in the last two decades of
attempting to understand the Western art world, the rules of the art game and the logic
behind its initialization in contemporary Russia, the members and active participants of the
Moscow Conceptualist movement (artists, critics, curators) participated in forming the
present picture of Russian contemporary art. Thus Moscow Conceptualist traditions

100
Perhaps it is more accurate to say Moscow Conceptualism, a movement that was first of all based on the
“aesthetics of relationships,” entered a new phase when the majority of its active members emigrated and were
influenced by new critical thinking in the countries where they continued their practice.

54
acquired a special significance. Artists today seem to turn anew to their avant-garde heritage
and to the legacies of Russian modernism as a whole.

55
Conclusion

In this thesis I have shown that the works created by Komar and Melamid in the
period of their immigration from the Soviet Union to the United States, and during a surge
of interest in the social and cultural development in Soviet Union - Color Therapeutics,
Circle, Square, Triangle, Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People and
We Buy and Sell Souls – reflected the ideas and traditions of Moscow Conceptualism. In
these four works, Komar and Melamid skillfully blended references to avant-garde ideas, a
witty critique of Soviet ideology and Western consumerism that, helped by the political
conditions of the time, attracted significant attention to Moscow Conceptualism from the
Western public. Although it was not until later that Moscow Conceptualism was defined as
a serious and influential art movement, nevertheless, it turned out to be a remarkable
representation of Unofficial Soviet art in the West in the second half of the 20
th
century.
The works presented in this thesis reflect the ambivalence of Komar and Melamid’s
artistic language of the mid-late 1970: ironic and sincerely nostalgic at the same time.
Because irony and satire was always an integral part of Komar and Melamid, whether they
were producing works in the frames of Sots Art or Moscow Conceptualism, it is not easy to
say what could have been the artists’ real intention when they were producing these works.
What did they want to achieve playing their satiric games with political content? In all of
their projects, they railed against Soviet ideology, but at the same time mocked American
Capitalist consumerist society. In their interviews, they proclaimed that in the time of their
immigration to the United States their intention was to develop cultural diplomacy that
would unite East and West. At the same time, they were telling the press, “two weeks after
we came to the United States we realized we had comedic careers. We’re accepted by the art

56
world here because we are exotic – from Russia, working as team and so forth – and we
quickly understood we’re supposed to be amusing,” also conveyed that in the West they did
not find the freedom they were looking for. As Komar stated in his interview to Kristine
McKenna, “Before we came here we had an illusion of progress, but coming here destroyed
that.”
101
They felt free to proclaim since then that they were no longer citizens of any state,
they were homeless. However, taking into account McKenna’s claim that the two were
comedians it is difficult to understand whether it was a true statement or a part of their
irremovable jester image.
In conclusion, I could pose questions about the future of Sots Art and Moscow
Conceptualism in new social and political conditions of contemporary Russia. Instead, I
want to ask at which point contemporary Russian culture will have enough potential to give
birth to another new art phenomenon that will not only respond to the current political and
cultural challenges in the country, such as the new political oppression, the
commercialization of art, and the appearance of the new art terms such as “strategic
collecting” etc., but also signify a new era in the history of Russian art.

101
Kristine McKenna, “Two Soviet Artists Conquer the West,” The Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1990.

57
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Abstract (if available)

Abstract The Soviet-born American artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid formed their artistic partnership in Moscow in 1965. Over the course of almost 40 years of collaboration, they created various artworks commenting on power and popular culture using a wide range of media. In this thesis, I analyze four works by Komar and Melamid from the period of their immigration to the United States: Color Therapeutics (1974-1975), Circle, Square, Triangle (1974), Catalog of Super Objects – Super Comfort for Super People (1975) and We Buy and Sell Souls (1978-1979). These four works exemplify Komar and Melamid’s simultaneous criticality of ideological Soviet propaganda on the one hand, and Western consumer culture on the other. I argue that these works were created in accordance with the ideas and traditions of Moscow Conceptualism, as defined by Boris Groys in 1979. Through my analysis, I show that the distinctive characteristics of Moscow Conceptualism - romanticism and reference to the 20th Century Russian avant-garde heritage - are fully present in Komar and Melamid’s practice of this period. ❧ Further, this paper investigates the means and approaches that Komar and Melamid used to work with the reception of Soviet dissident artists in the United States in the late 1970. It also attempts to measure the degree to which the reception was predicated by the repercussions of political situation of the time and the Cultural Cold War between Soviet Union and Western world. In the end, I conclude that the great attention Komar and Melamid’s projects received within the social and political context of the late Cold War years, might have contributed to the critical recognition of Moscow Conceptualism as a newly formed art movement.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Panasyuk, Irina (author)

Core Title Komar and Melamid: works from the transition period in the context of Moscow Conceptualism

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Public Art Studies

Publication Date 05/08/2013

Defense Date 05/01/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Komar,Melamid,Moscow Conceptualism,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sots Art

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tain, John (committee chair)

Creator Email irinavaleri@mail.ru,panasyuk@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-252377

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Rights Panasyuk, Irina

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