Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid. "Dmitry Tveritinov’s story" @ Marat Guelman’s Gallery.
by Andrey Kovalev
Despite the fact that Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid have already become world class stars, they don’t seem to forget Russia and regularly bring new exhibitions to Marat Guelman’s gallery. The mass media regards Komar and Melamid as heroes; they are also worshiped by leftist radicals from the Radek group. However, they have already lost their romantic status of dissidents and emigrants without any possibility to return home and became simply Russian classics residing in New York.
This time they have brought to Moscow their discovery, namely an 18th century conceptualist Dmitry Tveritinov, who had painted an icon bearing not a picture but the Second Commandment: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image." At the exhibition one can see the artists’ reconstruction of most ancient conceptualist’s activity–a black square (!!!) with an inscription in Slavic characters and with that some photographic images of archive documents. The design is quite understandable, since the mass consciousness believes that in a conceptualist work image is replaced by text. Exhibitions of this kind is only possible in Moscow, where the majority of the population have a profound understanding of the Nikeian synod’s decree about Orthodox worship of icons. However, I remember two other characters discovered by K&M in their time. The first is an eighteenth century serf abstractionist Apelles Zyablov. The second is Nikolay Buchumov, a one-eyed realist from the 20s, who painted landscapes in which, in accordance with realist theory and practice, the artist’s nose was inevitably present. Now, after the discovery of "first conceptualist," a new conception of the history of art is completed: Tveritinov, Zyablov, Buchumov. The story has a fantastic end with elephants, painting, and Mickey the chimpanzee taking photos of Red Square. In the middle of this genealogical tree there are K&M themselves, who once wrote on the door of their Moscow studio "Well-known artists of 20th century seventies". Even sots-art, their invention, was a pure simulation of a "real" social realist artist who, owing to absolute imbecility, brought all the ideological directives to a logical end. Such actions are called "appropriation" in post-modernist slang.
But one must understand that artists Tveritinov, Zyablov and Buchumov appear at the exhibitions of cunning artists Komar and Melamid. Even their international project of artistic utilization of Soviet sculpture under the title "Monuments: Transformation for the future" should be regarded as Komar&Melamid’s individual action. I mean to say that Komar and Melamid became famous during the course of decades by playing tricks on decent people’s minds. And now, even if they are willing to tell us something serious about some positive values and other stuff, no one is going to believe them anyway.
But the strangest historical projection to appear at the new Moscow exhibition concerns global fluctuations of time. The simulated character under the name of Komar&Melamid is gradually becoming a historical object himself, preventing us from seeing good old fellows Alik and Vitalik, as they’re commonly called in Moscow. Under the moire shrouds of postmodernist speculations, true historical reality is becoming apparent. The text appearing at the exhibition no longer contains the usual cold manipulation with time and space. It tells us that the idea of an ancient conceptualist’s existence dawned upon artists’ heads in the seventies, during the times of Cold War and the struggle for the freedom of art. "So vividly we recall those Moscow underground workshops, with their foreign visitors and late night disputes, warmed up by our youth and vodka." When you read Tveritinov’s excuse that his picture is not aimed "against holy icons" but rather intended for "demonstrating it to foreigners and discussing".
And then, all of a sudden, one has the strange sensation that the Cold War era that gave birth to sots-art is as far away from us as the time of Peter the Great when Tveritinov lived. At this point, I must remind that K&M weren’t satisfied with sabotaging the basics of social realism. After moving to the US, they have remade in a social realist style the faces of well-known gentlemen from dollar bank-notes and other varieties of American Dream (Philadelphia Art Alliance, 2001). In that way, one might suppose, they hinted at the possibility of totalitarian tendencies in American society. And now, in an atmosphere of patriotic excitement that embraces America, such deconstructing gestures also look like evidences of a might-have-been story. This brutal and ironic gesticulation seems somewhat irrelevant from the standpoint of American patriotism. So the merry old fellows had to travel back to eighteenth century. But the real problem is that conceptualism that declared the impossibility of direct message and ambivalence of significates and denotations also became a historical style after 9.11.01.
