M50 Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid

Sots-Art Manifesto (1972–3)

The Russian artists Vitaly Komar (b. 1943) and Aleksandr Melamid (b. 1945) founded Sots-Art in the early 1970s. Their aim was to create a new style that bridged the gap between the official, state-sanctioned Soviet Realist art of the USSR and the ‘unofficial’ art deemed anti-Soviet by the authorities – in other words, anything that was influenced by the Western avant-garde or considered subversive by the regime. The duo exploited totalitarian symbols in their paintings in the same way that Western Pop artists exploited symbols of mass consumerism. They produced paintings, posters and banners that parodied Socialist Realism, used advertising clichés to provoke a debate about propaganda and identity, and critiqued the peculiarly Russian cultural norm of ‘double thinking’ – that is, of saying one thing in public and thinking another in private.

In 1974 Komar and Melamid took part in a small open-air exhibition of ‘unofficial’ art staged in a field on the outskirts of Moscow. Organized by the Neo-Expressionist painter Oscar Rabin, it was an attempt to evade the Soviet authorities’ increasingly strict control of the dissemination of unofficial art. Artists deemed nonconformists were often subject to random, humiliating interrogations and denied permission to exhibit their work in galleries; but this only intensified their desire to present their work to the ordinary public. Rabin’s show became notorious when the authorities wrecked it with bulldozers, prompting international outrage. Some of the artists who participated in it were later forcibly conscripted into the army or incarcerated in insane asylums. Many were exiled or left the Soviet Union of their own volition. Komar and Melamid themselves emigrated in 1977 and settled in New York. However, the spirit of Sots-Art found a new home in the work of the Slovenian art collective NSK in the 1980s, which similarly appropriated authoritarian iconography in order to try and subvert the communist Yugoslav state (M81).

Komar and Melamid first set out their vision for Sots-Art in a manifesto written at some point in 1972–3. Although it could not be published under the totalitarian censorship laws of the Soviet Union, versions of the text were read out to kindred artistic spirits at private meetings. The following variant, translated here into English, comes from Vitaly Komar’s own archives.

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We live in the USSR – the country where consciousness is defined by being.

We are the artists of Sots-Art – the artists of conceptual eclecticism – a new movement which connects official and unofficial art.

‘Sots’ is the first part of the term ‘Socialist Realism’ [Sotsialisticheskiy realizm], and ‘Art’ the last part of the term ‘Pop Art’.

We are grandchildren of the Avant-Garde and children of Socialist Realism.

If Western Pop Art reflects the excess of advertisements for consumer goods, then our Sots-Art reflects the excess of Soviet ideology – its visual propaganda.

Official state Socialist Realism has entered our unconscious, at the same time as the unconscious has become a topic of discussion in society.

Sots-Art is the admission that a Soviet person’s spiritual life has become state and societal property.

Sots-Art is conceptual eclecticism – it is a realistic reflection of the ambivalence within the collective consciousness of our peers.

Sots-Art’s eclecticism loves the Avant-Garde’s anti-aesthetic nihilism as well as the traditional aesthetics of kitsch.

Sots-Art is visualisation of the provocative, unarticulated part of our consciousness, where there is a border between the societal and the personal.

This is the twilight zone of unarticulated images in our consciousness.

This zone needs to give birth to a new word.

Art is less important than a conversation about it.

The creators of Sots-Art are the midwives of this new word.

Sots-Art is a word which appeared at the beginning of the end, and will be there at the end of the beginning.