fascists and communists are united in their hatred of "degenerate" art, so i'm fine with it. if exposing the citizens of the USSR to Modern American art advanced the fall of the soviet union then w/e, if it also happened to give Rothko money to paint then that's a solid win.— cognitohazard (@bryanarchyNOW) June 3, 2021
Prolekult was from the same era as Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. That's where I really like Soviet art, when it was a political revolution on top of modernism's perspective revolution. The hell of the 40s seemed to mostly stop that. I think nonconformist art is neat in the same way that Marcel Duchamp is one of my favourite artists, but it's such an internal dialogue between the artist and the Soviet state that it doesn't have the same sense of universal relevancy that other movements do. I can still be a dadist and consider Hexbear to be dada in forum form even if none of us lived through World War 1. Maybe it's just ignorance but I can't similarly put myself in the shoes of a 1950s-70s Soviet artist responding to a state that's completely foreign to me and a project I lost faith in with Khrushchev.
The nonconformists are pretty good (and I think that Picasso or Stravinsky's work is as much of an internal dialogue with the west as the non-conformists' is), but I was also thinking of the populist neo-futurist art of the 50s-60s. Khrushchev may well have doomed the union, but the art of the Soviet high water mark has such a sense of optimism and merges the modernist and Soviet Realist trends quite effectively, I think.
Prolekult was from the same era as Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. That's where I really like Soviet art, when it was a political revolution on top of modernism's perspective revolution. The hell of the 40s seemed to mostly stop that. I think nonconformist art is neat in the same way that Marcel Duchamp is one of my favourite artists, but it's such an internal dialogue between the artist and the Soviet state that it doesn't have the same sense of universal relevancy that other movements do. I can still be a dadist and consider Hexbear to be dada in forum form even if none of us lived through World War 1. Maybe it's just ignorance but I can't similarly put myself in the shoes of a 1950s-70s Soviet artist responding to a state that's completely foreign to me and a project I lost faith in with Khrushchev.
The nonconformists are pretty good (and I think that Picasso or Stravinsky's work is as much of an internal dialogue with the west as the non-conformists' is), but I was also thinking of the populist neo-futurist art of the 50s-60s. Khrushchev may well have doomed the union, but the art of the Soviet high water mark has such a sense of optimism and merges the modernist and Soviet Realist trends quite effectively, I think.