There should be a warning on the cover of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid's Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art: This is not a book. From the opening page, which offers "America's most wanted" painting (dishwasher-size, as preferred by 67 percent of the representative sample), the reader becomes a participant in a radical happening, '90s-style, complete with polls, global travel, and practical jokes. Komar and Melamid, two emigre artists who launched their American career in 1979 with a project of buying and selling souls, have now taken on the nature of art, democracy ("the people's choice"), and artistic authority. What is the universal language of the '90s: painting or numbers? Is there any universal language of beauty at all or do we now fully inhabit a postmodern multitude of taste? Who is the author or coauthor of popular fantasies?
Besides collaborating with each other, Komar and Melamid have collaborated with elephants, with history (in the project "What Is to be Done with Monumental Propaganda"), and with Stalin (in the remaking of Lenin's mausoleum). This time, they are collaborating with the silent majority of the democratic state. The subtitle - "Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guide to Art" - evokes two ideas of scientific truth: the Soviet Marxist-Leninist, and the American. Komar and Melamid do not parody either of these ideas. Instead, they dramatize their implications. If their fellow ex-Soviet artist Ilya Kabakov builds his installations on the threshold of individual obsessions and aesthetic dreams, Komar and Melamid build on the dream of the collective - from communist utopia to virtual democracy - and its grotesque distortion.Each of the paintings in the book seems thoroughly quotational, often citing from a national tradition. The triangles in Russia;s Least Wanted resemble those of El Lissitzky or Wassily Kandinsky, while the mother's unclad breasts in France's Most Wanted vaguely evoke Delacroix or Manet (as well as some amateur pictures from the beach in Normandy). None of the blue landscapes, however, was executed en plein air. Instead, an ideal landscape based on the work of Italian painter Domenichino was used as a template. The blue landscape, then, does not depict anyone's native soil, but rather a paradise within, a nostalgia for freedom. "Making people hermits for a second - maybe that is the basic idea of art," writes Komar.Komar and Melamid's coauthorship is dialectical; it reflects a desire for belonging to the people, to history, to the majority, as well as an emigre estrangement - at once a mental ghetto and a vantage point. For instance, even the world's favorite color does not represent universal serenity for these artists. Their blue is "different-looking." Komar associates blue with his first encounter with the West. On board the Boeing that carried him to the United States, he visited the toilet, flushed, and got the greatest surprise of his life: dark blue, the color of freedom, the color of the artificial heaven of consumer goods. It is from this resident-alien perspective that Komar and Melamid search for the people's choice, and a universal language.The dream of a universal language was the dream of modernism. According to Melamid, people believed that the square was what could unite people, that it was truly universal. But the blue landscape is what is really universal, maybe to all mankind. The Russian Futurist movement began with a manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." At first glance, it might appear that Komar and Melamid's project is a defense of public taste, a slap in the face of modernism and the art establishment. Yet the specter of modernism haunts the post-Communist artists.Komar and Melamid pledged to create "painting for the people," thus fulfilling the promise of both Socialist Realist art and capitalist advertisement. After conducting the first scientific poll of artistic tastes from Kenya to China, they made a shocking discovery. The most wanted painting, regardless of race, class, and gender, turned out to be a realistic, rather than (as the poll phrased it) "different-looking" landscape, dominated by the world's favorite color, blue, and featuring several people in the foreground - some famous, some ordinary (fully clothed was the preference in the United States, partially nude in France). The least wanted painting was invariably done in the style of geometric abstraction. Whether the results stemmed from a prejudice against nonrepresentational styles or a suspicion of anything "different-looking" remains unclear. Of the American poll results, Komar comments, "In a society famous for freedom of expression, freedom of individual, our poll revealed sameness of majority. Having destroyed communism's utopian illusion, we collided with democracy's virtual reality."Yet the citational texture of the paintings does not suggest a post-modernist multiplicity of narratives. The ironic artists take their blue landscapes seriously. It may be an artistic cliche, but for many people the blue landscape represents a moment of disinterested contemplation of almost Kantian beauty in everyday life. What is common to those polled is not so much their attachment to nature as their shared everyday dream of the beautiful. The kitschy, partially clad humans and animals that seem to come from international calendar art only deepen the strangeness of the background's haunting blue.For there is trouble in the paradise of the blue landscape. In America's Most Wanted, the eyes of the wandering George Washington never meet the gaze of the contemporary vacationers. in Russia's Most Wanted, the Jesus Christ look-alike seems to turn his gaze away from the laboring youth. They inhabit the same painting, but seem to exist on different planes. The smooth surface of these paintings is deceptive. Like Total cereal, the paintings have an extra helping of everything the people want without any interrelationship among the ingredients. Something is deliberately out of joint. In fact, the seamless surface is a collage.It has often been suggested that in contemporary society, polls have replaced politics and polity. Even though the pollsters and statistics professors openly acknowledge that theirs is a limited science, it has been made to function as the true representation of the people's choice and is repeatedly manipulated by politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Seemingly the most democratic tool, statistical analysis is frequently used as the most authoritarian one. It doesn't describe a demand, but constructs it. Komar and Melamid, however, take the polls at face value. This literal-mindedness, coupled with fantastic technology, is characteristic of much of American media culture. The artists reveal its absurdity. The "most wanted," calculated with the help of the polls, is what nobody wants - except those who order the poll.In his essay "Can it be the 'Most Wanted Painting' even if nobody wants it?" Arthur C. Danto writes that "Komar and Melamid are postmodern artists who yearn, as in a way we all do, for the sweet innocence of premodern art." In my view, if there is any nostalgia here, it is a nostalgia for the modernist belief in the role of art in society and in the possibility of any kind of aesthetic universal language, not necessarily that of abstraction. Komar, dissenting for a moment from his coauthor, confesses his hope that people who come to see the "Most Wanted" series "will become so horrified that their tastes will gradually change." Is their project a perverse defense of aesthetics via negativa?
It has often been suggested that in contemporary society, polls have replaced politics and polity. Even though the pollsters and statistics professors openly acknowledge that theirs is a limited science, it has been made to function as the true representation of the people's choice and is repeatedly manipulated by politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Seemingly the most democratic tool, statistical analysis is frequently used as the most authoritarian one. It doesn't describe a demand, but constructs it. Komar and Melamid, however, take the polls at face value. This literal-mindedness, coupled with fantastic technology, is characteristic of much of American media culture. The artists reveal its absurdity. The "most wanted," calculated with the help of the polls, is what nobody wants - except those who order the poll.
