There may want to be a warning on the cover of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid's Painting by Numbers: Komar and Melamid's Scientific Guidebook to Artwork: This is not a guide. From the opening web page, which gives you "America's most wished" painting (dishwasher-measurement, as preferred by 67 percent of the representative sample), the reader gets a participant in a radical occurring, '90s-fashion, total with polls, world-wide travel, and functional jokes. Komar and Melamid, two emigre artists who introduced their American career in 1979 with a challenge of purchasing and marketing souls, have now taken on the nature of artwork, democracy ("the people's decision"), and creative authority. What is the universal language of the '90s: painting or figures? Is there any universal language of elegance at all or do we now completely inhabit a postmodern multitude of taste? Who is the author or coauthor of well-liked fantasies?
Komar and Melamid pledged to make "painting for the everyday people," so satisfying the assure of equally Socialist Realist artwork and capitalist advertisement. Once conducting the to start with scientific poll of creative tastes from Kenya to China, they produced a shocking discovery. The most wanted painting, irrespective of race, class, and gender, turned out to be a practical, fairly than (as the poll phrased it) "many different-shopping" landscape, dominated by the world's popular color, blue, and featuring a number of men and women in the foreground - some recognized, some ordinary (completely clothed was the preference in the United States, partially nude in France). The least desired painting was invariably undertaken in the style of geometric abstraction. Regardless if the outcome stemmed from a prejudice in opposition to nonrepresentational variations or a suspicion of something "different-searching" stays unclear. Of the American poll success, Komar responses, "In a society well-known for flexibility of expression, flexibility of personal, our poll uncovered sameness of bulk. Having destroyed communism's utopian illusion, we collided with democracy's virtual fact."
Aside from collaborating with each and every other, Komar and Melamid have collaborated with elephants, with historical past (in the project "What Is to be Executed 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 Manual to Art" - evokes two concepts of scientific reality: the Soviet Marxist-Leninist, and the American. Komar and Melamid do not parody either of these options. Instead, they dramatize their implications. If their fellow ex-Soviet artist Ilya Kabakov builds his installations on the threshold of particular person obsessions and aesthetic desires, Komar and Melamid make on the dream of the collective - from communist utopia to virtual democracy - and its grotesque distortion.
Komar and Melamid's coauthorship is dialectical it displays a want for belonging to the consumers, to record, to the bulk, as perfectly as an emigre estrangement - at when a mental ghetto and a vantage position. For instance, even the world's favorite colour does not represent universal serenity for these artists. Their blue is "distinctive-trying." Komar associates blue with his initially encounter with the West. On board the Boeing that carried him to the United States, he visited the toilet, flushed, and received the biggest surprise of his living: darkish blue, the colour of independence, the color of the synthetic heaven of purchaser items. It is from this resident-alien viewpoint that Komar and Melamid lookup for the people's preference, and a universal language.
The dream of a universal language was the dream of modernism. According to Melamid, consumers considered that the square was what could unite men and women, that it was unquestionably universal. But the blue landscape is what is in reality universal, possibly to all mankind. The Russian Futurist movement commenced with a manifesto entitled "A Slap in the Face of Public Style." At to start with glance, it may very well seem that Komar and Melamid's job is a defense of public style, a slap in the encounter of modernism and the artwork establishment. Nevertheless the specter of modernism haunts the publish-Communist artists.
For there is problems in the paradise of the blue landscape. In America's Most Wished, the eyes of the wandering George Washington under no circumstances meet the gaze of the contemporary vacationers. in Russia's Most Needed, the Jesus Christ search-alike appears to be to flip his gaze away from the laboring youth. They inhabit the identical painting, but seem to be to exist on unique planes. The clean surface of these paintings is deceptive. Like Total cereal, the paintings have an further helping of all kinds of things the visitors want free of any interrelationship between the ingredients. A little something is deliberately out of joint. In fact, the seamless surface is a collage.
Every of the paintings in the e-book appears extensively quotational, generally citing from a nationwide tradition. The triangles in Russias Least Needed resemble individuals of El Lissitzky or Wassily Kandinsky, whilst the mother's unclad breasts in France's Most Needed vaguely evoke Delacroix or Manet (as nicely as some amateur pictures from the seashore in Normandy). None of the blue landscapes, yet, was executed en plein air. As a substitute, an ideal landscape primarily based on the show results of Italian painter Domenichino was put into use as a template. The blue landscape, then, does not depict anyone's native soil, but relatively a paradise in, a nostalgia for independence. "Making many people hermits for a 2nd - it's possible that is the essential strategy of art," writes Komar.
Yet the citational texture of the paintings does not advise a publish-modernist multiplicity of narratives. The ironic artists take their blue landscapes significantly. It may perhaps be an artistic cliche, but for many visitors the blue landscape represents a minute of disinterested contemplation of very nearly Kantian attractiveness in everyday living. What is familiar to these polled is not so a lot their attachment to nature as their shared each day dream of the awesome. The kitschy, partially clad human beings and animals that appear to be to come from worldwide calendar artwork only deepen the strangeness of the background's haunting blue.
In his essay "Can it be the 'Most Wanted Painting' even if nobody wishes 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 artwork." In my look at, if there is any nostalgia right here, it is a nostalgia for the modernist belief in the purpose of art in society and in the chance of any variety of aesthetic universal language, not essentially that of abstraction. Komar, dissenting for a second from his coauthor, confesses his hope that visitors who arrive to see the "Most Wished" series "will turn into so horrified that their tastes will little by little improve." Is their job a perverse defense of aesthetics by means of negativa?
The artists, educated in conspiratorial ways, recognise that the only way to talk publicly about artwork, at least in American society, is by speaking about polls. In point, the statistical graphs in the book themselves resemble abstract paintings. Modernist kinds have been transferred into lifetime, celebrating the victory of science, data, and the media. But at a target-group discussion in Ithaca, New York, Komar elevated the subsequent question: If he ate a person chicken and Melamid ate none, would the statistic say that every of the artists had eaten 50 percent a chicken? Even if Alex realistically had gone hungry? A data professor who was participating in the discussion explained that his system was concerned with chicken usage in basic, not with specific ingesting routines. At this stage, the hungry artists realized that the statistical tactic could possibly threaten the nature of their collaboration.
It has nearly always been proposed that in contemporary culture, polls have changed politics and polity. Even although the pollsters and figures professors openly acknowledge that theirs is a confined science, it has been made to function as the a fact representation of the people's selection and is repeatedly manipulated by politicians, businessmen, and journalists. Seemingly the most democratic instrument, statistical analysis is regularly put into use as the most authoritarian just one. It will not describe a demand, but constructs it. Komar and Melamid, still, take the polls at encounter worth. This literal-mindedness, coupled with terrific solutions, is attribute of substantially of American media tradition. The artists reveal its absurdity. The "most wanted," calculated with the guide of the polls, is what nobody wishes - other than those who order the poll.
Writer: Svetlana Boym
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