One of the most comprehensive exhibitions about the Sots-Art movement took place in 1984 at New York's Semaphore Gallery. It was entitled "Sots-Art: Russian Mock-Heroic Style" and its curator Margarita Tupitsyn included in it Aleksandr Kosolapov's "Symbols of the Century" (1982), a juxtaposition of Lenin's profile with the Coca-Cola logo and the slogan "It's the real thing".
The piece became a symbol of this movement in the West, but, after that first event, there weren't other exhibitions analysing the nostalgic playfulness of Sots-Art in an engaging way. At least until curator Liisa Kaljula decided to analyse the theme in conjunction with the post-Soviet aesthetic of the 2010s in fashion, organising an intriguing event at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn, Estonia.
"Sots Art and Fashion: Conceptual Clothes from Eastern Europe" (the exhibition was launched in March and will be on until 4th August) is a coherent journey of rediscovery.
Named by twenty-five-year-old Moscow artists Vitalii Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, Sots-Art emerged in the early 1970s in Moscow, it originated in painting and poetry and moved from Socialist Realism. The inspiration came indeed from some very ordinary work that Komar and Melamid were doing in a Pioneer camp outside Moscow.
The images of young Pioneers, veterans, and Party leaders they had to use to decorate the camp, inspired the two artists a way to destroy ideological constructs: Komar and Melamid started borrowing the myths and motifs, objects and materials of Soviet visual culture to subvert the latter in a satirical key, creating a new and modern language.
Soviet leaders, idealised workers and pioneers went through a process of distortion and, through clever juxtapositions, the sacred Soviet iconography was desacralised, while freedom was created through images that were the opposite in meaning.
Kaljula didn't stop at Sots-Art, though: inspired by iconic pieces such as Leonid Sokov's "Hammer and Sickle", a furry sculpture of the Soviet symbol that could be considered as suspended between art and fashion, she created a bridge between Komar and Melamid's movement and young fashion designers who moved from the socialist past of their countries to reinvent a sort of post-Soviet aesthetic in the spirit of Sots-Art.
There is definitely a link between Sots-Art and some of the fashion designers included in the exhibition: Katya Filippova, who showcased one of her collections in the '80s at British Fashion Week at Sovintsentr alongside more famous international designers such as Vivienne Westwood, was inspired by tsarism, and military, communist and religious symbols, but combined them with a punk aesthetic, coming up with red ballet tutus matched with uniforms or deconstructed uniform jackets with lace tails. Look at the photographs of Filippova's punk-meets-ballet-meets-communism outfits or at Saima Priks' Perestroika and Glasnost outfits and you will realise there is a link between them and Sots-Art, but also between these designs and fashion in the West. Indeed Filippova or Priks' creations wouldn't have looked out of place in a club in London in 1987.
Among the contemporary designers the curator selected there are Yulia Yefimchuk from Kiev, Marit Ilison from Tallinn, Sonja Litichevskaya from Berlin and Nina Neretina and Donis Pouppis from Moscow.
In much the same way as you can see punk clashing with Soviet symbols in Filippova's work, when seeing Nina Donis' collections you feel you may be looking at the palette of a Russian Constructivist painting or staring at the simplicity of Suprematism, but, if you analyse better their designs, you will see an electro-pop mood surrounding them, borrowed from the graphic design of record covers by Pet Shop Boys, New Order or Kraftwerk.
"Our Russian heritage consciously and unconsciously influences us and directs the way we work," the Nina Donis duo state. "This heritage is something not always clearly defined, certain and specific. But it is probably a mix of Russian folk costume and the Russian avant-garde movement. Sots-Art inspire our collections as this was one of the noticeable and bright directions in the Soviet unofficial art that left a noticeable mark and gave direction to subsequent ideas. Sots-Art is as important as the Russian avant-garde and Russian conceptualism."
Among the artists included in the exhibition that Nina Donis feel closer to there are Leonhard Lapin and Raul Rajangu, and in part the duo identifies with Komar and Melamid's slogan, "We are grandchildren of the avant-garde and children of Socialist Realism."
"We grew up soaking up this legacy," they claim. "Our past lives with us and of course our past influences and shapes how we develop and go further in life, it sets a certain direction vector. We are not sure that this can be defined as our constant inspiration, but it certainly occupies some part of our knowledge and of our memories. All this can both limit or expand you as a person, as an individual. It depends on how you use it."
There's mockery, playfulness and style in the displays at Komu and there is maybe a tiny bit of Pop Art as well, after all Komar and Melamid often stated that Sots Art was the Russian equivalent of American Pop Art. "In a way you can draw parallels between Sots-Art and Pop Art," Nina Donis state. "But these were art trends in two completely different societies: Pop Art reflected the Western consumer society, while Sots-Art reacted to the ideology and politicization of Soviet society. They do have in common irony and grotesque, though."
The public programme of the exhibition (that includes works from private collections from Moscow, Tallinn, Kiev and Berlin, and from the collections of the Estonian History Museum, the Art Museum of Estonia, the Estonian Artists' Association, Mart Erik's collection and the Fotomuseum Winterthur) will culminate on 3rd August, with the roundtable discussion "Post-Soviet Aesthetic: Globalising Fashion from Eastern Europe", moderated by Sten Ojavee. But, in the meantime, get inspired and learn more about Sots-Art and fashion by reading the following in-depth interview with the curator.
What inspired the "Sots Art and Fashion, Conceptual Clothes from Eastern Europe" exhibition?
Liisa Kaljula: I get this question very often! I am a great fan of Eastern Europe and I often think about how this region undermines its own cultural richness, always looking to the former West for inspiration. Western culture is so established and well-known through decades and decades of publishing and curatorial work. But I think the true mission of a curator is to shake the established cultural hierarchies and to always offer something new and yet unknown to visitors. Sots Art as well as post-Soviet aesthetic - the two movements that this exhibition is dedicated to - are to my mind even better known outside of Eastern Europe than in Eastern Europe itself. So that was the main motivation for me as a curator - to offer to Eastern Europe its own cultural richness that it is greatly unaware of.
What fascinates you about the Sots-Art movement?
Liisa Kaljula: I have been studying Sots-Art for several years now and what fascinates me about the movement is the way it turns to the stigmatized local histories, Soviet symbolic and material legacy. Soviet visual culture was generally detested by the liberal artists throughout the Soviet Union, but Sots-Art suddenly turned back to it in a very playful, ambivalent, subversive way, almost predicting all the Eastern European punks who started using Soviet officialdom in their outfits in the 1980s in a tongue n' cheek way. So the early Sots-Art that emerged in the 1970s in Moscow is very far from the commercial movement that it later became in the West when Saatchi Gallery became its main promoter. Early Sots-Art has such wonderful pieces like Leonid Sokov's "Hammer and Sickle", which was one of my main inspirations for this exhibition. It's a furry sculpture of the Soviet symbol – basically a strange object that stands between art and fashion!
What criteria did you use to select the designers involved?
Liisa Kaljula: It was very important for me to have designers from different countries from the former Eastern block. Because I wanted to show a border crossing cultural movement, which Sot- Art as well as post-Soviet aesthetic both really are. Secondly, I wanted all the regional fashion centers to be represented, so it was natural that I had to go to Moscow and Kiev to do fieldwork for the exhibition, and Tallinn and Berlin also came along. Post-Soviet aesthetic clearly has a more commercial and a more artistic wing to it – I was interested in the artistic wing, because the museums should not be market places, but places for aiming higher, places for artistic or cultural studies. This is the reason I selected Nina Donis, Yulia Yefimtchuk, Sonja Litichevskaya and Marit Ilison instead of the representatives of post-Soviet aesthetic who work with streetwear and use mass production. I wanted to show clothes that were somewhere between fashion and art.
In which ways do you feel the movement inspired the designers involved in the exhibition?
Liisa Kaljula: I am not really sure the movement has inspired them, because none of the designers I worked with for this exhibition really saw themselves as part of any movement. This is of course very common to all sorts of artists who usually identify as individuals, working alone and not in a group. But I also think that curators have not shaped this movement too much so far, simply because there haven't been too many museum shows of post-Soviet aesthetic yet. To my knowing – Sots Art and Fashion in Kumu is the first! For a movement to start having a wider influence, it has to be much more institutionalized than post-Soviet aesthetic is at the moment. But if you ask how this show, this contextualization of their work within Sots-Art and post-Soviet aesthetic has influenced the designers, then it's probably too early to tell! They are very busy people constantly working on a new collection, so we might see that in the near future if this museum adventure had any effect on their work or not!
Moscow artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, invented the Sots Art style. Komar and Melamid expressed their credo in this slogan: "We are grandchildren of the avant-garde and children of Socialist Realism". Do you feel the designers involved in the event can identify with this slogan?
Liisa Kaljula: If Komar and Melamid said they are grandchildren of the avant-garde and children of socialist realism, then the designers of post-Soviet aesthetic represented at the exhibition can say they are the great-grandchildren of the avant-garde and the grandchildren of socialist realism. And, by the way, two participants of the exhibition, Yulia Yefimtchuk and Sonja Litichevskaya are both children of the 1980s avant-garde artists, who are spiritual grandchildren of the early avant-garde! But, besides that, all the designers involved have had a socialist childhood, so they mainly relate to that time through the eyes of a child and probably have less taboos regarding the Soviet experience than their parents and grandparents, because it's the most natural thing to feel nostalgia for one's childhood, even if it happened to be in the Soviet Union, the "empire of evil".
Komar and Melamid often stated that Sots-Art was the Russian equivalent of American Pop Art: do you think this statement could be applied not just to art, but also to fashion and in particular to some of the designers and clothes included in this event?
Liisa Kaljula: To me, American Pop Art symbolizes one of the dominant art movements globally after Second World War. The big Western museums have had plenty of blockbuster exhibitions that are dedicated to showing how American Pop Art took over the world in the 1960s and 1970s. I personally think explaining everything via these big Western styles is not the best habit and we should gradually drop it. Besides, this is why we have Pop Art in the Western countries and Sots-Art in Eastern Europe – to show that socialist Eastern Europe had its own mass culture in the form of Soviet propaganda, it didn't need American Pop Art to discover that for them. So to be honest no, I do not really think it gives these wonderful young designers anything if we say they are pop artists. Quite the opposite – saying that someone is a pop artist today means that you think they are somewhat superficial.
Sots-Art fashion found one of the most iconic expressions in Komar and Melamid’s conceptual mail-order catalogue "A Catalogue of Superobjects: Supercomfort for Superpeople" (1977): do you think it inspired also some of the designers involved in this event?
Liisa Kaljula: I wish it was so! Because it's such a charming work of art! And spending time at the exhibition with young Eastern European designers I see that they really stop in front of it, it talks to them somehow. And I assume it's the poetic spirit of that work, which finds that art was everywhere in the Soviet everyday, simply because socialism was in a way very surrealist, things didn't really function that well in this huge bureaucratic country and therefore there was a lot of poetic absurd in people's lives. And I am pretty sure young Eastern European artists are actually looking for that kind of local inspiration, they do not want to be missionaries of big Western styles anymore.
The critics of Sots-Art often called it "anti-art": do you feel that some of the designs included in this exhibition can be defined anti-fashion?
Liisa Kaljula: Russian Sots-Art is historically part of Moscow conceptualism and conceptualism is always anti-art in the sense that it questions what do we mean when we say art and can art mean something that is the opposite of how we usually define it. The designs included in this exhibition are what could be called conceptual clothes, which means they are not really functional blouses or trousers or dresses, but something that ask – can this be a blouse? Can these be trousers? Can this be a dress? So in that sense, yes, they definitely can be seen as anti-fashion. But even more, they are anti-fashion in the sense that they are going against the global fast fashion business that is wasteful, environmentally unfriendly and based on people's addiction of that system. None of the pieces exhibited at the show are mass produced, they are unique, well-made pieces produced in the home countries of the designers.
Do you think that this exhibition will travel to other countries after Estonia?
Liisa Kaljula: I sure hope so! I hope that museums globally will start sharing the idea that it's important to support variety and diversity. Not only show the well-known names and movements to attract big audience numbers, but really think about diversity as the mission of the museums. In my opinion museums should not become supermarkets that select and showcase works in accordance to an audience's taste, but they should actively form expectations and be intellectual rather than commercial centres.
Image credits for this post
Images 1 to 4, 6 and 7 in this post courtesy of the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn
1. Saima Priks' collection "Perestroika and Glasnost" (1987) in the front; Leonhard Lapin's graphic series "Conversation of Signs" (1989-90) in the background
2. Sonja Litichevskaya's collections "Geometry of Freedom" (2017-18) and "Sputnik" (2019) are juxtaposed to Raul Rajangu's multimedia series "Politburo" (1982)
3. Photo wall of Moscow alternative fashion from the Perestroika era with works by Gosha Ostretso, Katya Filippova, Svetlana Petrova and the Experimental Laboratory of Modelling
4. NINA DONIS's Autumn-Winter 2015-2016 collection with Leonhard Lapin's graphic series "Signs" (1979) in the background
5. NINA DONIS's Autumn-Winter 2015-2016 collection. Courtesy of Nina Donis.
6. Andres Tolts's assemblage Constantinople (1990) and Marit Ilison's installation "77 Chintzes" (2019)
7. Yulia Yefimtchuk's collections "Technical Aesthetics" (2018) and "Dimitry Vrubel's Fraternal Kiss" (2015-16)
8. Marit Ilison, Smock, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Hooligan Hamlet
9. Sonya Litichevskaya, Geometry of Freedom, 2017-2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Lara Ohl
10. Yulia Yefimtchuk, Propaganda about Propaganda, 2017. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Masha Mel
11. NINA DONIS, Autumn-Winter 2015-2016 Collection, 2015. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Natasha Ganelina
12. Sonya Litichevskaya, Reconstructed Contrasts, 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Svenja Trierscheid
13. Saima Priks, Perestroika and Glasnost, 1987. Estonian History Museum. Photo: Sergey Didyk
14. Katya Filippova, First collection, 1987. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Ăsa Franck
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