Komar and Melamid

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Komar and Melamid

The New York based Russian painters, Vitaly Komar and Aleksander Melamid,
took part in the notorious “bulldozer” exhibition of dissident art in Moscow.
They received their art education in the relatively liberal sixtieswhen the director of the Stroganov Institute was an ex-constructivist who taughtpre-Stalin avant-garde styles along with academic social realism, and Pop Art could befollowed in the pages of western art journals.

Peter Hill: You collaborate on all your work. How do you go about this,
both working out the initial ideas and applying the paint? Do you work together
at every stage?

Aleksander Melamid: The origin of the idea is very simple. Each artist
wants to be a great artist and our definition of great art was “great art is rare art”.
The problem was finding a rare way to make rare art. It is very rare for artists to work
together. There are only a handful who do this and most of them are in Russia producing collective socialist realism. This was the first impulse for us to do
something unusual.

Vitaly Komar: In the pursuit of uniqueness we had to abandon the idea of
uniqueness.

PH: You are always uniting opposing styles, ideologies, cultural signs and
subject matter in your works...

AM: It is dialectical. But to go back to the way we work. We have a big
studio in Canal Street, in New York...

AM: ...and we make sketches and have discussions about what we are going to
work on. We never both work at the same time on one canvas. We usually start
working on several canvases at the same time, and we do not always work in the same
room, but in the same building always. And we switch the canvases around between
ourselves once they are begun.

AM: No, we do not specialize. And one thing we do not share is our brushes.
Paint brushes are like toothbrushes, they are very personal. Everything else is
shared fifty/fifty. Even the money!

PH: You use many recurring image and none more so perhaps than the life and
death of Stalin, and the Yalta conference...

AM: This is not a result of our life in America as many think. We did not
start using images of Roosevelt and Yalta and ET just because we went to America. We
remember from our childhood the American “lend-lease” programme, and we
remember tins of American beef and cans of sweet condensed milk, and
everywhere posters saying “Russia, America, and Britain – Forward!” Then there were the ordinary images of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill which came to us through
popular magazines, All these images come from our early, early childhood. But all
our lives are affected by the Yalta conference.

PH: In the catalogue introduction for your Friutmarket exhibition Peter
Wollen wrestles with the question of whether you are post-modernists or whether you
are post-socialist realists, and concludes you are both. Would you agree?

VK: Sure, because socialist realism was one of the modernist movements of
the twentieth century. It reflects the other side of the same coin, with
Abstract Expressionism on the reverse. It is like socialism and fascism, they are
different but exist in the same time; yet they are deeply similar in structure and ideas.
They will always be enemies but that is the paradox of our century.

AM: Both of them, the modernist movements and Socialist Realism, can be
separated from the avant garde which exists at a distance from them.
Modernism has made the avant garde more commercial, brought it closer to the centre. It is very important that Socialist Realism happened instead of the Russian avant garde.

PH: And would you agree with peter Wollen that you unite the avant garde
with kitsch through neo-academic means?

VK: The avant garde invented the word “kitsch” for everything that does not
belong within the avant garde. It is like a label – “kitsch” is an elite word to
keep out everything that does not belong.

VK: The trouble is we have a very deep disbelief in modernism. We like some
modernist artists of course, but we do not like the idea – and that is why we
are post-modernist.

AM: And sometimes it seems that Socialist Realism is more close to
post-modernism than it is to modernism. It was really an alternative to the
early Russian modernists. And Pop Art can be seen as having made the first
post-modernist step...

VK: The whole notion is to make art closer to people, to make art
interesting to them. What is very bad about much modern art, especially this new imagery, is that it is very far from the intellectual life of the people. We know many poets and musicians in New York and they have no idea of what is going on in the art
world. And everything that is going on seems very ridiculous to them. But the art
market has become so big it can survive by itself – it is a self-sufficient system and
that’s very bad because although it’s larger now than it used to be, it’s more close to
outsiders. It has lost touch with the intellectual life of literature, and philosophy , and
everything. So all the time we are trying to break down these barriers.

AM: If it is interesting for us and our small collective then I think it
could be interesting for other people.

VK: We do not use the jargon of the art circles, we try to speak as humans,
as intellectuals, as people.

AM: The problem is, modern art tries to exist outside history. Through
trying not to be traditional they lost any kind of history.

VK: It is a rebellion against time, any time. It tried to create something
outside time. Like Mondrian, working in a vacuum.

AM: It is very significant that Abstract Expressionism could be done by
children, by animals, by people who have a mental problem – it is not historical, it is an
archetype existing outside time.

VK: It’s like the early stages of any revolution. Revolutions are always
rebelling against time, trying to stop time.

AM: That’s the trouble with post-war and contemporary expressionism. They
try to repeat something which it is impossible to repeat, because early
expressionism was very close to the intellectual life which began a revolution, and it will always belong to the beginning of this century.

PH: So you would feel closer to say, Hans Haacke or Terry Atkinson, than to
Kiefer of Chia?

AM: You know, I think we represent some movement, and let’s say maybe our
art is the last movement of the 20th century. Some people call it eclecticism, we
may call it synthecism, or whatever, it’s not our job to invent terms. But you find
many young artists today who try to put several contradictory images together. You can see David Salle, or Longo or Borofsky, and even some of our own work from 1973 where we tried to combine several politics. I think it is all a kind of vague exit
from a certain situation. It’s not as simple as the artist likes to make out to the
spectator. According to, for example, Pollock, he was a very simple person – according to his paintings, that is.

VK: He wasn’t a person – he was a gesture. He liked the idea that he could
exist within his gesture. But it is not true because the work could very easily be
imitated, it is not about personality.

PH: You spoke of your small collective. Do you include your families and
your friends in that idea, or just yourselves?

VK: No, no – this is something very unique to the two of us. We are alone
together. Work is a very special part of our lives, separate from everything else. It
is like being a member of a party, or a secret society. We are like freemasons, but
there’s only two of us. We have a party system. In Russia it is a one party system, but we have a two party system. All this utopianism about individuality, about gesture, is a
complete failure. You have to have something with which to compare yourself. Imagine Pollock, every day of his life he paints the same canvas, year after year. A
splash of colour. It is a prison, it is more than a prison...

PH: Do you not see your own way of working becoming a similar prison
eventually?

VK: That problem faces the artist always. Every second we exist in a prison
and what we are trying to do is to escape from that prison every other second.

AM: That’s why we switched to the new work we’re doing which is very
different from the larger canvases we are known for.

VK: We had this aim to defeat modernism, because we are all part of this
world which has been destroyed by modernism. In the previous work we tried to
change the world with a single style, but we realise we cannot do this...

AM: So we have gone back to much smaller work like we used to make in Russia
years ago.

PH: You made a series called Biography that contained coded messages and
which was small enough to smuggle out of the Soviet Union.

VK: But we did another thing which we have not mentioned! We painted a lot
of different pictures, different size, everything, and the only thing they had
in common was that the right corner was cut off on every painting. This was a very
early attempt at trying to find a way to unite different things.

PH: How do you see your work in relation to conceptualism? It seems to me
that a lot of what we are talking about stems from conceptual art of the early
seventies.

AM: But classical painting always was conceptual, because it was a way of
conveying ideas from religion; and throughout classical art we find a lot of
conceptualising. Art is conceptual by nature.

PH: But that does not mean that it is always “Conceptual Art” which has been
defined as “a theoretical examination of the concept art,” which is what I
believe you are very successfully doing but with paint and brushes in your theoretical
tool-box. You’re breaking away from the prison of style, whether that style be Abstract
Expressionism or Russian icons.

VK: Icons are different because behind icons you can see God. God himself
ruled what the artist was doing.

AM: The icon is a good example actually, because the icon is very different
from other styles, it has a complete originality of style; yet it is a highly
collective art, highly anti-individual, yet very original and very rare.

VK: We do not like to use such words as spirit or soul, but I think in a way
it might be a key to understanding something that is in our art.

AM: It is not real eroticism that we paint, it is nostalgic eroticism to do
with memories of ourselves as teenagers, and the teenager’s image of sex, and of
fantasy.

VK: What is very important, and what we always try to stress – maybe we are
wrong of course and do not understand what we are doing – is that our work is not
about Hitler, or Stalin, or anybody else but ourselves. And our work occupies us
as much as our real lives do. Stalin, in our life, had a proper significance, as did
many, many different things. So when you are working constantly these images of heroes are only a small part of the work.

AM: And we give you the right to any interpretation of our work. Different
people can legitimately see the same image in different ways; and the more the
better.

VK: Some people feel afraid to write about our work because they think we
are too intellectual and that they do not understand it all, or they think they must
understand a lot about Russia, and history...

AM: Yes, it’s not just a problem of our reputation. It’s the reputation of
Russia. Everybody is a little afraid to write about Russia because it is kind of...

AM: Terra incognito, a bit like Tahiti, they see us like Gauguin coming back
from Tahiti and bringing with him a different kind of culture.

VK: A lot of people have an inferiority complex about Russian culture, they
are afraid of not understanding Tolstoy and making a mistake – making a
capitalist mistake.

AM: In general it is a problem of translation. Of translating one culture
to another, Russian language to English, verbal language to visual language. There is
always something mysterious that is impossible to translate.

PH: Have you ever thought of going to a third culture, to Africa, or
Australia, to see how it would affect you?