Empire Burlesque

Saturday morning, as a column of rebel mercenaries seemed hell-bent on capturing Moscow, I made my way to the campus of Rutgers University to visit the Zimmerli Art Museum’s exhibition “Komar & Melamid: A Lesson in History.” Against the burlesque backdrop of Russian politics, it was a fitting day to view this puckish duo’s artwork—paintings, mixed-media installations, and conceptual presentations ranging from the early 1970s to the early 2000s that satirize the pomp and circumstance of Socialist Realism. At least as far back as Potemkin’s village, Russian public and political life has been a farcical affair, a set of glaring dissonances between high and low registers—officious and vulgar, sincere and facetious, tragic and comic. The Soviet art duo Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, promising students classically trained at Moscow’s Stroganov Institute, were two of the first to crystallize these dissonances in a gonzo style they dubbed “Sots Art,” a play on Socialist Realism, the mandated genre of art in the Soviet Union from the time of Stalin on. Predictably, their subversive material could only be shown in underground venues and apartments and found little appreciation among the authorities. When the pair participated in an infamous show of nonconformist art in the Moscow woods in 1974, a crew of “gardeners” with bulldozers “spontaneously” appeared, flattening canvases and wounding attendees left and right.