Artwork: Sergei Sherstiuk (Russian, 1951-1998). The Cosmonaut’s Dream, 1986. Oil on canvas. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photo Peter Jacobs 2014.
At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union went hard in the paint, battling it out with the United States for domination of both the earth and of outer space. Science and technology became the twin engines upon which the nation raced to advance the causes of space exploration and weapons development. Curious such lofty and brutal goals should find themselves locked in an embrace, one that captivated popular imagination in strange and curious ways.
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A new exhibition, Dreamworlds and Catastrophes, on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, through July 31, 2016, looks at this period in art through the works of more than 20 artists from the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, and Russia. The works selected for the show are infinitely compelling, as they reveal the complex interplay of creative and destructive energies manifest in the national impulse emerge as the leading totalitarian state.
Petr Belenok (Ukrainian, 1938-1991). Untitled, undated. Tempera on fiberboard. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photo Peter Jacobs 2014.
More often than not, artists tend to possess an disinclination towards groupthink. As such they are able to consider and critique where others only seek to embrace without thought to context or consequence. Using a wide array of media, from photography, painting, collage, screenprints, and etchings, among others, the artists featured in Dreamworlds and Catastrophes explore the underlying tensions of the political machine underlying it all, while carefully walking the line of living in a culture of censorship.
One work from the series Sots Art, 1975–86, by photographer Boris Mikhailov speaks to the beautiful way in which the artist subverts the symbols of “Socialist Realism,” the official aesthetic doctrine of state, to comic effect. Where Socialist Realism depicted a blissed out world of peasants headed by the young and fit Joseph Stalin, Sots mocked the art for all it was worth. In Mikhailov’s world, the good children of the Soviet Union have become monsters, ready to die for Comrade Stalin and his global demands. The work is sad, somber, and sweet—if only it didn’t seem so real.
Boris Mikhailov (Ukrainian, 1938). From the series the Sots Art, 1975-1990. Gelatin silver print handcolored with aniline dyes. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo Peter Jacobs 2014
Counter this with the work of Lev Nussberg and Natalia Provkuratova: Altar for the Temple of the Spirit (Sketch for the Creation of an Altar at the Institute of Kinetics), 1969–70. This is a key work associated with Dvizhenie (Movement Group), a short-lived, loose collective of artists who came together in the mid- to late 1960s interested in synthesizing art and science through kinetic objects and environments. Here the urge for utopia exists as an intense, otherworldly experience that seems as foreboding as it is grandiose—much in the same way the works featured in Dreamworlds and Catastrophes walk the perilous line between heaven and hell.
Lev Nussberg (Russian, born in Uzbekistan, 1937) and Natalia Prokuratova (Russian, 1948). Altar for the Temple of the Spirit (Sketch for the creation of an altar at the Institute of Kinetics), 1969-70. Tempera and photocollage on paper. Gift of Dieter and Jutta Steiner. Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers. Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photo Jack Abraham 2006.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
