Many of us have heard of Pop Art, of Conceptual Art, and of the umbrella term, “Modern Art”. But not many of us have heard of Sots Art. Sots art is a relatively lesser well-known art movement that originated in the Soviet Union, in the 1970s-mainly as a retaliation against the official state approved “Socialist Realist” art style.
Invented By the two-man artist collective Vitaly Komarand Alexander Melamid, this artistic tendency was called Sots Art, combining the “sots” from Socialist Realism (sotsialisticheskikh realizm in Russian) and the “art” from Pop Art.
Though Komar and Melamid originally gave the name “Sots Art” to a specific series of works from 1972–73,it has come to refer to the work of a number of other artists, including Leonid Sokov, Alexander Kosolapov, and Boris Orlov, who all worked in a kind of socialist pop style. Rather than turning away from politics and disappearing into the rarefied sphere of art (in imitation of Western Modernism, which was banned in the U.S.S.R.), the Sots artists turned a critical eye to the subjects and modes of Socialist Realist visual culture, an approach that was just as, if not more, politically risky than avoiding politics altogether.
Insight into the Creators:
Komar and Melamid were trained at the Stroganov Institute of Art and Design in Moscow, the oldest
artistic educational institution in Russia, and graduated in 1967. This year happened to correspond with
a very important date: the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution.
In 1972, Komar and Melamid were commissioned to create a program of visual décor for a young pioneer camp in the Moscow countryside to celebrate the anniversary of the founding of the organization of young pioneers-with the two artists put in charge of decorating the camp with signs, slogans, and plaques.
Two of the works in the resulting Sots-art series were typical red signs with white lettering,resembling the ubiquitous signs that one might see proclaiming Communist slogans on the wall of a meeting hall, on the side of a building, in a classroom, or carried during a public demonstration. However, Komar and Melamid altered the familiar Soviet sign in several crucial ways. In one work, Quotation(1972), they replaced the slogan's letters with white rectangles, suggesting that the contents of the words were of no importance since Soviet citizens were already deeply conditioned to understand white letters on a red banner as being typical Communist propaganda. Our GoalIs Communism! (1972), Komar and Melamid Produced the famous slogan word for word, but instead of citing the author of the quote, Vladimir Lenin, below the text, they signed their own names, the way an artist might sign their name at the bottom of a finished canvas.
We shall end this introduction to Sots Art with a quote by Komar and Melamid in their Sots Art Manifesto: they are not “craftsmen who support the aesthetic needs of the middle class.”