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"Collaboration Between Two Worlds: Selling Russia to the West"

Komar & Melamid, Arden Reed, Kevin Platt

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Event Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2003
Location: Slought Foundation
Conversations in Theory Series | Organized by Nina Zaretskaya, Aaron Levy

Caption: Slought Foundation Event Space, 2003

An evening slide lecture and peformance by Komar & Melamid, followed by a public conversation with Arden Reed and Kevin Platt. Event sponsored by Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania.


Vitaly Komar (1943) and Alexander Melamid (1945) were born in Moscow. They attended and graduated from the Stroganov School of Art and Design in 1967. During the late 60s and early 70s, Komar & Melamid founded the movement "Sots Art," which combined the principles of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. They collaborate on various conceptual projects, ranging from painting and performance to public sculpture, installation, and photography. In 1974, their work, along with the work of other underground artists, was destroyed by Soviet authorities at the "Bulldozer Exhibition." By 1978 they were living in New York. Projects in the 90s are devoted to statistics ("People's Choice") and ecology (collaboration with animals, "Asian Elephant Project"). Komar & Melamid's most recent project, "Symbols of the Big Bang," connects mysticism and science. Marjor individual exhibitions: Museum of Moden Art (Oxford) and Museum of Decorative Art, the Louvre (Paris), 1985; Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1989; Museum of Modern Art (Cologne), 1997; Kuntshalle Vienna, 1998; Venice Biennial, 1999. Collections: Guggenheim Museum (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, Museum of Modern Art (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Albertina (Vienna), Museum Ludwig (Cologne), San Franscisco Museum of Modern Art, etc.

Arden Reed, Professor of English at Pomona College, California, is the Author of "Manet, Flaubert, and the Emergence of Modernism: Blurring Genre Boundaries" (forthcoming from Cambridge, in Norman Bryson's "New Art History" series), and a prize-winning book on European Modernism. He is a regular contributor to Art in America (an article on the Manet/Velazquez show will appear in the May 2003 issue). He recently organized a colloquium on art and attention, whose participants included James Turrell, Bill Viola, Lev Manovich, and Pauline Oliveros.

Kevin M. F. Platt is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of _History in a Grotesque Key: Russian Literature and the Idea of Revolution_ (Stanford UP, 1997) and a number of articles concerning the representation of Russian history in literature and the arts. He is currently at work on a book about Peter the Great and Ivan the Terrible as Russian political and cultural myths in works of the last two centuries up to the present day.

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To Cite this Page using MLA Style:

Komar & Melamid, et al. "Collaboration Between Two Worlds: Selling Russia to the West." Slought Foundation Online Content.
[16 April 2003; Accessed 22 November 2008]. <http://slought.org/content/11155/>.



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