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The Psychoanalytical Aspects of the Deconstruction of Images of Socialist Ideals
Such deconstruction has led to the destruction, reinstallation or removal of
monuments that reflect the Soviet ideology of the 1930s—1960s (see also Czar¬
necka, this volume). The wave of dismantling monuments swept across the USSR
between 1956 and 1962, following the Twentieth Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union. Monuments to Stalin were destroyed all over the coun¬
try as zealously as they had been installed just a few years earlier. The next wave,
which began in 1991 after the fall of the State of Emergency Committee, involved
dismantling monuments to Soviet political leaders. The overall deconstruction of
the ideals of totalitarianism, which took place in 1991, included all types of hu¬
mour represented in the different genres and conceptual directions of the visual
arts. Sots Art, conceptualism and pop art aimed at criticising the values of socialist
realism. The stylistic canons of realism were mixed with pop art and the traditions
of ‘primitive’ cultures.
Artists of the post-Soviet period made use of the traditions of pop art and
primitive art, advanced the principles of parody and presented well-known subjects
of paintings or popular plays in a laughable, degraded form.
The ironic components of many areas of Russian conceptualism of the 1990s
reflected the need for psychological regression in society. The post-Soviet avant¬
garde undertook those functions, which in previous times were performed by tra¬
ditional primitive folk art and pop art. The traditions of primitive folk art were
always viewed as a sphere that divided ‘friends’ and ‘foes’, a sphere that was filled
with its own symbolism and semantics and which possessed a certain measure of
mysticism, even mythology. In post-Soviet conceptualism, as in primitivism, “there
is a certain delirium, incoherence and alogism, like in a dream” that require an
explanation from the creator (Yurkov 2003: 177).
Yuri Lotman noted that primitive folk art and popular prints represented an
entire culture, which includes knockabout comedy—performances at markets and
fairs with harlequinade and buffoonery—the witty talk of peddlers and the popular
theatre and advertising posters (Lotman 1998).
The affinity of popular culture to theatralisation and game playing is visible in
a whole range of conceptual areas of the twentieth and twenty first centuries that
are denoted by actions and performances used to construct meaning. It is enough
to recall the Moscow radical art (Moscow actionism) of the 1990s, which, from
its very inception, positioned itself as the successor of folk primitivism and the
continuator of the political tradition of the avant-garde of the twentieth century.
‘The performances of the 1990s became a sensational metaphor for the situation in
which the Soviet people found themselves, having become, after the “shock therapy”
of the neoliberal reforms, deprived of social safety, much like a dog thrown out into
the street. A good example is the 1994 performance of Oleg Kulik and Alexander
Brener Mad Dog or the Last Taboo Guarded by the Lonely Cerberus (Fig. 196).
Within actionism, accepted standards of behaviour are disrupted by choreo¬
graphed deviant behaviour aimed at creating a shocking ‘spectacle’ that the public
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