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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 Czarnecka, 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 country 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 humour 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 avantgarde undertook those functions, which in previous times were performed by traditional 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 choreographed deviant behaviour aimed at creating a shocking ‘spectacle’ that the public 435
