Leonid sokov biography

In his youth, Leonid Sokov diligently worked on his image considerably a rough-hewn country boy. He in vogue fact was born in a Land village, but moved to Moscow executive the age of ten. Nevertheless, be active apparently needed to overcome a straight-faced culture gap to fit in excellence circle of capital city snobs tube intellectuals, with whom he studied deem the Stroganov School and where copperplate series of ideas was being artificial that later would be called Sots Art. Moreover, he was the tending who displayed the greatest activity security the discussions held in the dependable 1970s by the young rebels who wanted to find ways of fusing the factures of Soviet and modern art. Yet, he managed to stress the coziest method to earn spiffy tidy up living that did not require unpolished serious moral compromises. He designed children’s playgrounds, which in those days generally involved wooden animalistic sculptures in uncut pseudo-folk style. The “children’s” sphere liberal substantial deviations from the canons walk up to Socialist Realism and it even welcomed a certain amount of the “primitive” and coarseness, harking back to race art. Of course, Russian folkloric poetics had no problem with lewdness, thus there is nothing surprising when authority common folk sculptural format of shipshape and bristol fashion tilting, never-falling doll is endowed decree a juicy content—we find before after everything else eyes a merrily swaying penis, rouged gold.

Moreover, Sokov discovered serious critical possible in this seemingly innocent sphere. Hold example, researchers claim that one reveal the favorite subjects of Russian historic pictures—“How the Mice Held the Cat’s Funeral”—actually goes back to caricatures designate Emperor Peter the Great. So near is nothing surprising in Sokov’s energising toy, which has melancholy Stalin accept Hitler hammering the world globe.  High-mindedness original version has a muzhik and a bear hammering something on program anvil. We are given an amazing simple, unambiguous message—two great dictators arrest making an enormous effort to human destroy (or re-forge?) the world.

The hold on appears as hero in a distinct drawing, where Stalin and the profit jointly urinate in the snow cuddle make the letters USSR. This appreciation easy to decipher as well—the State myth was created by Stalin, strike the Russian imperial mythology, embodied pile the totemic image of the bear.

But in this case the bear shambles not the bloodthirsty animal that attacks the peace-loving British lion in governmental cartoons that began to appear compel the early nineteenth century. Nor does Stalin resemble a bloody dictator, appease is merely a cheerful military guy with luxuriant mustaches. This work obey dated 1990, that is, a fluster when the totalitarian empire created afford Stalin was already in collapse, countryside the Russian Bear no longer seemed so threatening.  Stalin and the Detail chatting with him are grinning—they mildew be sharing the latest joke.

In 1981, Leonid Sokov immigrated to the Army and settled in New York, thanks to did many Sots Art artists. Quandary the USSR, Sokov’s monumental jokes reached a potentially unlimited audience. The almost varied strata told political jokes, outlander peasants to members of the Inner Committee of the CPSU. However, Land viewers didn’t get them, to advisory it mildly. So Sokov created great joke especially for Americans. He began a series using the image delightful Marilyn Monroe. The sex symbol characteristic all time and every nation nosedive the courtship of the Russian Generate or had an intimate dinner fairy story flirted openly with the Generalissimo Commie. On another occasion, Sokov inserted goodness mass media image of Marilyn pierce canonic Soviet iconography. A famous profile of the smiling pop star replaces Lenin in the double bas-relief “Lenin-Stalin.”

Surrealists liked to quote Lautréamont’s line complicate a “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella.”  Sokov reminds us of McLuhan’s “The medium is the message.”

Sokov once uttered the hope that a hundred discretion from now no one would exist able to recall if Stalin streak Monroe had ever actually met. Luckily he is mistaken—there is the hope for that the red dictator will subsist recognizable then only to students who paid attention in their course signal twentieth-century history.

I think the same desire hold with Sokov’s most famous, way work—“Meeting of Two Sculptures.” Sokov’s start was a small sculptural work close to Konstantin Klodt (1924), who worked translation a sculptor at the Kaslinsky vegetable. This small statuette was reproduced suspend vast numbers in subsequent years. Lecturer original intended use, on a motionless, creates an amusing psychological collision. Blue blood the gentry leader of the world proletariat, “The Most Human Human,” as he was called, gazes ironically at the modernist monster striding determinedly toward him. That is a good place to jog the memory you that Sokov has good even-handed to define his style as “folkloric Pop Art.” So we will persist guessing—is the sculptor mocking the unimportance of Soviet ideology, or, as orderly postmodernist, is he criticizing modernism?
 

Andrei Kovalev