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(E-E) Evgenij Kozlov: Leningrad 80s • No.115 >>
Epilogue: USA-CCCP. Points of Contact In the Soviet Union, political propaganda was omnipresent. It was part of the natural environment, like advertisements in a capitalist society. But instead of promising people to strike some advantageous bargain, its mission was to keep them in a perpetual state of agitation – in view of real or imaginary dangers, in the first place coming from America, since America, the political rival, was the only country perceived as being on the same level of grandeur as the USSR. Put differently, the aim of agitprop was to keep people “always prepared”, according to the solemn pioneer promise – and to have them guided by the wisdom of the Party. The fixation on America sometimes took on strange forms: a popular slogan, attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, was “To catch up and overtake America” (догнать и перегнать Америку).[1] It is no wonder that this hardly veiled obsession provoked (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov to re-interpret the Soviet-American relationship, especially since by the ninety-eighties, Soviet propaganda had lost its persuasive power in the face of the USSR’s economic problems. This rather increased the attractiveness of western (youth) culture. Kozlov’s diaries more >>, letters, photographs, and other documents show how he gained access to it through international radio programmes (Letter M), records (Sending art and other gifts), books (Letter D), fashion (Letter J), and movies (Letter N, Part 1). What is more, his friendship with Catherine Mannick gave him the possibility to receive first-hand information about the West.[2] In fact, Kozlov was not the only Leningrad artist to approach the USA-CCCP [USA-USSR] subject matter – among his black and white pictures, there is a reproduction of Kirill Khazanovich’s painting from 1984 ЗНАЙ НАТО / KNOW NATO more>>. Yet Kozlov was the only artist to pursue this topic throughout the ninety-eighties. In Letter J (1986), he discusses the genesis of one of these works, CCCP-USA, CCCP pronounced as Latin letters, see-see-see-pee.[3] He must have drawn inspiration from a global task he had set himself; a year later, mentioning France and China, he writes that he feels inclined to “process” (переработать) all major powers, adding
To create new symbols reflecting the very substance of “major powers”, that is, to conceive of modern allegories, obviously attracted him. But with the exception of China in the painting КИТАЙ. СССР / China. USSR, which depicts both countries as guitar players, each playing for themselves, no other countries have been documented . One might, perhaps, include (Letter N, 1987)Deutschland (Letter F), a large collage from 1984 created with a map of Western and Eastern Germany, although for Soviet citizens, neither represented a major power. Western Germany was considered as an annex to America, while the GDR was considered as an annex to the Soviet Union, often referred to as “our Germany” (наша Германия, nasha Germaniia). Clearly, for Kozlov, the USA took the lead among all other countries, and in Letter P (1989), he wrote „And, of course, I am still interested in the CCCP-USA topic. I often return to it in painting“. The earliest works are from 1980 – two large gouache paintings, Rucksack and This Century’s Dead Caresses, Up Until…, the latter going with a second title, The Outward Appearance of the Relationship Between the Two World Powers.
When it comes to his motifs, Kozlov has always drawn inspiration from his personal circumstances. For example, the origin of the red mantle can be traced back to a red raincoat which he had been in the habit of wearing, making him very conspicuous. As with this American-made raincoat, Kozlov’s American-made red rucksack formed the antecedent to a painting of the same name. Рюкзак / Rucksack may be considered the counterpart of This Century’s Dead Caresses, Up Until…. The painting shows the American flag above the rucksack, and the flag’s soft texture is reminiscent of Jasper Johns’ iconographic portrayal of the American flag dating to 1954 / 55. At the time, Johns was 24; Kozlov was the same age when he painted Rucksack, in 1980.
However, the focus of Kozlov’s USA-CCCP works is on the second half of the 1980s – the period of perestroika – when he started introducing script to images, as in his “funny picture” for Catherine Mannick in Letter H from October 1985, which displays a small flag with the inscription CCCP on top and USA below. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he always used the letters USA and CCCP in these works, but they appear quite frequently, not only on paintings, but also on objects, for example, on a table and on handbags.
Kozlov, through his frequent jobs as a designer of visual propaganda, that is, of sign boards and banners, was familiar with working with script. At the same time, his jobs kept him in permanent contact with such crude party slogans as “Внешнюю и внутреннюю политику КПСС одобряем и поддерживаем / We support and approve the foreign and internal policy of the CPSU”.
 His largest painting from that period, CCCP, a huge banner from 1987 in a 2 x 6 m metre format, can be considered as his personal answer to the omnipresence of such slogans. With the four letters C C C P filling almost the entire surface of the fabric, he carried the concept of communism’s superiority to an extreme, thereby annihilating it.[4]
His ironic approach might have been ignored when the painting was first displayed in 1988 above the stage of Leningrad’s Sverdlov House of Culture as part of a New Artists group exhibition. But it made a lasting impression at the New Artists exhibition in Stockholm later the same year, followed by Tate Liverpool in 1989 more >>. It is now among five of Kozlov’s works in the collection of Tate Gallery External link >>. Not surprisingly, many Soviet artists reacted to Soviet “newspeak” stereotypes with irony, for which the Russian language created a proper term, стеб / stiob, semantically somewhere in between banter and sarcasm displaying intellectual superiority.[5] It became particularly popular among Moscow conceptualists, such as Komar and Melamid. After the duo settled in New York in 1978, they created, in the style of socialist realism, ironic paintings of Stalin with E.T. or Lenin with a MacDonald’s logo (Ностальгический соцреализм / Nostalgic Sots-Realism, 1982–1983). In the same vein of fusing Soviet symbols and American logos, Moscow-born Alexander Kosolapov, who emigrated to the US in 1975, assembled Lenin and Coca Cola or Malevich and Marlboro. Following the example of Andy Warhol for American Pop Art, they established themselves as Soviet pop artists, but unlike Andy Warhol, added a “stiob” note. E-E Kozlov’s approach to the USA-CCCP relationship is different from that of Soviet pop artists. First of all, the paintings, works on paper, sketches, textile works, and objects he dedicated to this subject matter constitute only a fraction of his body of works from the 1980s, albeit an important one.[6] Second, he created them in a variety of styles – from Malevich’s and Lebedev’s geometrical, monochrome approach to figures (1980) to graffiti art (1985-1987) and constructivism (1987/1989), thereby adapting Russian avant-garde features as well as contemporary American art. In other words, he applied the very styles to the USA-CCCP subject matter he used for other works from the same years. Third, the stiob doesn’t play a determining role in his compositions, although it appears at times, but more often in the manner humorous “shock moments” (see description of the “goblins” in “CCCP-USA” in the introduction to Letter J). Fourth, the artist created his own symbols and logotypes, including script, carefully worked out in his sketches to take shape in numerous paintings or objects. The “carved pumpkin head”, the “smiling sickle”, the “shouting skull” and the lettering “ART из СССР” (ART iz СССР / ART from the CCCP) illustrate his approach and technique.
Fifth, in many compositions, the message remains ambiguous, as in CCCP-USA from 1986 (Letter J) or in a second version of his photo collage diptych from 1984. When he spray-painted CCCP 671 and 21 USA, respectively, on large parts of these collages, it changed their message completely, yet there is no obvious interpretation of why one part of the diptych now refers to the USSR, while the other one refers to the USA[7]. The same ambiguity is present in the title of a large work on paper from 1987, CuCsCaP (Сто вопросов и ответов) / CuCsCaP (One Hundred Questions and Answers), where the letters CCCP and USA are rhythmically intertwined.
Sixth, and last but not least, there are sometimes spiritual-religious dimensions in his pictures that may not be evident at first sight. An example is a large painting from 1989, the title of which is painted in black at the top: Страх Врагам. Огни Петродворца. / Terror to the Enemy. The Fires of Petrodvorets. The Cyrillic letters Ст, however, are painted yellow, so that the first word may be read either as Russian страх, terror or fear, or, alternatively, as Latin pax – peace: Terror / Peace to the Enemy.[8]
This dialectic approach finds its culmination in the constructivist Точки соприкосновения / Points of Contact, a large painting on jute from 1989. Kozlov adapted it from a design he had created a year earlier inside a felt-lined cutlery tray provided with two horizontal compartments at the top, where he inserted the letters USA and CCCP, respectively, and two vertical compartments below, to which he added a male figure to the left and a female figure to the right (Letter P).
The figures are based on sketches from 1987, when he experimented and further developed constructivist designs, one of them being partly reminiscent of Kazimir Malevich’s costume design for The Athlete of the Future (Будетлянский силач), a character of the first futuristic opera Victory over the Sun (Победа над Солнцем) from 1913. With his feet firmly grounded and his arms pointing down, the male figure’s posture is nevertheless relaxed, unlike that of Malevich’s, whereas the woman, with legs slightly lifted from the earth and arms upstretched, seems to be floating towards the sky. While it is clear that the figures stand as symbols – personifications – for America and the Soviet Union, viewers, depending on their choice of attributes, may come to different conclusions concerning which of the two represents “man/earth” and which represents “woman/heaven”. However, the main point isn’t even to assign each country to one particular figure. The main point is how these opposite forces relate to each other: what unites them both is a feature that might not reveal its significance at once:
These dots, or points, are the “points of contact”. They symbolise a human being’s most important properties: the brain and, in the lower abdomen, the reproductive organs. The contrasting black and red colours are assigned to them in a manner akin to the black and white dots inside a yin-yang symbol – the “taijitu”, expressing transformation, metamorphosis. When the tajitu is rotated around its axis by 180 degrees (or mirrored in itself and rotated around its axis), the position of the dots is reversed. Thus, it is black (top) / red (bottom) for the man, and red (top) / black (bottom) for the woman.
Put differently, Kozlov established a twofold, symmetric interdependency between the USA and the CCCP, thus proceeding from antagonistic to complementary forces. Following this argument, the painting is not just an allegory of an existing polarity, visualised as man / woman, left / right, top / bottom, gravity / weightlessness, but expresses a complex concept of how such a polarity may generate a third principle, albeit as a possibility, a potential that needs to be realised by the viewer.[9] Could Kozlov have created this work without his friendship with Catherine Mannick? A spontaneous answer would be, yes, he could. Given the fact that artistic intuition leaves the realm of daily life experience, it would be wrong to establish a simple cause and effect relation. But would he still have created it? Kozlov’s and Mannick’s friendship created individual points of contact between America and the Soviet Union, and although the composition is not reflecting their personal relationship, it is highly probable that it motivated the artist to find, through art, a universal answer to what remains an unsolved conflict otherwise. Hannelore Fobo, 27 January 2025 [1] In reality, Lenin already formulated this concept in a similar way, employing the term “leading countries” (передовые страны) instead of “America”: …либо погибнуть, либо догнать передовые страны и перегнать их также и экономически. / …either perish or overtake and outstrip the advanced countries economically as well. See: «Грозящая катастрофа и как с ней бороться» / The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It, 1917, in Полное собрание сочинений В.И.Ленина / V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 34, p. 198, External link >> During the Cold War, “America” became a placeholder for capitalist countries – “The West” – but communist ideology was not an obstacle to cooperating with the capitalist opponent, as the following examples show: the Gorky Automobile Plant (GAZ) constructed by Ford Motor Company (1932), the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, built with the expertise of Canadian and US-American engineers, the Volga Automotive Plant, AvtoVAZ, producing Lada vehicles, built in cooperation with Fiat, Italy (1966), and the heavy truck manufacturer KAMAZ (1969), equipped by companies from the USA, West Germany, Sweden, Italy and France, among others. [2] Over the last two hundred years, Russia’s intellectual debates about the beneficial or detrimental factor of western culture for its own identity – arising, among other reasons, from the rivalry of Christian confessions (Rome-Byzantium) – has found its expression in an enormous wealth of literature, polemics, and pamphlets. In fact, disputes between “Westerners” and “Slavophiles” dominate Russia’s agenda to our day. See also: Hannelore Fobo, Empire and Magic. Sergey Kuryokhin's “Pop-Mekhanika No. 418” (1995), page 9. Dugin and the Salvation of Mankind, 2018/2020 more >>. The aim of Soviet censorship was, however, not to completely isolate its citizen from the West, as the de facto ban on travel to capitalist countries may suggest, but to steer public opinion. Thus, Soviet leaders, looking for suitable western role models, courted “true” Americans, such as communist and civil rights activist Angela Davis. [3] About the artist’s love for playing with sounds see Hannelore Fobo, (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov • White on Red – Five paintings from 1987, page 5, CCCP (2020) more >>. [4] In 1990, Kozlov went one step further, when he painted The Great Le-yenin, Lenin with red eyes, to unmask Vladimir Lenin’s true personality. See Letter R. [5] See also Hannelore Fobo, Pop Mekhanika in the West, page 6. Why shouldn’t one play with a funny nose on? The “styob” (2017/2018) more >>. [6] Approximately a fifth of the roughly 850 works documented for the 1980s; see catalogue text USA-CCCP-CHINA (2018) more >>. [7] The titles of the works, written on the reverse of the diptych, are “CCCP” and “21 AVE USA”. Kozlov didn’t change the dates, which means that he might have done both second versions already in 1984 – or, if later, he didn’t bother to correct them. see also (E-E) Evgenij Kozlov, Catherine Mannick, and Hannelore Fobo papers, 1979-2022 (inclusive) Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Special Collection Harvard University >> |
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Published 29 January 2025 |
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