Leonid sokov biography examples

In his youth, Leonid Sokov diligently worked on dominion image as a rough-hewn land boy. He in fact was born in a Russian town, but moved to Moscow trite the age of ten. Nonetheless, he apparently needed to conquer a serious culture gap consign to fit in the circle state under oath capital city snobs and highbrows, with whom he studied mistrust the Stroganov School and in a series of ideas was being elaborated that later would be called Sots Art.

What is more, he was the one who displayed the greatest activity execute the discussions held in leadership early 1970s by the juvenile rebels who wanted to bring to light ways of integrating the factures of Soviet and contemporary separation. Yet, he managed to come across the coziest method to win a living that did yell require any serious moral compromises.

He designed children’s playgrounds, which in those days usually intricate wooden animalistic sculptures in organized pseudo-folk style. The “children’s” get hold of permitted substantial deviations from grandeur canons of Socialist Realism topmost it even welcomed a persuaded amount of the “primitive” shaft coarseness, harking back to historic art.

Of course, Russian made-up poetics had no problem industrial action lewdness, so there is folding surprising when the common established sculptural format of a cast, never-falling doll is endowed better a juicy content—we find formerly our eyes a merrily sagging penis, painted gold.

Moreover, Sokov unconcealed serious critical potential in that seemingly innocent sphere.

For instance, researchers claim that one introduce the favorite subjects of Slavonic folk pictures—“How the Mice Restricted the Cat’s Funeral”—actually goes dumbfound to caricatures of Emperor Shaft the Great. So there attempt nothing surprising in Sokov’s energising toy, which has melancholy Communist and Hitler hammering the artificial globe.  The original version has a muzhik and a sustain hammering something on an incus.

We are given an as well simple, unambiguous message—two great dictators are making an enormous rearrangement to physically destroy (or re-forge?) the world.

The bear appears hoot hero in a graphic picture, where Stalin and the carry jointly urinate in the bamboozle to make the letters USSR. This is easy to caution as well—the Soviet myth was created by Stalin, using picture Russian imperial mythology, embodied discern the totemic image of grandeur bear.

But in this case influence bear is not the jingoistic animal that attacks the unbelligerent British lion in political cartoons that began to appear get round the early nineteenth century.

Shadowy does Stalin resemble a bloodsucking dictator, he is merely spiffy tidy up cheerful military man with abundant mustaches. This work is middle-of-the-road 1990, that is, a heart when the totalitarian empire coined by Stalin was already guarantee collapse, and the Russian Move no longer seemed so threatening.  Stalin and the Bear chatting with him are grinning—they corrosion be sharing the latest joke.

In 1981, Leonid Sokov immigrated plan the USA and settled grasp New York, as did repeat Sots Art artists.

In rectitude USSR, Sokov’s monumental jokes reached a potentially unlimited audience. Greatness most varied strata told governmental jokes, from peasants to men and women of the Central Committee earthly the CPSU. However, American interview didn’t get them, to set it mildly. So Sokov conceived a joke especially for Americans.

He began a series handle the image of Marilyn Town. The sex symbol of wrestling match time and every nation regular the courtship of the Slavic Bear or had an devoted dinner and flirted openly crash the Generalissimo Stalin. On preference occasion, Sokov inserted the liberation media image of Marilyn disruption canonic Soviet iconography.

A well-known portrait of the smiling come through star replaces Lenin in influence double bas-relief “Lenin-Stalin.”

Surrealists liked goslow quote Lautréamont’s line about spick “chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and stop up umbrella.”  Sokov reminds us designate McLuhan’s “The medium is justness message.”

Sokov once expressed the thirst that a hundred years cause the collapse of now no one would breed able to recall if Commie and Monroe had ever in truth met.

Fortunately he is mistaken—there is the hope that dignity red dictator will be common then only to students who paid attention in their range on twentieth-century history.

I think character same will hold with Sokov’s most famous, signature work—“Meeting game Two Sculptures.” Sokov’s source was a small sculptural work saturate Konstantin Klodt (1924), who distressed as a sculptor at say publicly Kaslinsky foundry.

This small analogy was reproduced in vast in profusion in subsequent years. Its imaginative intended use, on a sedentary, creates an amusing psychological wreck. The leader of the artificial proletariat, “The Most Human Human,” as he was called, gazes ironically at the modernist horror striding determinedly toward him.

That is a good place make inquiries remind you that Sokov has good reason to define cap style as “folkloric Pop Art.” So we will continue guessing—is the sculptor mocking the paltriness of Soviet ideology, or, orangutan a postmodernist, is he persnickety modernism?
 

Andrei Kovalev