Boris Groys
The artist in the age of commodity fetishism

The history of art hasn't seen that many artists whose work is indisputably symptomatic of their time. But Alexander Kosolapov is one of those artists. In our post-modern times, many believe that it is no longer possible to be surprised or provoked. However, Kosolapov has succeeded in both surprising and provoking — his recent works provoked a rather violent rejection by a section of the public, and he was even accused of offending religious beliefs. It is easy to disregard such protests, thinking that they stem only from the more backward members of the population who haven't yet quite figured out the nature of contemporary art. A more interesting undertaking, however, might be to try to understand what it is the offended believers ACTUALLY believe in, and why it is that the practice of contemporary art seems to controvert their faith.

Protests resulted mainly from the fact that Kosolapov quoted Russian orthodox icons in a profane context, placing them at the same level with a McDonalds advertisement and caviar. As a matter of fact, there is nothing special about this kind of quotation. Moreover, not only has contemporary art come into existence through precisely these kinds of quotations, but also art in general. We shouldn't forget that art as such is a relatively recent phenomenon. In effect, art emerged out of the secularization of a sacred tradition — that which had once been an icon became a painting. The artists of the Renaissance had already placed the protagonists of the Bible in a profane contemporary setting. After the French Revolution, cult images and objects taken from diverse sacred contexts were placed in the profane context of European museums. Just imagine the indignation of a priest from Ancient Egypt, if he were to see what the British Museum or the Louvre had done with his venerated mummies. The 19th—20th centuries elaborated upon the hypocritical habit of understanding art as something sublime and beautiful. In reality though, from its very beginnings art has been a profanation of everything sublime and beautiful — that is, of the sacred. Art has always been “just art”, “simply art” — an essentially frivolous, unsound, idle and, in any case, suspiciously profane activity. The merit of Kosolapov's recent works exists first and foremost in reminding the spectator of the profane beginnings of art practices as such.

Therefore, one can argue that the offended believers felt offended not because of the de-sanctification of Christ, but mainly because of the de-sanctification of art that they rightfully detected in Kosolapov's work. The Russian Orthodoxy reveres the icon, and this very reverence was transposed by Russian art onto the painting. From the Wanderers on, through the Russian Avantgarde and up to Socialist Realism, Russian artists, as much as the Russian public in general, expected from art a revelation of the beautiful and the true. To a certain extent, these expectations still persist. In any case, the believers offended by Kosolapov have been inculcated with such expectations by the Soviet power, and are now returning to the actual religious sources of those expectations. Of course this secondary sanctification of art took place not only in the East but in the West as well. For this reason, art has had to continually reaffirm its profane nature — the entire history of contemporary art is, essentially, a history of such reaffirmations. Art has always manifested itself through the profanation of the sacred — primarily when de-sanctifying its own image. The situation essentially remained the same when art began to move away from the profanation of sacred images and objects, and instead increasingly transfigured everyday objects and even things belonging to that sphere which Bakhtin called the “bodily lower stratum”. Some might contend that Duchamp did the pissoir an honor by presenting it in the exhibition space as a work of art. Or that Piero Manzoni payed respect to his shit, by packing it in cans and exhibiting it as “merda d'artista”. But actually, nothing has changed. In Latin, sacer signifies both holy and unholy. Since at least the times of Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille we have known that everything related to excrements is sacred — that is, forbidden and taboo. Therefore Duchamp and Manzoni belong to the good old tradition of the profanation of the sacred — the no less traditional replacement of the holy with the unholy included.

The practice of Andy Warhol and other Pop artists, for its appropriation of the icons of commercial mass culture, is in a similar vein. The word icon speaks here for itself. The notion of the sacred is inseparably bound to the notion of the ritual: that is, repetition, copying, and reproduction. Any religion, and especially its fundamentalist — the most radical and authentic — interpretation, always insists on the immutability, repetitiveness and reproducability of the ritual. In that sense, all industrial culture of the 20th century, which is also based on mass reproduction, can be regarded as nothing less than the propagation of the sacred ritual across the entire — hitherto profane — sphere of production and mass communication. Not for nothing did the socialist and communist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries sanctify the “working class”. An industrial worker can indeed be sanctified, since he, like a priest, carries on one and the same mechanical ritual, for example screwing the same bolts into the same holes over and over again. Symbols of mass culture are de facto just as sacred, for they are infinitely reproducible, and so are the masses — every person in a crowd looks alike. Therefore we can say that in defiance of the prevailing opinion, no secularization of culture ever took place in modern times. Instead, the democratization and “massovization” of the sacred has occured. Not for nothing has our time seen a proliferation of fundamentalist religious movements through the mass media: the repetitiveness of the ritual coincides here with the mechanical reproduction through which mass media operates. It is this very condition of contemporary culture that Kosolapov’s work diagnoses, at the same time as it reveals the symptoms of the contemporary sacred.

Throughout the 1970s to the 1990s Kosolapov made a great many works in which he combined symbols of the Soviet space with symbols of Western commercial civilization — Lenin, for instance, was associated with Mickey Mouse. This sanctification of the masses and mass culture was very characteristic of Soviet ideology. The incessant reproduction of Soviet signs manifested unity with people, the ability to be part of the whole and to partake in a mystery of the eternal recurrence of the order of thought and life. Anyone who preferred reading, say, Proust, to watching the film “The Diamond Arm”, would generally be regarded as a suspicious renegade. Looking at Russian culture today, you get the impression that this perception hasn’t really changed since the abolishment of the Soviet power, except that renegades are now habitually referred to as marginals. The point here is that the sanctification of the masses is as much a phenomenon of Western capitalist civilization as it was of the Soviet regime — although the character of this sanctification is slightly different. During the years of Soviet power, the masses were sanctified for their capacity to work, and due to the monotony and reproducability of their social and productive practices. A key symbol of this monotonous reproduction are the portraits of Lenin that marked every corner of Soviet space, and were carried aloft by the workers during demonstrations. In contrast, the source of the masses’ sanctification in capitalist society is the monotony and reproducability of their ability to consume. A symbol of this monotony of consumption is Mickey Mouse, images of whom frequently appear in all sorts of American processions. We can therefore argue that in his early work Kosolapov prefigured the gradual transition from Lenin to Mickey Mouse, that is, from the monotony of production to the monotony of consumption. We can also say that the famous “perestroika” precisely implemented this transition. Occurring in parallel was the transition from Socialist Realism to glamour, that is, from images of the laborers of production to the laborers of consumption, carried into effect by the Russian culture in the same period.

The sacred potential of the contemporary masses consists in their collective power of purchase: clearly, only a product being sold to the general masses can generate a serious, real profit. Accordingly, a central question for contemporary capitalism might be: what unifies the masses? What transforms a versatile human crowd into a standardized consumer mass? For the answer to this question contemporary thought turns increasingly to religion, while the question itself increasingly reveals a theological bent. Kosolapov's recent work answers this very question and gives, I believe, a rather accurate theological answer. In fact, Kosolapov sees in Christianity the initial form and archetype of our current consumer society. The figure of Christ appears in Kosolapov's work as a symbol of the contemporary masses' purchasing power, while the figure of Lenin appeared above all as a symbol of their power of production. In turning from commercial brands towards religious brands — at times the commercial brands’ archetype — contemporary consumer society is returning to its roots. Kosolapov demonstrates this process by making a Christian icon share space with images of caviar or the MacDonald’s logo.

Indeed, both Orthodox and Catholic communion might be considered a primary form of consumption — at least in the context of Christian and post-Christian civilization. The mystery of the Eucharist aims at the unification and standardization of the versatile human mass, and aspires to transform it into a community of consumers of divine bliss. The Russian Slavophiles have already begun to describe Christian sacraments in terms of their consumption, as opposed to their traditional interpretation of them in terms of production. According to Slavophile theoreticians, these sacraments are sacred not so much by virtue of their divine origin, but rather due to the fact of their having accumulated the desires of the masses: the icons are holy because of the prayers they have received, the Eucharist is holy since it unifies the community, etc. Some parallels with the functioning of commercial brands are evident here. We are talking here in particular about equation of commodity and divine bliss. Or rather, about a theology of commodity as bliss. It is no coincidence that some Western authors (Marie-Jose Mondzain, for one) have based their analysis of the icon on the etymological adjacency of the words “icon” and “economy”: the icon has been addressed as a manifestation of the divine “iconomy”, that is, the most economical way to display the invisible in the visible world. Recalling the analysis of Marxian commodity fetishism should suffice for concluding on the iconic genealogy of commodity. Any commodity can be interpreted as the manifestation of an invisible, symbolic monetary value. In essence, Kosolapov's works reveal and continue this Slavophile theological tradition of understanding the symbolism of the commodity, so that at first glance it isn't clear why they generated such irritation and annoyance among those who actually believe themselves to be part of this very tradition.

The reason can only be that a quotation of the icon of Christ and its interpretation as a symbol of the masses' purchasing power was carried out in an unsanctioned way, that is to say, privately. Evidently, Kosolapov's unsanctioned privatization of symbols that are supposed to operate in a centralized and organized manner generated the outrage of a certain section of the populace. However, such unsanctioned, private use of social and state symbols was characteristic of the art of 1970—1990s, within which tradition Kosolapov belongs. During the epoch of Soviet communism, these symbols were officially perceived as belonging to nobody, collective — so that apparently everyone could use them. The official reaction to the works by Sots-Artists, however, repeatedly demonstrated that the collective property of communist symbols — such as the red flag or a portrait of Lenin — was fictitious and illusory. Any attempt to take this lack seriously and realize it was interdicted as affecting the state power's privileges.

The very same reaction confronts Kosolapov today. At first glance, Christ is communal and doesn’t belong to anyone in particular; anyone can appeal to him in the form he or she wishes, or use his icon IN the way he or she desires. In practice, however, this is not the case. The consumption of the icon of Christ — like consumption in general — is considered sacred, that is, correct and normative, only in its standardized, ritualized form. In contrast, any individual idiosyncratic methods of consumption are rejected and regarded as marginal and thus dangerous for the masses’ consumerist psychology. But precisely this kind of individual and thus profane consumption of social symbols is practiced by Kosolapov in his works from both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The real act of profanation doesn’t consist of utilizing images of Lenin or Christ in the context of art — such usage has, naturally, a long and established tradition; rather, it is a matter of the individual playing with societal symbols in a way that goes beyond their ritualized usage. Kosolapov has again revealed in his work the current mechanisms of sanctification, and first and foremost the fact that, in relation to these mechanisms, art is still capable of playing its traditional role: the secularization and profanation of the mechanisms of sanctification themselves as well as the results of their implementation. Since the purchasing power of masses is the actual object of worship today, a private appropriation of the symbols of this purchasing power — what is more, conducted free of charge — occurs as a frivolous and even mocking act of irreverence towards the sacrament — but such has always been the perception of art that effectively performs its task.

Translated by Elena Sorokina and Emily Speers Mears