Scenes from the Future: Komar and Melamid

Western Modernism and Russian Stalinism were projects that demanded a denial of the past, a constant movement towards an ideal future. But the past cannot be denied. Like the repressed it always returns…


It is against this somber background Komar and Melamid’s penchant for parody and irony should be seen. It is a device, a way of combating the sense of tragedy. They quote Kierkegaard: “In irony, the subject is negatively free, free from the shackles which in reality restrain him so firmly.” Irony provides a provisional release from tragedy. At the same time it eats away at rhetoric, hypocrisy, and idealization. It corrodes myths, old and new. In his brilliant and path-breaking essay from the late fifties, “On Socialist Realism,” Sinyavsky wrote that “irony is the laughter of the superfluous man who derides himself and everything sacred in the world. Irony is the faithful companion of unbelief and doubt: it vanishes as soon as there appears a faith that does not tolerate sacrilege”—whether, it might be added, that faith is in Stalinism, Old Russia, or free market Westernization. Irony may provide only a “negative freedom,” yet this peculiarly “accursed” Russian irony, this “disorder of the soul,”…is still the only passage out from an epoch of half-measures and half-truths, from a present mortgage to an imaginary future and a future dragged back by the weight of the past. There are no new miracles or new truths to be spun out of new dreams and new delusions. It is better to start the future over with the wormwood and the rust.

by Peter Wollen
 



Isn't it nice that irony finally gets the respect it deserves?  Am I being ironic?  What's cool is that even though this essay is talking about some Russian artists who came to America and how they functioned here, and it specifically mentions how they are dealing with Russia's past, it really works the same way with us here...I'll repeat what I already quoted to make the point:

Irony may provide only a “negative freedom,” yet this peculiarly “accursed” Russian irony, this “disorder of the soul,”…is still the only passage out from an epoch of half-measures and half-truths, from a present mortgage to an imaginary future and a future dragged back by the weight of the past. There are no new miracles or new truths to be spun out of new dreams and new delusions. It is better to start the future over with the wormwood and the rust.

What better description of our present could there be?  Seems particularly timely.