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Art and Morality under Neoliberalism: Reflections on “Blasphemous” Art from the East—A Tale in Three Parts
[…] Part II: Russia and the Icon If the new Poland has since entered a period of relative normalcy, both culturally and economically, the same cannot be said of the new Russia. From the early 1990s to the 2000s, Russia has witnessed the aggressive deregulation of the private sector in tandem with Vladimir Putin’s re-nationalization […]
Censorship: What Is It?
[…] The Andrei Sakharov Museum in Moscow had a show titled Caution! Religion in 2003, which included This is my blood by Alexander Kosolapov. The artwork looked like a Coca Cola advertisement with Jesus Christ on it and the words “This is my blood” in English. Another piece related to it showed Jesus on a […]
Prophets and Profits through the Prism of Art
[…] Russian-born American artist Alexander Kosolapov defended his image of Christ on a Coca-Cola logo with the words “This is my blood” as a ‘protest against the commercialization of religion.’ It would be interesting to have Mr. Kosolapov’s analysis as to the exact point in history when religion began to become ‘commercialized.’ Kosolapov’s work was part […]
The artist in the age of commodity fetishism | Художник в эпоху товарного фетишизма
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 […]
Kosolapov Before and After | Косолапов до и после
Alexander Kosolapov has lived in America for two years longer than he has in Russia. His life is cleft in two by the dramatic episode that goes by the name of “emigration.” The first half of his life was spent in an environment formed by the Stalinist epoch. It was then that the avant-garde’s dream […]
Alexander Kosolapov and The Void | А. Косолапов и пустота
Time is working to Alexander Kosolapov’s advantage: we’ve barely had time to forget the scandal associated with his works at the Moscow exhibition Caution: Religion when now we find in the papers a new news-story with a typically Kosolapovian plot-line: Certain functionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church have demanded the removal of the names and […]
Alexander Kosolapov, catalog 1989–98 New York, Berman Gallery | Александр Косолапов, каталог 1989–98 Нью-Йорк, галерея Бермана
What Warhol was to the 1960s, Alexander Kosolapov, a leading Soviet emigre artist, gives every creative indication of becoming for the 1990s-the artist best at giving fresh and unforgettable expression to complex times and best at using art in suprimly revieling fashion as a peerless means of cultural commentary. Так же как Уорхол для шестидесятых, […]
Sots Art, catalog The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. 1986 | Sots Art, каталог Новейшего Музея современного искусства, Нью-Йорк, 1986
For Kosolapov the role of the superimposed element (of Socialist origin) is to disrupt the context in which it is inserted (a context made up of borrowed cultural stereotypes). This is an example of the Brechtian paradigm of montage, one which is designed reveal “a knowable, but shifting, multifaceted and contradictory outer reality, estranging his […]