Remembrance: Russian Post-modern Nostalgia - Alexandre Gertsman

The book explores the function of cultural memory in contemporary Russian art. A nostalgia mentality is peculiar to artists. It is especially characteristic of contemporary artists born in the ex-Soviet Union - such as Komar & Melamid, Ilya Kabakov, Grisha Bruskin, Natalya Nesterova, Osar Rabin, Eric Bulatov, Svetlana Kopystiansky, among other artists - and now living in the United States, France, Germany, and Russia in a kind of "Diaspora" in the beginning of a new millennium. Post-Modernism of these artists is unique for, under the fierce denial of the past culture, denial of the so called "democratic" but actually suppressive regime, they carry the secret respect for the strong state, the habit of handling a lack of freedom of selection of themes and images and using allegorical language of expression. They use aesthetic sources of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s and the unique Russian metaphysical gnosis based on a Dostoevsky-like "love for a victim", a victim that is being "killed with love". Russian artists actively use the traditions of early modernism and create a "Nostalgic Conceptualization", which combines deconstructive tendencies with a yearning for order and "lost truth".