Ars: časopis Ústavu Dejín Umenia Slovenskej Akadémie Vied (45.2012)

4. Viktor Koretsky: Twins in Spirit andßlood, 1960s, original maquette.
Photo: Ne boitai. A Collection of 20"’ Century Propaganda.

something, and as such, if they are about anything,
they are usually about themselves. Yet at the same time,
ťhis is not l’art pour l’art, if anything, iťs hard to say
that iťs l’art at all. Such Soviet productions keep the
spectator’s mind vibrating around their own proce-
dures, embodying one of the most sustained efforts
in the twentieth Century to escape the Sex/Death
matrix: to leap beyond représentation into the space
of being as such.11 *

With these observations in mind, one could say
that the graphie designs and photoposters (fotoplakaty)
of the state-sponsored Soviet artist Viktor Koretsky
attempted to propel vision and Communism beyond
modern arťs self-reflexivity and Socialist Realist
rectitude [Figs. 2-5]. In his art, Koretsky argues that
a truly Communist and modern vision must ignore
représentation of the Known to enact évocations of
the Unknown, while also trading materializations of
prosperity for visualizations of pain.
Unlike Koretsky’s adventurous designs, most
Soviet propaganda awkwardly revolved around the
banalities of everyday life, and the viewer living in the
U.S.S.R. would compare the imagery to her Uved real-
ity and she would immediately detect a yawning gap
between her day-to-day existence and the depicüons
of happy workers and wise leaders placed before
her. Such earnest, yet crude images would obviously
never be able to compete with Western advertising’s
alluring fables of acquisition. As Koretsky writes:
“We often encounter posters today that should be vital, but
that serve as illustrations. For example, a lot of posters corne
out in which you see tractor drivers harvesting grain, and so
on. These subjects long ago lost their impact. In posters with
thèmes such as Farmers! More Grain for the Motherland!’,
we often run into an image of a collective farm workerinfront
of a grain elevât or or harvesting machines. Such a stratégy
— head-on and déclarative — results in the spectator glancing
at theposter while casually passing byfn
In the last thirty years of the Soviet Communist
project, Victor Koretsky’s art struggled to solve an
enduring “vision riddle”: how to ensure — or restore
— Communism’s moral health through the produc-
tion of a distinctively Communist vision. The politi-
cal poster artist, he writes, succeeds when “the challenge
tofulfill an important state task is organically combined with
an upsurge of émotion in the spectator’s individualfeelingF’.13
Which pictures, Koretsky asked, would not only sur-
vive, but thrive, in a domestic environment irradiated
by the bland bombast of state-sponsored lies — or
even more problematically, within a global arena al-

11 Jacques Rancière discusses “the project for an art released from
image” and its enaetment through an “art which abolishes the
distance of the image so as to identify its procedures with the forms of
a whole life in action, no longer separating artfrom work orpolitics” in
RANCIÈRE, J.: The Future of the Image. London — New York
2007, p. 19.

12 KORETSKY, V: Tovarishchplakat: opyt, raymyshleniia [Comrade
Poster: Expérience, Thoughts]. Moscow 1981, p. 64.
13 Ibidem.

22