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

5. Viktor Koretsky: Africa Fights, Africa Will Win!, 1968, original maquette. Photo: Ne boitai. A Collection of 20"' Century Propaganda.

ready swimming in Sex/Death? To invoke both Lenin
and Chernyshevsky: “Whatis to be done?”
Koretsky’s Communist art did not wish to con-
centrate attention on what the viewer had already
seen. Rather, he expected the display and viewing
of photoposters to be transformed in the future.
Regarding the technological enhancements to the
post-viewing process, he writes that poster art "will
turn to such means to intensify its artistic impact’ ,14 Aban-
doning “head-on and déclarative” visual strategies in
favor of the hallucinatory and the horrifie, this art
demonstrates what an “avant-garde late Communist
art” would have looked like if we had ever seen it
mature. Manifesting the pain and suffering of others
in visually captivating forms, in forms that sought to
establish extreme modes of personal identification

— or "medium intima^’ as Robert Bird puts it — be-
came Koretsky’s self-imposed task. His art aimed
to construct an Empathy Machine that would have
ceaselessly pulled viewers out of their accustomed
image-worlds toward the expériences of another
- ideally, a person far away, someone they would
never meet - a person suffering in ways that they
could hardly imagine. To achieve this exceptional lev-
el of emotivily (emotsional’nost’), Koretsky pursued
tragic and jarring thèmes from exotic places, while
also working with a team of actors (who would be
photographed in various poses), so that he became
"like a directorwho employs the actors’ expressive mastery’/"
In Koretsky’s hands, vision and Communism would
not have supplied viewers with uplifting slogans, or
titillating configurations of familiar pleasures, but
with exquisite orchestrations of vicarious pain.

14 Ibidem, p. 66.

15 Ibidem.

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