Frontal Nudity

poster,  2010

The image which you are looking at is the result of progressive valuable system,

 and the obvious nakedness- the result of irreproachable full value.

Karen Alekyan’s conceptual work likewise relates to memory: it comprises text that doubles as its title, and an old photograph kept in the archives of Mosfilm studios. This photograph by an anonymous artist of the 1920s represents a forlorn memory of building a happy society. Karen Alekyan’s work is called The image you are seeing is the result of a progressive system of values, whereas blatant nudity – of immaculate adequacy.

By putting Socialism on the same footing as Stalinism, we are guilty of unwarranted encroachment on our memory, whereas the author brings us back to the pre-Stalinist Soviet Union, where private property still existed alongside personal chattel and collective assets.

The physical extermination of private owners by the military-bureaucratic system had not yet been declared to constitute the triumph of socialism, compromising socialism and communism and departing irreversibly from Marxism. The country in the photograph is the one implementing the New Economic Policy (NEP), where collective enterprises engaged in free competition with individual entrepreneurs, demonstrating their advantages – the joy of collective labor and freedom.

       

Arman Grigoryan