| This dissertation centers on Soviet nonconformist artists Erik Bulatov and Boris Mikhailov, who in defiance of Socialist Realism, the only sanctioned creative method for the arts in the USSR, engaged simultaneously painterly and photographic means to critique communist ideology and its systems of representation. This study analyzes how through their common strategy of appropriating, manipulating, and hybridizing painting and photography, both dominant propaganda tools from the 1920s through the mid-1980s, the two artists exposed and subverted views of social and political reality imposed by the official discourse, as well as elucidated the Soviet individual's implied and actual role within this reality.;Bulatov and Mikhailov offer disparate, but complementary, depictions of Soviet existence throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, a time of renewed political propaganda, severe state censorship, a new personality cult, and expanded Soviet imperial ambitions. A documentary impulse underlies their artistic endeavors, which together paint a most telling portrait of Soviet society. Bulatov's large-scale photorealistic paintings examine the Soviet person's inner conditions resulting from ideology's psychological impact on the human consciousness. Mikhailov's hand-painted photographs focus, however, comment on the physical deformations of the Soviet collective body, thereby endorsing---in direct opposition to the official iconography of the positive image---the unbeautiful as the sign of the Soviet. Bulatov's and Mikhailov's oeuvres from this period sought to open alternative, if metaphorical, spaces of existence, and endeavored to foment a democratic ideal that valued individual thought, action, and creative expression. Ultimately, their works functioned within a larger network of resistance, parallel practices, and exchange of officially unavailable information, which had emerged in response to the Soviet attempt at engineering a uniform society. |
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