A Catalogue of Superobjects - Supercomfort for Superpeople.

New York.: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts., 1977. Loose as issued in original grey cloth paper-lined box.. (27 x 22 cm).. Leaf with title, leaf with introductory text, 10 leaves with section titles and 36 original colour photographs, each with leaf of descriptive text. From the edition limited to 100 copies, with each photograph stamped verso by the artists and numbered and signed by the publisher. The Russian conceptual art dissidents and collaborators Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid were trained originally - as were all of their peers - as painters in the Socialist Realist tradition. Increasingly disenchanted with a regime and society that they felt oppressive, the two were expelled from the Artists’ Union for the crime of ‘distortion of Soviet reality’ in 1973. In 1974 the pair were arrested and had work, together with other nonconformist artists, destroyed by the government in what became known as the ‘Bulldozer Exhibition’. The pair began to receive international recognition and were invited in 1977 to hold an exhibition in New York at the Ronald Feldman Gallery. ‘Superobjects - Supercomfort for Superpeople’, presented here, was the subversive and satirical photographic portfolio that resulted, produced in Komar and Melamid’s absence from smuggled negatives printed in the US as the artists were refused permission to attend by the Soviet regime. The portfolio, a twisted re-imagining of an American sales catalogue, describes fantastical Soviet consumer articles, devices and products. The ‘Olo’, for example, a tongue-ring with pearl, helps ensure that only positive words are spoken, while the ‘Alton’, a beribboned block of wood in the shape of a brick, provides those who use it with an enhanced sense of self-importance and is designed to free one from ‘the foolish scramble up the ladder of social success’. All of the depicted objects highlight and satirise both untrammelled consumerism and repressive social hegemony. [Ref. Ksenya Gurshtein's 'Utopia by Mail: Komar and Melamid's A Catalogue of Superobjects: Supercomfort for Superpeople', 2014].