Maslov and Kuznetsov: Camping and Revamping Classical Scenarios

Among the Neoacademists’ programmatic revival of earlier art forms, none–with the possible exception of Ol’ga Tobreluts–as regularly reached so far back to bygone eras as Oleg Maslov and Viktor Kuznetsov once they launched their artistic collaboration in 1993. Finding inspiration in Greco‐Roman anti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Russian review (Stanford) 2019-04, Vol.78 (2), p.245-271
Main Author: GOSCILO, HELENA
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antiquity
Articulation
Artists
Audiences
Camping
Complicity
Humor
Philosophy
Victorian period
Work
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Summary:Among the Neoacademists’ programmatic revival of earlier art forms, none–with the possible exception of Ol’ga Tobreluts–as regularly reached so far back to bygone eras as Oleg Maslov and Viktor Kuznetsov once they launched their artistic collaboration in 1993. Finding inspiration in Greco‐Roman antiquity and its evocation in seventeenth‐ccentury French classicism and the Victorian era in England, their art chiefly comprised large paintings or photographed tableaux vivants derived from literary or visual works that intimated or described sexual play, which they revised most frequently in an irreverent tongue‐in‐cheek vein. Like most of the Neoacademists’ work, theirs depended on the body (normally their own) and adopted a gay aesthetic of campy excess that implied an erotic bond between the two artists or, in the case of group constellations, among all participants. Self‐consciously performative, the two artists solicited their audiences’ complicity, relying on humor to establish the shared recognition of “quotation marks” that served as a knowing wink–a wink that registered the temporary assumption of roles instead of the articulation of a sustained and heartfelt “philosophy of life.”
ISSN:0036-0341
1467-9434
DOI:10.1111/russ.12222