Alexey Bobrikov

Was born in 1959. Ph.D. in History of Arts, Associate Professor of St. Petersburg State University, senior researcher of the Russian Institute of Art History. The author of the book Another History of Russian Art (2012) and articles published in The Art Magazine, The Inviolable Stock, the exhibition catalog Berlin-Moscow/Moscow-Berlin. Lives and works in St. Petersburg.

«The Russian Idea on the Souvenir Counter» and Other Essays on (Post)Soviet Art
Manuscript. SPb.: 2017

The collection is devoted to the problems of anthropology of the Soviet, mainly socially and politically meaningful corporeality, considered on the examples from the history of Russian art of the last century in the range from early Vladimir Lebedev to the New Stupid and Nikola-Lenivets trades.
Soviet art is viewed here as an instrument for constructing political and ideological («social» and «national»), creating normative images of «the future» and «the past», representing ideal models of «male» and «female» — with totalitarian ambitions. On the other hand, it is understood as part of the «normal» art history (for example, art of the XIX century), which has a completely understandable logic of iconographic and stylistic evolution, historical memory, professional quality standards. Finally, it is described in the categories of mass culture, advertising, souvenir industry.
One of the important topics that runs through all the texts of the collection is the connection between the Soviet and the Post-Soviet, socialist realism and postmodernism, which is most often a reflection of Soviet artistic, cultural and social experience; explanation and demonstration (often parodic) of the methods of making the Soviet — using modern art.