Gigi’s Reviews > Art and Revolution: Ernst Neizvestny and the Role of the Artist > Status Update

“Until comparatively recently the condition of the world was not intolerable…The degree of exploitation and enslavement was as great. The suffering involved was as intense and as widespread…But it was not globally intolerable because the full measure of the truth about the condition was unknown.”

“It is those who accept the world as it is who are becoming the disinherited at the same time as the dispossessed are rediscovering their inheritance.”

“The people of the three continents are involved in a struggle which they will never abandon until they have achieved their freedom: not the nominal freedom of independent states, but the freedom for which all others so far imagined have been a preparation: the freedom from exploitation. When they have achieved this freedom…they will produce art unimaginable by us today.”

“It is impossible because the positive role of endurance cannot be demonstrated by any single act, event or outcome. The role is essentially a dialectical one of process and growth transcending the individual case.”

“By comparing this figure with the Dead Soldier one can see all that Neizvestny means to imply: this mutilated man is a Prometheus because he is alive; his mutilation adds to his Promethean character by allowing him to show the extent of human adaptability, and the strength of the will to survive.”

“The poles of Neizvestny’s imagination are life and death: a polarity so fundamental and general that it can seem banal…Death for him is a starting point rather than an end. It is FROM death that he measures, instead of towards it.”

“A State can be judged by the future its sculpture sets out to promise it.”

“It is their tragedy that under the autocracy of Stalin, the belief in the prophetic quality of art was subtly but disastrously transformed into the belief that art was a means of definitively deciding the future now.”

“It is true that all works of art exercise an ideological influence — even works by artists who profess to have no interest outside art.”