The Agitprop porcelain ware of the Soviet era is a hilarious attempt to have one’s cake and eat it: to maintain the bolshevist fury and to gain the philistine niceness; to make the offensive momentum of the authorities at all “edible” for the citizens. Niceness won. The momentum of a great epoch, served on a silver plate, became the delight of a prosperous bourgeois. Hence, the conclusion: applied art is the best remedy for pathos.
My Agitprop Porcelain is a remedy for each and every kind of pathos. The ideological debris that we inherited, flotsam and jetsam of cultural, religious and political doctrines are worth no more today than the junk left in a sandbox after children’s games. Yin-and-yang, star-and-swastika, cross-and-sickle, Lenin-and-Mickey-Mouse, Che-Guevara-and-Marilyn-Monroe – this is no longer an ideological dispute. These are elements of the new ornament; mementoes of a different era that lost their significance, but not yet their allure.