The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, artistic and literary movement began with the Sots art of Komar and Melamid in the early 1970s Soviet Union, and continued as a trend in Soviet nonconformist art into the 1980s. It attempted to subvert socialist ideology using the strategies of western conceptual art and appropriation art.[1] It was an artistic counterpoint to Socialist Realism,[2] and the artists experimented aesthetically in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, performance, and literature.[1] As Joseph Bakshtein explained, "The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him. To preserve one's identity in this situation, one had to create a separate value system, including a system of aesthetic values."[3]
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