Ham, photo
	Monuments to the Unknown Prisoner, 1996, oil/canvas, 105 x 100 cm

Comments:

The central variant is  the most modest, it is made on a photo of a stub. It suits in a sence - the person was extinguished as a cigarette and that is that. The variant  left side of pictures is a mixture, eclecticism if you want, or a reminiscence of works of two authors. The two-faced skull reminds a monument to victims of communism of Michael Shemjakin, installed in St.-Petersburg on beach of  Neva opposite to prison Crosses, and the bones laid  in a hill Vadim Sidura's work "Treblinka". The variant on the right side of picture is greater. I never saw a monument to victims of communism which was made for Magadan by Ernest Neizvestnyj, but knowing predilection of the author for grandiose constructions, have composed something big. It can be construction behind a barbed wire (for example, the Moscow State University - not a small construction – was built by convicts), either island (Solovki), or city (for example, Dudinka), or a symbol of the country as a whole - expression of "Russian idea" - construction of communism behind a barbed wire.

Now communism do not build, methods of management too were softened, but it is not necessary to forget, that such idea about Russia is widely widespread abroad, and in many countries even is actively propagandized. Especially it is true for some countries of the former Warsaw contract or in former republics of USSR.

Times, certainly, vary. The variant mentioned above suits for internal using a little, it is insufficiently attractive, and numerous attempts are made to formulate somehow differently "Russian idea". Let to themselves theorists to look for suitable formulations. More often as others I had to meet idea, and with obviously positive intonation, described as virtue, sometimes as it is unique essential virtue, is a skill to be arranged in a life.

I am somehow not so inspired. Well, what you will await from the artist? Probably, I am a fool, who had read too much foreign books.