1972

K&M found a movement they name Sots Art—Soviet Pop and Conceptual Art based on Socialist propaganda and mass culture. Sots Art combined the principals of Dadaism and Socialist Realism. Works include portraits of family members and self-portraits in the style of representations of official heroes, and works bearing popular slogans—"Glory to Labor!" or “Onward to the Victory of Communism!” for example—signed by K&M. Later, after the end of the USSR, they will create a very long scroll, History of the USSR in Slogans, 1917-1991, [now in the collection of the Ludwig Museum of Modern Art, Cologne, as a part of the Lenin Mausoleum Installation]. Ironically, all originals of official slogans, which served as an ephemeral conceptual part of Socialist Realism, vanished because no one collected them, and only the slogans painted by K&M survived.

A list of the many Russian journalists, critics, philosophers, poets and academics who have written about Sots Art includes:

Ekaterina Andreeva, Konstantin Akinsha, Joseph Bakstein, Evgeniy Barabanov, Alex Batchan, Leonid Bazanov, Ekaterina Bobrinskaya, Alexander Borovsky, Svetlana Boym, Igor Golomstok, Katerina Dyogot, Andrey Erofeev, Alexander Genis, Alexander Glezer, Sergei Gollerbach, Boris Grois, Olga Holmogorova, Aleksander Iakimovich, Mikhael Iampolski, Victor Mesiano, Victor Nekrasov, Vadim Paperny, Vitaly Patsukov, Mikhael Riklin, Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, Peter Wail, Viacheslav Zavalishin, Zinoviy Zinick, and others.

For information about the Sots Art movement refer to:

Robert Atkins, Art Speak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1990) A Dictionary of 20th Century Art, edited by Ian Chilvers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), also see the entry, “Nonconformist Art.”