Yesterday I went to Leonid Sokov’s’s studio along with Brian Droitcour. Sokov talked about Daniil Kharms, the utopian ideas of communism, Letatlin, art market, language, animals, how to work with gold as material for sculpture and Kandinsky prize.
In the video below Sokov describes (in Russian) one of his pieces – 4 portraits of prominent Russian figures: Khlebnikov from bread (khleb), Solzhenitsyn from salt (sol’), Gorky from mustard (gorchiza) and Stalin from steel (stal’).
Leonid informed us that it was the bithday of early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet Daniil Kharms’ and recited a Khams poem (in Russian):
Sokov cloud:
He said that Sothebys would never sell his paintings with Russian texts all over them. Things that sell are “objects one can put on the table”:
