contemporary monkey

Attention all aliens from extragalactic nebula outside Earth’s Solar System (third planet from our sun, in the Galaxy called the Milky Way). Consider this a human plea for what was at one time, righteously ours, and to many people, fondly remembered.  We would like to have our Russians back please.  The ones that were on Earth before the black hole of what was known as the Soviet Union, where those of us on the outside were completely blinded by a lack of hard data, while those on the inside were vacuumed up by your molecular-level, cell-parsing tractor beams.  There are 180 million of them - you can’t miss ‘em.

Before the Frost of Irrelevancy: Kandinsky

For those of us Earthlings devoted to the subject of art, and who were forced observers from beyond the Iron Curtain (look it up, it’s too depressing to describe here), there are more than 70 years which cannot be accounted for.  It’s during this massive time void that we suspect you’ve taken our most significant Russians and hoarded them for yourselves.  For this self-serving act, we can’t blame you, but we’d like them back now.

Prior to our Western Earth Year of 1917, our collection of gifted Russian artists included Kandinsky, Chagall, Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, and more.  Now we’re left with the heap that’s thrashing about the walls inside the London art gallery, Calvert22.  Gutov, Khanyutin, Zakharov, are all speaking visual gibberish to us with no claim on story-telling.  These androids seem to be using your indecipherable language on us, and have yet to master the ability to communicate with what we call “Homo Sapiens” or “man”.  Maybe you can make sense of this twisted jabbering, but they might as well be speaking Martian to us (ref: Mars, the fourth planet in our solar system, with no life form…the reference to Martian language is a obviously a glib remark, because, oh forget it).  Let’s make it a straight swap: you give us our soulful, complex, but engaging Russian artists back, and in return you can have what ever’s inside Calvert22.

Video seems to be their choice of parlay with us, possibly because of your presumption that all human beings drink a form of electricity through reflected-light screens and energy-emitting monitors.  Only some of us, e.g. Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson and Peaches Geldof, are able to accomplish such a feat, but assume that most of us cannot.  What’s more, your Russian replicants seem to enjoy duplicating each other’s work by using our black and white video format to shed light on their bleak, cheerless, barren land, with a life short on human emotion.  If that is indeed the point of their art, they had me at ten seconds of the first video.  The rest of the works were simply superfluous.  Next time, have your automatons draw straws and send down a single humanoid, armed with just one of his human videos, limited to 15 seconds in length (preferably shorter).  Oh, and can you beam down the latest human that resembles Kandinsky, or Malevich so we can remember what Russian artistic talent was like, before your photon-separating magneto-pulse device chemically reduced our Russians to their component parts.  You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you can’t put them back together.