Materials on Display

A philosophical consideration of Soviet Socialism that reveals the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporary anticapitalist discourse and theory  This book, a philosophical consideration of Soviet socialism, is not meant simply to revisit the communist past; its aim, rather, is to witness certain zones where capitalism's domination is resisted--the zones of countercapitalist critique, civil society agencies, and theoretical provisions of emancipation or progress--and to inquire to what extent those zones are in fact permeated by unconscious capitalism and thus unwittingly affirm the capitalist condition.  By means of the philosophical and politico-economical consideration of Soviet socialism of the 1960 and 1970s, this book manages to reveal the hidden desire for capitalism in contemporaneous anticapitalist discourse and theory. The research is marked by a broad cross-disciplinary approach based on political economy, philosophy, art theory, and cultural theory that redefines old Cold War and Slavic studies' views of the post-Stalinist years, as well as challenges the interpretations of this period of historical socialism in Western Marxist thought.

Russian poet, author, artist and art theorist Andrei Monastyrski (born 1949) is, along with Ilya Kabakov, one of the founders of conceptualism in Russia, and a protagonist of Collective Actions, a group of artists who have organized participatory actions on the outskirts of Moscow since 1976. Though his poetry is less well known, poetry is where he began. After writing in the manner of the Russian modernists (who were newly available to Soviet readers during Khrushchev's thaw), Monastyrski's interest in John Cage and ideas about consciousness from Western and Eastern philosophical traditions led him to conduct experiments with sound, form and the creation of artistic situations involving constructed objects that required viewer engagement to complete. Elementary Poetry collects poems, books and action objects from the '70s and '80s, tracing a genealogy of the art action in poetry.

The artistic tradition that emerged as a form of cultural resistance in the 1970s changed during the transition from socialism to capitalism. This volume presents the evolution of the Moscow-based conceptual artist group called Collective Actions, proposing it as a case-study for understanding the transformations that took place in Eastern European art after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Esanu introduces Moscow Conceptualism by performing a close examination of the Collective Actions group's ten-volume publication Journeys Outside the City and of the Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism. He analyzes above all the evolution of Collective Actions through ten consecutive phases, discussing changes that occur in each new volume of the Journeys. Compares the part of the Journeys produced in the Soviet period with those volumes assembled after the dissolution of the USSR. The concept of "transition" and the activities of Soros Centers for Contemporary Art are also analyzed.

Collective Actions is one of the most significant artistic practices to emerge from Moscow Conceptualism. The group's enigmatic idea of 'Empty action' is the focal point for Marina Gerber's exploration of this practice in relation to labour in the late Soviet Union. Based on interviews with members of the group (Monastyrski, Panitkov, Alexeev, Makarevich, Elagina, Romashko, Hänsgen and Kiesewalter) she exposes the relation between their jobs, their individual art practices and their contribution to the collective in the context of post-Stalinist debates on labour and free time. Departing from the mundane fact that Collective Actions' practice took place in free time from work for the Soviet State, Gerber identifies Empty action as a form of 'art after work'.

An insider's account of the art and artists of the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of "unofficial" artists in Moscow--artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences--created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian avant-garde. The book collects Groys's essays on Moscow conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group--including Ilya Kabakov, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov--became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow Conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the cold war.

Beyond the view that multiple, globally dispersed conceptual art practices provide a heterogeneity of cultural references, Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions propose much more: other dimensions altogether, other spatiotemporal politics, other timescales, other understandings of matter, other forms of life--not only as works, but as a basic condition for being able to perceive artworks in the first place. Could it be that the Moscow Conceptualists were so elusive or saturated with the particularities of life in a specific economic and intellectual culture that they precluded integration into a broader art historical narrative? If so, then their simultaneously modest and radical approach to form may present a key to understanding the resilience and flexibility of a more general sphere of global conceptualisms that anticipate, surpass, or even bend around their purported origins in canonical European and American regimes of representation, as well as what we currently understand to be the horizon of artistic practice. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Contributors Claire Bishop, Keti Chukhrov, Ekaterina Degot, J rg Heiser, Terry Smith, Anton Vidokle, and Sarah Wilson

A compelling study of unofficial postwar Soviet art, The Experimental Group takes as its point of departure a subject of strange fascination: the life and work of renowned professional illustrator and conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov. Kabakov's art--iconoclastic installations, paintings, illustrations, and texts--delicately experiments with such issues as history, mortality, and disappearance, and here exemplifies a much larger narrative about the work of the artists who rose to prominence just as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. By placing Kabakov and his conceptualist peers in line with our own contemporary perspective, Matthew Jesse Jackson suggests that the art that emerged in the wake of Stalin belongs neither entirely to its lost communist past nor to a future free from socialist nostalgia. Instead, these artists and their work produced a critical and controversial chapter in the as yet unwritten history of global contemporary art.

  Innovative poets such as Vsevolod Nekrasov, Lev Rubinstein, and Dmitry Prigov are among the most prominent literary figures of Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, yet they are virtually unknown outside Russia. The same is true of the numerous active Russian performance art groups, especially the pioneering Collective Actions group led by the brilliantly inventive Andrei Monastyrsky. Everything Has Already Been Written strives to make Moscow Conceptualism more accessible, to break the language barrier and to foster understanding among an international readership by thoroughly discussing a broad range of specific works and theories. Janecek's study is the first comprehensive analysis of Moscow Conceptualist poetry and theory, vital for an understanding of Russian culture in the post‑Conceptualist era.  

Literary Nonfiction. Art. Performance. Translated from the Russian by Yelena Kalinsky. Active in Moscow since 1976, the Collective Actions group played a key role in the development of performance art in the Soviet Union. Inspired by the work of John Cage, the organizers invited audiences to take part in minimal, outdoor actions in fields and forests on the edges of the city. These spatio-temporal events directed viewers' attention to the pure contemplation of their own perceptions, and over time, the actions produced a great variety of documentary material. COLLECTIVE ACTIONS: AUDIENCE RECOLLECTIONS FROM THE FIRST FIVE YEARS, 1976-1981 concentrates on the early period of field actions when the problems of documentation--how to capture and convey ephemeral action to non-participants--were just beginning to be considered. Appearing for the first time in English, the subjective recollections presented here provide a counterpoint to the group's better-known descriptive texts and theoretical writings, a selection of which are also included. Composed by several of Collective Actions' regular audience members, the generously illustrated recollections share the author-participants' idiosyncratic attempts to remember and give narrative to their own experiences of actions, and they illustrate the group's ongoing investigation into the status of documentation in participatory art.

Throughout its modern history, Russia has seen a succession of highly performative social acts that play out prominently in the public sphere. This innovative volume brings the fields of performance studies and Russian studies into dialog for the first time and shows that performance is a vital means for understanding Russia's culture from the reign of Peter the Great to the era of Putin. These twenty-seven essays encompass a diverse range of topics, from dance and classical music to live poetry and from viral video to public jubilees and political protest. As a whole they comprise an integrated, compelling intervention in Russian studies. Challenging the primacy of the written word in this field, the volume fosters a larger intellectual community informed by theories and practices of performance from anthropology, art history, dance studies, film studies, cultural and social history, literary studies, musicology, political science, theater studies, and sociology.

Andrei Monstyrski's semi-autobiographical novel Kashira Highway is set in the early 1980s and tells the story of an artist's nervous breakdown.
Juxtaposing the gray world of Brezhnev-era Moscow and the lurid landscape of the protaginist's imagination.

Artists in the Soviet Union faced a difficult choice: either join the official academies and make art that conformed to the state's aesthetic and ideological dictates, or attempt to develop alternative artistic practices and spheres for exhibiting their work. In the early 1970s, conceptual artists Ilya Kabakov and Viktor Pivovarov chose the latter option, turning their limited resources into an asset by pioneering an entirely new artistic genre: the album. Somewhere between drawings and novels, Kabakov and Pivovarov's albums were also the basis for unique performance pieces, as the artists invited select audiences to their Moscow apartments for private readings and viewings of the albums, helping to cultivate an alternative artistic community in the process. This exhibition catalog brings together Kabakov and Pivovarov's key works for the first time, putting the two artists in dialogue and recreating their artistic community. It not only includes nearly hundred pages of full-color illustrations, but also provides complete English translations of the Russian texts that appear in the volume, plus new interviews with each artist. Taken together, they give viewers a new appreciation of the different aesthetic strategies each artist used to depict the absurdities of everyday life in the Soviet era. Published in partnership with the Zimmerli Museum.

Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Tatiana Tulchinsky. Preface by Catherine Wagner. Almost ten years ago UDP published CATALOGUE OF COMEDIC NOVELTIES, a representative selection of Lev Rubinstein's "note-card poems," a seminal body of work from one of the major figures of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. These texts form what Rubinstein called a "hybrid genre": "at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them." As American scholar Gerald Janecek has noted, the texts are made up of "language ready-mades (commonplace expressions, overheard statements, sentence fragments)" and organized "in such a way that we seem to be observing the creation of a poem from raw material."

KEYNOTE: From Stalin's demise to Gorbachev's glasnost, this is the definitive survey of underground Soviet art in the post-war era. The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection at Rutgers University's Zimmerli Art Museum is the largest collection of Soviet nonconformist art in existence. Comprising more than 25,000 works by over 900 artists, it documents the activities of underground artists from Moscow and Leningrad, as well as from the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan between the years 1956-1987. This volume features the most outstanding of these works in stunning color and black-and-white reproductions. Essays by leading scholars and statements and interviews with artists such as Ilya Kabakov, the Gerlovins, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who played a major role in this important movement, offer a general critical appraisal and history of the movement and highlight certain distinctive aspects such as performance and experimental art. The book also looks at this movement through a Western lens, comparing and contrasting the works with those of the Conceptualists in the US and the rest of the Free World. AUTHOR: Alla Rosenfeld is Vice President of the Russian Paintings Department at Sotheby's and Director of the Russian Art department at the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University (New Jersey), where she also teaches. ILLUSTRATIONS: 450 illustrations

The history of contemporary art in Russia, from socialist realism to the post-Soviet alternative art scene. In The Museological Unconscious, Victor Tupitsyn views the history of Russian contemporary art through a distinctly Russian lens, a "communal optic" that registers the influence of such characteristically Russian phenomena as communal living, communal perception, and communal speech practices. This way of looking at the subject allows him to gather together a range of artists and art movements--from socialist realism to its "dangerous supplement," sots art, and from alternative photography to feminism--as if they were tenants in a large Moscow apartment. Describing the notion of "communal optics," Tupitsyn argues that socialist realism does not work without communal perception--which, as he notes, does not easily fit into crates when paintings travel out of Russia for exhibition in Kassel or New York. Russian artists, critics, and art historians, having lived for decades in a society that ignored or suppressed avant-garde art, have compensated, Tupitsyn claims, by developing a "museological unconscious"--the "museification" of the inner world and the collective psyche.

"A collective of artists, a gallery and a movement, APTART was a series of self-organised 'anti-shows' that took place in a private apartment and outdoor spaces in Moscow between 1982 and 1984.These covert and anarchic actions, which soon came into conflict with the Soviet authorities, represent a collective attempt to rethink the politics of exhibition-making and the practice of making public in the absence of a public sphere.The first comprehensive publication on APTART, this book presents extensive photographic documentation of their activities alongside archival texts from contributing artists and documents from the time.Main essays by Margarita Tupitsyn and Victor Tupitsyn offer a detailed elucidation of the movement's history and guiding concepts; and further contexts and analysis are provided through contributions by Manuel Alcayde, Alexandra Danilova and Elena Kuprina-Lyakhovich, Richard Goldstein, Sven Gundlakh, Ilya Kabakov, David Morris and Valerie Smith.Including an introduction by David Morris and interviews with participating artists such as Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, Nikita Alekseev and Victor Skersis.Published with Afterall Books in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.Part of the Exhibition Histories series."

Among the most compelling artists in the history of conceptual art, the Russian-Americans Komar and Melamid used humor and irony to lambaste Soviet officialdom. With new scholarship and full-color illustrations, the book explores their journey from working under an oppressive regime to finding new subjects in the US for their provocative critique. From the invention of Sots Art, a conceptual movement that emerged in the early 1970s in the Soviet Union, to their sardonic Most Wanted Paintings project, based on market research, to the end of their joint career in the US, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid challenged viewers with provocative, witty and ironic art. Lavishly illustrated the book includes the latest scholarship on the duo and historically important texts, offering a renewed interpretation of the artists' social and political concerns.