Moscow Conceptualism through Collective and Private Memory. The Archive as an Artistic Self-historicising Practice in Vadim Zakharov

"In an era characterised by the growing tension between local and global, the multiple activities acted by the artist Vadim Zakharov offer an important case study to investigate critically the relationship between artists and the art institutions at the time of the Global Art History. Artist, archivist, collector and editor in the frame of Moscow Conceptualism, since the end of the 1970s up to today, Zakharov embodies the figure of the “artist as institution” in the attempt to reach his artistic autonomy. This text introduces to his expansion of the archival attitude typical of Moscow conceptualism, a Soviet unofficial art movement developed in the marginal, underground, and self-referential context in the capital of USSR since the 1970s. Due to its transnationality, Zakharov’s story gives the opportunity to trace parallels, comparisons and differences to what happened next, when he moved in Germany in 1989, after the fall of USSR, and with the appearance of the new labels of “post-Soviet” and “Russian contemporary art”. Within this socio-historical framework, he joined a more cosmopolitan artistic scene, enlarging his archival practices with the aim to self-institutionalize and self-historicize his own artistic practices and the circle of Moscow Conceptualism in an international scene. Keywords: Vadim Zakharov, Moscow Conceptualism, Russian Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art, Global Art History, Archival fever. "

The Evolution of Moscow Conceptualism: From Early Kabakov to Later Pepperstein

This article considers the most important strategies, techniques, and concepts that formed in the Moscow artistic environment from the late 1970s until the present day. The author of the article focuses on the creative work of Pavel Pepperstein, an artist and writer who belonged to the group of young conceptualists. The artist adopts some of the conceptual strategies he inherited from his father V. Pivovarov, I. Kabakov, and A. Monastyrsky and develops them in his own manner, thus giving them special characteristics and his own features. The aim of the article is to show and enlarge the context of the artist’s oeuvre by analysing his collaborations with other Moscow conceptualists and social artists, paying special attention to the Medical Hermeneutics Inspection group founded by Pepperstein in 1987 with S. Anufriev and Yu. Leiderman. Apart from visual artistic forms, mainly graphics, installations, and performances, one of the main activities of the group were numerous theoretical treatises that addressed issues of aesthetical, philosophical, and linguistic discourse in conceptual and contemporary art, as well as the relationship between art and its interpretation.

Transformation of the idea of power totality in poststructuralism discourse (based on the cycle “Apotheosis of Policeman” by D.A. Prigov)

Statement of the problem. The paper analyzes transformation of an image of power totality in the conditions of the openness of the information society system, according to the Moscow conceptualism of D. Prigov. The purpose of the article is to provide an assessment of the representation of a positive image of power in the Soviet mass media, through legislative acts (the law on the Soviet police) and its further deconstruction in the works of Moscow conceptualists. Research results. The article demonstrates the importance of a policeman as a power representative within paradigm of social semiosis of J. Baudrillard’s simulacra – through the formation of a simulacrum in its stages; of J. Deleuze’s simulacrum – as an image devoid of similarity, considering the simulacrum through the paradigm of Plato’s vision of being; of J. Bataille’s simulacrum – as a meaning that deforms being itself – in the original ontological sense of the concept of simulacrum; and of S. Zizek’s social theory of post-Marxism – as an illusory “objective necessity”, continuing the Marxist concept of alienation in the broadest sense. The author considers the representation of power in the image of a policeman from the third order of simulacra: in the need to conceal the absence of the original actual meaning, to the fourth order – in the totality of simulation. Conclusion. The problem of the totality of power and its representation in the literature is raised symbolizing the crisis of the existing ontology of identity and the transition to the ontology of differences where the signified is no longer identical to the signifier, where the policeman stands and “does not hide”.

A New Type of Subjectivity in the Works of Dmitry Prigov

The article dwells upon the issue of a subject intrinsic to the art of the 70s and 80s of the 20th century, it elicits the reasons determining the problematization of “the Self” category inherent in the aesthetic program of the Moscow Conceptualism, preeminently with regards to the works of Dmitry Prigov. “The crisis of the language describing ‘the Self’” has been considered as discrediting the dominant discursive models, disabling the possibility of individual expressing. Within the first part of the article we problematize “the Self” category inherent in the aesthetic program of the Moscow Conceptualism, examine the dominant discursive models and denote the crisis of the language describing “the Self.” The second part is devoted to the issue of “the personal consciousness” coming into being within the aesthetic program of Moscow Conceptualism. The Self is considered as a “category of categories” in dichotomy between “the collective” and “individual” ones. Finally, the third part represents the analysis of a subject of the aesthetic activity. “An imaginary personality” intrinsic to the works of Dmitry Prigov is considered as a subject of “a gnoseological game.”

The Grand Narrative of the Mukhomor

This article addresses the complex role of mushrooms, particularly that of the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) [Russian: Mukhomor], in the art of Moscow conceptualism in a broad setting. This paper explores the mythopoetic theme of mushroom-induced beliefs, which influenced the Moscow conceptualists, and employs background historical scholarship by R.G. Wasson, V.N. Toporov, T.J. Elizarenkova, and others. Aside from the mushrooms per se that were particularly important for Moscow conceptualism, this article also mentions various ethno-botanical entheogens (i.e. biochemical substances such as plants or drugs ingested in order to undergo certain spiritual experience, or “generating the divine within”). Apart from analyzing the ethnobotanical historical background of manifesting hallucinogenic mushrooms on the Russian soil (including Siberia), this article focuses on Pavel Peppershtein’s novel Mifogennaia Liubov’ Kast (The Mythogenic Love of the Castes), which was co-authored with Sergey Anufriev. As the narrative of the novel unfolds, its main character, the Communist Partorg (Party Organizer) Dunaev, is wounded and shell-shocked at the very beginning of the Great Patriotic War (World War II). Partorg Dunaev finds himself deep in a mysterious forest, where he inadvertently snacks on unknown hallucinogenic mushrooms. He subsequently transforms into an exceptionally strong wizard who is capable of fighting spectral enemies both on earth and in heaven. The reader discovers the so-called “parallel war” sweeping over the Russian territory where legendary Russian/Soviet fairy heroes are locked in combat with their opponents, the characters of the Western children’s tales, and books. A heroic mushroom-eater, Partorg Dunaev joins one of the sides in this fight and gradually reaches the “utmost limits of sacrifice and self-rejection.” This article contextualizes the fungi-entheogenic episodes of Moscow conceptualism into a broader sphere of constructed visionary/ hallucinogenic reality by focusing on psilocybin fungi, particularly the fly agaric/Amanita muscaria/Mukhomor, and their cultural significance.

After Moscow Conceptualism: Reflections on the Center and Periphery and Cultural Belatedness

Conceptual art is not only subject to a striking unevenness and a range of diverse forms across national territories during its emergence, but each national-cultural context in which it emerges is also exposed to the general belatedness of conceptual art’s relationship to its own avant-garde past. Each national-cultural formation was working with, and through, very different cultural and historical materials on the basis of very different kinds of awareness of the avant-garde past and the recent conceptual present. This article addresses this unevenness and belatedness by looking at the case of Moscow conceptualism in the 1970s and 1980s. In a period of post-Thaw and late Soviet ‘stagnation’, conceptual art takes the form in Russia of a generalised apophatic withdrawal from the ‘public sphere’, in which the absences, phlegmatic silences, and textual ambiguities of (some) conceptual art, assume a kind of heightened moral and poetic antipode to the (failed) rhetoric of Stalinist productivism. Yet, despite, its modernist reverence for indeterminancy, this work, nevertheless, retains an active ‘working’ relationship to the avant-garde (collective practice, the critique of the artistic monad). As such, this article examines the active and revenant links of Moscow Conceptualism to the memory of the avant-garde, based on Russian art’s contemporary sense of itself as a once major (revolutionary) centre of avant-garde production.