The View from Out Here: Western Conceptual Art in the Moscow Conceptualist Imagination Yelena Kalinsky In February 1973, the Soviet Academy of Arts published a the new volume sometime in 1973 or 1974, what struck revised edition of the 1969 book Modernism: Analysis and them most of all were the illustrations. Artworks that were Critique of the Main Trends. In the original introduction, impossible to see first-hand and known, if at all, only from the editors promised to address “art born in the spiritual Western periodicals smuggled by foreign friends and scholars crisis of rotting capitalism” through a “developed historical or perused in restricted access foreign-language libraries, analysis and serious theoretical critique from the point of were reproduced in numerous double-page spreads. One view of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics.”1 In actuality, the book image in particular caught Alekseev and Monastyrski’s eyes had done much more than give a Marxist-Leninist reading and imaginations (Figure 1). It showed a man wearing slacks, of Western art. It offered readers detailed descriptions of t-shirt, and a snorkeling mask hovering above the ocean floor such canonical movements in European Modernism as amid fluttering leafy plants. He faces the camera and seems French Cubism, German Expressionism, Italian Futurism, to peer at the viewer through his dark mask. The caption and Dada. Art that had disappeared from museum walls and identifies the work as Dennis Oppenheim’s Replanting Corn official Soviet publications in the 1920s and 1930s was, in on the Bottom of the Ocean from 1969.4 the wake of Khrushchev’s Thaw, finding its way back into For Alekseev and Monastyrski, the utter strangeness public discourse.2 of the porthole-like photograph, coupled with the absurd Perhaps more surprising than mention of Picasso or Mari- gesture of planting corn on the ocean floor as an artistic act, netti in the first edition were new sections in the second edition carried a powerful charge. The implication, for these two on postwar trends like Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptual Art.3 Soviet viewers, had less to do with the ideological success or While strongly criticizing these movements — Pop’s proxim- failure of contemporary Western art or its aesthetic status as ity to advertising, for example, or Minimalism and Concep- advanced or retrograde, than with the notion that a certain tual Art’s extreme reductionism and anti-aesthetic programs kind of artistic action could transport viewers into strange or — the authors of these sections nonetheless provided gen- unknown realms, utterly other to the artists’ present reality.5 erous overviews of recent practices in North America and While they no doubt prized the information gleaned “be- Western Europe. Given the shortage of such information in tween the lines” of this polemical Soviet publication, Mon- the Soviet Union, we might expect that, despite its censori- astryski insists that it is this image in particular — and not ous tone, Modernism was an invaluable source for readers any analysis or critique of recent trends relayed in the text — especially artists — eager to glimpse the newest currents — that he remembers as having made the greatest impact coursing through the art world “out there.” Yet, as this paper upon him at the time. It was not long after this encounter, describes, this reception is only half the story. that Monastyrski and Alekseev began to collaborate with When Nikita Alekseev and Andrei Monastyrski, young several others as the Collective Actions group, inviting view- artists active in Moscow’s alternative circles, encountered ers to enigmatic performances in the fields and forests on 1 V.V. Vanslov and Iu.D. Kolpinskii, eds., Modernizm: Analiz i kritika zapadnoi Evropy i SShA,” in Modernizm (1973), 243-75. osnovnykh napravlenii; Sbornik statei (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1969), 7. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are those of the author. 4 Plate 164, unnumbered section; also identified in a list of illustrations, Modernizm (1973), 279. The works in the spread are identified as 2 On the transformation of Soviet culture in the 1920s and 1930s, see Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Shed, 1970, misidentified as “Par- Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolution- tially Burned”; Oppenheim’s Replanting Corn on the Bottom of the ary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). On artistic debates Ocean, 1969; Oppenheim’s Explosion; Jan Dibbets’s White Line on in the Thaw period, see Susan Emily Reid, “Destalinization and the the Sea; and Iain Baxter’s Self-Destructing Work. Remodernization of Soviet Art: The Search for a Contemporary Real- ism, 1953-1963” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996). 5 Author’s conversation with Andrei Monastyrski, April 2009. A work Monastyrski mis-remembers as having been illustrated in the volume 3 M. Kuz’mina, “Pop-Art, Op-Art, kineticheskoe iskusstvo,” in Modern- is Peter Hutchinson’s Threaded Calabash, 1969, another underwater izm: Analiz i kritika osnovnykh napravlenii, ed. V.V. Vanslov and Iu.D. photograph. This work, however, is not illustrated in Modernizm Kolpinskii, 2nd rev. ed. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1973), 229-42; and L. (1973), but Monastyrski’s mistaken memory of it suggests an interest Reingardt, “Otrechenie ot iskusstva: Noveishie techeniia v iskusstve in actions undertaken in otherworldly environments. ATHANOR XXIX YELENA KALINSKY Moscow’s outskirts. Escaping the over-signified space of the performance (Figures 2-5). In addition — and perhaps thanks city, these actions sought to lead viewers into a realm of pure to — this broad definition, the movement lasted nearly two potential in the empty, snow-covered landscape. Could the decades.9 What unified these practices was an active and experience of displacement and imaginative travel prompted committed circle of artists and poets who gathered in studios by Monastyrski and Alekseev’s reception of Oppenheim’s and apartments to share and discuss work. In the absence of underwater photograph have something to do with this? This galleries and critics, they served as each other’s audiences paper argues that it is precisely through this kind of playful, and interlocutors, and it is these constant and close-knit or even frivolous connection that we should understand interactions that allowed the Moscow Conceptualist circle the reception of Western Conceptual Art in the Moscow to develop and thrive. Conceptualist imagination. One place to launch an investigation of Moscow Con- Cold War historians have discussed cultural exchanges, ceptualism’s reception of Western Conceptual Art might be such as the landmark Sixth World Youth Festival that brought the Moscow Archive of New Art, or MANI, an artist-created 34,000 foreign and 60,000 Soviet delegates to mingle in Mos- archive that aimed to showcase the activities of Moscow’s al- cow’s Gorki Park in 1957, as carefully orchestrated tools of ternative culture in the years 1980-82 (Figures 6-7).10 Though cultural politics. Jazz, jeans, and abstract art, as well as unprec- late in comparison to the height of Conceptual Art in the edented contact with foreigners are said to have prepared the West, these years were the culmination of the first intense way for Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika in the 1980s.6 decade of conceptualist activity in Moscow. By 1980, there Serge Guilbaut’s study of Abstract Expressionism demon- was a sense that important strides had been made in devel- strates how the American avant-garde came to symbolize oping a native form of contemporary art that needed to be what he calls a “political apoliticism” that might help to documented and preserved for the future. For its organizers explain its appeal to young Soviet artists tired of Socialist MANI might function as such a vehicle. Realist clichés.7 As the story of Collective Actions’ reception Each volume of MANI consists of envelopes containing of Modernism suggests, it may be useful to set aside read- theoretical texts, documentary photographs, and original ings that focus on the one-way transmission of Western artworks by various individuals and groups associated with ideologies to Soviet viewers in order to consider the ways the Conceptualist branch of Moscow’s unofficial art world. that those viewers may themselves have made creative use Though on the face of it, each one is a collection of unique of the materials available to them. hand-made objects, the artists have used available forms of The case of Conceptual Art in Moscow, which emerged mechanical reproduction — photography and carbon-copied in the late 1960s and flowered in the 1970s and 1980s, is type — to create several versions of the archive for greater a particularly vivid example of such a creative reception. As exposure and dissemination. Of course, unlike the émigré in the West, conceptual artists in Moscow rejected an earlier journal, A-Ya, published in Paris and distributed widely current of expressionist abstraction, turning to text-based, throughout Europe and the U.S., the largest part of MANI’s idea-driven practices that downplayed visuality and reflected audience consisted of fellow artists and friends who were philosophically on the artwork’s condition.8 However, while invited to peruse its contents while visiting the studios or Western Conceptual Art was a fairly brief (if highly influential) apartments where the volumes were often stored. It was in episode in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sharing the stage this bustling and increasingly hopeful atmosphere that the with other postwar movements, Conceptual Art in Moscow artists of the circle chose to represent themselves to each itself comprised a much broader range of practices, from other, to an imaginary Western audience, and to art history. ironic pop-inspired painting and sculpture to more enigmatic The ways that a number of MANI artists staged self-conscious text-based paintings, narrative albums, object poetry, and encounters with contemporary Western art — especially 6 Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange & the Cold War: Raising the Iron 9 One could speculate that in an art world that included public ex- Curtain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 2003).