We have recently seen a growing interest in Russian cosmism as a subject of theoretical polemics and a conceptual frame for several major art projects. Cosmism’s broad presence in the international intellectual arena was long impossible for several reasons. Despite the ambitiousness of his ideas (foremost among

01/15 them, the persistent desire to challenge death itself), Nikolai Fedorov, Russian cosmism’s central philosopher, was a private person who attempted to live his life in keeping with the notion of Christian modesty. Fedorov devoted himself body and soul to his work as a librarian, a context that shaped many of his ideas. It was working in libraries that gave him a daily sense of Marina Simakova the importance of the past, of carefully archiving it to save it from utter oblivion. Fedorov did not shy away from people, however. On the contrary, No Man’s he cordially welcomed all visitors to the libraries where he worked and was an extremely attentive Space: On interlocutor. Fedorov’s coeval Leo Tolstoy, the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, and the Russian young experimental scientist spent hours on end talking with him. Nevertheless, despite the rumors of the amazing Cosmism librarian and the relative accessibility of his manuscripts, it wasn’t until 1906, three years after Fedorov’s death, that his disciples began assembling his theoretical works, culminating seven years later in the book of the Common Task (the phrase which subsequently came to designate Fedorov’s doctrine). Fedorov’s works were not published during Soviet times. His ideas were a disavowal of both Soviet and the official doctrine of dialectical . đđđđđđđđđđThe Russian religious thinkers greatly influenced by Fedorov suffered a much sadder fate. Valerian Muravyov was sent to the camps in 1929. Father Pavel Florensky was shot in 1937, the same year that Alexander Svyatogor was arrested and sent to the camps, where he died. Alexander Yaroslavsky was shot in 1930. The hard scientists among the cosmists were more fortunate. Tsiolkovsky lived out his days peacefully. Vladimir Vernadsky taught and researched until his death in 1945. did research in the camps – a minor privilege granted him in otherwise desperate conditions – and continued his work after his release.đThe late 1980s witnessed the

e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 4 — 2 0 1 6 đ M i S m k v N o M a n ’ s S p c e : O R u i C m thoroughgoing study of the works of Fedorov and the other non-scientist cosmists as well as the unification of all the doctrine’s adherents into something like a single theoretical front within the . đđđđđđđđđđFedorov’s ideas penetrated the West slowly and gradually, often through references in works by . After the Second World War, a handful of Slavists took an interest in certain

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Francisco Infante-Arana and Nonna Gorunova, Artifacts (from the series Centers of the Curved Space), 1979.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT aspects of the cosmist legacy, and cosmism Simultaneously, a variety of techno-optimists, warranted brief mentions in anthologies on accelerationists, and transhumanists were Russian philosophy. The late Seventies, however, more interested in cosmism, including saw the publication of several book-length Ben Goertzel in his book A Cosmist Manifesto: surveys, including George M. Young’s Nikolai F. for the Posthuman Age, Fedorov: An Introduction, and Stephen which situates Russian cosmism within Lukashevich’s N. F. Fedorov 1828–1903: A Study pseudoscientific futurology and polemics about in Russian Eupsychian and Utopian Thought. 03/15 technology. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the cosmists đđđđđđđđđđWith cosmism’s influence on Russian, were increasingly mentioned in studies of the Soviet, and post-Soviet art, the historical avant- and the culture garde emerges in all its diversity, including Vasily surrounding the exploration of outer space, and Chekrygin’s futurism, Pavel Filonov’s analytical theorists such as Tsiolkovsky and Chizhevsky art, Malevich’s suprematism, Kandinsky’s took their rightful place in the history of science. abstractionism, and Alexander Labas’s utopian Translations of works by Fedorov himself were subjects. In addition, cosmism had a direct published in the Nineties, the same decade in impact on the intuitive artists immersed in which Boris Groys edited a volume of historical Eastern spirituality, for example, the group texts by cosmists in German translation.1 Amaravella (Sanskrit for “sprouts of Nevertheless, Russian cosmism remained a ”), which was close to the circle of niche topic until the end of the 2000s. the artist, traveler, and superstar mystic đđđđđđđđđđFinally, in 2012, George M. Young published . Amaravella’s aesthetic views a full-fledged historical study, The Russian and esoteric paintings, produced in the 1920s, Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai were ignored by the general public and scarcely Fedorov and His Followers, in which the scientific had any chance of surviving in postrevolutionary cosmists coexisted with the religious thinkers, , where all other subjects would soon be and the theoretical problems of cosmism as a wholly displaced by the all-powerful Socialist unified doctrine, embracing a gigantic complex of Realist canon. quite diverse concepts, were tackled. đđđđđđđđđđđ

Alexander Labas, Aliens: Variant, 1974. From the series The Inhabitants of Distant Planets.đ

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT 04/15

Collective Actions, Voyage to Saturn, 2004. Performance.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT đđđđđđđđđđIn the 1960s, amid the Khrushchevian Thaw, performance Wall Newspaper, mounted by the triumphal exploration of outer space, and Collective Actions the same year, also contained widespread interest in cybernetics, there an allusion to cosmism’s focus on emerged a geometric and kinetic art that .3 The materials on the makeshift harkened back to constructivism, the avant- wall newspaper were grouped around an excerpt garde’s figurative experiments, and the dynamic from Georgy Martynov’s sci-fi novel Visitor from art of Naum Gabo. The interests of the group the Abyss, about a Soviet diplomat who has been

Dvizhenie (“Movement”), as embodied by its 05/15 resurrected eighteen centuries after his death. leader Lev Nussberg and other artists, lay in đđđđđđđđđđThe creative duo of Igor Makarevich and engineering, science, and technology. On the Elena Elagina, former members of Collective other hand, they involved a holistic view of the Actions, soon turned directly to Russian world as a specific environment, a kind of cosmism. In their 2009 project Common Cause harmonious biocosmos whose basic principle (the English title is an alternate translation of was movement. The singularity of , the “common task”), Makarevich and Elagina unity of parts and the whole, and the affinity of imagined Fedorov’s doctrine as a meta-utopia (a everything with everything else (in particular, the “Great Utopia”), a meta-project combining synthesis of the various art forms) formed the Christian and materialism, and hence basis of the aesthetic program of the Russian extremely open to interpretation.4 Common kinetists. Their futuristic project Macropolis, or Cause involved several installations. The first of Artificial Bionic Cybernetic Environment, was a these, Oven with Three Ladders, consisted of a model of an artificial world at whose heart was three-sided ladder propped atop a Russian oven. situated the city of the future. (The future, in this The second, The Celestial Staircase and the case, was the middle decades of the twenty-first Ethereal Island, consisted of a red toadstool, century.) The kinetists successfully combined symbolizing “pastoral care of the ,” on aesthetic exploration with official commissions. which a model of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third Dvizhenie worked on decorating Leningrad for International had been mounted. (The spiral- the fiftieth anniversary of the October shaped “international” functioned here as the Revolution, a project for which the artists were celestial staircase, while the hallucinogenic able to employ their own photo-kinetic designs. mushroom was the “ethereal island,” Among other things, they wowed the public with respectively.) According to Fedorov, this staircase their famous kinetic flower, a huge glowing and (or, as he called it, “ladder”) symbolized spinning object symbolizing the universe. The humanity’s and ascent, as well as the focus on synthesizing the natural and artificial, unification of the heavenly and mundane in both on organizing nature and the man-made world senses, the divine and human, and the cosmic into a single cosmological order, would be and telluric. “Ethereal island” was Tsiolkovsky’s present from the Seventies onwards in the works definition for the so-called known universe. The of Francisco Infante, a former member of phrase was not a metaphor, but the fruit of the Dvizhenie who has walked the line between cosmist and scientist’s scholarly intuition. installation art and land art, as captured in Tsiolkovsky argued that ether was the material photographs. environment surrounding the universe and, at the đđđđđđđđđđIn the 1980s, concerned that the space race same time, the source of its emergence. Thus, he had enclosed the idea of outer space in positivist considered the ethereal state the first phase in boundaries and squeezed it in a geopolitical, the shaping of the solar system. militaristic vise grip, the Moscow conceptualists đđđđđđđđđđThese projects were followed by the tackled cosmological subjects. In 1986, Ilya installation Unknown Reasonable Forces, based Kabakov presented his installation The Man Who on a diary entry by Tsiolkovsky. On a May evening Flew into Outer Space from His Apartment, in in 1928, Tsiolkovsky had a vision. He saw the which space was presented as a realm of total three Latin letters rAy in the sky, which he freedom, a place where a person could make his deciphered as the Russian word rai (“heaven”), individual escape from the hopelessness of the given their phonetic similarity. These electrified late-Soviet stagnation period. Nearly twenty letters were the key element in Elagina and years later, in 2004, Collective Actions mounted e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 4 — 2 0 1 6 đ M i S m k v N o M a n ’ s S p c e : O R u i C m Makarevich’s installation. the absurdist performance Voyage to Saturn.2 đđđđđđđđđđThe poignant paintings and graphic works of While listening to a tape recording of a sci-fi Pavel Pepperstein, too, are chock full of ironical story, the artists “nailed” a diagram from a book utopian subjects involving the exploration of by Andrei Monastyrsky (the shape at the center distant planets. Quite curious in this regard is his of the diagram vaguely resembled Saturn) to a sci-fi noir film Sound of the Sun, produced many snow bank using a loaf of black bread whose years ago in collaboration with Natasha Nord. crust had been studded with pictures of random The film deals with the notion that sunlight is people taken from a Soviet encyclopedia. The sound, and that people behave differently when

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT this sound is amplified. This is a clear reference the “temple” has been conceived as an to Chizhevsky’s heliocentric theories, according unfinished collective project. Each individual to which people’s actions are directly dependent exhibition is a kind of building block that goes on bursts of solar activity. towards the construction of the virtual temple, đđđđđđđđđđThe cosmist tendency has been clearly although actual, palpable “cosmist” altars have legible in post-Soviet art beyond . been erected at several shows and We might recall Leonid Tishkov’s “macaroni performances. One of the group’s first works, cosmism.” Tishkov evoked the cosmists through 06/15 Necrophonia (2010), was a recording of the futuristic designs built from macaroni, including acoustic vibrations produced by the graves of a macaroni tube, dedicated to Tsiolkovsky, for Russian poets, writers, and scientists, including traveling in space, and an “Ionic Sun,” a prickly Gogol, Nikolai Zabolotsky, and Vernadsky.5 It is a ball of spaghetti noodles, arranged in rays, that kind of auditory séance with the dead “fathers.” resembled both the sun and Chizhevsky’s Some of Vverkh!’s shows and performances have renowned chandelier. taken place in unconventional, non-institutional đđđđđđđđđđIn the last decade, the group Vverkh! (“Up!”) spaces such as the countryside and apartment has consistently elaborated the subject of galleries. For example, the exhibition Field of cosmism. Although cosmism was not a starting Silence (2011) was mounted in a snow-covered point but a conditional frame for combining the field in the village of Khlebnikovo. After dark, a creative interests of the artists, it was cosmism row of televisions arranged in the snow lit up, that encouraged the future members to conceive showing video works by the artists.6 The cold, of themselves as a group. Emerging in the spring snow, and distance from the bustle of the city of 2010, Vverkh! claimed they were working on were meant to underscore the sense of constructing a so-called Temple of Cosmism, a abandonment and the emptiness of space. The cultural space synthesizing science, , and same year, the group produced and screened politics. The idea of cosmist synthesis once several video films, including the diptych Yu-165. again proved extremely seductive, defining both Yu is an allegorical tale based on excerpts from the group’s method and stance. The roster of cosmist texts and Yuri Gagarin’s biography, while participating artists has remained flexible, and 165 is the story of a reclusive writer and an

Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich, Irrational Forces of the Unknown, 2010. Installation, wooden ladders, neon, shoes.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Looking Up, Reading the Words, 1997. Installation.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT artist, both of them obsessed with the fear of and philosophic grounds. death. đđđđđđđđđđOver the last year, Arseny Zhilyaev has đđđđđđđđđđTwenty people have been involved in tackled cosmism head on. His project Cradle of Vverkh!’s projects at various times. Although Humankind, about a network of museums of the currently the group has practically ceased to future that have entangled the universe, was exist, its members have been in no hurry to write shown at the Venice Biennale. The network is a off cosmism, and they have remained involved in global museum, transcending national the “temple” in a certain sense. In February of 08/15 boundaries after humankind has transcended this year, the film Elixir, shot by Vverkh! member planetary boundaries. The Earth has turned into Daniil Zinchenko, was screened as part of the a museum corporation that flamboyantly Berlin Film Festival’s Forum program.7 Elixir is a combines the conservative function of feature-length film about Russia itself. According museology with entertainment. Even though to Zinchenko, Russia is a space where the humanity spreads across the Universe, horizontal and the vertical, expansiveness and capitalism won't collapse under the weight of its outer space, intersect. The film is a dense tangle own contradictions. Quite the opposite, the of myths and archetypal images that cannot be planet Earth turn into a huge shopping mall, unraveled. (And, apparently, according to the and the cosmist project will become a dystopia. film’s concept, do not need to be unraveled.) The The exhibition included graphic works, stained- film features a fairytale Russian forest and glass pieces, and gilded objects – for example, a swamps, and characters such as Serafim and the model of the world and a human figure entombed Carpenter, cosmonauts and guerrillas, in a glass coffin. Zhilyaev’s historical project bureaucrats and even the Motherland, portrayed Cradle of Humankind 2, which dealt with Nikolai as a distant, winking constellation. It is difficult Fedorov, was partially implemented at a Moscow to tell whether the festival audience was able to pop-up exhibition, accompanied by a conference descry Elixir’s local philosophical subtext, but featuring Anton Vidokle, Natalia Sidlina, and Russian viewers would know for certain that the Anastasia Gacheva. The conference was myth of Russia was a cosmist myth, a myth that occasioned by the publication of the book Avant- would be impossible without specific religious Garde Museology, which presents Russian

Arseny Zhilyaev, Tsiolkovsky, Second Advent, 2015-2016. Mixed media.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT cosmism as integrated into the historical avant- đđđđđđđđđđCosmist outer space was a space in which garde.8 Sidlina was a co-curator of the popular earthly time and gravitation had been surpassed, show Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age, which a space where biological clocks and their ran from September 2015 to March 2015 at the concomitant fears no longer existed. Working Science Museum in London. Despite its hard- with cosmist ideas is attractive, because, first, science perspective, the show featured futuristic anything – or, at very least, many things – is drawings and sketches by Tsiolkovsky and seemingly possible in this space, and second, selected works by Ilya Chashnik, Ivan 09/15 cosmism, as an art project itself, argued we Kudryashov, and Konstantin Yuon. Anastasia should regard eternal life as art, and art as a tool Gacheva is a specialist in Russian religious for cosmologizing the world, i.e., a means for the philosophy and the history of cosmism who now simultaneous rational and sensual organization runs the Nikolai Fedorov Library and Museum in of chaos, a gnostic vaccine inoculating Moscow. humankind from the ultimate dispersion of đđđđđđđđđđA film trilogy by Anton Vidokle presents a matter and meaning. To fully answer the above contemporary interpretation of the cosmist questions, we should recall certain key features worldview. The first film,đThis Is Cosmos, is a of Russian cosmism – which was a set of quite video that mixes excerpts of Fedorov's writing disparate ideas – as well as what united them. with texts by Voloshin, Maria Ender, Alexander đđđđđđđđđđRussian cosmism included a variety of Chizhevsky, Ilya Kabakov, Andrei Monastirs, and concepts focused on humankind’s conquest of others. The second part, entitledđThe Communist the entire universe both literally – in the sense of Revolution Was Caused by the Sun, was shown at spreading human life throughout the universe – the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and figuratively – in the sense of overcoming and explores some of Chizhevsky’s ideas about cosmic illiteracy, i.e., developing our medical heliobiology and the relationship understanding of how outer space is organized between solar cycles and human history.9đWhile and employing this understanding for the benefit watching the film, the viewer makes a journey to of human civilization. Life in space was not Kazakhstan, where Chizhevsky worked for a long reduced to colonizing other planets, but also time. Kazakhstan has also been the heart of the embraced interplanetary space (e.g., Soviet, and now Russian, space programs, as it is Tsiolkovsky’s “ethereal settlements,” vertically the site of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, where elongated cities built in orbit around planets) Russian rockets are launched into space. and eventually the entire universe. Most cosmist Vidokle’s third film is currently in the works. concepts contained three components. The first đđđđđđđđđđCosmism’s widespread reemergence and component was immortalism, a focus on export to the West has not been the outcome of a ensuring immortality, from rejuvenation by collective impulse to rehabilitate a theoretical means of blood transfusions in Bogdanov, to the project that vanished from the map of the resurrection of the dead in Fedorov. The second imaginary nearly a hundred years ago. Rather, it component was so-called active evolution: the reveals a continuity of thematic interests conscious overcoming of the limitations laid paradoxically present in contemporary art down by consciousness and nature, space and despite the differences among generations and time. It was a natural consequence of humanity’s contexts, formal approaches and idioms. But prolonged development and humanization of the why have artists continued to evoke the legacy of world (i.e., it was the result of a kind of creative Russian cosmism, what with its naïveté, growth), but at the same time evolution was to be esotericism, mysticism, and, in the case of most taken under the strict control of reason, moral cosmists, the emphatic Russophilia of its ideas? sense, and notions of . Active evolution Why does art that vigorously evokes the was an intermediary, obligatory stage. After theoretical, discursive aspect of cosmism pay far passing through it, the of the past would less attention to rethinking the artistic practices become the humans of the future, absolutely shaped in the womb of cosmism and engaged in rational and just, endowed with unlimited direct dialogue and polemics with it? Why has capabilities, and so on. The third component was the topic, seemingly pigeonholed and examined a moral and ethical system that combined from all possible angles, not been exhausted, e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 4 — 2 0 1 6 đ M i S m k v N o M a n ’ s S p c e : O R u i C m elements of Christianity, occult doctrines, continuing, instead, to unfold and expand, asceticism, and Marxism. It was a special type of navigating recent times? What are the causes of social responsibility that emerged only when this capaciousness and magnitude, of the ability individuals became aware of their close and to expand and prolong the subject, multiplying it continuous link with civilization, with the in hundreds of art projects? What, finally, links humankind of past, present, and future. the problems of today with the issues that đđđđđđđđđđSo we see that cosmism had its own, concerned the cosmist scientists a hundred or completely unique cosmos. This cosmos was not more years ago? transhistorical: it was a utopian horizon that had

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT to be reached in the very near future. The rational subject, one that had absorbed the individual’s objective was to accelerate the lessons of Russian religious thought and the process. While most inhabitants of our planet theories of the utopian socialists. Cosmism’s regard space as the starry heavens above their totality was also ensured by the fact that it dealt heads, the cosmists also saw it as vouchsafing with a social ideal that embraced (and the fulfillment of moral law. permeated) the entire universe. This ideal put a đđđđđđđđđđRussian cosmism was a totalizing project. premium on the fraternalism and responsibility

Tsiolkovsky’s oft-quoted saying that “Earth is the 10/15 that ensured immortality, which, like salvation cradle of humankind” can easily be compared from disease, was one of the objectives in with Hegel’s assertion that “slavery is the cradle cultivating outer space and would become our of liberty.” The cosmists argued that becoming “common task.” Fedorov, who conceived the human in the true sense was possible only by concept of the common task, thought we should humanizing the universe, by completely infusing combat the individual’s non-fraternal condition it with human artistic and creative energy, which by developing “means of restoring kinship.” All would lead finally to this energy’s full revelation. men and women were brothers and sisters The humans of the future were, in some ways, because they shared the same universe. more advanced versions of the cosmists. The đđđđđđđđđđDeclaring the “cosmic growth of cosmist scientists were experts in many humankind” its goal, cosmism was, of course, a disciplines. They simultaneously pursued both modernist project, but it was the project of an the hard sciences (moreover, several at once) and alternative modernity. It experienced the religious philosophy. A few centuries after the tremendous impact of scientific theory, Renaissance man and long before the scientistic becoming its esoteric extension. The dream of rage for interdisciplinarity, cosmism imagined an human immortality was not a romantic fantasy, artist-cum-researcher thinking beyond but an integral system of viewpoints that grew disciplines and formal restrictions, and out of a principled refusal to view the world motivated by the desire for the absolute through the eyes of the lonely and selfish intellectual and creative freedom that was individual, that is, through the eyes of the available to everyone. Like Renaissance culture, nihilist. Immortality implied an unwillingness to cosmism was anthropocentric, but it was an separate the human of the present from the anthropocentrism focused on the collective human of the past, as well as the destruction of

Anton Vidokle, Immortality and Resurrection for All!, 2016. Video, single channel.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich, Pagan (Tatlin's Mushroom), 2008. Papier-mache, wood, enamel.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT all obstacles standing between people, so they ethical imperative: evolution could and must be could easily feel as one. Progress, in this prudently managed for the welfare of mankind. instance, was neither an end in itself nor a đđđđđđđđđđAn inalienable part of this collective well- harbinger of the revolutionary rupture (although was the preservation of human physicality, the idea of a mandatory period of active the triumph over death. For example, evolution did resemble the inevitable Tsiolkovsky’s idea of positive entropy maintained dictatorship of the proletariat on the road to that, after death, all the molecules constituting communism), but a natural necessity and 12/15 the human body were freed from the prison of measure of . the flesh and traveled around the universe, đđđđđđđđđđRussian cosmism was thus a radical literally escaping into outer space. Even if a response to the less humane, positivist, and person did not manage to will, as Einstein did, rationalist doctrines of the nineteenth century. It that she be cremated and her ashes scattered to poeticized their scientific components while the wind, her corporeal matter would spread problematizing existential questions. At the throughout the universe. The postmortem same time, most of the cosmists argued with the movement of bodily matter was, in fact, eternal materialists, from Engels to Chernyshevsky, space travel. One of the most striking evocations proposing an alternative, animated materialism, of the debates on matter can be found in Andrei but a materialism all the same. Cosmist Platonov’s unfinished novel Happy Moscow, in materialism often resonated with the the passage where Dr. Sambikin shows his friend materialism of Henri Bergson, who insisted on the “cause of all life.” Dissecting a corpse, the duration and continuity of matter, which was Sambikin points out the empty section in the intuitively, not analytically, knowable. The intestines between undigested food and outcome of such cognition – cognition enacted excrement. This emptiness, which “sucks all due to a kind of power surge, an excess of humanity into itself,” is simultaneously the soul intuition – was, in fact, the evolutionary process, and the engine of world history. This illustration which included this eternal duration, involving is consistent with the orthodox dialectical the constant penetration of past into present. An scheme at the basis of historical materialism. We important between cosmist can assume it would also suit the cosmists, with philosophy and the thinking of Bergson, who the proviso that the detected “empty soul” regarded all evolution as creative evolution, was continuously produce brotherly love and moral that the cosmists maintained a purely pragmatic sense. attitude towards evolution. This attitude was an đđđđđđđđđđđ

A still extracted from Daniil Zinchenko's 2015 feature-length movie Elixir.

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT đđđđđđđđđđThese considerations lead us to the first as Malevich had promised, to which what “grows explanatory hypothesis. Why is art still on its shoulders” would belong. It is a present interested in Russian cosmism? There has been that knows that nothing belongs to it and that its much talk recently about the end of the era of shoulders are powerless. Consequently, we are grand narratives, fatigue from , the suffering from a crisis of the utopian coming age of neomodernism or altermodernism, imagination, and one of the few available and the corresponding need for a new, unified therapeutic remedies entails working with the sensibility amid a world of infinite differences. In 13/15 future inherited from the past. turn, this has given rise to efforts to rehabilitate đđđđđđđđđđThe third hypothesis has nothing to do with modernist projects long situated on the the future as such, but with the human being of periphery of the art world’s attention. Does the the future, who, judging by numerous cosmist turn testify to the search for a new, manifestos, theoretical works, conferences, and altermodernist project? Here we can divine a so on, is nowadays much easier to imagine than fully formed desire to get rid of the split subject the future itself. Aside from the fact that Russian by reassembling it and implanting it in new cosmism certainly has had an indirect impact on circumstances. Perhaps the demand for the transhumanists, in the scenario conceived by the universal as opposed to the particular, a demand cosmists themselves human would find articulated through a borrowed, old romantic themselves in fundamentally new dream of future unity, might be considered a anthropological circumstances by taking full delayed reaction to post-Fordist globalization, responsibility for the universe. In this case, which has produced total isolation. After all, with anthropocentrism and ecocentrism are not the respect to the hard-nosed and opposites, but are practically identical to one enlightened of the nineteenth century, another. This is what Western researchers have cosmism was the selfsame “new ” talked so much about recently as they have whose emergence researchers of society and problematized the concept of the Anthropocene, culture have noted against the declining fortunes which has captured the imaginations of of postmodernist . geologists, biologists, transhumanists, and even đđđđđđđđđđThe second hypothesis is that artists want environmental activists. Proponents of the to address our unresolved relationship with the concept argue that, in the 1950s, a new future and talk through the utter lack of a current geological era kicked off in which the Earth’s futurological project. Despite the fact that an destiny became inseparable from the fate of image of the future can be assembled from a human civilization. (The previous era, the number of portrayals in recent sci-fi films, this Holocene, lasted eleven to twelve thousand image has been extremely fragile and has years.) According to certain calculations by immediately shattered into hundreds of supporters of the theory of the Anthropocene, disjointed, scattered shards. The future as a geological processes no longer exist in and of project, even a romantically tinged project, has themselves. Human beings and human progress been simply lacking nowadays. Everyone clearly have fundamentally altered the Earth’s physical sees that technological development is primarily and chemical makeup, the movement of water focused on consumer technologies, that is, on and tectonic plates, and the mineral composition the targeted improvement of everyday life, not on of the soil and subsoil. These processes cannot building orbiting cities in outer space. be reversed; no environmental activism will save đđđđđđđđđđEven the most accurate, thoughtful them. The bifurcation point has been passed, prognoses, taken together, are incapable of and now we have to understand how to live with pointing exactly where human progress is it. From the perspective of the social sciences, it headed nowadays. The cultural mechanism is important to note that recognition of the responsible for the production of new ideas fundamentally new era features an affirmative about the future has seemingly become approach to humanity’s intervention in nature, dilapidated and broken down. This state of the final abolition of the opposition between the affairs was theorized by Mark Fischer in his 2009 natural and the artificial. Wasn’t this what was book Capitalist Realism. The current pace of predicted by the cosmist Vernadsky, who argued changes in the market requires rapid adaptation e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 4 — 2 0 1 6 đ M i S m k v N o M a n ’ s S p c e : O R u i C m that, by altering the , humanity would from the people swept up in it, meaning it be able to create a and become a becomes impossible to plan one’s own life. We “powerful geological force”? So attention to are unsure of what tomorrow will bring, and we cosmism, on the one hand, reflects general neurotically monitor and scan , on the concern and anxiety about the Anthropocene. On lookout for all the new trends. Reality is rendered the other hand, it is a valuable conjuctural an object of constant evaluation and short-term action, an attempt to connect local history with investment; all our intellectual and creative the global scientific context. powers are focused on it. It is hardly the present, đđđđđđđđđđđ

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT đđđđđđđđđđThe fourth hypothesis, which has been of the future, the cosmist project has been a partly touched on by Groys in his texts and realm of relatively peaceful coexistence. For the Zhilyaev in his exhibition projects, concerns time being, it has accommodated leftists and museification. Nowadays, the museum is rightists, artists, techno-skeptics and techno- conceived not as a custodian of tradition or a optimists, futurologists and liberal arts scholars. graveyard of the arts, but primarily as a relatively Camouflaging its strict moral stance beneath a open space that is attached to a particular colorful canvas of sci-fi and mystical ideas, apparatus of bureaucratic capitalism. The 14/15 cosmism was tolerant in the Christian sense and museum is a vehicle of institutional power. Art intellectually flexible, as malleable as modeling tried but failed to destroy the museum, to make a clay. final break with it. Art called on artists and đđđđđđđđđđFor the time being, cosmism can be used viewers to take to the streets, so to speak, and it effortlessly to handle terrible, irrational, and took to the streets itself. It even went online, but gloomy topics without fear of offending anyone’s the museum has not yet embarked on the path of feelings or interests. And although it might seem self-destruction. Maybe in this case it makes that cosmism stretches like elastic, admitting sense to shift the boundaries of the museum everyone to its realm, it has miraculously avoided itself, to deterritorialize it, to work with its formal clear-cut appropriation. It does not yet belong to and semantic boundaries. Aside from its anyone, nor is it affiliated with anyone. Cosmism expositional, educational, and entertainment is still a no man’s land, which makes it not only a functions, there is some doubt as to whether the popular local subject but also a temporarily safe museum will be able to carry out its memorial buffer zone for the organization and deployment function in the future. What, for example, will the of opposing forces. Cosmism’s harmlessness, the museums of the future have to exhibit from the apparent weakness of its social and political current era: galleries of screenshots, logs of stance, is a temporary circumstance. Everyone social network conversations and instant who wanders into no man’s land always runs the messaging services, and analyses of big data? risk of getting caught in the crossfire. That is why According to Fedorov, the universe of the future Russian cosmism, extremely attractive to would be a “resurrectional” museum, a museum supporters of various ideological views, is the of resurrected human bodies, a museum that site of an impending war. It is the past in the had conquered death, i.e., a museum of life. It future over which a bitter struggle will unfold, a would be a total museum where, as in cosmism struggle wherein spectating is not an option. itself, physics would be fused with mathematics, đđđđđđđđđđ× culture with biopolitics, the artificial with the Translated from the Russian by Thomas Campbell. An earlier version of this essay in Russian was first published on human. Such a museum would radically reorient Colta.ru. our sensibility from the subjective to the objective. đđđđđđđđđđFedorov once commented on the museum’s contradictory status within culture, the of contempt and honor revealed in its system of attitudes. Putting something in a museum is tantamount to hauling it to the scrap heap, to writing it off as useless, to eliminating it from life, but at the same time, it involves carefully storing it and exalting it as a valuable artifact. Engels once used a similar example to elucidate the Hegelian law of the negation of the negation. The of primitive materialism, rejected by the monotheistic and metaphysical , can still be divined in modern materialism. The law seemingly corresponds to cosmism: destroyed at the level of form, human life must necessarily be e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 4 — 2 0 1 6 đ M i S m k v N o M a n ’ s S p c e : O R u i C m preserved in terms of its content. đđđđđđđđđđIt is vital we examine all these questions pragmatically. The museum has reconciled progressives, who insist on the need to get rid of everything irrelevant, untopical, and not “contemporary,” and conservatives, obsessed with the desire to preserve everything obsolete and their own links to the past. Like the museum

07.08.16 / 14:27:08 EDT Marina Simakova is a Russian researcher and cultural đđđđđđ1 critic based in Saint Petersburg. She studied Die Neue Menschheit, eds. Boris Groys and Michael Hagemeister in Moscow, London and (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, Paris. Her research interests include Marxism, critical 2005). theory, cultural studies and early Soviet literature. Her critical essays and translations have been published đđđđđđ2 See http://conceptualism.letov.r in Colta.ru, Openleft.ru and Translit journal. u/KD-ACTIONS-101.htm

đđđđđđ3

15/15 See http://conceptualism.letov.r u/KD-ACTIONS-102.htm

đđđđđđ4 See http://www.conceptualism- mos cow.org/page?id=86&lang=en

đđđđđđ5 See https://vimeo.com/13896240

đđđđđđ6 See http://os.colta.ru/art/proje cts/7748/details/21350/

đđđđđđ7 See https://www.berlinale.de/en/ archiv/jahresarchive/2016/02 _programm_2016/02_Filmdatenb latt_2016_201607988.php#tab= video25

đđđđđđ8 Avant-Garde Museology, ed. Arseny Zhilyaev (New York: e- flux classics, 2015).

đđđđđđ9 The script for the second film can be read here http://supercommunity.e-flux .com/texts/notes-for-a-film- the-communist-revolution-was - caused-by-the-sun/ e - f l u x j o r n a # 7 4 — 2 0 1 6 đ M i S m k v N o M a n ’ s S p c e : O R u i C m

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