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Transition in Post-Soviet Art Transition in Post-Soviet Art: “Collective Actions” Before and After 1989 by Octavian Eșanu Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Kristine Stiles, Supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Patricia Leighten ___________________________ Pamela Kachurin ___________________________ Valerie Hillings Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 ABSTRACT Transition in Post-Soviet Art: “Collective Actions” Before and After 1989 by Octavian Eșanu Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Kristine Stiles, Supervisor ___________________________ Fredric Jameson ___________________________ Patricia Leighten ___________________________ Pamela Kachurin ___________________________ Valerie Hillings An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Philosophy in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University 2009 Copyright by Octavian Eșanu 2009 ABSTRACT For more than three decades the Moscow-based conceptual artist group “Collective Actions” has been organizing actions. Each action, typically taking place at the outskirts of Moscow, is regarded as a trigger for a series of intellectual activities, such as analysis, interpretation, narration, and description. The artists have systematically recorded and transcribed these activities, collecting and assembling texts, diagrams, and photographs in a ten-volume publication entitled Journeys Outside the City. Five volumes of this publication concern the activities of the group before, and five after, 1989. Over the years the Journeys Outside the City became an idiosyncratic, self-sufficient aesthetic discourse arrayed along a constellation of concepts developed by those engaged in “Collective Actions.” In its elusive hermeticism and self-referentiality the aesthetic framework constructed by these artists formed a closed system, gathering bundles of signs that seldom referred to anything concrete outside the horizon of Moscow Conceptualism. It is in this regard that the early volumes of the Journeys Outside the City can be compared to the similarly closed ideological discourse of the Soviet Politburo. After 1989, however, with the transition from socialism to capitalism, the aesthetic and artistic language of this group began to change as its text-based self-sufficient system began to open up under pressure from new socioeconomic conditions introduced by the processes of democratization and liberalization. My dissertation Transition in Post-Soviet Art: ‘Collective Actions’ Before and After 1989 is neither a history of nor a monographical work on “Collective Actions,” but iv rather an analytical exploration of aesthetic, artistic and institutional changes that have transpired in the Journeys Outside the City during the transition from socialism to capitalism. As the artists migrated from one art historical category into another (from the status of “unofficial artists” to that of “contemporary artists”), their aesthetics and art revealed a series of stylistic, technical, formal, textual, and aesthetical transformations and metamorphoses that paralleled broader cultural conversions taking place in post- Soviet and Eastern European art during the transition to capitalism. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………...iv List of Diagrams and Illustrations………………………………………………………viii Acknowledgments…………………..…………………………………………………….ix Introduction………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1. KD and Moscow Romantic Conceptualism……………………………….…17 Literature Review…………………………………………………………...……18 Defining Moscow Conceptualism………………………………………………..40 The Term “Romantic”…………………………………………..………………..53 The Term “Emptiness”….………………………………………………………..61 Chapter 2. KD’s Journeys Before 1989……………………………………………….....68 Volume I (phase 1976-80): “Appearance”………………………………………72 Volume II (phase 1980-83): “Ten Appearances”………………………………..92 Volume III (phase 1983-85): “Discussion”……………………...……………..112 Volume IV (phase 1985-87) and Volume V (1987-89)………………………...131 Chapter 3. “During:” Transition to Capitalism…………………………………………160 Transition and Transitology………………………………………………….…162 The Cultural Transition: The SCCA Model…………………………………….174 Chapter 4. [KD]’s Journeys After 1989………………………………………………...184 Temporality of Transition………………………………………………………186 vi New Schizo- Terms in the Dictionary………………………………………….192 Bracketed [Totality]…………………………………………………………….200 From Action to Installation……………………………………………………..214 Project Method………………………………………………………………….232 The Fate of Kievogorskoe Field………………………………………………...244 A More Comfortable Journey …………………………………………………..259 The Democratization of [KD]’s Language……....……………………………..263 Conclusion: From KD to [KD]: From Objectivation to Reification……………………274 Glossary………………………………………………………………………………...288 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………304 Biography……………………………………………………………………………….316 vii LIST OF DIAGRAMS AND ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Page 1 Vadim Zakharov History of Russian Art from the Russian Avant- Garde to Moscow Conceptualism, installation, 2004. 38 2 Ilya Kabakov, Diagram of “Hope” and “Fear,” circa 1980, (Kabakov 1999, p. 63). Reconstructed by Octavian Eșanu in 2008. 56 3. A. Monastyrsky, Ten Appearances, diagram, 1981, (Monastyrsky 1998, p. 138). Reconstructed by Octavian Eșanu in 2008. 97 4 A. Monastyrsky, The Position of the Objects, the Spectators and the Organizers during the Action “Discussion,” diagram, 1985, (Monastyrsky 1998, p. 388). Reconstructed by Octavian Eșanu in 2008. 112 5 A. Monastyrsky, The Arrangement of the Spectators on the Kievogorskoe Field, diagram, 1989. (Monastyrsky 1998, p. 675). Reconstructed by Octavian Eșanu in 2008. 144 6 A. Monastyrsky, The Position of the Objects on the Desk Project for the Installation “Journey to the West,” 1989, (Monastyrsky 1998, p. 775). Reconstructed by Octavian Eșanu in 2009. 218 7 A. Monastyrsky, Earth Works, diagram, 1987, (Monastyrsky 1998, p. 541). Reconstructed by Octavian in Eșanu in 2009. 222 8 A. Monastyrsky The Interrelation of the Demonstrative Fields in KD’s Series of Actions “The Perspective of Speech Act,” diagram, 1985. (Monastyrsky 1998, p. 411). Reconstructed by Octavian Eșanu in 2009. 222 9 A. Monastyrsky, Show-window, Installation with the third volume of the “Journeys Outside the City,” installation, 1990. 229 10 Kievogorskoe Field in 1989 and in 2001, maps. Assembled from A. Monastyrsky, The Arrangement of the Spectators on the Kievogorskoe Field, diagram, 1989 and A. Monastyrsky 625-520, map, 2001. Reconstructed by Octavian Eșanu in 2009. 252 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like first of all to thank my dissertation advisor Dr. Kristine Stiles, without whom this dissertation would neither have been conceived nor completed. Andrei Monastyrsky has offered me the unpublished material of the Journeys Outside the City, and has been remarkably open to questions and quick to answer them, for which I am grateful. Many other individuals have been indispensable to the completion of this project. I am thankful to my dissertation committee: Fredric Jameson, Patricia Leighten, Pamela Kachurin and Valerie Hillings. I also wish to acknowledge Duke University faculty and doctoral candidates for their insight and inspiration: Gennifer Weisenfeld, Michael Hardt, Pedro Lasch, Edna Andrews, Greta Boers, Hans Van Miegroet, Malachi Hacohen, Esther Gabara, Oscar Cabezas, Beatriz Rodriguez-Balanta, Anna Krylova, Julie Tetel, Natalie Hartman, Isis Sadek, Mark Antliff, Lola Capri Rosenberg, Mitali J. Routh, William A. Broom, and Linda Stubblefield. I am also grateful to many within a wider academic and artistic community, also for their inspiration and support: Steven Mansbach, Robert M. Jenkins, Yuri Leiderman, Willy Thayer, Dan Spataru, Inga Zimprich, Ingela Johansson, Stefan Rusu, Vlad Bulat, Vasile Rata. Finally, I would like to thank Katherine A. Stern for sponsoring the Stern Dissertation Year Fellowship, and to thank Catherine L. Hansen for everything. ix INTRODUCTION In the late 1990s a Moscow-based institute for the study of culture investigated some major changes that had occurred in the genre of “author’s song” (avtorskaya pesnya)1 after the fall of the USSR. In the Soviet times this semi-official genre was practiced mainly by dissident singers, making it very popular among the public. The researchers discovered that during the transition from socialism to capitalism the following important changes took place. Before 1989 there were three main requirements that a performer had to meet in order to be called an “author” or a “bard:” 1) the concert had to take place in an informal or unofficial location, and in the Soviet times the bards often performed in apartments, or in the woods around a fire when they sang for a larger group; 2) the lyrics had to be semantically complex, for the songs were also called “guitar poems”; 3) the author-singer wore the same kind of clothes as his or her audience. After 1989 none of these three criteria survived. During the transitional nineties, and after the interpreters of the author songs started to perform in large and brightly lit concert halls, the verses began to deteriorate, becoming simple and straightforward, losing
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