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The Museological Unconscious VICTOR TUPITSYN introduction by Susan Buck-Morss and Victor Tupitsyn The Museological Unconscious VICTOR TUPITSYN The Museological Unconscious VICTOR TUPITSYN Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND © 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. MIT Press books may be purchased at special quantity discounts for business or sales promotional use. For information, please email special_sales@ mitpress.mit .edu or write to Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, MA 02142. This book was set in Sabon and Univers by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, Georgia. Printed and bound in Spain. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tupitsyn, Viktor, 1945– The museological unconscious : communal (post) modernism in Russia / Victor Tupitsyn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-20173-5 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Russia (Federation) 2. Dissident art—Russia (Federation) 3. Art and state— Russia (Federation) 4. Art, Russian—20th century. 5. Art, Russian—21st century. I. Title. N6988.5.A83T87 2009 709.47’09045—dc22 2008031026 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Margarita CONTENTS PREFACE ix 1 Civitas Solis: Ghetto as Paradise 13 INTRODUCTION 1 2 Communal (Post)Modernism: 33 SUSAN BUCK- MORSS A Short History IN CONVERSATION 3 Moscow Communal Conceptualism 101 WITH VICTOR TUPITSYN 4 Icons of Iconoclasm 123 5 The Sun without a Muzzle 145 6 If I Were a Woman 169 7 Pushmi- pullyu: 187 St. Petersburg- and- Moscow 8 Batman and the Joker: 203 The Thermidor of the Bodily 9 The Body- without- a- Name 213 10 Notes on the Museological Unconscious 229 11 Negativity Mon Amour 249 12 Post- Autonomous Art 263 13 Rublevskoe Chaussée 277 NOTES 297 INDEX 329 PREFACE This book presents the history of contemporary Russian art as a communal paradigm—a model that grants the opportunity to discuss and analyze seemingly disconnected and incompatible events as effected by a number of communal phenomena, such as communal living, communal percep- tion, and communal speech practices. Because of this “communalizing” approach, many artists and art movements are brought together for the first time, as if they were the tenants of one large communal apartment. This common approach to a variety of issues is based on the theory that the optical unconscious of the Soviet people was structured like com- munal speech. Admittedly, all texts in this publication have been guided by a look- alike principle—the analogy between communal speech and communal vision is linked to the imperative of seeing through the eyes or on behalf of the “collective other.” Everything that appealed to the com- munal eye in post– World War II Russia is critically scrutinized in The Museological Unconscious, including the reproductions of up to one hun- dred artworks from both Soviet and post- Soviet periods. The reference to “communal postmodernism” in the title of the book reflects the fact that instead of fully abandoning their frustrating heritage, the alternative Russian artists of the post- Stalin era have turned their “vices” into “vir- tues,” thereby creating a new postmodern language. Whereas chapter 1 lays the ground for a coherent theoretical treatment of a variety of issues discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book, chapter 2 surveys the history of the alternative (unofficial) Russian art. Here, the conceptual matrix developed in the late 1980s and elaborated in chapter 1 comes to play on the level of recollecting, sorting out, and inter- preting a vast historical material that stretches from the late 1950s to the present. In chapter 10, the conditions of seeing, discussed in the first chap- ter, are subjected to a different approach, focused on the phenomenon of ix compulsive museification, through which the “museological unconscious” manifests itself. The rest of the book deals with specific issues (e.g., feminism, body politics) or artistic phenomena (e.g., sots art, apt art). Predictably, the final chapters are dedicated to the latest stage of the post- Soviet cultural meta- morphoses—the art of the new millennium. One may hope, however, that some of the interpretive and critical strategies spelled out in The Museological Unconscious will transcend the specificity of its “domestic context” and prove to be useful for socially engaged artists and intellectuals from all over the world (including Eastern Europe and Third World countries). All pho- tographic images belong to Victor and MargaritaTupitsyn’s archive. Every effort has been made to contact the rights holders, but in the event that I have missed any, I welcome hearing from those artists. I have been writing about contemporary Russian art since 1975, the year of my emigration to the United States. In 1976 I defended my Ph.D. thesis at suny Stony Brook, and in 1988, thanks to glasnost and pere- stroika, was able to spend a sabbatical year in Moscow, thereby renewing my access to its alternative art milieu, with which I had kept up an intense epistolary contact. Since then trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg have been regular, and I have frequently contributed to the artistic life of these cities as a writer and critical observer. The arguments outlined in this book originate from that period. Much of that writing was instigated by the sustained support of a number of magazine editors that include Joanne Morra and Marquard Smith of Parallax; Chantal Pontbriand, Jim Drobnik, and Eduardo Ralickas of Parachute; Rasheed Araeen and Jean Fisher of Third Text; Pierre Restany of D’Ars; Tim Griffin of Artforum; Aleksandr Ivanov of Ad Marginem; Nikolai Sheptulin of Mesto pechati; Viktor Mazin and Olesia Tourkina of Kabinet; Viktor Misiano of Kh/ Zh; Arsenii Meshcheriakov of WAM; and Irina Prokhorova of NLO. I would also like to thank the artists for sharing their insights with me in more than forty interviews and conversations, printed in a number of museum catalogues and in two books published in Moscow in 1997 and 2006. Special thanks to Susan Buck- Morss for discussing several chapters of this book with me in the introductory piece. I am grateful to Roger Conover for being recep- tive to The Museological Unconscious, and to my daughter Masha, the author of Beauty Talk & Monsters, for her incisive editorial interventions. Lastly, I want to express my gratitude to Margarita Tupitsyn, with whom I have been privileged to engage in brainstorming “seminars” on a daily basis. Victor Tupitsyn x PREFACE INTRODUCTION: SUSAN BUCK- MORSS IN CONVERSATION WITH VICTOR TUPITSYN SUSAN BUCK- MORSS In chapter 1 [“Civitas Solis: Ghetto as Paradise”], you state that “socialist realism is not transportable.” You argue that it is necessary to interpret this artistic phenomenon within the context of Soviet experience, and you provide a blackly humorous description of communal life under Stalin. When you describe the infantilism of this communalism, I could not agree with you more. I am fully convinced by what you say. But it immediately raises the question: Why is this case unique? Why only social- ist realism? Why not other artistic movements—surrealism, say, or conceptualism, or even abstract expressionism? This leads to the second question: Isn’t art recontextual- ized every place it is shown? VICTOR TUPITSYN Socialist realism is not transportable because—unlike surrealism— it was more than just an art movement or a sensibility shared by a limited number of individuals. It was the representation of the Soviet identity addressed to a nation- wide audience that was extremely receptive. The high level of reciprocation that existed between the communal subject and socialist realist imagery presents enough evidence to believe that socialist realism does not work without communal perception. It is an inte- gral part of an immense system that is too difficult to fit into crates. Such “crating” is at the expense of socialist realism’s identificatory dimension. You can travel the paintings to Kassel or Long Island City, but you cannot transport the optical conditions required for adequate communication with those paintings. For that you need to communalize the viewer and radically change his or her sense of visual identity. There’s nothing new about recontextualization, except for our desire to museify it. In this sense we have become truly postmodern. Now, let me respond to your second question: “Isn’t art recontextual- ized every place it is shown?” Yes, but simply because recontextualizing is an art medium. Take, for example, Duchamp’s Fountain, or Darwinian theory, according to which Homo sapiens is a recontex- tualized ape. As for the correlation between conditions pertaining to recontextualization of a “text” and its translatability, it is too vague to be based on Husserl’s conviction that “as heterogeneous as the essential structures of several constituted languages or cultures may be, translation in principle is an always possible task.”1 Husserl believed in the existence of the irreducible horizon, common to all empirical contexts, and it seems to me 1 that the trust you put into recontextualization is based on the same kind of “inaccessible infra- ideal.” This is precisely what Derrida (in his introduction to Husserl’s Origin of Geometry) called “consciousness of a pure and precultural we.”2 I share his skepticism when he asks: “Are not non- communication and misunderstanding the very horizon of culture and language?”3 I might as well argue that unlike socialist realist painting or any other “work of art in the age of communal perception,” a theoretical account of it cannot be exempt from “transportability.” I am absolutely convinced that because of their sus- ceptibility to eidetic determination, interpretive strategies and intellectual reflections are perfectly convertible, even if the corresponding referents are not.

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