Avant-Garde Museology e-flux Classics Avant-Garde Museology Arseny Zhilyaev, Editor Distributed by the University Published in collaboration with of Minnesota Press V-A-C Foundation CONTENTS Acknowledgments . 13 Arseny Zhilyaev Preface . 15 Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Introduction Avant-GARDE MuseoLogY: Toward a History of a Pilot Experiment . 21 Arseny Zhilyaev I Museum as Common Task The Museum, its Meaning and Mission (c. 1880s) . 59 Nikolai Fedorov The ART of ResembLance (of False Artistic Regeneration) and the ART of ReaLitY (Real Resurrection): Ptolemaic and Copernican Art (c. 1890s) . 143 Nikolai Fedorov The VORonezh Museum in 1998 (1898) . 149 Nikolai Fedorov Contents Contents the CATHERINE THE GREAT EXHIBITION II at the VORonezh RegionaL Museum The Museum of Avant-Gardism (1896) . 165 Nikolai Fedorov and Nikolai Peterson ON THE CathedRAL OF THE RESURRECTING THE MUSEUM OF ART, an EXceRpt FRom MUSEUM (1921) . 171 the noveL RED STAR (1908) . 255 Vasiliy Chekrygin Aleksandr Bogdanov THE CHURCH RITUAL AS A SYNTHESIS OF ON THE MUSEUM (1919) . 267 THE ARTS (1918) . 197 Kazimir Malevich Pavel Florensky THE MUSEUM NewspapeR: Suggestions for ON THE CReation OF A PANTHEON IN THE Regional Museums and Community Centers USSR: A Proposal (1927) . 215 (1931) . 275 Vladimir Bekhterev V. Karpov MateRIALS ON THE INSTITUTE OF BiogRAPHY AvaLANCHE EXHIBITIONS: The Experience (1920) . 223 of the Leningrad Organization of Worker-Artists Nikolai Rybnikov (1933) . 279 Leonid Chetyrkin THE REVOLUTION MEMORIAL RESERvation, AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL CHEVENGUR ON THE QUESTION OF MUSEUMS: Record of (1926 –28) . 233 the Discussion of Problems and Objectives of Andrey Platonov Fine Art Museums at the Art and Industry Board (1919) . 281 THE ASTRonomicaL OBSERvatoRY at THE Moscow Department of Museum Affairs PERM RegionaL MUSEUM (1935) . 249 V. I. Karmilov THE MUSEUM AND PROLetaRIAN CULTURE: Speech at the Meeting of the First All-Russian Museum Commission (1919) . 289 Osip Brik Contents Contents ON THE RESULTS OF THE MUSEUM AN EXPERIMENT IN MARXIST EXHIBITION- CONFERENCE (1919) . 293 MAKING at THE State TRETYakov GALLERY Nikolai Punin (1931) . 363 Natalya Kovalenskaya ON THE MUSEUM BUREAU (1920 –21) . 299 Aleksandr Rodchenko EVERYDAY LIFE OF THE WORKING CLASS FROM 1900 TO 1930 EXHIBITION: THE MUSEUM OF PAINTING CULTURE at History and Everyday Life Department of the ROZHDESTVENKA STREET, 11 (1926) . 307 State Russian Museum (1931) . 377 From Museums and Places of Interest in Moscow Valentin Kholtsov ON A MUSEUM OF INDUSTRY AND ART III (1931) . 389 David Arkin The Materialistic Museum A MUSEUM EXHIBITION OR A TheatRicaL PERFORMANCE? (1932) . 399 LENIN’S attitude TowaRD MUSEUMS N. A. Shneerson (1931) . 315 Nadezhda Krupskaya ON THE QUESTION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF EXHIBITION: Central Park of Culture and DIALecticaL MateRIALISM AND THE Leisure Exhibitions (1932) . 411 CONSTRUCTION OF THE MUSEUM (1931) . 319 I. M. Zykov Ivan Luppol MARXIST EXHIBITION METHODS FOR NatuRAL SCIENCE MUSEUMS (1931) . 341 — Boris Zavadovsky PLates PERMANENT COLLECTIONS OF FINE ART — MUSEUMS: Joint Report (1931) . 351 Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov Contents Contents IV V The Museum Outside Museum of the History of the Museum of the Revolution MUSEUMS IN INDUSTRIAL ENTERPRISES MARXISM-LENINISM IN EXHIBITIONS (1931) . 443 IN THE MUSEUMS OF REVOLUTION (1931) . 499 K. I. Vorobyov Andrey Shestakov THE EXPERIENCE OF DEVELOPING MOBILE MUSEUMS OF THE REVOLUTION (1931) . 509 EXHIBITIONS (1931) . 453 Nikolai Druzhinin Yuri Samarin A NEW EXHIBITION at THE LENINGRAD MUSEUM IN THE STREET (1931) . 469 MUSEUM OF THE REVOLUTION (1931) . 533 P. N. Khrapov Vera Leykina BRINGING THE AGITPROP-TRUCK TO THE THE MUSEUM AS A WEAPON OF CLASS SERVICE OF CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION STRUGGLE: Here and Abroad (1934) . 543 (1932) . 481 Roza Frumkina M. S. Ilkovsky THE MOBILE MODEL OF THE INSTRUCTIVE VI LABORatoRY HUT AND ITS OPERation (1935) . 489 The Atheists’ Museum I. F. Sheremet AN EXHIBITION AND PANORAMA OF THE MOSCOW CRematoRIUM (1931) . 553 A. F. Levitsky Contents THE QUESTION OF EXHIBITIONS IN Acknowledgments ANTIRELIGIOUS MUSEUMS (1931) . 557 S. P. Lebedyansky THE MUSEUM ON THE FRONTLINES OF THE I couldn’t visit the museums of revolution in Soviet times. WAR ON RELIGION (1932) . 569 But luckily, and paradoxically, Soviet history museums fully Yuriy Kogan conserved their exhibitions following the end of the Eighties. The revolution—even the word is basically forbidden and ANTIRELIGIOUS WORK at THE KLIMENT marked as pure evil in contemporary Russia—has continued TIMIRYAZEV BIOMUSEUM: Supplementary its quiet life in glass cases in the hidden but still beating heart Report (1931) . 581 of our present ideological constructs. Vorontsovsky We must admit that this duplicity is not radically new. From the beginning of the 1930s, Soviet museums hardly CHURCH PAINTING AND ITS HISTORY AS AN allowed any open discussion of the revolution outside the OBJECT OF ANTIRELIGIOUS PRopaganda canon upheld by Stalin’s History of the Communist Party of the (1932) . 587 Soviet Union. But something very deep, something connected Ivan Skulenko to the very physical organization of exhibitions—namely, the very idea of the Museum of the Revolution—continued to access the avant-garde impulse that museologists shared Authors’ Biographies . 605 with the artists of the Great October Socialist Revolution, with the Bolsheviks, and with the people who believed that Notes on the Original Publications . 615 the miracle of the proletarian revolution was possible. It’s probably similar to the way minerals hidden in the depths of the Earth, helping to sustain life on the planet, testify to the Earth’s origin and its future. This publication is a result of five years of research. Its goal is to direct attention to incredible but nearly unknown material on the exhibition experiments and radical rethink- ing of museums that occurred in Russia and the USSR at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first third of the twentieth. These various projects may, at first glance, seem isolated from each other, but in fact they have 13 ARsenY ZhiLYaev deep-rooted commonalities in their fostering of what I call avant-garde museology. Preface It is important to note that this publication doesn’t pretend to fully cover this subject or circumscribe it on a theoretical level. Born of my own artistic interest, this explo- ration of the exhibition and museum projects carried out Avant-Garde Museology is the first title to be released in e-flux by the Russian Cosmists, avant-garde artists, and Marxist classics, a new book series aiming to open the story of art to museologists is more literary than academic in its selection the full complexity and paradoxicality of artistic thought. and organization of works. But this doesn’t negate my hope The contemporary museum might be the most advanced that the subject of avant-garde museology will garner public recording device ever invented. It is a place for the storage interest as well as the interest of discourses surrounding cur- of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic rent artistic production. experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But a museum I would like to heartily thank Teresa Mavica, Anton can also be the very tomb where these projects are declared Vidokle, and Kadist Art Foundation for their limitless trust dead and laid to rest—joining other elements of the past: in the project; Dmitry Potemkin for his comprehensive sup- despotic kings and their belongings, an old order stretching port for the idea of this publication from the very begin- back centuries, perfectly preserved. This is why many artists ning and for helping to organize the material included in it; of the early Russian avant-garde in the years surrounding Anastasia Gacheva, Maria Chehonadskih, and Vlad Sofronov the 1917 October Revolution called for the destruction of for their valuable advice and commentary; Boris Groys and museums—as fortresses of history, they could only hinder Claire Bishop for their support of this book, and those with- the creation of an entirely new culture. Life, in all its vitality, out whom Avant-Garde Museology would never have seen must supersede art. the light. But artists were not the only ones who realized some- thing had to be done with the museum. Around the same — Arseny Zhilyaev time in Russia, a number of others joined artists such as Malevich in realizing that the meaning and purpose of the museum had to be reinvented. For artist Arseny Zhilyaev, these were the avant-garde museologists—a disparate group of state officials, art historians, writers, philosophers, and amateur scientists who identified the museum as a crucial site to be placed in the service of the collective production of life. While some of these thinkers are little known or com- pletely unknown, both to readers today and to each other in their own time, their placement in Avant-Garde Museology Avant-gaRDE MuseoLogY 14 15 PReface JULieta ARanda, BRian Kuan Wood, anton VidokLE alongside the encompassing influence of Vladimir Lenin, of contradictions that arose when ideas of progress came Kazimir Malevich, and Nikolai Fedorov distinguishes for the into contact with brute historical realities. And yet, the rich- first time a mature line of thinking running through early ness and character of the art and thinking that grew from Soviet society. a confrontation with these very contradictions is often flat- For Zhilyaev, the avant-garde museologists can be said tened under the weight of grand historical