TransStates: Conceptual Art in Eastern Europe and the Limits of Utopia by Ksenya A. Gurshtein A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (History of Art) in The University of Michigan 2011 Doctoral Committee: Professor Alexander D. Potts, Chair Professor Matthew N. Biro Associate Professor David T. Doris Assistant Professor Benjamin B. Paloff © Ksenya A. Gurshtein 2011 To my parents ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are a large number of people whom I have to thank for making the existence of this dissertation possible. First among them is Alex Potts, who in the first three years of graduate school was a wonderful professor and mentor to me. As my advisor and the chair of my dissertation committee in the last three, he offered advice and feedback that were instrumental in shaping my research and writing. I consider it a great honor to have had my thinking about both art history as a discipline and individual works of art be so thoroughly informed over the years by Alex’s insight and erudition. I am also deeply grateful to the three other members of my dissertation committee for their feedback and support. Matt Biro and David Doris have been valuable teachers to me in my time at the University of Michigan, and I appreciate the perspectives they brought to the project. I am also deeply indebted to Benjamin Paloff for taking an interest in my work and pointing out numerous connections that will provide me with further avenues for investigation. Finally, I would also like to thank Ray Silverman for indirectly but powerfully shaping the dissertation project by influencing the way I conceive both art’s social function and my own professional future. Being a part of the Museum Studies Program that Ray heads along with Brad Taylor at the University of Michigan was a singularly formative part of my graduate education. My research took me to Ljubljana, Moscow, and New York, and in all three places, I encountered great personal and professional generosity that made working on iii the dissertation both possible and personally meaningful. Those who shared their thoughts and memories with me during my time in Slovenia include Marko and Marika Pogačnik, Tomaž Šalamun, Naško Križnar, Iztok Geister, Matjaž Hanžek, Andraž Šalamun, Tomaž Brejc, Borut Vogelnik, and Miran Mohar. To all of them, I want to express my deepest gratitude for their time and trust, coupled with a hope that I have done justice to their stories. The same is true of my interactions with Milenko Matanović and David Nez, who made it so thoroughly worthwhile to take special trips to Seattle and Portland, respectively. My research in Ljubljana would also have been impossible were it not for the professionalism and good will of the staff of Moderna Galerija. I am very grateful to its director, Zdenka Badovinac, for encouraging me to pursue the project when I first came to Ljubljana, and to Igor Španjol, Jana Ferjan, Bojana Rogina, Maja Finžgar, Tomaž Kučer, and in particular Mojca Štuhec for facilitating my work with the museum’s archival materials and collections. I am also very grateful to Jurij Meden for his efforts as the editor of my article on OHO’s films in the journal Kino!, which also led to a much deeper analysis of the films in the dissertation. Finally, I want to pay a particular debt of gratitude to Igor Zabel, the curator at Moderna Galerija whom I never got a chance to meet due to his untimely death, but without whose decade-long engagement with OHO’s work and legacy they would surely not have become known to me. In my time in New York and Moscow, I was delighted to have the chance to interview Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, Viktor Skersis, Vadim Zakharov, Yuri Albert, and Anna Roshal-Fyodorova. It is, again, my hope, that they will find my dissertation to be a valuable contribution to the literature on Moscow Conceptualism. I iv am also deeply grateful to Mary Nicholas for her enthusiasm and encouragement over the course of the last two years. The Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum’s Dodge Collection and the archives that are part of it was another important resource access to which I deeply appreciated. For their help and encouragement there, I would like to thank Marilyn Symmes, Leslie Kriff, fellow graduate students Andrew Scruggs, Olena Martynyuk, and Allison Leigh- Perlman, and in particular curators Jane Sharp and Julia Tulovsky, working with whom in other contexts has been my pleasure. I would also like to thank Mary Nicholas and Jane Sharp separately for encouraging me to participate in the ASEEES conference in the Fall of 2010. The feedback I received on my presentation there was very helpful in improving the chapters on Komar and Melamid. Similarly, I would like to extend my thanks to Nariman Skakov at Stanford for inviting me to present at the Slavic Languages and Literatures Colloquium in the Spring of 2011. Writing that talk and receiving feedback on it was another occasion that allowed me to rethink and refine the second half of the dissertation. My work on the dissertation was generously supported by the Department of the History of Art and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan, who awarded me several fellowships that made sustained and continued progress possible. I am particularly grateful to the Forsyth family for endowing in the Department of the History of Art the Forsyth Dissertation Fellowship, which gave me funding during the early stages of work on the dissertation. The Summer Foreign Language Area Studies grant from the U.S. Department of Education made it possible for me to become near fluent in Slovene. The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies made v entering graduate school during my first year much easier. The final year of my work on the dissertation was spent at the Getty Research Institute, and I am deeply grateful to this institution for awarding me a predoctoral fellowship during its Display of Art theme year. Every single staff member I encountered at the GRI made being there a delight, and access to the GRI’s Special Collections helped me to widen considerably the scope of my thinking and understanding of the historical period I cover in the dissertation. Conversations with GRI curators Nancy Perloff and John Tain, along with many other art historians who work at the GRI, as well as with fellow scholars Anthony Fontenot, Jenni Sorkin, Lucy Bradnock, Atreyee Gupta, Adriano Aymonino, Weihong Bao, Olivier Lugon, Ann Thomas, and Saloni Mathur gave me consistently valuable food for thought, while Isabelle Flour proved to be a wonderful partner in both late-night writing marathons and non-academic pursuits. The staff and faculty at the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan make up yet another group of people who have been a source of help, insight, and inspiration through all of my time in graduate school. I am grateful to Deirdre Spencer, Myrtle Hudson, and Debbie Fitch for the both expert and friendly way in which they run the Fine Arts Library and handle graduate student affairs. I am grateful to the members of the History of Art faculty whose expertise, methodological savvy, and dedication to teaching prepared me to become a researcher myself. Stella Nair, Fernando Lara, Jacqueline Francis, Rebecca Zurier, and Jorella Andrews both opened up new realms of knowledge for me and offered models for the kind of teacher I myself might hope to become. Also, a special thank you is due to professor Betsy Sears, whose indefatigable efforts in her capacity as the department’s vi Director of Graduate Studies were awe-inspiring. My friends and peers have been deeply valued sources of support, encouragement, and advice over the years. At Michigan, my gratitude for their friendship goes in particular to fellow art historians Beth Horwitz, Kirsten Olds, Monica Huerta, Rebecca Bieberly, Kathy Zarur, Chris Coltrin, Elissa Park, Phil Guilbeau, Melanie Sympson, Marin Sullivan, Megan McNamee, Bea Zengotitobengoa, Candice Hamelin, and Anna Wieck. In my time in Ann Arbor, living and talking with Olivia Bustion and Libby Boulter made my life rich, and I am grateful to them for helping me make it through those long winters. While living in London, I was delighted to find similar- minded people in Klara Kemp-Welch and Milena Tomic. In Moscow, Natasha Milovzorova was first a wonderful colleague and then a deeply appreciated friend. Yelena Kalinsky has been a gift in terms of both shared intellectual interests and great personal kindness. And even though I met Josh Saxe towards the end of my work on the dissertation, his unflagging support, interest, patience, and willingness to engage me in intelligent conversation about my work, as well as help edit it, were things that I deeply appreciated and that made the final push less of an ordeal. Finally, I have to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, Olga Vorobieva and Alex Gurshtein, to whom I have also dedicated the dissertation. They have supported me over the years in innumerable practical ways as I pursued the study of art history, doing everything from making it financially possible to take on unpaid museum internships to e-mailing me hundreds of scanned pages while I was living abroad. More importantly, they gave me the capacity for inquisitiveness and persistence, along with their blessing to pursue my dreams and hunches. For this, as much else, I will always be in their debt. vii CONTENTS DEDICATION ………………………………………………...………………………… ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………..iii LIST OF FIGURES …………………………………………..………………………… xi ABSTRACT.…………………………………………………………………...……… xix INTRODUCTION ………...………………………………………...……………….….. 1 Defining Global Conceptualisms………………………………………………….3 Defining Eastern Europe…………………………………………………....……18 Collective Work………………………………………………………………….23 Art, Biography, and the Limits of Utopia………………………………………..26 CHAPTER I.