On the cover: Collective Actions, The Third Variant, 1978, detail.

• Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle

  Preface

• Boris Groys

  Introduction—Global Conceptualism Revisited

  I would argue that from today’s perspective, the biggest change that conceptualism brought about is this: after conceptualism we can no longer see art primarily as the production and exhibition of individual things—even readymades. However, this does not mean that conceptual or post-conceptual art became somehow “immaterial.” Conceptual artists shifted the emphasis of artmaking away from static, individual objects toward the presentation of new relationships in space and time.

• Ekaterina Degot

  Performing Objects, Narrating Installations: Moscow Conceptualism and the Rediscovery of the Art Object

  But Moscow art of the ’70s inhabited an upside-down world, one defined by the victory of anticapitalism rather than the victory of communism, socialism, or the Soviet regime. Today’s—partly utopian, partly routine—critical “politics of resistance” was their everyday life, the official discourse they had to negotiate; they were born into it and worked with it. It is their sober and dialectically quirky reflection on the conditions after the victory (and subsequent Thermidorian degeneration) of a social and aesthetic alternative that Moscow Conceptualism has to offer a contemporary audience.

• Terry Smith

  One and Three Ideas: Conceptualism Before, During, and After Conceptual Art

  I think that we are getting close to the core of conceptualism worthy of the name, and to the basis of its appeal to serious young artists today: it is something to do with rigor, without cause, and with implacable commitment in the face of meaninglessness.

• Keti Chukhrov

  Soviet Material Culture and Socialist Ethics in Moscow Conceptualism

  No matter what the conceptual work concentrates on—pure text, subversion, documentation, intervention, or animated situations (as in Hélio Oiticica’s parangolés)—the prevalence of index semiology makes conceptual work a machine that always preserves the gap between two correlated elements. What is most important in the indexicality of a conceptual work is this disjunctive gap that remains despite the act of correlation.

• Anton Vidokle

  Art without Work?

  It seems to me that art resides within and in between subjects, and subjects don’t always require work to produce themselves. For example, falling in love, or having a religious or aesthetic experience does not require work, so why should art require work to come into being?

• Sarah Wilson

  Moscow Romantic Exceptionalism: The Suspension of Disbelief

  Analysis of the movement by non-participants tends to follow the materialist, formalist pragmatism of secular American art history and American conceptual art (bearing in mind its absorption of French phenomenology and “theory” during the 1960s and 1970s). The philosophical, mystical background implicit in the Russian mind-set is hardly explained; it remains the “untransmissible secret.”

• Claire Bishop

  Zones of Indistinguishability: Collective Actions Group and Participatory Art

  After the controversial Bulldozer exhibition of September 1974 (in which an exhibition of unofficial art was destroyed by bulldozer), cultural authorities decided to regulate and legalize their relationships with “underground” art via the State Committee for Security (KGB). Most unofficial art was exhibited inside private apartments, forcing a convergence of art and life that surpassed what the majority of twentieth-century avant-gardists had ever intended by this term.

• Jörg Heiser

  Moscow, Romantic, Conceptualism, and After

  What I’m trying to aim at is a question about the relationship between the “inwardness” of the artistic, poetic self and “outwardness”—an orientation to something beyond artistic communication—and the way in which that relationship is situated for a respective political paradigm in the public sphere. What kinds of encounters between people are really possible, what is the possibility of intimacy?