This Collective Action is reproduced in color on the front of A-YA 4 (1982). It reappears as the cover of Groys’s Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow, 1960–1990 (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2008) and was the transposed leitmotif of the Russian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2011.
I also saw Parallel Play: Moscow Conceptualism, 1970–1990 (Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, 2009) and subsequently Field of Action: The Moscow Conceptual School in Context (Calvert 22, London, 2011), a special adaptation of an exhibition originally held at the Ekaterina Cultural Foundation (Moscow, 2010). Today we are also informed by Groys’s new anthology of Moscow Conceptualism texts, History Becomes Form, as well as Matthew Jesse Jackson’s The Experimental Group and the Ekaterina Foundation’s exhibition catalogue Field of Action: The Moscow Conceptual School in Context, all published in 2010. Evidently all art shown, all texts read, exist in the now; interpretations and rereadings hold contemporary truths.
Our Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-sponsored MA course (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London) was called “Global Conceptualism: The Last Avant-Garde or a New Beginning?”
Romantic Conceptualism, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, BAWAG Foundation, Vienna, 2007; Expanded Conceptualism, Courtauld Institute of Art with Tate Modern, London, March 18–19, 2011. See →.
See the conference French Theory: Réception dans les arts visuels aux Etats-Unis entre 1965 et 1995 (Wiels Contemporary Art Center, Brussels, May 11–14, 2011).
Boris Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” A-YA 1 (1979): 4.
A-YA is the subject of both an MA thesis and current PhD research by Elizaveta Butakhova at the Courtauld.
See Serge Regourd, L'exception culturelle (Paris: Puf, 2004).
See Bloom, “Clinamen or Poetic Misprision,” The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19–45.
The piece was shown in Heiser’s Romantic Conceptualism (2007) and Gender Check (Vienna and Warsaw, 2009–10).
See Sarah Wilson, “Althusser, Fanti: The USSR as Phantom,” The Visual World of French Theory: Figurations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 97–122.
“Francisco Infante,” A-YA 1 (1979): 38–41. (This issue also includes Kazimir Malevich, “Concerning the Subjective and the Objective in Art and Generally,” trans. T. and A. Schmidt, 42–43.) Compare Robert Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” Artforum (September 1969): 28–33. Infante is open about his reading in Moscow’s Foreign Language Library.
“Francisco Infante,” A-YA 3 (1981): 38–40. (Also included in this issue was Igor Golomstock, “The Malevich Complex,” trans. Robert Chandler, 41–44; and K. Malevich, “To the Innovators of the Whole World,” trans. Jamey Gambrell, 45–49, which includes photographs of Malevich’s funeral.)
Wolfgang Becker, “Le conceptualisme hyperréalisé,” Art conceptuel et hyperréaliste: Collection Ludwig–Neue Galerie, Aix-la-Chapelle (Paris: Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 1974).
For all manifestations and photographs of ex-Soviet participants in many sections see “Il dissenso culturale,” La biennale: eventi del 1976–77 (Venice: 1979), 528ff, photos 826–864.
See Vsevolod Nekrassov’s “Le photoréalisme dans la peinture d’Erik Boulatov,” given at the conference Photography and Painting (Moscow, 1982) and published in Boulatov (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1988), 23. See also Boulatov’s portrait of Nekrassov, 1981–5, (p. 55) based on a photo reproduced in the literary issue of A-YA (1985).
Daniel Spoerri, Postface to Krims-Krams-Magic (Hamburg: Merlin, 1971). My translation from the French is from Daniel Spoerri (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990), 88.
V. Patsyokoc, “Project, Myth, Concept,” trans. Jamey Gambrell, A-YA 2 (1980): 3.
Confirmed in conversation with the author, October 21, 2011. See Andrei Erofeev and Jean-Hubert Martin, eds., Nonkonformisten Russland, 1957–1995, Sammlung des Staatlichen Zarizin-Museums Moskau. (The corresponding exhibition was shown in the Documentahalle Kassel &leftbracket1995&rightbracket and at Moscow’s Manege).
Interview with Mikhail Roginsky, A-YA 3 (1981): 22.
See Stephen Bann, Concrete Poetry: An International Anthology (London: London Magazine Editions, 1967). See also Elizaveta Butakhova, “Dmitri Alexandrovitch Prigov as Concrete Poet: Sculpting in Ink, Writing in Blood,” Dmitri Prigov (Zurich: Barbican Art Gallery, 2011), 273–279 (especially note 6).
Boris Groys, “Communist Conceptual Art,” Total Enlightenment, 28–34. (“Moscow Romantic Conceptualism” from A-YA 1[1979] appears unreferenced, 316–22.)
See “Vsevolod Nekrassov,” A-YA Literary Issue 1 (1985): 36–47.
“Dimitry Prigov,” A-YA 1 (1979): 52. Also in A-YA Literary Issue 1, 84–99.
See Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, “Early Visual and Polyphonic Poetry” →.
See Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin, “Early Visual and Polyphonic Poetry” →.
For reception, see Nadim Samman, “Between the Gulag and the Guggenheim: (Post-) Soviet Artists and New York in the 1980s and 1990s” (PhD thesis, Universtiy of London, 2011), Chapter 2.
See note 11 and Mikhail Aksyonov Meerson, “The Art of Socialist Realism,” trans. Catherine A. Fitzpatrick, A-YA 3 (1981): 58–59. This was preceded by Komar and Melamid, “The Role of the War Ministry in Soviet Art,” trans. Jamey Gambrell, A-YA 2 (1980): 50–53; and followed by C. Core, “Jubilee Reflections on the Academy of Arts,” trans. K. G. Hammond, A-YA 7 (1985): 52–58.
A-YA 5 (1983): 54. The poster reads “Viva Stalin, 5-3-53–5-3-76, Viva la dittatura del proletario! (See Yves Benot, L’Autre Italie (1968–1976): Problèmes de la dictature du prolétariat [Paris: Maspero, 1977]).
Deluxe Room (1981) opposite the text piece “Taking Out the Garbage Pail” (1980) in A-YA 6 (1984): 28–29. (See also Sharp-Focus Realism, Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, 1972).
Kabakov’s piece on the self-reflexive “TEXT” (in the context of his knowledge of Duchamp and Pop Art in “Semidesiatie gody,” undated manuscript) is discussed in Groys, The Total Art of Stalisnism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 86–7.
Groys, The Communist Postscript (London: Verso, 2009), xx–xxi.
Schmitt’s Political Romanticism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986 [1925]) discusses the state as Idea and as work of art (125–7).
The installation shots I showed came from Artchronica 1 (2005).
Groys, The Communist Postscript, 34.
Dmitri Olchanski, “La Russie actuelle disparaîtra dans dix ou vingt ans,” Le Courrier de Russie (April 8–22, 2011): 3.
See Jane and Louise Wilson’s Chernobyl Project (2010–11) or Eric Lusito’s photographs in After the Wall: Traces of the Soviet Empire (Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2009).
See “S.S.,” “Oleg Vassilyev,” A-YA 2 (1980): 26–31 (with Diagonal).
“Varlam Shalamov Tikhonovich,” A-YA Literary Issue 1, 124ff.
Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817.