This essay forms part of a chapter in my forthcoming book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2011).
“The spectacle exists in a concentrated or a diffuse form depending on the necessities of the particular stage of misery which it denies and supports. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery ... If every Chinese must learn Mao, and thus be Mao, it is because he can be nothing else. Wherever the concentrated spectacle rules, so does the police.” Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), sections 63 and 64.
Of course, memories of class difference were not entirely erased. In “The Power of the Powerless,” Václav Havel speaks of his social awkwardness at having to work in a brewery in the mid-1970s (Havel, Open Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), 173–4). The artist Vladimír Boudník (1924–68) worked in a print factory and declared, a good decade before Joseph Beuys did, that everyone was an artist. He viewed his art as having an educative mission: he produced work in the streets (late 1940s–50s), finding images in peeling paint and stains on walls, occasionally adding to them, and framing them (for example with paper), before encouraging passers-by to converse with him about their meaning. See Vladimír Boudník (Prague: Gallery, 2004). Mílan Knížák was aware of Boudník’s work, and some of his early actions make reference to everyday workers. For example, Anonymous (1965) involved scattering the following script in the street: “1. A HAPPENING for street sweepers and janitors. 2. ENVIRONMENT for pedestrians. 3. DELIGHT for the creator, resulting from the action.” See Milan Knížák, Actions For Which at Least Some Documentation Remains, 1962–1995 (Prague: Gallery, 2000), 73.
The socialist calendar in Slovakia, for example, included organized mass parades for Victorious February (February 25), International Women’s Day (March 8), International Workers’s Day (May 1), Liberation Day (May 9), International Children’s Day (June 1), Nationalization (October 28), and the Great October Socialist Revolution (November 7). See Mira Keratova, “Vivez sans temps mort,” Transforming 68/89 (Berlin: Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, 2008), 528–37. For the Yugoslav context, see Branislav Jakovljevic, “Balkan Baroque: Yugoslav Gestural Culture and Performance Art,” 1968–1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change, eds. Claire Bishop and Marta Dzeiwańska (Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 31–50.
Andrei Erofeev, “Nonofficial Art: Soviet Artists of the 1960s” (1995), Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s, eds. Laura J. Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 42. See also William J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1995), Chapter 10.
Groys, conversation with the author, New York, January 28, 2010.
“The communal apartment is a place where the social dimension occurs in its most horrifying, most obtrusive, and most radical form, where the individual is laid bare to the gaze of others. Furthermore, this gaze belongs to largely hostile strangers who consistently exploit their advantages of observation in order to gain advantage in the power struggle within the communal apartment.” Boris Groys, “The Theatre of Authorship,” Ilya Kabakov: Installations 1983–2000, Catalogue Raisonné Vol. 1, ed. Toni Stoos (Kunstmuseum Bern: Richter Verlag, 2003), 40.
According to an interview with Monastyrsky in Flash Art (October 2005): 114. The initial group consisted of Nikia Alekseev, Georgii Kizevalter, Andrei Monastyrsky, and Nikolai Panitkov, later joined by Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, and Sergei Romashko. On the literary aspects of Moscow Conceptualism, Kabakov has noted the central role of the Russian literary tradition of the nineteenth century: “Literature took upon itself all moral, philosophical, pedagogical, and enlightening functions, concentrating them all in itself and not simultaneously in the plastic arts, which did happen in the West.” Kabakov, “On the Subject of the Local Language,” in Kabakov, Das Leben Der Fliegen (Berlin: Edition Cantz, 1992), 237.
Viktor Misiano, “Solidarity: Collective and Collectiveness in Contemporary Russian Art,” in WHW, Collective Creativity (Kassel: Fridericianum, 2005), 185.
It should be noted that CAG also designed actions for individuals or pairs; for example, For N Panitkov (Three Darknesses), 1980; For G Kizevalter (Slogan-1980), 1980; The Encounter, 1981; For N Alekseev, 1981. It was rarer for actions to take place in private apartments (Playback, 1981) or in the city streets (Exit, 1983; The Group, 1983).
Monastyrsky refers to this as a psychological state of “pre-expectation,” created through the form of the invitation and through the spatio-temporal peculiarities of the journey to the site of the event. See Monastyrsky, “Preface to the First Volume of Trips to the Countryside,” Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960–1990, ed. Boris Groys (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle/Hatje Cantz, 2008), 335.
“And yet, if the experience so far was that of pure expectation, this experience now transforms upon the appearance of the object of perception on the real field. It is interrupted, and there begins a process of strenuous looking, accompanied by the desire to understand what this object means. In our view, this new stage of perception constitutes a pause. While it is a necessary stage in the process of perception, it is by no means the event for the sake of which all of this was arranged” (ibid., 336).
Ibid., 333.
Andrei Monastyrsky, “Seven Photographs,” trans. Yelena Kalinsky, available at → (last accessed July 23, 2009).
Ibid.
Ibid.
This, reports Kabakov, was unusual in setting up a particular experience of expectation: “one was going there with the idea of participation, and one was wondering what would happen” (Ilya Kabakov, “Ten Appearances,” in Kollektivnye deistviya, Poezdki za gorod [Moskva: Ad marginem, 1998
Ibid., 151–2.
Andrey Monastyrsky, “Ten Appearances” (1981), reprinted in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London: Whitechapel and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 129.
This is what I understand him to mean by the following dense sentence: “The fact that of the ten possible appearances only eight, and not all ten, came to pass, represents in our view not a failing of the action but, on the contrary, underscores the realization of zones of psychic experience of the action as aesthetically sufficient on the plane of the demonstrational field of the action as a whole” (ibid). This is corroborated by Kabakov’s more amenable narrative: “I had some space of freedom and I had to make up my mind what to do then. But actually, I had no doubt or speculation about what to do—to leave, etc.—not at all. What I wanted to do immediately was to share this joy I experienced with the others, and also thank those people who made it happen for me” (Kabakov, “Ten Appearances,” 153).
Viktor Tupitsyn: “The same happens in combat: while you’re in the thick of it, everyone is so busy with the ‘physical stuff’ that all kinds of hermeneutic activities are foreclosed. Later, though, this void is going to be filled with interpretations, whose excessiveness will compensate for the lack of interpretation at the site of Action.” Monastyrsky: “Exactly! ... Quite a number of texts about our Actions were composed by both spectators and organizers, who were equally fond of writing down what had really happened—first Kabakov, followed by Leiderman, and then by Bakshtein and others. They were impelled to do so in order to compensate for the impossibility of commenting on and interpreting the Actions as they occurred.” Tupitsyn and Monastyrsky, unpublished interview, 1997, archive of Exit Art, New York.
English translations of the works and photo-documentation can be found at → (last accessed July 23, 2009).
Groys, “Communist Conceptual Art,” in Groys, Total Enlightenment: Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960-1990 (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle/Hatje Cantz, 2008), 33.
Groys, in Claire Bishop and Boris Groys, “Bring the Noise,” Tate Etc. (Summer 2009): 38.
Tupitsyn and Monastyrsky, unpublished interview, 1997, archive of Exit Art, New York. However, it’s worth noting that Monastyrsky goes on to assert (contra Groys) that CAG sought to erase the distinction between work of art and spectator and with it the critical distance that might constitute the political:
The snowy fields have variously been compared to Malevich’s White Paintings and the white pages of Kabakov’s albums. It is worth noting that CAG was not the first to use white fields as the site for art: Francisco Infante had also deployed the field as a backdrop for photo-conceptualist works in the late 1960s, such as Dedication (1969), a Malevich-style constructivist composition made of coloured papers on white snow.
Sergei Sitar, “Four Slogans of ‘Collective Actions,’” Third Text 17:4 (2003): 364.
Tupitsyn and Monastyrsky, unpublished interview, 1997, archive of Exit Art, New York.
Cited in “Serebrianyi Dvorets,” a conversation between Ilya Kabakov and Victor Tupitsyn, Khudozhestvennyi Zhurnal No. 42 (2002): 10–14. Cited in Viktor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post-)Modernism in Russia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 70.
Kabakov, “Ten Appearances,” 154. Translated by Anya Pantuyeva.
See for example the interview with Joseph Beuys undertaken by two Russians, V. Bakchahyan and A. Ur, in the samizdat magazine A-YA at the time of Beuys’s Guggenheim retrospective. Their questions make explicit their wariness of art having anything to do with social change, since the work of the avant-garde post-1917 was so flagrantly co-opted by political officials to be a harbinger of communism: “Our Russian experience shows that to flirt with politics is dangerous for an artist ... Aren’t you afraid that the artist who’s inside you is being conquered by the politician?” (V. Backchahyan and A. Ur, “Joseph Beuys: Art and Politics,” A-YA 2 (1980): 54–5).