THE LEGACY OF MOSCOW AND LENINGRAD CONCEPTUALISM IN CONTEMPORARY CURATORIAL PRACTICES ON THE EXAMPLE OF MOSCOW CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER WINZAVOD

THE LEGACY OF MOSCOW AND LENINGRAD CONCEPTUALISM IN CONTEMPORARY CURATORIAL PRACTICES ON THE EXAMPLE OF MOSCOW CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER WINZAVOD

Mariia Korneeva

Student, Saint Petersburg State University,

Russia, Saint Petersburg

The heritage of Moscow Conceptualists is a complex system of meanings. This system reflects both the general conceptual art principles shared with their Western counterparts and also the very peculiar conditions of the existence of such art in the Soviet Union. This heritage has left its inevitable footprint in the artworks of the contemporary creators.

In order to fully comprehend the impact of Soviet conceptualists on the current creators and their artistic practices it is crucial to focus on the main characteristics of this movement.

To begin with, the primary feature of conceptual art is its attention to the role of text and language both artworks and in the human existence. This is the result of the popularity of linguistic, structuralist and post-structuralist concepts which had risen since the beginning of the 20^th century. This focus on the text and language connects the conceptual artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the USA this intention was declared by Art & Language group and their Art-Language journal as well as the renowned manifestos ‘Art After Philosophy’ and ‘Concept Art’ by Joseph Kosuth and Henry Flynt respectively [6, 7]. In the meantime one of the key underground Soviet artists Viktor Pivovarov creates his essay ‘On the Love of Words and Images’ and an art historian Boris Groys notes the importance of linguistic context for self-reflection, which is the basis of conceptual art [4, p.1].

Moreover, the extremely important idea is the concept of emptiness, which also corresponds to the American and European conceptual artworks. However, the attention to emptiness by western artists is mostly implemented by the usage of vast white spaces of museums and galleries like MoMA in New York or Kunsthalle in Bielefeld. Due to the ideological restrictions and censorship, Moscow and Leningrad conceptualists did not have such an opportunity to exhibit [2, p.3]. The infinitely white background is therefore represented by the fields and forests of Moscow oblast covered in snow. These landscapes became the constant canvas for posters and performances by the Collective Actions group (Image 1). Sheets of paper also serve as an embodiment of emptiness, therefore Moscow conceptualism is often described as book- or ever paper-centred. There is the white hollow all over the verses of Andrei Monastyrsky’s and Gennadi Aigi’s poetry (Image 2); flies, graters, mugs and other household objects are also placed in the middle of the void by Ilya Kabakov (Image 3), as if he created a communal apartment herbarium. Timur Novikov’s collages made of cheap fabric also depict tiny ships and planes navigating a land of emptiness (Image 4).

A feeling of claustrophobia may be distinguished as another important detail of Soviet conceptualism curiously combined with the emptiness mentioned above. The ‘fly series’ paintings by Ilya Kabakov possess a frame inside the picture, the closed spaces of Rimma Gerlovina’s also seem to be pieces of the void claustrophobically kept in the bigger cube (Image 5). Each of the small cubes bears a name of a certain Moscow artist (e.g. ‘Pivovarov’, ‘Komar’, ‘Melamid’), which may be viewed as a metaphorical depiction of the Soviet Union being a closed country.

The overall claustrophobic feeling corresponds with one more paramount conceptual art feature, namely the sense of escapism which permeates multiple artworks. The Collective Actions group escapes to the forest, Erik Bulatov ‘blasts’ his canvases (Image 6), making room for the blue skies, while Kabakov’s ‘Komarov’ flies away (Image 7), and even Timur Novikov’s collages depict tiny objects due to the fact that the viewer is places high above the ground [1, p. 541].

An additional characteristic of both conceptualist and underground artists in general was described by S. Savitsky as the deliberate dilettantism [9, p. 47]. The same feature was highlighted by E. Bobrinskaya as the attention to the man-made, inglorious objects, like Lev Rubinstein’s cards (Image 9) [2, p. 5], William Brui’s and Grigory Kapelyan’s metallic plates (3, p. 83) or Henry Khudyakov’s jackets adorned by badges, flyers, candy wrappers and other objects found on the New York streets (Image 18). Such amateurism seems to be a certain opposition to the government-approved, professional and pompous posters, murals and monuments which surround the Soviet citizen.

Focusing on these primary features allows us to investigate the influence of Moscow conceptualist private exhibitions on modern practices. In the beginning of 2023 Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art launched two impressive exhibitions: Cementa II and A Brief Guide to Modern Urban Mythology in Pictures and Diagrams.

The very location of Cementa II alludes to the conceptualist underground. The Excise Hall where the exhibition takes place is literally located in the basement. Even though the Winzavod center is quite a hotspot on Moscow map, going downstairs and having low ceilings above evokes the sense of belonging to a secret community, also adding the claustrophobic feeling described above.

The Cementa’s heroes are focused on the text and words, just like their predecessors; however, their toolkit seems to be richer. In The World is Simple and Whole Tatyana Pole frames a plywood sheet – a useless inglorious object – with a flowing LED (Image 10). Ilya Kabakov's and Viktor Pivovarov's school-like handwriting cursives are echoed by Yustina Komissarova in her work Letters Tangled Up in Words showing gradual loss of meaning in the sentences and turning the utterances into a cluttered tangle of curved lines (Image 11). Words and letters also help Anastasia Ivanenkova to rethink the tragic story of the German woman Emma Hauck, a life-long prisoner in a psychiatric asylum. Instead of a sheet of paper covered with her plea ‘Herzensschatzi komm’, the artist embroiders ‘Любимый, приди’ (‘Beloved, come’) on a hospital sheet. However, over a dozen pleas there is a scarlet message which demands ‘Любимый, уйди’ (‘Beloved, go away’), as if denouncing the one who is guilty of Emma's madness (Images 12, 13).

The escapist atmosphere can also be found along with the preference of the amateur craft. The wooden letters ‘I am not here’ by Vladimir Kozin appropriate the shape of a popular urban object in Russian cities: ‘I love’ with the name of the city added (e.g. Moscow, Ulyanovsk, Nizhny Novgorod). The ‘not’ is red and placed in the place of the heart in such objects, echoing the concept of emptiness (Images 14, 15).

A Concise Guide to Modern Urban Mythology in Pictures and Diagrams refers not to the underground, but to the concept of void. The exhibition is held in Fermentation Plant of the Winzavod with its white halls with high ceilings. Kirill Doeshvili turns out to be the heir of the Moscow (Prigov) and Leningrad (Novikov) conceptual poles at the same time. The echo of the city messages by ‘Dmitry Aleksanych’ permeates the artist’s welcome text, handwritten in block letters right on the walls of the A-S-T-R-A Gallery, while the tiny inhabitants of his architectural paper sheets live in a white void like the characters of Timur Novikov's collages (Images 16, 17).

Finally, in April the Pop/off/art gallery opens Ivan Simonov's solo exhibition, Text as Landscape.

Black-and-white-and-scarlet posters under the gallery’s ceiling immediately catch the eye of the viewer in the same way as it happened at the Russian Lettrism exhibition in 2009. Overall, such posters evoke the image of the Collective Actions’ posters in the forests near the Kievogorsk field. The pretentious slogans  (‘Art is eternal’, ‘A unique way’, ‘Big slogans’) remind us of the mocking red panels by Komar and Melamid. The artists would reduce the letters of the Soviet slogans to the white rectangles – with the inevitable exclamation point in the end (Images 18, 19).

The legacy of Kabakov and his total installations is visible in many of Simonov's works and their organization in the exhibition hall. In the corner of the hall there is a door with the chalk-written ‘Who is there’ (Image 20). Once a viewer stands on a chair, they discover a crowd of people in the peep hole: ‘That's all of us’. Five years ago the corners of one of the halls of the General Staff Building in St. Petersburg were occupied by The Closet and The Toilet by Ilya Kabakov. According to Kabakov, in childhood he would use these places as the only opportunity for solitude in a communal apartment. Nowadays the housing is much less of a problem yet even in your own apartment the desired loneliness is not guaranteed. The school cursive is also used in I have an offer: and offer is subjected to syntactic analysis, as during the Russian language lesson (Image 21).

Fragments of announcements like Prigov's notes surround the mailbox which is a typical picture near the door to an ordinary Russian apartment. In Soviet times the state would have a monopoly on addressing people; the twenty-first century allows it to anyone who is able to buy a printer (Image 22). Nevertheless, individual expression is still paradoxically impossible: decades ago it was forbidden, now it is drowned in the rumble of other voices. The text is mixed, imposed on each other and actually turns into a landscape; a potential reader just slides their eyes indifferently.

There is also an homage to Eric Bulatov: phrases like ‘Further more’, ‘Beautiful far away’ in Bulatov’s receding perspective are shown from the rounded windows of either buses or electric trains. The dirty windows show the outskirts of the city and the snow-covered forest, which is already known to us due to the footage of the Collective Actions performances (Images 23, 24).

It will be useful to conclude with the idea which Simonov decided to begin with. It will not be beautiful (Image 18) is a self-critical poster in the spirit of Yuri Albert (‘I am not Liechtenstein’, ‘I am not Jasper Johns’), as if characterizing the ironically weary conceptual spirit as a whole. Sol LeWitt in his ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ highlights the lack of emotion and orientation towards cognitive, intellectual perception of conceptual art. While the muses are silent, Simonov appeals to a similar seriousness.

References:

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