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(Review) Avant-Garde Museology
Avant-Garde Museology is an anthology of documents, prose, fragments and experiments from the period of post revolutionary Soviet Union museum practice which until now have been dispersed and unavailable in English. The translated collection draws together ideas that share as editor Arseny Zhilyaev suggests a common theme that is the project to reconstitute the museum as an institution of hope as opposed to the old order that ordained their own ideals and objects to the cost of the majority. The unfinished project heralded in this collection – which with the advent of Stalinism reversed what achievements had been made – is an approach to the museum that is active and alive, alongside the undertaking to rebuild a fairer society. The anthology aimed at art historians, archivists and cultural theorists brings together a lightly curated selection of documents and projects. It represents a missing compendium to the movements that are recognisable as the outputs of the Russian revolution such as constructivism and social realism, and to the dominating narrative of the museum as a Western modernist enterprise. The book is divided into six sections – Museum
2018
Arseny Zhilyaev: “The experimental marxist exhibition was a complex, multilevel, conceptual installation that even for a trained spectator of the time was something like a UFO coming down from heaven.” Arseny Zhilyaev is a Russian artist based in Moscow and Venice. He is also the editor of 'Avant-Garde Museology' (2015), published by e-flux in collaboration with the V-A-C Foundation, through which Western audiences can access many key texts of Russian and Soviet museology undisclosed until today. We spoke with Zhilyaev, among others, about the heritage of cosmism, the avant-garde and Soviet museology, and how his interest in these fascinating and challenging experiments feeds his own artistic practice.
e-flux #05, 2017
If you have “avant-garde” and “museology” or “museum exhibitions” in one sentence, especially if that sentence is in English, the first name that comes to mind is El Lissitzy and his collaboration with Alexander Dorner in Hannover. Everyone who has an interest in experiments with display design has seen images of the Abstract Cabinet installed at Landesmuseum in late 1928. This masterpiece marks the limit of known ambitions for the transformation of the museum in the time associated with the young Soviet state or even the historical avant-garde. But most interpretations of the Abstract Cabinet reduce its meaning to formal innovations distinctive for Western modernism. The new concept of the museum that resulted from the combination of new social relationships and a political agenda remains unconsidered. I’d like to risk going beyond this limitation to describe the trajectory and logic of the transformation of the concept of the museum and art in general from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century in Russia and the Soviet Union.
Soviet Museology During the Cultural Revolution : An Educational Turn , 1928-1933
2017
The article examines a radical reform of Soviet art museums during the late 1920s and early 1930s both on their own distinct ideological terms, as institutions that would illustrate Marxist dialectical view of historical development, and in the context of a broader international drive to modernize art museums and turn them into primarily educational institutions accessible and attractive to the broader population. A case study of a radically innovative exhibition entitled Art on Soviet and Revolutionary Themes, organized by the young Marxist art historian and curator Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in June 1930, reveals the degree to which the Soviet art historian’s innovative and polemical curatorial approach finds parallels with the educational strategies of one of the most iconic examples of modern displays in western museums, Cubism and Abstract Art, organized by Alfred Barr, Jr. at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.
Patterns of historiography: Russian avant-garde art in curatorial practice, 1979-1992
Inside the Exhibition. Temporalità, dispositivo, narrazione, Artemide, Rome, 2022
This paper examines four exhibitions which had an immense impact on the historiography of the Russian avant-garde and fostered its canonisation: Paris-Moscou (Paris, 1979); The Avant-Garde in Russia, 1910-1930. New Perspectives (Los Angeles, 1980); Art of the Avant-Garde in Russia: Selections from the George Costakis Collection (New York, 1981) and The Great Utopia (New York, 1992-1993). By noting recurring curatorial patterns in the organisation of these retrospective displays, this essay demonstrates how the circulation of Russian avant-garde art in the postmodernist context was informed by the emphasis, widespread in Western institutions in those years, on the evolution of expressive means and the formal qualities of artworks, favouring non-figurative artistic outputs and amplifying individual narratives of defiance and martyrdom. Moreover, the study contextualises this circulation within broader cultural processes.
Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND, 2021
Our second publication in "Lesser-Known Russian Avant-Garde" series is on the first museum of modern art. Although we usually assume think that such museum was MoMA (New York, 1929), another museum called Museum of Pictorial Culture was established in 1919 and run by most important Russian avant-garde artists until its closing in 1929. In our two essays, we discuss a number of innovations this museum introduced. We also discuss museum's exhibiting methods and how they anticipate the emerging use of visualization in museum interfaces in the 21st century.
Provoking Museology: the geminal thinking of Zbynek Z. Stránský
The paper intends to make a conceptual revision of the work produced by the Czech museologist Zbyněk Zbyslav Stránský (1926–2016), referring to the period between 1965 to 1995, when he was responsible for the attempt to conceive a theory for museology. With his metatheory, this thinker aimed to defend and sustain this discipline’s scientific status. In his works, by refuting the museum as the study subject for this supposed “science”, Stránský would discuss which should be its fundamental subjects of interest in its place, creating specific concepts for museology. With the terms musealia, museality and musealization he shifts the discipline’s focus from the museum, as an instrument for a certain end, to the processes of attributing value to things. His theory generates, thus, the necessary foundation for the museological field, integrating theory and practice, and initiating a social and scientific reflection for museology. Therefore, the paper historicizes the process of configuration of disciplinary museology in Eastern Europe in order to understand what was in the base of the geminal thinking structuring this branch of knowledge and, at the same time, appointing new pathways for its future.
Traumatic Contemporaneity: Reflections on Piotr Piotrowski's Critical Museography
Baltic Worlds, 2021
This essay analyses two texts by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski (1952-2015) articulating theoretical stances towards art museography. Reflecting on how they deal with psychological as well as openly political issues, I interpret and assess their joint contribution to the broader interdisciplinary field of (critical) museography. The texts are "New Museums in New Europe" and "Making the National Museum Critical". Together the texts developed Piotrowski's concept of "the critical museum" as a way of dealing with the challenges of running an old national art museum based on masterpieces while also striving to engage with pressing contemporary issues. which is a prerequisite for critical intervention.