(Review) Avant-Garde Museology (original) (raw)
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Avant-Garde Museology, 2015
Avant-Garde Museology is the first title in e-flux classics, a new book series focusing on an emerging historical canon specific to an era when the world’s many eccentric modernities, economies of knowledge, and shared political histories seek to be recognized through contemporary art. The museum of contemporary art might very well be the most advanced recording device ever invented in the history of humankind. It is a place for the storage of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, this recording device was undertaken by a number of artists and thinkers as a site for experimentation. Arseny Zhilyaev’s Avant-Garde Museology presents a collection of crucial essays documenting the wildly encompassing progressivism of this period, by figures such as Nikolai Fedorov, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Bogdanov, Andrey Platonov and many others—several of which are translated from the Russian for the first time. While the first question for any progressive curatorial practice and museology concerns how the errant futures stored in the museum can be played back, for the authors in this compendium, the more urgent question becomes: How might the contents of the museum be reanimated so as to transcend even the social and physical limits imposed on humankind?
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.
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.
Ideology and the public art museum in post-revolutionary Soviet Russia
The victory of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution in 1917 heralded not only important political and economic changes, but the redefining of art and the museum and their mutual place within the wider culture of the new Soviet state. Unlike in Europe, the public museum was an alien concept to the ordinary Russian. The ruling class had vast collections which were microcosmic cultural worlds; art museums in all but name, and inaccessible to the public. 1 When the dust began to settle after the revolution, decrees made by Lenin and his cultural commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky indicate an awareness of the need to preserve Russia's artistic heritage. 2 This acquisition had ideological considerations, principally due to the fact that much of the art was regarded to have been produced and disseminated by the ruling classes of Europe and the revolution had destroyed this cultural hierarchy in Russia. 3 It was ultimately associated with the 'vanquished classes', while the museums that housed these collections were conceptually divorced from the proletarian's working life, who did not have time for idle leisure: the vita contemplativa. 4 The abundance of public museums after the revolution created for the first time a 'museum public', 5 something 1 Priscilla Roosevelt, 'Soviet Culture after the Revolution', which politicians were eager to capitalise on, but many in the burgeoning Bolshevik state were ideologically opposed to the continued existence of the museum and these forms of art. 6
Russian museum practice is based on the principle of the "indivisibility of a museum collection" as set out in the law on Museum Fonds and museums of the Russian Federation. The principle is the key theoretical and legal basis for museum practice in Russia; however it has faced many challenges throughout the 20 th century. These varied from the division of collections owned by museums destined to be closed and thus shared among other museums, to belligerent claims for restitution of looted or unfairly seized pieces in Soviet times. Currently, the most vulnerable point for the policy is the possible "creeping restitution" of sacred pieces from museum holdings that are being granted to churches within a return process of "religious property". This would violate the principle of indivisibility and create a disharmony between state and society, which is reflected in the disputes between museum professionals and church representatives. If the museum community does not influence the state of affairs, "creeping restitution" may be approved and deaccession policies and procedures will become less rigorous as a result. The greatest challenge is the misuse of museological terminology, full of notion substitutions, that represents a disinformation tool for society at a whole. This problem has become acute and vital in 2010. This paper reviews its history and suggests solutions.
The Museum as a Political Instrument: Post-Soviet Memories and Conflicts
2022
This book presents an elaboration of selected materials from the author’s doctoral thesis, Dissonant Memories in the Post-Soviet Space: Newly Established Museums and Political History in Russia (1991–2016), supervised by professor Luca Basso Peressut and co-supervised by professor Francesca Lanz. The thesis was successfully defended on June 30, 2020, at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano.
Transformation of the concept "museum" in the Ukrainian space
Museologica Brunensia
After the conference in Japan in 2019, museum communities of different countries discussed the transformation of the concept of "museum" and the need to change the existing definition. The article attempts to outline how the idea of "museum" was transformed among Ukrainian museum workers from the end of the 19th century till now. At this time, active museum life unfolded on Ukrainian lands, and activists sought to outline the museum's mission. The idea of this concept was modified given the change in the political situation. Special requirements for the museum as a tool of propaganda existed within the framework of the Soviet socio-political system. After Ukraine declared independence, theorists and practitioners of the museum business primarily evaluated the museum as an institution of social memory, indicating this direction's importance for Ukrainian civil society. As an official representative of the Ukrainian museum community, the Presidium of the IC...