The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (original) (raw)
Related papers
Russian Avant-Garde and the Environs
Aksenov and the Environs, edited by Lars Kleberg and Aleksei Semenenko, originated from a major international conference held in Sweden in 2008. The volume focuses on the somewhat lesser-known Russian avant-garde personality, Ivan Aleksandrovich Aksenov (1884–1935), an experimental Russian poet and prominent critic who was also active as a translator, and who worked both in the theatre and in the early Soviet cultural administration.
Studies in East European Thought, 2011
This article describes a logic of distinction and succession within the late-twentieth-century Leningrad-St. Petersburg cultural field, whereby consecutive intelligentsia mainstreams were replaced by their avant-garde peripheries. In this dynamic picture of socio-cultural transformations, I propose a working hypothesis of a repeated stratification of the field into an ‘official’, an ‘unofficial’, and a third ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia. This hypothesis is tested in reference to the ‘non-aligned’ groups founded by the avant-garde artist and ideologue Timur Novikov (1958–2002). Three major shifts are described: from the politicized late-Brezhnevite early 1980s to the apolitical radicalism of Novikov’s New Artists; from this anarchistic underground, through the perestroika era, to the playful ‘classicism’ of the New Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s; and from this postmodern international orientation to an arch-reactionary, neo-imperial posturing at the turn of the 2000s. Lastly, this ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia is suggested as a possible precedent, or, indeed, a model for understanding other historically significant avant-garde peripheries, which commonly seek to distinguish themselves from (often mutually-exclusive) centres.
Specters of a Marxist: Boris Arvatov and His Art of Insubstantial Presence
The Russian Review, 2023
Boris Arvatov (1896–1940?) is hardly a household name among Slavists today. Mostly known to scholars of early Soviet avant-garde art and materiality, Arvatov and his publications have been conspicuously missing in the larger field of studies of postrevolutionary culture. Writing at the time of a radical collapse of previous social conventions and aesthetic assumptions, Arvatov managed to envision new ways of connecting ideas, humans, and things. Art and byt (“daily life”) emerged in his work as productive “laboratories” to “organize people” and to bring about a “new sociality.” Focused on social genealogies of artistic forms and artistic labor, Arvatov’s theory of productivist art is a perfect example of the combination of political awareness and artistic sensitivity. Following his own slogan, he “socialized aesthetics instead of aestheticizing the social environment.” Reopening Arvatov’s legacy helps us expand the theoretical lexicon and the methodological toolbox that we have been relying on for studying artistic production, performative practices, and the organization of daily life far beyond the limits of early Soviet Russia.
The Revolutionary Aesthetics of the Second Russian Avant-Garde
Appeared in: "Russian Studies in Literature", Volume 53, 2017, Issue 2: Avant-Garde and Revolutionary Aesthetics, Routledge (Taylor & Francis), pp. 172-200. *** The text focuses on the Stiob (the Russian word for a particular form of parody) and subversive aesthetic praxis of the Second Russian Avant-Garde. In particular, Ioffe analyzes Michail Grobman’s oeuvre from the perspective of various irreverent techniques associated with the political left and the cynic tradition, drawing a conceptual parallel between the avant-garde’s life-creational outrage and Surrealist patterns of discursive terror. The author reflects on the synthetic nature of the avant-garde, which puts equal emphasis on visual and verbal arts. His analysis explores the radical artistic gesture that represents one of the unique contributions of this cultural paradigm.