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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
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
“Avant-garde art display recreations historised: Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź as a referential case?”
Muzeológia a kultúrne dedičstvo , 2021
Museums can no longer pretend to be mere containers of art or other cultural treasures; their fascinating legacy for posterity is definitely not just the respective collection, but also its idiosyncratic articulation and ulterior resignification. This essay surveys sifting trends in the re-staging of modern museographies; but instead of using New York’s MoMA as the obvious paradigm, pride of place is given here to the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (Poland). Its original Neoplastic Hall survived only from June 1948 until October 1950; but it was reconstructed ten years later, prefiguring other museographical remakes of avant-garde art displays. Thereafter, it also became, in many ways, a typical example characterising postmodern museological trends. All in all, it could perhaps be discussed nowadays in the light of critical museology as a referential case in the history of heritagised museographies.
"Where, how, by whom and for what were the first museums of contemporary art created? These are the key questions addressed by J. Pedro Lorente in this book. In it he explores the concept and history of museums of contemporary art, and the shifting ways in which they have been imagined and presented. Following an introduction that sets out the historiography and considering questions of terminology, the first part of the book then examines the paradigm of the Musée des Artistes Vivants in Paris and its equivalents in the rest of Europe during the nineteenth century. The second part takes the story forward from 1930 to the present, presenting New York's Museum of Modern Art as a new universal role model that found emulators or 'contramodels' in the rest of the Western world during the twentieth century. An epilogue, reviews recent museum developments in the last decades. Through its adoption of a long-term, worldwide perspective, the book not only provides a narrative of the development of museums of contemporary art, but also sets this into its international perspective. By assessing the extent to which the great museum-capitals – Paris, London and New York in particular – created their own models of museum provision, as well as acknowledging the influence of such models elsewhere, the book uncovers fascinating perspectives on the practice of museum provision, and reveals how present cultural planning initiatives have often been shaped by historical uses. Contents: Introduction; Part I The Parisian Musée du Luxembourg as a Paradigm in the 19th Century: The origin of the Musée des Artistes Vivants in Paris; The first emulators and alternatives to the Luxembourg; Unresolved dilemmas in the last third of the 19th century; Utopian ideas and experiments at the turn of the 19th century. Part II The Role of the MoMA of New York as the International Model of the 20th Century: Foundations and context of the MoMA's creation; MoMA's transition to adulthood amidst war and confrontations; MoMA as an international role model during the Cold War: triumph and opposition; The Pompidou Centre, a counter-model which ends up imitating MoMA; Topographic review of the new museums of contemporary art at the turn of the millennium; Epilogue; References; Index."