Moscow Conceptualists

Template:Short description The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, artistic and literary movement began with the Sots art of Komar and Melamid in the early 1970s Soviet Union, and continued as a trend in Soviet nonconformist art into the 1980s. It attempted to subvert socialist ideology using the strategies of western conceptual art and appropriation art.Template:Sfn It was an artistic counterpoint to Socialist Realism,Template:Sfn and the artists experimented aesthetically in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, performance, and literature.Template:Sfn As Joseph Bakshtein explained, "The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him. To preserve one's identity in this situation, one had to create a separate value system, including a system of aesthetic values."Template:Sfn

Overview

The central figures of the movement were Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, Viktor Pivovarov, Eric Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrski, Komar and Melamid, poets Vsevolod Nekrasov (ru), Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Anna Alchuk, Timur Kibirov, artist and prose writer Vladimir Sorokin, and also such writers as Viktor Yerofeyev and Julia Kissina.Template:Sfn

Mikhail Epstein explains why conceptualism is particularly appropriate to the culture and history of Russia, but also how it differs from Western Conceptualism:

EpsteinTemplate:Sfn quotes Ilya Kabakov:

The Moscow Conceptualist artists faced difficulties exhibiting their work in the cultural atmosphere of the late Soviet Union. At the Manezh exhibit of 1962, which featured the work of many aesthetic precursors to the Moscow Conceptualists, then-Party first secretary Nikita Khrushchev excoriated the art and artists he saw there. In 1974, at the infamous Bulldozer Exhibition, many Moscow Conceptualist artists had their work destroyed when the Soviet authorities brought in bulldozers to clear the field in which the exhibition was held. The art movement was largely ignored outside of the Soviet Union, and within it, it was confined to a narrow circle of Moscow artists and their friends.

See also

• Russian postmodernism
• Soviet nonconformist art
• Neo-conceptual art

External links

• Moscow Conceptualism. Russian Conceptual Art
• MOSCOW CONCEPTUALISM PRESENTED BY VADIM ZAKHAROV
• e-flux journal #29