Moscow Conceptualism, or, The Visual Logic of Late Socialism Victor Tupitsyn. The Museological Unconscious; Communal (Post) Modernism in Russia. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. 544 pp., 90 b/w ills. 134.95

Boris Groys. History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. 224 pp.. 92 b/w ills. $27.95

Matthew Jesse Jackson. The Experimenta) Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Cardes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 356 pp., 54 color ills., 86 b/w.55

The Soviel Union occupies, a curious plane in die history of twentiedi-century art. Prominent in standard accounts of prewar modernism, die Russian-cum-Soviet avantgarde of tlie 19105 and 19205 also plays a pivotal role in both the history and the historiography of postwar art. During ie 1960s, Russia's avant-garde was an important touchstone for artists such as CarlAndre and Dan Flavin, who saw in the constructions of Vladimir Tadin and Aleksandr Rodchenko a welcome alternative to the then-dominant model of high modernism. Later, beginning with the 1974 publication (and 1984 English translation) of Peter Burger's Theory of the ¿yam-Garde, Russian Constructivism and Productivism became common reference points in discussions of the relationship between die historical and neo-avant-gardes. During the late 19705 and 19805, as die Soviet Union spun toward its demise, meditations on tie historical significance of the Soviet avant-garde cropped up repeatedly in the pages of Western art publications - including, of course, October, named after the October Revolution. In short, the Soviet Union was a constant presence in the story of modern art as it unfolded and came to be understood in Western Europe and the United States - constant but spectral, however, since references to Soviet art invariably invoked the historical avant-garde rather than any more recent developments. The cultural landscape of the contemporary USSR - viewed dismissively as a land of misunderstood Marxism, "bureaucratic socialism."

pervasive censorsliip, and bland, state-sponsored art - was little known, its visual production of little apparent interest.

We find ourselves today at a dislance of twenty years from the Soviel collapse. Widi the twentieth century also receding into history, now is perhaps an appropriate time to ask what was happening artistically in Russia during just those years - from the 19605 through the 19805 - when Western artists and commentators were developing a deep, critical engagement with the Soviet past. Fortunately, three new books on iatetwentieth -century Russian art provide the beginnings of an answer: a study of Ilya KabaJfov and his milieu by (he art historian Matthew Jesse Jackson; a collection of critical essays on Moscow Conceptualism and related practices by the philosopher, curator, and critic Boris Groys; and a compilation of historical writings, critical commentary, and personal reflections on Soviet and postSoviet Russian art by the independent scholar and critic Victor Tupitsyn.

That each of the three authors is of a radically different critical bent is a boon rather than a hindrance to our understanding of the common terrain they chart. Those familiar with the theoretical verve of Groys 's writings - especially Tk Total Art ofStalinism. which draws a straight line between the avant-garde's desire to reshape society and Stalin s accomplishment of this "artistic" feat - will not be stunned to hear that his is the roost provocative account. The fourteen essays of his book advance strong, often surprising theses about Soviet and Russian art, framed in terms culled from fields ranging from economics (the Western market economy versus the Soviet "symbolic economy") to religion ("blasphemous" uses of official imagery) Io anthropology (Conceptualism s relation to the Polynesian gift practices studied by Marcel Mauss and Claude Lévi-Strauss). Tupitsyn 's approach, while also unorthodox, is more eclectic and wide-ranging, deploying a dizzying array of interpretive models across a broader and more diverse selection of Works. In contrast to Groys, who focuses on how unofficial artists grappled actively with Soviet ideoiogy and the culture it produced, Tupitsyn is more attentive to how ideology worked upon artists, emphasizing the impact of deep-seated psychological factors on thenwork. Jackson, meanwhile, takes the most scholarly path, providing a monographic account of Kabakov's early career nested within a deeply informative cultural history of Moscow 's artistic underground. Although the three authors overlap considerably (though not completely) in the material they cover, their different emphases and inclinations make for vastly different studies.

Providing a focal point for all three accounts, Moscow Conceptualisai has long been recognized by Russian artists and critics as the most important Russian art movement of the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, only a few of its key figures - notably Kabakov and the collaborative duo of Vilaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. and, more recently, Andrei Monastyrski. founder of the Collective Actions group - have achieved strong international reputations. According to Tupitsyn, the tepid response of international authences to Moscow Conceptualism, and to late twentieth-century Russian art more generally, can be attributed to die fact that the Soviet Union had its own, highly idiosyncratic regime of seeing - a "communal optic" that is difficult for outsiders to comprehend, Tupitsyn develops this concept in the first chapter of his book, explaining that the Soviet ideological apparatus sought to abolish bourgeois individualism through ps)cho]ogical]y manipulative rhetorical strategies - "communal speech" and communalizing images - that urged people to regard themselves as part of a larger social body. Constant subjection ?? these collectivizing forms of address was at the heart of Soviet experience, says Tupitsyn; therefore, any attempt to understand Soviet alternative art must attend to bodi the conscious and the subconscious ways in which artists responded to "the imperative of seeing through the eyes or on behalf of the 'collective other'" (ix).

Questions about the relationship between the individual and the "collective other" also come strongly to bear on Tupitsyn 's writing, which teems with references to giants of the Western theoretical canon. In an interview with Susan BuckMorss included at the beginning of die book, Tupitsyn contends that these familiar figures - Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Gules Deleuze. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and JeanFrancois Lyotard, among others - serve at least as much an evocative as an interpretive function in the text, their combined presence conjuring the overcrowded, cooflictuaJ annosphere of a Soviet communal apartment. Sadly, the humor and self-reflexivity of Tupitsyn 's performative approach to citation are likely to be lost on many readers, who will instead see his copious, often superficial references as a nervous bid for legitimacy. (There is, of course, some truth to this, as Tupitsyn himself freely admits.)

In keeping with Uns plethora of references, the book's title is a clear nod to both Fredric Jameson's The Politico! Unconscious and Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious. Strangely, however, it is not until Chapter io that Tupitsyn deploys his concept oí' a "museological unconscious." In the Soviet Union, he explains, avant-garde practices of institutional ,subversion and critique did not obtain, since there were no institutions dedicated to contemporary an. Thus, rather than challenging the norms of museums, unofficial artists sought to compensate for "the absent museum of contemporary art" through various practices of self-institution - alization (234). Taking on the additional roles of viewer, collector, archivist, curator, critic, and connoisseur, artists became the infrastructure they lacked, a process that Tupitsyn calls the "museißcation of the individual's inner world" (234). In a sense, this "rnuseification" of the self represented a withdrawal of avant-garde ambition into the realm of the psyche, as the dream of transforming life through art yielded disenchanted)y to "the ability to perceive life as a work of art" (234).

Tupitsyn 's second chapter. "Communal (Post) Modernism: A Short History," sets forth what is by far the best concise account of Russian post -Stalinist art yet to appear in print, hi a scant thirty pages, Tupitsyn chronicles the emergence of an artistic underground in Moscow during the cultural "thaw" of die late 19505 and early 19605; the abandonment ofWestern-inspired modernist practices and emergence of more critical local models during the late 19605 and 19705; and the consolidation of a tight-knit, multigenerational community of Conceptualises in Moscow during die late 19705 and 19805. He also traces die cycles of relative freedom and repression that artists experienced under the watch of Soviet officials, who for decades alternated unpredictably between censorious and laissez-faire attitudes toward nonconforausm.The chapter closes with a discussion of transformations in Russia's an landscape under Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing policies of glasnpst and peiestraika, which presented artists for the first time with bodi the opportunities and the pressures of the art market and new, international horizons of reception.

In "Moscow Communal Conceptualism," his third chapter, Tupitsyn introduces several of the most influential Conceptualists; Kabakov. Kornar and Metamid, and Monastyrski. According to Tupitsyn, all diese artists were centrally concerned with the phenomenon of "communal speech," but they examined it from different angles. Whereas Komar and Melamid sought to dismantle the lofty, communalizing rhetoric of die Soviet propaganda machine, demonstrating its failure to speak for anyone despite its claims to speak for all, Kabakov turned his attention to die mundane conversations about chores and household affairs typically held in Moscow's communal apartments. Monastyrski, meanwhile, took a third path, seeking through collaborative projects to develop a new language of elective community that would provide an alternative to both the authoritarian and the quotidian regimes of collective discourse. These analytical approaches inspired other artists in Moscow to begin working in a nonretinal, discursive vein, setting the course of unofficial art for many years to come.

Tupilsyn's remaining essays are more narrowly focused. In Chapter 4, "Icons of Iconodasm," the author uses a Lacanian lens to examine subversive appropriations of Soviet official imagery In the strain of Moscow Conceptualism known as Sots art (a term linking the Russian word for Socialist Realism, soisreotízm, to Pop art). Other chapters center on photography, alternative art in St. Petersburg, and the work of female ConcepEualists. In his final chapters, Tnpitsyn lakes a hard view of the contemporary art context, criticizing post-Soviet art practice as well as enduring miscommunications between the Russian and Western art worlds. Here he indicts recent Russian artists, especially the so-called tdesnikî of die 19905 - sensational acuonists such as Oleg Kulik and Aieksandr Brener - for abandoning the criticality of their Conceptualist forbears and engaging instead in affirmative antics for Russia's nouveaux riches. Turning to problems of intercultural communication, Tupitsyn condemns acts of "reckless recontextualization" such as the Guggenheim's loo? Russia! exhibition, which, in failing to provide any sense of context, transform cultural specificities into "different regimes of spectacle" (284, 285).

The issue of cultural legibility is also of concern to Groys, who, in the introduction to his compendium, underscores the status of Moscow Conceptualism as an enlightening record of "a certain period of modern history - namely, the history of realization of the Communist project" (3). Spanning the period from 1979 to 2008, nearly all of the essays in Groys 's book have already appeared in print, though not always in English or in publications easy to locate. Following the introduction, which discusses the Conceptualists' imaginative engagement with "universal art history" and the figure of the modern artist, the book divides neatly into two parts (13). The first four essays seek to identify and theorize common threads in late and post-Soviet an practice, while die remaining ten discuss individual artists and artists' groups, Of this latter group of essays, four are dedicated to Kabakov and two to me Medical Hermeneutics group, while the remaining four address the work of Monastyrski, Boris Mikhailov, Grisha Bruskin, andAlexander Kosolapov. This distribution is radier lopsided, reflecting Groys 's personal and professional engagements radier than any concerted attempt to provide an overview of Conceptualist practice. Moreover, as Groys concedes in his introduction. Bruskin and Kosolapov were never really part of the Conceptualist circle; nor, arguably, was Mikhailov. Groys Justifies, his inclusion of these quasi-oudiers by citing their shared interest in "an artistic analysis of Soviet culture" - an accurate assessment, to be sure, but this inclusiveness risks confusing the historical picture, especially since many indisputable Conceptualists, such as Yuri Albert and Vadim Zakharov, are mentioned only in passing, if at all (9).

Groys 's writings on Conceptualism. while diverse, include a handful of recurring themes, which die current volume makes evident for me first time. Prominent among diese is the notion of "privatization," elaborated most fully in the book's second essay, hi the Russian context, the term "privatization" refers to die transfer of state-owned properties into private hands following the Soviet collapse. Groys transposes this concept into psychological territory, arguing that the space of Soviet ideology was equally subject to private appropriations, and that many works of late and post-Soviet art can be understood as examples of this process. A second recurring motif is the notion of a "symbolic economy." Because there was no such thing as an an market in the Soviet Union, says Groys, the "value" of a work of an was not its price, but the degree of "social recognition and political acceptance" it accrued through official "theoretical, philosophical, ideological, or art historical commentary" (69. 83). Recognizing the paramount importance of discourse in determining art's status, ConceptuaUst artists positioned their work both within and against the Soviet symbolic economy by making deconstructive explorations of discursive processes integral to their practice.

In comparison toTupitsyu. Groys places far fess emphasis on the Soviet communal mindset and far more on problems of artistic self-definition. His essays on Kabakov are especially illuminating in this regard. In "Ilya Kabakov: The Artist as Storyteller." Groys asserts thai the isolation of Soviet unofficial artists from international art processes rendered them indifferent to ideas of art-historical necessity and progress. Instead, they saw the history of modern art as a "panorama" of equally valid options, and most simply gravitated toward what they liked best, creating derivative works based on Western precedents. Kabakov, however, took a more distanced approach, using his work to analyze "the actual psychological position of contemplating the panorama" (88). In so doing, he developed J critica) rehiionship to Western art history that differed drastically from his colleagues' intuitive borrowings, ha two later essays, "The Theater of Authorship" and "The Utopìa of Painting," Groys describes Kabakov 's experiments with "the fictionality of authorship." arguing that die artist's use of avatars and a neutral illustralìonal style, among other strategies, "made explicit the deep déstabilisation of individual authorship that official Soviet art had always implicitly practiced" (125. 132).

Whereas Groys 's and Tupitsyn's essays are, for the most part, thematically driven. Jackson's book is a cohesive art -historical study that proceeds more or less chronologically. This integrated format, together with Jackson's targeted discussion of specific works and attention to historical detail, makes The Experimental Croup noe onìy the most accessible of the three texts, but also the most concretely informative book on the Moscow Conceptualisi milieu to date. Jackson's lucid, engaging prose further recommends his study, especially to readers seeking an introduction to Soviet unofficial art. However, tins is neither a comprehensive nor a neutral history, and Jackson's monographic focus on Kabakov necessarily shades bis discussion of other artists and tendencies.

Jackson is particulariy adept at both describing and conjuring the distinctive blend of criticality and pathos that forms the core of Kabakov 's practice, hi Chapter ?, for example, he recounts Kabakov 's struggle, as a young artist having just completed his official education at Moscow's Surikov Institute of An, to create a large, ambitious painting thai would rival the accomplishments of Pablo Picasso and other modern masters. Kabakov- worked on chis project for years, calling it his "masterpiece," but ultimately abandoned it in frustration, never again to attempt such painterly heroism. Jackson identifies this moment as a decisive one for the history of Soviet unofficial ari. since it marked Kabakov 's break with the uncritical modernism then dominating the Moscow scene. "Obviously," he writes, "something stale and nostalgic permeated [Kabakov 's 'masterpiece'], as if modernist painting were being travestied. As if Kabakov belatedly realized that his position in Moscow in 1961 existed outside the modernity to which this sort of modernism had once responded" ( 32) .

In the following chapters, Jackson traces Kabakov 's movement, in the wake of his catasíjophic fliraijon with modernism, toward a distincdy postmodernist practice. He sees the artist's mature work as emerging from a keen appreciation of the limitations imposed on artists by the Soviet bureaucracy, combined with a desire to work critically within (rather than piously against) these limits. Kabakov led a double life, employed officially as a children Vbook illustrator but using me resources afforded by his position to create a host of self-reflexive, slyly subversive unofficial works. His was therefore an art of concession, deeply informed by his participation in the bureaucracy that constrained him. "The fact of Kabakov 's art." writes Jackson, "is not its resistance to power, nor its sustenance of an embattled human aspect, but rather its cohabitation with all that made Kabakov disreputable to himself" (91 }.

Jackson provides a thorough account of Kabakov's first three decades of work, analyzing a wide range of drawings, albums, and paintings. He also considers a handful of performances by Kabakov and the Collective Actions group that sought deliberately to elicit states of boredom or disinterest - as, for example, when Kabakov subjected audiences to readings of Ms long, repetitive alburns, or when Collective Actions had viewers travel to a field outside Moscow to be greeted by nothing more than the sound of an electric bell ringing in the snow. Jackson describes these events as "total nonexperiences ... in which body and mind, confronted the invisible hallow core of Soviet (modern?) consciousness" (i67). Here, Kabakov's notion of "positive boredom" combines with Monastyrski's "rituals of nonlife" to form the basis for a unified theory of critica) tedium. Drawing on the writings of Hans Ulrich Gumbrechi and Rem Koolhaas, Jackson claims that the "painful sameness" of Conceptualist performances redirected viewers' attention from "meaningeffects" to "presence-effects," transforming "junktime" into a positive state of abstractedness (172). At the same time, these events highlighted the pervasive tedlousness of Soviet existence, creating a continuum of "nonexperience" between life and art.

Throughout his book, Jackson interweaves his consideration of Kabakov with long sections dedicated to contemporaneous changes in Moscow's cultural and alternative landscapes. In combination, diese passages provide a variegated portrait of Moscow's artistic life from the late igcos through the late 19805, describing the nature and structure of siaie -sponsored institutions for art education and production, clashes and compromises between unofficial artists and Soviet authorities, trends in Soviet intellectual discourse, and the various channels through which artists learned about Western art and the Soviet avant-garde. This wealth of contextual information serves as a muchneeded backdrop not only for Jackson's discussion, but also for arguments advanced elsewhere by Groys, Tupitsyn, and others. Unfortunately, Jackson's eagerness to orient Western readers leads him occasionally to indulge in frivolous comparisons between his material and more familiar works from the modern canon - as, for example, when he describes a horizontal band in a painting by Erik Bulatov as "Barnett Newman's bisecting 'zip' turned sideways" ( : 16) . Such defensive moves risk undermining the works they are meant to endorse by reinforcing a counterproductive view of me West as center.

Given that Moscow Conceptuahsm has yet to find a secure place within wider conversations about late-twentieth-century art, lhe books under discussion musi be seen not only as studies of a circumscribed movement, but also as implicit proposals for how we might begin to understand this movement relative to current art-historical narratives. Against Jameson's influential description of postmodernism as "the cultural logic of late capitalism," reified in the art of the Western European and American neo-avant -gardes, these studies insist strongly that the dismantling of modernist paradigms - expressive artist, autonomous artwork - also occurred under late socialism, atbeit in different form. In so doing, they urge us toward an expanded history of late - twentieth-century art: one that accounts for the presence of non- Western and noncapitalist postmodernities, and that seeks to place in dialogue concurrent developments in the visual cultures of iaie socialism and late capitalism.

Author affiliation:

Lara Weibgen is a doctoral student in art history at Yale University, SKe is interested in promoting dialogue about intersections of artistic, intellectual, and political practice, and has developed public programs for Amnesty international Firefly Project and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Her dissertation. "The Aesthetics of Mereness: Moscow Conceptualism 1 975- 1 988," explores strategies of artistic selffashioning among second-generation Moscow Conceptuatists.