“Out of Nowhere: Emptiness and Aesthetic Feeling in the Works of Collective Actions”

This paper examines the early works of Soviet conceptual performance art group Collective Actions, founded in 1976, and focuses on the way the group employed the concept of “emptiness” as a motif throughout its practice.

I propose to consider performance art practices of Collective Actions as negotiating a productive relationship between emptiness and collectivity through an artistic practice that relies on, at the time suspect, categories of structure, composition, and social form. Their approach renders emptiness not a byproduct of the disenchanted negation of the old but as a particular quality of the newly articulated space, available for aesthetic exploration. Collective Actions, I argue, take one of conceptualism's dominant tropes—that of nothingness, dematerialization, boundlessness—and articulate it in a tangible, workable, and localized tension within the confines of a work of art.