“Looking in the Wrong Direction: Emptiness and Aesthetic Feeling in the Early Works of Collective Actions”

Florida State University. 38th Annual Art History Graduate Symposium.

Apr, 2022

This paper examines the early works of the 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. Namely, I consider the 1979 action Place of Action, organized by Andrei Monastryrski and Nikita Alekseev, and pay particular attention to how the organizers engaged with the aesthetic quality of emptiness and worked to articulate the possibility of human practice within an empty space.

Collective Actions, Place of Action, Octover 31, 1979. Participant in the field.