“Out of Nowhere: Monastyrski’s aesthetics of emptiness in the context of global conceptualism”

Harvard University. Slavic Graduate Conference Views from the Exosphere: Contemporary Slavic Literature Up Close and From Afar. Panel: Reperforming from Afar.

Apr. 2022

This paper examines the early performances of the Collective Actions group and theoretical writings of its leading organizer, Andrei Monastyrski. I consider Collective Actions within the context of the historically situated, transnational conceptual art movement and demonstrate the uniqueness of their contribution vis-à-vis Conceptualism in the West and the contemporaneous unofficial Soviet art practices.

The stakes of such a line of inquiry are best understood when one considers the historical moment of the Collective Actions' work, as well as the parallel artistic tendencies within the unofficial art circle in the Soviet Union and the ambitions of conceptual art in the West. Notions of nothingness, emptiness, and dematerialization dominate the visual language of much conceptual art in post-war Western and late-Soviet contexts and articulate a critical position vis-à-vis the old, assumed to be retrograde, notions of structure, institution, and aesthetic form. I argue that Monastyrski's approach differs from that of Western and fellow Moscow conceptualists in that it 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, Slogan. January 26, 1977.