In the installation shots of past MoMA exhibitions dedicated to abstract art and the Russian avant-garde, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition: White on White(1918) and Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Non-Objective Painting no. 80 (Black on Black)(1918), both in the Museum’s collection, are inseparable. The importance of MoMA’s exclusive opportunity to display these two paintings side by side, thus reconstructing “an original installation” from the Tenth State Exhibition: Nonobjective Creation and Suprematism (1919), is accentuated by Aleksandra Shatskikh in her book Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism (2012).¹ Yet in the current hanging at MoMA, White on White and Black on Black (which are part of Malevich’s larger White on White series and Rodchenko’s Black on Black series, respectively) are split by Lyubov Popova’s Painterly Architectonic (1917), prompting a reexamination, on the centennial of the Tenth State Exhibition, of the relationship between white and black paintings, including their historical and cultural contexts.

Varvara Stepanova, whose diary is a unique source for this endeavor, assessed the Tenth State Exhibition as “a contest between Anti [Rodchenko’s pseudonym expressing his nonconforming stance] and Malevich. The rest is nonsense.”² In this categorical summation, she dismisses the other participants’ works, including her own, for the sake of the approbation of a black-and-white dialectic. Denying Rodchenko’s black paintings their own meaning, she adds, “Anti wanted to hang . . . his black things next to Malevich . . . so that these blacks do not go to waste.”³

Malevich first used the term “nonobjective” in his brochure “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism” (1916), writing in advance of—but also as though about—his later white paintings: “I transformed myself in the zero of form and emerged from nothing to . . . nonobjective creation.” This endorsement of a ground-zero regime of painting amply corresponds to a post-revolutionary atmosphere marked by erasure of the toppled political system, including its cultural institutions. It also explains why the phrase “nonobjective creation” was adopted by avant-garde artists. Under this banner, which synthesized both a worldview and the role of experimentation in nonrepresentational art, they ascertained their identity in the newly established state. 

This broader and more politically potent meaning of post-revolutionary nonobjectivism, which in turn implies that painting was near its exhaustion, was endorsed by Stepanova after the opening of the Tenth State Exhibition. “Nonobjective creation,” Stepanova wrote, minimizing (like Malevich) the use of the word “art,” “is not only a movement or a tendency in painting, but also a new ideology born to destroy philistinism of spirit, and maybe it is not for the social system, but for the anarchic one and an artist’s nonobjective thinking is not limited to his art, it enters his entire life, and under its flag all his needs and tastes proceed.”⁴ Stepanova’s reading of nonobjectivism as a synthesis of formalism and politics promises a means of identifying an alternative subject for post-revolutionary nonobjective practice in general, and for the white and black paintings in particular. 

Malevich and Rodchenko produced their respective series between mid-1918 and the beginning of 1919, a period of violent social and political ruptures in modern Russian history. The October Revolution, World War I, in which Malevich served, and the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, made it impossible for the two artists to remain nonpartisan. Avant-garde literature has routinely positioned the two as supporters of the Bolshevik regime.⁵ However, as Stepanova suggested, the theoretical basis of post-revolutionary nonobjectivism may in fact be rooted in anarchist aspirations, which is indeed confirmed in Rodchenko’s first contribution to the newspaper Anarchy: “We are coming to you, beloved comrades, anarchists, instinctively recognizing in you our hitherto unknown friends . . . The present belongs to artists who are anarchists of art.”⁶ The section “Creation,” established in Anarchy for artists’ writings, avoided old terminology associated with fine art, and in this, went against the newly established Department of Visual Art in Narkompros (under the People’s Commissariat for Education) established on January 29, 1918. The title “Creation” specified that the true objective of contributors Aleksei Gan, Malevich, Aleksei Morgunov, Rodchenko, and Nadezhda Udal’tsova was to defend artists’ rights to freedom of expression, which they felt were equally threatened by the prerevolutionary institutions and the newly established commissariats. Their goal was to achieve unmediated creations that would replace any form of “prostituted”⁷ art. Above all, they thought, artists should pursue their own revolutions against artistic conventions and restrictive institutions. The Soviet government’s later repressive cultural policies proved that this early concern with freedom of expression was prolifically critical. 

Manifesto-style texts such as Rodchenko’s “To Artists-Proletarians” and “Be Creators!,” and Malevich’s “Declaration of Artist’s Rights,”⁸ all three of which were written for Anarchy, positioned artists as an oppressed and enslaved class akin to that of the proletariat. Rodchenko’s terminology, including “creator-rebel” and “revolution-creation,” radicalized the creative process and shifted it from an isolationist practice to a socially active one. Malevich’s text is more concerned with practical aspects such as the protection of artists’ work spaces and their right to maintain control over profits from sold art. Malevich preferred public collections to private ownership. 

Equally oppressive for both Malevich and Rodchenko was the view held by some critics at home and abroad that Russian modernists “imitate[ed] the West!”⁹ Malevich’s term “Suprematism,” coined to describe flat geometric painting, encodes an assertion of originality and preeminence over Western movements.¹⁰ Yet some nonobjectivists, including Rodchenko and Stepanova, resisted Malevich’s claim for “supremacy” in nonobjective circles by reason of suspecting him of mysticism,¹¹ and they were unwilling to accept his Black Square (1915) as their trademark. However, Rodchenko’s desire to free himself from the cultural bondage of the West outweighed this kind of issue with Malevich, as he realized that cooperating with him would guarantee the formation of “an entirely original identity in Russia’s art” and position them as “the first inventors of the new, as yet unseen in the West.”¹² Pledging to be Russia’s “own art,” and thus a national style, it asserted a competition with the West and, significantly, declared a position of difference from a Bolshevik internationalism that is embodied in, for instance, Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1920).

Initially viewing the anarchist groups as allies in the fight against the old regime, by the summer of 1918, the Bolsheviks were ready to dissolve them and their critical forum Anarchy.¹³ Shatskikh dates “the emergence of white Suprematism” from this time.¹⁴ This means that Suprematism was conceived when Malevich could no longer write for Anarchy, and when the possibility of a “working anarchism” had dissolved. A retreat to “pure anarchism,” that is, “abstract, utopian, and realized only on paper,”¹⁵ was the only remaining option. White paintings were as pure and nonconventional within the conventions of modernist painting as Malevich could come up with. He succeeded in producing a work “as yet unseen in the West.”¹⁶ He also constructed a visual metaphor of an unmediated, autonomous creativity, which he had defended in Anarchy. But the subject of white paintings is additionally discernable from Malevich’s text “Declaration I,” written on June 15, 1918, around the time Malevich executed them. In this text, he describes the current state of Suprematism as a blend of formal and political concepts—a “Suprematist federation of colors of colorlessness,” and a “new symmetry of social paths;”¹⁷ and he sees “socialism illuminating its freedom to the world,” and “Art falling in the face of Creativity.”¹⁸ The result is a fervent socio-formalist concoction that, mirrored in white Suprematism, once again positions art and creativity as opposing concepts: the former systemic and institutional, the latter unmediated and under artists’ control. 

This new model of post-revolutionary Suprematism—and the creation of White on White—was Malevich’s act of spite toward Black Square, a trademark of pre-revolutionary Suprematism that had begun to alienate him from the Moscow nonobjectivists. In White on White, Malevich bleached Black Square, turning it into a pale shadow hardly distinguishable from its white background. The remaining black outlines around the square function as a referent to the subject of contention. Skewed, and edged closer to the picture frame, White on White upsets the steely stability of Black Square, moving toward new borders that are beyond painting. 

By the end of 1918, Rodchenko had definitely seen Malevich’s white paintings. He wrote, “Malevich paints without form and color. The ultimate abstracted painting. This is forcing everyone to think long and hard. It’s difficult to surpass Malevich.”¹⁹ Rodchenko’s statement confirms his acceptance of Malevich as a guru of “the new,” and an artist who is hard to outdo—and with whom he himself now wanted to collaborate. “Malevich and I decided to write and publish as much literature as possible,”²⁰ he wrote regarding the content of the catalogue for the Tenth State Exhibition. Rodchenko’s genius lay in realizing that all he had to do was invert Malevich’s new creation: to come up with a concept that, together with Malevich’s series, would construct the dialectical condition rife with overcoming negation. With this in mind, Rodchenko flung himself into hyper production, and by New Year’s Day, 1919, he had done “[a]bout twenty-nine to thirty new pieces.”²¹

Rodchenko painted Black on Black during this marathon, yet he commenced his contest with Malevich with a retort not to White on White, but rather to Black Square. This made White on White a dialogical painting, synthesizing nonobjectivists’ voices of discontent toward this passionately debated canvas as anti-painting, as “nothing,”²² “philosophy of a square,” “a graphic scheme.”²³ Rodchenko ignored Malevich’s defensive warning that it would be impossible to avoid the square’s effect, and “destroys”²⁴ it by swirling its shape, rounding it off, and replacing the Suprematist trademark with a circle. Rodchenko turns Malevich’s “color realism” —“a smooth coloring in one paint”²⁵—into “painterly confusion,”²⁶ destroying the divided positions that the black and white colors have in Black Square. His palette in Black on Black reverberates his excitement about being able to buy “a few tubes of marvelous oil paints, including “black, ocher . . . whites,”²⁷ luckily obtained amid the “constant looking for food”²⁸ that was necessary during the Civil War. The fortunate abundance of painting materials (Rodchenko also obtained fifteen stretchers) resulted in an “exhaustion from painting” that Rodchenko described as “the most pleasurable thing.”²⁹ Black on Black exudes, to paraphrase Roland Barthes, “the pleasure of the painting.”

Yet some sections of this work contradict this kind of painterly sensation; these are covered with an unmodulated, dull black color, at times applied thickly, and like Black Square, full of craquelures. It is this “most unthankful”³⁰ form of the color black at which, to rephrase Rodchenko, color and brushwork die, that he employs in order to create the ultimate color reverses to Malevich’s White on White paintings. These are monochromatic compositions nos. 81, 82, and 84, for which the collective title Abstraction of Color and Discoloration, under which Rodchenko listed his black-on-black series in the Tenth State Exhibition’s catalogue, is particularly apt. Rodchenko describes them as “Black on Black. Elaboration of one color by means of different surface conditions. Destruction of color for the same material treatment of monotonality.”³¹ These canvases lack painterliness and gesticulation, and they offer no visual pleasure. They are not photogenic. The color black is a priori more aggressive than white, and perhaps this is why Rodchenko compensates this cold color with warm forms of “ovals, circles, ellipses”³² (similar shapes, can be found in Malevich’s white paintings now in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). 

Black-on-black’s antagonistic aura served “Anti” well in his anti-Western agenda and also in his goal to create an artwork that no one would deem an imitation of Western art. Stepanova affirms Rodchenko’s success, saying that he “gave in the ‘blacks’ what the West has dreamt about, a true easel painting brought to the last point . . . one can now speak about new painterly realism.”³³ “The peculiarly Russian conceptions of faktura [texture],”³⁴ which preoccupied many leading avant-gardists in Russia, played a role in Rodchenko’s achievement. In fact, Malevich’s indifference to the effects of faktura was another reason why nonobjectivists criticized his work. This continued with the White on White series that, to them, lacked textural interest. Instead of painting, they said, Malevich covered works in paint. In contrast, in the black paintings, Rodchenko charted gradations within a single color by rendering it “shining, matt, faded, rough, smooth.”³⁵ This “triumphed”³⁶ faktura, and created a more complex relationship with the viewer. Stepanova observed that during the Tenth State Exhibition, “More serious [viewers] were less resentful of the black [paintings], which they perceived as something particularly abstract or maybe they simply did not see them.”³⁷ Presumably, viewers were not always able to focus on the black paintings due to the lack of familiar pictorial characteristics, in the absence of which, the paintings merged into actual space, revealing the objectness (predmetnost) of nonobjective forms and alluding to the end of painting. 

Unlike Malevich’s White on White series that I earlier referred to as an allegory of autonomous practice, the Black on Black paintings were not. This is because they were conceived within the logic of supplementarity in relation to White on White paintings. However, while making many black canvases, Rodchenko also conceived of his own example of pure anarchic creation. These are white sculptural objects, described as Assembled and Disassembled, that originated Rodchenko’s three series of “spatial constructions” and launched the laboratory period of Constructivism. It is conceivable that in his Assembled and Disassembled objects, Rodchenko was reacting to Malevich’s non-geometric and even non-Suprematist forms, which are rendered in a different shade of white (I am again referring to the paintings from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), this time recognizing the sculptural potential he fulfilled before Malevich made his “architectons” (1920). Stepanova describes Rodchenko’s state of joissance from process rather than product: “Anti is constructing sculpture, he loves it . . . it takes nothing for him to break everything and make the most amazing thing again. . . . he is so confident in the power of his creativity.”³⁸ For Rodchenko, the “game”³⁹ (his expression) of the materialization and dematerialization of an aesthetic object raised the degree of creative anarchism that he and Malevich propagated in their writing for Anarchy. Their shared platform of anarchist utopia allowed them to reconcile their differences with regards to nonobjective practice, establishing a dialectical and agonistic relationship. Malevich seemed to agree that the two-color match ended in a draw. “We should appear together,”⁴⁰ he proposed to Rodchenko after the exhibition’s opening.

Rodchenko’s comrade Osip Brik, a formalist critic and editor of the newspaper Art of the Commune, visited the Tenth State Exhibition and, according to Stepanova, the “‘Blacks’ brought [him] into amazement.”⁴¹ Perhaps Brik’s keen, leftist eye (brilliantly conceptualized by Rodchenko in an unpublished cover of LEF in 1924), observed a looming transition from faktura to factography in Rodchenko’s black paintings.⁴² Indeed, his later street photography, such as the series of images of the Building on Miasnitskaia Street (1925), the Brianskii Railway Station (1927), and Pine Trees (1927), filled Rodchenko with an unbounded sense of independence and creative freedom, as he wandered the streets of Moscow, climbed rooftops, and lay on the ground in resistance to photography’s conventional belly-button perspective. On becoming a commissioner of SVOMAS (Free state art studios), where Malevich already had a studio, Brik invited Rodchenko to join. For both artists, the school’s agenda of “maximum freedom for artists,”⁴³ the availability of work space, and the independent teaching curriculum, complemented their model of liberation from institutional constraints, middlemen, and anxiety over the production and distribution of art objects. “Nonobjective painting has left the museums, it is—the street, the square, the city and the entire world,”⁴⁴ asserted Rodchenko in 1920. With this statement, he reaffirms Malevich’s craving for an objectless avant-gardism, which the latter expressed two weeks after the Revolution, when he said: “I decided to declare myself the chairman of space. It makes me at ease, withdraws me, and I breath freely.”⁴⁵ Such a fantasy of nonobjective creation without borders was also invested into the white and black series, making them a symbol of the gap between what Malevich and Rodchenko had imagined and what the Bolshevik apparatus was preparing for them.

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In Balloon, “objectness,” “provocation” and “abandonment” were manifested almost perfectly. —Nikita Alekseev, 1980.

In 2008, The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Media and Performance Art acquired an approximately 5-minute film of a Collective Actions Group (CAG) action titled Balloon (June 15, 1977, Moscow region).¹ Learning about this acquisition made me wonder why Balloon (shot by Ludmila Veshnevskaia) or the only other footage of a CAG performance, Lieblich (April 2, 1976, Izmailovsky Park, Moscow; also shot by Veshnevskaia) were not archived by a group so diligent about the preservation of documentation. On CAG’s website, there are only blurry stills from Lieblich, a poor-quality substitute for the originals, the negatives, which were smuggled and lost.² Is CAG’s lack of interest in the filmic documentation of their actions (whose importance, given that cinematic recordings of underground art are virtually nonexistent, transcends their significance for CAG’s archive) circumstantial, or does it have a conceptual underpinning?

Considered by practitioners of production art to be the most modern and egalitarian technology for grasping socialist reality, movie and still cameras were, by the late 1930s, viewed as spy equipment. This paranoid perception debilitated Soviet operative photographers and filmmakers, such as Aleksandr Rodchenko and Dziga Vertov, depriving them of identities rooted in the representation of street life. In view of the mediums’ reputation as prime suspects in the success of a deceptive regime, neither kind of camera had immediate appeal to the first generation of dissident modernists (regardless of the easing of restrictive measures on their use), who emerged during the Khrushchev thaw. It was at this time, however, that the use of movie and still cameras diverged. The latter was affordable; black-and-white film was accessible; and if necessary, an unofficial photographer could take snapshots stealthily, a constraint that Boris Mikhailov brilliantly turned into artistic method. In contrast, obtaining a movie camera, along with the equipment for it, was a privilege granted to few, and operating it in a public space could be viewed as sabotage. 

CAG made its start with the action The Appearance (March 13, 1976, Izmailovsky Park), shortly after two pivotal open-air exhibitions had taken place: the Bulldozer Show, organized on September 15, 1974, in a field in the sleepy Moscow district of Beliaevo, which was violently terminated by authorities, and a sanctioned display that lasted for four hours in Izmailovsky Park on September 29, 1974. By staging The Appearance on the site of the second show, CAG’s founding members—artist Nikita Alekseev, photographer Georgy Kizevalter, and poets Andrei Monastyrski and Lev Rubinshtein—considered these heroic art exhibitions as an impetus for initiating their paradigm for the de-urbanization of the Moscow countercultural milieu. Monastyrski and Rubinshtein directed CAG’s early discourse toward the exploration of transgressive forms of poetry. This is supported by a note that Monastyrski wrote on the back of a photograph of The Appearance, which he sent to Victor Tupitsyn in New York shortly after the action took place: “These are the viewers-listeners-readers,” he explained—extending the viewers’ experience beyond the solely visual.

Balloon was CAG’s fifth performance. In order to secure a photographic record (in light of the fact the negatives from Lieblich had been lost), Kizevalter was backed up by the photographer and artist Andrei Abramov. Veshnevskaia, “woman with a movie camera,” to allude to Rodchenko’s Girl with a Leica, was also at the Balloonsite. In another letter to Victor Tupitsyn, Monastyrski stressed that Balloon was his concept, and clarified CAG’s authorial canon: 

“In all the details and as a whole, the concept [of each action] belongs to its author; we pay a great attention to the image of staging, which is born introvertedly and within the order of an internal life (aesthetic? religious?) of [the author’s] individuality. Co-authorship is based on a complete acceptance of this image or a symbol as [his] own and in [his] own order and practice. So these things are simultaneously individual and collective.”

Monastyrski provided further interpretation of Balloon in yet another letter, this one written directly on the backs of three photographs of the action: 

“On this photo is our [my emphasis] last work ‘Dream About a Balloon’ (planned to be called just ‘Balloon,’ but because of the weather, nothing came out of it, it was raining during all six hours, while we were blowing balloons, and as you see from the photographs, we ended up with some kind of a haystack instead of a balloon… but it blended in even better.”

This appears to be the moment when Monastyrski developed a paradigm for an objectless (bespredmetnyi) vanguard practice in Russia based on the dematerialization of an art object, for in the Soviet Union, he notes: “Only those artists can survive who do not make ‘things,’ but rather look at art as a form of existence… that is, do not make art consciously. Here everything is rotting because no one consumes these art goods in time. We function independently from the society because we make nothing that could rot.”³ Monastyrski’s title “A Dream about the Balloon,” initially a dream about an ideal object, turns into the pursuit of an aesthetic de-reification (Adorno’s dream). The physical disappearance of the balloon, whose impermanence was predetermined by its imminent deflation, was an act of de-familiarization with the concept of equating aesthetics with the preservation of objects.

In CAG’s first self-published volume of Trips to the Countryside, compiled in 1980, Alekseev, in tune with Monastyrski, states that the perfect round shape “sought for… was not achieved,” but salutes Balloon for the “nonpragmatic and absurd… sobornyi labor performed by a small group of people living without a canon.”⁴ And like Monastyrski, Alekseev sees the compensation for hard, physical labor and difficult weather conditions to be the creation of a perfect object (four meters in diameter), which turned out to be a failed quest. What replaced it was “a true catharsis” experienced by the participants watching the balloon as it drifted down the dodging river and listening to the soft sound produced by the bell installed inside of it. There is no question that this part of the action (as well as the entire Lieblich, which centered on a ringing bell hidden in the snow) would have greatly benefited from a movie camera with sound. CAG’s interest in sound comes from a fascination with concrete music in general and with John Cage’s 4′33″ in particular. On April 10, 1977, CAG received Cage’s response to their earlier letter to him, in which he specifically says: “Your work with bells outdoors and the idea of bells under the seats in a concert hall are excellent.” He expresses an interest in collaboration and inspires Alekseev to think about the difference between underground practices in New York and Moscow. Alekseev believed that Cage’s idea—that independence from mainstream culture would necessarily create “an embryo of a happy future”—was utopian and that, in general, the idea of “a happy future in this world is absurd.”⁵ This statement is noteworthy because it amply demonstrates the divide between the West and the East in terms of utopian thinking formed due to Stalin’s destruction of “the embryo” of the Revolution, and later by Khrushchev’s false promise of a communist future.⁶And yet, I still believe there was a utopian aspect (distinctive from romanticism, a concept ruined by Andrei Zhdanov) to CAG’s performances.⁷

Alekseev’s interpretation of Balloon demonstrates that filmic documentation infringes upon CAG’s central format of the participant’s recollections based on his/her in situ perceptions. A movie camera’s association with accuracy competes with the psychologically nuanced written interpretations provided by the participants. In them, there is no place for the claim that “no, that’s not how and what had happened,” which means that the textual is trusted more than visual. Is this why that although one could buy an 8mm movie camera in Russia at that time, Monastyrski admits that he was not interested in filming CAG’s actions?⁸

According to Givi Kordiashvili, a contributor to CAG’s second self-published volume of Trips to the Countryside, “Monastyrski had a pathological fixation on the ‘quality photographs,’” and this is why the Moscow photographer and artist Igor Makarevich “decisively ‘killed’ Monastyrsiy by providing two Leica cameras.”⁹ This inspired the Place of Action (October 31, 1979), in which photography performs a structural rather than documentary function, affirming its fundamental role for Conceptual art. In his text “Seven Photographs,” Monastyrski clarifies “the interrelation between the event of an action and a secondary material that documents it”¹⁰ in order to determine which forms of documentation (including participants’ recollections) represent “a sign” that “points to the essence of an event.” His conclusion is that such a “sign” appears only in those photographs that capture a fragment of what CAG calls “an empty action.” These shots re-endow photography with an “auratic” component, and thus cannot be considered documentary.¹¹ Rather, he argues, they are “sign[s] of a higher meaning,” for they reflect a moment that is “in principal unrepresentable.” Along this line, Monastyrski later stresses the difference between “an accent on details, on thingness” and the “ephemeral faktura of the emptiness of our ideal fields.”¹² There are no shots of empty actions in the Balloon footage, which provides instead captivating and mundane close-ups of participants and objects, shifting the whole participatory experience from the metaphysical to the productive. On the other hand, both cameras could not technically capture an empty action, for in Balloon, Alekseev notes, the key for CAG’s structural element, was “expanded” into the period after the balloon has disappeared from the participants’ field of vision.¹³ And once it had, it was out of reach of a viewfinder and thus indubitably “unrepresentable.”

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The interviews were conducted via email. post editors asked Margarita Tupitsyn, curator of the exhibition’s Soviet Union section, to respond to the following questions in 500 to 1,000 words.

1. How did you get involved in the exhibition?

When Global Conceptualism was planned, I had already curated several exhibitions dedicated to Moscow Conceptualism. In 1981 the collector Norton Dodge offered me a curatorial position at the Contemporary Russian Art Center of America, which he established that same year in New York. The first show I curated there was Russian New Wave. It combined Conceptualists still living in Russia and those who had immigrated to New York. At that time the art world was only familiar with the work of Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, first presented in 1976 in a highly acclaimed exhibition Color is a Mighty Power! organized by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. I attended the opening, during which Charlotte Moorman played Komar and Melamid’s piece, Music “Passport”. By exhibiting Komar and Melamid in a gallery that had also shown Marcel Duchamp and Chris Burden, Ronald Feldman integrated Komar and Melamid into the historical and contemporary contexts of Conceptual art. This gave Moscow Conceptualism a significant push. During perestroika¹, I curated a number of exhibitions of Conceptual art, among which were The Green Show (Exit Art, 1990) and Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (Tacoma Art Museum and ICA, Boston, 1990), which I co-curated with David Ross and Elisabeth Sussman. Jane Farver mentions these two exhibitions in her essay “Global Conceptualism: Reflections”, so I believe this played a role in her decision to invite me to curate the Russian section of Global Conceptualism.

2. How did you approach the label “Conceptualism”?

I based my selections on the differences rather than similarities between Moscow and Western Conceptualisms. In the mid-1960s, a handful of artists (Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov among them) reacted to the supremacy of the verbal and the scarcity of the visual in Soviet culture. They also faced the prolonged absence of critics who positioned artists of the counterculture as the sole interpreters of their own production. Unlike in the case of the Western Conceptualists, it was easy for Moscow artists to dismiss the art object because there was neither public space for its display nor a market for its dissemination. Thus, instead of opposing art-as-commodity, they resisted art-as-mechanism for ideological control, which automatically made Conceptual art political. In these circumstances, “art-as-idea,” “art-as-knowledge,” and “artist-as-an interpreter” were logical practices for them to adopt. In my selections for Global Conceptualism, I aimed at reflecting the artists’ responses to these unique cultural conditions of “seeing words instead of objects.” I divided my selections into two parts: works that challenge political (Komar and Melamid) and communal (Kabakov) speech head on, and works that demonstrate the escapist approach toward the inundation of the verbal clichés (Irina Nakhova and Collective Actions group). I also stressed the importance of photography in Conceptual art by including in my section of Global Conceptualism, Boris Mikhailov’s photo-book, Unfinished Dissertation, in which he re-situates photography as an independent medium rather than a handmaiden to the fine arts. Mikhailov’s annotations, which accompany each image, present a critical deconstruction of photography’s documentary promises.

3. Would you have done anything differently?

Every time a curator thinks of past exhibitions, he/she questions if they could have been done differently. Usually this has to do with the loans on which every curator depends heavily and which are not always available. Because Global Conceptualism took place in the post-Soviet period, I did not face any problems with securing the artworks I wanted. Beyond the loans, I think it’s not particularly productive to think about past exhibitions in the subjunctive tense, for one’s connection with that particular historical moment is partially lost, and thus the evaluation of previous curatorial projects is hardly objective because it’s tainted by new perspectives. Also, in Global Conceptualism, each curator had to work within a very limited exhibition space and under the supervision of the three main curators. Although our collaboration was rather efficient, I do not think that this is the best curatorial arrangement.

4. Today the artists, including Vitaly Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, and Andrei Monastyrski, who were associated with Moscow Conceptualism are well-known internationally. Though Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s was not the first exhibition in New York City, or even the United States to display works by these artists, could you describe the effects you think the exhibition had by exposing a larger and more diverse audience to these works specifically situated within the context of global Conceptual art practices?

Any exposure to a larger audience is good for artists and the study of historical movements. Unification of international artists who work in a similar mode gives a viewer the opportunity to observe what Lucy Lippard described as “the spontaneous appearance of similar work totally unknown to the artists.” This of course gives the artists a broader understanding and a more objective evaluation of their production. For viewers, such an exhibition dilutes the contextual specifics of each region, for it comes across as a conceptually unified project. Undoubtedly for the artists from the Soviet Union, Latin America, Asia, and Africa, exhibiting with Europeans and North Americans meant integration into an already existing Western genealogy of Conceptual art. Whether it did or could work is another question. But Global Conceptualism was one of the first attempts to unite the international community of postwar artists under the umbrella of one movement.

5. What are the legacies of these conceptual tendencies in Russia today?

During perestroika, Moscow Conceptualism was revered in Russia because, along with Sots Art, it was the only postwar art movement that was able to stand on an equal footing with international art movements. This remains true today, for although the collapse of the Soviet Union opened up many opportunities to contemporary artists, the theoretical and aesthetic intensity achieved by Moscow Conceptualists, has not yet been matched and can only be compared with the movements of the historical avant-garde.

6. How did your work on the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s affect your later work as a scholar and curator?

Curators of a non-mainstream art must always ask themselves if they are able to organize exhibitions that transcend a narrow expertise. Being part of Global Conceptualism made me want to test my skills and methods in other fields, or at least conceive exhibitions that include more than just Russian artists. This worked particularly well with the concepts developed by Russian avant-garde artists that I traced in artistic production throughout the twentieth century in several exhibitions I curated after Global Conceptualism. These were Malevich and Film (Fundação Centro Cultural Belém, Lisbon, 2002) and Against Kandinsky (Museum Villa Stuck, 2006). Moreover, the year Global Conceptualism opened, I was invited to curate a major exhibition on the Bauhaus called Bauhaus: Dessau, Chicago, New York (Museum Folkwang, 2000). I do not think I would have had the courage to take this project on if I had not first mentally transcended, by participating in Global Conceptualism, the sociocultural specificity of Russian art.

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