Collective Actions: Moscow conceptualism, performance, and the archive, 1976-1989

This dissertation charts the history of Collective Actions, a group of artists, poets, musicians, and other intellectuals who staged conceptual actions that investigated the nature of viewer perception and aesthetic experience in late-Soviet Moscow. Focusing on the period between 1976 and 1989, the dissertation draws on perspectives from art history, performance studies, and Soviet cultural history to closely analyze the enigmatic actions, dispersed multi-media archive, and voluminous theoretical writings of Collective Actions and Andrei Monastyrski, a founding member and the group’s chief theoretician. In doing so, it reveals how the lack of institutional location in both Soviet and Western art worlds allowed Collective Actions to create highly unstable works that were produced discursively by audience participation, rather than formally determined by the artists themselves. It traces the shifting boundaries between poetry, action, factographic object, and documentary photograph, and shows how each artistic encounter served to test viewer perception and became, over time, the object of documentation and extended group discussion. The group’s collective practice, the dissertation argues, became a key site for the elaboration of a Moscow Conceptualist vernacular. The dissertation seeks to locate this collective project of producing an alternative institution within the specific conditions of unofficial art in Moscow in the last Soviet decades, and in this way, offers a new way of understanding the signal postwar movements of conceptual and performance art and their relationship to institutionalization in the postwar period.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Yelena Kalinsk