Journeys for the void – Weekend

The artistic practices of Andrey Monastyrsky and Collective Actions are usually viewed in the context of Moscow Conceptualism, which puts the machine of interpretation on rails from which it is impossible to jump off. Collective Actions actions continue to this day – the last one took place in Losiny Ostrov this spring. Anna Tolstova tells how the longest-running project of the Moscow conceptual school began and how in the mid-1970s “Trips out of town” took artists away from Soviet Moscow to the extraterritorial area of ​​the absurd.

On March 13, 1976, thirty people met on the outskirts of Moscow. They stood at the appointed place on the edge of the Izmailovsky field and waited. A few minutes later, two men came out of the woods at the opposite end of the field, crossed a snow-covered expanse, and handed typewritten certificates to the congregation confirming that they had attended such and such an event on such and such a date. It was Appearance, the first action of Collective Actions (KD), a group of artists and poets from the circle of Moscow conceptualists who became participants in Andrei Monastyrsky’s strange art project. Dada activist and historiographer Hans Richter, answering the question of how, in fact, this movement differs from other versions of the avant-garde, because both Italian futurists and Russian wise men chose the same tactics of scandal and practiced alogism in the same way, and a little earlier, he claims: Dadaists were looking for a meaning that could be contrasted with the meaninglessness of time. In the Western tradition, this senselessness of time, which gives rise to the art of the absurd, is associated with world wars: during the first, dada arises, when the shock of the second begins to pass, something like neo-dadaism appears. But in Russia, the flourishing of the absurd does not coincide with the European ones and, as it were, are caused by internal tectonic shifts, although they correlate with the world ones, but are not equal to them.

It has long been noted that in the name of Moscow Conceptualism, the adjective does not so much indicate the localization of the phenomenon as it emphasizes its specificity and difference from “classical” conceptual art. And these exclusivity and exclusion, quite understandable for the artistic environment, self-born behind the Iron Curtain, were strengthened by the fact that Moscow conceptualism developed an authoritarian language to describe its own activities, which is difficult to translate and which is forced to move, losing a critical distance, domestic and foreign criticism . Indeed, it seems difficult to find a common denominator between a tautological object, where the phrase “four colors four words” is displayed in multi-colored neon, and an album about a “closet-sitting” character, whose story is told in the manner of a children’s book. However, the conceptual art theorist Joseph Kossuth, referring to Wittgenstein’s language games and Duchamp’s ready-mades, and Vagrich Bakhchanyan, the forefather of Moscow conceptualism, arguing that “We were born to make Kafka come true” and that “PRAV DADA” is the typeface of the name of the most truthful newspaper in the world, follow the path of the absurd, albeit somewhat different routes. Traces of absurdity remain in the snow of the Izmailovsky field, which witnessed the senseless and illogical “Appearance”.

Moscow Conceptualism has often been interpreted as a reaction to the Soviet regime in its geriatric stage, and Monastyrsky with KD at first glance correspond to this interpretation in all respects. And in the institutional aspect – as the art of escaping into alternative, private, relatively free from control and ideology zones of apartment exhibitions and outings in the country (the documentary archive of KD actions, which has already been more than a dozen volumes, is called “Trips out of town”). And in terms of image, form, content – as an attempt to bring the absurd reality to the ultimate degree of absurdity. An organized group of comrades comes to God knows where, only to receive a certificate like a housing office or trade union committee that they have come to God knows where. The red slogan is stretched over the hillside in the middle of a blind and empty winter area – instead of the usual one, about the victory of communism or overfulfillment of plans, one can read the enigmatic “I don’t complain about anything, and I like everything, despite the fact that I’ve never been here I’ve been and I don’t know anything about these places. Citizens collectively collect a lot of garbage, methodically signing the ledger, as if for paid union dues. The early actions of the KD and “action objects” of Monastyrsky, no matter how much the authors disassociate themselves from Sots Art, can be read as a continuation of the Sots Artistic line, that is, as a parody of the bureaucratic rituals of the Soviet system. Yes, and the whole set of actions with their administrative-bureaucratic routine, with multi-volume descriptions and discussions reminds of the country of endless subbotniks and party meetings.

Of course, this “vulgar sociological” interpretation contradicts what the artists themselves said about themselves, who developed for this speaking a system of poetic-philosophical concepts (“empty action”, “leadership mandalas”) or ironic (“kolobok”, “Livingston in Africa ”) properties, without which not a single research text can do (Monastyrsky is not the sole author of the Dictionary of Terms of the Moscow Conceptual School, but it was the practices of regulating self-description of CD that eventually spread to this entire circle). It should be noted that “classical” conceptual art was characterized by the same autodescriptive tightness and hostility to external linguistic intrusions. But the very totalitarian nature of the text that arises in “trips out of town” and accompanying “actions” can again be interpreted as a parody-mimetic act, probably only possible in a state whose repressive potential has degenerated into the total violence of an ideologized language.

Monastyrsky always insisted that his art, including the CD project, had nothing to do with dissidence and the struggle for freedom of creativity, being extremely apolitical: if political reality was taken into account, then only in the form of clots of ideology, its centers sacred texts, and the political action consisted in their “aesthetic criticism”. For example, in the ironic recoding of the sacred space of the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy using the language systems of various religions and denominations, primarily Orthodoxy and Buddhism, as in the essay “VDNKh is the capital of the world”: “… each element of the described sacred complex has its own plastic analogue in any religious tradition. The bull on the roof is from the Zen series of pictures “In Search of the Bull”, the dome of the “Cosmos” pavilion is made in the style of Catholic temple architecture (only instead of a cross it is topped with a sheaf), the “Domestic Services” pavilion is in the style of a lamaist temple, where Amitabu’s paradise is placed, and at the entrance to the “Water Management” pavilion there are huge wheels of the reclamation plant, as if the wheels of the samsara that grinds everything. The fountain “Golden Ear” is designed in the biblical tradition: after all, it is installed in the middle of the pond. It is, as it were, “the spirit of God hovering over the waters” before the cosmogonization of chaos, but it is presented here in the form of a collective (an ear in which there are many grains).” However, this is a relatively late text, written at the beginning of perestroika, when speech could hardly lead the poet to places not so remote.

Seeing in the actions of KD a specific “spiritual practice”, “poiesis of philosophy”, a continuation of his poetic research at the crossroads of verbal, visual and sound, the poet Monastyrsky comes to a very special form of creativity, where space and time are combined in a “reduction to emptiness”, and the reader , the viewer or, more precisely, the contemplator lives together with the author some strange emotional experience akin to asceticism. It is characteristic that this reduction of the text to emptiness begins against the background of the textual overproduction of ideologemes during the late stagnation. But at the same time, both text-generating machines are in an existential temporal conflict: the texts of power, by inertia, are directed to the communist future, the texts of the “Collective Actions” are turned to the past, because the archive is the best way to translate space into time, the complex past.

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