Main entry:

Groĭs, Boris.

Title & Author:

History becomes form : Moscow Conceptualism / Boris Groys.

Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, ©2010.

Description:

198 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Moscow romantic Conceptualism -- Privatizations/psychologizations -- Sots-art : eastern prophecies -- Communist conceptual art -- Ilya Kabakov : the artist as storyteller -- Ilya Kabakov : we shall be like flies -- Ilya Kabakov : the theater of authorship -- Ilya Kabakov : the utopia of painting -- Boris Mikhailov : the eroticism of imperfection -- Andrei Monastyrski : living in art -- Medical hermeneutics, or curing health -- Medical hermeneutics : after the big tsimtsum -- Grisha Bruskin : allegorical man -- Alexander Kosolapov : the artist in the age of commodity fetishism.

Summary:

In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of "unofficial" artists in Moscow -- artists not recognized by the state, not covered by state-controlled media, and cut off from wider audiences -- created artworks that gave artistic form to a certain historical moment: the experience of Soviet socialism. The Moscow conceptualists not only reflected and analyzed by artistic means a spectacle of Soviet life but also preserved its memory for a future that turned out to be different from the officially predicted one. They captured both the shabby austerity of everyday Soviet life and the utopian energy of Soviet culture. In History Becomes Form, Boris Groys offers a contemporary's account of what he calls the most interesting Russian artistic phenomenon since the Russian Avant-Garde.
In 1976, Groys moved from Leningrad to Moscow; there he joined the artistic underground and grew close to Russian artists llya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov, Dmitri Prigov, Andrei Monastyrski, Lev Rubinstein, and Ivan Chuikov. He first wrote about them in 1979 for A-Ya, Russian-language magazine published in Paris, calling them "Moscow Romantic Conceptualists." History Becomes Form collects Groys's essays on Moscow Conceptualism, most of them written after his emigration to the West in 1981. The individual artists of the group became known in the West after perestroika, but until now the artistic movement as a whole has received little attention. Groys's account sheds light not only on the Moscow conceptualists and their work but also on the dilemmas of Soviet artists during the Cold War. --Book Jacket.

ISBN:

9780262014236 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
0262014238 (hardcover ; alk. paper)
9780262525084
0262525089

Subject:

Galereja "Kino" Moskau
Conceptual art Russia (Federation) Moscow.
Art conceptuel Russie Moscou.
Conceptual art Russia (Federation)
Conceptual art.
Concept-art
Conceptuele kunst.
Kunstenaars.
Konceptkonst Sovjetunionen.
Modern konst Sovjetunionen.
Russia (Federation) Moscow.
Moskou (stad)
Sovjet-Unie.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 284508
Call No.: BIB 223484
Status: Available