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Arseny Zhilyaev in conversation with Boris Groys: "Contemporary art is the theology of the museum". This recent conversation is part of the Center for Experimental Museology, a collaborative project between COLTA.RU and the V-A-C Foundation. The material was published on e-flux conversations for the first time in english.
The avant-garde character of the art created by Soviet museologists must be reopened to the world, in spite of the critique by the official Soviet bureaucracy and the silence of their Western colleagues, who considered the Soviet experiments of the ’20s as too far beyond the institutional borders of art. Do we deny aesthetic cogency to the sculpture of Pallas Athena merely because it depicts a pagan goddess, and not Jesus Christ or a spaceship?
2019 •
The seventh graduate workshop of the Russian Art & Culture Group will focus on the main tendencies in Russian art theory from Russian modernism to the present day. We want to specifically explore responses to the question “What Is to Be Done?” [Что делать?] by artists, art critics, writers, and other members of the Russian intelligentsia, specifically reflecting upon movements such as the Russian avant-garde, neo-primitivism, constructivism, formalism, Socialist realism, and nonconformist art, and examine the use of artistic concepts such as parody, self-historization, or the center/periphery problem as well as responses to art movements from abroad, including cubism, concept art, and others.
This text is a modest research about what activism in Art means or can mean, for the global North as for the global South. Names as Boris Groys, Arseny Zhilyaev, Paulo Nazareth among others, are mentioned in these ten pages, as long as their work. Key word may be: artivism.
Institutionalisation: Fighting It, Using It
Arseny Zhilyaev in conversation with Maria Silina: "Institutionalisation: Fighting It, Using It"2020 •
Artist Arseny Zhilyaev and art critic Maria Silina discuss how the museum and art function in an environment of heavy institutionalisation, and consider how a Russian experiment of the early 1930s has been cruelly misread.
We are now coming to the core of Nikolai Fedorov's project and to the quintessence of the avant-garde museum, i.e. to the resurrection of dead generations. By then, most likely, a friendly, collective artificial intelligence will have been created by all living humans. This will become possible due to the development of production and of the general intellect. The development of a collective artificial intelligence will mean that enough common effort exists to implement all-universe projects. The procedure of resurrection will most likely be performed in the name of a collective artist-curator.
Arseniy Zhilyaev is an artist, writer and political activist who lives and works in Moscow. Zhilyaev’s artistic practice poses questions about the political and social legitimisation of art. Through exhibitions and participatory projects, he explores the relationship between art and social production – from the labour conditions of creative workers to the demand for, and capitalisation on, workers' creativity. His projects often delve into the avant-garde practices of the Russian revolutionary era that attempted to bring together artistic and social concerns, elaborating on their contemporary currency for creative practices aiming to bridge art and activism. Below, Silvia Franceschini talks with Zhilyaev about his recent and upcoming projects, and the relationship between artistic production and the current socio-political context in Russia.1
2017 •
The article examines a radical reform of Soviet art museums during the late 1920s and early 1930s both on their own distinct ideological terms, as institutions that would illustrate Marxist dialectical view of historical development, and in the context of a broader international drive to modernize art museums and turn them into primarily educational institutions accessible and attractive to the broader population. A case study of a radically innovative exhibition entitled Art on Soviet and Revolutionary Themes, organized by the young Marxist art historian and curator Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov at the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in June 1930, reveals the degree to which the Soviet art historian’s innovative and polemical curatorial approach finds parallels with the educational strategies of one of the most iconic examples of modern displays in western museums, Cubism and Abstract Art, organized by Alfred Barr, Jr. at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1936.
2019 •
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