Between Avant-Garde and Nonconformism. Soviet artists and their alternative practice between thaw and stagnation

Funded by the DFG, duration 2023-2026
 

It explores alternative Soviet artists and the practices they used to situate themselves (a) anew in society, (b) between pre-revolutionary and Soviet art practices, and (c) possibly in relation to their contacts with the art world in the West during the fading thaw with its supposed freedoms. The focus is both on their role as members of a society in a situation of upheaval and on their significance for the formation of new stylistic means on the one hand and for joining the Russian avant-garde on the other. The paradigm of "otherness" is thereby illuminated and called into question from the opposite perspective: Did the alternative artists really move on the fringes of Soviet society, as has been claimed so far?

To this end, a historical and an art historical sub-project will examine protagonists of the Lianozovo and Uktus schools in Moscow, Sverdlovsk and Leningrad. The historical sub-project analyses subject constitution processes of artist couples of the two schools, such as Ry Nikonova/Sergej Sigej or Oskar Rabin/Valentina Kropivnitskaja. On the one hand, it asks which ideas and discourses were of fundamental importance for the individual positioning in the fading thaw when exploring one's own relationship to the state and society, and on the other hand, it looks at the interconnections of the individual actors with other (alternative) milieus.
The art-historical sub-project looks at art production in the period between the Manege exhibition of 1962 and the Bulldozer exhibition of 1974 and analyses the artistic strategies and the visual-poetic vocabulary in the field of tension between officially supported art and the reception of the Russian/Soviet avant-garde as well as contemporary Western art movements. In particular, the position of the artists of the "Thaw Generation" between the first, historical Russian avant-garde and the second Russian avant-garde, which is usually used to describe the Moscow Conceptualism of the 1980s, will be examined more closely. In doing so, the study will address both the term "dissident modernists" coined by Margarita Tupitsyn and Matthew Jesse Jackson's thesis that "few non-conformist artists* before the mid-1980s considered themselves members of a movement that revived the historical avant-garde".