DescriptionThis dissertation engages historical accounts of the art of the Moscow conceptualist circle and proposes a different understanding of its purpose and significance for Russian and international art history. It challenges the current critical narratives of Moscow Conceptualism as a Soviet variant of a globalizing conceptual art and argues that the movement cannot be assimilated by the taxonomical categories of Western art history. Rather, I contend that Moscow Conceptualism must be historically and locally situated within the discursive framework of the late Soviet era. Through extended analyses of major Moscow conceptualist works, I demonstrate that the movement is distinguished by
its purposive investigation of the organizational structures of Soviet history. These investigations occur at a juncture in which the teleological frameworks of official Soviet discourse had become self-evidently obsolete and incapable of orientating the present
within a broader historical manifold. It is the uncanny space that exists between the modernist and Utopian foundations of Soviet socialism and the stagnation and alienation of contemporary Soviet life which this dissertation frames as a primary subject of
Moscow conceptualist enquiry.