This dissertation charts the history of Collective Actions, a group of artists, poets, musicians, and other intellectuals who staged conceptual actions that investigated the nature of viewer perception and aesthetic experience in late-Soviet Moscow. Focusing on the period between 1976 and 1989, the dissertation draws on perspectives from art history, performance studies, and Soviet cultural history to closely analyze the enigmatic actions, dispersed multi-media archive, and voluminous theoretical writings of Collective Actions and Andrei Monastyrski, a founding member and the group’s chief theoretician. In doing so, it reveals how the lack of institutional location in both Soviet and Western art worlds allowed Collective Actions to create highly unstable works that were produced discursively by audience participation, rather than formally determined by the artists themselves. It traces the shifting boundaries between poetry, action, factographic object, and documentary photograph, and shows how each artistic encounter served to test viewer perception and became, over time, the object of documentation and extended group discussion. The group’s collective practice, the dissertation argues, became a key site for the elaboration of a Moscow Conceptualist vernacular. The dissertation seeks to locate this collective project of producing an alternative institution within the specific conditions of unofficial art in Moscow in the last Soviet decades, and in this way, offers a new way of understanding the signal postwar movements of conceptual and performance art and their relationship to institutionalization in the postwar period.
Subject (authority = RUETD)
Topic
Art History
Subject (authority = ETD-LCSH)
Topic
Performance art--Soviet Union--History—20th century
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Rutgers University Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Identifier (type = RULIB)
ETD
RelatedItem (type = host)
TitleInfo
Title
Graduate School - New Brunswick Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Rutgers University. Graduate School - New Brunswick
AssociatedObject
Type
License
Name
Author Agreement License
Detail
I hereby grant to the Rutgers University Libraries and to my school the non-exclusive right to archive, reproduce and distribute my thesis or dissertation, in whole or in part, and/or my abstract, in whole or in part, in and from an electronic format, subject to the release date subsequently stipulated in this submittal form and approved by my school. I represent and stipulate that the thesis or dissertation and its abstract are my original work, that they do not infringe or violate any rights of others, and that I make these grants as the sole owner of the rights to my thesis or dissertation and its abstract. I represent that I have obtained written permissions, when necessary, from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis or dissertation and will supply copies of such upon request by my school. I acknowledge that RU ETD and my school will not distribute my thesis or dissertation or its abstract if, in their reasonable judgment, they believe all such rights have not been secured. I acknowledge that I retain ownership rights to the copyright of my work. I also retain the right to use all or part of this thesis or dissertation in future works, such as articles or books.