This is a digital project developed as part of the Spring 2019 MSU Digital Humanities Faculty Learning Community for use in an upcoming course on Soviet & East European Contemporary Art. The project equips students with the technical and conceptual tools for building and maintaining personal research collections for art history research.

“The stakes of performance and its documentation extend beyond museological questions of cataloging and preservation. While performance encompasses a wide range of activities, in general it uses forms of temporal and bodily presence, photo, sound, and video documentation , as well as narrative forms such as the script and the audience’s…[Read more]

The emergence in the 1970s of albums, conceptualist object-poetry, and performances that addressed a small and select audience in private studios or suburban fields is evidence that at least some artists did not seek access to the wider Soviet public or official recognition of their activities in exhibitions. On the contrary, this conceptual turn…[Read more]

Essay for exhibition catalogue for “’Thinking Pictures’: Moscow Conceptual Art in the Dodge Collection,” Zimmerli Art Museum, on view Sep 06, 2016 – Dec 31, 2016.

This article traces a provisional history of the early years of the conceptual performance art group Collective Actions through an examination of three critical terms—action, documentation, and factography—that came to figure prominently in the group’s definition of its aesthetic project. A close reading of several of the group’s actions and key…[Read more]

Through a series of close readings of an album by Ilʼia Kabakov and actions by the groups Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deistviia) and Mukhomor, this article considers the place of laughter in the work of the Moscow Conceptualist circle. Distinguishing between a metaphysically-oriented laughter in the 1970s and a carnivalesque or kynic…[Read more]