The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, movement began with the Sots art

Sots Art

Often referred to as “Soviet Pop Art”, Sots Art originated in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s as a reaction against the official aesthetic doctrine of the state—"Socialist Realism"...

 of Komar and Melamid

Komar and Melamid

Komar and Melamid is an artistic team made up of Russian-born American graphic artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid . In an artists’ statement they said that “Even if only one of us creates some of the projects and works, we usually sign them together...

 in the early 1970s, and continued as a trend in Russian art into the 1980s. It attempted to subvert socialist ideology using the strategies of conceptual art

Conceptual art

Conceptual art is art in which the concept or idea involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Many of the works, sometimes called installations, of the artist Sol LeWitt may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions...

 and appropriation art.

The central figures were Dmitri Prigov

Dmitri Prigov

Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov was a Russian writer and artist. Prigov was a dissident during the era of the Soviet Union and was briefly sent to a psychiatric hospital in 1986....

, Ilya Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov, Russian Илья́ Ио́сифович Кабако́в , is a Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish descent, born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives and works on Long Island...

, Viktor Pivovarov

Viktor Pivovarov

Viktor Pivovarov , along with Ilya Kabakov and Erik Bulatov, was one of the leading artists of the Moscow Conceptualist artistic movement of the 1960s and 1970s...

, Eric Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrsky and Komar and Melamid

Komar and Melamid

Komar and Melamid is an artistic team made up of Russian-born American graphic artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid . In an artists’ statement they said that “Even if only one of us creates some of the projects and works, we usually sign them together...

.

Mikhail Epstein

Mikhail Epstein

Mikhail Naumovich Epstein is an American literary theorist and critical thinker. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia...

, in After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (1995) explains why conceptualism is particularly appropriate to the culture and history of Russia, but also how it differs from Western Conceptualism:

"In the West, conceptualism substitutes "one thing for another"--a real object for its verbal description. But in Russia the object that should be replaced is simply absent.”

Epstein (1995) quotes Ilya Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov

Ilya Kabakov, Russian Илья́ Ио́сифович Кабако́в , is a Russian-American conceptual artist of Jewish descent, born in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives and works on Long Island...

:

“This contiguity, closeness, touchingness, contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of 'Russian conceptualism'... It is like something that hangs in the air, a self-reliant thing, like a fantastic construction, connected to nothing, with its roots in nothing... So, then, we can say that our own local thinking, from the very beginning in fact, could have been called 'conceptualism'.”

External links

• Moscow Conceptualism. Russian Conceptual Art