Contingent, Convergent, Collaborative: Liberating Art Practices in Soviet and Post-Soviet Space

• In Event: Liberating the Former East: Reassessing Collaborative Art Practices from East to West

Abstract

Building on the collaborative AptArt experiments of late-Soviet underground artists, this paper explores cooperative art practices both pre- and post-1991. AptArt attention to the role of cooperation, open dialogue, and co-authorship, particularly in path-breaking performance works, serves as useful context for an investigation of collaborative art in the post-Soviet space as well. Contingent groups such as Kapiton, Kupidon, Eti, and others made a virtue of continually shifting alliances in the post-Soviet era. In our increasingly polarized twenty-first century, it behooves us to explore the phenomenon of contingent art in greater depth, studying artistic models for unconstrained group participation and shifting creative associations for what they can tell us about the prospects for artistic evolution and political change.

Author

• Mary A. Nicholas, Lehigh U