Post-Soviet Reception and Canonization of Soviet Conceptualism

• In Event: Remembering the Soviet: Un(Mixing) Trauma and Nostalgia

Abstract

The transnational canonization of late Soviet conceptualism of the 1970s and 1980s started around the collapse of the Soviet system and in a sense continues to this day and, which has, through Western reception, returned to the Russian-language historiography of contemporary art to become a cornerstone of the convertibility of Soviet unofficial cultural discourse. The paper examines the specific strategies of this canonization and the roles of individual actors (Tupitsyna, Groys, Hubert-Martin, Kringst-Ernst, later Dogot, Gelman, Jerofeev), as well as the practices of self-canonization by the artists themselves and the roles of state institutions (the Tretyakov Gallery, the State Centre for Contemporary Art, the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art, etc.).

Author

• Tomas Glanc, U of Zurich (Switzerland)