Reception of the Avant-garde in Russian Contemporary Art of the 1980s and 1990s

The article examines the reception of the Russian avant-garde art of the 1910s and 1920s in Soviet non-official art and early post-Soviet art of the 1980s and 1990s, the period when the Russian avant-garde art was widely discovered, followed and/or challenged, primarily focusing on the Moscow art scene. The author attempts to trace the changing in time transformation of the attitude towards the avant-garde represented by several generations of artists associated with three different trends: Moscow conceptualism, ‘new wave’, and Moscow actionism. Some of the proposed strategies of interaction with the avantgarde that employed methods of quotation, pastiche, irony, and criticism obviously fit into the postmodernist paradigm. Others could refute the common belief in the obsolescence of the avant-garde project and approach or actualize the avant-garde issues against the predictions of the art theory. For Soviet non-official artists in the previous decades, the Russian avant-garde legacy was a kind of secret knowledge, but in the 1980s, due to its national and international recognition and its success in the West, Soviet artists accepter the necessity of identifying themselves with the new avant-garde and correlating their own practice with it — if not to continue the avant-garde project, then to sum it up. During the perestroika era, the energy and the imagery of the early Soviet avant-garde tuned in to the spirit of the times. A number of phenomena on the unofficial scene were marked by the pro-avant-garde tendencies, so the dual attitude towards the avant-garde was expressed by the slogan “The avant-garde is dead — long live the avantgarde!”. And it was only in the 1990s that the ambition rose to produce something comparable to the historical avantgarde in radicalism of statement and to stand on a par with its legacy, although in the end, Moscow actionism stated the impossibility of continuing the project in contemporary reality

Art criticism · Communism · Contemporary art · Criticism · Modern art · Obsolescence · Slogan · Art, Politics, and Modernism · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Vladimir Nabokov Literary Studies