Timur Novikov and the New Artists

The chapter focuses on a circle of nonconfomrist artists that formed around Timur Novikov in the early 1980s. The circle’s multimedia practices absorbed multiple influences, but, most importantly, ludic aesthetics of Russian Futurists and OBERIU. Their interest in avant-garde non-art was not tantamount to a rejection of such traditional techniques as painting and drawing. Their painterly practice was “wild”: they immersed themselves in an unbounded expressionism, a style that had been vigorously vilified and persecuted by the normative Soviet aesthetic. Through the analysis of the New Artists’ multimedial works, actions, and innovative genres the article traces the group’s evolution and establishes the connection of its shared aesthetic with such global trends as the new wave, Тransavantgarde and environmental art of the early 1980s. By turning the most unexpected, ordinary things into art, the New Artists environmentally revitalized life and culture.

Abstract art · Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Normative · Novikov self-consistency principle · Painting · Pure mathematics · Style (visual arts) · Visual arts · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Art, Technology, and Culture · European Linguistics and Anthropology · Mathematics · Philosophy