Performance on the Margins: Collaborative Art Practices in the Late-Soviet Underground

Abstract

The so-called social turn toward collaborative art practices in the West has a curious but rarely discussed parallel in unofficial art in the late Soviet Union where collaborative performance art served as a significant catalyst for artistic innovation, particularly during the watershed period between 1975 and 1985. Pathbreaking performances by the Nest, SZ, and others, as well as the important collaborative art movement AptArt between 1982 and 1984, suggest interesting parallels to developments in the West and underappreciated precedents for Moscow Actionism in the 1990s and protest and street art in the 21st century. This article expands the picture we have of collaborative performance in the late-Soviet underground and highlights its role as precursor to participatory practices today.

1. Introduction

Of the many contradictions in Russian art history, collaborative performance is perhaps the biggest conundrum. An important exhibit at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in 2014 covered a century of performance art in Russia and drew needed attention to pre-revolutionary Futurist face painting, early experimentation in theatre, music, and poetry, and state-organized mass reenactments in the 1920s and 1930s as precedents for work done from the late-Soviet period into the new millennium. That path-breaking show included important performances and collaborative artwork from the 1970s to the 2010s. Yet there was little explanation for the seemingly sudden (re)appearance of performance after decades and no overarching rationale for grouping pieces from the 1970s by the group Movement (Dvizhenie), for example, with work by the artistic duo of Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, artistic collaborators Rimma and Valery Gerlovin, Andrei Monastyrski and the group Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deistviia), and the three artists who made up the Nest (Gnezdo) other than the fact that they appeared in the same ten-year period.1

This article addresses that conceptual lacuna by looking more closely at previously marginalized collaborative art projects from the watershed period between 1975 and 1985. To provide background and context, I look at current discussions of slightly earlier precedents in the unofficial art milieu as well as pathbreaking collaborative performances from the mid- to late 1970s and early 1980s, including innovative work by the Nest of Gennady Donskoy, Mikhail Roshal, and Victor Skersis, SZ (Skersis and Vadim Zakharov), and the collaborative AptArt project between 1982 and 1984. Part of a larger study I am undertaking of collaborative art in the Soviet Union and Russia between 1972 and 2022, this article contends that a more granular approach to late-Soviet performance art is needed, one that differentiates between the highly structured, tightly controlled modernist works of certain late-Soviet art groups and the genuinely collaborative, postmodern works of others in the unofficial art world, who substituted participatory experimentation for the hierarchical structures and predetermined outcomes in the works of their peers. Boris Groys has contended that a “collective or group-based character” is one of the few traits that distinguishes Eastern European art from contemporary Western art (Groys 2003, p. 330), but closer analysis makes it clear that the actual practices of such groups can vary significantly.2 The fuller history of late-Soviet performance art suggests that some collectives in the unofficial art milieu focused on meticulous planning, valorized artistic control, and tended toward insularity, while other collaborative groups prioritized broader participation, egalitarian access, and greater artistic experimentation. By downplaying the role of individual authorship, introducing a variety of ludic and interactive elements, and adopting a resolutely modular approach to questions of concept and philosophy, such collaborative artists were able to expand the field for late-Soviet unofficial artwork and establish practices that would prove to be of value throughout the tumultuous perestroika era and the complex post-Soviet period that followed.

2. Discussion

In studies of late-Soviet unofficial art, the Nest has been something of a “missing link” until recently, even though Nest artists participated in the “cult” event Paradise (Rai) organized by their teachers Komar and Melamid, bore witness to the famous Bulldozer debacle in 1974, debuted their own performance work at the watershed exhibit of unofficial art at VDNKh in 1975, and remained active in that milieu even after the group dissolved in 1979.3 The Nest’s collaborative focus on meaningful, unscripted, real-time communication with the larger public was definitive in helping late-Soviet unofficial art overthrow notions of the artist as inspired solitary genius that still held sway in Soviet art—both official and unofficial—throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. In a decisive break with that modernist paradigm, Nest artists emphasized wider participation in the process of artmaking and, from the very beginning of their multi-faceted practice, sought direct engagement with broader audiences in the joint construction of meaning. Performance was an important aspect of their innovative approach, and Nest efforts significantly expanded the artistic repertoire of Moscow conceptualism as a result. In a series of interviews with artists involved in the origins of that important movement, Yuri Albert calls the Nest both “the last current of high modernism and the first current of postmodernism” (Albert 2014, p. 9). Performance art by the Nest and other like-minded artists from the 1970s and early 1980s helped move late-Soviet art from a “period of harsh, ‘black-and-white’ conceptualism” and “oppressive modernism”4 to the more fluid, inventive, open, postmodern era that followed.

To understand the shift in paradigm that the Nest represented, it is worthwhile looking more closely at the immediate context in which the group’s practice developed. In an interesting and wide-ranging study of the “Moscow vanguard” from 1922 to 1992, Margarita Tupitsyn argues that unofficial artists faced a dilemma at the end of the 1960s created by the disappearance of possibilities to participate in public discussions about art, which “evaporated as soon as Brezhnev’s reign began” (M. Tupitsyn 2017, p. 99). Tupitsyn contends that artists interested in “producing more radical content and forms” at that juncture were forced by circumstance to form “their own milieu that bifurcated into rural and urban (or studio) production” (M. Tupitsyn 2017, p. 108). In her account, the now underground art milieu thus gradually came to be characterized by a dichotomy between city and country that found early expression, for example, in work by former Movement member Franciso Infante, who imagined “an uncontaminated rural setting” as “the ideal site for experimental art.” Tupitsyn contends that a similar shift took place in a “dialogical paradigm of Moscow conceptualism” between “studio and rural” that “developed throughout the 1970s and early 1980s” (M. Tupitsyn 2017, p. 99).5

The now famous “out of town” performances by Collective Actions would seem to fit Tupitsyn’s description perfectly. Nearly all of the group’s performances took place outside of Moscow in what Monastyrski later likened to “postindustrial” space “free from any kind of ownership.”6 Despite the division between urban studio works and performances in the countryside that Tupitsyn’s dichotomy implies, however, she herself argues convincingly that, starting with the 1977 performance Comedy (Komediia), Collective Actions artists actually “began to script their events according to fairly precise structural rules that were similar to those of two-dimensional works made at the time in Moscow’s studios” (M. Tupitsyn 2017, p. 115). Though Collective Actions performances took place in locations outside of town, they reproduced in many ways the approach and atmosphere of carefully curated shows for select groups in the city’s art studios that were typical in much of the unofficial art milieu in that period.

As Monastyrski notes in a 1989 interview with Victor Tupitsyn, “beginning with Comedy,” Collective Actions’ performances began to involve a “fairly stable group of audience members” and take place in a “narrower, specialized field” (V. Tupitsyn 1997, p. 224). Monastyrski describes the collective’s work as taking place “under the open sky,” but he also mentions a decidedly contained “bubbling” (puzyrchatost’) that appears there, in his telling, as “something domestic, intimate (kamernoe), though out-of-town at the same time.” Although he remembers events as an “exit into open space,” Monastyrski also notes that performances on this “bubble” (puzyr’) of domesticated rural space have “nothing in common with [artistic] happenings.” As proof, he points out their performances’ “meticulously crafted structures, which are tied to extremely abstract, metaphysical constructs” (V. Tupitsyn 1997, pp. 224, 225). Collective Actions’ events were carefully choreographed and as regulated as possible: Monastyrski remembers that “while working out the plan for battle with our viewers [srazhenie s nashimi zriteliami], we tried to account for as many variants as possible in order to start the battle in a way they wouldn’t expect” (V. Tupitsyn 1997, p. 228). That was required, it seems, for performances that evoked the “expectation of a miracle, at least full readiness for one,” as artist Ilya Kabakov, a regular participant in Collective Actions’ performances, described Comedy in 1980 (Monastyrski et al. 1998, p. 58).7

As Margarita Tupitsyn herself points out, others in the late-Soviet unofficial art world were irritated by such mysticism and rejected it along with other aspects of the traditional artist–audience relationship that characterized much of both official and unofficial late-Soviet art.8 Tupitsyn persuasively argues, for example, that the 1976 Doubling I (Udvoenie I) by still understudied artist Mikhail Chernyshov in collaboration with Boris Bich was Chernyshov’s discontented reaction to unofficial painters who “mechanically relocated their paintings from studios to [the hastily authorized 1974 exhibit of unofficial art at] Ismailovsky Park, showed them on easels, and engaged in a traditional author-viewer dialogue with the audience” (M. Tupitsyn 2017, p. 109). In a 2012 interview Alexander Melamid remembers his own search for an alternative to the artistic status quo as “an escape from an inescapable situation—to not do what they were doing.” Recalling the isolation he and fellow artist Vitaly Komar felt even in the unofficial art world where they had to work without “a single supportive person from Kabakov’s or Rabin’s circle,” Melamid remembers that only his students Donskoy, Roshal, and Skersis “understood the essence” of art as a “different activity.” According to Melamid, as younger artists “without any sort of entanglement with that [older] circle,” it was “easier” for them to break free (Albert 2014, pp. 110, 112–13).

The public debut of those younger artists in 1975 could not have been more decisive. With pride of place at the entrance to the main hall at VDNKh, Moscow’s premier exhibition space, the Nest’s now legendary work Hatching a Spirit (Vysizhivanie dukkha) was well positioned to pioneer unmistakably new possibilities for late-Soviet art. The artists’ introduction to the larger urban stage was far from painless, however. The group was almost deterred from participating in the unprecedented show when authorities on a last-minute inspection of the hall declared the nest a fire hazard and tried to remove it altogether. That eleventh-hour attempt at censorship was stopped only when other artists in the show, numbering around 150, began to remove their own works in protest.9 Even sympathetic artists were not entirely sure of the significance of the work, the only genuinely performative piece in the entire exhibit. Years later, artist Viktor Pivovarov recalled in an interview that Hatching a Spirit seemed “revolutionary in the extreme, very unexpected for us all,” noting that it “overturned all expectations” of what art could be at the time (Albert 2014, p. 136).

That kind of reaction makes the young artists’ creative tenacity and commitment even more significant. As later comments by Skersis testify, they were themselves still in the process of answering that fundamental question “what is art anyway?”10 In a curious exchange reproduced in an interview with a disapproving Soviet journalist at the time of the VDNKh exhibit, one of the young artists is asked whether he and his collaborators are ready “to sit in the nest 100 years, to devote your life to it.” The answer—“as long as our work and its idea elicit interest among the audience”—encapsulates the essence of Nest devotion to shared experimentation. The antagonistic journalist misses the point, but the artists were insistent: “Everyone can hatch whatever they want” (Shpagin 1975). Though infrequently noted in discussions of late-Soviet art, that genuinely collaborative spirit was in direct opposition to the more hierarchical, regulated, and elitist spirit that reigned in much of the rest of the unofficial art milieu at the time. As Nest artists demonstrated in their first public performance, late-Soviet modernism would eventually give way to postmodernism’s sense of play, self-irony, shared authorship, direct engagement with everyday Soviet life, and the aspirational focus on broad accessibility that would follow.

Like Hatching a Spirit, other Nest works, including other pieces displayed at the VDNKh exhibit, offered willing audiences an open invitation to participate in the process of artmaking. Participation was meant to be broadly accessible, carried out in real time and open to all regardless of background. Both Communication Tube (Kommunikatsionnaia truba) from 1974 and Pump the Red Pump! (Kachaite krasnyi nasos) from 1975 were available at the VDNKh exhibit for any willing to accept the challenge. Both of those works alluded to their Soviet legacy in their use of the characteristic red-and-white color palette, exhortative phrases, and references to the necessity of shared effort toward a common goal. Yet such familiar elements were mobilized to subversive ends, as participants were urged to consider their own actions more closely and contemplate the possibility of taking individual responsibility for their own utterances. Ludic elements were part of both works: lifting the metal Communication Tube—unwieldy at just over four feet long—or choosing one of two bicycle pumps to pump in support of “world peace, happiness, and love” brought delight, confusion, absurdity, and animation to the artmaking process. Although the censorious Soviet journalist declined to engage directly with the tube, its creators offered the object to help users “analyze a simple function—communication between two people.” Nest artists seemed convinced that it—and art as a whole—could serve as “an effective means for the improving communication between peoples.”11

That focus on accessibility characterized their equally iconic work Iron Curtain (Zheleznyi zanaves). Constructed in 1976 from a metal sheet scavenged from a Soviet building site, the work vividly demonstrated the artists’ unconventional belief that both political discourse and the act of artmaking belong squarely in the hands of the public. Nest artists cemented their commitment to open access as an essential part of collaborative art practice with their performative 1977 work Let’s Become a Meter Closer! (Stanem na metr blizhe!). That piece urged “friends” on both sides of the artificial boundary separating East and West to “take up shovels” in a daily project aimed at “rapprochement.” The artists’ general appeal invited “all inhabitants of the western part of the world” to join them in excavating half a meter of the soil that divided them in order to bring all participants “a meter closer.” In an even bolder move, the artists offered to coordinate efforts globally, directing inquiries on the timing of “International Digging Day” to Roshal’s actual Moscow address.12 For the site of their nearly unprecedented 1978 work Art to the People (Iskusstvo v massy), Nest artists chose a public street in Moscow. The performance was fleeting, but bold: lifting a Soviet-style yet clearly unsanctioned banner on two poles, the artists carried the piece—a complicated pastiche of American Expressionism and Soviet agit-prop—across the intersection of Dmitry Ulyanov Street and Academic Vavilov Street in Moscow. Although the large piece seems to have elicited little reaction from passersby at the time, its performance was significant as a definitively public statement about artistic freedom and its theoretical accessibility to all.13 Though brief, the action was pointedly directed toward real-world engagement with an expanded urban audience. It was built on the conviction the Nest had first demonstrated publicly at the VDNKh exhibit in 1975: the richest artistic discoveries come from open-ended and unscripted engagement with our surroundings.

That emphasis on individual initiative and deep engagement with both the surrounding environment and the artistic process itself explains a host of other Nest works, including their 1976 series School of Painting (Shkola zhivopisi) that presented art history as a series of homemade masterpieces available to anyone, offering participants the opportunity to repaint works from the classical repertoire in the kind of “do-it-yourself” artwork surprising even to contemporary viewers in the West.14 Nest insistence on the idea that artistic activity was within reach of everyone would underpin many other works in the years that followed as more and more artists found the conversations restricted to narrow audiences of experts, professional colleagues, or even the “circle of interested people” around Collective Actions increasingly unsatisfying.15

Continuing to build on models for unconstrained creative collaboration, Skersis began working with a new “coauthor” in the summer of 1980. Skersis and Vadim Zakharov, working in tandem as SZ, began a period of artistic experimentation intended to expand both the creative vocabulary available to artists in the Moscow underground and the set of art practitioners in that milieu. One of their most interesting and compelling ideas was SZ’s notion of unconstructed artistic “activity” (deiatel’nost’) that recast the individual artwork as a process with indeterminate boundaries in time and space. The concept lies precisely between notions of the artistic happening, which the Nest had found so productive in the 1970s, and a more expansive idea of “life as art,” which Skersis describes as a “trick” both they and artists in the West “already knew.” According to Skersis, the idea of “activity” conceptually extended—but did not entirely remove—the temporal boundaries of any individual artwork. Stretching the time boundaries of the artistic process thus put every individual creation in dialogue with a multitude of others. As a result, the individual work was no longer a “single manifestation” of a concept, but rather the productive start of a “particular process.”16

SZ’s notion of “activity” ensured that each artwork was actively engaged with the surrounding environment and available to independent actors within it. This connected approach characterized most SZ works, including Filling the Niches, a 1980 piece that imagined engaging everyday city dwellers in the free and unconstrained exchange of views on art and life. Casting the endeavor as part of a bid to “produce various types of information; develop polysemantic products; and search for new channels for the circulation and receipt of information,” the artists distributed an SZ Bulletin, installed “bird-feeder mailboxes,” and announced the creation of a special “nook and cranny for information of any sort” (Skersis and Zakharov 2004, p. 49). As representatives of the newly “trademarked” artistic company SZ, the artists opened the realm of unofficial art in Moscow to often ignored stimuli and responses, including willful absurdity, artistic appropriation, misdirection and distortion, and the use of readymades. Their production of “commercial” art objects, including an SZ advertising campaign and repurposed art matchboxes available for purchase at unofficial exhibits, extended their reach into unfamiliar, even inappropriate realms. SZ works are infused with whimsy, humor, and faux derring-do, as the duo creatively extends the Nest’s notion of the urban landscape as a site for unrestricted art performance.

Another SZ work from 1980, Rationalization of Urinary Function in Dogs similarly recast the Moscow city map as a kind of creative art space open to all comers. Using Canis Major, an important constellation from the southern celestial hemisphere to create an imaginary network above the city, the artists plotted five locations on the urban landscape where they then affixed small rags marked with the urine of the real-live dog Fedya. The artists dutifully documented their performance and implied that others would soon join them in careful monitoring to ensure that these important “signaling installations” would continue “functioning normally” (Skersis and Zakharov 2004, p. 52). The pseudo-scientific vocabulary the duo used to describe these quasi-logical monitoring activities highlighted the sense of play the artists brought to the often deadly serious unofficial art world. As part of their conviction that the unofficial artworld needed renewal and expansion, the artists use play and buffoonery to stake out new territory in defense of unrestricted imagination widely accessible to all.

Wider connection and play are also part of the implicit message of SZ’s 1980 Inscriptions series. Here, too, the artists treated the late-Soviet urban landscape as an open canvas on which they stenciled open-ended statements for individual contemplation. The varied, randomly placed, and ambiguous texts, including statements such as HERE!, OH!, AH!, and HAT!, suggest a gamut of potential responses from affirmation to delight as they shift responsibility for artistic meaning to the casual passerby. Overall, the series offered willing “readers” a moment all too rare in late-Soviet life: the chance to interpret public texts on their own. Other SZ projects, including their series of “Self-Defense Courses against Things” and their third and fourth SZ personal exhibitions, were specifically designed to engage the larger community in conversations about art.

Zakharov’s own 1980 Stimulations series included playful attempts to engage casual passersby with small coins placed in their path and to offer compensation to individuals who would agree to scratch their own ears, suck their own fingers, or alter their appearances. He later remembered having to pay only one person who lightly tapped his own nose with his index finger for a ruble.17 Though not a single colleague from the unofficial art world accepted that particular challenge, Zakharov continued to look for ways to engage with his fellow artists in a broader discussion about their shared profession, employing questionnaires, interviews, and group performances to that end. He would come to see co-authorship with fellow artists as an essential way to develop his own practice and expand artistic possibilities in the milieu more generally.18 Zakharov’s early work with artist Nadezhda Stolpovskaya, for example, included a complicated investigation of the role of influence and borrowing on their artistic practice. As part of that collaboration, Stolpovskaya created a series of games she proposed in early 1981 to dispense entirely with notions of ownership, artistic one-upmanship, and creative dominance. Game No. 1, to be played by as many players as desired, involved taking turns laying out coins or objects on a playing field. At the end of the variable-length play time, the items are parceled out evenly among the players, in a process demonstrating that all the shared items and the creative ideas surrounding them are worthy of consideration and imminently transferrable. Documentation for the coauthored project makes it clear that Stolpovskaya approached the coauthored project itself as a “game,” in which play revolved around each artist “trying to guess what the author would do,” both made immeasurably richer by the free exchange.19

Such whimsical play, interaction with the surrounding environment, and openness to a variety of continually evolving artistic models are still underappreciated aspects of the unofficial art world at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. Though often overlooked, such approaches were significant aspects of collaborative art practice in that period. In a 1988 conversation with Victor Tupitsyn, one-time Collective Actions member Georgy Kiesewalter, for example, remembers becoming disenchanted with work being done by that group starting “some time in 1982” when they “began to make pieces that were rigidly planned out, well-constructed, sterile.” At the time Kiesewalter himself was more interested in his own ideas about art as free play and considered himself “simply an artist at play (igraiushchii khudozhnik), unconstrained by obligations to society, the people, the muses, and so on” and working on the principle “if I want, I do [art]; if I don’t want, I don’t do [it] (V. Tupitsyn 1997, p. 147). Noting that “constant changes in style” are characteristic for him, he expressed sympathy for the view that “if an artist has fully formed, it means he’s died. Because there is life out there (vovne), flowing by, continually changing” (V. Tupitsyn 1997, p. 145). Other Collective Actions participants, including founding member Nikita Alexeev, who eventually left the group, agreed.20

Works by Rimma Gerlovina and Valery Gerlovin, underappreciated contributors to late-Soviet performance art and Moscow conceptualism alike, help fill out our picture of the unofficial art world at the time as both grounded and playful. A 1980 interview with Victor Tupitsyn makes it obvious that play was a vital part of their activity, both before and after emigration from the Soviet Union.21 Valery Gerlovin identifies “involvement of the viewer in a game” as “one of the very most important elements” of their practice. Rimma Gerlovina agrees on the importance of the “creation of a playful atmosphere” insisting that “we only have in mind not-for-profit games, in which the only value of the game is the game itself.” Shunning any notion of coercion or deception on their part, Gerlovina insists on the voluntary nature of participation, noting “our [one] condition is not to compel the viewer. If you want, play. If you want, don’t play. If you want, watch. If you want, don’t” (V. Tupitsyn 1997, p. 86).

In archival materials dated November 1975 and included in a 1977 issue of the samizdat journal Metki,22 Rimma Gerlovin’s Cubes (Kubiki) and other “experiments in space [pomeshchenia]” are described as “not the fruit of existential thought,” but rather the “ceaseless interaction of Man and Nature, among people, between the personality [lichnost’] and itself.” It is “this very act of attention to the natural state” that should generate individual “creative activity.” The human being then “becomes an experimental subject, not for the artist, but for the individual himself, without the slightest need for force.” Unconstrained participation is both key and momentous. “Anyone willing” may expect the opportunity to feel again and perhaps to comprehend one’s role in nature, interrelatedness and mutual accountability, the consanguinity of oneself and the surrounding environment and thereby expand the boundaries of one’s own individual “I.”

Lest readers of the dissident journal take themselves—or the process of artmaking—too seriously, the document concludes with the Gerlovins’ extended proposal for a mirror-sided urban “cube-toilet,” which presents defecation as a “harmonious process of social existence,” which should be carried out in public in the town square. That sense of humor and willingness to play is reflected in the same issue of Metki in the transcript of a “Conversation of the Gerlovins with Komar and Melamid that occurred on 29 March 1976.” In the document, “Komar and Melamid” participate in the wide-ranging discussion as a unified “K. and M.,” occasionally answering “themselves” or being interrupted by “R.G.” and “V.G.” as well as amorphous “others.”23 The overall effect is both theatrical and tragicomic, especially when the conversation touches on the loaded question of the relative spirituality (dukhovnost’) of Moscow and Leningrad artists. Those present treat the subject with practiced irony and skepticism, but it is clearly still a fraught issue with real-world consequences.

Contention over such topics weighed much less heavily on the younger generation, as the Nest work Hatching a Spirit had already made clear. The alternative title to that 1975 work—Hatch Eggs! (Vysizhivanie iatsa!)—seemed to make a direct connection between “spirituality” and the actual egg the artists were “hatching” in the nest at the VDNKh exhibit, but the stenciled signs that the young men posted on and near the work alluded instead to the slang word for testicles, urging exhibitgoers, in effect, to “man up.” That more casual attitude to the “mysterious Russian soul” and the Russian/Soviet messianic mission characterized much of the younger generation and is reflected, for example, in works SZ created for the collectively assembled Moscow Archive of New Art (Moskovskii arkhiv novogo iskusstva, or MANI) and in the purposely egalitarian approach Skersis and Zakharov adopted in collecting items for the counter-archive of unofficial art in 1981 and 1982.24 Their focus on open access and collaboration led them to cast as wide a net as possible in their search for MANI contributors, and it also marked their individual contributions, including pieces by fictitious artists that the duo created for a 1982 Phantoms series and included in the archive. Like other work in the Phantoms series, the banner All Men are Scum!—ostensibly created by a feminist artist—tries to imagine voices that were otherwise missing in the Moscow artistic underground. This consistent emphasis on inclusivity, conversation, and unconstrained collaboration defined SZ activity throughout the artists’ time together, and it was essential in shaping and developing the important AptArt project of the early 1980s as well.

The unofficial AptArt phenomenon (1982–1984) presents a particularly intriguing example of late-Soviet collaborative performance, providing an almost perfect case study of underground art done by a relatively well-defined group of artists who kept extensive (though not complete) records over the distinct period from October 1982 to May 1984. AptArt offers a useful snapshot of artistic collaboration as it was understood by those artists during that era. Margarita Tupitsyn describes the emergence of AptArt as the result of artist Nikita Alexeev’s decision to “set up his studio apartment as a site for the eruption of creative energy that had been gathering force among young artists since the late 1970s” (M. Tupitsyn 2017, p. 126), but Alexeev himself identifies a much wider group of contributors and notes that the TOTART duo Natalya Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov had offered their own apartment as gallery space too (Alexeev 2008, pp. 168–87). Alexeev makes a point to include them as well as Roshal, SZ, the Toadstools (Mukhomory), and Georgy Kiesewalter in the list of core contributors. Such detail is essential as we try to recover and reappraise aspects of late-Soviet collaborative art practices that have been obscured or misinterpreted in scholarship written about them in the years that followed.

A closer look at AptArt makes it clear that the artists most closely involved with that phenomenon were genuinely interested in cooperative effort and determined to expand the discussion and practice of art to a wider public beyond the elitist, hot-house conversations that had characterized much unofficial work up to that point. This is true despite the fact that the artists represented several generations, a variety of artistic approaches, and a changing cast of participants. A 1982 TOTART document by Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov, for example, noted that AptArt was intended as a “continuation of investigative work,” including “demystifying the myth of the artist-demiurge, of the misunderstood lonely genius” (Abalakova and Zhigalov 1998, pp. 121–22).25 That 1982 document, written just before the first AptArt group exhibit and originally intended as a programmatic statement of the entire phenomenon, refers specifically to related work by SZ on “the functioning of art [and] the range of problems surrounding both artistic and everyday life and their mutual interactions.” The document insists that anyone attending the first AptArt show in October and November 1982 should be prepared “not for the typical contemplation of art ‘objects,’” but rather for “work and participation.” The artists insisted: “It’s an event, not an exhibit” (sobytie, ne vystavka).26 Zhigalov referred around the same time to the “genuine democratism” of SZ’s work, which was open to participants at “any level” of skill or preparation. SZ works, he continued, “are communicative and in principle can exist and develop even without the authors.”27 AptArt exhibits united dozens of disparate artists in a collaborative spirit that characterized both personal and group shows there, including the outdoor exhibits AptArt en Plein Air (May 1983) and AptArt Beyond the Fence (September 1983).

Commentary on AptArt by Nika Dubrovsky, self-described as “one of the youngest” of the unofficial art scene in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, suggests the uniqueness of the phenomenon as well as the difficulty of drawing present-day comparisons to events from a continually receding past. In an online discussion of her experiences entitled “What is AptArt? Why is it Important?,” (Dubrovsky 2022) recalls being “immediately struck by the closeness of their [AptArt] community,” which seemed to her full of individuals who were “cheerful, educated, and brave” (https://museum.care/what-is-aptart/) (accessed on 30 May 2025). Not everything there appealed to her: she remembers, for example, the “misogyny” of the mostly male milieu, their “romantic view of the role of the artist,” and the “almost caste-system of selection.” In her later remarks about the underground scene of the time, Dubrovsky remembers that this “circle of friends” had “no less strict a hierarchy and ideological censorship than the party Obkoms or Soviet Exhibitions’ committees.”

Despite these criticisms, however, Dubrovsky describes her brief interaction with the AptArt “environment” in often glowing terms, noting “the beautiful things about APTART—unselfishness, friendship, the opportunity to take risks, to be uncomfortable, absurd, and even meaningless—I would say to be free.” AptArt lessons stayed with her and inspired her later creation of an open series of exhibition rooms for the online Museum of Care, where she labels AptArt as “art for everyone, in the home and the neighborhood.” Dubrovsky’s notion of “care” is an unmistakably recent addition to discussions of late-Soviet collaborative art, but her twenty-first-century comments nevertheless illuminate the modesty, generosity, spirit of joint experimentation, and accessibility at the heart of AptArt and the work of key participants that followed. This is reflected again and again in perestroika-era and early post-Soviet art by these artists. Their focus on co-authorship and profound commitment to shared artistic inquiry continued, even during the late 1980s and 1990s, when, as artist Andrei Filippov recalled, the “ties between artists were broken” (Levashov 2009a, p. 30) by market forces and outside influences. Work that downplays the role of particular individuals in group activity, eliding, disguising, or even removing evidence of solo effort and individual signatures in deference to the group effort still characterizes at least a select group of artists from AptArt to the present.28

Outreach efforts from the late-Soviet period were admittedly more aspirational than effective in generating broad participation. Alexeev, for example, documents an ephemeral series he created that resembled the handmade announcements late-Soviet citizens used to barter goods and services. Unsurprisingly for Alexeev, AptArt as a whole, and the MANI collection that archived such work, the artist’s announcements—which introduced poetry, whimsy, and invention into conversations about art—elicited no public response.29 A number of Anatoly Zhigalov’s works from the same period, including “My Last/Latest Work,” similarly involved communal activity aimed at contributing to a larger shared discussion about art, although as he and his co-creator document, some of his outreach work had decidedly negative personal consequences (Abalakova and Zhigalov 1998, pp. 110–13, 125). In the late-Soviet context, however, even the work of artists who typically worked alone resonated as part of a group effort. Individual works by Yuri Albert, for example, imagine a group context for his personal creations or knowingly undermine Albert’s own artistic “persona” by presenting a weakened, confused, foolish, or decidedly unheroic image in place of the “demiurge” of Art earlier generations adopted.30

The perestroika period would find Albert engaged in works of determined outreach, like his 1987–1989 series of “Elitist-Democratic Art,” in which he shared his understanding of seemingly esoteric contemporary art with vastly different audiences usually excluded from discussions about the artistic endeavor. He later remembered his initial puzzlement with Western visitors who arrived at the “art squat” on Moscow’s Furmanyi Lane that he, Filippov, Toadstool artists, and others occupied during the 1990s more interested in acquiring art pieces and making deals than in drinking tea and philosophizing about “sacred art.”31 Skersis spent most of the perestroika period and the 1990s working on “useful” art as a medical illustrator. When he took part in art conversations in Russia during the period, it was often to insist on the greater need for art with real-world applications. Skersis’s 1997 exhibit in Moscow, for example, bore the cheeky English title Irrelevant and displayed drawings of medical implants and artificial joints that were protected by commercial copyright. In an equally irreverent interview as part of a 2009 group exhibit at the Stella Art Foundation in Moscow, Skersis pretends to recall an apocryphal 1993 conversation in which the “art cooperative” Cupid (Kupidon)—uniting Albert, Skersis, Filippov, and, eventually, Paruir Davtian—supposedly first decided to work together (Levashov 2009c, p. 22). Though that recovered memory was false, Cupid’s actual first show in 2008 set a tone for joint work full of good humor, shared artistic inquiry, and creative generosity that clearly recalled the collaborative spirit of earlier times. Cupid’s successful model for shared work ended only with Filippov’s untimely death in 2022.

As luck would have it, discussions of this powerful collaborative tradition seem to have been crowded out by interpretations of Russian art from the West as well as the tragic developments of the last few years. Neglect and disregard of home-grown art practices in favor of borrowed traditions from abroad characterized much work in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The 1998 street performance Barricade (Barrikada), for example, coming nearly 20 years to the day after the Nest’s 1978 Art to the People, might seem to be the perfect demonstration of continuity in the collaborative performance history in Moscow. Yet the organizers of Barricade, including artist Anatoly Osmolovsky, modeled their work on far-left French student protests from 1968 and included banners from that period, some in the original French, in the performance, which they described as the “first use of non-traditional techniques of political warfare in the Russian situation.” The work, like others in Moscow Actionism, aimed at open confrontation between an antagonistic group of “us” in opposition to an amorphous “them.” In his discussion of “socially engaged art” from 1991 to 2011, Nato Thompson argues for the abandonment of distinctions between “artist-initiated” and “non-artist-initiated” art projects. That kind of “cattle call” approach (Thompson 2012, p. 27)—imperfect in the West—is particularly unworkable in the post-Soviet space. Some of the most visible post-Soviet artists were laser-focused on establishing themselves as personalities, political figures, and founders of new artistic movements, which they would control and define. Osmolovsky himself eventually complained about the demands of such “radicalism” and criticized works of performance artists in the 2000s for ignoring the “Dignity of Art” (Dostoinstvo Iskusstva) and its “Independent Nature” (Samostoiatel’nost’), warning Pussy Riot in particular of the dangers of “drifting into pure politics.”32 When art is wielded primarily as a political weapon, it seems, artists themselves risk becoming tools in the hands of others.

There are powerful artistic alternatives, however, many perfected in the late-Soviet period. In 1987 Albert asked “haven’t you noticed that the subjects of my works are art and the artists?” (Albert and Zakharov 1987, p. 91). He described work by Cupid as the product of a similar artistic stance, pointing out resolutely in an interview about the group’s 2009 exhibit in Moscow that “we know [what we do] ends up being art and we want to discuss [that art] not just with one another but also with the audience” (Levashov 2009b, p. 15). These artists understand that spectators have their own agency, and they insist on reminding us all of that fact. Although his long-term participation in the collectively organized Cupid was initially somewhat of a departure for the solo artist, Albert has consistently demonstrated an open and inclusive stance toward audience members, fellow artists, and the public at large. His continued generosity has been visible since his public debut in the performance Y. F. Albert Gives His Entire Share of Warmth to Others (Iu. F. Al’bert vse vydeliaemoe im teplo otdaet liudiam) at a 1978 collaborative event organized by the Nest. Recalling that kind of open-hearted collaborative spirit in a group conversation in 1987, Albert noted that “during AptArt times everyone pushed each other forward, but now they try to throw [them] back. Yesterday’s colleagues have become ballast on the road to a career” (V. Tupitsyn 1997, p. 82). As we expand the history of performance to include work recovered from the “margins,” such words deserve our long and careful consideration.