Andrei Monastyrski
dal 21/11/2010 al 26/1/2011
Segnalato da
21/11/2010
Andrei Monastyrski
State Museum of Modern Art of the Russian Academy of Arts, Moscow
A solo exhibition of Monastyrski, one of the most important Russian contemporary artists, a leader of Moscow conceptualist school. The aesthetic field created by Monastyrski is composed of a number of equally significant components - artworks, theoretical texts, performances, poetry, and documentations of Collective Actions group, of which he is the leader and the driving force since 1976. This first museum exhibition of Monastyrski is the starting point for the theoretical comprehension and representation of the artist through a retrospective of his installations.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art and VICTORIA — the Art of being Contemporary Foundation are pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Andrei Monastyrski, one of the most important Russian contemporary artists, a leader of Moscow conceptualist school.
The aesthetic field created by Monastyrski is composed of a number of equally significant components — artworks, theoretical texts, performances, poetry, and documentations of Collective Actions group, of which he is the leader and the driving force since 1976. This first museum exhibition of Monastyrski is the starting point for the theoretical comprehension and representation of the artist through a retrospective of his installations.
The exhibition intends to start building a synthetic overview of the artist’s work over the past 30 years, based on installations and documentations of Collective Actions performances. It features the works previously not shown in Moscow — Fountaininstallationthat toured major European museums, Goethe, the work of 1976 exhibited at Documenta XII in Kassel and in Chicago, as well as new installations — Corridor of CA and Encasements.
Presenting the exhibition, Andrei Monastyrski writes:
«Most of my installations are based on performances of ‘Collective Actions’ group. <...> The work of CA can be equally treated as literature (‘novel’), visual arts (performance, installation) and music (audio discourse). Different times require different lattice actualisations of Collective Actions materials. CA never engaged in art as a process of manufacturing tangible objects of art. Its meta-position is in its existential and aesthetic practices, in aesthetic discourse. The process has always been and remains much more important for us than the result...Space and time are main characters of ‘Trips out of Town’ by CA, rather than the viewers or us, their authors and organisers.
In the 1970-80s, within the Russian conceptual art movement, as well as in the West, Collective Actions was regarded as the cutting edge of contemporary art, as ‘art after philosophy’. These books are nothing short of the history of contemporary art in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. This was an art of international level; it poised and resolved most general problems and issues of art theory: in plastics, in style, in discourse. The same problems and issues were common for the international evolution of contemporary art: from Duchamp and Dada, through Fluxus, John Cage, Dennis Oppenheim, and Chris Burden to Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and many others.»
The exhibition catalogue to be published later is to bring new opportunities to ‘lattice actualisations’of the work by Andrei Monastyrski. Robert Storr, Klaus Biesenbach, and IlyaKabakov, the key figures of the international contemporary art scene will present both a universal perspective and the personal viewpoint on his work in their essays and dialogues with the artist.
Andrei Monastyrski
Born in 1949in Petsamo, Murmansk region, Russia. Graduated from the language and literature department of the Moscow State University. Since 1975 his practice oscillates between installations, objects, writings and performances; one of the leaders of Collective Actions group(1976-2010); author of Trip out of Town anthology by CA group; originator of Moscow Archive of New Art anthology (1986-1990); originator of Glossary of Terms of Moscow Conceptualist School (1999). He participated in group exhibitions of Apartment Art (1982) and Club of Avant-garde (KLAVA) in Moscow as well as in many other exhibitions in Russia and abroad.
Selected solo exhibitions: Andrei Monastyrski (Kunstihoone, Tallinn, 2008); Earthworks (StellaArtGallery, Moscow, 2005); 70s and other works (NaviculaArtis, Saint-Petersburg, 2000); Gosagroprom(Gosagroprom, Moscow, 1998); Branch (XL Галерея, Moscow, 1996); Untershriften (Kunstwerke, Berlin, 1994).
Selected group exhibitions: HideandSeek (MuseumofContemporaryArt, Chicago, 2010); 52ndVenice Biennale (2007); Documenta 12 (Kassel, 2007); Vincent 2006, (StedelijkMuseum, Amsterdam, 2006); Angelsof History (MHKA, Antwerp, 2005); Moscow Conceptualism (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin, 2005); 50th Venice Biennale (2003); Art of the 20th century (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, 2000); L’autremoitié de l’Europe (Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2000); Global Conceptualism... (QueensMuseumofArt, New York, 1999); KunstimUntergrund (Albertina, Vienna, 1999); Praprintium (Berlin — Bremen, 1998); Collective Actions (ExitArt, New York, 1997); PassaggioaOriente (45th Venice Biennale, 1993); SowjetisheKunst um 1990 (BinationaleIIIsrael/UdSSR, Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, 1990).
Andrei Monastyrski is announced to represent Russia at the next Venice Biennale.
Collective Actions group (CA)
The group was founded in 1976. Now, nearly 35 years later, most of CA original members — Nikolai Panitkov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Sergei Romashko, SabineHansgen— continue to work together (Nikita Alexeev left the group in 1983 and GeorgyKizelwalter in 1989). The group staged 125performances that have been documented in the ten-volume (volume 11 is a work-in-progress) Trips out of Town anthology.
As early as 1977, only a year after the group was formed, Flash Art, at the time a leading international art magazine, published a major article about CA with a photograph of one of their performances on the cover (next to the works of Beuys, Serra and Boltanski). The same year documentation of CA’s actions was exhibited at the Venice Biennale. The group’s actions attracted crème de la crème of the flourishing Moscow avant-garde scene which at the time was really on the world level. IlyaKabakov, Oleg Vasiliev, Eric Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov, VsevolodNekrasov, Boris Groys, Lev Rubinstein, Dmitri AlexandrovichPrigov, Alexander Rabinovich, Alexei Liubimov, Leonid Sokov, Francisco Infante, Eduard Gorokhovsky, Joseph Backstein, Mukhomory and Medical Hermeneutics art groups and many other artists, poets, musicians and critics were all there — asviewers as well as participants and therefore co-creators.
Klaus Biesenbach
In 2004, Biesenbach was appointed as curator in MoMA Department of Film and Media. He joined MoMA PS1 as curator in 1996; named Chief Curator of MoMA’s newly formed Department of Media in 2006, which was subsequently broadened to Department of Media and Performance Art. Biesenbach founded Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Artin Berlin in 1991, as well as the Berlin Biennale in 1996, and remains Founding Director of both entities. Under his artistic and executive directorship, KW and the Berlin Biennale were started as self-inventive initiatives and are now federally and state funded institutions.
Robert Storr
American curator, academic, critic, and painter. Since 2006 he was named Dean of the Yale School of Art; director of the Venice Biennale in 2007. From 1990 to 2002 Storr was curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. He is considered to be one of the most influential Americans in the art world. Over the years, Storr has written for the following publications: Art in America, Artforum, Art Press, New York Times, Washington Post, Village Voice, Art & Design, Interview, etc. His regular column ’View from the Bridge’ appears in Frieze magazine.
Ilya Kabakov
Russian-American artist, leader of Moscow Conceptualist school and a friend of Andrei Monastyrski. His work has been shown in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Documenta IX, at the Whitney Biennial in 1997 and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, among others. In 1993 they represented Russia at the 45th Venice Biennale with their Red Pavilion installation. Kabakov has also completed many important public commissions throughout Europe and received a number of honors and awards, including the Oscar Kokoschka Preis, Vienna, in 2002 and the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, Paris, in 1995.
Moscow Museum of Modern Art
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Opening November 22, 2010
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