Ross David (ed.) Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism

Tacoma Art Museum, Tacoma, Washington; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts. — The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1990. — 228 p. — ISBN: 0-262-68065-3The Soviet Conceptualists (now more typically called the Moscow Conceptualists), formed as an underground art movement in the early 1970s, were never clearly codified until the fall of the USSR at the close of the ’80s. Their work stood against and to the side of the state mandate for Socialist Realism. Anything outside the mandate was seen as subversive and deemed criminal by the state, with any offending artist and the rings of his or her family subject to surveillance and punishment. The work was as bold in its slyness as it was in its fantasias of freedom, and the works on view in Between Spring and Summer (and in the portfolio presented here) reveal an aesthetic that is raw, deeply cynical, even nihilistic, carrying within it a poetics of dark humor. In framing the context for these works in 1990, lead curator David A. Ross, who was then the director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, writes: “It is an exhibition which presents the voices of artists who had previously been denied speech within their culture—a culture that suppressed truth for the sake of pragmatism, and that glorified a now seemingly obsolete utopian model.”Provisional Reading: Notes for an Exhibition. David A. Ross
No. 6/1 Sretensky Boulevard. Richard Lourie
U-Turn of the U-Topian. Margarita Tupitsyn
On Emptiness. Ilya Kabakov
The Third Zone: Soviet Postmodern. Elisabeth Sussman
On Conceptual Art in Russia. Joseph Bakshtein
East-West Exchange: Ecstasy of (Mis)Communication. Victor Tupitsyn
Scenes from the Future: Komar & Melamid. Peter Wollen
Concepts and Reality. Alexander Rappaport
Metamorphoses of Speech Vision. Mikhail RyklinArtists in the ExhibitionThe Image of Reagan in Soviet Literature. Dmitri Prigov[i]Artists’ Chronologies
Select Bibliography
Checklist of the Exhibition
Notes on Contributors