Moscow Conceptualism and the (Mis)Translation of American Art

Abstract

This essay examines the strategies used by artists in the Soviet Union to access censored publications about contemporary American art between the 1950s and 1980s. It weaves together the personal recollections of artists associated with Moscow Conceptualism to consider the effect that smuggled or secretly reproduced texts and images had on those among whom they were circulated. The essay explores how the literal and metaphorical translation of artistic concepts into an environment with a contrasting normative background destabilized what is often assumed to be an instance of unidirectional West-to-East influence, with experiences such as misunderstanding and self-exoticization provoking new creative possibilities.

Keywords:

• American art
• Soviet art
• Russian art
• Cold War
• Moscow Conceptualism
• Sots Art
• Pop Art
• art and censorship

Acknowledgments

I would like to add my personal thanks to the staff of the Terra Foundation for American Art for their generosity in enabling much of the research that informed this essay, and the Art in Translation/Hot Art, Cold War editorial team, Claudia Hopkins, Kristina Keall, and Iain Boyd Whyte, for supporting its production. I am grateful above all to Yuri Albert and Nadezhda Stolpovskaya for a wonderful evening listening to their recollections and for their kindness with sharing recommendations and images. Thanks must also go to Nadia Bourova, Laura Davis-Chanin, Lola Liivat, Reen Liivat-Oorschot, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Melamid, Andrey Prigov, Kädi Talvoja, and Thames & Hudson for kindly agreeing image usage.

This essay is dedicated to those in the former Soviet republics who bravely continue to resist authoritarianism.

Notes

1 Julia Tatiana Bailey, “On and under the Radar: American Art in Soviet Russia in the Early Cold War,” in Hot Art, Cold War—Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945–1990, ed. Claudia Hopkins and Iain Boyd Whyte (New York and London: Routledge, 2020), 457–64.

2 Groys initially used the term “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” although the middle adjective was quickly abandoned. See B. Groys, “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism,” A-YA 1 (1979): 3–11.

3 “Интервью с Борисом Гройсом [Interview with Boris Groys],” in Московский концептуализм. Начало [Moscow Conceptualism: The Beginning], ed. Yuri Albert (Nizhny Novgorod: Государственного центра современного искусства, 2014), 55–6.

4 For more on the function of text in the works of the Moscow Conceptualists in the period under discussion, see Mary A. Nicholas, “Rereading Moscow Conceptualism,” Slavic Review 75.1 (Spring 2016): 22–51.

5 See the frequent references to this in the artist interviews compiled in Albert, Московский концептуализм. Начало.

6 Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, preface to André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), vii.

7 Harry L. Colman, “An American Action Painter Invades Moscow,” ARTnews 57.8 (December 1958): 33, 56–7 (33).

8 Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, Implementation of the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe: Findings and Recommendations. Seven Years after Helsinki, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., 1982, p.201, accessed May 30, 2022, https://www.csce.gov/sites/helsinkicommission.house.gov/files/Implementation%20Report%20-%20Findings%20and%20Recommendations%207%20Years%20After%20Helsinki.pdf. The Daily Worker, known for some years as the Daily World, published by the Communist Party USA, was the most widely distributed American newspaper in the USSR.

9 Amerika sometimes used the subtitle “America Illustrated,” which is the title by which the magazine was later known. It was published by the State Department from 1944 to 1952, and from 1956 until 1994 by the United States Information Services (the international name of the USIA). The magazine Soviet Life was distributed in the United States from October 1956, when it was initially titled The USSR. It was published by the Embassy of the USSR in Washington, DC.

10 Komar and Melamid, “The Barren Flowers of Evil,” Artforum 18.7 (March 1980): 46–52 (46).

11 Ibid., 46.

12 “Интервью с Александром Меламидом [Interview with Alexander Melamid],” in Albert, Московский концептуализм. Начало, 111. Unless indicated, all translations from Russian to English are by the author.

13 Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting, 92, 87.

14 “Так и мы восстанавливали целое по разрозненным цитатам из Джозефа Кошута или Июси Ииппард.” Quoted in “Интервью с Виталием Комаром [Interview with Vitaly Komar],” in Albert, Московский концептуализм. Начало, 78.

15 Komar and Melamid, “The Barren Flowers of Evil,” 46.

16 “с «живым концептуалистом».” Quoted in “Интервью с Виталием Комаром,” 81.

17 Douglas Davis, quoted in Tilman Baumgärtel, Net.art 2.0: New Materials Towards Net Art (Nuremberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2001), 58–60, reproduced in “Davis, Douglas; Komar, Vitaly; Melamid, Alexander «Questions Moscow New York»,” Media Art Net, http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/questions-moscow-new-york (accessed April 5, 2021).

18 See, for example, Susan Edwards, “Vitaly Komar: Exploring the Lines Between Us,” The Iris, March 28, 2012, https://blogs.getty.edu/iris/vitaly-komar-exploring-the-lines-between-us (accessed March 21, 2021); Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, “Where is the Line Between Us?,” The New Inquiry, February 29, 2012, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/where-is-the-line-between-us (accessed March 21, 2021).

19 For a thorough overview of this incident, see “A Case Study: Repression,” in Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, ed. Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 65–77.

20 “воображаемые экспонаты из будущего … после землетрясений, вулканов, атомных войн и работы реставраторов.” Quoted in “Интервью с Виталием Комаром,” 87.

21 “Художники московского концептуализма все были ориентированы на западный музей, но не реальный, а какой-то такой фиктивный западный музей, в который помещено все то, что они видели в журналах, в каталогах выставок и так далее.” Quoted in “Интервью с Борисом Гройсом,” 63.

22 “у меня, был почти шок, когда ты очутился на Западе и увидел, что большая часть современного искусства – говно.” Quoted in “Интервью с Никитой Алексеевым [Interview with Nikita Alexeev],” in Albert, Московский концептуализм. Начало, 28.

23 “Они так настаивали на своей советскости. … Потому что советское – это было экзотично, странно, неожиданно, это было то, что можно предложить.” Quoted in “Интервью с Борисом Гройсом,” 63.

24 Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009), 41–2.

25 Odile Cisneros, “From Isomorphism to Cannibalism: The Evolution of Haroldo de Campos’s Translation Concepts,” TTR 25.2 (2e semestre 2012): 29–30.

26 “Непонимание оказалось очень продуктивным. А сама проблема понимания/непонимания стала одной из основных в московском концептуализме.” Quoted in Albert, introduction to Московский концептуализм. Начало, 8.

27 Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, “Komar & Melamid: Color is a Mighty Power!,” press release, February 1, 1976.

28 Victor Tupitsyn overviews some of these instances in The Museological Unconscious, 41–2, 213–7.

29 Haroldo de Campos, “Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture [1981],” trans. Odile Cisneros, in A.S. Bessa and O. Cisneros (ed.), Novas: Selected Writings (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 174.

30 “Artist interview: Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid,” Tate, September 2015, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/ey-exhibition-world-goes-pop/artist-interview/vitaly-komar-and-alexander-melamid (accessed March 22, 2021).

31 “Color is a Mighty Power!”

32 Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett, POPism: The Warhol ’60s (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 3.

33 Mikhail Lifshitz, “The Phenomenology of the Soup Can: The Quirks of Taste,” in The Crisis of Ugliness: From Cubism to Pop-Art, trans. David Riff (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 106.

34 “Artist interview: Komar and Melamid.”

35 For more on this topic, see Roman Alexander, “American Fast Food as Culture and Politics: The Introduction of Pepsi and McDonald’s into the USSR” (master’s thesis, University of Oregon, 2013), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/36687825.pdf (accessed December 13, 2020).

36 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 100–1. Joseph Backstein has recalled that, in 1975, Alexander Melamid showed him a smuggled copy of Warhol’s newly published book, which he says was a guiding text for Komar and Melamid’s work. See “Интервью с Иосифом Бакштейном [Interview with Joseph Backstein],” in Albert, Московский концептуализм. Начало, 32.

37 Yuri Albert and Nadezhda Stolpovskaya, interview by author, Cologne, September 28, 2019.

38 Ibid.

39 Komar and Melamid, “The Barren Flowers of Evil,” 46.

40 “это было сделано для Запада.” Quoted in “Интервью с Александром Меламидом,” 119.

41 “Мы понимали, что мы совершенно другие и никакого отношения к этому миру, в котором мы «крутимся» … Поэтому большинство наших концептуальных работ, ну, в смысле – текстовых, было сделано по-английски. У нас была знакомая немка, которая нам переводила. То есть мы и не рассчитывали, что будет что-то внутри России, мы не рассчитывали, что мы будем поняты.” Ibid., 113.

42 Ksenya Gurshtein, “Utopia by Mail: Komar and Melamid’s A Catalogue of Superobjects: Supercomfort for Superpeople,” Getty Research Journal 6 (2014): 203–13 (206), https://doi.org/10.1086/675803 (accessed March 22, 2021).

43 Lifshitz, “Phenomenology of the Soup Can,” 120.

44 “Reading Between the Lines: Methods of Analysis of Soviet Military Literature,” Cryptologic Quarterly 4.3 (Fall 1985): 115–20, https://www.nsa.gov/Portals/70/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-quarterly/Reading_Between_the_Lines.pdf (accessed March 21, 2021).

45 “упадочных” … “Они имели доступ к подлинным манифестам течений в западном искусстве и философии. Я думаю, в душе они прекрасно понимали, что таким образом у них появляется возможность обходить цензуру и знакомить художников и вообще интересующихся современным искусством людей с какими-то выжимками того, что сейчас модно на Западе.” Quoted in “Интервью с Виталием Комаром,” 77.

46 Yuri Albert, Sandra Frimmel, and Sabine Hänsgen, Yuri Albert: Elitist-Democratic Art, exhibition guide (Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2018), 31.

47 Albert and Stolpovskaya, interview.

48 Albert, Frimmel, and Hänsgen, Elitist-Democratic Art, 31.

49 Albert and Stolpovskaya, interview.

50 David K. Shipler, “Show of U.S. Paintings Opens in Moscow,” New York Times, December 22, 1977.

51 Joseph Kosuth, “Art after Philosophy,” Studio International 178, no. 915 (October 1969): 134–7.

52 Основным вопросом традиционной философии является проблем “выражения” (“высказывания”), а, вернее, “невозможности выражения” (“высказывания”). Философы двадцатого века, занимающиеся аналитической лингвистикой, в результате долгих исследований пришли к следующему заключению: “невысказанное” “невысказанно,” потому что “высказать” его невозможно.

53 Albert and Stolpovskaya, interview.

54 While I have been unable to verify this rule, Albert and Stolpovskaya assured me that this was a widely known fact at the time among Soviet dissidents.

55 The former KGB officer Mikhail Abrosimov, tasked with surveilling the Moscow underground art scene, donated his private archive of this documentation to the art journal Iskusstvo, providing an unexpectedly valuable record of the artists’ activities. As well as Albert and Stolpovskaya, targets of Abrosimov’s surveillance included Alexander Melamid, Valeriy Gerlovin, Vadim Zakharov, Sergei Anufriev, and Elena Elagina. See Inke Arns, Kata Krasznahorkai, and Sylvia Sasse (eds.), Artists & Agents—Performance Art and Secret Services (Dortmund: Kettler, 2020).

56 The story is reminiscent of the later series by Albert, My Favourite Books (2001), in which he burns novels, poetry, and textbooks and uses the ash to create abstract monochrome paintings—thus making the printed word not only the inspiration and content of art but also its medium. However, these works, which Albert describes as “self-portraits,” are according to the artist rather “an attempt to understand what painting is made of.” See Albert, Frimmel, and Hänsgen, Elitist-Democratic Art, 16.

57 Ann Komaromi, “The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat,” Slavic Review 63.3 (Autumn 2004): 597–618 (616).

58 Jacob Edmond, introduction to A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 8.

59 laria Bignamini, “From the USSR,” Flash Art 76/77 (1977), 16; quoted in Octavian Eşanu, Transition in Post-Soviet Art: The Collective Actions Group Before and After 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2012), 24.

60 Eşanu, Transition in Post-Soviet Art, 127.

61 Albert, Frimmel, and Hänsgen, Elitist-Democratic Art, 5.

62 Yuri Albert, Autoseries I [Автосерия I], 1979–80.

63 Yuri Albert, Presentation—Project “Retrospective Exhibition”, 2001 [Презентация—Проект «Ретроспективной выставки», 2001 г.], from the series Exhibition (Unrealized Projects), 2001.

64 Eşanu, Transition in Post-Soviet Art, 52.

65 Terry Smith, “Art and Art and Language,” Artforum 12.6 (February 1974): 49–52 (50).