Between Avant-Garde and Nonconformism: Soviet Artists and their Alternative Practices between Thaw and Stagnation

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The research project focuses on alternative Soviet artists and their practices, with which they (a) re-positioned themselves in society during the fading thaw with its supposed freedoms, (b) between pre-revolutionary and Soviet art practice, and (c) possibly in relation to their contacts with the art world in the West. The focus is both on their role as members of a society in a situation of transition and on their significance for the emergence of new art styles on the one hand and for adapting traditions of the Russian avant-garde on the other. The paradigm of "otherness" is thereby illuminated and called into question under reversed auspices: Did nonconformist artists really move on the fringes of Soviet society, as has been claimed so far? For this purpose, protagonists of the Lianozovo and Uktus schools in Moscow, Sverdlovsk, and Leningrad will be examined in a historical and an art historical subproject. The historical case study analyzes subject constitution processes of artist couples of these two artists’ groups, including those of Ry Nikonova/Sergej Sigej and Oskar Rabin/Valentina Kropivnitskaja. It asks about the ideas and discourses fundamental to self-perception and exploring one’s own relationship to the state and society in the declining thaw, but it also looks at the interactions and connections of the mentioned actors with other (alternative) milieus. The case study in art history examines artistic practices and the related reception and transfer processes during the period between the 1962 Manege and 1974 Bulldozer exhibitions. The focus is on analyzing the artistic strategies and visual-poetic vocabulary evolving between officially promoted art forms and the reception of the art of the Russian/Soviet avant-garde as well as contemporary Western art movements. The position of the artists of the “thaw generation” between the first, historical, Russian avant-garde and the second Russian avant-garde, which is usually used to describe Moscow conceptualism of the 1980s, will be explored further by not only considering the term “dissident modernists,” coined by Margarita Tupitsyn, but, in particular, Matthew Jesse Jackson’s thesis that before the mid-1980s only a few nonconformist artists’ considered themselves as members of a movement that revived the historical avant-garde.The doctoral students will work together under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Susanne Schattenberg and Prof. Dr. Isabel Wünsche. In their research, they will draw on material from the archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies at Bremen University and the Russian Art Archives Net (RAAN), as well as sources from other state and non-state archives and museums in Russia.