The Poetry of Moscow Conceptualism / Translations and Roundtable

Simon Schuchat and Ainsley Morse read DMITRI PRIGOV; Yelena Kalinsky and Brian Droitcour read ANDREI MONASTYRSKI; Philip Metres reads LEV RUBINSTEIN

Discussion moderated by Kevin M.F. Platt and Matvei Yankelevich

The release of several books in translation over the last few years is bringing Moscow Conceptualist writers and artists as a coherent movement to an English-language readership and scholarly community for the first time.

Moscow Conceptualism differs substantially from the preceding and contemporaneous conceptualist moment in western European and American art, and these differences are marked by political context as well as by Moscow Conceptualism's relationship with (and critical distance to) earlier Soviet avant gardes. Investigation into this body of work is central to an understanding of late-Soviet art and poetry, and the place of performance and criticism within the art-production of the period. The performance work of Prigov and Monastyrski in particular is a direct, acknowledged influence on political performance art/actions in Putin's Russia (Pussy Riot, Voina, etc.) and therefore it is useful to take Moscow Conceptualist approaches and methodology into account when discussing contemporary politically-oriented art actions in the Russia.

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ANDREI MONASTYRSKI (b. 1949) is a poet, author, artist, art theorist based in Moscow. He is, along with Ilya Kabakov, one of the founders of conceptualism in Russia. He graduated from Moscow State University with a degree in philology and worked for many years at the Literature Museum in Moscow. In 1973, he began to work with serial structures and minimalist sound compositions and in 1975, turned his attention to poetic objects and actions. He is best known as a founding member and chief theoretician of the Collective Actions group, which began to stage outdoor actions on the edges of Moscow in 1976. He compiled many of the group’s documentary volumes, Trips Out of the City, and participated in many solo and group exhibitions with his own work. In 2003, Monastyrski was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in literature. He also received the Soratnik Prize in 2008 and the Innovation Prize in 2009. His poetry and theoretical writings have been gathered into several Russian-language volumes by the publisher German Titov for his Library of Moscow Conceptualism series.

DMITRI PRIGOV (1940-2007) was one of the most important figures in the literary history of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet era, and is considered one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism. Prigov was a prolific writer, in all genres, as well as an accomplished visual artist. However, almost until the collapse of the Soviet Union, his writing circulated solely in unofficial samizdat editions and overseas publications. In 1986, he was briefly detained in a Soviet psychiatric hospital, but was released after protests from establishment literary figures. With the onset of glasnost and perestroika, he was able to publish and show his visual art in “official” venues, and also exhibited his art outside of Russia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, his work was acknowledged with several awards, including, in 2002, the Boris Pasternak prize. He acted in films, traveled widely with performances, readings, and exhibits of his work, and often collaborated with younger artists. Prigov died, in Moscow, of a heart attack in 2007. His collected works, edited by Mark Lipovetsky, are published in Russia by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie.

LEV RUBINSTEIN (b. 1947) was a major figure of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. While working as a librarian, he began using catalogue cards to write sequential texts. He described his “note-card poems,” as a “hybrid genre” that “slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the “unofficial” art scene of the sixties and seventies, finding wide publication only after the late 1980s. Now among Russia’s most well-known living poets, Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes cultural criticism for the independent media. His books in English translation include Here I Am (Glas, 2001), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2004), and Thirty-Five New Pages (UDP, 2011). In Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2014), his note-card poems appear in their entirety in English for the first time.