Interview with Arseny Zhilyaev

“The experimental Marxist exhibition was a complex, multilevel, conceptual installation that even for a trained spectator of the time was something like a UFO coming down from heaven.”

Arseny Zhilyaev is a Russian artist based in Moscow and Venice. He is also the editor of Avant-Garde Museology (2015), published by e-flux in collaboration with the V-A-C Foundation, through which Western audiences can access many key texts of Russian and Soviet museology undisclosed until today. We spoke with Zhilyaev, among others, about the heritage of cosmism, the avant-garde, and Soviet museology, and how his interest in these fascinating and challenging experiments feeds his own artistic practice.

BY PACO BARRAGÁN

Paco Barragán - The book that you edited titled Avant-Garde Museology tells a fascinating story that had not been told yet. I know that you have an interest in the subject, but what is the historical interest in the museological history of Russia and the Soviet Union?

Arseny Zhilyaev - My first education was connected with philosophy and psychology. In many respects, I took up art, as I realized that my theoretical activity does not quite fit into the academic field of post-Soviet Russia. Plus, the first example of actual artistic practice with which I was confronted was Moscow conceptualism, a movement that put theorizing in its canon.

Later attempts to find justifications or the experimental development of my own artistic practice logically led me to study Soviet museology. In many of its endeavors, it has come close to what later emerged under the name of ‘institutional critique’ or ‘conceptual installation.’ Moreover, in my opinion, the exhibition experiments of the 1920s and 1930s went further than even the most courageous avant-garde utopias like the Productivism art movement, which denied traditional mediums and tried to integrate into the production of the life tune.

I thought that such a theoretical framework could be very relevant to the present. For me it is a horizon, an asymptote of creative development, at least in the forms we know today.

COSMISM: THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEATH AND THE COLONIZATION OF SPACE

P.B. - The book is divided into three parts, according to the three museological phases you have articulated: cosmism, avant-gardism, and Marxism. Would you say there are common features between the three stages like, for example, a general critique of capitalism?

A.Z. - Indeed, at first glance, the museological aspects of cosmism theory of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the anarchic pathos of artistic destruction and the Marxist critical exposition have little in common. However, they all have an important characteristic for the avant-garde: namely, they claim to overcome institutional boundaries. Only if artists like Malevich talked about the total destruction of the museum institution, then the Marxists and the cosmists reinterpreted it in a rather radical form. The museum overcomes its bourgeois features and, instead of disappearing, absorbs the whole fabric of life, as it does in the philosophy of Nikolai Fedorov.

P.B. - Nikolai Fedorov’s idea of the ‘common task’ is precisely one of the key elements of the Russian cosmism movement. His ideas of the ‘resurrection of the death’ and the ‘colonization of space’ are even today in the 21^st century very original. How were these radical ideas to be connected with the museum?

A.Z. - Fedorov has much in common with the much more well-known thinker Walter Benjamin. First of all, they are united by a special attitude toward history and progress. Like Benjamin, Fedorov criticizes progress, for its unreasonableness. It’s too subordinate to the chaos of capitalist production. But a revolution in the case of Benjamin or a real victory over death opens the possibility for a new development, for true history and life. We are dealing here with a non-trivial form of conservatism, which is impossible without a radical new one. After all, only it can give a chance to the hopeless hopes of the past. And the museum, especially in its modern forms-an institution that preserves the past, ‘obsolete,’ but all of its thoughts are the future.

P.B. - Another fascinating thing about Fedorov is the idea of counter-posing museums to exhibitions and the idea of the exhibition as a sort of ‘resurrection.’

A.Z. - According to Fedorov, also known as The Thinker, the museum should become a platform for future resurrection, a meeting place for the church with its intuition of immortality, science with its craving for knowledge and art with its creative imagination. But for some reason, in the English-speaking world for some time it was believed that Fedorov was against exhibitions but for museums. This is a mistake. The Thinker criticized international industrial exhibitions for promoting consumption for the sake of consumption. Fedorov was extremely skeptical about capitalism, and in this respect he is not much different from contemporary art criticism. But an exhibition that aims to research or to work with memory was highly welcomed, in his opinion. The Thinker believed that showing a work of art was as calling it to life anew, causing in the viewer an impulse to overcome death.

P.B. - Besides his philosophical ideas, what is also surprising is his practical experience as a curator conceiving theme-based exhibitions at Voronezh Regional Museum about the “Coronation” (May 1896) or the “Rule of Catherina the Great” (November 1896). In general terms, we tend to believe that theme-based exhibitions are something of recent invention.

A.Z. - Unfortunately, this aspect of The Thinker’s activity has been studied extremely little. But based on the available information, it can be argued that he acted as a curator-researcher. Also, he was one of the initiators of the creation of the regional museum in Voronezh. Moreover, one of the local artists, Lev Solovyov, under the influence of the cosmist, opened the ‘Resurrecting Museum’ at his home in the late 19^th century. Of course, it was about the installation of the artist’s work and not a scientific laboratory. But the fact itself is quite curious.

AVANT-GARDISM: FROM EUPHORIA TO DEFEAT

P.B. - Although Fedorov’s ideas lived on, the avant-garde artists took a very critical stand with respect to the museum as an institution, and Malevich even argued in his article “On the Museum” (1919) that the museum as a relic of the past should be deleted. Of course, avant-garde artists and the museum have always had a troubled relationship. How successful were they in bringing about a real change?

A.Z. - It is generally accepted that avant-garde artists were haters of the museum. But everything is somewhat more complicated. Malevich himself already several years after the revolution opens following the model of the Soviet museum (Petrograd Museum of Artistic Culture) its own art institution: the State Institute of Art Culture (GINHUK). This shift from museum to institute is important. Many active figures of the artistic avant-garde like Rodchenko or Brick and Punin moved in a similar direction. But in general, it seems to me that their work with the museum was not so radical. From the idea of the complete destruction of the past, they quickly moved to the appropriation of the main artistic institution. This was expressed in the propagation of new art (that is, actually avant-garde art) for the masses, as well as the correction of the museum’s acquisition policy, again in favor of experimental artists. However, there were no cardinal changes in the very understanding of the museum outside of its educational and research function.

P.B. - Even if Lenin was not particularly interested in the museum as an institution, Futurists, Constructivists, Productionists and Suprematists had an active role in the first years of the revolution. But the euphoria did not last long, maybe until 1923. Mayakovsky, Malevich, Rodchenko and Tatlin were relentlessly criticized by the new cultural bureaucrats. The artists had promoted the re-position and now became their victims. What are, in your opinion, the key elements that codify this phase of avant-garde euphoria to avant-garde defeat?

A.Z. - If we move in the logic of Marxist museology, then the problem of the post-revolutionary avant-garde was that it was not able to transform its method based on a new political and historical situation. There was a fetish of the critical method. But after the successful proletarian revolution was it worth continuing to criticize the bourgeois taste and traditional patterns of perception? If it was, then the emphasis should have been shifted towards the production of a new person, a new way of life, etc. In other words, criticism of criticism was necessary. And Soviet museology in the person of Alexey Fedorov-Davydov and his experimental Marxist exposition tried to implement it. The idea was to come up with a way of exhibiting art that was self-reflexive, self-critical and therefore went further than the pre-revolutionary slogans of the avant-garde. Unfortunately, this phenomenon did not exist for long either. With the assertion of the doctrine of socialist realism, ‘experimental Marxist expositions’ gave way to a more or less traditional hang-up.

SOVIET MUSEOLOGY AND MARXIST DISPLAY

P.B. - As you just mentioned, the idea of the aristocratic-bourgeois museum had no reason to be in the USSR. The revolutionary museum used ‘dialectical materialism’ as its methodology in the 1920s and 1930s. Can you explain what the principles and goals were of Soviet Museology?

A.Z. - It was necessary to find a way to save the masterpieces of past eras but at the same time to remove or deconstruct them, that is to critically show the context in which they had arisen. Here it is possible to link to Benjamin, whose history begins only after the revolution. So the question was ‘what to do with the prehistoric material.’ To burn, as suggested by Malevich, was too wasteful for the Bolsheviks. The winner had the option of appropriating it, but also to place that artwork in the context of a critical installation where economic, political and other information would be displayed important for its reception.

P.B. - Talking about reception, the revolutionary museum had the same problem as the bourgeois museum: the latter had to deal with artworks that were aristocratic in nature, and the Soviet museum additionally with bourgeois art. How was this dilemma confronted from a museological point of view in terms of display?

A.Z. - Critical approach allowed it to work effectively not only with works of art, but in principle with any object. In this sense, the museum of the revolution did not differ from its artistic colleagues. But they had a significant difference from the Western museums of modernism. The latter have always been a curatorial installation, consisting of works each of which marked a certain end of art. The Museum of the Revolution was, from at least a formal point of view, an installation of one artist (at its limits this artist was supposed to be the entire proletariat), an installation dedicated to the death of the old history.

P.B. - The narrative element of museology became, as we can read from Ival Luppol’s text Dialectical Materialism and the Construction of the Museum (1931), an important element to stimulate ‘a person’s will to revolutionary action.’ Think of the exhibition with its introductory texts, the labels, the museum guides, leaflets, brochures. Can you comment on how the inexperienced or unqualified masses were addressed in the aim of comprehending the material aspects of reality?

A.Z. - It is known that in the first decade after the revolution of 1917, Russia experienced a boom of interest in the museum from the people. This is largely due to the fact that there was a nationalization of private collections, and this was the first time they were available for visiting.

In principle, the museum had become more open and understandable for workers and peasants. Then you can’t underestimate the fact that many who visited museums considered themselves a subject of history, those who actually created museum expositions. But it is obvious that this situation could not last very long. Gradually, the museums of the revolution turned into places of cult worship rather than a lively conversation about the struggle for freedom.

At the same time, some exhibition experiments turned out to be incomprehensible to the audience. I already mentioned Fedorov-Davydov and his experimental Marxist exposition, although it was conceived as a convenient didactic tool for ordinary workers. In reality, it was a complex, multilevel, conceptual installation. Needless to say, even for a trained spectator of that time, it was something like a UFO coming down from heaven.

P.B. - Yes, you’re totally right. What I find fascinating about this period is the First National Museological Congress in 1931 and professionals like Natalia Kovalenskaya, Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov, Vera Leykina, Boris Zavadovsky, Ivan Luppol, and many others. What were the greatest challenges and/or failures of making exhibitions more scientific but also more popular according to the revolutionary museum?

A.Z. - I think one of the central problems of Soviet museology in the 1920s and 1930s was the lack of training of the museum’s workforce.

In general, there was an attitude toward maximizing the involvement of people from the proletariat and the oppressed classes. This was a politically strong move, but in reality, the museum’s network received a large number of people who did not have sufficient experience and competence. Yes, they were ready for the boldest experiment, but would this be enough to build a new vision of art and the museum.

The second problem was the lack of consensus on what should be the Marxist aesthetics in general and museology in particular. After all, it was believed that the scientific nature of the exposition should primarily be a scientific Marxist one, which led to real problems in the direction of the philosophical debate about the legacy of Hegel’s dialectic or about the significance of Lenin’s contribution to the theory of revolutionary struggle.

The third problem is perhaps the most important: after the revolution, Russia was a country with a completely destroyed industry, with famine, torn apart by civil war, etc. In such a situation it was not up to museums and art. But perhaps all this together were not so much obstacles on the way to a new museum and art, but rather those unique circumstances that eventually resulted in one of the most radical experiments in the history of the exhibition business.

The lack of clear criteria and concrete practical patterns on which it was necessary to act led to a lush flowering of possible interpretations of what the museum should be after the revolution. Unfortunately, when the criteria were worked out and the situation returned to normal, the experiment had ended.

P.B. - Besides the different museums of the revolution, there was a particularly fascinating new museum type: the atheist or anti-religious museum. These anti-religious exhibitions had the goal of counteracting and outplaying the power of the church. What did their exhibitions look like? Do they still exist?

A.Z. - In modern Russia, former museums of the revolution have been transformed into museums of Russian history, and museums of atheism into museums of the history of religion. I think if any artist would have reconstructed the exposition of an anti-religious museum, no matter in Russia or outside it, I think they would end up in prison or some kind of persecution. Religion for modern ideology is more important than almost 100 years ago. At the beginning of the 20^th century, the viewer could get acquainted with the critical history of religious painting, its social and political roles. We can learn this from the history of the church with all its unseemly pages.

The main idea of the exhibitions in the museums of atheism was to deconstruct the powerful impact of the temples, but at the same time try to preserve them as a cultural heritage. It was extremely difficult to do this. Many church relics were destroyed. Yes, and religion as a whole returned soon after the revolutionary hangover of the 1920s and ’30s.

But the experience of the museum faculty of religious institutions was, I think, extremely important for understanding the role of the museum, its capabilities, and limitations.

P.B. - Very often, communist regimes and their socialist realism ended up in a cult of the leader, like the famous ‘Stalin wall’ that we find in museums and even in private houses in the former Soviet Union. There is still a Joseph Stalin Museum in Gori, Georgia. How do you interpret that shift from materialistic museology to a ‘cult’ museology?

A.Z. - Yes, unfortunately, materialistic museology did not last long. In fact, everything that we are discussing is about 20 years after the revolution. This is longer than the existence of the historical avant-garde, but still extremely small in order to build a new interpretation of art and its main institution. As I have already said, in many respects, the experimental nature of these years was associated with a strong desire to implement the covenants of the New World, but at the same time with a lack of understanding of how exactly this could be accomplished. Moreover, the man responsible for the normalization of museology-the Soviet Marxist Mikhail Lifshitz, who came to replace Fedorov-Davydov in the Tretyakov Gallery management-was a brilliant theorist. With his critical arguments against the “Experimental Complex Marxist Exposition,” it is rather difficult to polemize.

However, along with corrections of theoretical errors, the practical findings of the exposition design that were amazing for their time were forgotten. Moreover, formal normalization itself coincided with the heyday of Stalinism, which filled the museum with lies and fear. By that time, many of the participants in the debate about the role of the main art institution and the new art, in general, were repressed, and those who escaped the camps never tried to remember the period of creative search of the times of the young socialist state.

And I’m afraid that the final answer to the question of why this happened is not possible to find.

P.B. - I guess you’re right. Soviet museology is a long and fascinating topic and impossible to address in all its complexity in an interview. So my question would be: What is still standing today from this experience? That is, what are museums of modern and contemporary art in Russia still using today from soviet museology, as it seems that everywhere the ‘white-cube’ model is being used?

A.Z. - Russia in matters of museum construction is not very different from the West. Here, the museum model developed by MoMA and Alfred Barr, Jr., dominates. Perhaps this is the specificity of the most contemporary art, which is largely the heir to modernism, rather than a more radical avant-garde. The experiments of the 1920s and ’30s are considered a dark page in the history of Russian museology. The functionaries are silent or simply not interested in them, although, on the part of the artist, these practices are of interest. The museum as an experimental laboratory is a conceptual form of self-expression, which is often found in Russian authors. But so far this is not enough to legitimize the experiment at the institutional level.

INTERGALACTIC MUSEOLOGY

P.B. - Let’s talk about your work as an artist as it is intimately related to the topics we have been discussing here, and in particular with the ideas of cosmism. I would like to discuss three recent works that are interrelated. Let´s start with MIR: Polite Guests From the Future from 2014.

A.Z. - This exhibition was shown in San Francisco in the space of the Kadist Foundation. The idea was to create an imaginary museum of Russian history in the future. There are many funny and unusual things happening in it. For example, there is a change in the official religion. Russia decides to choose a more modernist faith-the church of the Chelyabinsk meteorite. This is a real small sect that arose for a short time at the beginning of 2010 in Siberia after the fall of the meteorite. President Putin decides to seriously tackle the issues of culture and himself becomes an artist.

In general, he acts as the heir of the 1990s, namely radical Moscow actionism. He is interested in the research of border limits of the animal and human, such as the work of Oleg Kulik, known for his performance in which he portrayed a dog. The president comes up with more conceptual positions, but he flies with birds and gives a lot of attention to dogs as well. Cosmism arises here as a philosophy appropriated by the authorities for the needs of ideology. For the exhibition in the Kadist, I made a map of the possessions of the Russian Space Federation and a documentary film about the colonization of distant planets. At the same time, the conflict in Ukraine flared up, and my country’s imperial ambitions were noticeable at a closer level.

P.B. - Reality is always stranger than fiction. The next project you embarked on was Cradle of Humankind (2015), which is a continuation of the former project. The museological design is very interesting. Could you briefly discuss the project and especially the display?

A.Z. - From the standpoint of the display, I wanted to work with the Soviet museum design of the 1970s. It is characterized by an interest in the heritage of modernism. So in the museum architecture, there are motifs inspired by science fiction and the successes of the Soviet space program. In the interiors, strict geometric, often abstract forms are combined with the fugitive elements characteristic of socialist realism or for pre-modernist trends. During this period, stained glass, tapestries, unusual colors like gold, etc. are common.

Since the Cradle of Humanity was a fictitious museum from the future, which our descendants would try to reconstruct for touristic purposes, I tried to give my installation a little plastic, kitsch view. It was an attempt to make a museum dystopia with folk art from distant galaxies, such as cartoon stained-glass windows and gold geodesic spheres as museum exhibits.

P.B. - And the last project within these series would be your recent installation at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin titled Intergalactic Mobile Fedorov Museum-Library, Berlin (2017), a futuristic, star-shaped reading space that is part of the exhibition “Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism.” Here you deal among others with the linguistic element of curating and the idea of ‘reading’ artworks and the exhibition as ‘resurrection.’

A.Z. - Yes. Here again, we turn to the idea of Fedorov about the exhibition as a step towards resurrection. But it is important to note that in general, cosmist thinkers have always tried to move from theory to practice, despite all the fantasy of the venture. Fedorov acted as a curator. Tsiolkovsky was not only a freak philosopher and a man who inspired the Soviet space program but above all an engineer and inventor. In addition to studies of solar activity, Chizhevsky developed and proved the effectiveness of air ionizers. My installation for Berlin does not pretend to be such a grandiose achievement, but still, there is a possibility of practical, direct use for the common cause in it.

P.B. - I find it very boring and even abnormal when I see most of the avant-garde in the Western museum-be it Rodchenko, Malevich, Goncharova et al-hanged according to ‘white cube’ aesthetics. Firstly, they did not use the white wall and made site-specific installations, and secondly, the white cube ‘depoliticizes’ and ‘aestheticizes’ the work, betraying its nature. From a conceptual and display point of view, it has nothing to do with the Russian avant-garde. What is your opinion as someone who has studied these topics in depth?

A.Z. - Whether we like it or not, contemporary art in its present form has been developed in the U.S. and was exported to Europe after World War II. The ‘white cube,’ despite all the limitations and criticism, is one of its integral parts. The same can be said about art history. The historical avant-garde is present only its formalistic aspect. The conceptual and political side of the issue usually recedes into the background.

Needless to say, productivism art and radical constructivism, which deliberately refused to call their activities ‘art,’ are part of the artistic experiments of the 20^th century. All that is behind them, and here I include the avant-garde museum in its Marxist and cosmists parts, which are completely unknown and ignored.

But I think that the professionals have shown discontent with the current state of affairs. Contemporary art as a project looks drained. There is an active search for alternatives. And the line represented by the exhibition experiments of the 1920s may be one of the possible scenarios for reactivation.

P.B. - My final question is related to the very idea of utopia. Russia and the Soviet Union have symbolized in many ways the political, philosophical and aesthetic idea of utopia. In a neo-liberal moment, where utopia is being ridiculed, what can we safeguard from this century of utopia?

A.Z. - Utopia was justly criticized both by Marxists and cosmists for being cut off from life, for its excessive mystification, for being unscientific. Therefore, what I would save from the century of utopias is the readiness for the practical implementation of what once seemed utopian to us but eventually becomes an urgent necessity.

By the way, the museum in this matter can be very useful.

P.B. - Yes, but it needs a brutal shake up. Thank you for your time and wonderful insight.

Paco Barragán is a PhD candidate at the University of Salamanca (USAL) in Spain and the former visual arts curator of Centro Cultural Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile. He recently curated “Juan Dávila: Painting and Ambiguity” (MUSAC, 2018), “Arturo Duclos: Utopia´s Ghost” (MAVI, 2017) and “Militant Nostalgia” (Toronto, 2016). He is the author of The Art to Come (Subastas Siglo XXI, 2002) and The Art Fair Age (CHARTA, 2008).