Author(s): Arseniy Zhilyaev

Art Artists

This book tells of a challenging exhibition held in one of the major Russian museums - the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Arseny Zhilyaev created a conceptual project for an imaginary museum. The viewer sees into the future after the liberation-revolution, and is confronted with a radically different outlook on the history of 20th Century art. At the core of the exhibition there turns out to be a complex dialectic in the relationship between museum and artist: how does an artist's work come to be exhibited in a museum? When and why does an artist engage in artistic creation outside the museum walls? Is the museum the space in which a happening takes place? The book includes texts by Russian and foreign art critics, as well as a number of previously untranslated Soviet avant-garde texts about museums and proletarian folklore.