This dissertation examines the early works of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and traces the beginning of a linguistic trend in the development of Moscow Conceptualism. Analyzing the drawings and paintings that the artist created between 1962 and 1966, I place Kabakov’s artistic style and ideas in the context of the cultural, theoretical and scientific phenomena that affected Soviet art and society in the early 1960s. Kabakov’s works are shown as evolving in a process that renders the artist’s techniques increasingly polysemantic, dialogic and conceptual. The dissertation then demonstrates that Kabakov’s visual images and linguistic titles participated, indirectly yet actively, in the cultural debates of Moscow’s artistic underground and the Soviet society. The dynamic correspondence between a fervent cultural context, growing interest in linguistic and scientific ideas, increasing conceptualization of visual means of expression and intellectualization of the artistic approach to the image led to the appropriation of language in the works of Moscow underground artists. The dissertation establishes such a development in the early works of Ilya Kabakov, proposing that his earliest “conversational” work Whose Fly is This? was the first conceptual painting to display text in the form of a written dialogue. The colloquial style and conversational character of the depicted discourse are examined as an ironic gesture that takes its genesis from the polyphonic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and reverses the official non-dialogical imperatives of Soviet newspeak and ideology. The main figural image of the painting—the fly—is seen as articulating the utopias and anti-utopias of avant-garde figures such as Kharms or Malevich and interpreted as alluding to a key contemporaneous scientific discovery—the chromosomes of the drosophila. In the end, the words and the image of Whose Fly is This? form the two mutually exclusive and mutually complementary aspects of a compound conceptual signifier. That is the signifier of the free artistic spirit, evanescent human existence and mundane, yet resilient human nature that ironically survives—against all odds and despite all absurdities—beyond the boundary of the social utopia and the limits of epistemological systems. / text

No description available.

Ce travail propose une lecture de la création artistique russe actuelle – 1990-2010 – au regard de l’histoire qu’elle entretient avec la folie grâce à l’analyse de personnages qui émaillent son paysage culturel. Que ces derniers soient jugés fous – fols-en-Christ ou jurodivye, artistes romantiques, dissidents internés en Union soviétique – ou qu’il s’agisse de figures traditionnelles d'idiots – Ivan le simple, le prince Mychkine de Dostoïevski –, un pont sera créé qui reliera ces archétypes et certaines pratiques de l’extrême contemporain, allant jusqu’à la prière-punk des Pussy Riot. Cette étude porte sur le concept d’une idiotie comme posture artistique permettant à l’artiste de se faire le médiateur d’une vérité – politique, religieuse ou sociale. Avançant masqué, il révèle ainsi les glissements sémantiques opérés entre les notions de « folie » et de « norme », en parallèle des rapports qu’entretiennent « art » et « politique ». L’histoire de la folie en Russie sera par ailleurs abordée à travers diverses formes d’envol – compris d’un point de vue métaphysique comme un escapisme de la raison. La littérature servira de socle à une première analyse de la figure romantique de l’artiste maudit à la raison vacillante, celle-ci ensuite mise à mal par les créateurs postmodernes qui déconstruisent aussi bien le mythe du saint idiot que celui du génie artistique, par l’incarnation d’un créateur sot reproduisant des formes sans en saisir le sens. Certains en appellent de surcroît, directement ou non, à la figure ancestrale du jurodivyj afin d’élaborer des postures critiques, parfois scandaleuses, envers les pouvoirs politique et religieux. Considérant les réactions virulentes que peuvent susciter les pratiques actuelles, et grâce à l’étude d’œuvres problématiques représentatives, les causes de leur rejet deviendront explicites. Il sera ainsi permis d’envisager ces créations, paraissant en rupture avec l’ordre établi, dans leur ancrage au sein d’une tradition historique et littéraire de la folie. / This work proposes an interpretation of the current Russian artistic creation – 1990-2010 – with regard to his links with history of madness, through the analysis of characters that punctuate Russian cultural landscape. The latter characters are deemed insane – holly fools, Romantic artists, dissidents interned in the Soviet Union - or whether are traditional idiots figures - Ivan the fool, Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin. A bridge will be created linking these archetypes and certain contemporary practices, up to Pussy Riot’s punk prayer. This study focuses on the concept of idiocy as an artistic position which allows the artist to become a mediator of a political, religious or social truth. The creator, moving forward hidden, reveals semantic shifts made by the concepts of "madness" and "norm", in parallel with relations held between "art" and "politics." The history of madness in Russia will also be depicted through various forms of soaring - understood in a metaphysical point of view as an escapism of reason. Literature will be used as a base for a first analysis of the romantic image of the damned artist with flickering reason. This picture will then be undermined by postmodern creators who both deconstruct the myths of the holy fool and the artistic genius, by their incarnation of a stupid creator reproducing forms without understanding their meaning. Moreover, some of them require, directly or not, to the ancestral figure of the holly fool to develop critical postures, sometimes scandalous, against political and religious powers. Considering the violent reaction that can generate the current artistic practices, and through the study of representative problematic works, the causes of their rejection shall become explicit. This will make it possible to consider these creations – apparently breaking with the established order – in their anchor within a historical and literary tradition of madness.

This thesis presents a theoretical and historical account of how artists have responded to politics of democracy since the late-1980s. Three questions guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: why, during its apparent apotheosis in recent years, have numerous artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? Secondly: how have artists undertaken this critique? Thirdly, and most importantly: what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy that they critique? Particular case studies of art from Europe help us to address these questions, for Europe has been an important crucible for vociferous, and often fraught, arguments about democracy in recent aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses. The first chapter of this thesis rigorously contextualises these discourses in relation to historical mobilisations of democracy since the Iron Curtain??s collapse. Relying on writings by Pat Simpson, Slavoj ??i??ek, Alain Badiou and Mario Tronti, I chart the significant imbrications of political ideology, philosophy and what I call ??aesthetics of democratisation?? from the end of European communism, through the democratisations of postcommunism to the militarised democratisations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Notions of democracy shift and change during this period, becoming what ??i??ek calls a problematic ??transcendental guarantee?? of assumed values and self-legitimation. These shifting values in turn propel the concurrent critiques of democracy that are the subjects of the five subsequent chapters: Ilya Kabakov??s ??total?? installations; Neue Slowenische Kunst??s mimicry of the nation-state during the 1990s; Thomas Hirschhorn??s large-scale works from the late-1990s onwards; Christoph B??chel and Gianni Motti??s collaborative ventures; and the co-operative practices of Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Through examination of the artists?? installations and voluminous writings, and based primarily on archival research and interviews, this thesis examines how their aesthetic politics emerge from the remobilisation of nonconformist art histories, through self-instituted contexts and alternative models for art production, exhibition and interpretation. These models, I argue, counter our usual understandings of art practice and its politics in Europe. They cumulatively assert ??postsocialist aesthetics?? as an impertinent, yet urgent, prism through which to analyse contemporary art.

This thesis presents a theoretical and historical account of how artists have responded to politics of democracy since the late-1980s. Three questions guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: why, during its apparent apotheosis in recent years, have numerous artists critiqued democracy as the political, critical and aesthetic frame within which to identify their work? Secondly: how have artists undertaken this critique? Thirdly, and most importantly: what aesthetic and political discourses have artists proposed in lieu of the democracy that they critique? Particular case studies of art from Europe help us to address these questions, for Europe has been an important crucible for vociferous, and often fraught, arguments about democracy in recent aesthetic, philosophical and political discourses. The first chapter of this thesis rigorously contextualises these discourses in relation to historical mobilisations of democracy since the Iron Curtain??s collapse. Relying on writings by Pat Simpson, Slavoj ??i??ek, Alain Badiou and Mario Tronti, I chart the significant imbrications of political ideology, philosophy and what I call ??aesthetics of democratisation?? from the end of European communism, through the democratisations of postcommunism to the militarised democratisations of Iraq and Afghanistan after 2001. Notions of democracy shift and change during this period, becoming what ??i??ek calls a problematic ??transcendental guarantee?? of assumed values and self-legitimation. These shifting values in turn propel the concurrent critiques of democracy that are the subjects of the five subsequent chapters: Ilya Kabakov??s ??total?? installations; Neue Slowenische Kunst??s mimicry of the nation-state during the 1990s; Thomas Hirschhorn??s large-scale works from the late-1990s onwards; Christoph B??chel and Gianni Motti??s collaborative ventures; and the co-operative practices of Dan and Lia Perjovschi. Through examination of the artists?? installations and voluminous writings, and based primarily on archival research and interviews, this thesis examines how their aesthetic politics emerge from the remobilisation of nonconformist art histories, through self-instituted contexts and alternative models for art production, exhibition and interpretation. These models, I argue, counter our usual understandings of art practice and its politics in Europe. They cumulatively assert ??postsocialist aesthetics?? as an impertinent, yet urgent, prism through which to analyse contemporary art.