Avant-Garde Museology

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2 Avant-Garde Museology

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4 e-flux Classics Avant-Garde Museology Arseny Zhilyaev, Editor Distributed by the University of Minnesota Press Published in collaboration with V-A-C Foundation

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6 CONTENTS Acknowledgments Arseny Zhilyaev Preface Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle Introduction Avant-Garde Museology: Toward a History of a Pilot Experiment Arseny Zhilyaev I Museum as Common Task The Museum, its Meaning and Mission (c. 1880s) Nikolai Fedorov The Art of Resemblances (of False Artistic Regeneration) and the Art of Reality (of Real Resurrection): Ptolemaic and Copernican Art (c. 1890s) Nikolai Fedorov The Voronezh Museum in 1998 (1898) Nikolai Fedorov

7 Contents the Catherine the Great Exhibition at the Voronezh Regional Museum (1896) Nikolai Fedorov and Nikolai Peterson On the Cathedral of the Resurrecting Museum (1921) Vasiliy Chekrygin The Church Ritual as a Synthesis of the Arts (1918) Pavel Florensky On the Creation of a Pantheon in the USSR: A Proposal (1927) Vladimir Bekhterev Materials on the Institute of Biography (1920) Nikolai Rybnikov The Revolution Memorial Reservation, an excerpt from the novel Chevengur ( ) Andrey Platonov The Astronomical Observatory at the Perm Regional Museum (1935) V. I. Karmilov

8 Contents II The Museum of Avant-Gardism The Museum of Art, an excerpt from the novel Red Star (1908) Aleksandr Bogdanov On the Museum (1919) Kazimir Malevich The Museum Newspaper: Suggestions for Regional Museums and Community Centers (1931) V. Karpov Avalanche Exhibitions: The Experience of the Leningrad Organization of Worker-Artists (1933) Leonid Chetyrkin On the Question of Museums: Record of the Discussion of Problems and Objectives of Fine Art Museums at the Art and Industry Board (1919) Moscow Department of Museum Affairs The Museum and Proletarian Culture: Speech at the Meeting of the First All-Russian Museum Commission (1919) Osip Brik

9 Contents On the Results of the Museum Conference (1919) Nikolai Punin On the Museum Bureau ( ) Aleksandr Rodchenko The Museum of Painting Culture at Rozhdestvenka Street, 11 (1926) From Museums and Places of Interest in Moscow III The Materialistic Museum Lenin s attitude Toward Museums (1931) Nadezhda Krupskaya Dialectical Materialism and the construction of the Museum (1931) Ivan Luppol Marxist Exhibition Methods for Natural Science Museums (1931) Boris Zavadovsky The Permanent Exhibitions of Fine Art Museums: Joint Report (1931) Aleksey Fedorov-Davydov

10 Contents An Experiment in Marxist Exhibition- Making at the State Tretyakov Gallery (1931) Natalya Kovalenskaya Everyday Life of the Working Class from 1900 to 1930 Exhibition: History and Everyday Life Department of the State Russian Museum (1931) Valentin Kholtsov On a Museum of Industry and Art (1931) David Arkin A Museum Exhibition or a Theatrical Performance? (1932) N. A. Shneerson On the Question of the Principles of Exhibition: Central Park of Culture and Leisure Exhibitions (1932) I. M. Zykov Plates

11 Contents IV The Museum Outside of the Museum Museums in Industrial Enterprises (1931) K. I. Vorobyov The Experience of Developing Mobile Exhibitions (1931) Yuri Samarin Museum in the Street (1931) P. N. Khrapov Bringing the Agitprop-Truck to the Service of Cultural Construction (1932) M. S. Ilkovsky The Mobile Model of the Instructive Laboratory van and its Operation (1935) I. F. Sheremet

12 Contents V Museum of the History of the Revolution Marxism-Leninism in Exhibitions in the Museums of Revolution (1931) Andrey Shestakov Museums of the Revolution (1931) Nikolai Druzhinin A New Exhibition at the Leningrad Museum of the Revolution (1931) Vera Leykina The Museum as a Weapon of Class Struggle: Here and Abroad (1934) Roza Frumkina VI The Atheists Museum An Exhibition and Panorama of the Moscow Crematorium (1931) A. F. Levitsky

13 Contents The Question of Exhibitions in Antireligious Museums (1931) S. P. Lebedyansky The Museum on the Frontlines of the War on Religion (1932) Yuriy Kogan Antireligious Work at the Kliment Timiryazev Biomuseum: Supplementary Report (1931) Vorontsovsky Church Painting and its History as an Object of Antireligious Propaganda (1932) Ivan Skulenko Authors Biographies Notes on the Original Publications

14 Acknowledgments I couldn t visit the museums of revolution in Soviet times. But luckily, and paradoxically, Soviet history museums fully conserved their exhibitions following the end of the Eighties. The revolution even the word is basically forbidden and marked as pure evil in contemporary Russia has continued its quiet life in glass cases in the hidden but still beating heart of our present ideological constructs. We must admit that this duplicity is not radically new. From the beginning of the 1930s, Soviet museums hardly allowed any open discussion of the revolution outside the canon upheld by Stalin s History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But something very deep, something connected to the very physical organization of exhibitions namely, the very idea of the Museum of the Revolution continued to access the avant-garde impulse that museologists shared with the artists of the Great October Socialist Revolution, with the Bolsheviks, and with the people who believed that the miracle of the proletarian revolution was possible. It s probably similar to the way minerals hidden in the depths of the Earth, helping to sustain life on the planet, testify to the Earth s origin and its future. This publication is a result of five years of research. Its goal is to direct attention to incredible but nearly unknown material on the exhibition experiments and radical rethinking of museums that occurred in Russia and the USSR at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first third of the twentieth. These various projects may, at first glance, seem isolated from each other, but in fact they have 13

15 Arseny Zhilyaev deep-rooted commonalities in their fostering of what I call avant-garde museology. Born of my own artistic interest, this exploration of the exhibition and museum projects carried out by the Russian Cosmists, avant-garde artists, and Marxist museologists is more literary than academic in its selection and organization of works, a number of which are fragments of longer texts excerpted and translated here for their relevance to the topic. It is important to note that this publication doesn t pretend to fully cover this subject or circumscribe it on a theoretical level. The untranslatability of many Russian terms alone renders many nuances of their meaning inaccessible. But this doesn t negate my hope that the subject of avant-garde museology will garner public interest as well as the interest of discourses surrounding current artistic production. I would like to heartily thank Teresa Mavica, Anton Vidokle, and Kadist Art Foundation for their limitless trust in the project; Dmitry Potemkin for his comprehensive support for the idea of this publication from the very beginning and for helping to organize the material included in it; Anastasia Gacheva, Maria Chehonadskih, and Vlad Sofronov for their valuable advice and commentary; Boris Groys and Claire Bishop for their support of this book, and those without whom Avant-Garde Museology would never have seen the light. Arseny Zhilyaev Avant-garde Museology 14

16 Preface Avant-Garde Museology is the first title to be released in e-flux classics, a new book series aiming to open the story of art to the full complexity and paradoxicality of artistic thought. The contemporary museum might be the most advanced recording device ever invented. It is a place for the storage of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But a museum can also be the very tomb where these projects are declared dead and laid to rest joining other elements of the past: despotic kings and their belongings, an old order stretching back centuries, perfectly preserved. This is why many artists of the early Russian avant-garde in the years surrounding the 1917 October Revolution called for the destruction of museums as fortresses of history, they could only hinder the creation of an entirely new culture. Life, in all its vitality, must supersede art. But artists were not the only ones who realized something had to be done with the museum. Around the same time in Russia, a number of others joined artists such as Malevich in realizing that the meaning and purpose of the museum had to be reinvented. For artist Arseny Zhilyaev, these were the avant-garde museologists a disparate group of state officials, art historians, writers, philosophers, and amateur scientists who identified the museum as a crucial site to be placed in the service of the collective production of life. While some of these thinkers are little known or completely unknown, both to readers today and to each other in their own time, their placement in Avant-Garde Museology 15

17 Preface alongside the encompassing influence of Vladimir Lenin, Kazimir Malevich, and Nikolai Fedorov distinguishes for the first time a mature line of thinking running through early Soviet society. For Zhilyaev, the avant-garde museologists can be said to have exceeded the magnitude and imaginative scope of the early artistic avant-gardes themselves. They internalized the critique of the museum voiced by artists and sought to advance its pedagogical function accordingly. If Malevich himself called for a museum of life to replace the incinerated remains of the backwards past, the avant-garde museologists further asked how such a museum of life would be realized, whether through museology and curation or philosophically and temporally. In fact, for Nikolai Fedorov, the eccentric philosopher who laid the foundation for Russian Cosmism, the museum was the very site where the border between life and death could be negotiated, precisely because it is the crematorium for the epochal dead described by Malevich. But the function of Fedorov s museum of the future had to be turned not only to serving life, but also to conquering death itself in the service of immortality for all people. Other figures such as the neurologist Vladimir Bekhterev sought to preserve human intelligence through a pantheon of the brain, while Aleksandr Bogdanov, first an ally and later a rival of Lenin in the early Bolshevik days, created the world s first Institute of Blood Transfusion. Many avant-garde museologists also sought to rethink existing museums and the role of pedagogy and material preservation according Marxist dialectics, writing in the pages of journals such as Soviet Museum from the perspective of a state official or museum worker. Russia is only one part of the world among many where the period of modernity marked a passage through an era Avant-garde Museology 16

18 Julieta Aranda, brian Kuan Wood, anton Vidokle of contradictions that arose when ideas of progress came into contact with brute historical realities. And yet, the richness and character of the art and thinking that grew from a confrontation with these very contradictions is often flattened under the weight of grand historical or art historical narratives applied to explain them from a distance. The early Russian avant-gardes, for instance, have been mainly understood in the English-speaking art historical and museum fields in formalist terms as abstract geometric experimentation, or subjected to analysis through a Cold War political lens fetishizing the otherness of communism. A collection such as Avant-Garde Museology should hopefully inspire a reader to forget all that immediately before reading further. Still, it is important to bear in mind that the history written by that very English-language art history and museum complex remains a primary source for our knowledge and awareness of not only the early Russian avant-gardes, but of art history in general in the period of contemporary art. While many rich histories of art exist, language barriers have limited their availability to audiences beyond the contexts where they originated. Which is to say that this historical canon has already shown itself to be irrelevant at the same time as it is being upheld as the only de facto historical record available. e-flux classics would like to take this as a historical contradiction of our own time by asking what an artistic canon for the period of contemporary art might be. Rather than resurrect the old order or invent a new king, the approach might be more similar to what Zhilyaev proposes: to rewind the tape to resurrect in memory all that deserves life. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle 17

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20 Dedicated to the sweet memory of my beloved grandmother Anna Kirsanovna Golysheva