Cosmic Shift: Russian Contemporary Art Writing

by Ilya Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov

A TLS Book of the Year 2017

In this, the first anthology of Russian contemporary art writing to be published outside Russia, many of the country’s most prominent contemporary artists, writers, philosophers, curators and historians come together to examine the region’s contemporary art, culture and and theory.


With contributions from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Boris Groys, Dmitri Prigov, Anton Vidokle, Keti Chukhrov, Oxana Timofeeva, Pavel Pepperstein, Arseny Zhilyaev and Masha Sumnina amongst many others, this definitive collection reveals a compelling portrait of a vibrant and complex one built on a contradicting dialectic between the material and the ideal, and battling its own histories and ideologies.

Genres: Art

537 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 5, 2017

About the author

Ilya Kabakov (Russian: Илья́ Ио́сифович Кабако́в; born September 30, 1933), is an American conceptual artist, born in Dnipropetrovsk in what was then the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. He worked for thirty years in Moscow, from the 1950s until the late 1980s. He now lives and works on Long Island.

Throughout his forty-year plus career, Kabakov has produced a wide range of paintings, drawings, installations, and theoretical texts — not to mention extensive memoirs that track his life from his childhood to the early 1980s. In recent years, he has created installations that evoked the visual culture of the Soviet Union, though this theme has never been the exclusive focus of his work. Unlike some underground Soviet artists, Kabakov joined the Union of Soviet Artists in 1959, and became a full-member in 1965. This was a prestigious position in the USSR and it brought with it substantial material benefits. In general, Kabakov illustrated children's books for 3–6 months each year and then spent the remainder of his time on his own projects.

Reviews

[Giuliano Vivaldi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent, an anthology of around thirty Russian writers on the various contexts of Russian contemporary art. The great majority of these writers and artists truly deserve recognition. From this anthology there should be a realization that tens of books need to be commissioned for translation in coming years. Brilliant stuff by Keti Chukrov, Ilya Budraitskis, Maria Chehonadskih, Gleb Napreenko, Pavel Pepperstein, Gutov and Osmolovsky, Oxana Timofeeva, Joseph Backstein to name but a few of the authors in this collection of writings.