Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism

by David A. Ross

Between Spring and Summer looks at the multigenerational Soviet conceptual art movement during an age of unprecedented change. Eleven American and Soviet scholars build upon the work of a senior generation of Soviet artists - Ilya Kabakof, Andrei Monastyrsky and Komar and Melamid - to examine a new generation of artists whose work draws sustenance from its critical engagement with everyday Soviet life.

Loosely related to the work of American and European neoconceptual artists of the 1980s, Soviet conceptualism gains its distinctive character both from its imaginative response to the poverty of material conditions (the absence of disposable commodities and everyday products) and its dialectic with Western ideals of production and promotion. In looking at the work of 27 artists, architects, and artists' collectives, the essayists writing in Between Spring and Summer provoke questions about the nature of collaborative artistic action and ideological formation in an environment of cultural isolation and changing artistic values in the age of glasnost and perestroika.

The Provisional Notes for an Exhibition, David A. Ross. No. 6/1 Sretensky Boulevard, Richard Lourie. U-Turn of the U-Topian, Margarita Tupitsyn. On Emptiness, Ilya Kabakov. The Third Soviet Postmodern, Elisabeth Sussman. On Conceptual Art in Russia, Joseph Bakshtein. East-West Ecstasy of (Mis)Communication, Victor Tupitsyn. Scenes from the Komar & Melamid, Peter Wollen. Concepts and Reality, Alexander Rappaport. Metamorphoses of Speech Vision, Mikhail Ryklin. The Image of Reagan in Soviet Literature, Dmitri Prigov.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1990

About the author

During a museum career of more than forty years, David A. Ross has been director of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He began his museum work in 1971 as the world's first curator of video art at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, NY. An independent curator and writer, he serves on the faculty at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.