Out of Nowhere: Emptiness and Aesthetic Feeling in the Works of Collective Actions

Resumo

This paper examines the early works of Soviet conceptual performance art group Collective Actions, founded in 1976, and focuses on the way the group employed the concept of “emptiness” as a motif throughout its practice. Namely, I consider the 1979 action Place of Action (fig.1-4), organized by Andrey Monastryrski and Nikita Alekseev, and pay particular attention to how the organizers engaged with the aesthetic quality of emptiness and worked to articulate the possibility of human practice within an empty space.

The stakes of such a line of inquiry are best understood when one considers the historical moment of the Collective Actions’ work, as well as the parallel artistic tendencies within the unofficial art circle in the Soviet Union and the ambition of conceptual art in the West. Notions of nothingness, emptiness, and dematerialization dominate the visual language of much conceptual art in post-war Western (fig. 5) and late-Soviet (fig. 6) contexts and articulate a critical position vis-à-vis the old, assumed to be retrograde, notions of structure, institution, and aesthetic form. To this end, I will freground conceptualism’s expressions of disillusionment in and disavowal of political and cultural institutions. These sentiments welcomed “nothingness” as a productive metaphor which was worked into the larger conversations about art’s function in the late Cold War era. Though they took different avenues, many Western and Soviet conceptual practices arrived at theorizations of varying voids as emancipatory practices.

I propose to consider performance art practices of Collective Actions as negotiating a productive relationship between emptiness and collectivity through an artistic practice that relies on, at the time suspect, categories of structure, composition, and social form. Their approach renders emptiness not a byproduct of the disenchanted negation of the old but as a particular quality of the newly articulated space, available for aesthetic exploration. Collective Actions, I argue, take one of conceptualism's dominant tropes—that of nothingness, dematerialization, boundlessness—and articulate it in a tangible, workable, and localized tension within the confines of a work of art.