collective action

I’ve been thinking some about Collective Action of late.  They were (are?) an art group active in Moscow in the 1970s & 80s. I first ran into their work a couple years ago at the Stedelijk. Fascinating stuff, even though I understood little of their documentation. Andrei Monastyrsky, one of the main figures, comes from a background in minimalistic poetry and music and was influenced by John Cage and Joseph Beuys (not bad, that).

The notes I’ve been able to find (not a lot out there it seems, at least not on the web) say they came together in 1976. One show’s curator, Joseph Backstein, writes “…the peculiarity of (the) Soviet performance lies in its attempt to demonstrate the … evolution of various stereotypes of human behavior against the background of official ideology. This ideology aimed at monopolizing the very right to interpret all manifestations of the Real including its reflections in art. Collective Actions insists on multiple interpretations.”

It seems that most of the performances took place outdoors, in the countryside around Moscow. Groups of people would be invited to view the performances, none having a full view of the proceedings. Then various documents were compiled at the site, and later upon reflection. These were then set alongside the description by the artists of the specifics of the event. A collection of the ‘real’ for each participant, along with photos and video, became the documentation .

I was really drawn to the videos in Amsterdam. One in particular of a sort-of suitcase, with holes in the sides, thrown down a snowy slope. There was audio coming from the suitcase as it was pulled back up the hill, through the scrub, by a length of rope. Hard to describe the attraction but it was mesmerizing.

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