Abstracts
Russia on Edge: Reclaiming the Periphery in Contemporary Russian Culture
Interdisciplinary Workshop, 11-12 December 2009 (CRASSH, University of Cambridge)
home - about - program - abstracts - route - contact
Aleksanteri Institute Helsinki
Living on the Archival Edge: The Closure of the Petersburg Archive and Library of Independent Art and the Afterlife of Nonconformist Art
The
Petersburg Archive and Library of Independent Art, as its rude
Russian acronym ПАиБНИ forebodes, was no
ordinary institution of record. This one-and-a-half-room library, editorial
bureau, collector's depository, archive and art space run by Andrei Khlobystin,
played a remarkable role within Pushkinskaya
10, St. Petersburg's home of nonconformist art. In the Spring of 2007, after
a boisterous life of over 80 exhibitions - or rather, "experiments in total
archivization" - it was forced to close. Alongside other curatorial finds
from peripheral cities and groups such as the newly discovered "Leningrad
Archive of Conceptual Art" which had remained hidden beyond the pale of
central gatekeepers (in Petersburg and Moscow, not to speak of New York), it was
exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kiasma (Helsinki) as part of
"The Raw, The Cooked and The Packaged - The Archive of Perestroika
Art" in 2007-2008.
Aside from providing an exegesis and documenting ПАиБНИ and other (neo)avant-garde philosophies and practices of archivisation, this paper analyses misguided attempts at bringing the archive to "closure" -- both in the physical-institutional and the discursive sense. ПАиБНИ was closed by "official un-officialdom" as it were -- Pushkinskaya 10's own establishment -- with the proclaimed purpose of a need for a "proper" archive. How should we understand this closing down of "living memory" to be replaced by "dead history"; the desire to turn the "Raw" and the "Cooked" into the "Packaged"? This leads us into the fraught relations between disparate factions of the former cultural intelligentsia underground, leading all the way back to incidents of the 1980s. In this discussion a repeated stratification of the "official", the "official un-official" and a third, "radical" or "non-aligned" intelligentsia will be described. Here accusations of "mimicry" of official structures, strategies of styob, but also tactics of cynical, vertiginous or dialogic transgression of the central (official, canonised or "Packaged") will be investigated. Today, as in the early 1980s, the experiment and innovation of the "non-aligned" periphery could never be fully closed by the opposing "official" centres, but indeed, set the pace of memory's disclosure.