Empty Action: Labour and Free Time in the Art of Collective Actions 9783839440902

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Marina Gerber Empty Action

Image  | Volume 124

For Stewart

Marina Gerber (Dr.) has taught at Queen Mary University of London, Berlin University of the Arts and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art and its relation to labour, free time and knowledge.

Marina Gerber

Empty Action Labour and Free Time in the Art of Collective Actions

This book is a slightly amended version of my PhD thesis submitted at the Berlin University of the Arts. Printed with the kind support of the Siblings Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation for the Humanities. Supported with funds of the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg ‘Das Wissen der Künste’.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Collective Actions, from the Action Second Painting, 1988, photographer: Igor Makarevich. Andrei Monastyrski archive. Copyediting: Danny Hayward Typeset by Justine Buri, Bielefeld Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4090-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4090-2 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839440902

Contents Acknowledgements |  7 Introduction |  9 Interlude: A Participant’s Report on the Action SUMMA (2015) | 2 7 1. Empty Action |  39 2. Collective Actions’ Concept of Art |  71 3. Free Time in Trips out of Town |  109 4. Free Time, Labour and Art: A Theoretical Contextualisation |  131 5. Collective Actions Members ‘at Work’ and ‘after Work’ |  155 6. The Production of (Collective) Actions |  183 7. Empty Action as the Suspension of Work |  197 Bibliography |  215 List of Illustrations |  231

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Martina Dobbe for taking on the laborious task of supervising my PhD thesis, on which this book is based, for her genuine interest in the project, and her intellectual support and encouragement throughout. I also thank my second supervisor Gregor Stemmrich for his interest and enabling me to present my research in his seminars at the Free University of Berlin. I thank the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg ‘Das Wissen der Künste’ at the Berlin University of the Arts for funding my PhD research for three years, including financial support to participate in conferences and symposia abroad, and for research trips to Moscow where I conducted several interviews with artists associated with Collective Actions. Thanks to all the members of the Graduiertenkolleg for their interdisciplinary perspectives on my research: Heide Barrenechea, Claudia Blümle, Kathrin Busch, Tiago da Costa e Silva, Anastasia Dittmann, Martina Dobbe, Daniela Fugellie, Barbara Gronau, Marion Haak-Schulenburg, Susanne Hauser, Ulrike Hentschel, Johann Honnens, Jens Meinrenken, Tanja Michalsky, Dörte Schmidt, Benjamin Schneider, Moritz Schumm, Ildikó Szántó, Ekaterina Tewes and Nina Wiedemeyer. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present various stages of my research at: Georg Witte’s seminar at the Free University of Berlin; Michaela Marek’s ‘International Forum for Doctoral Candidates in East European Art History’ at the Humboldt University of Berlin; several ‘Historical Materialism’ conferences in London; the symposium ‘Performance and Labour’ at University College London (with support from Josefine Wikström and Larne Abse Gogarty); the ‘Association of Art Historians’ Annual Conference’, Warwick; the ‘You were not expected to do this’ symposium of the Graduiertenkolleg ‘Materialität und Produktion’ in Düsseldorf and the symposium of the Graduiertenkolleg ‘Das Wissen der Künste’ in 2014. Special thanks to Andrei Monastyrski for the intellectually inspiring conversations and correspondence, and for enabling me to access the admirably well organised archival material of Collective Actions. Many thanks to all other current and former members of Collective Actions: Igor Makarevich and Elena Elagina, Sabine Hänsgen, Nikolai Panitkov, Sergei Romashko, Nikita Alexeev,

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Georgi Kiesewalter for their very insightful and interesting conversations, and their engagement with my research, also to Vadim Zakharov, Sergey Letov, Andrei Abramov and Sylvia Sasse. I thank especially Stewart Martin for his invaluable intellectual and emotional support throughout, for his admirable capacity to engage in the deepest theoretical concerns, for reading drafts of this book, for great inspiration and patient attention. Thanks also to Andy Fisher, Anke Hennig and Sabeth Buchmann for interesting discussions, and to Cornelia Kastelan and Eriks for reading draft chapters of this book. Great thanks to Lidia Gerber for faithfully engaging with me and my work throughout.

Introduction

Forty years ago a group of friends from Moscow decided to make an Action on the snowy, empty field of a park. The plan was to ‘appear’ to a group of invited viewers on the other side of the field, to photograph it, and to call it Appearance (1976). One year later these photographs and those of their subsequent Actions, Tent and Banner-1977, were published in a catalogue of the Venice Biennale, where, in a section called “Mediazione Concettuale, Comportamento e Azioni Collettive”, the names of Andrei Monastyrski, Nikita Alexeev and Georgi Kiesewalter were mentioned.1 In the same year they were joined by Nikolai Panitkov and, in 1983, by Elena Elagina, Igor Makarevich and Sergei Romashko. In 1979 Boris Groys attended his first and last Action (Pictures), and immediately wrote his essay “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism”, where he referred to the group as ‘Collective Actions’ (Коллективные Действия/Kollektivnyye Deystviya).2 Recently Groys claimed that he did not invent this name himself and that it came up in a conversation with Monastyrski in mid-1978, before he published his essay.3 Monastyrski subsequently speculated that this name might have come up as a result of talking to Groys about the exhibition catalogue from the Venice Biennale. In any case, it is only in 1983 that the name ‘Collective Actions’ emerged on the cover of their, by then, second volume about the Actions, 1 | Cf. La Nuova Art Sovietica. Una Prospettiva non Ufficiale a Cura di Enrico Crispolti e Gabriella Moncada, exh. catalogue, la Biennale di Venezia, 1977. 2 | Cf. Boris Groys, “Moskovskiy Romanticheskiy Kontseptualizm”, in A-Ya, no. 1 (Paris, 1979), pp. 3–11. Translated as “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism”, in idem., History Becomes Form. Moscow Conceptualism (MIT, Cambridge/MA, 2010), pp. 35–55. Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Obshcheye Primechaniye” [1997], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 5], (Ad Marginem, Moscow, 1998), p. 779. The transliteration of Russian terms and Russian bibliographical references follows the BGN/PCGN 1947 System. Excepted are the names of individuals who have chosen a specific transliteration, e.g. Andrei Monastyrski. 3 | Cf. Boris Groys in conversation with Andrei Monastyrski, “O Nazvanii KD”, video recording, February 12, 2011. URL: m.youtube.com/watch?v=9nht_QzmzYQ

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Trips out of Town (Поездки за Город/Poyezdki za Gorod).4 Before that, only the names of the group’s members were listed. By the time the group name had been established, Alexeev had already left the group. Subsequently, in 1989, a new member joined, Sabine Hänsgen, who together with Monastyrski remains an active member to date. Until now Collective Actions have produced over 140 Actions and completed twelve volumes of Trips out of Town, books that describe, document, comment and analyse the Actions. For someone who has never participated in an Action, reading this material is the only way to familiarise oneself with the work of Collective Actions. Given that it is impossible to participate in past Actions, the importance of Trips out of Town cannot be overestimated. The typical volume includes around a dozen Action descriptions (opisatel’nyye teksty), photographs, several participants’ reports (rasskazy uchastnikov), a few thematic essays, one foreword (predisloviye), a few commentaries (kommentarii) by the members of Collective Actions, transcribed recorded discussions, and documentation (dokumentatsiya), such as tables, schemes, leaflets, etc. They also include photographs and descriptions of Actions by individual members of Collective Actions that are related to, but not part of the collective practice. It makes sense to read Trips out of Town from the beginning, because Collective Actions understand their practice and these volumes as broadly sequential and historically evolving. The forewords to the volumes make this explicit. It is also possible to study single Actions, but one needs to be prepared to follow up some cross references. Each Action is surrounded by complementary material, which gives it a certain degree of self-sufficiency, so one can spend hours reading around one Action, e.g. the Action description, then the reports by the participants, looking at the photographs and the documentation, reading the foreword which contextualises the Action, or perhaps the essays and commentaries. Each of these genres of documentation offers a different perspective on the Action. The volumes of Trips out of Town were initially produced to be ‘published’ privately, as samizdat’, i.e. in merely five copies, which were shown to friends 4 | The title translates into German as Reisen vor die Stadt, in Sylvia Sasse, Texte in Aktion. Sprech- und Sprachakte im Moskauer Konzeptualismus (Fink, Munich, 2003); as Reisen aus der Stadt in Georg Witte, “Kleine Reisen aus Moskau”, in Bernd Blaschke et al. (eds.), Umwege. Ästhetik und Poetik exzentrischer Reisen (Aisthesis, Bielefeld, 2008), pp. 275–296; into English as Trips to the Countryside in Empty Zones. Andrei Monastyrski and Collective Actions, exh. catalogue, ed. Boris Groys, Pavilion of Russia at the 54th International Art Exhibition – la biennale di Venezia, 2011; Journeys Outside the City in Octavian Esanu, Transition in Post-Soviet Art: The Collective Actions Group Before and After 1989 (CEU, Budapest/New York, 2013).

Introduction

only. The texts were typed on blueprint A4 sheets of paper and the photographs were glued onto the paper. It was only in 1998 that Trips out of Town became available to a wider audience, as the first five volumes were issued by the publisher Ad Marginem in Moscow.5 Since 2009 the so-called Guerman Titov’s Library of Moscow Conceptualism (Biblioteka Moskovskogo Kontseptualizma Germana Titova, BMK hereafter) published all twelve volumes of Trips out of Town (and the first part of volume 13).6 Alongside the latest Action descriptions in Russian, one can find English, German and Japanese translations on Sergey Letov’s website, which includes numerous photographs, videos and audio-recordings.7 The meticulous documentation and publication of the Actions has no doubt enabled a wide international reception of Collective Actions, which pays tribute to their historical and contemporary significance. Being part of the broader circle of artists known as Moscow Conceptualists, Collective Actions got to show their work in a number of major international exhibitions, which resulted in catalogues featuring essays or passages on Collective Actions. Such publications include: Between Spring and Summer. Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of late Communism (1991), Total Enlightenment. Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960– 1990 (2008), Moscow Conceptualism in Context (2011), Field of Action. The Moscow Conceptual School in Context (2011).8 The grouping of the Moscow-based artists and writers – besides Collective Actions, including Ilya Kabakov, Vladimir Sorokin, Vadim Zakharov, Yuri Albert, Yuri Leiderman, etc. – is not a curatorial invention. They were a group long before they got to exhibit together abroad and in Russia. An alternative way to show their work was the production of the so-called MANI Folders (Papki 5 | Cf. Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod (Ad Marginem, Moscow, 1998). 6 | Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 1 (BMK, Vologda, 2011); Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 2–3 (BMK, Vologda, 2011); Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 4–5+11–13 (BMK, Vologda, 2016); Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 6–11 (BMK, Vologda, 2009). 7 | Cf. conceptualism.letov.ru, ed. Sergey Letov. URL: http://conceptualism.letov.ru/ KD-actions.html 8 | Cf. Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of late Communism, exh. catalogue, ed. David A. Ross, Tacoma Art Museum, 1990, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1990–1991, Des Moines Art Center, 1991; Die Totale Aufklärung. Moskauer Konzeptkunst 1960–1990/Total Enlightenment. Conceptual Art in Moscow 1960–1990, exh. catalogue, eds. Boris Groys et al., Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2008; Alla Rosenfeld (ed.), Moscow Conceptualism in Context (Prestel, New York, Munich/London, 2011); Field of Action. The Moscow Conceptual School in Context 1970–1980s, exh. catalogue, eds. Alexandra Danilova and Elena KuprinaLyakhovich, Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow, 2010.

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MANI) – folders in which the artists could put their latest works and which were circulated amongst friends.9 Alexeev used to show some of the Moscow Conceptualists’ work in his apartment (AptArt Gallery).10 Another indicator of the relation between Collective Actions and Moscow Conceptualism is, for example, the list of Collective Actions’ viewers; most of the Moscow Conceptualists attended at least one Action.11 The term itself was coined by Groys in 1979,12 and generally the ‘conceptualism’ at stake is not to be considered as programmatic. Its use in regard to Moscow-based artists is a strategic choice, intended to communicate their work to a broader audience, perhaps acquainted with the Anglo-American artistic movement from the 1960s–1970s.13 In this light, Collective Actions were also included in exhibitions and publications, which go beyond Moscow and the Soviet context. The exhibition catalogue Global Conceptualism. Points of Origin (1999) frames Moscow Conceptualists, including Collective Actions, in terms of an expanded and international idea of Conceptualism.14 The exhibition catalogue Out of Actions. Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979 (1998) provides some contextualisation of Collective Actions within the history of performance and Action art, while remaining within the framework that was provided by Groys’ essay “Moscow Romantic Conceptualism”.15 Jörg Heiser’s exhibition and catalogue Romantic Conceptualism (2007) included Collective Actions and developed Groys’ idea considerably further.16 Although this idea was very popular, it remained largely unquestioned and none of the authors have engaged with Collective Actions’ actual, very critical reception of Romanticism, which will be raised here in chapter 2. Due to Collective Actions’ work and interest in music and sound art they also operate in music theory contexts: Sounding the Body Electric. Experiments

9 | In the archive of E.K. Art Bureau, Moscow. 10 | Cf. Margarita Tupitsyn et al., Anti-Shows. AptArt 1982–84 (Afterall, London, 2017). 11 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Obshcheye Primechaniye”, pp. 780–782. 12 | Cf. fn. 2. 13 | For comparisons between Moscow and western Conceptualism: cf. Valerie L. Hillings, “Where is the Line between us? Moscow and western Conceptualism in the 1970s”, in Alla Rosenfeld (ed.), Moscow Conceptualism in Context, pp. 260–283. 14 | Cf. Global Conceptualism. Points of Origin 1950s–1980s, exh. catalogue, eds. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 1999. 15 | Cf. Out of Actions. Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979, exh. catalogue, ed. Paul Schimmel, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1998. 16 | Cf. Romantic Conceptualism/Romantic Conceptualism, exh. catalogue, eds. Jörg Heiser, Ellen Seifermann, Kunsthalle Nürnberg, BAWAG foundation Vienna, 2007.

Introduction

in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957–1984 (2013),17 and Sounds Like Silence. John Cage–4’33’’–Silence Today (2012).18 (Cf. chapter 2.) Despite this sustained and broad public interest in Collective Actions, only a few scholarly studies were published. The main point of originality of the present study is that it addresses Collective Actions’ main artistic idea, which revolves around the term ‘Empty action’ (пустое действие / pustoye deystviye). Empty action is, as far as Collective Actions are concerned, a neologism. It describes a certain experience that they seek in their practice, namely of action without purpose. This is not intended to induce an experience of futility as such, but of a break or pause from the purposefulness of art, from the necessity of interpreting and judging artworks. Meaning and interpretation are not constituted by the Empty action, but arise almost independently from it, afterwards.19 The reports and numerous other reflections on the Actions, which include interpretations, are incidental effects and afterimages of the experience of the Empty action. The Empty action is, however, more than an experience – its conceptual aspect permeates Collective Actions’ whole practice and, once grasped, it enables us to understand the vast majority of their views on, and their relations to, various artistic and social practices, as the present study sets out to demonstrate. A critical study of Collective Actions’ practice in terms of the Empty action thus promises to reveal what is most specific and original about their art. Scholarly research on Collective Actions took place in various disciplines, such as Slavic Studies, Philology, Archivology, Religion Studies and Art History. Sylvia Sasse’s Texte in Aktion (2003) examines the relation between the ‘power of the word’ in the Soviet Union to the art of the Moscow Conceptualists, including Collective Actions, in the framework of theories around the so-called ‘performative turn’.20 The Actions of Collective Actions are treated as an analytical tool with a view to revealing the cultural specificity of the practice 17 | Cf. Sounding the Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957–1984, exh. catalogue, eds. David Crowley, Daniel Muzyczuk, Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012/Calvert 22, London, 2013. 18 | Cf. Sounds like Silence. John Cage–4’33’’–Silence Today, exh. catalogue, eds. Dieter Daniels, Inke Arns, Hartware Medien Kunstverein, Dortmund, 2012/2013. 19 | Cf. Dennis Ioffe, “Andrei Monastyrskii’s Post-Semiosis and the Tradition of Moscow Conceptualism: Ekphrasis and the Problem of Visual-Ironic Suggestion”, in Russian Literature, no. 74, 1–2 (2013), pp. 255–273. 20 | Cf. Sylvia Sasse, Texte in Aktion; Uwe Wirth (ed.), Performanz. Zwischen Sprachphilosophie und Kulturwissenschaften (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 2002); Erika Fischer-Lichte, K. Hasselmann (eds.), Performing the Future. Die Zukunft der Performativitätsforschung (Fink, Munich, 2012); Erika Fischer-Lichte, Performativität. Eine Einführung (transcript, Bielefeld, 2012).

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at stake. Consequently, not the Empty action, but the Action itself is the main object of analysis for Sasse. Julia Scharf’s Das Archiv ist die Kunst (2006) can be considered as an elaboration of Sasse’s analysis of the Actions, on the one hand, and on the other as a departure from it, insofar as she proposes that the ‘performative’ is not only to be found in the Actions, but also in Collective Actions’ documentation practice. Her thesis is that the ‘performance’, and therefore the ‘art’, of Collective Actions is to be found in the way that they document the Actions and how they use these documents in and for further Actions. According to Scharf, the documentation and Actions are entwined to such a degree that a differentiation between the two becomes absurd.21 Here too, the Empty action is conceived as a tool or device only,22 and not as the main object of art, as will be done in the present book. The philologists Georg Witte and Sabine Hänsgen participated in a number of Actions of Collective Actions from the mid-1980s, and their very early translation and editorial work around Moscow Conceptualism, including Collective Actions, has been a major reference point in the German-speaking reception of Collective Actions.23 Witte’s two essays on Collective Actions from 2008 and 2010 approach their work mostly immanently, employing the terms and concepts of literary-criticism.24 Witte is the only author (apart from the viewers who were commissioned by Collective Actions to write reports) who considered his experience of participating in the Actions as central. It is perhaps for this reason that Witte recognises the relevance and consistency of the Empty action in Collective Actions’ work. The complex issue of Collective Actions’ relation to religious practices has been addressed in the unpublished course work by the student of world religions Arina Atik, who examines the relation of Collective Actions to Zen-Bud-

21 | Cf. Julia Scharf, Das Archiv ist die Kunst. Verfahren der textuellen Selbstreproduktion im Moskauer Konzeptualismus (Forschungsstelle Osteuropa Bremen, no. 78, 2006), p. 44. 22 | “Als Mittel zur Konstruktion des Ereignisses wird also diese ‘leere Handlung’ angesehen, während das Ziel der Aktion darin besteht, diesem Ereignis einen textuellen Ausdruck zu geben.” (Ibid., p. 23.) 23 | Cf. e.g. Günter Hirt and Sascha Wonders [pseudonym G. Witte and S. Hänsgen] (eds.), Kulturpalast. Neue Moskauer Poesie und Aktionskunst, incl. audio cassette and cards (Edition S, Wuppertal, 1984); Moskau. Moskau. Aktion Kunst Poesie (S, Wuppertal, 1987). 24 | Cf. Georg Witte, “Unsichtbar machen. Kontraevidentielle Aktionsbeschreibungen der Gruppe ‘Kollektive Handlungen’”, in Gabriele Brandstetter et al. (eds.), Notationen und Choreographisches Denken (Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2010), pp. 207–233; idem., “Kleine Reisen aus Moskau”.

Introduction

dhism (2015).25 This is illuminating, insofar as it clarifies the extent to which the Empty action is akin to certain Buddhist experiences of the enlightenment (e.g. prajnya), and thorough, since Atik acknowledges the depth of Collective Actions’ knowledge of Buddhism. However, given that the Empty action is intended by Collective Actions as a means of forming an artistic practice and not as a religious practice, such studies are problematic, because they ignore Collective Actions’ implicit critique of religion as an ideology. The work by German authors has remained unacknowledged in the English-speaking literature on Collective Actions. Yelena Kalinsky’s PhD thesis (2013) is a history of Collective Actions from 1976 until 1989, which largely draws on Collective Actions’ self-historicisation, with a contextualisation of Collective Actions within the Moscow Conceptual art circle.26 Kalinsky also translated the first reports of the viewers, Collective Actions: Audience Recollections From the First Five Years, 1976–1981 (2012).27 Generally, her thesis provides an overview of the different materials that Collective Actions worked with, such as documentation, photography, recorded speech and sounds. Kalinsky understands the work of Collective Actions in purely material and structural terms, and therefore the Empty action as a specific experience of art remains unaddressed. Octavian Esanu’s published PhD Transition in Post-Soviet Art (2013) presents Collective Actions’ practice as a case study in order to illuminate cultural shifts that took place in the former socialist countries during the period of ‘transition’ (the 1990s), in particular the liberalisation of markets, including the art market.28 The first part of his book delivers a similar, if less detailed, account of Collective Actions’ work between 1976 and 1989 to Kalinsky’s. It goes beyond Kalinsky’s history insofar as Esanu considers Collective Actions’ terms after 1989. In terms of method, Esanu’s book can be compared to Scharf’s Das Archiv ist die Kunst (2006), which is to say that it aims to demonstrate Collective 25 | Cf. Atik, Arina, “Proizvodstvo Opyta Osvobozhdeniya v Religii i vne Religii: Vliyaniye Dzen-Buddizma na Ranniy Moskovskiy Kontseptualizm”, unpublished essay, 48 pp., Philosophy of Religion and Religion History Department of the Moscow State University, 2015. 26 | Cf. Yelena Kalinsky, “Collective Actions: Moscow Conceptualism, Performance, and the Archive”, PhD thesis, The State University of New Jersey, 2013; cf. also her published article, which represents chapter 3 of her dissertation: “Drowning in Documents. Action, Documentation and Factography in Early Work by the Collective Actions Group”, in ArtMargins, vol. 2, no. 1 (2013), pp. 82–105. 27 | Cf. Yelena Kalinsky (ed. and transl.), Collective Actions: Audience Recollections from the First Five Years, 1976-1981 (Soberscove, Chicago, 2012). Cf. Marina Gerber, “After Participation”, in Mute, September 19, 2013. URL: http://www.metamute.org/ editorial/articles/after-participation 28 | Cf. Octavian Esanu, Transition in Post-Soviet Art.

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Actions’ evolution in relation to their textual production. Despite his claims to “pay attention to concepts and ideas”, Esanu’s contribution to the understanding of the main concept of the Empty action, or to the understanding of the sources which Collective Actions used, remains limited.29 The variety of the possibilities of interpretation and association that arises from Collective Actions’ practice will no doubt continue to generate more and more perspectives. For example, a study in terms of music history, the various philosophical traditions or literature is overdue. Just as with Buddhism, and, in fact, Russian orthodox Christianity, Collective Actions’ members demonstrate substantial engagement with musicology, with German Romanticism, with philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and literary works such as Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg and the so-called “four classic Chinese Novels”.30 Each of these numerous ex29 | The basis for Esanu’s book is his 2010 translation of the Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism, which was edited by Monastyrski in 1999. Cf. Andrei Monastyrski (ed.), Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism, trans. Octavian Esanu (Contimporary, Chisinau, 2010). Originally published in Russian in 1999 in Vadim Zakharov’s journal Pastor, no. 7. 30 | See Monastyrski’s video, where he goes through books which he would “get rid of in the last instance”: Andrei Monastyrski, “Knigi, ot Kotorykh ya by Izbavilsya v Poslednyuyu Ochered”, video recording, February 16, 2011. URL: https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=C4tfj5jC2Ss The list of books consists of (in order of appearance): Yulian Shchutsky, I Ching; Thomas Mann, Magic Mountain; Lama Anagarica Govinda, “Psychology of the early Buddhism” and “The Foundations of Tibetian Mysticism”; Vladimir Losski, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church; F.I. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic; Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason; Chandrakirti, Introduction to Madhyamaka; Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations; Xu Yun, Empty Cloud. Autobiography of the Chinese Zen Master Xu Yun; Iron Flute. 100 Koan; Fauna of USSR. Tunicates; Wu Cheng’en, Journey to the West. In this video Monastyrski is sitting in his living room and going through a selection of twelve books from his library. On the table in front of him are two stacks of books, divided into what he calls “the Palestinian canon” and “the Far-Eastern canon”. By “Palestinian canon” he means “the sum of Old Testament and Testament books, the writings of church fathers, Muslim tradition, even Ancient Greek – all in all, the textual canon of the European civilization, which was consolidated towards the end of the 19th century.” (Correspondence with the author, November 22, 2014.) The FarEastern-canon stack includes two branches of Far-Eastern traditions: Buddhist and Daoist. Before picking up one book after another, each time alternating between the ‘canons’, he says that he is going to read a passage from each of the books, from pages opened at random. Each book is introduced in the following way: the author, full title,

Introduction

plicit and implicit references, which can be followed up throughout Trips out of Town, promises to illuminate Collective Actions’ relation to world culture. The present study, however, only deals with these references insofar as they are necessary to understand the form of the Empty action. It does not seek to probe whether Collective Actions understood or misunderstood certain traditions, but to investigate Collective Actions’ own ‘theory’, which itself results in their own tradition. Even though, strictly speaking, the Empty action does not constitute a theory in a conventional sense, its consistency and depth has proven to be an effective epistemological tool within the analysis of Collective Actions’ practice and their historical context. The present study of the Empty action is understood as setting the ground for any further investigations of Collective Actions’ relation to other traditions. A further main point of originality of the present study is an innovative contextualisation of Collective Actions’ practice within Soviet social history and theory, which, as a result, enables a deeper understanding of the Empty action. The period in which the beginning of Collective Actions’ practice falls is the mid-1970s. Mikhail Gorbachev referred to the period between 1964 and 1982, during which Leonid Brezhnev was the Second and then the First Secretary of the Communist Party, as ‘the era of stagnation’. Monastyrski claimed in his essay “Earthworks” (1987) that the Actions of Collective Actions resonate with the era of stagnation: the Actions of Collective Actions, which were carried out on fields belonging to the kolkhozes and herewith against the background of the Soviet agrarian complex, could be interpreted “as an ‘Empty action’ (in the metaphorical sense as an inefficient, from the economic point of view, empty endeavour).”31 Writing about Collective Actions, Margarita Tupitsyn also implicitly endorses Gorbachev’s interpretation of the Brezhnev era: Collective Actions “identified emptiness as the main characteristic of Soviet existence throughout the Brezhnev era.”32 According to Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, one of the reasons why such a conception of the Brezhnev era remained unchallenged for so long is that “the discourse of stagnation seemed to have been so self-evidently confirmed by the chaos and breakdown of the Soviet collapse that

the first time he came across it (year), which edition, and the edition of the current publication. Then he reads out an arbitrary passage from each book. 31 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Zemlyanyye Raboty” [1987], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 4], p. 546. Translated into English by Yelena Kalinsky as “Earthworks”. URL: http://conceptualism.letov.ru/MONASTYRSKI-EARTH WORKS.htm 32 | Margarita Tupitsyn, “About early Soviet Conceptualism”, in Global Conceptualism, p. 105.

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it was scarcely worth questioning.”33 Drawing on the recent scholarly reconsideration of the Brezhnev era and its preconditions, the present study argues that it is the era of Nikita Khrushchev, also referred to as ‘De-Stalinization’ or ‘the Thaw’ (1953–1964), which was formative for the art of Collective Actions. On reflection, it is the social transformations during the Khrushchev era that affected cultural and intellectual aspects of life, as well as the conditions of work. For example, one of the main themes in the literature on the post-Stalinist period is the development of housing, which enabled citizens to live in their own apartment, behind the doors of which they could speak and do what they wanted. (Previously they had to share housing with people in whose presence they did not feel free expressing their views.)34 Collective Actions did not just carry out one third of the Actions in their apartments: it has also been emphasised by Kiesewalter that many conversations prior to 1976 took place during informal meetings in private apartments.35 Alexeev’s AptArt Gallery would also have been unthinkable if he had not had his own private, if small, apartment. We can also take into account studies which demonstrate that during the Khrushchev era the numbers of people with higher education rose significantly, thus causing the Soviet intelligentsia to expand rapidly.36 Another relevant feature of the period was the reduction of censorship in the arts, humanities

33 | Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, “Brezhnev Reconsidered”, in Edwin Bacon and M.A. Sandle, (eds.), Brezhnev Reconsidered (Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2002), p. 204. 34 | Cf. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (HarperCollins, London, 2009), pp. 257–258. On the housing project during the Khrushchev era cf. e.g. Christine Varga-Harris, “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front: Reviving the Socialist Contract and Constructing Soviet Identity during the Thaw”, in Polly Jones (ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization. A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era (Routledge, London/New York, 2006), pp. 101–116; Steven E. Harris, “Moving to the Separate Apartment: Building, Distributing, Furnishing, and Living in Urban Housing in Soviet Russia, 1950s–1960s”, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 2003; David Crowley, “Thaw Modern: Design in Eastern Europe after 1956”, in Cold War Modern. Design 1945–1970, exh. catalogue, eds. David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 2008, pp. 128–153. 35 | Cf. Givi Kordiashvili [pseudonym Georgi Kiesewalter], “Istoriya ‘Kollektivnikh Deystviy’. Povest’ v Dvukh Chastyakh s Epilogom” [1983], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 2], pp. 198–215. 36 | Cf. Mark Sandle, “A Triumph of Ideological Hairdressing? Intellectual Life in the Brezhnev Era Reconsidered”, in Edwin Bacon, M.A. Sandle (eds.), Brezhnev Reconsidered, p. 137.

Introduction

and science.37 This showed itself in the expansion of academic journals, collaboration and research in general, in the publications of previously unpublished texts, and in exhibitions of previously unseen art works. The sudden access to completely new themes and literature can be recognised as having formed the extremely varied, eclectic and engaged reading of Collective Actions’ members. The period of De-Stalinization did not only have effects on culture, but also resulted in reforms of labour legislation, which, for example, made redundancies on the basis of the efficiency argument difficult or even impossible.38 The increase in control over one’s own work conditions made the Stalinist ideals of labour, such as efficiency and acceleration,39 obsolete. Furthermore, it became illegal to be unemployed, which forced everyone, even people who did not need to work, or were self-employed, into employment. In this sense, this era is not only marked by a cultural Thaw, but also by a changed attitude to labour, and most importantly, to free time. These changes directly affected the members of Collective Actions. The everyday life of Collective Actions’ members was structured by the routine of work and free time: by their official work for the Soviet state on the one hand, and their individual artistic practice, and the collective practice for Collective Actions, on the other, which took place in their free time. This straightforward observation leads to the following question: How does the practice of Collective Actions, and their Empty action, sit in relation to this structuring of their lives, and what does the relation tell us about the socio-historical context of labour and free time? One of the main sources of this study are the interviews which the author conducted with all the members of Collective Actions between 2014 and 2015 (Monastyrski, Elagina, Makarevich, Panitkov, Kiesewalter, Romashko, Hänsgen, Alexeev). The central questions of these interviews revolved around the individual members’ professional work activities, and around the relation that these may have to Collective Actions’ practice. The second main source for addressing the socio-historical question is the journal Voprosy Filosofii (Questions

37 | Cf. Karen Laß, Vom Tauwetter zur Perestroika. Kulturpolitik in der Sowjetunion (1953–1991) (Böhlau, Cologne, 2002); Polly Jones (ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization. 38 | Cf. Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization. The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964 (Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1992); Mark Harrison, “Economic Growth and Slowdown”, in Edwin Bacon and M.A. Sandle (eds.), Brezhnev Reconsidered, pp. 38–67. 39 | Cf. Anna Feldmann Leibovich, The Russian Concept of Work, Suffering, Drama, and Tradition in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary Russia (Praeger, Westport, London, 1995), pp. 93–94.

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of Philosophy).40 Especially between 1959 and 1966, the journal published relevant essays around the relation between labour, free time, art and aesthetics. This period is marked by an epistemological break within the conceptions of labour and free time, and consequently of art and aesthetics. It is this epistemological break which will serve as a contextualisation for the present consideration of the work of Collective Actions. By adopting this perspective, the study not only contributes to the writing of the history of Collective Actions, but also to the history of Moscow Conceptualism, and, inasmuch as artists in other socialist countries were affected by the Thaw period, also to the history of art in the Eastern Bloc. Finally, the immanent analysis of Collective Actions’ Empty action and the socio-historical analysis are able to illuminate the unavoidable and problematic issue of Collective Actions’ relation to politics. It is unavoidable, because it is expected from a non-official art practice, such as Collective Action, that it be politically active against the Soviet state, especially when it has ‘action’ in its name. The issue is problematic, insofar as this expectation is not entirely fulfilled, and furthermore, because Collective Actions understand their art to be independent from politics, or even opposed to politics. Recently the art critic Claire Bishop argued that Collective Actions are “a good example of participatory art under communism”.41 Bishop’s approach to Collective Actions is characterised by the method that she developed for the analysis of participation art.42 Her main proposition is to challenge the political ambitions of participatory art that emerge in the 1990s. She advocates the necessity of grasping internal for40 | Voprosy Filosofii was, and remains, an influential academic journal in the Soviet Union, founded in 1947, edited by a changing collective of academics. According to Vladislav Lektorski, chief editor of Voprosy Filosofii between 1987 and 2009: “One could claim that there is not one really interesting philosopher in our country, starting from the 1960s, who was not supported by the journal and was not published on its pages.” (V.A. Lektorski, “Voprosy Filosofii za 60 Let”, in vphil.ru [2007?]. URL: http://vphil.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=6 Speaking especially about the period between 1947 and 1959, the bibliographer of Soviet philosophy J.M. Bochenski points out: “One could claim without exaggeration that all that is essential of the given period is either directly present, or is at least discussed here. Thus, the ‘Voprosy’ present the basis for any study of Soviet philosophy since 1947 until today.” (J.M. Bochenski, Bibliographie der Sowjetischen Philosophie (D. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1959), vols. 1–2, die ‘Voprosy Filosofii’ 1947– 1956, II.) 41 | Cf. Claire Bishop and Boris Groys, “Bring the Noise”, in Tate Etc, May 1, 2009. URL: http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/bring-noise 42 | Cf. Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents”, in Artforum (February 2006), pp. 178–183.

Introduction

mal relations, rather than focusing exclusively on the ethical or political meaning that a given work projects. This is how she approaches Collective Actions, which she supports by suggesting that Collective Actions were not dissident or political artists, but rather wanted to withdraw from the political context of the Soviet Union.43 This is broadly correct, but does not enable us to understand the actual complexity of Collective Actions’ relation to politics. When it is attempted to fit Collective Actions into a narrative of Russian art since the beginning of the 20th century, it is immediately suggested that as part of Moscow Conceptualism, Collective Actions need to be understood as a recovery of the achievements of the Russian Avant-Gardes; Socialist Realism is understood as a rupture from this critical and innovative movement. Ever since Boris Groys’ The Total Art of Stalinism (originally published in German in 1988), in which Groys argued that the Avant-Garde could never be the point of departure for Moscow Conceptualists, because they do not share the utopianism of the Avant-Garde – a movement which, furthermore, was also appropriated by the Soviet State – it has been understood that it can have been at most the formal and artistic achievements of the Avant-Garde that were influential for the unofficial art of the 1960s–1980s.44 What is interesting about Collective Actions is that even their main formal element, namely the Empty action, fundamentally contradicts the outlook of the Avant-Garde. But this is not reflected in Groys’ narrative in any way. To elaborate Groys’ argument: The Avant-Garde wanted to (artificially) construct a new world, following a certain Gesamtplan, herewith subjecting everyone and everything to the immanent rule of this plan. This, according to Groys, presupposed a certain understanding of the revolution, as discontinuation/end of time and history, which in turn is implicit in Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism.45 Groys’ The Total Art of Stalinism makes the argument that the very conception of art as Suprematism is problematic, because it urges to realise itself not just in art, but especially in the social. Groys rightly grasps the mood of the 1970s and 1980s Moscow Conceptualists by describing it as ‘post-utopian’, insofar as they had reflected on the ‘perils’ of art as the end 43 | Cf. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, London, 2012), p. 161. 44 | This is explicit in Inke Arns, “Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear! Die Avantgarde im Rückspiegel. Zum Paradigmenwechsel der künstlerischen Avantgarderezeption in (Ex-) Jugoslawien und Russland von den 1980er Jahren bis in der Gegenwart”, PhD thesis, Humboldt Universität, Berlin, 2004, and implicit in Matthew Jesse Jackson, The Experimental Group. Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (University of Chicago, Chicago, 2010), and in Alla Rosenfeld (ed.), Moscow Conceptualism in Context. 45 | Cf. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond, trans. Charles Rougle (Princeton, New Jersey, 1992), p. 93.

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of history, i.e. fascism and Stalinism, and decided to turn back to the traditional role of the artist, namely that of constructing new worlds, but this time only as art.46 Thus Groys understands ‘post-utopian’ art (which would include Collective Actions) as a complex critical narrative of the Soviet communists’ urge to realise a utopia. About Collective Actions’ Empty action he writes: [… Monastyrski’s] artistic practice represents an intelligent and stimulating reaction to the phenomenon of Soviet Communism. Communism can indeed be best understood as a collective and yet ‘empty action’ that achieved its reality only though subsequent interpretations. The ‘collective actions’ Monastyrski organized are the manifestations of life, but a life that from the outset was a life in an art project. 47

This suggests that no one understood Soviet communism while it was happening, and that it is only retrospectively that we can make sense of it. This would presuppose that between 1917 and 1991 nothing happened (Empty action), and furthermore, that Collective Actions themselves were not aware of how they related to Soviet communism, and could only produce an unconscious ‘reaction’ to it. In any case, Groys’ hypothesis remains an account of ‘art’ or culture as such (its internal logic),48 and not an account of art from a socio-historical perspective. That is, even when he speaks about the Soviet socio-historical context, it is always to give an account of the socio-historical as art (herewith himself remaining caught in the Avant-Garde’s project). The present study can be considered as an attempt to disentangle this conflation, by means of a new perspective on the socio-historical context; by means of a reflection on free time and labour; and by showing that Collective Actions did have a pronounced understanding of the social and did reflect on it consciously (chapters 3–7). The socio-historical perspective of this study raises the question of what happens with Collective Actions and the Empty action after 1991. The relations to work and free time get completely inverted for most of the members of Collective Actions: the Actions are not made in free time anymore, not on weekends, but during the week, since most of the members no longer work at set hours. The fact that they have now reached retirement age is also a significant issue, and this would need to be considered in a study dedicated to the period after 1991. In any case, such a study presupposes the present one.

46 | Cf. ibid., p. 78. 47 | Boris Groys, History Becomes Form, p. 151. 48 | Cf. Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, p. 17.

Introduction

G ener al N otes and Tr ansl ation I ssues The term ‘action’ is a translation from the Russian действие (deystviye), which Collective Actions use in their name – Коллективные Действия. This is, as we have seen above, literally a given name, because it was Groys who first used it. However, Groys did not use the name Kollektivnyye Aktsii, but Kollektivnyye Deystviya. The word aktsiya (Action) was used more or less from the start (first volume of Trips out of Town, 1980) and throughout to refer to the works of the group, the Actions: “This book is a collection of textual documentation of Actions [aktsiy] out of town, which we conducted in the course of the last five years.”49 The first sentence of the foreword to volume one of Trips out of Town suggests that aktsiya and deystviye are not the same: “The majority of Actions [aktsiy] described here are situations, where a group of people are called by the organisers of the Action [aktsii] to participate in some action [deystviye] unknown to them.”50 We get here a differentiation between the Action as a specific event to which the viewers are invited, and action as something that happens there. Sasse’s German translation of deystviye and aktsiya correctly reflects the importance of the difference between deystviye/Handlung as a dramaturgic device, and aktsiya/Aktion as Collective Actions’ works.51 In English there does not seem to exist a comparably good solution. If we wanted to differentiate deystviye from aktsiya, we would need to translate deystviye as ‘act’, ‘plot’ or ‘activity’, and aktsiya as ‘action’. But this would make it impossible to maintain the congruity with the original Russian text, which does not specify the exact meaning of the word deystviye. In this study deystviye will be referred to as ‘action’, and aktsiya as ‘Action’ with a capital ‘A’, with the aim of consistency.52 (The only 49 | “Эта книга представляет собой сборник текстовой документации по загородным акциям, которые мы проводили в течении пяти лет.” (Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod, p. 19.) 50 | “Большинство описанных здесь акций представляет собой ситуацию, когда группа людей позвана устроителями акции участвовать в каком-то неизвестном им действии.” (Ibid.) 51 | Cf. Sylvia Sasse, Texte in Aktion, p. 136. 52 | Many of Collective Actions’ terms, including действие, can be found in the influential Short Dictionary of Literary-Criticism Terms, such as сюжет (Sujet), замысел (concept/idea), персонаж (personage), образ (image), рассказ (report/ story) and экспозиция (exposition). (Cf. S.V. Turayev, L.I. Timofeev (eds.), Literatura. Spravochnyye Materialy (Prosveshcheniye, Moscow, 1989). The proximity of Collective Actions’ members to philology is implicitly addressed in Sasse’s and Witte’s translations and interpretations of Collective Actions’ Actions. Witte uses the terms Aktionsereignis and Mirkosujet to refer to ‘actions’. Cf. Georg Witte, “Kleine Reisen aus Moskau”.

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exception would be in the name of Collective Actions, the reason being the already internationally established usage.) Being aware of different performative artistic genres, such as performance, happening, staging (theatre), or concert, Collective Actions chose Action at a time when it was not common in the Soviet Union to call an artistic performance aktsiya (the term was rather associated with politics or finance, ‘shares’). The translation of the term ‘Empty action’ (pustoye deystviye) in the present book draws attention to the fact that it was not the planned event, the Action, that was at stake, but an ‘action’ or ‘act’ (deystviye), and, in order to emphasise the significance of this term, it is used with a capital ‘E’. The argument of this study is that the best way of analysing and interpreting the practice of Collective Actions is to approach it through the Empty action – their main idea, which structures all that they do as part of their collective artistic practice. It is a key, which, in the first instance, enables a specific reading of the Actions. But what are these Actions? They are events that take place on a certain date, in a certain place and to which a certain number of viewers are invited. What Collective Actions call Action description is a description of what was planned and realised during this event. In the secondary literature it is common to treat these Action descriptions as seemingly the obvious piece of evidence of the ‘object’ at stake. This is, however, very questionable: these texts are already descriptions of the events, and are by no means objective. Theoretically, there could exist variations of these descriptions, employing different words and expressions. The rule would be only to describe those acts which are intentional. What dramatises the fragility of the Action descriptions is, for example, a translation, which necessarily questions the original description and consequently disrupts the initially presumed delimited character of the object. In this study the problem of the ephemeral character of the Actions will be addressed in the following way. Where an analysis of an Action is required, a translation of the Action description will be provided in a text box.53 In a few instances where the Action description exceeds one page, a summary will be given. The Action descriptions will not be treated as the main ‘objects’ of art, but precisely as descriptions. These will be complemented by views that are produced in the viewers’ reports, and occasionally by other documentary materials, and by contextual material. The Action descriptions do not address the experience of the Empty action – this is something that only the viewers’ reports and the theoretical texts of the members of Collective Actions gesture towards. The photographs, videos and audio recordings purvey another dimension, which is not captured in the texts, but, on the other hand, they are not able 53 | In Trips out of Town the Action titles are emphasised with quotation marks, whereas here they will be in italics. The reason for the usage of quotation marks is simply that Trips out of Town were typed on a typewriter which did not have italics.

Introduction

to grasp the scope of the proceedings of an Action (cf. chapter 1). What has been identified as the main ‘object’ of art in this book is the Empty action, which demands of the viewer and reader that they break with the presupposition that we need to be able to see an objectively delimited artwork. If we want to fully grasp the Empty action and herewith the specificity of Collective Actions’ art, we cannot compromise on this point. The use and distinction between the terms ‘work’ and ‘labour’ that is present in this study is mostly idiomatic. As opposed to the German language, where no distinction between ‘work’ and ‘labour’ exists (both Arbeit), in Russian and English two words are used to refer to more or less the same thing: labour (trud) and work (rabota). An analysis of the usage of these terms in Trips out of Town suggests that, for Collective Actions, work and labour do not consistently communicate different ideas (except, perhaps, in that ‘work’ is associated with ‘going to work’ (idti na rabotu), and labour (trud) with a purposeful activity, which is carried out at work, or for the Actions).54 The distinction between the two terms, such as is maintained by Hannah Arendt,55 for example, is not of principal importance here, because the main problem of the present study revolves around working and not working, between labour/work and free time. What is of principal importance is that Collective Actions’ artistic practice takes place in free time, as opposed to within a professional work practice. What is also relevant is that some of the members made art in the context of their official profession. This, in turn, is separate from their individual art practice in free time, which maintains a strong relation to work, as this study sets out to explore. In order to emphasise this relation, the term ‘art after work’ is introduced: ‘After’ refers to the temporal dimension, and in some cases, a resemblance of ‘art after work’ to work. ‘Art after work’ includes a number of activities that this study considers to be distinct: amateurism, individual artistic activities and the collective artistic practice. It is argued that the Empty action results from a peculiar form of ‘art after work’, which radicalises the suspension of work. What follows is a participant’s report of the Action SUMMA (2015). It is conceived as a direct and vivid entry into the ‘object’ at stake in this study, and as a contrast to the rest of the work, insofar as it presents an individual and internal view on one Action of Collective Actions.

54 | Cf. Nikita Alexeev, “O Kollektivnykh i Individual’nykh Aktsiyakh 1976–1980” [1980], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1], pp. 87–107; Givi Kordiashvili, “Istoriya ‘Kollektivnikh Deystviy’”. 55 | Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago, Chicago/ London, 1998 [1958]).

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Interlude: A Participant’s Report on the Action SUMMA (2015) 1

In Trips out of Town it says that the Action may begin the moment one receives the invitation to participate in it. This is true, and in my case I believe this initial stage was particularly vivid. As soon as I heard about the Action, I had to consider the long journey to Moscow where the Action would take place, which would take a lot of time and effort – I was in London. On top of that, it was unclear exactly when the Action would take place. Andrei Monastyrski said everything depended on the weather. This was because the drone that he was planning to use could not be started in the rain or strong wind. At first the date was set for October 5, then for October 1 or 2. The date also depended on the schoolboy who owned the drone. It was unclear when he would be free from school. The problems with the date bothered me. I feared that the whole thing would not work out. Stewart Martin, my partner, said I might receive an email saying something like: “You have participated in the Action titled ‘The Setting of the Date of Action’”. (He knew the Actions Appearance and Exit.) But only a few days later, on September 26, I received an email from Monastyrski confirming that the Action would take place on October 2. It was only then that I was sure it was going to happen and that I would make it. At least I did not remember hearing that an Action was ever cancelled once the date was set. I started to look forward to it, thinking positively. On October 1, in Moscow, I called Monastyrski who gave me the following instructions: I should call Evgenia Veselova and arrange to meet her tomorrow at the Savelovskaya station at 12 a.m. to take the commuter train from there to the Lobnya station. She would be waiting at “the first wagon from the centre”. Veselova should have a map with directions to where the Action would take

1 | This Interlude is an edited and extended version of the original report on the Action Summa, published in Russian as “Rasskaz ob Aktsii SUMMA” [2015], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 4–5+11–13 (BMK, Vologda, 2016), pp. 459–464. URL: http://conceptualism.letov.ru/141/M-Gerber-o-141.html

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place. I called Veselova and arranged the meeting. She said I would recognise her at the station from her black coat with large white buttons. As I was getting ready to leave the next day, I received a call from Monastyrski. He said that there was a problem with the commuter trains and that I needed to come to his and Daria Novgorodova’s place, and that from there he would order a taxi. I departed in the direction of Ulanskiy Street. When I exited the metro at the Sretensky Boulevard I decided to call Veselova just in case – what if she didn’t get the message and was waiting for me at the station? She said that she knew about the change of plans and that she had just boarded the train. I asked whether I would see her “at the place” and she replied “yes, I’ll see you”. Here the personage Veselova leaves this story; she was not at the place of the Action for reasons that remain obscure to me. Arriving at the flat, I was greeted by Novgorodova, then the dog (Ab-)Salut, Monastyrski and, to my pleasant surprise, Vadim Zakharov. (Although it was only half a surprise, because in one of the several scenarios that I had imagined, anticipating my arrival, he was there.) He told me about the Moscow Biennale, that it took place at the VDNKh and that Varoufakis had spoken there yesterday. In the meantime, Monastyrski looked very focused. He was walking up and down the apartment and talking on the phone. It turned out that we were also expecting Vladimir Sorokin. On the way out of the flat, in the corridor by the door, I saw lots of different drugs with strange names on the bookshelf and remembered that I also had anti-nausea drugs with me. Sometimes I get sick in the car. For some reason I offered them to Zakharov, who immediately and gladly took one of them. We told Monastyrski we were taking the tablets due to our excitement about the Action. He found this convincing. We went downstairs and, on the Ulanskiy street, Sorokin appeared. Then Novgorodova drove the five of us out of town. I do not know how long it took because I did not look at my watch, even though I had planned to keep an eye on the time. Due to the interesting conversations about art and artists the journey went very quickly. Out of town, near some village, we stopped at a shop and bought something to drink and a few snacks. We carried on driving and went past the ‘Williams Institute of Fodder’, but I could not understand why we carried on after this, driving further and further, because this Institute is referred to in Trips out of Town and I assumed it was somewhere close to the Kievogorskoye field – where lots of Actions had taken place in the past. Then we suddenly stopped on the border of a busy road, with forest on both sides. Throughout the long car journey I had tried not to ask questions like: “where are we?”, “where are we going?”, “how far is it?”, etc., because I did not want to upset my anticipation of the unknown. But when we stopped at the border of the road, I could not hold back: “Have we arrived?” Everyone started to get out of the car, unloading bags and rucksacks, and we started walking. Monastyrski soon returned to the car to get his rubber boots,

Interlude: A Par ticipant’s Repor t on the Action SUMMA (2015)

which worried me. I had recently bought a pair on a glamping trip, but I had left them in London. We turned off the road and walked along a path towards a field. I saw plants with huge umbels that I recognised from photographs from past Actions, and Monastyrski also drew our attention to them. At this point I did not know that this field was the Kievogorskoye field. I could have anticipated this, of course, but in Trips out of Town the walk to the place of the Action is often described as long and difficult, so I did not think that we were already at the field. To me it was just a field. On the edge of the field there was a group of people waiting: the schoolboy Voznesenski, presumably his parents, and Sitar (whom I knew from Trips out of Town). We walked across the field, turned to the right and walked towards a clearing. There was another group waiting: Masha Sumnina (Monastyrski’s daughter), Mikhail Leykin and Andrei Kuzkin. I had heard about the artistic group ‘MishMash’ (Masha Sumnina and Misha Leykin) but didn’t know exactly what they did. I didn’t realise who Kuzkin was, although I knew a work of his that had impressed me, in which he treads for hours in slowly solidifying concrete. Throughout the whole Action he was simply ‘Kuzkin’ for me. We walked along the clearing, which Monastyrski, for some reason, called ‘Nina Hagen Clearing’. (I should not have asked why.) Nearby, supposedly, was the ‘Heidegger Clearing’. It was invisible, which for me was no surprise. I walked behind everyone. I was very happy and contented. I did not ask myself where we were going, which is unusual for me. This state of not-asking I registered as the ‘beginning of Action’. For some reason I was surprised to see Monastyrski recording everything on camera. He called this device ‘the registrator’. I knew that everything is always recorded during the Actions, but I still found it unexpected. Monastyrski suddenly said: “Here, we will do it here”. I had the impression that we had arrived too quickly. For some reason I felt an urge to carry on walking, but then I noticed the roofs of some high-rises at the end of the clearing and realised there was nowhere to go. Everyone and everything started to get a bit hectic. We were standing in the middle of the first half of the clearing. I saw that the organisers of the Action had started to spread out a huge purple sheet. They offered the viewer-participants the opportunity to help. Monastyrski insisted that the sheet should be completely flat, but there were plants and tree shoots hindering the realisation of this ideal. Monastyrski instructed everyone to help sort this out by cutting back the vegetation with garden shears and a saw. Everyone started to help except for the schoolboy Voznesenski, who was responsible for setting up the drone and the technology that goes with it. As we were absorbed in the activity of flattening the purple sheet, I saw printed on it the digits ‘1204’. I tried to understand what they meant. I was thinking very hard, expecting that – given my knowledge of Collective Actions’ Actions – eventually I would understand it. But I just could not. Nothing, absolutely

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nothing came to mind. In the background of my intense, yet absolutely empty thinking, I heard Monastyrski saying: “Later I will explain everything – get on with it”. He said it so comfortingly, as if he had sensed the anxious not-understanding of the viewer-participants. In this moment, I remember, I decided that now, for sure, the Action had started. I thought this not because something was happening (in fact, nothing special was happening), but because I sensed a kind of withdrawal, as if the time was just passing and I was simply standing in the clearing waiting precisely for nothing specific. And most importantly, because it felt very comfortable. Some people were taking photographs, others were video recording. Sorokin was fiddling with a plant stalk. Figure 1a: Collective Actions, from the Action SUMMA, 2015

A screen panel was installed, which was meant to show images from the drone camera. The drone was started and I looked at it – how strangely it was humming around. I looked at the screen, near which I was standing, and saw a small purple circle. I had already seen such circles in the works of Collective Actions. I remembered the ‘internet Actions’ which only took place on the internet (on Letov’s website). Only now this circle was no longer an edited reproduction of Google Maps, and I was not looking at my laptop. It was a picture of a real event. The picture on the screen, showing the circle between blocks of tree tops, was moving slightly, reminding me of its ‘live’ character. I looked at the drone in order not to miss the real event, part of which I had now already missed while I

Interlude: A Par ticipant’s Repor t on the Action SUMMA (2015)

was looking at the screen. In other words, in the time during which the drone was started, had landed and been restarted again, I was switching between looking at the screen and then at the drone, trying not to miss anything. Why is it that I was switching like this? As I am writing this I am thinking the following: Neither the one, nor the other had fulfilled my desire to see everything. When you look at the drone, you see, as it were, the central ‘action’ of the Action: the starting of the drone. But only by looking at the screen do you see what the drone is doing, namely recording – what is ‘really happening there’. But looking at the screen, again, you do not see the working drone itself. In other words, you see either the work, or the result, but never the two together. For some reason I really do not remember the sequence of events which followed this oscillating contemplation. Either it was then that MishMash and Sitar disappeared into the forest, followed by the drone and Voznesenski, leaving Monastyrski to explain the Action to the remaining viewer-participants (the number 1204 was the sum of all the numbers of the Actions which had taken place there plus this Action) and to distribute the factography, or it was then that the viewer-participants were asked to assemble at the upper part of the purple sheet. In any case, I remember that when MishMash, Sitar and Voznesenski returned, they asked what the factography meant, so they were not present when Monastyrski explained the Action. Presumably it was their disappearance into the forest and subsequent return that confused me. Sitar was carrying a white balloon, which he for some reason put under his jacket, provoking the association with pregnancy for some of the viewer-participants – this was not part of the Action, as Monastyrski repeated several times, but I just couldn’t be sure. In any case, whether it was before or after, we grouped up by the purple sheet and looked up at the drone. I could not see it continuously and did not always know where it was. It was high up in the sky and very small. It came closer to the group and was humming loudly, and although I knew that Voznesenski was in control of it, I still had the feeling that it was alive and doing its own thing, like some kind of insect from which you do not know what to expect. The last, but for me very important, action was the watching of the video material which was recorded by the camera fixed to the drone. Sumnina opened the laptop and it took some time to get ready. There was a discussion whether food could be served and eaten on the purple sheet, like a picnic cover. In the end that’s just what we did. On the laptop, which was also placed on the purple sheet, we watched the ‘disappearance into the forest’. The drone was slowly flying above the early-autumn tree tops, observing the now barely visible group of us through the trees, and then it landed on a triangle that seemed to be purposefully constructed out of tree trunks. (Someone said the arrangement was incidental.) Then we watched the recording from the drone when it was hovering above the group. This recording was very strange for me. The group was visible from afar; then the drone came closer and closer and one could

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see that we stood there artificially still, as if hypnotised by the humming of the drone. We looked as if we had been ‘planted’ into the soil, and everything around us was in gradual panoramic movement. After this intense impression everyone started to get moving, packing their things, and we departed. We went back to Moscow by car, and Sorokin, Zakharov and I were dropped off somewhere near a metro station. Zakharov took me to Garage (the museum of contemporary art) and showed me his exhibition. We walked in circles around his huge folders, out of which videos were resounding and flashing. We had a close look at them while Zakharov told me interesting stories about life and art. When I returned home I saw that Novgorodova had posted some of the photographs from the Action on social media. Her posts showed the group, photographed by herself, plus a few post-Action portraits (of Sitar, Oksana Sarkisyan, and the trio of Sorokin, Monastyrski and Zakharov). What was unexpected for me was how she pictured Voznesenski. In one of the two photos he is about to catch the landing drone, and in the other photo he is, it seems, about to set it up. These photographs really captured something that I did not realise during the Action: the main performer there was him. This realisation derives in large part from the aestheticisation that these photographs have produced. Each photograph had a special meaning for me, either confirming or shifting my own prior experience. On the next day I received a link to the video which was recorded by the drone, as well as more photos and the description of the Action. I looked at the photographs. The first I saw showed Sumnina, Sarkisyan and Novgorodova with the drone above them. Sumnina was looking at the drone, Sarkisyan at the purple sheet, and Novgorodova, this time herself the object of a photograph, was also looking at the drone, holding her camera aside. Behind them was the path through the clearing with the fenced off gas outlet, which we went past as we were walking towards the place of Action. It had a sign saying something like ‘Danger’. The next photo showed Sorokin and myself from the back, standing by the purple sheet, and me reaching out to Zakharov to take back my camera – with which he had just made a photo of Sorokin and me – while Novgorodova was making a photo of this situation.

Four Views The third photo I saw after the Action is strange, but it perfectly documents my experience of disorientation at the Action. However, it was only two weeks later after I had written the original version of this report, and after the first stages of reflecting on how my experience of the Action shifted my previous knowledge – that I realised its significance. The photograph appears to be structured by multiple ‘views’. However, it is not evident at first sight where these views originate (fig. 1b).

Interlude: A Par ticipant’s Repor t on the Action SUMMA (2015)

Figure 1b: Collective Actions, from the Action SUMMA, 2015

It shows a screen in the focused foreground, and the clearing in the background, with Sarkisyan sitting in front of the purple sheet, looking at her picture-camera display. The set up suggests that the screen in the foreground records what is behind it – i.e. as if we are looking through a camera lens. But then one realises that this is impossible, since the two figures on the screen do not seem to be behind it – only Sarkisyan is there. So where is the camera lens? In actuality, the screen displays the recording from the drone camera, which is somewhere outside the photographic image. The two figures on the left-hand side of the screen, Monastyrski and myself, are looking at something that we are blocking from view in the photo. In fact, we are looking at the very screen that is at the centre of the photograph. The image of us on the screen is produced by the drone camera, which is behind the scene, fairly centrally on the clearing path. Therefore, the photograph must have been taken within the space between the screen (since it is on the photo) and the drone camera (since it does not encompass the drone itself). And that means that the photograph must have been taken by Monastyrski, which I do not remember seeing, despite standing next to him. This must have been because I was looking at the screen. In other words, I did not notice him taking this photograph because the drone image, at which I was looking, did not record it, since it only showed our backs, and not what was happening in front of us.

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Such photographs are hardly intentional works, although they give the impression of being constructed. Such unintentional and yet meaningful works resonate with the Empty action. The Action provides a frame, a structure, which is then filled with incidental elements, some of which extend and complicate the structure in a seemingly purposeful, intentional way. But this is an illusion, or an effect of the construction itself. This is the Empty action. More specifically, the report of an Action produces this illusion by means of mentioning the intended events as if in passing, which produces the sense that the structure or frame of the Action was secondary or unintentional. What seems primary in the report is rather the details of individual experience. However, this is misleading, since without the Action and the whole work of Collective Actions there would be no such experience as is captured by the report. To go back to the experience of looking at the documentary material. After I had looked at the photos, I delayed watching the video, because I wanted to remain in this state of working through the experience in relation to the photographs. I was expecting a sensuous overload from the video. But this expectation was not fulfilled. The video was post-produced. It contained three shots and the recording of the ‘disappearance into the forest’ was missing. The first part of the video showed the first attempt to start the drone, with people standing, dispersed, around the purple sheet with the number 1204 the wrong way around. (Monastyrski said that it is not important that it is the wrong way around.) Then it appears as if the camera were zooming out rapidly. To someone not used to watching images taken by means of a drone, this experience is confusing, because there is no visual reminder of the fact that what one sees is filmed by a drone. The only indication of this is the noise produced by the drone propeller, but this is far too non-specific to define and structure the perception of this material as ‘filmed by a drone’. The people around the circle were becoming smaller and smaller, as the drone went up higher and higher before suddenly stopping, hanging in one position. The coin-sized purple circle looks almost artificial, as if collaged into the video frame, the clearing taking up at least half of the image. On both sides the first rows of trees are visible. Around the purple circle there are black dots with bright patches, people in dark clothes looking up to the drone. But who exactly was there is not discernible. We were in what Collective Actions refer to as ‘the line of the indistinguishability. Then the drone quickly came back down, past the tree branches through which I was looking at it. For the second shot in the video the drone went up considerably higher. The people are almost invisible and one sees more of the forest (fig. 1c). The image alternates between being almost frozen and turning round on its own axis. Sometimes one can see one of the 13 black dots making a few steps to the side. Then it slowly goes down towards the purple circle, approaching the

Interlude: A Par ticipant’s Repor t on the Action SUMMA (2015)

dispersed group, and – what is not visible in the video – the drone is caught by Voznesenski. Figure 1c: Collective Actions, from the Action SUMMA, 2015

The last shot revolves around ‘the group’, starting out from the midst of grass and bushes, which are bending from the force of the drone propeller. It shows the group and then there is a zoom out and we see the clearing; then slowly the circle with the number and the group standing at the top. Then again the clearing and the soil coming closer and closer before the camera changes view and shows the group again. The video ends by ‘landing on the zero’ of the number 1204. After several viewings of the video and the photos I read the description of the Action: SUMMA A circle of purple sheet, of five metres diameter with the digits 1204 (the sum of numbers attributed to the Actions of CA, which were carried out at this place + the number of the Action Summa itself, 141) printed on it with white paint, was spread out, with the digits facing up, on the Nina Hagen clearing path (a broad ‘gas’ clearing path, running parallel to the ‘electrical’ Heidegger clearing path), which connects the Kievogorskoye field and the ‘Field of Polar Explorers’ to the south-east. Hereafter a drone with a video camera goPro was started above the circle, which went up to the height of 105 metres, filming the circle and the participants of the Action around it (the low altitude to which the drone has risen could be explained by the fact that the aerodrome ‘Sheremetyevo’ is not far

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from the Kievogorskoye field, and the software of the drone contains a limit when started near aerodromes). Then the video, taken by the drone, was viewed by the participants on the laptop they had carried with them. The factography distributed amongst the viewer-participants was a laminated fragment of the map of the Kievogorskoye field, with circles and numbers of the Actions of CA carried out where the circle 1204 was placed. (These are no. 98: Action with Clocks (19.04.2003); no. 99: Banner-2003; no. 105: Banner-2005; no. 108: K; no. 111: Library-2007, no. 131: Translocation-4; no. 134: Hibernation in the Soil on the Heidegger Clearing; no. 137: Subterranean Five-Year[-Plan] (26.08.2014); no. 140: Kashchey the Immortal of Collective Actions (12.02.2015); no. 141: SUMMA). [In the general list of CA’ Actions the first Action of volume 13 of Trips out of Town is attributed the number 1204 (141)]. Forest (‘N. Hagen Clearing Path’) to the south-east from the Kievogorskoye field. October 2, 2015. A. Monastyrski, M. Sumnina, P. Voznesenski Viewers-participants: V. Sorokin, V. Zakharov, A. Kuzkin, S. Sitar, D. Novgorodova, O. Sarkisyan, M. Leykin, I. Voznesenski, O. Petrunenko, M. Gerber.2 I was surprised that it said that the drone was flown to an altitude of 105 metres. In my head, for some reason, the height was 300 metres, and according to the plan of the Action, it needed to be 500 metres. It was intended that a bigger area would be covered by the image, including the Kievogorskoye field. But for technical and geographical reasons this was not achieved. The Sheremetyevo Airport was nearby, and the drone’s software assigned altitude limits near to airports. Maybe it was because Monastyrski kept repeating the number ‘300’, and Voznesenski was saying that the drone is set up to fly to heights of 500 metres, that I do not remember the ‘105’. Writing the report, I could have edited out the evidence of my false memory, such as the misremembering the flight altitude, not knowing of the exact terms for the technological devices, the sequence of the actions during the Actions, the full names of the participants and who they are, etc. But I did not in order to demonstrate the character of such reports, namely, that they seem to be written without access to full information about the Action – in a space between just having experienced the Action and not yet having had the chance to verify this experience in relation to documentary material. The evidence of this is 2 | Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 4–5+11–13 [vol. 13], pp. 387–388.

Interlude: A Par ticipant’s Repor t on the Action SUMMA (2015)

the considerable variations between the reports of two different viewer-participants in one and the same Action. Reading them, one sometimes even gets the impression that the individuals were not at the same Action. Consequently, it is usually not enough to read one report in order to get ‘the full picture’. And as was demonstrated here, in order to get a perspective on the Action, it is necessary to consider the other available material, such as the photographic and video documentation and the Action description. It is also very useful to study the forewords, thematic essays, and comments; these are usually written by Collective Actions’ members about a series of Actions or about a whole volume of Trips out of Town (usually containing about a dozen Actions). There one can get a sense of how Collective Actions’ members discuss the single Action within the broader context of their work. As the volumes of Trips out of Town multiply (the Action SUMMA is the first Action of the 13th volume), this context necessarily becomes broader, and, as a consequence, with each new volume a variation within the overall context is produced.

E xperience My knowledge of Collective Actions’ work, which previously was objectified only in textual- and speech spaces (on paper, in talks or discussions), was, after the Action SUMMA, suddenly transformed into an image. In other words, my knowledge radically changed its form. I do not mean that the visual imagery of the Action had eclipsed my previous view. Rather, the knowledge itself turned into an image. It was clear that I enjoyed this image, but I could not show it to anyone, since it was inside my head. I feared that I would not be able to record it. I saw that this image was made out of stuff that was familiar to me, but nonetheless the different form in which it appeared to me was disquieting, because I could not understand how exactly it was constructed, and how I could reproduce it. In this moment, I realised what it means when in Trips out of Town it says that the Action itself does not mean anything. Precisely this was my perception, and only several hours later did I realise that I was not asking myself what this or that, or even the Action as a whole, means. This situation is perhaps what in Trips out of Town is referred to as ‘emptiness’. I tried to prolong this emptiness and the contemplation of the inconceivable image in my consciousness. I experienced what it means in Trips out of Town where it says that the Action takes place in consciousness. On the second day after the Action I started to worry that the image might be ephemeral, and I began to write down what I saw there. But it seemed that the effort required to reconstruct this image with text was colossal. I was making notes, but they seemed to me like fragments and patches. Only after I had written the report of SUMMA, and some accounts of the experience itself, did I understand that the process of trying to reconstruct the image in my head

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would take an indefinite amount of time, since it had shaken my previous perception of Trips out of Town, of art, work and free time. One could say that the more the viewer-participant knows the work of Collective Actions, the more intense is the experience of the Action, the larger is the image into which it all transforms, and the more enjoyable is the emptiness – the break from the endless processes of thinking. The original version of the report was written for those who were present at the Action and who would have already looked at the photographs and the description of the Action, and watched the two videos (the 8-minute drone video and the perhaps 1 ½ hour video recording the Action without interruption). It seems absurd to assume that these individuals would learn anything new about the Action by reading my report. However, in the report I focused on that which I was thinking and experiencing before, during and after the Action, but did not share with others at the time. Those who were present will therefore find at least half of my report surprising. The report ‘records’ that which no one could see during the Action, namely that which took place in my consciousness, and my individual view. Apart from perhaps being a piece of storytelling, this report does not have any value in itself. Its function is rather to produce a contrast to other materials surrounding the Action, which are all, in some ways, merely individual views, herewith scrutinising the ‘objective’ character of documents such as photos, videos, Action descriptions and factography. This presupposes that the Actions construct a ‘reality’ which cannot be grasped by one single view, and not even by the totality of all the available views. Rather, the ‘reality’ at stake is constituted by processes of interpretation – a central feature of the activity of Collective Actions, which they impose not only on their viewer-participants, but also on their readers. Therefore, ideally, a reader who comes across a description of an Action or any other material that surrounds it will not take it for granted. The report is merely one step in this process of construction, which is always subject to revision, depending on which context it is placed in. From this perspective, it may even be better if one does not participate in any Actions, but is instead familiar with Trips out of Town.

1. Empty Action The Empty action (pustoye deystviye) is the red thread that can be followed throughout the whole of Collective Actions’ practice: it determines the structures of the Actions and it anticipates a specific experience. The existence or absence of this experience marks the success or failure of each Action. The core of the Empty action experience can be described as a pause or break.1 It has also been described by Andrei Monastyrski in terms of immediate perception or meditation, meaning a perception without thinking, and as a temporary suspension of understanding and interpretation of that which is perceived.2 This experience is supposed to be comfortable or pleasant, concluding with a pre-conceptual ‘understanding’, which occurs at the point when the viewer thinks that he or she now understands everything without yet being able to articulate it critically or theoretically. The Empty action presupposes a specific structural form, which in the following will be addressed in detail as the pair of ‘demonstrational’ and ‘extra-demonstrational’ elements. The demonstrational element appears to be intended and the extra-demonstrational to be accidental. It is these two main elements that condition the perception of the viewers, enabling them to have an experience. The whole practice of Collective Actions can be described as an investigation of different possibilities to produce new constellations of these elements. This is pursued by means of various devices, which will be addressed further below. Failure is an important aspect of the critical character of Collective Actions’ investigation. This makes the Empty action not only a form of art, but also a research question. Put to the test in different contexts and structures, it does not always succeed. According to Monastyrski, “in the end, all this is not quite

1 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Kol’tso KD” [1996], in idem, Esteticheskiye Issledovaniya. Teksty, Aktsionnyye Ob’’yekty, Installyatsii (BMK, Moscow, 2009), p. 492. 2 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1980], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1] (Ad Marginem, Moscow, 1998), p. 20.

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a work of art, but rather an aesthetic practice”.3 The Empty action can also be characterised as a principle or category that shapes the broader aesthetic practice and discourse, and which includes success as well as failure. If the Empty action is unproductive of meaning in and for itself, its effect is all the more interesting for Collective Actions. Unable to make sense of the Action as it is happening, a few days, weeks or months later the viewers begin to write their reports, where they describe and characterise their experiences. These reports can be considered as attempts to compensate for the fact that during the Action the viewers could not make sense of it.4 Normally the reports present intuitive and spontaneous associations of the experience of the viewers with knowledge that is readily available to them. This is demonstrated by the fact that there are as many different theoretical views on the Actions as there are theories that were read by the viewers. Such almost automatic associations are referred to by Monastyrski as gnoseological or epistemological effects.5 The members of Collective Actions on their part also engage in a retrospective production of the meaning of the Actions, which involves collecting, archiving, editing and re-organising the available documentary material. This is called the “Factographical Discourse”, in the process of which new perspectives can be generated and even some previously unnoticed Empty actions detected. Collective Actions went a long way to describe, theorise and validate the Empty action as something that evades description, theorisation and validation. The aim of this chapter is to nonetheless try to characterise the Empty action as it is presented in Trips out of Town, with the aim of exploring its epistemological consequences within and beyond Trips out of Town.

1.1 The D emonstr ational and E x tr a -D emonstr ational E lements In the “Commentary” (1978), where the Empty action is first mentioned, we learn that, especially with the series of Actions Appearance, Comedy and Third Variant, Collective Actions want to “construct the ‘Empty action’ as a category which can be experienced aesthetically […] With ‘Empty action’ we mean the extra-demonstrational time of that which takes place, that which is the dramatic centre of the 3 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Tekst Perevoda. Archeologiya Pustogo Deystviya” [1984, sic! correct: 1985], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 3], p. 309. 4 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, Victor Tupitsyn, “Razgovor v Moskve, 1989”, in Victor Agamov-Tupitsyn and Andrei Monastyrski. Tet-a-Tet: Perepiska, Dialogi, Faktografiya, ed. Margarita Masterkova-Tupitsyna (BMK, Vologda, 2013), p. 237. 5 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1989], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 5], p. 670.

1. Empty Action

staging.”6 In 1979 it is stated in “Short Commentary to the Actions 1976–1979 (November)” that the Empty action can be understood in two ways: Firstly, as an element which elicits the demonstrational structure as such […] Secondly, as an extra-demonstrational event-time for the viewers, which is experienced by some participants or some viewers as the dramatic centre of the Action. ‘Empty action’ has a time-spatial and psychic existence. It is placed onto the demonstrational field of the Action as a certain gap to it, namely on the margins of distinguishability of the ‘demonstration’ and ‘non-demonstration’.7

The ‘demonstrational’ element is that which is ‘shown’ to the viewers, that which is consciously constructed or activated (zadeystvovano) by the organisers of the Action. It is also characterised as ‘the text’,8 which refers to the planned and authored plot of the Action. Effectively, this text is only written down after the event, and before and during the Action it only exists in the head of the organisers. It is then referred to as the ‘description text of the Action’ (opisatel’nyy tekst aktsii). The demonstrational element consists of various devices and acts, which are stated in the Action description.9 In this sense, the Action description is the central evidence of the demonstrational element. In this book, the published Action descriptions are given in their original form: Title, text, place and date of Action, and the names of the organisers (later also the names of the viewer-participants). For example: Appearance The viewers were sent invitations to the Action Appearance. All the invitees (30 persons) gathered on the edge of the field; five minutes later two participants of the Action appeared from the forest on the opposite side. They crossed the field, approached the viewers and gave them certificates (‘Documentary confirmation’), identifying their presence at Appearance. Moscow, Izmaylovskoe field. March 13, 1976. A. Monastyrski, L. Rubinstein, N. Alexeev, G. Kiesewalter.10 6 | “Andrei Monastyrski, Nikita Alexeev, Nikolai Panitkov, Georgi Kiesewalter, “Kommentariy” [1978], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 1 (BMK Vologda, 2011), p. 152. 7 | [Kollektivnyye Deystviya], “Kratkiy Kommentariy k Aktsiyam 1976–1979 gg. (Noyabr’skiy)”, in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 1, p. 167. 8 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1983], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 2], p. 117. 9 | Cf. ibid. 10 | Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1], p. 25.

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The ‘extra-demonstrational’ element is that which is not constructed or activated (ne zadeystvovano) by Collective Actions.11 It is a structural element, the content of which is not determined in any particular way. It includes potentially everything that surrounds the Action concretely and theoretically, that is, its background: snowy or brown field, trees, the weather, the time, the people, previous Actions and the broader context. The placing of the extra-demonstrational into the demonstrational element is that which is conceived as ‘the dramatic centre’ of the Action. In the foreword to the first Trips out of Town (1980) this definition is consolidated: “The introduction of an extra-demonstrational element into the demonstrational structure at various stages of action, as well as its passing within the time of demonstration, we will from now on call ‘Empty action’.”12 In these phrasings we can already detect a major paradox: how can something that is not activated by Collective Actions, the extra-demonstrational element, be ‘placed’ or ‘introduced’? What is meant here is that the experience sought by Collective Actions is neither that which is ‘demonstrated’, nor that which is ‘not demonstrated’, but the experience of a certain indistinguishability between the demonstrational and extra-demonstrational elements. We can say that, from the perspective of the viewer, the Empty action comes into effect when the demonstrational and the extra-demonstrational elements are indistinguishable. They are indistinguishable only in the perception of the viewer, since in reality, as we just learned, the demonstrational element is clearly defined by the Action plan. The Empty action begins to work when the demonstrational element is perceived by the viewers as the extra-demonstrational element or vice versa. In this fleeting moment, the viewer cannot clearly identify what is and what is not a demonstrational element, and thus cannot start his or her interpretation of the ‘demonstrated artwork’. The viewer experiences a break from the consumption of art and from the need to interpret it. Although the viewer is expecting to see an artwork, he or she is not able to grasp it: “Here we have defined the ‘Empty action’ as a principle, although in each Action it is expressed specifically, and is considered as a time fragment within the Action, when the viewers, if one can say this, ‘intensely do not understand’, or ‘misunderstand’, what is happening.”13 The point of the Empty action is to delay judgement and interpretation for as long as possible.14

11 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Slovar’ Terminov Moskovskoy Kontseptual’noy Shkoly”, in Pastor, no. 7 (1999), pp. 164 and 184. 12 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1980], p. 20. 13 | Ibid., pp. 20–21. 14 | Cf. ibid., p. 20.

1. Empty Action

Figure 2: Collective Actions, from the Action Appearance, 1976

In Appearance, two organisers of the Action appear from afar (fig. 2), walk over the field and gradually approach the viewers. Their appearance across the field is not perceived by the viewers as the demonstrational element, but as the extra-demonstrational element. The viewers think that the appearance of the organisers is part of getting ready, comparable to the arrival of the performers on stage in a music concert. After the organisers have arrived, the viewers receive a piece of paper which says: “Documentary confirmation that _______was witness of Appearance, which took place on March 13, 1976.”15 (Fig. 3.) At this point it is revealed to the viewers that, while they were under the impression that they were looking at an extra-demonstrational element, they were in fact looking at the demonstrational element. This makes meaningful that which previously appeared meaningless or incidental to the Action. The crucial moment of receiving the certificate of participation makes them unsure what else was potentially already part of the demonstrational element – the walk to the field, the trip out of town and even the invitation are all now subject to reinterpretation. From the Action description we learn that the reception of the invitation to the Action was already a demonstrational element. This marks an important characterisation of the Empty action: it can take place not just during the Action, but potentially expands to weeks or months before and after the Action. In other words, the Empty action is able to configure not just the view of a specific event, but potentially a whole series of life events. From this perspective, we can say that the effect of the Empty action can bind events that are causally unrelated to the Action (the extra-demonstrational element) into a meaningful whole. 15 | Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod, [vol. 1], p. 36.

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Figure 3: Collective Actions, from the Action Appearance, 1976, certificate of attendance

1.2 D e vices In most cases the experience of the Action begins already with the reception of the invitation. The invitation is a constant device of all the Actions, as is evident from the fact that it is stated in the Action descriptions (usually in the first sentence): “The viewers were sent invitations to the Action Appearance”; “In the sent invitations it was proposed to visit Lieblich”; “The invited viewers (10 people) were picked up from the station ‘Lobyna’ [...]”; etc.16 To participate in an Action presupposes a personal invitation by the organiser(s) of an Action. The trip out of town, being picked up at the station and the walk to the place of Action are also devices that occur regularly in Action descriptions: “Having arrived at the village ‘Kievy Gorki’ with a regular bus (time of the trip 20 mins.) and having walked through the forest (10 mins.), the viewers came out on the edge of the field”.17 The invitation and the trip have the purpose of preparing the viewer for subsequent events, which ideally extends the state of anticipation for as long as possible. According to Monastyrski, no individual element should jump into the foreground of perception, such that it would appear as a demonstration 16 | Cf. Action descriptions of Third Variant, Twins, Place of Action, Reproduction, Looking at the Waterfall, Sound Perspectives of Trips out of Town, ‘M’. 17 | Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1], p. 27.

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of the ‘main part’ of the Action. Once the viewers are led through the forest to arrive at a clearing, the waiting for the start of the Action begins.18 At this point, not expecting anything specific, the viewers see an empty field. As an empty ‘stage’, the field draws even more attention to the expectation, that now something will take place: “The real field might well be brown, green, even, undulating, etc., but it is absolutely clear that for the person who has undergone anticipation and is now experiencing waiting, the field’s major characteristic is ‘emptiness’.”19 According to Monastyrski, the objective is then to introduce acts to the visual field without causing the viewers to feel that something is being ‘shown’ to them: At this point, there arises the problem of not upsetting this state through the crude injection of some object or event into the field of vision. As we have already said above, our goal is not to ‘show’ something to the viewer-participants. 20

The aesthetic category which characterises this moment is the ‘line of indistinguishability’, when it is not yet clear or distinguishable exactly what is taking place.21 In Appearance, for example, the ‘line of indistinguishability’ is represented by the appearance of the organisers on the opposite side of the field. All this takes place before the critical event, which in Appearance is the reception of the certificate of participation. Monastyrski describes this moment as a “deceiving event”, which now happens in the zone of “distinguishability”.22 What follows is the realisation that “the action was deceiving, ‘empty’ and, subsequently, the ‘experience of realised expectation’.”23 In other words, once the viewers receive the certificate, they know that the appearance of the organisers was not what they thought it was. This realisation is then, ideally, completed by the experience of having ‘received’ something, namely an experience of an artistic Action. Collective Actions hope that even though ‘nothing happened’, the viewers will still perceive their hours-long trip out of town as having been worth their while. In the Action Appearance, the certificate is a special device that confronts the viewer suddenly and thus initiates the Empty action. We can characterise this device further in a narrative sense as ‘the reveal’ at place of Action. This device is also used, for example, in the Action Stop (1983).

18 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1980], p. 22. 19 | Ibid. 20 | Ibid. 21 | Cf. ibid., p. 24. 22 | Cf. ibid. 23 | Ibid.

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Figure 4: Collective Actions, from the Action Stop, 1983, certificate of attendance

Thirty viewers were taken to the park Sokolniki in Moscow. Walking along an alley, they were led by one of the organisers.24 What they did not know is that for these twenty minutes of walking they were followed by two other organisers, who were recording their impressions on tape: “descriptions of their surroundings – skiers, trees, fire engine with firefighters, dogs, birds, etc., including their own state of health.”25 The last part of the recording consisted of them reading a theoretical reflection that deals with the structure of the Action and which they had prepared in advance. This ends with the following information: “Stop. February 6, 1983, 12:56 in the afternoon”.26 The group of viewers was then stopped, so that as they turned around they saw the two approaching organisers with the audio player: “The apparatus was still working in recording mode, until the first phrase was uttered by one of the viewers (‘Hello!’).”27 (Fig. 5.) The organisers play back the recording, and at this point it is revealed to the viewers that the Action took place while they were under the impression that they were walking towards an empty field, where, they anticipated, the Action would take place. The viewers receive a participation certificate, which is comparable to the one from Appearance: “On February 6, 1983, at 12:56 (handwritten) in the afternoon in Sokolniki park Stop took place. Thank you for your participation in its organisation.”28 (Fig. 4) However, it can be argued that the 24 | Cf. Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod, [vol. 2], pp. 127–128. 25 | Ibid. 26 | Ibid., p. 128. 27 | Ibid. 28 | Ibid.

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reveal takes place not when the viewers receive this certificate, but earlier, at the point at which they hear the recording, which introduces them to the idea that the walk towards the place of Action was not extra-demonstrational, but demonstrational. Figure 5: Collective Actions, from the Action Stop, 1983

In some Actions the reveal is suspended until the viewers return home and read the Action description several days or weeks later. In the Action Third Variant (1978), a figure in a purple gown appears from the forest and then disappears ‘off the face of the Earth’. Three minutes later, 30 metres to the left, another figure appears ‘out of nothing’, with a big red-balloon head. (Fig. 42.) The balloon head explodes and the figure disappears again. The figure who disappeared first, 30 metres to the right, reappears from the earth and then disappears into the woods. The viewers remain far away from the figures. They are not introduced to them as people whom they might recognise. Nothing is revealed or explained.29 Monastyrski writes: The participant came out of the forest, went into the field and lay in a ditch. He is invisible. Time passes. Two minutes pass, five minutes, ten. The field is empty. Where is the 29 | Cf. Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1], p. 28.

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Empty Action — Labour and Free Time in the Ar t of Collective Actions participant? Is he in the ditch or did he crawl away? Does the action continue or did it end a long time ago, at the point when the participant lay in the ditch? The viewers do not know this. 30

In the case of the Action Lieblich (1976), Monastyrski writes: A group of viewers gathered on a sunny April day at a snowy empty field. From underneath the snow a bell is ringing. Nothing else happens. The viewers leave the field. The bell continues ringing. Is the action over or not – since the bell continues ringing? The viewers do not know this. This can only be clarified later, when they read the description text of the Action with commentaries on it. Such elements of ‘non-happening’ we call ‘Empty action’. 31

The Empty action here is meant to come into effect as a result of not knowing the Action plan, i.e., not being able to identify the beginning and end of the demonstrational element, which is prolonged until the viewer reads the Action description. Certain Actions are evidently oriented towards achieving the Empty action by engaging the viewers in a continuous, extended and monotonous activity. The viewers either carry it out themselves, or they watch others doing it. In such monotonous Actions, it is designed that the organisers do not do anything to reveal the Action plan; rather the reveal comes to the viewers ‘on its own’ or spontaneously. An example of such an Action is Time of Action: Time of Action In a forest, not far from the field’s edge, a reel was hung between trees. Beforehand the Action organisers had spooled seven kilometres of white rope on it. The reel was hung in such a way that it could not be seen from the opposite side of field, where, 200 metres across the open space, the ploughed earth, the end of the rope was pulled, and where the viewers (20 persons) and two participants of the Actions were waiting (the third participant stood by the reel in the woods). From 13:30 to 15:00 (an hour and a half) the participants of the Action and some of the viewers were, in turns, continuously pulling the rope, which was unwinding from the reel. The other end of the rope had not been attached to the reel, and thus in the process of the action the whole rope was pulled out of the forest. 30 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Kol’tso KD” [1996], p. 492. This device of concealment usually was put to play on fields when operating with ditches: Comedy, Third Variant, Place of Action, Shot. 31 | Ibid.

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Moscow region, Savelovskaya railway line, near the village Kievy Gorki. October 15, 1978. A. Monastyrski, N. Alexeev, N. Panitkov, A. Abramov (photo).32 Figure 6: Collective Actions, from the Action Time of Action, 1978

Figure 7: Collective Actions, from the Action Time of Action, 1978

Having arrived at the field and having observed one organiser start to pull the rope, the viewers presumably understood the Action to have started. The ‘end’ of the Action, however, is imagined by them at the end of the rope. Visually this is also projected by the rope, which is stretched across the field into the forest (fig. 7). The idea here is to engage the viewers in a process whose end is imagined but which does not exist in reality: there is literally nothing at the end of the rope. At the moment when they realise that the pulling is ‘empty’ or 32 | Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1], p. 29.

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purposeless, and yet recognise another meaning or purposefulness to it, the Empty action comes into effect. Ivan Chuikov, who was one of the viewers of this Action, describes his experience in the following way: The first thing that comes to mind when you start reasoning about that which is happening, interpreting in the course of action, is this time, the extent of time, the pure action. But this is all just reasoning, this is not that which is working. That which is working (this happens unexpectedly) is related to imagination – you imagine the rope. But this imagination does not happen instantly. First, I was waiting in the expectation that something might appear. Someone might have come out, something might have been pulled out; I had different presuppositions. But fairly quickly it becomes evident that it is all about that, about the action, the action as such, pure action. But this, again, is a rationalisation [...] 33

Thus, the Empty action is not merely time, nor is it the pulling, nor the rope. As the end fails to materialise, Chuikov begins to realise ‘that it is all about that’, or, in other words, that this non-materialisation of the end itself is the Action plan. The experience of this realisation Chuikov describes as a revelation (otkroveniye): “In actual fact this is a miracle, because a revelation is happening. For me it was like a jump, towards the end of the action. For me this was the meaning of the work, I was given.”34 The reveal happens not because the organisers of the Action announce its end (like in Appearance, Exit, Stop and Group-3), but through time itself. It makes its own way, so to speak, into the consciousness of the viewers. To recapitulate: the viewers are engaged in an activity that they believe has a purpose, but as they realise this purpose is not materialising, and when it becomes evident that there is nothing ‘at the end of the rope’, they begin to become aware of their involvement in an Action by Collective Actions, the plan of which is to suspend the end. The Empty action would not work if the viewers were merely told that the Action will last one and a half hours and will consist of pulling the rope. This would make the pulling of the rope the ‘content’ and meaning of the Action. It would then be about the activity of pulling. This is not what is at stake in Collective Actions. They employ devices in order to induce particular expectations in the viewers. These expectations are left unfulfilled, and yet this exposes a meaningfulness within the expectation itself, and consequently beyond it, too. The tension needs to be maintained. When pulling the rope, they are not told: “pull this rope and this will be the product”. Rather they are told: “pull this rope and you will help realise the Action”. In other words, the activity is properly imagined as being part of a larger process, one which 33 | Ivan Chuikov, “Rasskaz I. Chuikova. Ob Aktsiyakh Vremya Deystviya, Kartiny” [1980], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1], p. 71. 34 | Ibid.

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goes beyond that in which they are presently engaged. In the perception of the viewers, the ‘end’ lies clearly beyond their own horizons: it extends further than they can see. Once they realise that there is no end, they are not disappointed, they do not think: “Oh well, my activity was futile/empty.” No. Ideally, they think: “My activity contributed to the realisation of the Action, the plan of which was precisely not to have an end.” It is crucial that the activity itself is at no point conflated with its imagined end. One last major instance of a manifestation of the Empty action around Actions is when the organisers leave objects behind at the place of the Action for an anonymous viewer. In the Action Tent (1976), the organisers arrived at the place of the Action and put up a tent made out of paintings that were sewn together. They then leave it behind. For the Action Banner-1977 (1977), they put up a banner in a forest and leave it there. All the participants know what the demonstrational element is, namely the installation of the tent and the hanging of the banner. It seems that there is no way for the Empty action to come into effect. But here it is about the uncertainty of what will happen once the Action is over, once the organisers have left the place of the Action: “All the banners were intended for an anonymous viewer. […] Their existence in this anonymous zone of the viewer was an ‘Empty action’, (for us) an extra-demonstrational eventfulness with an unknown end.”35 What this means is that once the demonstrational element is concluded, the extra-demonstrational element begins to ‘work’: will someone see it, and, if so, what would they think about this? Collective Actions’ members do not know this. Collective Actions frequently leave behind the objects they employ during the Action, including in those Actions made for specific viewers. Numerous Actions have this residual element in which something is left behind: “the ‘residual’ anonymity [exists] when the object continues ‘working’ even after the invited viewers have left the place of action [...]”36 In 2009, Monastyrski goes even so far as to claim that the “luckiest attendance of an Action is either when one incidentally finds oneself next to an Action object that was left behind, or when one is told where to go right after the Action has finished”.37 There is currently a list of 74 objects that were left behind after an Action.38 35 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Lozung-2003 (Chetyrnadtsataya Kniga). Kommentariy k Aktsii s Chasami” [2003?], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 6–11 [vol. 8] (BMK, Moscow, 2009), p. 274. 36 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1989], p. 674. 37 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [2009], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 6–11 [vol. 10], p. 390. 38 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predmety Ostavlennyye na Meste Deystviya v Aktsiyakh KD”, in conceptualism.letov.ru. URL: http://conceptualism.letov.ru/KD-objects.html (accessed 29.03.2016).

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The different devices that were thematised here – ‘the reveal at the place of the Action’, ‘the suspension of the reveal’, ‘the engagement in a monotonous activity’ and ‘the leaving behind of objects’ – presuppose different relations between the viewers (zriteli) and the organisers (ustroiteli). In the first two instances there is a clear separation between the viewers and the organisers.39 The reveal requires the organisers to maintain an illusion and to conceal from the viewers the Action plan until a specific point that the organisers determine in advance. The device of monotonous action ideally requires the viewers to become participants, and the organisers engage with the viewers almost on the same level. For example, in Jupiter. 4.33 (1985), two people, Sergey Letov and Sabine Hänsgen, were asked to contribute to the production of the demonstrational element by improvising on their musical instruments for four hours and 33 minutes.40 In the instance of leaving behind objects, everyone who is present is an organiser. No viewers are invited, because the Action is made for unknown viewers. Here the organisers reverse the usual situation, in the sense that in this case they are the ones who do not know what is going to happen. It can be argued that these Actions are specifically made for the organisers, enabling them to experience an Empty action themselves.

39 | The organisers are sometimes referred to in this context as the ‘participants’ (uchastniki) (Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1980]; cf. also description texts of all the Actions from the first volume of Trips out of Town, except Tent, Banner, Balloon, Torch, For Kiesewalter). However, this is misleading, because a viewer can also be a participant, but this would not make him or her an organiser. Effectively, we need to distinguish between four different forms of involvement in the Action: viewers, viewer-participants, organisers and organiser-participants. The viewers are those who stand around, who do not know the Action plan and who are not engaged themselves in an instructed activity. The viewer-participant is someone who does not know the Action plan but is engaged in an instructed activity during the Action. He or she is then not just a viewer, but actively participates in the process. The organisers are those who know the Action plan and make sure that it is realised. The term ‘organiser-participants’ means that the organisers actively take part in constructing the demonstrational element with their own movements or acts. In some ways, the organisers always do this in any case, and therefore the term ‘organisers’ presupposes participation. 40 | This Action is a reference to John Cage’s 4.33. The relation to Cage is thematised in chapter 2.

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1.3 E xperience Because the discussion of devices and their employment has been extensive here, and also in Trips out of Town, the danger is that we overlook the main issue, namely the experience of the Empty action. Even Monastyrski has to occasionally remind himself: The devices and structures constitute merely an ‘object-frame’ (ob’’yekt rama), whereas in the centre of the Action is emptiness.41 However, without this object-frame the Empty action cannot come into effect. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that the employment of a device will produce the experience of an Empty action. The best way to think about this non-causal relation of the devices to the Empty action is perhaps the image of ‘viewing platforms’ that is suggested by Monastyrski: “What is at stake in our Actions is the expositional field, whereas the demonstrational field (the actual artistic event) is conceived as a system of observation positions, ‘viewing platforms’, from where the contemplation of expositional spaces takes place.”42 The paradox of the relation between the devices and the Empty action is that any production, including action, always results in something, and yet the Empty action is an experience of an empty production. Production constitutes for Collective Actions the demonstrational element, which is, as such, full and not empty, as can be seen for example in ‘pulling the rope’. For an Empty action to occur, something that is detached from the act or production must appear. The experience is detached or liberated from that which is lacking. In other words, the Empty action is not the realisation that an act is futile or fruitless, that no bucket of potatoes was pulled out, but that its purpose was to have an empty end. Even if something at first appears as ‘empty’, it is immediately thereafter filled with stuff, such as the devices, the snow, trees, people, etc. In and of itself the Empty action is not this substitution of emptiness with fullness. The task of the Action is to produce an emptiness which is not filled by anything during its moment of occurrence. The Empty action is also not a moment of experiencing emptiness as the lack or absence of something, but as lack or absence as such. This experience relieves tension and gives the viewers a sense of comfortable emptiness. It gives meaning to something that is meaningless in itself. Irina Pivovarova’s account of Time of Action draws this out: The time is passing so freely, it flows freely, is spent, as it were, on nothing. At the same time, it was pleasant to realise precisely this. To suddenly realise that [...] why not, per41 | Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1985], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 3], pp. 220–221; idem., “Ob Aktsii Peresecheniye-2” [2008], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 6–11 [vol. 10], p. 431. 42 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Kol’tso KD” [1996], p. 493.

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Empty Action — Labour and Free Time in the Ar t of Collective Actions haps that economy which we are engaged in is empty, and perhaps this long action is in fact a very full time. In any case, all this did not produce the feeling of emptiness, but a feeling of richness, completeness. 43

This characterisation of the experience as rich and complete as opposed to empty is significant. It draws attention to the error that one can make if one assumes that ‘empty’ action is a description of an activity or action which is meaningless. As Pivovarova vividly expresses, the experience at stake is not the lack of meaning, but a certain richness and completeness. It is, in some ways, misleading to use the terms ‘empty’ or ‘full’ to characterise the Empty action. Pivovarova’s experience was comfortable not because she identified with the act itself, but because she identified with the Action of Collective Actions. Pivovarova, like Chuikov, thematises a moment of revelation. She shows how the point of the Action is not to function like “that economy in which we are engaged”, which, despite its purposefulness and productivity, at points appears meaningless. The Empty action, by contrast, somehow projects a meaning, even if an unproductive one. Even though Pivovarova was expecting something to be pulled out (perhaps some potatoes, as she speculates at the beginning of her text), and yet nothing materialised, she still experienced it as meaningful. It can of course be argued that this meaning emerged partly in her own consciousness; but it was also prepared by Collective Actions by setting up a situation which appears to have a purpose, but which suspends this purpose in the process of its unfolding. This engages the viewer in an activity to which he or she cannot help but give a meaning, even though there is no intrinsic meaning. This moment of realisation that the meaning is that there is no meaning is the (comfortable) experience of Empty action.

1.4 F ailed E mp t y A ction There is no causal relation between the devices and structures of the Actions and the Empty action. However, there are some errors to be made, which would make the Empty action impossible. The first Action which is explicitly identified as having failed as an Empty action is Russian World (1985).44 The viewers were picked up by Sergei Romashko and guided to a field where a purple sheet with an audio recorder on top of it was spread out on the snow. From here the viewers could see the profile of a flat three meters high white 43 | Irina Pivovarova, “Rasskaz I. Pivovarovoy. Ob Aktsiyakh Liblikh, Fonar’, Vremya Deystviya” [1980], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 1], p. 76. 44 | Cf. Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 3], pp. 265–267.

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plywood hare (which for them looked like a big stick). They could also see the immobile figure of Monastyrski in the distance and hear the sound of a recording that had been produced two hours before the Action and which consisted of the sound of the hare being installed. Romashko left the group and moved towards the hare. What was almost invisible to the viewers was that Monastyrski was winding a thread up and down onto an object which he calls the ‘Soft Handle’. Romashko arrived at the hare and started first softly and then more and more powerfully to kick it until it fell over, before dragging it away into the forest. Then Monastyrski started to make his way to the viewers, which took seven to eight minutes, since the snow was very deep. He put the Soft Handle onto the purple sheet with nine white painted and gold-leaf decorated objects, which he distributed to the viewers. The viewers were then asked to come along in the direction back home. Coming out in a clearing, they saw the huge hare and were photographed beside it with their objects (fig. 8). Subsequently they were asked to put their objects on top of the hare, and then Monastyrski and Romashko set the hare and the objects on fire. Figure 8: Collective Actions, from the Action Russian World, 1985

In his text “Tsi-Tsi” from later in the year 1985, Monastyrski writes the following sobering conclusion: [T]he viewers gathered in front of the sheet with the audio recorder and at the centre of their expectations was my immobile figure – I was standing 70 metres away, facing them. I was oscillating there, not like a standing person prepared for the action, but as an already sufficient – in the aesthetic sense – object of consideration – a ‘person in the

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The failure here consists, it seems, in the employment of established devices. So, if previously ‘person in the distance’ or ‘walking across the field’ could have constituted an extra-demonstrational element, such as in Appearance, now these elements have themselves turned into demonstrational elements. And the Empty action itself, as Monastyrski says, has turned into a metaphorisation. This is slightly exaggerated. He most likely means that those devices which were previously employed to trigger an Empty action, to introduce the extra-demonstrational element, were now perceived as devices per se, without actually introducing the Empty action. It can be argued that the Empty action fails here because Collective Actions repeat too many devices, and that the whole Action consists of ‘rules of compositional relations’, as Monastyrski says above. It fails their most important principle, of ‘not showing anything’.

1.5 F actogr aphical D iscourse In the foreword to the second volume of Trips out of Town (1983) the definition of the Empty action from the first volume of Trips out of Town (1980) was revised. It now stated that the Empty action can also manifest itself by means of documentary material. The following formulation was adapted in 2008: “The introduction of an extra-demonstrational element into the demonstrational structure at various stages of action, as well as its [existence within the event text, including its authored interpretational layers], we will from now on call

45 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Tsi-Tsi. Zametki ob Atsiyakh Tret’yego Toma” [1985], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 3], pp. 418–419.

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‘Empty action’.”46 This revised definition suggests that the Empty action can take place not only on a field out of town, and not only during an Action, as considered above, but also within the so-called ‘event text’. With ‘event text’ Monastyrski means the Action plan itself, which subsequently becomes the Action description, and anything that refers to or that interprets the event text can become the space of the Empty action. More specifically, the discovery of an extra-demonstrational element within the event text can be referred to as the Empty action. The work with this event text is referred to by Collective Actions as ‘the factographical discourse’. In the secondary literature on Collective Actions there seems to be a disagreement or ambiguity about the factographical discourse. Yelena Kalinsky’s essay “Drowning in Documents” (2014) points out how Collective Actions’ increasing interest in the documentation of their own Actions undermined their initially pure Actions in the fields, and consequently revealed some “deep fault lines hidden below the surface of Moscow conceptualism at the cusp of the 1980s”.47 Implicitly opposing Kalinsky’s end-of-time image of Collective Actions’ ‘factographical discourse’, Julia Scharf’s Das Archiv ist die Kunst (2008) emphasises its productivity and centrality. Her argument is that it is the work with archival material, the documentation, that is productive of Collective Actions’ artistic practice.48 Kalinsky suggests that the work with documents has suffocated the initially open and liberating practice of Collective Actions, whereas Scharf argues that it has propelled it. These fundamentally opposed positions can be explained by the immanence of this contradiction to Trips out of Town – an immanence which the just-mentioned authors do not explicitly 46 | “Введение внедемонстрационного элемента в демонстрационную структуру и его протекание во времени демонстрации мы будем в дальнейшем называть ‘пустым действием’ […и его наличие в тексте события, включая его авторские интерпретационные слои. – АМ, 2008].” (Cf. Monastyrski, “Predisloviye k Sborniku Opistel’nykh Tekstov” [1980], revision from 2008 in square brackets, in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 1, p. 169.) Cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1983], p. 20. 47 | Yelena Kalinsky, “Drowning in Documents. Action, Documentation and Factography in Early Work by the Collective Actions Group”, in ArtMargins, vol. 2, no. 1 (2013), p. 105. 48 | Scharf is interested in the ‘performative’ or processual character of archival practices. According to Scharf, the production and the use of the archive is “the content and goal of all the artistic activity” of Collective Actions (Julia Scharf, Das Archiv ist die Kunst. Verfahren der textuellen Selbstreproduktion im Moskauer Konzeptualismus, Forschungsstelle Osteuropa Bremen, no. 78, 2006, p. 8). Scharf does not address the Empty action in any detail and understands the Actions as having their purpose in textual expression (cf. pp. 23–24).

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address. What has also remained unaddressed in the secondary literature is the relation of the ‘factographical discourse’ to the Empty action. And yet, this is the most central issue in understanding Collective Actions’ relation to their own documentary material.

Factography An important term to clarify before we turn to the complexities of the ‘factographical discourse’ is ‘factography’. The very prominent use of this term in Trips out of Town is not intended as a reference to the theories and discussions around factography in the Russian Avant-Garde, most famously in the work of Sergey Tretyakov and the journal Novy LEF, despite its potentially revealing relation.49 In Trips out of Town ‘factography’ initially means ‘the writing of facts’ (Latin: factum – fact; Greek: graphé – script/writing). The main Russian dictionary (edited by Ozhegov) offers the following entry, which is very close to Collective Actions’ primary use of the term: “Factography: Description of facts without analysis, generalisation and illumination.”50 However, the description at stake here is not representational but indexical. When Collective Actions say ‘factographical text’ they unambiguously mean the written names of the organisers, place and time of Action – data which is attached to the Action descriptions.51 Factography is in this sense some unambiguous information, some facts, which do not represent the event, but which connect it to some evidently external and objective circumstances. In other words, that which is described without analysis is not the Action event, but e.g. the attendance. Apart from the names of the organisers, title, place and date, factography also constitutes schemes of the Action plan, or maps on which the places of Actions are indicated. For Collective Actions then, factography is any kind of information which constitutes the factual background of the Actions, such as, for example, the weather. Factography is thus not a realist or fictional description of the Action, but the data that surrounds and attaches to the Action. Once factography is presented in the form of a certificate to mark the end of the Action, as, for example, happened at the Action Appearance, it becomes a device (fig. 3). And yet, somewhat misleadingly, Collective Actions refer to such devices as ‘factography’ as well. One further source of confusion is that, from the Appearance certificate on, anything that is given to the viewers, be it during 49 | This requires a separate study. Cf. Benjamin Buchloh, “From Factura to Factography”, in October, vol. 30 (1984), pp. 82–119. Special Issue on Soviet Factography”, October, vol. 118 (2006), ed. Devin Fore. Cf. also Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious. Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia (MIT, Cambridge/MA, 2009). 50 | S.I. Ozhegov. Slovar’ Russkogo Yazyka, ed. N.Yu. Shvedova (Russkiy Yazyk, Moscow, 1983), p. 754. 51 | Cf. Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 2], p. 123.

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the Action or after, is referred to as factography. As the Action Ten Appearances (1981) shows, photography can also become an Action device, and thus a factography. In Trips out of Town it is suggested that it is this Action that prompted the revision of the definition of the Empty action. To explain this, we will consider the Action Ten Appearances: Ten Appearances Together with the Action organisers, ten participants, who neither knew the title nor the Action, nor what would happen, gathered in the middle of a vast snowy field surrounded by woods. Onto a board (60 x 90 cm) which was placed on the snow, ten reels of sturdy white thread were attached using vertically battered nails, each reel 200 to 300 meters long. Each participant was guided to pick up the thread and walk towards the surrounding forest, thus unreeling it. This movement was to begin simultaneously at the organisers’ command. The participants were instructed to walk in a straight line to the woods and then to proceed into the woods following the same direction for ca. 50– 100 metres, until losing sight of the field. Thus, each participant’s path length measured up to 300–400 metres; the movement across the field and into the forest demanded much physical effort, as the depth of the snow measured up to 50–100 cm. Having completed their march route, they had (as instructed) to pull out the other end of the thread (it was not attached to the reel), to which a paper with factographical text (organisers’ names, place and time of Action) was attached. As there were no further instructions, after having pulled out the factography, the participant was to decide what to do next, i.e. either to return to the field’s centre, where the organisers had remained, or to leave the place of Action, walking farther into the forest. Eight participants returned to the centre of the field within an hour (I. Pivovarova, N. Kozlov, V. Skersis, L. Talochkin, O. Vasilyev, I. Kabakov, I. Chuikov, Y. Albert); seven of them returned on their own paths, and one (N. Kozlov) on the neighbouring path. Two participants – V. Nekrasov and A. Zhigalov – did not return. Those participants who had come back were given photographs (30 x 40 cm) glued onto cardboard. Each photo depicted that area of the forest which each participant entered at the beginning of the Action, and a small indistinguishable human figure appearing from the woods. The photographs were labelled, and these labels detailed the names of the Action authors, its title – Ten Appearances – and the event depicted on the photograph, for example: ‘Appearance of I. Chuikov on February 1, 1981’, i.e. each photograph indicated the ‘appearance’ of the participant to whom it was given. These photographs were produced one week prior to the Action: The Action organisers

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recorded themselves at the ‘line of indistinguishability’, moving towards the same destination to which the participants were later directed, and from which the organisers subsequently appeared. Moscow region, Savyolovskaya railway line, ‘Kievy Gorki’. February 1, 1981. A. Monastyrski, G. Kiesewalter, S. Romashko, N. Alexeev, I. Makarevich, E. Elagina.52 Figure 9: Collective Actions, from the Action Ten Appearances, 1981

Having already, while they were still in the forest, pulled out what Monastyrski calls here factography, namely, the confirmation of their participation in the Action Ten Appearances, the viewer-participants think that the Action is over, and eight of them return to the initial position in the centre of the field. There, unexpectedly, they receive photographs which, as the labels suggest, seem to depict them (fig. 10). In this crucial moment, according to Monastyrski, the participants “located themselves outside the demonstrational field of the Action, that is, accomplishing the ‘Empty action’.”53 Not understanding how it was possible for the organisers to develop these photos so quickly, the participants leaped into the extra-demonstrational element of the Action – into the ‘space of the photos’ that were made long before February 1, 1981. One constitutive part of their experience was something outside of the Action, an external, that is, 52 | Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod [vol. 2], pp. 123–124. 53 | Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye” [1983], p. 118.

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historical event. From this perspective, the experience of the reception of these photographs can be considered as the ‘introduction of the extra-demonstrational element’ into the demonstrational element. This activation of external, ‘documentary’, material is referred to as the beginning of the ‘factographical discourse’.54 Figure 10: Collective Actions, from the Action Ten Appearances, 1981, factography

The Factographical Space To elaborate the significance of the factographical disource for the Empty action, let us consider Monastyrski’s individual work Kol’tso KD (The Ring of CA) (1996).55 It consists of 63 sheets of paper. On the first sheet there is a large number 54 | Cf. ibid., pp. 117–118; cf. Andrei Monastyrski, “Predisloviye k Tomam 7–9 Poyezdok za Gorod. Skafandry Faktografii” [2007], in Kollektivnyye Deystviya, Poyezdki za Gorod 6–11, pp. 5–10. Translated by Yelena Kalinsky into English as “Dive Suits of Factography”. URL: http://conceptualism.letov.ru/ANDREI-MONASTYRSKI-DIVE-SUITS-OF-FACTOGRAPHY.htm 55 | This work was exhibited at the following shows: “L’autre Moitié de l’Europe”, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2000; “Kunst im Untergrund”, Albertina, Vienna, 2000; “Horizons of Reality”, Venice Biennale 2003, M HKA Antwerpen, 2003.

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‘1’ in the middle with the algebraic sign ‘less than’ (