Transport. An Aesthetic Plate
Andrei Monastyrsky
Open storage
- Category
- MediumWood, paper, cardboard, printing, metal, rope, typescript, black-and-white photograph
- Dimensions32 × 27.5 × 4 cm
- Сollection
- Inventory numberМСИГ_ОФ_11
- Acquired from
- Year of acquisition2024
Keywords
About the work
Andrei Monastyrsky is a leading ideologue of Moscow Conceptualism, a legend of contemporary art, and one of the founders of the group Collective Actions, which has been producing spatial and temporal actions since 1976. Over the years the group has included Nikita Alexeev, George Kiesewalter, Nikolai Panitkov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Sergei Romashko, and Sabina Haensgen. Most of the actions were documented and published in 15 volumes as Trips Out of Town .
The assemblage Transport. An Aesthetic Plate is related to the so‑called object zone of the demonstrative field of actions, which took place between 1983 and 1985 and were part of the third volume of Trips Out of Town . In the preface, Monastyrsky stressed the aesthetic independence of the objects: they can be exhibited without the accompanying texts and photographs.
Initially Transport was created for the action Discussion , which took place in Monastrysky’s apartment on September 28, 1985. The first stage of the action involved listening to a 55-minute recording of Monastyrsky’s text “TsZI‑TsZI,” and the the second was a discussion accompanied by slide films from the series Fragments. Closed City . The discussion was made more difficult by the fact that every comment by participants was repeated into a microphone by Monastyrsky.
The visuals comprised an exhibition of Category CA objects (the group’s term), which included nine absurdist objects, some of which had already been used in other actions. Transport. An Aesthetic Plate comprised “wooden frames, covers of the magazine Guten Tag with metallic wings and stars, and metal sheets combined and laid on top of each other in a specific manner.”
According to Joseph Backstein, “these objects are typically completely and utterly incomprehensible to those not in the know. They are not objects, but some kind of embodiment of the absurd.” Later Monastyrsky would state that the creation of the objects was an unconscious act which took on meaning for him during the making of the action. In essence, this action was an attempt to be liberated “from a mentalized aesthetic program,” from “the ideological social space of accepted reality” or, in simpler terms, we might say that it, like most of CA’s actions, involved a search for internal freedom in a situation of total lack of liberty.
