The tour explores two strategies: the vsechestvo («everythingness») of the New Artists and the neoacademism of the New Academy of Fine Art, which reflected the spirit of the 1980s and 1990s, with its interest in the ideas of the avantgarde art of the 1910s and 1920s.
The conversation will focus on Timur Novikov and the community of young artists and universal creators that gathered around him and worked in a variety of art forms: painting, theater, music, art criticism, video art, and fashion.
The art of the New Artists was characterized by total improvisation and performative reworking of everyday life, a leaning toward expressionism, the use of unconventional materials, and an interest in youth subculture aesthetics and stilyagi culture. Some of the key episodes in the history of the group, which was active from 1982 to 1986, include the creation of «zero culture» and Timur Novikov and Ivan Sotnikov’s work Zero Object, Igor Goroshevsky’s performances, the activities of Assa Gallery and the NCh/VCh squat, live performances by New Composers and Pop-Mekhanika, Necrorealist films, and animated music videos by Engineers of Art. The tour will also cover the self-institutionalization of the community in the second half of the 1980s: the establishment of the New Academy of Vsechestvo Art at the palace of the Central Lecture Hall of the Znanie Society and the official registration of the Club of Friends of V. V. Mayakovsky and the creative association Nauchnaya Fantastika («Science Fiction»).
The establishment of the New Academy was part of the retrofuturist revolution, which involved a declaration of the return to «beauty, ” to the practices of life drawing and the transfer of knowledge from teacher to pupils, an interest in antiquity, dandyism, and a theatrical reworking of everyday life. The discussion will focus on several projects by the New Academy and the artists of Timur Novikov’s circle: the studios (1994–2010) and the Museum at Pushkinskaya 10 (1995–2010), exhibitions at Dvortsovy Bridge (1990–1992) and the festival The Triumph of Neoacademism (1997), Pirate Television (1989–1992), the works of Konstantin Goncharov’s studio A Strict Young Man (1988–1996), and the making of the short films Woe from Wit (1994) and Manifesto of Neoacademism (1997) by Olga Tobreluts.