Treasures of Nonconformism. Texts for the exhibition Sekretiki: Digging Up Soviet Underground Culture 1966–1985

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<p class="p1">Some types of <i>sekretiki </i>are hidden in plain sight. At first glance it seems that there are none of the distinctive characteristics pertaining to art in Yuri Albert&rsquo;s helping people with household chores. The age of pragmatism has created a demand for art that is closer to the people by being accessible, socially engaged, and preferably for free. Albert&rsquo;s conceptual work meets these expectations. It provides a technology of self that enables the transformation of the realm of everyday life into an artwork.</p>
<p class="p1">This approach is similar to one of the four spiritual paths in Hinduism, the yoga of action. Right work done well as a form of prayer is not a foreign concept to the Moscow conceptualists, and is best expressed in this poem by Dmitri Prigov:</p>
<p class="p1">I struggle with domestic entropy<br />As the source of divine energy<br />I conquer imperceptible blind forces<br />In an untriumphant struggle</p>
<p class="p1">I wash dishes three times a day<br />I wash and polish the floor all over<br />I erect the meaning and structure of the world<br />On a spot that would seem to be empty</p>
<p class="p1">Another <i>sekretik </i>concealed in Albert&rsquo;s work is the invisible woman. How would the meaning of the artwork change if the author of <i>Helping with the Housework </i>was female? This is the right moment to ask who usually did the cleaning after apartment-based art events. Who made sandwiches for the participants of Collective Actions&rsquo; <i>Trips Out of Town</i>? &ldquo;In our work we are focused on the realm of the psychological, and therefore we have to pay particular attention to that which occurs at the edges of the action&rsquo;s demonstrational field,&rdquo; acknowledges Andrey Monastyrsky, one of the leaders of the Moscow conceptualist movement. The mother of action artist Sven Gundlakh was not impressed by <i>Helping with the Housework</i>. After Albert&rsquo;s cleaning services her apartment, the &ldquo;action&rsquo;s demonstrational field,&rdquo; looked much dirtier than before.</p>

Sekretiki No. 9. Yuri Albert's Helping with the Housework

<p class="p1">By 1964, the artist Oskar Rabin had saved enough money to move to a cooperative apartment in Chertanovo and move his family from the legendary barrack in Lianozovo that had been an important public platform for the underground art of the Thaw era.</p>
<p class="p1">Together with his wife, Valentina Kropivnitskaya, and their children, Rabin moved to the concrete jungle, immediately raising the need for a natural &ldquo;retreat.&rdquo; Through Vladimir Nemukhin, an artist closely linked to the Lianozovo group, they found one on the Oka River. It was a dacha in the village of Priluki, where likeminded artists such as Dmitri Plavinsky, Lydia Masterkova, Nikolai Vechtomov, and Boris Sveshnikov also rented homes. Nemukhin called Priluki, where everyone spent the summer, &ldquo;the Barbizon of unofficial art.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="p1">Ten years later, Andrei Sakharov was commissioned by the New York magazine <i>Saturday Review </i>to write a futurological forecast. Entitled &ldquo;Tomorrow: The View from Red Square&rdquo; (published in Russian in 1988), it envisaged the emergence of the Internet (or UIS, the Universal Information System) and the splitting of the planet into two territories. &ldquo;The PT [Preserve Territory], larger in area, will be set aside for maintaining the Earth&rsquo;s ecological balance, for leisure activities, and for man to actively re-establish his own natural balance.&rdquo; In other words, it will be a huge &ldquo;retreat,&rdquo; while the &ldquo;Working Territory&rdquo; will be marked by high population density and urbanization.</p>
<p class="p1 text__muted text__small"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed__F7A3898665354.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1067" /><br />Valentina Kropivnitskaya<br /><i>Log.&nbsp;</i>1977<br />Private collection</p>
<p class="p1">Valentina Kropivnitskaya&rsquo;s drawings look like a report from the utopian thickets of the Preserve Territory. There are two different versions regarding the kind of creatures which inhabit it. Since Sakharov warned humanity about the nuclear threat, might these mutants have been brought to life by the collision of the two superpowers of the bipolar world? Alternatively,</p>
<p class="p1">they might be humans desperately wishing never to return to the &ldquo;Working Territory.&rdquo; With masks on their faces, they pretend to be something between human and animal. With an animal head one can stay in the &ldquo;retreat&rdquo; forever.</p>
<p class="p1">Sakharov spent his $500 fee for the article in a Beriozka store, where Soviet citizens could buy quality imported goods, albeit by a complicated route. Like yoga, abstract art, and the majority of religious affiliations, in the Soviet Union the Beriozka was a <i>sekretik </i>of a sort. The press occasionally wrote about these stores and the system of stripes on Vneshposyltorg checks with which Soviet citizens working or receiving payments from abroad were paid (no stripes was the best option, a blue stripe prohibited access to most products). You couldn&rsquo;t just walk into the store from the street. Plainclothes police officers at the entrance made sure potential shoppers had currency or checks. As a result, Sakharov&mdash;a technocrat and traitor to the motherland according to the Soviet press&mdash;was now on the same consumer level as loyal specialists allowed to travel abroad. But instead of spending the money on himself, Sakharov bought food to send to political prisoners in the Mordovan camps (political repression, rather than prosecution for real crimes, was another grim <i>sekretik </i>of the Brezhnev era).</p>

Sekretiki No. 28. The Question of a Nature Retreat

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<p class="p1"><i>Sekretiki </i>was a popular Soviet childhood game. It was all about strategy, but charged with daydreaming, aesthetic pleasure, and self-learned balance between creatively shaped solitude and mindfully practiced social engagement. First you find a secret place in a forest or a backyard, where you can spend time concealed from the view of others. You dig a hole the size of a fist and store your treasure (an odd pebble, a selection of colorful candy wrappers, a feather, a very personal drawing, a flower). You arrange them in a representative and aesthetically pleasing display, put a piece of glass on top, and camouflage the hole by covering it with moss or soil. Then you choose who you trust to share this secret: your fantasies and tastes, your valuables and values.</p>
<p class="p1">The archetypical components of collecting, arranging, hiding, and confiding in the structure of the game are similar to the creative methods employed in Soviet period nonconformist art. Made within the constraints of surveillance and an ideologically controlled social environment, many of these works of art (or the means of their display and distribution) explore the complex relationship between private and public. The human inclination toward secrecy as ritualized forms of keeping a secret or revealing it to selected confidants was turned into an aesthetic game. Its rules often included absurdity, double meanings, cryptographic language, and hide-and-seek tactics.</p>
<p class="p1">Some works invited participation, while others were constructed as time capsules with self-destruction encoded in their format to protect against intrusion. One can open the sealed sepulcher of Dmitri Prigov&rsquo;s rejected poems, but there is no guarantee that the literary find will compensate for the ruined artwork. It is not polite to peep through a keyhole, but who said that art is about politeness or that our aesthetic inclinations are not driven by curiosity regarding the intimate.</p>

Sekretiki No. 5. Small Coffins of Rejected Verses by Dmitry Prigov

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<p class="p1">Alla Pugacheva, a young and upcoming singer, was recording in the home-studio at composer Alexander Zatsepin&rsquo;s apartment. He had written several songs with her in mind as vocalist. The singer was struggling with a cold that day, but her voice seemed to be okay so they started work on the jazziest of the pieces, &ldquo;The Shaman&rsquo;s Drum.&rdquo; As she hit the high notes at the end of the second verse, Pugacheva&rsquo;s vocal cords suddenly gave in. It took months to recover her voice, and even longer to get it back in shape. This was achieved with the help of &ldquo;breathing gymnastics,&rdquo; a wellbeing system invented by the self-made healer Alexandra Strelnikova. &ldquo;The Shaman&rsquo;s Drum&rdquo; was never recorded again, and the singer&rsquo;s voice had lost the option of falsetto forever.</p>
<p class="p1">In the same year, Vera Dyakonova, a prominent researcher at the Leningrad branch of the Ethnographic Institute of the Academy of Sciences, published her Candidate of Sciences thesis &ldquo;The Burial Rites of Tuvans as a Historical and Ethnographic Source.&rdquo; Since 1957, she had been a regular participant in scientific expeditions to the Tuva region in southern Siberia. Many of the topics she was interested in, particularly those regarding shamanic practices, were a well-kept secret to avoid animosity from local government and Communist Party officials. In order to avoid detection, some shamans had even given up using the drum. This was a complex innovation, since the drum is believed to be the horse on which the shaman rides to the world of spirits.</p>
<p class="p1">The photo-documentation of Dyakonova&rsquo;s field studies includes portraits of Tuvan children. They pose on the doorsteps of their homes and show the researcher the secret burial place of a sacred horse. Through the eyes of the ethnographer, they themselves seem to be an embodiment of a secret, since the unique gift of being a shaman was perceived to be an issue of involuntary inheritance. The &ldquo;closing&rdquo; of such a gift was a sought-after favour, with practicing shamans often being approached by parents to do this for the sake of their child&rsquo;s social inclusion and future career prospects.</p>

Sekretiki No. 8. Alla Pugacheva and Tuvan shamans

<p class="p1 text__muted text__small"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_faces_stones-(1)-45452.jpg" alt="" width="1600" height="1321" /><br />Nikita Alexeev<br /><i>Stones on My Head </i>1982/2019<br />Photo: George Kiesewalter<br />Courtesy of the artist</p>
<p class="p1">Rock stacking has carried spiritual meaning across cultures for centuries. The concept of Buddhist stupas, originally built as piles of stones to house relics of a holy person or objects associated with their life, was later extended into a form of votive offering. The act of balancing stones requires patience and mental focus, thereby demonstrating the builder&rsquo;s commitment to achieving an undistracted, peaceful mind.</p>
<p class="p1">In Sanskrit stūpa also means &ldquo;top-knot&rdquo; and designates the upper part of the head. This double meaning is a good fit with the artist, who poses in front of the camera with stones on his head. Nikita Alexeev admits to having spent a period of his life engaged in &ldquo;godsearching.&rdquo; He devoted several years to reading samizdat translations of Buddhist sacred texts and visiting &ldquo;Inostranka,&rdquo; the State Library of Foreign Literature, to work on his own translations of texts on Huineng, a central figure in the early history of Chan Buddhism. &ldquo;I adhered to Buddhism. And like a mosquito in amber I am wallowing there, preposterously.&rdquo; How does the world look when seen through the color-filtered lens of amber? What changes in the world as a result of crowning oneself with a stone from a Crimean beach?</p>

Sekretiki No. 4. Stones on Nikita Alexeev’s head

<p class="p1">Viktor Skersis, Vadim Zakharov, and Fedya the dog&rsquo;s attempt to impose order on the urination habits of Moscow&rsquo;s canine population was an olfactory mapping of an invisible urban habitat. In accordance with the position of the five stars in the constellation Canis Major, they placed signaling installations&mdash; small rugs that Fedya had urinated on&mdash;at five points in Moscow. Apart from dogs walking in the areas around Kropotkinskaya and Kolkhoznaya (now Sukharevskaya) metro stations, the Hotel Leningradskaya, the Udarnik cinema, and Kievsky railroad station, almost no one noticed them. Was Fedya the dog an underground activist?</p>
<p class="p1">The term &ldquo;underground&rdquo; incorporates a sense of binarity&mdash;on the ground versus under the ground&mdash;that seldom exists in real life. It is rarely used for unofficial art practices in the Soviet Union, one reason being that the artists preferred not to be defined as merely in opposition to the ideological system. There were plenty of other systems to choose from and most of the time they existed without even being aware of the Soviet order of things. The planetary system, for example, or subterranean fauna. Neither of these two was opposed by Fedya the dog, whose habitat remained fixed somewhere between the stars and the land of worms. And one does not necessarily have to take into consideration the system of the Soviets when creating an artwork for dogs.</p>

Sekretiki No. 12. The habits of Moscow’s dogs

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<p class="p1">At the time it was considered a brave decision to use sociological observation in filming a documentary about the life of young people. With secret cameras stalking them in the streets, analyzing their ecstatic behavior on the dancefloor, and deciphering their fashion statements, the film claimed to be helpful guidance for parents and educators. The crew collaborated with the police in order to get subjects of interest to talk, and often used interrogations instead of interviews.</p>
<p class="p1">After <em><a href="https://youtu.be/Gk2zlQC8DMI">Faces</a></em><i>&nbsp;</i>was &ldquo;put on the shelf &rdquo; by the censors, it figured in the kitchen-table conversations of young filmmakers as a radical portrait of their generation, but was seldom criticized for the ways in which this was achieved. An element of voyeurism is present in any archive-based exhibition of recent history, and there is always a feeling that more could be revealed, if only one were in a position to demand the whole truth.</p>
<p class="p1 text__muted text__small"><i>Faces (excerpts) <br /></i>Director: Imants Brils<br />1971<br />2&rsquo; 4&rdquo;<br />1&rsquo; 50&rdquo;<br />2&rsquo; 15&rdquo;<br />National Archives of Latvia, Riga</p>

Sekretiki No. 19. Hidden cameras on the dancefloor

<p class="p1">&ldquo;I was always a weird boy,&rdquo; recalled Armen Bugayan in a conversation with curator Maria Perchikhina. Born in 1940, the artist began making art at an early age to ease the &ldquo;boring and hard&rdquo; life of the postwar years. While in the army, where Bugayan served from the age of 20, he created (now lost) paintings, the titles of which (<i>Suprematism</i>, <i>Homosexuality</i>) demonstrate an unusual awareness for people of his generation of both the history of art and issues of sexuality.</p>
<p class="p1">After military service, Bugayan found himself in the Yuzhinsky Lane apartment, with the prose of Yuri Mamleev and the mysticism of Evgeny Golovin. &ldquo;Armen Katakombych,&rdquo; as his friends called him, married the star of Yuzhinsky Lane, Lorik Pyatnitskaya, and started working as a foundryman at a factory to support his family and the community of mystics. Bugayan&rsquo;s artistic language of the period was strongly influenced by drawings of the mentally ill from Vasily Gilyarovsky&rsquo;s book <i>Psychiatry </i>(1942), especially that depicting a female patient&rsquo;s &ldquo;torn thoughts,&rdquo; resembling seaweed or busted balloons.</p>
<p class="p1">After discovering text as a model for drawing in the 1970s, Bugayan developed a new method. &ldquo;My interpretation of text through black-and-white squares was the result of four random circumstances: reading the Torah, several books on symmetry, and the <i>I Ching </i>(<i>The Book of Changes</i>), and spending an evening at Andrei Monastyrsky&rsquo;s place,&rdquo; Bugayan writes in his autobiography.</p>
<p class="p1">The resulting works are reminiscent of the QR code, invented in Japan in 1994. But whereas a QR code contains information about a single data format (a URL, geographic coordinates, etc.), Bugayan&rsquo;s &ldquo;ciphers&rdquo; invoke infinite interpretations. The artist Vera Khlebnikova recalled the practice of (variant) reading of Bugayan&rsquo;s works: &ldquo;Armen invited me to his place and left me in a room full of his works while his wife was cooking pies. I had to peer into the flickering of black-and-white squares and draw the chimeras brought to life by this haze. Once I saw the first face, they began to emerge in huge numbers.&rdquo; The squares&rsquo; generative potential is explained by Bugayan&rsquo;s interest in the sacral qualities of pattern. Through ornament chimeras come alive. This was a familiar experience for any Soviet child who had ever stared at the biomorphic wallpaper patterns of the late socialist era. Patterned wallpaper disappeared from the image of the ideal apartment, at least in its Moscow iteration, after 1991, becoming an indirect victim of de-Sovietization.</p>

Sekretiki No. 34. QR codes and patterned wallpapers

<p class="p1">Naming touch as the least subtle yet most trusted of all senses, artist couple Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin have created several series of tactile works. The flow of mental images and associations initiated by such artworks is based on the verbally or visually indescribable feelings at one&rsquo;s fingertips. Tactile artworks usually cease to function in the intended way when landing in a museum collection. This is not completely true with regard to the group of objects from Planet FC-9X. Even placed behind glass in a museum vitrine, the bags with their extraterrestrial content evoke reflections on how it feels to be in the material world, where most recent scientific discoveries are invisible by nature and our worldview is gradually becoming more dependent on concepts alone, with some comfort provided by data visualizations.</p>
<p class="p1">Knowledge about Planet FC-9X was gained by scientists combing the universe with a radio telescope, as radio astronomy allows for the exploration of celestial objects that are not visible to optical devices. Some of the most extreme physical processes in the universe have been detected by identifying their radio emissions. This has also led to the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation that is regarded as evidence in support of the Big Bang theory. As for the Gerlovins, these found objects from an invisible planet seemed to provide the artists with an opportunity to contemplate, from an astrophysical perspective, human existence as perpetual becoming, &ldquo;a wandering of the soul between the alternating states of being absorbed and being emitted.&rdquo;</p>

Sekretiki No. 13. Radio astronomy with the Gerlovins

<p class="p1">One of the basic, though high-maintenance, systems of self-support in the unofficial art environment was being a couple. Among the conceptualists, to work in such a tandem was often perceived as an opportunity to fuse art and life, to nullify the distinction between the artwork and the author. Artists Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin, who have worked collaboratively since 1972, describe their almost five-decades-long partnership as follows: &ldquo;Every artist is an artwork and we, working both together and separately while remaining true to ourselves, were simultaneously each other.&rdquo;</p>
<p class="p1">In the mid-1970s, with no opportunity to exhibit or produce large-scale installations, the Gerlovins found a way to keep their imagination under the control of productiveness. They self-published 40 small booklets, each with laconic building instructions for a staged environment of pre-programmed experience. The potential installations were seen by the artists as arranged settings for psychoanalytic exercises. Some of them can even serve as experimental couples therapy sessions, for example the <i>Taboo </i>environment, with its two interconnected cabins.</p>

Sekretiki No. 18. Steam therapy sessions

<p class="p1">Whether a visitor drawn to what the professional film community in Moscow referred to &ldquo;Riga de Janeiro&rdquo; or a Riga resident, one could escape drab Soviet normaility via the city&rsquo;s hippie flaneurs, who wore flamboyant clothing and Flower Power facepaint, spoke in slang, staged informal theater performances in public squares and caf&eacute;s, held jazz jam sessions and art events in private flats, gathered on the seashore for happenings, and attended discreetly organized foreign film screenings. By the late 1960s, Riga had become one of the epicenters of pan-Soviet youth counterculture and Andris Grīnbergs, trained in men&rsquo;s fashion design and naturally skilled at provocation, was acknowledged as a visible local ringleader.</p>
<p class="p1">Film proved to be an unparalleled vehicle for such influences. The greatest impact was exerted by films from abroad celebrating alienated youth and featuring commensurately alien visual tropes and narratives, namely the French New Wave movies and pictures by Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Semi-clandestine screenings were organized in the small Riga Cinema House, in the medieval quarter, near the hippies&rsquo; principal gathering spots. These events, quietly publicized among Cinematographers Union members and their friends, featured so-called &ldquo;circle films:&rdquo; foreign films whose circulation had been limited to higher profile Soviet film festivals and nation-specific film days in Moscow and Leningrad as evidence of official tolerance of liberal values. Such prints were subsequently stolen, stashed in state film repositories, and circulated surreptitiously along with films deemed outright illegal within the Soviet Union, but copied during their screenings in Bulgarian, Czechoslovakian, Polish, and Hungarian cinematheques and passed to Riga through unofficial Soviet channels.</p>

Sekretiki No. 2. Newsreels of Riga de Janeiro

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<p>The athletic body was a long-established symbol of communist self-discipline, and sport was seen as the ideal tool for achieving mass physical participation in a militarized society. The social context of the 1960s&mdash;with a population that had seen conscription decrease under Khrushchev, at the same time as consumer choice in goods and ideas increased&mdash;provoked new attempts at propaganda designed to generate a popular sense of militarized patriotism and collective ownership of one&rsquo;s body as an economic instrument. The national sports programme Ready for Labour and Defence (GTO), initiated by the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) in 1931, underwent significant reforms in 1972 to become a mass movement for all age groups. By 1976, 220 million people had been awarded GTO badges after having passed tests in running, throwing dummy grenades, doing push-ups or just having pretended to enjoy it as a tongue-in- cheek formality organized annually at the workplace.</p>
<p>A different understanding of the body and its ownership was cultivated at a number of remote beaches near Riga, practically unpopulated due to the neighboring army base. Favored by nudists since the 1930s, they were a perfect playground for Andris Grīnbergs&rsquo; early happenings, in which pagan rites and a martyrdom aesthetic was mixed with Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski&rsquo;s ideas about performers and spectators co-creating events as &ldquo;an act of the most deeply-rooted love between two human beings.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Grīnbergs&rsquo; two-day-long happening Wedding of Jesus Christ (1972) took place shortly after like-minded enthusiasts at the Lithuanian Academy of Art had organized an unauthorized staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber&rsquo;s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, the musical&rsquo;s unacknowledged European premiere. Many performers were subsequently targeted by the KGB.<br /><br /></p>
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<p>The Soviet system discriminated not only against specific individuals but also entire art forms, denying them the status of a professional art. Performance art belonged to these genres and, consequently, existed as a hybrid &ldquo;in-between&rdquo; of diverse practices, such as acting, dance, poetry-reading, musical performance, and photography. All of them were present in Grīnbergs&rsquo; happenings and provided participants&mdash;musicians, photographers, writers, actors&mdash;the opportunity to experience the cross-disciplinary approach not only as a new form of creative freedom but also as the liberation the body.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 1. Happenings and Physical Culture in the USSR

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<p>What is the hidden potential of a human body? Where 2&rsquo; should we seek the unknown capacities of our brain? How might the achievements of natural sciences prompt us to reconsider who we are and who we could be, both as individuals and a society?&nbsp;Driven by these questions, filmmaker Feliks Sobolev created popular science films that implied an ideological provocation of the Soviet system of declarative equality. The idea of a super-brain gave wide scope for journeys of self-exploration to those choosing &ldquo;inner exile&rdquo; as a dissident approach of noncollaboration with the state. It also inspired the social circles of &ldquo;physicists and lyricists,&rdquo; who were preoccupied with finding common ground between the humanities and technical advances.</p>
<p>Limited screenings of Sobolev&rsquo;s film caused a commotion outside Moscow&rsquo;s Rossiya cinema, with mounted police sent to deal with the crowd. Such enthusiasm for being an eyewitness to the incredible was in tune with the cinematic innovations of Sobolev and his colleagues at Kyivnaukfilm. Covering various spheres of contemporary science&mdash;from sociology to astrophysics, from biology to cybernetics&mdash;their films tested new ways of seeing and combined documentary footage, animation, hidden camera recordings, and macro close-ups of scientific experiments. Nevertheless, they provided enough space to nurture the idea of blindness, the invisible, the overlooked, and the hidden as significant components of visual culture.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 3. Popular Science for Dissidents

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<p><img src="https://cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed__F7A3921-Edit.jpg" alt="" width="338" height="225" /></p>
<p class="column text__small text__muted">Igor Palmin, <br />From the series <em>The Enchanted Wanderer</em> and <em>The Disquiet</em>, 1977 (printed 2019)<br />Courtesy of the photographer</p>
<div class="column">In 1977, Igor Palmin was hired as a photographer for an expedition exploring Bronze Age burial sites near Arzgir in Stavropol Krai. Inspired by a group of young people contracted as manual laborers to help with excavation, he created a series of photographs portraying the other-worldly atmosphere typical of many such expeditions at that time.</div>
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<p><br />In unofficial cultural circles, scientific expeditions organized by universities and institutes were a well- known option for a brief and adventurous escape from the ideologized environment of Soviet everyday life. With informal conversations and guitar-poetry by the campfire in the evenings, and the fact that excavation sites in remote regions were far from the controlling gaze of the authorities, such expeditions attracted those whose declared aim was the avoidance of and non- engagement with anything Soviet.</p>
<p>Palmin&rsquo;s original idea was to photograph the whole band of exotic countercultural figures who had joined the expedition, but only a few were willing to pose. One of them was the young Moscow hippie Sergei Bolshakov, a drop-out from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, who had feigned insanity to escape compulsory military service and was closely linked with the Moscow circle of nonconformist artists. The photographer first met him in 1975, when photographing the nonconformist exhibition in the House of Culture at the Exhibition of National Economic Achievements (VDNKh). As a member of the artist group Hair, Sergei was one of those behind the embroidered hippie flag, which was removed from display by the KGB on the day the exhibition opened. The final shot of Palmin&rsquo;s series, with Sergei departing toward the horizon in the company of stray dogs, recalls the slogan on the confiscated flag: &ldquo;Country Without Borders.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A plaster copy of an African ritual mask, sandwiched between a comedian&rsquo;s bald-head wig and a mass- produced bust of the Red Army Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, is not an obvious or predictable encounter. The mutant creature brought to life by overlapping cultural narratives belongs to the world of Prigov&rsquo;s storytelling. There are meanings running in all directions, searching in vain for a butterfly effect that could explain their sudden togetherness. The totality of each separate medium or social sign system is undermined by being combined with others.</p>
<p>The sculptural collage of found objects, created as a spoof of Soviet power and revealing its ritualistic and religious nature, is more than mere political critique. Its absurdity contains a mystical horror related to the cultural crises of the globalized world, where to endure doubt is the ultimate human condition and the starting point for a new type of anthropology with which to study our habits and social instincts.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 6. Nonconformists at Archeological Digs

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<p>Moscow hippie Vladimir Teplyshev, nicknamed Zen-Baptist, put together a samizdat journal called Alternativa, which introduced its readership to the ideals of hippie-Christians and Jesus Revolution. The publication was inspired by his participation in the network of underground discussion groups of the ecumenical movement, founded by Sandr Riga and active in many cities across the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Ecumenism&mdash;a Christian movement promoting unity among religions through greater cooperation and improved understanding&mdash;was part of the &ldquo;religious revival&rdquo; that was set in motion by Khrushchev&rsquo;s Thaw. The movement&rsquo;s respect for the variety of spiritual paths accorded well with the challenges of the youth counterculture in the late 1960s and early 1970s.</p>
<p>Generational anti-establishment protest at the time&mdash;often going hand-in-hand with a bohemian lifestyle and self-destructive practices of &ldquo;negative freedom&rdquo;&mdash;had begun to reveal its negative side- effects: alienation, personal crises, addictions, early deaths. There was a need to replace the blind alley of marginalization with a more positive, spirituality- orientated outlook on life. But there was also a desire to enjoy radical freedom of choice when shaping one&rsquo;s own religiosity.</p>
<p>Many members of Soviet hippie communities were fascinated by the myriad number of belief systems and the prospects for religious eclecticism. Some preferred to remain self-made believers outside any particular religion or confession, others joined the Orthodox church, sympathized with Tolstoyan ideas or found their spiritual base in Buddhism, the Hare Krishna movement or the endless realms of &ldquo;occulture.&rdquo; The ecumenist Sandr Riga and his samizdat journal Prizyv demonstrated acceptance of such personal freedom by setting new standards for religious samizdat. Prizyv was respectful of the individual differences in spiritual experiences and provided open editorials for sharing them. The movement received a serious blow in the mid-1980s, when several of its leaders were imprisoned or locked away for &ldquo;treatment&rdquo; in psychiatric hospitals.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 10. Soviet Ecumenism

<p class="p1">For a short but radiant period, Igor Lutz was an active participant in Moscow&rsquo;s underground art scene. In the early 1980s, when the Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI) was formed as a collaborative initiative by artists to collect and share the artworks of the conceptualist circle, he contributed a series of photographs. Lutz&rsquo;s input stands out among other contributions. Minimalist, straightforward, and lacking any irony, lyricism or mystery, his work is dedicated to a pure act of deliberate destruction. This aggressive presence of entropy contradicts the very idea of collaboration or collecting that stood behind the archiving project.</p>
<p class="p1">Social movements of the Soviet underground rarely practiced systematic documentation of their activities, since it could potentially serve as evidence for the organs of state security in the fight against unofficial forms of activism. This also fostered a preference for nonobject- based art and ephemeral actions among certain representatives of the unofficial art scene. Combined with temporality and unpredictability&mdash;aesthetic qualities praised in the West as a contraceptive strategy against the art market and the mainstream&mdash;secrecy and reliance on a closed &ldquo;circle of interested people&rdquo; (krug zainteresovannykh lits) became important components of unofficial creative practices and the way such artworks were perceived.</p>
<p class="p1">Every time a secret is shared, it accumulates the potential for destruction. Either outward or toward itself. Inner circles, closed discussion groups, and secret societies are often seen as a force of destruction, dangerous to the existing order. That said, the bigger and, supposedly, more influential they become, the less secret and stable their own existence. Secrets cease to exist with their telling. Lutz gave up making art around the time when the secrets of his circle were exposed and members began to come out in the open.</p>

Sekretiki No. 11. Circles of Trust

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<p><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed__F7A3935-Edit.jpg" alt="" width="437" height="291" />&nbsp;</p>
<p class="text__muted text__small">Journal <em>Znanie </em><em>&mdash; </em><em>Sila</em> [<em>Knowledge is Power</em>], 1968&ndash;1978<br />Editor-in-Chief: Nina Filippova<br />Head Designer: Yuri Sobolev<br />Garage Library</p>
<p>Under the editorship of Nina Filippova the circulation of the popular science magazine Znanie &ndash; Sila [Knowledge is Power] sky-rocketed from a modest 200,000 in 1964 to 700,000 in 1967. This was a result of her strategy to build a bridge between the sciences and the general public by providing insight into the reasoning processes that permeate the field of science, and by emphasizing creative thinking as part of them. Articles on space exploration, chemistry or engineering were combined with reports on discoveries in the fields of archeology, ecology, and recently rehabilitated branches of the social sciences and psychology. As with dreams, which digest the challenges of the day during sleep, the magazine&rsquo;s rich combination of overlaps between academic disciplines was pieced together by literary works of science fiction.</p>
<p>Stories by the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychev, Volodymyr Savchenko, and translations of works by Stanisław Lem, Isaac Asimov, and Poul Anderson (with a foreword by the Soviet science fiction master Ivan Yefremov) captivated readers and inspired the artists who contributed to the magazine&rsquo;s visual identity. As it was considered to be an applied art, illustration enjoyed comparative freedom as compared to the ideologically constrained fine arts. This advantage gave illustrators the opportunity to use the grammar and narrative- building structures of modern art as metaphors within graphic design. It was Alexander Dobritsyn and his friendship circle of semi-independent artists&mdash;including Ilya Kabakov, Ernst Neizvestny, Eduard Steinberg, and Evgeny Bachurin&mdash;who made the magazine famous for its surreal or abstract illustrations, frequent references to the great masters of art history, experimental typefaces, and almost psychedelic subjects.</p>
<p>Letters of complaint addressed to the editor from confused readers and official accusations of anti- Soviet aesthetics coincided with news policies brought in under Leonid Brezhnev. The cover designs went through radical changes thanks to new artistic director Yuri Sobolev, who transformed them into cryptic mandalas using the safest visual medium from the point of view of ideology&mdash;photography. The employment of a circular shape, similar to the porthole of a spaceship or the glass cover of a sekretik, announced a shift into the universe of secret knowledge, coded language, and reading between the lines.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 14. Science and Science Fiction

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<p>There is an issue of Znanie &ndash; Sila magazine at the Russian State Library with the page featuring an article about the self-development practice of autogenic training torn out. Now replaced with a photocopy, this artefact characterizes the scarcity of such information in the Soviet print media, and the desperate eagerness of citizens to attain it.</p>
<p>Yuri Sobolev, the artistic director of the magazine, likely chose the seated Buddha image for illustrating this article. He had recently updated the magazine&rsquo;s layout by initiating the use of a modular grid. Few of his colleagues knew about the compositional backbone of Sobolev&rsquo;s own art. His drawings are speckled with irregular dots that bear little relevance to the general subject of the image. They mark an invisible underlay of the same grid that usually governs the iconographic composition of traditional religious images of the seated Buddha. The rules of the grid include an emphasis on the number twelve, drawing from the twelve stages of the Buddha&rsquo;s life and thereby also manifesting in the geometric proportions of Sobolev&rsquo;s drawings.</p>
<p>Sobolev&rsquo;s keen interest in Eastern religions, yoga, and the works of psychoanalyst Carl Jung brought him close to Anatoly Dobrovich, a psychologist and regular contributor to Znanie &ndash; Sila. Other than an early attempt at science fiction, Dobrovich wrote for the magazine about psychology, a field of science that had a dubious reputation in the Soviet Union. Due to state surveillance, a general lack of trust, and social taboos regarding sexuality, psychology was a risky undertaking. It is therefore remarkable to find notes of the group psychotherapy sessions organized within underground circles by Sobolev and Dobrovich for a closed group of friends. From the books in Sobolev&rsquo;s library one can assume that some members of the circle had ties with the Esalen Institute Exchange Program, a mysteriously influential network bringing together the Soviet and American elites under the new-age slogan &ldquo;Toward a New Worldview.&rdquo; The Esalen Institute was also co-organizer of the early satellite- TV bridges between the two countries, one of which became famous for the historical phrase &ldquo;There is no sex in Soviet Union,&rdquo; uttered by a participating Muscovite.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 15. Secrets of the Magazine Znanie — Sila (Knowledge is Power)

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<p>There were several attempts to found hippie communes or temporary summer camps in the Soviet Union, with the first short-lived experiments taking place in Altai region and Crimea as early as 1970. One of the few that succeeded was Gauja, on the Baltic Sea coast, not far from Latvia&rsquo;s capital, Riga, and close to the highway to Tallinn, Estonia.</p>
<p>Founded on the night of the 1978 summer solstice, Gauja managed to outlive the Soviet Union, regardless of regular attacks by the authorities. In the early 1980s, the camp would accommodate up to 2,000 participants every summer, with around 200 campers at a time, and became an important hub of the countercultural network, attracting pilgrimage groups from across the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Even during its first summer, the campsite had to be relocated after the intervention of the police. The exodus along the seashore in search of a new site, which would become the long-standing future location of Gauja, was captured on camera by one of the participants. The event&rsquo;s visually dramatic atmosphere, as seen in the film, is generated by the presence of two ceremonial attributes that are carried by the wanderers, an easel and a cross.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 16. Hippie Communes as Summer Camps

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<p>In order to consider the legacy passed from the 1960s generation to the youth counterculture movement of the early 1980s, one needs to reflect on the changes that affected the socially and politically charged phenomenon of campfire gatherings and the semi- legal network of D.I.Y. singer-songwriters (Klub samodeyatel&rsquo;noi pesni, or KSP). &ldquo;Campfire, sleeping bag, tent&rdquo; is one alternative version of how to expand the abbreviation KSP, pointing to the crucial role of camping as a form of escapism for the 1960s generation, who felt that outdoor activities offered a way of life in which such values as courage, friendship, risk, trust, and mutual support still mattered. By the 1980s, outdoor activities were far too institutionalized and mainstream to still be attractive as a countercultural platform, while the singer-songwriter movement had to step aside to give the stage to rock.</p>
<p>Hippie camps, such as Gauja, were still important gathering places, but they were easy to spot and subject to harassment by the authorities. The social circle that formed around the campfire was often broken up, literally stretched out in a straight line and escorted by armed police out of the woods. It was easier to build hidden urban networks, commute between cities, and gather in semi-underground clubs than to find a communal hiding place somewhere in the countryside.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 17. Camp Fire, Sleeping Bag, Tent

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<p>The popular science film Me and the Others by Feliks Sobolev was a rare attempt within official Soviet culture to tackle the question of conformism, the tendency uncritically or habitually to adopt the attitudes, behavior or conventions of the social group to which one belongs. The film consists of several experiments in social psychology. Documented with a hidden camera, they illustrate the individual&rsquo;s decision-making process when there is a contradiction between personal observations and the assertions of the group. With ten colleagues maintaining that the two objects on the table are white, it&rsquo;s hard to say the opposite. The hypnotizing mantra of &ldquo;Both are white,&rdquo; recited in the film by participants in the experiment, became a colloquial idiom to describe the habit of not questioning obvious lies or absurdities that were part of Soviet everyday life.</p>
<p>How to relate to one&rsquo;s own (in)sanity under the conformist pressure of &ldquo;common sense&rdquo; was a concern for many in the social circles of unofficial culture. As was the issue of who to entrust with the secret of seeing things differently and how to maintain such a circle of confidants, despite the shared enjoyment of madness. To be one of ours meant a readiness to outpace the official system by becoming collective masters of even greater absurdity, but such a circle of partners-in- crime also demanded concern for each other and an autonomous system of social bonding.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 20. Conformism Test

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<p>To change something radically was a difficult task for an ordinary Soviet person. But to control things was rather easy. From the early 1970s, the authorities encouraged the formation of so-called bodies of public control, which recruited party members along with non-members who had passed the selection. As the French historian Nicolas Werth observed, these bodies soon grew into a whole army, with almost every sixth person serving in it. According to Werth, this structure &ldquo;stimulated voluntary participation in the life of society&rdquo; and attracted many educated individuals.</p>
<p>For Anatoly Zhigalov, the job of building supervisor was not a tool of control but provided access to a three- dimensional space. From the perspective of an artist, &ldquo;participation in the life of society&rdquo; through service in a body of public control is a parody in terms of content and vanguard in terms of form. &ldquo;In the 1970s I was a consistent and radical geometrist,&rdquo; explained Zhigalov. My Last Work &ldquo;declared a break with the conventional language of art (a square) and access to real space (a cube as a square in three-dimensional space).&rdquo; The multiple meanings of Zhigalov&rsquo;s work derive from the transformation of square into cube. A poster shows him offering to sell his &ldquo;last work.&rdquo; One month of artistic supervision costs 561,515 rubles and 62 kopeks. The price of the &ldquo;last work&rdquo; is the supervisor&rsquo;s salary of 82 rubles and 50 kopeks, cubed. Zhigalov planned to spend the money on digging a channel that would separate the European and Asian parts of Russia, and thus forever define the country&rsquo;s cultural localization.</p>
<p>&ldquo;My latest piece, I Work as a Supervisor, belongs to the people thrice,&rdquo; states Zhigalov on the poster. In fact, the work itself and the actions it implied (the laying of Avant-Garde Alley, for example) were addressed not to an abstract &ldquo;people&rdquo; but to &ldquo;deterritorialized milieus&rdquo; (to use anthropologist Alexei Yurchak&rsquo;s definition of the informal social circles of late socialism). The deterritorialized milieus, or &ldquo;our people,&rdquo; may quietly and without opposition affects respond to calls and slogans, and even repeat them, but they ignore the meaning of what is said. The most popular character of 1970s Soviet mass culture of was Max Otto von Stierlitz, the protagonist of the TV series Seventeen Moments of Spring. His &ldquo;last work&rdquo; was as a SS Standartenfuhrer, raising his hand in the Nazi salute where necessary, carrying out orders, and simultaneously working in a completely different dimension: Stierlitz was a Soviet spy tasked with finding out who in the German command was conducting secret negotiations with the United States and the allies. The lifestyle of the Nazi elite and Stierlitz is suspiciously similar to the status quo established during the era of stagnation in the Soviet Union: the rapprochement of Mueller and Bormann with the US toward the end of World War II perfectly correlates with the &ldquo;détente&rdquo; following President Nixon&rsquo;s 1972 visit to the Soviet Union. &ldquo;The regime is not on the attack but on the defense. Its motto is &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t touch us and we won&rsquo;t touch you&rsquo;,&rdquo; wrote dissident Andrei Amalrik in his prophetic text &ldquo;Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?&rdquo;.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 21. Anatoly Zhigalov's Art Supervision

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<p>On the morning of February 16, 1980, the editor- in-chief of the magazine Chelovek i zakon [Man and Law], Sergei Semanov, was examining the results of the 1979 census of the Soviet Union. According to a diary note made on that day, he was generally pleased, as the total Russian population had increased by 6.3%. The situation in Lithuania, however, worried Semanov. &ldquo;Lithuanians are doing great: +6.8%, 97.9% speak their native language, 80% at home. This is a monolith, and a pretty dangerous one, especially bearing in mind Rome&rsquo;s new advance on us.&rdquo; By Rome the Russian nationalist and anti- Semite Semanov meant the West, which was allegedly planning to annihilate Russia and everyone it held dear. In the event of a Western attack, Semanov saw Lithuanians&mdash;who spoke their native language and whose population was increasing&mdash;as a fifth column, with the Soviet Union resembling a freedom-loving Roman province fighting for independence with varying success. Something like Judea, but with the chosen people being Russians, oppressed by capitalists and the Сommunist Party&rsquo;s liberals (Semanov saw parallels in the strategies of global expansion of both). From the other point of view, some campaigners for the Baltic States&rsquo; independence, such as the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski, compared Rome to the Soviet Union: in a 1967 poem, Kaplinski described his fellow countrymen as Gauls, who swear to take revenge on the cruel empire.</p>
<p>Semanov&rsquo;s diary note concludes with a mention of Andrei Sakharov, who developed the Soviet nuclear program in the 1950s and was now a dissident in exile in the closed city of Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), which foreigners were not allowed to visit at the time. Semanov disliked Sakharov. By this time, the authorities didn&rsquo;t like the father of the hydrogen bomb either, perhaps seriously considering him a &ldquo;Roman&rdquo; agent. The KGB launched a propaganda campaign in the press aimed at depriving the academician and former Stalin Prize laureate (all of Sakharov&rsquo;s awards were removed by a special Politburo decree before he was exiled) of the people&rsquo;s trust.</p>
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<p>Sakharov&rsquo;s contacts with the outside world were already limited. The Politburo hid the dissident in a hotel for KGB officers, which became his sekretik. He listed the conditions of his detention in his diary: &ldquo;2) Idonothavetherighttoleavethecity[...]3)Idonot have the right to contact [. . .] foreigners. 4) I do not have the right of postal and telephone communication with foreign countries.&rdquo; Also on February 16, 1980, Sakharov made a note in his diary about the article &ldquo;Caesar has Failed to Succeed,&rdquo; published in the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda a day earlier. The academician melancholically repeated the accusations against him (&ldquo;technocrat,&rdquo; &ldquo;cannibal hatred toward Vietnam and his own country and people, toward socialism&rdquo;) and regretted that his father was mentioned in the article as &ldquo;professor&rdquo; (&ldquo;he never liked that title&rdquo;). &ldquo;Caesar,&rdquo; according to the journalist, was Sakharov himself, who &ldquo;reportedly aspired to own the world with the help of the thermonuclear bomb.&rdquo;</p>
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<p>The picturesque sequence of allusions to ancient history on this day continues with the action Flower Burial by TOTART (Natalia Abalakova and Anatoly Zhigalov), centered around the Biblical image of the cypress tree as a symbol of renewal and rebirth. The title, however, is incorrect. The performance was originally called Flower Wake as a reference to James Joyce&rsquo;s last book, Finnegan&rsquo;s Wake. Using an ironic gesture as complex and chaotic as Joyce&rsquo;s novel to parody ritual and myth, the artists uprooted a cypress tree from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem from its pot (it was a house plant they received as a gift from a friend), put it into a tube, and sealed it with plaster. Cypress is a symbol of the Savior and rebirth. In the Old Testament, the prophet Zechariah states that at the end of the days the Messiah will ascend the Mount of Olives and begin to resurrect the dead. Toward the end of the action, Abalakova and Zhigalov staged their own funeral, lying in a bathtub in shimmering candlelight, before finally rising up and reuniting with the viewers for a modest meal.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 23. “Foreign Agent” Andrei Sakharov 

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<p>After Stalin&rsquo;s death, the Soviet Union launched a program of construction of cheap panel housing to help millions of people to leave the communal flats and barracks where they lived. But the legendary underground Apartments&mdash;apartments with a capital A&mdash;were never located in these newer buildings. They occupied the vast square meters of old, pre-revolutionary or equally spacious Stalinist- era buildings. This is what the home of the Erastov family was like, where the artist Igor Makarevich showed up for the first time as a young man.</p>
<p>The huge family of Konstantin and Elena Erastov and their seven children occupied an entire floor in a two-story house. As devoted Tolstoyans, the Erastovs had even tried to live in the country and follow the writer&rsquo;s doctrine. This turned out to be impossible in the Khrushchev era, as the fight against farming communities continued, with the intention of creating not just larger collective farms but entire agro-cities. The Erastovs returned to Moscow. There were constant guests representing all shades of dissident thought. Igor Makarevich recalls that in their apartment everyone&rsquo;s favorite hobby was the idealization of the imaginary West.</p>
<p>Chemist Natalia Braude recalled another apartment, the home of the dissidents Raisa Orlova and Lev Kopelev. &ldquo;Conversations were like bouts between good fencers, with phrases, jokes, familiar and unfamiliar names swishing past one&rsquo;s ears like foil blades. Newcomers like me struggled trying to follow dialogues in the language of unfinished hints and cryptic expressions, already common among the apartment&rsquo;s regulars but incomprehensible for the uninitiated.&rdquo;</p>
<p>From the mid-1970s, the inhabitants of the secret apartment worlds began preparing to leave for the other world, the West, to find out what it was really like. Peter Weill and Alexander Genis produced a list of locations appropriate for the intelligentsia and bohemians of the Soviet empire, who had finally convinced themselves of their own politics and of the illusory nature of the revolution&rsquo;s democratic ideals: &ldquo;in the stoker&rsquo;s basement, in an exile village, in a guard&rsquo;s booth, in a suburban barrack, and finally in emigration.&rdquo; The Erastovs emigrated in 1979, looking not only for freedom of assembly but also for freedom of action, speech, and conscience. Wakes and leaving parties for those moving abroad were pretty much the same at the time, according to witnesses. Makarevich went to Sheremetyevo airport with some friends, where he photographed petrified faces: no one believed that they would meet again. Later, he went back to Bolshoi Gnezdnikovsky Lane, to the Erastovs&rsquo; apartment, which was later demolished together with the house. He photographed the walls, covered with hundreds of random texts ranging from (comically) philosophical to (comically) anti-Soviet. But Makarevich had forgotten to change the film, and the faces of friends bidding farewell to the Erastov family showed through the wallpaper, like a store window. People seem to be peering into the wallpaper, placed behind a museum vitrine.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 24. Apartments of the Underground

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<p>In October 1964, a Chinese student, wise enough not to mention his name, wrote home from the Moscow State University dormitory. &ldquo;I learnt two pieces of good news at once: China detonated an atomic bomb and Khrushchev has been removed as General Secretary. This demonstrates that the Western wind has finally died down. The wind from the East is gaining momentum. Genuine Marxist-Leninists are winning.&rdquo; The student&rsquo;s optimistic pro-Chinese forecast was cited by the Chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny, in his regular note on the mood in the country to the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>The student was right: the storm of change in Russia had come to an end, progress slowed to a crawl. In the period from 1966 to 1981, 44% of members of the Central Committee maintained their positions. Brezhnev practiced a bureaucratic version of Taoist inaction using the slogan &ldquo;Trust in Cadres,&rdquo; which allowed local party workers to establish family dynasties and develop a Soviet version of feudalism. Its dismantling would begin from the Central Asian border areas, but only after Brezhnev&rsquo;s death.</p>
<p>In October 1985, six fishing lines were tied to the rotating pipe of a metal coring collar dug into the earth on the Kievogorskoe Field, with the other ends attached to different trees at the edges of the wood. The action Capstan by the art group Collective Actions was a spatial expansion of the I Ching (The Book of Changes), which contains 64 hexagrams each consisting of six solid or broken lines. Each hexagram has an interpretation. This ancient book of Chinese philosophy had a wide circulation in the narrow circles of Soviet mystics and experimenters. Along with its practical function&mdash;fortune-telling&mdash;the book also had a symbolic meaning as something opposite to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Drawing on the idea of history&rsquo;s rational development, the political project of the Soviet regime implied progression toward its grand finale, communism. The mental health of members of the underground was largely dependent on practices of &ldquo;ritualized uncertainty,&rdquo; in which the 64 I Ching hexagrams proved very helpful. The Chinese classic even inspired several variations, which used parody to emphasize the original&rsquo;s value. Examples include the Sots Art Book of Changes by Vyacheslav Akhunov and the carnival version, The Book of Sequels by Igor Makarevich.<br /><br /></p>
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<p>After the small group of viewers had received the &ldquo;score&rdquo; of the action, its author Nikolai Panitkov began to turn the collar. The weather suddenly worsened. As Andrei Monastyrsky, the founder of the Collective Actions, recalled, &ldquo;white darkness fell upon us, as if the sky was playing our score.&rdquo; As soon as the fishing lines began to tear one after another, composing various hexagrams&mdash;from Xiao Kuo (&ldquo;preponderance of the small&rdquo;) to Kun (&ldquo;execution&rdquo;)&mdash;the clouds dispersed and the wind stopped. Only the metaphorical wind of change kept pace. Two years later, it brought the long-awaited peace in relations between China and the Soviet Union, with the perestroika announced by Gorbachev finally coming into line with the &ldquo;policy of transparency and reforms&rdquo; launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 25. Fortune Telling Using the Book of Changes

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<p>In Poems about Death&mdash;something like La Rochefoucauld&rsquo;s Maxims and Blaise Pascal&rsquo;s Thoughts for the late socialist era&mdash;Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid point to a tendency in humans to seek happiness in something finite, something countable. &ldquo;An intellectual in Russia knows that if a banned book (which they would perhaps never even read) is published, it will make them feel better,&rdquo; they wrote. &ldquo;Ten such books will make one feel ten times happier.&rdquo; But this simple mathematics doesn&rsquo;t work with the books from Sergey Zhigalkin&rsquo;s library.</p>
<p>They differ from the usual &ldquo;forbidden stuff &rdquo; and samizdat as much as Brahman differs from Atman in Indian philosophy: the two notions are separated by a spiritual eternity. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a dictionary of symbols, and various other publications defined the atmosphere of writer and mystic Yuri Mamleev&rsquo;s apartment in Yuzhinsky Lane, described by the artist and writer Vladimir Kovenatsky as &ldquo;a weird wax museum bringing together sullen Moscow schizoids to have some fun.&rdquo; Readings of Mamleev&rsquo;s short stories and the poems of Evgeny Golovin, discussions of esoteric literature and drinking pure alcohol&mdash;an act akin to pure mathematics&mdash;it all happened here. &ldquo;To drink wine and to dream of God,&rdquo; to quote Mamleev&rsquo;s own motto for Yuzhinsky Lane, which existed throughout the 1960s and disappeared with the demolition of the building.</p>
<p>At the time it wasn&rsquo;t necessary to be fond of Gurdjieff, Blavatsky, Steiner, and the like in order to sense the illusory nature of the border between the real and the other world. &ldquo;We were not real,&rdquo; said Ilya Kabakov in an early 1990s interview. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t remember myself living in the reality called the Soviet Union. We lived within a small circle of people, we fantasized, and we shared those fantasies with each other.&rdquo;</p>
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<p>Sociologist Elena Zdravomyslova defined such self- perception as a typical strategy of retreat by Soviet &ldquo;bohemians,&rdquo; explaining it as a means of adapting to the &ldquo;context of structural tension between officially proclaimed goals and the social norm.&rdquo; The discrepancy between goals and norms forced people to choose either the former (and, simply speaking, become a politician) or the latter (and live the life of a philistine). Those who couldn&rsquo;t identify with this paradigm &ldquo;retreated.&rdquo; The West, commonly idealized by Soviet dissidents, had its own version of this strategy. Many American intellectuals considered the war in Vietnam to be an act of imperial violence. The land artists of the 1970s (Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, Robert Oppenheim, Nancy Holt, et al), who held similar attitudes to American dissidents, were confident that sculptural gestures could live outside institutions, the commercial sector, and the military- industrial complex. This is how a series of monumental sculptural &ldquo;retreats,&rdquo; such as de Maria&rsquo;s The Lightning Field or Smithson&rsquo;s Spiral Jetty, came to life. Nancy Holt even hid a number of sekretiki, encouraging her fellow land artists to find a poem buried by her on a desert island in Florida or in a nature reserve in Utah. Interestingly, &ldquo;retreats&rdquo; have become extremely popular again recently, not in the general meaning but in a special way: in the form of trips to the mountains, beaches, and islands accompanied by yoga instructors and qigong teachers. Their function remains the same as in the 1970s: to release the tension between the ideals and norms of society.</p>
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<p>Underground artists adored Freud. Yuri Sobolev studied his article &ldquo;Delusion and Dream in Jensen&rsquo;s Gradiva.&rdquo; Ülo Sooster, perhaps ironically, confessed in a letter to a friend that he had discovered &ldquo;anal eroticism&rdquo; in his psyche, which explained why he rarely answered letters but did so in detail. Although less preoccupied with Freudian ideas, the artist and poet Vladimir Kovenatsky, as often happens, did things that beg psychoanalytic interpretation.</p>
<p>Thanks to Kovenatsky, the gatherings of passionate seekers of esoteric experiences in Yuri Mamleev&rsquo;s apartment in Yuzhinsky Lane became widely known as meetings of &ldquo;sexual mystics,&rdquo; as this was the subtitle of the &ldquo;art newspaper&rdquo; which Kovenatsky showed there. Bohemians who came to Yuzhinsky in search of orgies left disappointed by the serious, even religious atmosphere within the circle of researchers into divine and otherworldly realms.</p>
<p>At Dawn is not the only self-portrait capturing his encounter with horror. In his memoirs, Mamleev recalled that Kovenatsky &ldquo;had one drawing [. . .] in the foreground there is an artist sitting perkily with a canvas in front of him, and he [. . .] is drawing a nuclear explosion, a mushroom growing somewhere not that far away. This is Kovenatsky himself, his situation. The artist and the explosion of this world.&rdquo; At Dawn brings together the figure in a self-portrait with a shaved monster whose head slowly emerges from the depths (a metaphor for the unconscious, according to Freud). The shaved head and distorted facial features refer to the, unfortunately, still popular stereotype of a mental hospital patient. It may be that At Dawn depicts the ghost of the serious illness that would soon swallow Kovenatsky, in the 1980s, after his experiments with psychoactive substances.</p>
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<p>&ldquo;But it cannot be that way,&rdquo; Mamleev continued, commenting on the drawing with the mushroom cloud. &ldquo;You cannot look into the eyes of your murderer and enjoy suffering his gaze. You cannot be permanently ruptured. The rupture should be followed by a breakthrough, resurrection, escape.&rdquo; Today, Kovenatsky&rsquo;s poems and drawings break through to the reader mainly thanks to references in the books and interviews of Viktor Pelevin, a contemporary writer who continues the Yuzhinsky Lane tradition of the psychedelic representation of Russian everyday life.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 26. Yuzhinsky Lane’s “Sexual Mystics”

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<p>Vyacheslav Akhunov is a major figure in Central Asian art. He uses a diverse range of techniques, and even so his entire body of work is, to varying degrees, a critique of power. The absurdity and abnormality of Soviet life is also reflected in Breathe Quietly and Live Quietly. The artist suggests that the everyday life of the Soviet people, with their desires, dreams, and passions, was held back by ideological directives imposed by the authorities. The norm of living in totalitarian societies is not just about &ldquo;living quietly&rdquo; but also about trying to &ldquo;breathe quietly.&rdquo; There are two versions of each work: a drawing, as shown here, and an installation which occupies the exhibition space to the ceiling, thus pushing to the limit the metaphor of the presence of ideology and power in private life.</p>
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<p>With manic consistency and meticulousness, Vyacheslav Akhunov reproduces and juxtaposes various Soviet memorabilia, from photographs of leaders and members of the Politburo to slogans, documents, song lyrics, flags, and other objects representing communist ceremonial. One of the artist&rsquo;s most notable projects, which he has worked on much of his life, is the series Mantras of the USSR. For decades, Akhunov has been collecting artefacts, such as newspaper clippings, old folders, archive records, and canvases, and covering them with excerpts from textbooks on scientific communism and dialectical materialism in his compact handwriting. The project consists of thousands of such objects.</p>
<p>Akhunov remembers Patterns as his &ldquo;first independent work.&rdquo; Here is his story: &ldquo;At our institute, after lunch, there were lectures on Marxism-Leninism, scientific communism, art, dialectical materialism, and the history of the Communist Party. And as if we were in the army, they forced us to write notes. Out of laziness, I began to write them on paper patterns, and then I realized that wearing a dress made from these patterns would look very ideological. So I covered the patterns with lectures on Marxism-Leninism.&rdquo; This work represents a collision of the multiple meanings and cultural realities of the time. Magazines with patterns were especially popular in the Soviet Union, as it was extremely difficult to get good clothes due to the severe shortage of consumer goods. People often sewed garments for themselves. And whereas these magazines are in a sense a symbol of the deficit of goods in the Soviet Union, the uniform &ldquo;bootleg&rdquo; recordings on them testify to the amount of time wasted on the endless memorization of &ldquo;party testaments.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Famous for their humorous and irreverent actions, in 1982 Mukhomor (Toadstool) group (Konstantin Zvezdochotov, Sven Gundlakh, brothers Vladimir and Sergei Mironenko, and Alexey Kamensky) created instructions for a performance. The artists&rsquo; friend, Andrei Degtaryev, was invited to take part. He arrived at Begovaya metro station at the appointed hour and received a train ticket and a map of the area from a stranger. In the country, 30 kilometers away from Moscow, Degtyarev used the map to find a freshly dug hole where there were two boxes with the following instructions: 1) reveal the next sheet only when you have fulfilled the previous instruction; 2) take off all of your clothes; 3) put on the clothes in the boxes; 4) put your clothes in the boxes and bury them; 5) return to Moscow with the train ticket provided. The boxes contained tarpaulin trousers, a padded jacket, and artificial leather boots. Degtaryev was planning to go to a birthday party after the action and was dressed smartly, in a corduroy three-piece suit (which was hard to come by, like any quality clothing). But that didn&rsquo;t prevent him from carrying out the instructions. Watching with a spy glass from a distance was Nikita Alexeev, invited by the members of Toadstool group. Gundlakh suggested the following interpretation of the performance: &ldquo;Among other things, we raised the question: How many people are needed for artistic act to take place?&rdquo; Incidentally, Degtaryev&rsquo;s clothes were returned to their owner a few days later.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 29

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<p>Despite the popular myth about the closed character of Soviet society with its strictly regulated leisure and everyday life, in the later period there were numerous ways of spending free time. People organized communities around hobbies&mdash;such as amateur radio, travel, collecting stamps or records&mdash;and related to professions, within which expeditions occupied a special place. As the Soviet state saw no ideological reasons to forbid its citizens to explore the ancient past, at a certain point archaeology became an important part of life for a large number of thinking people. In the 1950s and early 1960s, when Vyacheslav Akhunov was a teenager, he assisted his father during an archaeological expedition to southern Kirghizia. The artist recalls: &ldquo;I dreamt and even raved about becoming an archaeologist, and my games matched my dream. Imagining myself a seeker of antiquities, I rummaged through every old scrapyard in the vicinity of the barrack on Stalin Street where we lived. That&rsquo;s how obsessed I was with the idea.&rdquo; This childhood hobby is manifested in the book and series of drawings Art- Chaeology of the USSR, depicting the Soviet Union as a vanished civilization. Some of the drawings and texts accompanying them were included in The Book of the Path.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 31

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<p>Leonid Talochkin (1936&ndash;2002) was a collector of Soviet unofficial art of the 1960s&ndash;1990s, a faithful friend of the artists, and a historiographer of the Soviet underground. In the early 1960s, he became part of the circle around the Moscow nonconformist artists and began collecting their work. By the mid-1970s he had around 600 works in his possession and devoted all of his time to archiving unofficial art.</p>
<p>Talochkin began to assemble his archive in the early 1960s. It contains several thousand documents, including: catalogues of apartment shows; manuscripts by underground writers, poets (Genrikh Sapgir, Yuri Mamleev), and artists (Oskar Rabin, Evgeny Kropivnitsky); and correspondence with émigré artists (Mikhail Chernyshov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, Mikhail Roginsky), foreign Slavic studies scholars ( Jindřich Chalupecký, John Bowlt), collectors, and Russian and foreign museums and art institutions; hundreds of documentary photographs from the 1960s through the 1990s; numerous exhibition invitations, including some rare handwritten ones; booklets, postcards, posters, and newspaper clippings.</p>
<p>In 2014, the Leonid Talochkin archive became part of Garage Archive Collection.</p>
<p>One of the most important parts of the archive comprises Talochkin&rsquo;s diaries, which contain detailed accounts of his everyday life and that of his artist friends. This part of the archive is restricted access, and most of the diaries will only become publicly available many years from now, when the contents will no longer impact on the private life of the diaries&rsquo; protagonists.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 32

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<p>In 1980, Dmitri Prigov wrote a prose cycle entitled Obituaries, which concluded with this single- sentence text: &ldquo;The Central Committee of the CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, and the Soviet government announce with deepest sorrow that on June 30, 1980, in his fortieth year, Dmitri Prigov is living in Moscow.&rdquo;</p>
<p>A year later, on May 22, 1979, the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the Council of Ministers of the USSR, and the KGB issued a &ldquo;Top Secret&rdquo; document permitting the membersofToadstoolgrouptodigontheterritoryof the Odintsovo Order of Lenin Hunting Resort. The document, featuring the names of Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Andropov, requested that the local administration facilitate this process by &ldquo;providing labor force, instruments, and transport.&rdquo; The action Excavations, a.k.a. Treasure, took place five days later, on May 27. Having at first got slightly lost, Toadstool members found the excavation site, which had been pre-prepared and filled with soil. After a short period of digging, Sven Gundlakh appeared, in the 21st year of his life. He was a group member, who had been buried alive for one night. The action proceeded calmly, without the need for additional labor or the attention of the authorities. No one asked the artists to present the document giving permission.</p>
<p>Obviously, the paper allegedly sanctioned by the highest echelon of Soviet leaders was a fake by Toadstool group. Parodying the language of newspaper editorials and the rigid composition of Socialist Realist paintings was a favorite activity among the conceptualists in the mid-1970s. This practice demonstrated a simple and convenient truth: within a pile of erased ideological constructions and speech one could hide any content, just like Toadstool group hid a whole person in a field in Moscow Region. Excavations was defined as a &ldquo;socially absurd performance&rdquo; by Toadstool group. Such performances occupied a large amount of time in the everyday life of Soviet individuals, who were obliged to attend party and Komsomol meetings.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 33

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<p>Yan Ginzburg employs a variety of artistic and conceptual methods, whether it be making a series of objects using different techniques while referencing the Moscow conceptualists or developing exhibitions as total installations based on a sophisticated yet coherent system of citations from the history of Soviet unofficial art. Aiming to penetrate the past in order to signify and reconsider his trajectories in the present, Ginzburg goes far beyond archive research or interviewing the bearers of historical experience. For several years, his projects have been inextricably (one might even say retroactively) linked to the practice of the late artist Joseph Ginzburg, whose family name Yan Ginzburg officially adopted, along with responsibility for his heritage.</p>
<p>Commissioned by Garage for the exhibition, The Room of Geniuses brings together a chain of associations and allusions drawn from various sources. The fact that the space itself is inhabited by geniuses is a direct reference to Joseph Ginzburg&rsquo;s dream, as mentioned in his diary, of living in a spacious room with walls covered with portraits of great people. The installation&rsquo;s form, which resembles a screen, paraphrases the display format used by Ilya Kabakov to exhibit albums such as Sitting-in- the-Closet Primakov, their protagonists&rsquo; lives often unfolding in closed, claustrophobic spaces.</p>
<p>The motif of citation in The Room of Geniuses can also be examined through Vladimir Vorontsov&rsquo;s book Symphony of Reason, recommended to Joseph Ginzburg by a friend in a letter. The book contains aphorisms by great thinkers and Soviet party leaders. Vorontsov allegedly compiled this publication as a gift to his boss, Mikhail Suslov, who was the de facto number two in the country after Brezhnev. It is known that Suslov was not a great reader of books, but he enjoyed reading reviews and loved to &ldquo;reinforce&rdquo; his public speeches, articles, and statements with smart quotes.</p>
<p>Yan Ginzburg concludes: &ldquo;The reconstruction of [Joseph] Ginzburg&rsquo;s idea using Vladimir Vorontsov&rsquo;s readymade &lsquo;intellectual screen&rsquo; launches a complex game of associations between the Soviet Union&rsquo;s ideological production and the unofficial art of the 1970s. The book&rsquo;s illustrations are on 16 unnumbered pages that feature 144 portraits of geniuses arranged alphabetically on a table-like grid. If we were to present these illustrations in three-dimensional form, there would be a clear similarity between Symphony of Reason and Joseph Ginzburg&rsquo;s &lsquo;room of geniuses.&rsquo; After all, it&rsquo;s likely that Vorontsov&rsquo;s book was the starting point for Joseph&rsquo;s idea.&rdquo;</p>
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Sekretiki No. 35

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<p>With manic consistency and meticulousness, Vyacheslav Akhunov reproduces and juxtaposes various Soviet memorabilia, from photographs of leaders and members of the Politburo to slogans, documents, song lyrics, flags, and other objects representing communist ceremonial. One of the artist&rsquo;s most notable projects, which he has worked on much of his life, is the series Mantras of the USSR. For decades, Akhunov has been collecting artefacts, such as newspaper clippings, old folders, archive records, and canvases, and covering them with excerpts from textbooks on scientific communism and dialectical materialism in his compact handwriting. The project consists of thousands of such objects.</p>
<p>Akhunov remembers Patterns as his &ldquo;first independent work.&rdquo; Here is his story: &ldquo;At our institute, after lunch, there were lectures on Marxism-Leninism, scientific communism, art, dialectical materialism, and the history of the Communist Party. And as if we were in the army, they forced us to write notes. Out of laziness, I began to write them on paper patterns, and then I realized that wearing a dress made from these patterns would look very ideological. So I covered the patterns with lectures on Marxism-Leninism.&rdquo; This work represents a collision of the multiple meanings and cultural realities of the time. Magazines with patterns were especially popular in the Soviet Union, as it was extremely difficult to get good clothes due to the severe shortage of consumer goods. People often sewed garments for themselves. And whereas these magazines are in a sense a symbol of the deficit of goods in the Soviet Union, the uniform &ldquo;bootleg&rdquo; recordings on them testify to the amount of time wasted on the endless memorization of &ldquo;party testaments.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Famous for their humorous and irreverent actions, in 1982 Mukhomor (Toadstool) group (Konstantin Zvezdochotov, Sven Gundlakh, brothers Vladimir and Sergei Mironenko, and Alexey Kamensky) created instructions for a performance. The artists&rsquo; friend, Andrei Degtaryev, was invited to take part. He arrived at Begovaya metro station at the appointed hour and received a train ticket and a map of the area from a stranger. In the country, 30 kilometers away from Moscow, Degtyarev used the map to find a freshly dug hole where there were two boxes with the following instructions: 1) reveal the next sheet only when you have fulfilled the previous instruction; 2) take off all of your clothes; 3) put on the clothes in the boxes; 4) put your clothes in the boxes and bury them; 5) return to Moscow with the train ticket provided. The boxes contained tarpaulin trousers, a padded jacket, and artificial leather boots. Degtaryev was planning to go to a birthday party after the action and was dressed smartly, in a corduroy three-piece suit (which was hard to come by, like any quality clothing). But that didn&rsquo;t prevent him from carrying out the instructions. Watching with a spy glass from a distance was Nikita Alexeev, invited by the members of Toadstool group. Gundlakh suggested the following interpretation of the performance: &ldquo;Among other things, we raised the question: How many people are needed for artistic act to take place?&rdquo; Incidentally, Degtaryev&rsquo;s clothes were returned to their owner a few days later.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 30

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<p class="p1">Underground artists adored Freud. Yuri Sobolev studied his article &ldquo;Delusion and Dream in Jensen&rsquo;s Gradiva.&rdquo; &Uuml;lo Sooster, perhaps ironically, confessed in a letter to a friend that he had discovered &ldquo;anal eroticism&rdquo; in his psyche, which explained why he rarely answered letters but did so in detail. Although less preoccupied with Freudian ideas, the artist and poet Vladimir Kovenatsky, as often happens, did things that beg psychoanalytic interpretation.</p>
<p class="p1">Thanks to Kovenatsky, the gatherings of passionate seekers of esoteric experiences in Yuri Mamleev&rsquo;s apartment in Yuzhinsky Lane became widely known as meetings of &ldquo;sexual mystics,&rdquo; as this was the subtitle of the &ldquo;art newspaper&rdquo; which Kovenatsky showed there. Bohemians who came to Yuzhinsky in search of orgies left disappointed by the serious, even religious atmosphere within the circle of researchers into divine and otherworldly realms.</p>
<p class="p1"><i>At Dawn </i>is not the only self-portrait capturing his encounter with horror. In his memoirs, Mamleev recalled that Kovenatsky &ldquo;had one drawing [. . .] in the foreground there is an artist sitting perkily with a canvas in front of him, and he [. . .] is drawing a nuclear explosion, a mushroom growing somewhere not that far away. This is Kovenatsky himself, his situation. The artist and the explosion of this world.&rdquo; <i>At Dawn </i>brings together the figure in a self-portrait with a shaved monster whose head slowly emerges from the depths (a metaphor for the unconscious, according to Freud). The shaved head and distorted facial features refer to the, unfortunately, still popular stereotype of a mental hospital patient. It may be that <i>At Dawn </i>depicts the ghost of the serious illness that would soon swallow Kovenatsky, in the 1980s, after his experiments with psychoactive substances.</p>
<p class="p1">&ldquo;But it cannot be that way,&rdquo; Mamleev continued, commenting on the drawing with the mushroom cloud. &ldquo;You cannot look into the eyes of your murderer and enjoy suffering his gaze. You cannot be permanently ruptured. The rupture should be followed by a breakthrough, resurrection, escape.&rdquo; Today, Kovenatsky&rsquo;s poems and drawings break through to the reader mainly thanks to references in the books and interviews of Viktor Pelevin, a contemporary writer who continues the Yuzhinsky Lane tradition of the psychedelic representation of Russian everyday life.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 27

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<p class="p1">To change something radically was a difficult task for an ordinary Soviet person. But to control things was rather easy. From the early 1970s, the authorities encouraged the formation of so-called bodies of public control, which recruited party members along with non-members who had passed the selection. As the French historian Nicolas Werth observed, these bodies soon grew into a whole army, with almost every sixth person serving in it. According to Werth, this structure &ldquo;stimulated voluntary participation in the life of society&rdquo; and attracted many educated individuals.</p>
<p class="p1">For Anatoly Zhigalov, the job of building supervisor was not a tool of control but provided access to a three-dimensional space. From the perspective of an artist, &ldquo;participation in the life of society&rdquo; through service in a body of public control is a parody in terms of content and vanguard in terms of form. &ldquo;In the 1970s I was a consistent and radical geometrist,&rdquo; explained Zhigalov. <i>My Last Work </i>&ldquo;declared a break with the conventional language of art (a square) and access to real space (a cube as a square in three-dimensional space).&rdquo; The multiple meanings of Zhigalov&rsquo;s work derive from the transformation of square into cube. A poster shows him offering to sell his &ldquo;last work.&rdquo; One month of artistic supervision costs 561,515 rubles and 62 kopeks. The price of the &ldquo;last work&rdquo; is the supervisor&rsquo;s salary of 82 rubles and 50 kopeks, cubed. Zhigalov planned to spend the money on digging a channel that would separate the European and Asian parts of Russia, and thus forever define the country&rsquo;s cultural localization.</p>
<p class="p1">&ldquo;My latest piece, <i>I Work as a Supervisor, </i>belongs to the people thrice,&rdquo; states Zhigalov on the poster. In fact, the work itself and the actions it implied (the laying of Avant-Garde Alley, for example) were addressed not to an abstract &ldquo;people&rdquo; but to &ldquo;deterritorialized milieus&rdquo; (to use anthropologist Alexei Yurchak&rsquo;s definition of the informal social circles of late socialism). The deterritorialized milieus, or &ldquo;our people,&rdquo; may quietly and without opposition affects respond to calls and slogans, and even repeat them, but they ignore the meaning of what is said. The most popular character of 1970s Soviet mass culture of was Max Otto von Stierlitz, the protagonist of the TV series <i>Seventeen Moments of Spring</i>. His &ldquo;last work&rdquo; was as a SS Standartenfuhrer, raising his hand in the Nazi salute where necessary, carrying out orders, and simultaneously working in a completely different dimension: Stierlitz was a Soviet spy tasked with finding out who in the German command was conducting secret negotiations with the United States and the allies. The lifestyle of the Nazi elite and Stierlitz is suspiciously similar to the status quo established during the era of stagnation in the Soviet Union: the rapprochement of Mueller and Bormann with the US toward the end of World War II perfectly correlates with the &ldquo;d&eacute;tente&rdquo; following President Nixon&rsquo;s 1972 visit to the Soviet Union. &ldquo;The regime is not on the attack but on the defense. Its motto is &lsquo;Don&rsquo;t touch us and we won&rsquo;t touch you&rsquo;,&rdquo; wrote dissident Andrei Amalrik in his prophetic text &ldquo;Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984?&rdquo;.</p>
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Sekretiki No. 22

<p class="p1">A plaster copy of an African ritual mask, sandwiched between a comedian&rsquo;s bald-head wig and a mass-produced bust of the Red Army Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, is not an obvious or predictable encounter. The mutant creature brought to life by overlapping cultural narratives belongs to the world of Prigov&rsquo;s storytelling. There are meanings running in all directions, searching in vain for a butterfly effect that could explain their sudden togetherness. The totality of each separate medium or social sign system is undermined by being combined with others.</p>
<p class="p1">The sculptural collage of found objects, created as a spoof of Soviet power and revealing its ritualistic and religious nature, is more than mere political critique. Its absurdity contains a mystical horror related to the cultural crises of the globalized world, where to endure doubt is the ultimate human condition and the starting point for a new type of anthropology with which to study our habits and social instincts.</p>

Sekretiki No. 4. Stones on Nikita Alexeev’s head

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