An archive-based video project to mark Joseph Backstein’s 80th birthday.
Joseph Backstein (1945–2024)—a curator, art historian, and critic who, during his lifetime, was referred to as the engine of Russian contemporary art—was also a camera operator. Garage Archive Collection holds several dozen videos he took in the late 1980s and early 1990s on his personal camera, featuring actions and exhibitions at the Avant-Garde Club (KLAVA), the first exhibitions of Soviet nonconformist art abroad, artists’ trips to the UK, Germany, Italy, the USA, and France, and family and historical events. Many videos of Moscow and international exhibition openings, TV broadcasts and interviews, as well as artworks by his friends and alumni of the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art (today named after him) captured Backstein as an operator of a different sort—a mediator, a communication agent, a collocutor.
Bringing together videos made by and featuring Joseph Backstein, The Backstein Function² traces the history of Russian contemporary art from the apartment exhibitions and «collective actions» of the 1980s to large international projects such as the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art.
«The point is that removing the function of an intermediary associated with the name of Joseph Backstein does not remove the Backstein function within us. Strictly speaking, one cannot perform an action without Backstein as the universal operator of contemporaneity—everyone has their own inherent Backstein within. Seven or eight years ago, he was a reliable machine to measure the strength of group ties; today, he can be used to measure the depth of contemporaneity as an essential film enveloping every event, ” wrote philosopher and cultural historian Mikhail Ryklin in 1996. In 1999, the name of Joseph Backstein became a term when the definition of the Backstein function as a universal operator of contemporaneity was included in the Dictionary of the Moscow Conceptualist School.
The public program includes meetings with artists, art historians, and Joseph Backstein’s colleagues.
Curator: Elmira Minkina
Project team: Vladislav Voropaev, Polina Glukhova, Nikolay S.-Frantsuzov, Dmitry Strukovnikov, Sergey Fyodorov, Vladislav Chikarevsky.
