<p style="font-weight: 400;">Due to&nbsp;the expansion of&nbsp;open storage, Garage Library is&nbsp;no&nbsp;longer located in&nbsp;the Seasons of&nbsp;the Year pavilion. Loans are not currently available and the reading room is&nbsp;temporarily closed.</p>
<p style="font-weight: 400;">The reopening of&nbsp;the library in&nbsp;a&nbsp;new location will be&nbsp;announced in&nbsp;the second half of&nbsp;2027.</p>

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Display on Links between Art and Mass Culture in the Late Soviet Era

Art on the 1980s Wavelength

<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable">
<p class="text__small"><strong>Overview by Elena Ishenko, Maryana Karysheva, and Valeriy Ledenev</strong></p>
</header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<p class="text__lead" data-tpl-selection="">This spring, Garage is playing host to three exhibitions that explore environmental issues and their possible interpretations in art: Viktor Pivovarov&rsquo;s <em>The Snail&rsquo;s Trail</em>, Rashid Johnson&rsquo;s <em>Within Our Gates</em>, and Taryn Simon&rsquo;s <em>Action Research / The Stagecraft of Power</em>. This overview by Garage Research offers a selection of texts on related topics.</p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Demos.jpg" alt="" width="3115" height="3109" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin">T.J. Demos. &ldquo;Art After Nature.&rdquo;</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted"><em>Artforum</em> April 2012, Vol. 50 №8: 191&ndash;197</p>
<p><em>Art After Nature</em>, written by art critic and curator T. J. Demos, was published in <em>Artforum</em> four years ago in April 2012; it has not lost its relevance in the years that followed. Indeed, <em>Moscow Art Magazine</em> included the article in its latest issue, devoted to &ldquo;the natural and the digital.&rdquo; Offering an overview of some of the landmark works and the latest trends in artistic reflections on nature, Demos points to the growing interest in the subject and a surge in the number of exhibitions, catalogues, and articles exploring the relation between art and ecology.</p>
<p>Without denying the achievements of eco-art pioneers like Joseph Beuys, Agnes Denes, Peter Fend, and Hans Haacke, Demos notes that while raising our awareness of certain problems and phenomena, they also unintentionally objectified nature. However, drawing on Timothy Morton&rsquo;s theory of &ldquo;ecology without nature,&rdquo; he argues that today objectification of nature is no longer possible, as nature cannot be envisaged separately from humanity; all living creatures and inanimate objects have become interconnected through contemporary politics and sensibilities.</p>
<p>The majority of works discussed by Demos explore the increasingly visible links between ecology, economy, and law. With their <em>Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium</em> (2001/2014), Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway refute the thesis about market relations being inherent to human nature, while Amy Balkin&rsquo;s <em>Public Smog </em>(2004) exists at the intersection of ecology and finance: buying permits for discharging pollutants on emissions markets, the artist creates &ldquo;clean-air parks.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Another global environmental problem derives from the concept of biotic and monetary equivalence, which sees nature as a commodity. This concept, Demos points out, overlooks the fact that life forms are embedded in singular knots of local relations and cannot be substituted for one another.</p>
<p>The article also discusses a number of local initiatives that blur the boundaries between art and activism, such as Nils Norman&rsquo;s<em> Geocruiser</em> (2001&ndash;2004)&mdash;a coach with a greenhouse and a library powered by solar energy and bio-diesel&mdash;and the eco-communist, bioregionalist <em>Edible Park</em> (2010).</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">As attested by the choice of articles for the April issue of <em>Moscow Art Magazine</em>, the problems raised by the projects discussed in &ldquo;Art After Nature&rdquo; are still as pressing as ever, if now transformed by the general digitization of culture. Along with the article by Demos, the issue contains the previously mentioned <em>Ecology without Nature</em> by Timothy Morton; Nina Sosna&rsquo;s essay<em> Mineral Man</em>, which expands the understanding of the human beyond biology; an overview of Ivan Novikov&rsquo;s &ldquo;natural art&rdquo;; Clair Bishop&rsquo;s article &ldquo;Digital Divide,&rdquo; which examines the transformation of art in the digital era; and Boris Groys&rsquo; text on art&rsquo;s ability to convey the truth. <em>M.K.</em></p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Nature.jpg" alt="" width="1707" height="2452" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin"><em>Nature</em>. Edited by Jeffrey Kastner</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Cambridge: MIT Press and Whitechapel Gallery, 2012. &ndash; 239 pp.</p>
<p>This anthology by critic and senior editor of <em>Cabinet </em>Jeffrey Kastner is devoted to the art of the anthropocene&mdash;the epoch when every human has become an actor in the ecosystem and can have an impact on Earth&rsquo;s nature, as the editor himself insists in his foreword. The book examines art&rsquo;s engagement with environmental issues over the last 60 years (the age of the interdisciplinarity in art) as well as the dichotomy of nature and culture&mdash;the elusive difference between the natural and the artificial, and the artist&rsquo;s role as a mediator. &nbsp;</p>
<p>Discussing a number of ways in which art can interact with nature, and the imagery such interactions can produce, the book is split into three parts, each devoted to a particular discourse on nature and examining it as a socio-philosophical phenomenon that manifests itself in a certain kind of artistic strategy. Part one of the anthology&mdash;&ldquo;Material Zones&rdquo;&mdash;opens with &ldquo;Imagination and Matter&rdquo; by Gaston Bachelard, who introduces the reader to the basic concept of an environment consisting of living organisms that are created by fundamental biological processes on the one on hand and independent subjects on the other. The following pages are devoted to the analyses of works by the pioneers of land art: Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, and Hans Haacke, among others. Part two is titled &ldquo;Evolutionary Ideas&rdquo; and focuses on the concept of post-humanism. It contains interviews and essays by Stelarc, Pierre Huyghe, and Philippe Parreno.</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">The most interesting section of the book with regard to the ecology of artistic imagery is &ldquo;Cognition and Conscience,&rdquo; which looks into the questions posed by the (de)humanization of nature. In his famous &ldquo;What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,&rdquo; American thinker Thomas Nagel links the proposition that all living creatures have a consciousness to the subjective nature of their perceptive experiences and thus questions the correlation between being and consciousness, laying the path for speculative realists. The book ends with an excerpt from &ldquo;Will Non-Humans Be Saved? An Argument in Ecotheology&rdquo; by sociologist and philosopher Bruno Latour, one of the primary developers of actor-network theory, who combines science with theology in order to replace the old opposition of subject and object with that of nature and creation. <em>E. I.</em></p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Documenta.jpg" alt="" width="2704" height="3336" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin"><em>DOCUMENTA (13). The Books of Books</em>. Catalogue 1/3.</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012. &ndash; 767 pp.</p>
<p>The three green volumes of the <em>DOCUMENTA (13)</em> catalogue seem to have embodied its artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev&rsquo;s love of ecology. Apart from the usual exhibition guide with a full list of participants (not only artists) and their projects (volume 3), the catalogue contains the story of the exhibition&rsquo;s making (volume 2, <em>The Logbook</em>) and <em>The Book of Books</em> (volume 1).</p>
<p><em>The Book of Books </em>is of particular interest: the 800-page tome contains 100 texts, including articles by thinkers like Gy&ouml;rgy Luk&aacute;cs, Walter Benjamin, Franco &ldquo;Bifo&rdquo; Berardi, feminist scholar Griselda Pollock, film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, curators &Eacute;douard Glissant&nbsp;and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artists Donna Haraway, Salvador Dal&iacute; and William Kentridge, psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, and physicist Anton Zeilinger. Reproducing the publication series <em>100 Notes&mdash;100 Thoughts</em>, <em>The Book of Books </em>consists of excerpts, sketches, project outlines&mdash;often unfinished and discrete fragments of thought. Assembled in one book, these texts, in the words of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, &ldquo;explore political emancipation through imagination.&rdquo;</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">In <em>The Third Table</em> (No. 085, p. 540) philosopher Graham Harman discusses the concepts of speculative realism and object-oriented philosophy, offering a new perspective on the objective world and, as a consequence, on art. The title is a reference to a lecture by Arthur Eddington, in which the physicist spoke of two tables: the ordinary table of the everyday (or, the table of humanities, which are focused on humans and society), and the table made of atoms and electrons (or the table of science). The two tables represented two different cultures. However, Harman, being a speculative realist, claims that none of Eddington&rsquo;s perspectives allow us to see the table as an autonomous thing without reducing it to its constituents or visual aspects. Such objects are inaccessible to sensory perception and human reason, and can only be studied indirectly (which is why they evade definition and are suspended between Eddington&rsquo;s two cultures). Searching for an apparatus that would allow us to make sense of such phenomena, Harman comes to the conclusion that a third perspective&mdash;offered by the culture of arts&mdash;comes closest to them, pointing out that artists do normally create works that cannot be reduced to the sum of their elements or their utilitarian function. Harman finishes with calling on philosophy to abandon its aspiration of becoming a science and instead make use of the energy offered by art. <em>E. I.</em></p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Istanbul.jpg" alt="" width="1296" height="2216" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin"><em>Tuzlu Su / Saltwater</em>. 14th Istanbul Biennial Catalogue</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Istanbul: IKSV, 2015. &ndash; 540 pp.</p>
<p>Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev&rsquo;s opus magnum<em> DOCUMENTA (13)</em> stirred debate and a wave of interpretations that secured her the top position in the 2012 Art Review Power 100&mdash;the magazine&rsquo;s list of the most influential people in art. Although it built on the logic of the Kassel exhibition, the 14<sup>th</sup> Istanbul Biennial, also curated by Christov-Bakargiev, was a more tempered take on the subject.</p>
<p>In Istanbul, she became a curator-archaeologist exploring the historical layers beneath the surface of the visible world in search of the social and ecological tensions and collisions that have determined our present.</p>
<p>Some of the key metaphors Christov-Bakargiev uses in the introduction to the publication are &ldquo;salty water,&rdquo; &ldquo;waves,&rdquo; and &ldquo;knots.&rdquo; Salt and water are essential constituents of living organisms. At the same time, salt has caused wars and conflicts; having access to salt might be a matter of survival, and it is used to preserve food. Salty water is the ocean&mdash;the space of great discoveries, &ldquo;endless waters and darkness in my mind,&rdquo; in the words of writer Orhan Pamuk, who has also contributed to the catalogue. &ldquo;Knots,&rdquo; Bakargiev explains, &ldquo;are arrested movements, hiccups in the flow of waves. [The Biennial] looks at the waves of history when time slows down and movement is arrested &lt;&hellip;&gt; We look at these knotted lines through the lens of our troubled times, we look at them archeologically, turning over the stones.&rdquo; &nbsp;</p>
<p>Refusing to follow any strict logic, in Istanbul Bakargiev exhibited works by contemporary artists like Pierre Huyghe, Cildo Meireles and Michelangelo Pistoletto next to drawings by psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan and Norwegian mathematician Carl St&oslash;rmer and writings by participants of Cansu &Ccedil;akal&rsquo;s feminist master class in the Istanbul city center. The selection of texts in the catalogue reflects the heterogeneity of the show and brings together texts as different as Boris Groys&rsquo; poetic essay comparing our perception of time to an image of a waves washing ashore and an article on theosophist and one of the first feminists, Annie Besant (whose drawings were also presented in the Biennial). There is also a piece by Lacanian psychoanalyst Jean-Michel Vappereau and a fascinating essay on rivers at the bottom of the ocean that change the Earth&rsquo;s surface by geologist Jeffrey Peakall.</p>
<p>One of the most interesting contributions to the catalogue is an article by Griselda Pollock discussing the work of Christine Taylor Patten, who also took part in Christov-Bakargiev&rsquo;s project. Summing up her analysis of Patten&rsquo;s series of 2,000 drawings, Pollock offers her perspective on the future of art &ldquo;after nature.&rdquo; &ldquo;We are blessed at the moment with a richness of thought about this question of life as human life in its visible and invisible complexity,&rdquo; she states, &ldquo;which, for [Hannah] Arendt, was political in its deepest sense, and about the relation of such a human life to other organisms whose &lsquo;life&rsquo; and liveliness we can now detect at macro levels hitherto unknown due to amazing firms of technological advance&hellip;&rdquo; Detect&mdash;and make them visible, she adds, without turning to dominant narratives, but using our language as the original structure that &ldquo;decentralizes&rdquo; as it creates. <em>V.L.</em></p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_Joselit.jpg" alt="" width="1960" height="2809" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin">Дэвид Джозелит. <em>Против репрезентации</em> [David Joselit. Against Representation]</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Художественный журнал №94 2015. &ndash; с. 46&ndash;52</p>
<p>The article by acclaimed American art theorist David Joselit, co-author of <em>Art Since 1900</em> (recently republished by Garage and Ad Marginem Press) is devoted to Pierre Huyghe&rsquo;s work <em>Untilled</em> (2011&ndash;2012), which was exhibited at <em>DOCUMENTA (13)</em>. However, it is essentially a theoretical essay on the ecology of the image.</p>
<p>Huyghe&rsquo;s work seems to resonate with Rashid Johnson&rsquo;s installation that is currently on show at Garage. Both works have sculptural elements (in Huyghe&rsquo;s case, a statue depicting a naked woman surrounded by piles of building material) and are partially made of organic matter (in Huyghe&rsquo;s case, a beehive, plants, etc), which lives and thus transforms the entire installation. Joselit is primarily interested in the economy of the image: how does the &ldquo;situation&rdquo; (as Huyghe calls it) created by the artist become visible to the viewer&mdash;accessible to the viewer&rsquo;s perception?</p>
<p>Analyzing the production of images, Joselit reminds us that this process is always at risk of being taken over by the commercial industry of representation. On the other hand, image perception is a subjective process determined by social and psychological forces that form human as a subject&mdash;a subject subservient to &ldquo;king &lt;&hellip;&gt; World Bank.&rdquo;</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">The logic of representation, to which even the most critical art tends to adhere, is the reductionist logic of avoiding contradictions and fragmentation. According to Joselit, one should subvert this logic by rejecting the opportunity to be represented, as representation is determined by the power structure and is inherently repressive. Do not create an image, but &ldquo;surround it&rdquo; in order to then destroy it: this strategy seems to be present in Huyghe&rsquo;s work, where &ldquo;the presumed equation between objects and images collapses into a compost heap&rdquo; and &ldquo;uncomposed and decomposing&rdquo; materials of <em>Untilled </em>surround&nbsp;an &ldquo;image in order to unsettle it.&rdquo; <em>V.L.</em></p>
</article>
</section>

Writings on 'Art After Nature'

<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable">
<p class="text__small"><strong>Overview by Ilmira Bolotyan, Maryana Karysheva and Valeriy Ledenev</strong></p>
</header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<p class="text__lead" data-tpl-selection="">With volumes written on the term &ldquo;contemporary&rdquo; in relation to art practices and hundreds of publications discussing the difference between modern and contemporary art, a complete overview of sources on the subject in one article seems impossible. This selection of books, available in Garage Library, offers an introduction to one of the central problems in art theory.</p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_opros.jpg" alt="" width="2042" height="2683" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin">Questionnaire on &ldquo;The Contemporary&rdquo;</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">October 130 Fall 2009. &ndash; pp. 3 &ndash; 125.</p>
<p>In autumn 2009<em> October</em> asked a number of American and European critics and curators to define &ldquo;contemporary&rdquo;. Paradigms like &ldquo;the neo-avant-garde&rdquo; and &ldquo;postmodernism&rdquo; have become a matter of the past without giving place to a new grand narrative, while today&rsquo;s art practices seem to float free of historical determination. At the same time, contemporary art has long been institutionalized: universities and museums run contemporary art courses and programs, overseen by corresponding departments. The question is: how real is such indeterminacy? Is it rooted in the local context and what are its causes?</p>
<p>Some of October&rsquo;s respondents focus on the contemporary art discourse in academia. Julia Bryan-Wilson points out that the main task in teaching contemporary art is not so much to analyze contemporary trends but to predict future ones, while Grant Kester reminds us that only a few decades ago contemporary art was not part of the standard academic program, and was commented on by journalists and not scholars.</p>
<p>James Elkins dismisses the concept of &ldquo;contemporary&rdquo; as useless in the postcolonial age that has rejected grand cultural narratives in favor of small or local models.</p>
<p>According to Richard Meier, today&rsquo;s students writing on the history of art increasingly focus on the current situation: artists of their own generation, recent exhibition projects or biennales &mdash; while their arguments are increasingly based on recent theory and critique.</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">Mark Godfrey argues that artists, curators and critics, &nbsp;have begun to feel ambivalent about the very idea of the contemporary, if the contemporary is understood as belonging to one&rsquo;s own time. Artists no longer see their practice as a development of, or dialogue with the past generations. Reflecting on their own position in the world, they often resist economic, social and political conditions of the present and are not particularly interested in the opportunities of the present, which means they do not use new technologies to articulate their protest. T.J. Demos places the emergence of the field of global contemporary art in 1989, a year marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the culmination of perestroika in the USSR and liberalization in China. These have led to the emergence of a network of international exhibitions around the world. This <em>was</em> globalization, a new global narrative, which reflected the triumph of neoliberal economy in art. Invoking the terms of Jacques Ranci&egrave;re, T.J. Demos calls on us to rethink globalization as an aesthetic-political project that challenges the forces of economic, social and political inequality, bringing alternate systems to life. <em>M. K.</em></p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_bishop.jpg" alt="" width="1666" height="2347" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin"><strong>Клэр Бишоп. Радикальная музеология. [Claire Bishop. Radical Museology]</strong></h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">М.: Ад Маргинем Пресс, 2014. &mdash; 96 с.</p>
<p>Discussing the history of &ldquo;the contemporary&rdquo;, Claire Bishop, professor at&nbsp;the&nbsp;<em>City University</em>&nbsp;of New York, points to the flexibility of the term. What used to stand for &ldquo;post-war&rdquo; in the 1990s, later came to mean &ldquo;starting in the 1960s&rdquo;, and is now often associated with the period from 1989 to the present. According to Claire Bishop, neither of these chronologies is completely correct. China, Africa and India, she argues, will have different histories of contemporary art, dating back to different decades, and no chronology will encompass what has been going on in every part of the world, which means &ldquo;contemporary&rdquo; becomes a discursive category or a question of temporal disjunction.</p>
<p>Bishop proposes two discursive approaches to defining &ldquo;contemporaneity&rdquo;: either it denotes stasis or a break with postmodernism by asserting a plural and disjunctive relationship to temporality. The latter approach, she argues, is more generative: it envisages a &ldquo;dialectic contemporaneity&rdquo;, where multiple temporalities coexist within a more politicized horizon. Not only should we be aware of the fact that different periods are present in every historical object, but we should ask ourselves why particular temporalities appear in particular works at a particular moment. To resist our contemporary presentism &mdash; or obsession with the present moment &mdash; we need to remain focused on the future: &lsquo;the ultimate aim is to disrupt the relativist pluralism of the current moment, in which all styles and beliefs are considered equally valid, and to move towards a more sharply politicized understanding of where we can and should be heading&rsquo;.</p>
<p>Bishop believes that museums with historical collections have become the best testing ground for a non-presentist, multi-temporal contemporaneity. Criticizing presentist thematic hangs, she discusses a number of new collection display paradigms that present a new category of contemporaneity: the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sof&iacute;a in Madrid, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova (MSUM)&nbsp;in Ljubljana.</p>
<p>Each of the institutions discussed has displayed its collection to suggest a provocative rethinking of contemporary art in terms of a specific relationship to history. &nbsp;The Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, whose catalogues are also available in Garage Library,&nbsp;has to reconcile the desire to represent the nation-state with the need to find its place in the transnational world of contemporary art. The solution offered by MSUM curators is self-reflection: an attempt to compare the ideals of Yugoslav &lsquo;self-management&rsquo; with the &lsquo;authentic interests of contemporary art&rsquo;.</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">Thanks to their clear political programs, Bishop concludes, the three institutions in question stand out among the presentist museums whose exhibition policy is determined exclusively by market interests. <em>I. B.</em></p>
</article>
</section>
<section class="text__review mceNonEditable"><header class="text__review__header mceEditable"><img src="//cdn-ec-static.garagemca.org/storage/tinymce_asset/compressed_joselit.jpg" alt="" width="1949" height="2812" /></header>
<article class="text__review__content mceEditable">
<h2 class="text__nomargin">Дэвид Джозелит. Об агрегаторах [David Joselit. On Aggregators]</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Художественный журнал №95 2015. - С. 112 - 122.</p>
<p>Until recently, David Joselit writes, the term &ldquo;contemporary&rdquo; was a neutral descriptor indicating an object&rsquo;s or phenomenon&rsquo;s recentness or belonging to its time. Today, it has acquired an ideological flavor. &ldquo;Contemporary&rdquo; has replaced the styles and movements of the past: it is a global language, more or less shared by artists and art professionals around the world.</p>
<p>As a methodological framework for a description of contemporaneity, Joselit chooses the concept of international style: international style is the dialect contemporary art speaks. &ldquo;The distinction between a &ldquo;period&rdquo; and a &rdquo;style&rdquo; may sound purely academic, but there are important distinctions: Periodization suggests a succession of visual languages, a string of new paradigms, whereas an international style encompasses the adoption and adaptation of an existing idiom by a culturally and geographically diverse, even unlimited, array of producers. &lt;&hellip;&gt; an international style arises when a visual language has reached a point of saturation, when its dissemination has allowed it to become legible throughout a global world.&rdquo;</p>
<p>Style implies a number of common characteristics and simultaneity of their manifestations. However, international style and contemporary art are rather defined by uneven development conditioned by globalization. International style is &ldquo;a frame of potential growth&rdquo;, a dialect open for individual interpretations.</p>
<p>Unlike a style that has emerged in a particular time and space and was then exported to new territories, international style does not only foster &ldquo;the standard&rdquo;, but encourages the invention of new lexical formats, which invite enunciations related to particular time and places and thus having &ldquo;rhetorical urgency &lt;&hellip;&gt; eloquence, and even &lt;&hellip;&gt; beauty&rdquo;.</p>
<p>Aggregators, exemplified by curated communication circuits like <em>Contemporary Art Daily</em> or <em>Art.sy</em>, are a perfect model of &ldquo;the contemporary&rdquo;. Aggregator is a model of accumulation where relatively autonomous elements retain their values and ideals.</p>
<p>On the other hand, aggregators (and therefore contemporaneity) are characterized by uneven development and asynchrony that has to do with local differences (compare the history of contemporary art in the former Soviet Union, Western Europe and China) as much as it is does with hierarchies within the art world and institutions rejecting anything that does not fall into the category of international style.</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">The model of asynchronous contemporaneity as an aggregator of various artistic and lexical forms inspires optimism. Not only it affirms heterogeneity and complexity of the world, but also it allows &ldquo;asynchronous objects to occupy a common space&rdquo;, and allows us to see their unique meaning without dismissing them as unimportant or secondary. <em>V.L.</em></p>
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<h2 class="text__nomargin">Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present. Edited by Alexander Dumbadze and Suzanne Hudson.</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Oxford: John Wiley &amp; Sons, 2013. - 494 pp.</p>
<p>This collection of essays is split into several sections exploring the key issues relating to contemporary art (education, art market, the questions of media etc.). The first section is entirely devoted to the concept of contemporary, and an essay by the French philosopher Jean-Philippe Antoine offers the most interesting perspective on the subject.</p>
<p>According to Jean-Philippe Antoine, contemporary is not a time period which we have to accept as a given, but something we construct as we write its history. The new and the contemporary (he often uses these terms as synonyms) are inseparable from the past, but build on it by creating and affirming otherness and singularity.</p>
<p>&ldquo;As once stated by the late nineteenth-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, history is above all a record of inventions,&rdquo; Antoine explains. &ldquo;Aside from fiction, history is the one discourse that has the potency not to dissolve invention into repetitious sameness. &lt;...&gt; As a consequence, a special responsibility emerges for artists and scholars to take care of the new, of the now, in terms of building for it a history.&rdquo;</p>
<p>&ldquo;That means that the contemporary,&rdquo; he concludes, &ldquo;far from identifying with the &ldquo;present&rdquo; &lt;...&gt; actually consists in the knitting together of a specific variety of times.&rdquo;</p>
<p>This variety of times consists of the past moments that have determined the way we understand the present. These moments live inside us like ghosts of Christmas past, but are no longer &ldquo;ready-mades of historical or stylistic periods&rdquo;. Instead, they have turned into &ldquo;shocking artefacts questioning our awareness of the now, and ultimately shaping our present.&rdquo;</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">At the same time, an analysis of the contemporary gives us a key to understanding the past, which is no more predetermined than the present, but appears to a contemporary viewer as a discrete trajectory in its making, a performing history.</p>
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<h2 class="text__nomargin">Терри Смит. Осмысляя современное кураторство. [Terry Smith. Thinking Contemporary Curating]</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">М.: Ад Маргинем Пресс, 2015. - 272 с</p>
<p>The writings of Australian critic Terry Smith present some of the most constructive ideas about the concept of contemporary. One of his works devoted to the definition of the term is <em>Our Contemporaneity?</em> published in <em>Contemporary Art: 1989 to the Present</em><em>.</em></p>
<p>To Smith, contemporary means a lived difference, coexistence of incompatible points of view in the absence of a universal art-historical narrative. Contemporaneity exists in versatile forms of the past coming to life and the desired future as seen from an experienced or a possible present. Contemporaneity cannot have strict conceptual borders and cannot be described in premade formulas.&nbsp; It is a form that one cannot define in advance.</p>
<p>In <em>Thinking Contemporary Curating,</em> published by Garage in collaboration with Ad Marginem Press, Terry Smith returns to the concept of contemporaneity in every other chapter. Insisting on its irreducibility to what is current or fashionable, or to some general formula, he points to the multiplicity of images of the past it offers us.</p>
<p data-tpl-selection="">On the other hand, that which we do not see as contemporary today appeared so before, and therefore any contemporaneity has a history, which, as Smith believes, it is up to the curator to discover in different cultural phenomena (the everyday, technology, human relations, sexuality).&nbsp; &ldquo;If we are contemporaries with the artist, the artwork makes its claim upon us in the time of our times, that is, our shared temporality,&rdquo; he argues. &ldquo;If we are not contemporaries with the artist, the artwork invites the possibility of such a sharing &ndash; in a past time, or an imagines other time &ndash; as an act of empathy that we know will be partial, temporary, but perhaps no less valuable for that.&rdquo; <em>V.L.</em></p>
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Publications on the concept of “contemporary” in contemporary art

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<p class="text__small"><strong>Overview by Elena Ishenko, Maryana Karysheva and Valery Ledenev</strong></p>
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<p class="text__lead" data-tpl-selection="">Since the early 1990s, Slovenian art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst&mdash; whose exhibition <a href="/en/exhibition/nsk-from-kapital-to-capital">NSK: FROM <em>KAPITAL</em> TO CAPITAL</a> is now on show at Garage&mdash;have been working on a project of a virtual state with no territory and no borders. Garage Research have prepared an overview of publications on NSK, the &ldquo;NSK State in Time&rdquo; and similar initiatives by other artists.</p>
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<h2 class="text__nomargin">Посольство NSK в Москве: Буклет проекта [NSK Embassy in Moscow: Booklet]</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Moscow, Regina Gallery, 1992, 16 pp.</p>
<p>In 1992 Neue Slowenische Kunst announced the creation of the &ldquo;NSK State in Time&rdquo;, a virtual entity that &lsquo;rejects the categories of (defined) territory and the principle of national borders and advocates the law of transnationality&rsquo;. The NSK Moscow Embassy opened in May the same year. The opening was accompanied by an exhibition and, more importantly, a public program, which invited reflection on world politics after communism. NSK embassies have also opened in Ghent, Berlin and Sarajevo.</p>
<p>The NSK Moscow Embassy opened as part of Viktor Misiano&rsquo;s project <em>APT-ART International </em>supported by Regina Gallery. As well as the booklet, published for the opening, Garage Library holds a Regina Gallery catalogue, featuring a long article on the embassy by Lyudmila Bredikhina. <em>V. L.</em></p>
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<h2 class="text__nomargin">Мастерская Юпа ван Лисхаута. Город рабов [Joep van Lieshout Studio. Slave City. Cradle to Cradle]</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Moscow, Winzavod CCA, 2009, 144 pp.</p>
<p>Joep van Lieshout Studio&rsquo;s first <em>Slave City</em> works date back to 2005. Regularly producing new work, the studio has since accumulated a large stock of designs, diagrams, sketches and sculptures that comprise the project. <em>Slave City</em> is a rationally organized autonomous and self-sustaining settlement of the future that takes the idea of zero waste production to the extreme. Its inhabitants, or&mdash;in the studio&rsquo;s terms&mdash;participants are workers, as well as the principle source of energy (biogas being produced from human waste), and eventually food for the others. Human recycling solves the problem of food supply as well as overpopulation. The studio has calculated the land surface needed for all of the city&rsquo;s buildings and infrastructure, as well as the initial funding and potential profit. Absolute rationality and contemporary preoccupation with ecology and zero waste lifestyle in the absence of traditional moral principles&mdash;such is the future portrayed by the authors of the project. <em>M. K.</em></p>
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<h2 class="text__nomargin">Grammar of Freedom / Five Lessons: Works from the Arteast 2000+ Collection, Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Moscow, Art Guide, 2015, 200 pp.</p>
<p>The 2015 Garage exhibition <em>Grammar of Freedom / Five Lessons</em> included a six-minute film <em>Pastan</em> by Ebrossyn Meldibekov. Pastan is an invented state featured in a number of Meldibekov&rsquo;s projects, including his work for the 2005 Venice Biennale, where he introduced himself as its citizen. According to the artist, many visitors nodded in response, as if they had heard about the country before or even travelled there. <em>V. L.</em></p>
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<h2 class="text__nomargin">Chinati. The Vision of Donald Judd</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Marfa: The Chinati Foundation; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. &mdash; 327 pp.</p>
<p>Donald Judd&rsquo;s minimalist art explored form at its simplest and had little to do with invented states. However, his artistic strategy did dramatically change a real town. In 1973, Judd moved from New York to Marfa, Texas and started buying land with abandoned warehouses and hangars, eventually turning the acquired land into an art residency. The book tells the story of the residency, which later became the Chinati Foundation, a contemporary art museum that became the heart of Marfa&mdash;a place where the American desert has been purged of the usual symbols of American capitalism with no branches of big banks or McDonalds.</p>
<p>Chinati residents included Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, John Chamberlain, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Long and Ilya Kabakov&mdash;minimalist artists like Judd whose art interested him in terms of his own work with space. The book contains detailed descriptions of works produced in the residency, artist&rsquo;s sketches, and Judd&rsquo;s own texts expressing his admiration of the landscape and his intent to make art that would be inseparable from its environment.</p>
<p>With Judd&rsquo;s texts and a great number of photographs, the book offers an example of an artist&rsquo;s idea&mdash;one that is far from any political agendas&mdash;intervening into the social landscape of a city and changing the lives of its inhabitants. <em>E. I.</em></p>
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<h2 class="text__nomargin">Interrogation Machine: Laibach and NSK (Short Circuits)</h2>
<p class="text__small text__muted">Cambridge MA, MIT Press, 2005, 314 pp.</p>
<p>Written by Alexei Monroe and published by MIT Press in 2005, this book on the art collective Neue Slowenische Kunst is not (as the author states at the beginning of the book) the biography we might expect it to be.</p>
<p>&ldquo;The point of my research has always been to establish NSK as an extremely significant subject about which it is legitimate to be uneasy or distrustful of, but which nonetheless should not be excluded from the history of its time because of a preference for less problematic but infinitely lighter or more simplistic artistic phenomena&rdquo;.</p>
<p>The book traces the evolution of the collective from its beginning to the latest works, made just before publication. The text also provides a political and historical context for a better understanding of NSK&rsquo;s works. <em>V. L.</em></p>
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<p>&nbsp;</p>

Publications on Artist States