Towards a Horizontal History of Soviet Conceptualism
Towards a Horizontal History of Soviet Conceptualism

Summary/Abstract: Moscow Conceptualism has come to represent the conceptual turn that took place in the unofficial art of the Soviet Union in the early 1970s. The aim of this paper is to make the histories of the movement more horizontal and bring attention to the variety of art centres that contributed to the emergence of the Soviet branch of Conceptual art. Special attention is given to the capitals of the Soviet Baltics, where similar intellectual tendencies surfaced at the end of 1960s and matured during the 1970s. What these new tendencies, appearing in parallel in Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius, had in common was the critique of the modernist notion of art as that of a subjective, single, auratic object, which the first half of the 20th century had cultivated in art. The paper also suggests that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, East European art historians could rethink the theory of horizontal art history offered by the Polish art historian Piotr Piotrowski for researching socialist art histories of the post-World War II period. Extending the notion of Moscow Conceptualism through the more horizontal and inclusive Soviet Conceptualism could be the first step in this process of decolonising the histories of the movement in the Soviet Union.

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