Knock, knock, anyone at home? In the Footsteps of Apartment Exhibitions in 1970s-80s Moscow

At first, I was thrilled with this exhibition. Right in the first room – my beloved Oskar Rabin! Kitchen conversations brought to life in a literal sense, stories of eccentricities within apartments.

This is what the exhibit about Moscow apartment exhibitions of the 1970s and 80s looked like. But a deeper dive is necessary: the information at the exhibition which is now on view in ROSIZO in Moscow was sometimes incomplete or not entirely clear, because something had been left out in the descriptions. I supplemented it with materials I found. I've sorted everything out for you.

In 1958, Rabin opened the doors of his shack-like home in Lianozovo, and it was a huge success. Starting from that period, a sincere, internal impulse for artists to show their work and open their homes to do so became apparent.

The 1970s

Then, we're immediately thrown into the mid-1970s. Seeking opportunities to show their work, artists wrote a collective letter, initiated by Oskar Rabin, addressed to the Moscow City Council (Mossovet). It contained a request to show paintings outdoors "on a Moscow wasteland on September 15, 1974, from 12 to 2 PM." Before this, exhibitions had never been held outdoors, so there was no explicit prohibition against them. Deliberate delay "from above" in providing a response created a situation "in between": the exhibition wasn't approved, but it wasn't forbidden either. This was the famous Bulldozer Exhibition, marking the beginning of the Khrushchev Thaw.

Participants and journalists (many of whom were foreigners) were dispersed by bulldozers. After negative reactions outside the USSR, the party leadership had to make concessions: they allowed an open-air exhibition in Izmailovo Park at the end of September 1974, and in the "Beekeeping" pavilion at the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy (VDNKh) in February 1975, and then in the House of Culture at VDNKh (where, by the way, only artists with Moscow residency permits were allowed).

In preparation for the exhibition at VDNKh, apartment exhibitions gained a semi-legal status: they were called "viewing" exhibitions and provided a qualitatively new, systematic approach to apartment exhibitions. Their execution became not just isolated events located in different apartments in Moscow, but well-thought-out showings with changing expositions, discussions, and selections of potential works for a collective exhibition.

In other words, they became an independent and sustainable phenomenon, organized by different groups, hosting total installations and performances.

The Vasya Museum

For example, Georgy Kizevalter's "Vasya Museum" from 1983, realized in the artist's room in a communal apartment on Bolshaya Polyanka.

The "Vasya Belov Museum" ("Meet: Vasya") is a unified space dedicated to the ideal, or rather, the average, most ordinary Soviet person of the early 1980s. It's a specific person, and the viewer enters a museum dedicated to him. It was important for Georgy Kizevalter that the concept of an environment was maintained, and that each individual work added something to the overall image of the hero. Vasi Belov's story is as follows: he works as a chauffeur for the director of some enterprise, but has ambitions (he's studying journalism by correspondence) and plans for his entire life, which are already all laid out and constructed according to the principles of "how a Soviet person should live."

The hero's image was broken down into all physical and spiritual components, which was reflected in the "Content of Vasya" and in the "Collected Works of Vasi Belov." In general, the exhibits consisted of various objects (hand-made & ready-made): slogans and photographs from Vasi's family history and numerous words for unrespected newspapers – examples of Vasi Belov's creativity, some things from his house, and comments.

Oh, Malta

Three years later, he created the "Paul I" project. The Russian emperor was the Grand Master of the Order of Malta, but never actually visited Malta. His portrait and accompanying text, children's drawings, an art critic's opinion, which also became part of the project – all of this is a multi-layered construction of Georgy Kizevalter's artistic method, drawing a fine line between the character and the real artist, the subject and knowledge, and influencing perception.

Museum of nonconformism

The nonconformists were very self-organized. Otherwise, there would have been no Moscow Archive of New Art (MANI), and no museum dedicated to it.

MANI was invented by Andrey Monastyrsky, Lev Rubinstein and Nikita Alekseyev in the mid-1970s, and from 1981 to 1986, 5 MANI folders were collected, which included texts, envelopes with descriptions and photos of artists’ projects, correspondence, homemade exhibition catalogues and various other artifacts documenting the artistic processes of that period, which would fit into an A4 envelope.

By the time the idea of creating the MANI Museum arose in 1988, the MANI circle of artists had already formed, consisting of about 40 artists with an active core of 15-20 people.

The MANI Museum can be called a kind of sixth MANI folder. It was collected in Nikolai Panikov's country house, where there was a large free space on the second floor. The MANI Museum's collection was truly diverse, but it had a distinctive feature: many large-format works that were difficult to store in the artist's studio or leave behind when he traveled, and thus it was possible to preserve them within the museum. In fact, preservation was the primary goal of the collection.

As a unique historical and artistic work that combines the features of an archive, a catalog, an artistic almanac, and an art object in its own right, the MANI folders provide an opportunity to explore the diverse range of artistic ideas and strategies that emerged in the early 1980s, marking the end of the era of unofficial art.

Thus, from the self-organized archive, in fact the first museum of the Moscow conceptual circle, an institution emerged, which, together with all the MANI projects, having created a serious research base, became one of the tools for legitimizing this layer of culture. It has been preserved to the present day, and works are provided for various exhibitions.