Moscow Conceptualists

The Moscow Conceptualist, or Russian Conceptualist, artistic and literary movement began with the Sots art of Komar and Melamid in the early 1970s Soviet Union, and continued as a trend in Soviet nonconformist art into the 1980s. It attempted to subvert socialist ideology using the strategies of western conceptual art and appropriation art. It was an artistic counterpoint to Socialist Realism, and the artists experimented aesthetically in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, performance, and literature. As Joseph Bakshtein explained, "The creation of this nonconformist tradition was impelled by the fact that an outsider in the Soviet empire stood alone against a tremendous state machine, a great Leviathan that threatened to engulf him. To preserve one's identity in this situation, one had to create a separate value system, including a system of aesthetic values."¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Moscow Conceptualists”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Moscow Conceptualists is Russian artistic movement, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶