Günter Hirt, Sascha Wonder
Moscow Concept 1985
Author(s) Günter Hirt, Sascha Wonder
Format softcover 16 x 22 cm
Year 2021
Language(s) Russian, English, German
Pages 56 × 3 books
Description
Moscow Concept 1985 Performance | Poésie | Studios
Videos / Reissue Günter Hirt / Sascha WonderVideos with Nikita Alexeev, Joseph Backstein, Erik Bulatov, Ivan Chuikov, Collective Actions / Kollektivnye deistviya, Ilya Kabakov, Andrei Monastyrski, Irina Nakhova, Vladimir Naumets, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Toadstool/Mukhomor, Oleg Vassiliev, Vadim ZakharovGünter Hirt & Sascha Wonders: MOSCOW CONCEPT 1985PERFORMANCE /POETRY/STUDIOS Reissue, Wuppertal: EDITION S PRESS 2021
In the 1970s and 1980s, an alternative art scene emerged in Moscow, developing its activities beyond state censorship and the cultural establishment: These activities took place primarily in apartments, studios, and in nature. A "domestic avant-garde culture" developed within this circle of friends and artists. It drew imaginative and creative energy from this paradoxically intimate publicity. Texts, images, and objects gave rise to a constant artistic exchange that took the form of performative staging.The current reissue makes the video works—recorded in 1985—accessible again in digital format and also allows for a renewed examination of these historical recordings. Poets and artists who have since gained international renown can once again be seen in the artistic milieu in which they began their work.
In addition to two DVDs subtitled in English and German, this S PRESS multimedia boxset contains three booklets accompanying the video recordings and presenting brief biographies of the artists.
More than 30 years after the first edition of these video works on tape, publishers Günter Hirt and Sascha Wonders reflect not only on their significance for the aesthetics of Moscow Conceptualism, but also on the principles of their own documentary approach. Their goal was to archive these specific artistic situations that would otherwise have been excluded from official cultural memory.A postcard with images from each of the artists' works presented on the DVDs is included as a souvenir of the original promotional card published by S PRESS in 1987.
EDITION S PRESS An editorial revivalo/o Verlag Wolfgang Mohrhenn, Wuppertal S PRESS, founded in the late 1960s as an independent publishing project for audio art on tape, ceased its activities in 2005 after the sudden death of Michael Koehler, who had directed S PRESS since the mid-1970s. Today, the S PRESS/Michael Koehler archives can be consulted at the Akademie der Künste/Berlin. Several of the original S PRESS titles were published by Wolfgang Mohrhenn/Wuppertal, S PRESS partner since 1980. In addition to the video book "Allen Ginsberg on Tour" (1983), titles such as "Kulturpalast" by Günter Hirt and Sascha Wonders, consisting of a book, an audio cassette, and a collection of poetic texts on cards (1985), deserve special mention. Subsequently, "Moskau Moskau," a video documentation, was published on VHS cassette with an accompanying booklet (1987). The latter included recordings of Moscow's contemporary and avant-garde artistic and literary scene. In 1992, another boxset titled "Lianosowo" was released. It dealt with the precursors of conceptual aesthetics in the unofficial culture of the 1980s and 1960s.
The very positive reception of the historical Moscow video recordings at international exhibitions and conferences, as well as encouragement from Sabine Hänsgen and the performance art research project in Eastern Europe at the University of Zurich, prompted Wolfgang Mohrhenn, co-publisher of S PRESS, to digitize these historical recordings and publish them in an enhanced form in a trilingual multimedia boxset, thus reviving S PRESS as a label for reissues of historical S PRESS publications.
ISBN: 9783982316901