Museum of Proletarian Culture by Arseniy Zhilyaev: book review

Museum of Proletarian Culture, The Industrialization of Bohemia (2013) is a reflection of Arseniy Zhilyaev’s exhibition of the same name held from 12 July to 9 September 2012 at the Tretyakov State Gallery in Moscow.

The book (catalogue) commences with three essays. The essays discuss the restrictions placed upon art and culture in Russia during the Joseph Stalin era (1978-1953), and the shifts in Russian art over the last 30 years from the 1980s to the present day.

The middle section displays photographs and the history of artists represented in the exhibition – Art Belongs to the People, Model No. 14, Collages of 1980s, Music Boxes and Home Shelves in the 1990s, The Hammerer, Screens, and Abay Wall.

Arseniy Zhilyaev’s exhibition was a ‘museum within a museum’ – ‘a fictional museum populated by characters rather than real historical figures’ – leading to a ‘complex study in which an analysis of museums as institutions and a genealogical analysis of folk art emerges.’ Zhilyaev contrasts two eras: the late Soviet period (the dawn of independent anonymous forms of creativity) and the post-Soviet period (‘ploughboy artists’ and commercial culture). Zhilyaev commences his analysis with a response to Alexei Fedorov-Davydov’s Experimental Marxist Exhibition of 1931. He includes the works of Ruben Beloglazov in Art Belongs to the People, Ilya Dondurenko’s architectural models from matchsticks in Model No. 14, Stepan Lugovo’s The Hammerer, and Islamic Kazakh poet Abay Kunanbayev’s wall.

It finishes with two essays on the Revolutionary Museum and Museum of Revolution. The final word belongs to artist, writer and political activist, Arseniy Zhilyaev (1984-) whose artistic practice ‘poses questions about the cultural production in the postsoviet condition.’

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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