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diCTionary of mosCow ConCePTualism (Main section) note: The concepts from the Main section of the Dictionary of Moscow Conceptualism translated in this appendix are arranged following the Cyrillic alphabet, in accordance with the original russian text A aBBrEviatiOnEitY (abbreviational reading, abbreviational vision) [abbreviaturnoe prochtenie, abbreviaturnoe zrenie] – an attitude toward the visual as toward a text that consists of abbreviations. The abbreviational perception of the world is conditioned by the existence of unconscious abbreviational structures in the depth of memory and language. (v. Tupitsyn, Moscow Communal Conceptualism, 1996. see also v. Tupitsyn, Kommunal’nyi (post)modernsim: russkoe iskusstvo vtoroi poloviny xx veka. Moscow: ad. Marginem, 1998) aBsOlutE PaintinG [absolyutnaia kartina] – Mona lisa, sistine Madonna, The Death of Marat, The Parable of the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the elder, Dürer’s Melancholia—all of these are absolute paintings. an absolute painting is that painting which, with maximal fullness and expressiveness, accumulates within itself the collective conscious and unconscious. it is also possible to say that the absolute painting not only accumulates but also forms the collective conscious and unconscious. These are paintings without which it is impossible to imagine the history of art. The overall number of these paintings—compared with the ocean of art—is relatively small, about fifty. This is only on the scale of european culture. it is possible, however, to locate absolute paintings within the templedome of individual national cultures, and these “regional” domes do not always overlap with the european ones. For example, the russian list of absolute paintings must include, without fail, ivan the Terrible and His son ivan (ilya repin, 1885) and the The Bath of the red Horse (Kuzma Petrov-vodkine, 1912)— paintings not part of the main (european) culture. (v. Pivovarov. “Dachnaia tetrad’” iz tsikla “serye tetradi) authOr [avtor] – the capitalized word “author” conveyed, in the rhetoric of the ProGraM oF WorKs, the pseudonym of the physical author lev rubinstein. (Compare to vitaly Komar and alexander Melamid’s collective pseudonym “Famous artists of the 1970s of the 20th century.”) The term “author” also partially parodied the idea of the romantic author-demiurge. it was an important break between the existence of the author and the radically authorless style of the texts in the ProGraM. (l. rubinstein, raboty, 1975) aPPendix 295 aGEnt [agent] – refers to a particular sense of abandonment and alienation from reality, a state of mind in which the individual has the impression that he is the agent of something he does not comprehend, as if he had parachuted somewhere with no particular task to perform and with no knowledge whatsoever of under what agency he acts. The agent’s state of mind is not functional: he is alienated to the same degree from everything (“for the agent all the stairs are slippery”). it is supposed that it is the euphoric opposite of paranoia. (Term by s. anufriev [1989], clarified by P. Pepperstein) aGEnt (anD aGEncY) OF DYstOPia [agenty (i agenstva) distopii] – semantic and visual turns (returneli) that both violate the one-directional character of utopian representation and destructure [destrukturiruischie] the space of utopian anticipation. (M. Tupitsyn. “Playing the Games of Difference” in artistas rusos Contemporaneos, sala de exposiciones, santiago de Compostela, 1991) thE aGGrEssiOn OF thE sOFt [agressia myagkogo] – marks the inevitable dependency of the speaker on what seems to be fortuitously produced speech; the impossibility of occupying a completely external position. The emptiness is continuously filled with soft residues from speech acts that were once produced, and which are not directed toward the other, but into eMPTiness. The “aggression of the soft” is the name of the performance by the group Frame (rama), which took place on February 19, 1989, in the presence of eleven spectators. During this performance sound recordings of Mikhail ryklin and andrei Monastyrsky’s voices were superimposed. (M. ryklin, a. al’ciuk, raMa. Performansy, Moscow: obskuri viri, 1994) alia [alia] – an intelligible state of things, the return to which generates realia. (s. anufriev’s term [1989], clarified by P. Pepperstein) analYtical trEE [analiticheskoe drevo] – potentially, an endless process of self-generation of art objects by means of consecutive fragmentation. (i. Chuikov. analytical Tree [stammbaum der analyse], 1994) antiGravitatiOnal mEasurEs (aGm) [antigravitatsionnye meropriatia] – the plot of a “gradual” (not “instant”) expansion of the universe, manifested in various forms that alter each other. (For example, “after the plants the aGM was conducted by the insects.”). (s. anufriev, na sklone gory, 1993) aPt–art (from the english words “apartment” and “art”) – the name of nikita alexeev’s gallery...

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