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Chapter 1 a bibliograPhiC overview The art and aesthetics of KD, and to some extent that of what is known as Moscow Conceptualism, are closely related to two fields, one physical and the other conceptual. The first, which KD’s members christened “Kievogorskoe Pole” due to its proximity to the village Kievy Gorky, is close enough to Moscow to make for a manageable day trip. The second field, which i call the “discursive field” of Moscow Conceptualism, is more abstract, and spans the central concepts and ideas that emerged within this tradition. over more than three decades both of these fields have undergone reorganization in numerous respects, a process that i discuss throughout this book. Whereas the transformations that took place on the real Kievogorskoe Field—the field to which the Moscow conceptualists journeyed in order to participate in KD’s actions—are discussed in Part ii, this first part of the present volume considers the emergence and the topography of the discursive field of Moscow Conceptualism, to which KD has substantially contributed. This book or, rather, one of its central conceptual approaches has been inspired by a method of historical analysis known in German as Begriffsgeschichte—“the history of concepts,” “conceptual history,” or “conceptual historiography.” This method is distinct from more widespread historical methodologies in devoting great interest in the linguistic and semantic aspects of the discipline of history. Unlike social history, which rests on the tenet that all historical manifestations are based on or derived from social conditions, conceptual history pays close attention to language and to the key concepts used by historians.1 informed by nineteenth-century German philology and twentieth-century structuralism, Begriffsgeschichte places a strong emphasis on linguistic and semantic analysis, focusing 1 on the difference between these two historical methods see reinhart Koselleck, “social History and Conceptual History,” international Journal of Politics, Culture, and society 2, no. 3 (1989): 309. in particular on those concepts used to construct historical narratives. Considering the concept to be the main prism of analysis, the practitioners of this method analyze and interpret key historical or political concepts in various historical contexts, pointing to the semantic transformations to which various concepts have been subjected over time. Those who practice Begriffsgeschichte emphasize that it must not be treated as an end in itself, but as a complement to social history.2 The discipline of art history—which in all the variety of its methods still treats, for the most part, artifacts and cultural events as manifestations of social conditions—may also benefit from a closer inspection of its vocabulary. a “conceptual” art history would aim at a closer historicosemantic examination, one that may reveal fossilized layers of historical connotations behind the signifying façade of its most frequently employed concepts. But a conceptual art history would be especially welcomed as a vehicle for examining a series of cultural phenomena that have evolved in the second half of the twentieth century under the art historical category “conceptual art” or “conceptualism.” Just as one significant task of traditional art history consists of addressing the materials and techniques employed by fine artists, so a conceptual art historical approach would pay equal attention to concepts and ideas, which for the conceptualists function as both artistic device and as medium. This introduction aims chiefly to familiarize the reader with a constellation of concepts invented and theorized by Moscow conceptualists, to lay out their “discursive field,”3 as well as to show the dependence of certain concepts on their socioeconomic context by showing how some of these words could have emerged only before and others only after 2 on the Begriffsgeschichte method see reinhart Koselleck and Todd samuel Presner, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, spacing Concepts (stanford, Ca: stanford University Press, 2002); and Koselleck, Futures Past: on the semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Ma: MiT Press, 1985). 3 i have chosen the notion of “discursive field” over that of “semantic field”—the latter being a term encountered more often in the Begriffsgeschichte literature—in order not to confuse it with KD’s “demonstrative semiotic field” and “exposition semiotic field,” to be introduced and discussed in Part ii. another term often encountered in conceptual historiography is “linguistic field.” i will not use this term, either, on the grounds that critics have insisted on a distinction between Western conceptualism, which is informed by various linguistic practices and theories of language, and the Moscow conceptualists, who repeatedly stress that their aesthetics is inspired by and derived from...

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