Transition in Post-Soviet Art: The Collective Actions Group Before and After 1989

Afterword From KD to [KD]: From Objectivation to Reification

afterword from kd To [kd]: from obJeCTivaTion To reifiCaTion Moscow conceptualists use the metaphor of a stone thrown into the air to describe the previous one hundred years of russian art. at the origin of the stone’s trajectory stood the russian historical avant-garde which had forcefully propelled the stone high into the air; when it began to lose speed, reaching the vertex of the parabola, it represented the Zhdanovist doctrine of socialist realism at its height; the response of the stone to the law of gravity and its return to the ground corresponded to the downfall of socialist realism and the beginning of post–World War ii unofficial art (the modernists of the 1950s and 1960s) that concluded with the art of the Moscow conceptualists, who prided themselves on being the ones who had followed the stone back to where it had been at the beginning of the century.1 There is in this metaphor of the stone something dialectical about its movement, something that may bring to the mind the Hegelian historical journey of the spirit in The Phenomenology of spirit. in Hegel’s journey consciousness constantly objectifies and alienates itself in its interaction with the external world, following a trajectory but then returning, like the stone, back to its point of origin. The journey of the spirit is a transition through various stops, called shapes of consciousness, which emerge as a result of the objectification that consciousness performs in the process of acquiring knowledge of the object. in some respects KD’s Journeys resembles Phenomenology, for it presents the journey of an artistic consciousness as it hardens and freezes into phases, stages, or steps during its transition through the abrupt successions of history in order to return into itself. 1 Kabakov uses this metaphor in the dialogue “spectator-Character” recorded by Monastyrsky in 1988. Monastyrsky, “Poezdki za gorod: 6–9 vols.” [unpaginated]. intheircriticalresponsetoHegel,Marxistcriticshaveusedtheconcepts ofalienationandreification,andtheyhavedonesoalsotodistinguishamong various forms of relations that occur between individuals in modern society or, in the context of labor, between producer and the product. in critical theory this distinction received particular attention in the work of György lukács,2 who initially used the terms “objectification” and “alienation” synonymously, and ceased to do so after he read the unpublished writings of the young Marx (the Paris Manuscripts).3 later, Peter Berger and stanley Pullberg would distinguish between objectification and reification in a more detailed and complex manner using the terms objectivation, objectification, alienation, and reification.4 objectivation is pure production; objectification involves the act of cognition and suggests the distance that emerges between the process of production and the product; alienation refers to the situation in which the unity between the process of producing and the product has been broken; finally reification is “the process of alienation in which the characteristic of thing-hood becomes the standard of objective reality” or, to put it in other words, “reification is objectification in an alienated mode.”5 objectivation and objectification are value-free and anthropologically necessary. objectivation defines the subject’s intentionality and its exterior motivation for interacting with the world. it is that aspect of human nature which defines a human being as a world-producing being, homo faber. “objectification,” on the other hand, “is a narrower epistemological concept and refers to the way in which the world produced by man is apprehended by him.”6 This meaning is closer to the Hegelian use of the term, expressing the very processes of naming, of knowing and of communicating knowledge to others. To objectify means to make various aspects of reality objects for consciousness. objectification, which implies a distance between subject and object, or between producer and product, conveys that the subject, or the producer, is still in full control over the distance that inevitably occurs 2 György lukács, History and Class Consciousness. 3 on lukács’s confusion of “objectification” with “alienation” see lee Congdon, exile and social Thought: Hungarian intellectuals in Germany and austria, 1919–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 81. 4 Peter Berger and stanley Pullberg, “reification and the sociological Critique of Consciousness,” History and Theory 4, no. 2 (1965); 199. 5 ibid., 199–200. 6 ibid., 200. 280 TransiTion in PosT-sovieT arT 7 ibid., 201. 8 non-Marxist thinkers, for instance, tend not to make this distinction. For example, Hannah arendt uses reification in terms of “fabrication, the work of homo faber,” which...