Critical Mass: Moscow Art Magazine 1993–2017

A collection of articles on Russian art from Moscow Art Magazine, selected by founder and editor Viktor Misiano.

With the launch of Moscow Art Magazine in 1993, curator and critic Viktor Misiano gave readers access to a rich variety of theory, criticism, and artists’ texts by Russian and international writers. It is the only independent art journal in Russia which has weathered the country’s economic crises and continued to publish innovative, and at times challenging, writing on visual art up to the present day.

Critical Mass: Moscow Art Magazine 1993–2017 is published to mark the hundredth issue of the magazine and presents a selection of texts which cover the development of Russian art since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Arranged thematically, they range from the hopeful manifestos of the early 1990s to the angry, politically-engaged art of the 2010s. Misiano, who received the Igor Zabel Award for Culture and Theory in 2016, has written new introductions to the themes covered in the book, setting the original texts within the social and political context of their time. Artist Georgy Litichevsky has produced seven comic strips, one for each chapter. A critical chronology marks important events in the cultural life of Russia connected to criticism and art theory, such as the first translations of key international texts.

Contributors include Sergei Anufriev, Oleg Aronson, Hrach Bayadyan, Alexander Brener, Lyudmila Bredikhina, Ilya Budraitskis, Maria Chehonadskih, Igor Chubarov, Boris Chukhovich, Keti Chukhrov, Ekaterina Degot, Yevgeniy Fiks, Kate Fowle, Nikita Kadan, Maxim Karakulov, Oleg Kulik, Ekaterina Lazareva, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, Nikolay Oleynikov, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Andrey Parshikov, Alexei Penzin, Pavel Pepperstein, Helen Petrovsky, Dmitri Prigov, David Riff, Valery Savchuk, Stanislav Shuripa, Vladislav Sofronov-Antomoni, Haim Sokol, Oxana Timofeeva, Dmitry Vilensky, Lioudmila Voropai, and Arseny Zhilyaev.

Critical Mass is the third in a new series of books by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art on the research and materials in Garage Archive Collection.