While innocuously titled, Mary A. Nicholas’ book Moscow Conceptualism, 1975–1985: Words, Deeds, Legacies is not a survey, but a polemical shake up of the established histories of Moscow Conceptualism. In this book, Nicholas purposefully omits the works of such Moscow conceptualists as Ilya Kabakov (1933–2023), Andrei Monastyrski (b. 1949), Erik Bulatov (b. 1933), and Dmitri Prigov (1940–2007) during the covered decade, emphasizing the younger generation of Moscow conceptualists born in the late 1950s: The Nest group (Gennadii Donskoi [b. 1956], Mikhail Roshal [1956–2008] and Victor Skersis [b. 1956]), Yuri Albert (b. 1959), Vadim Zakharov (b. 1959), Nadezhda Stolpovskaya (b. 1959), and the group TOTART (Natalia Albakova [1941–2024], Anatoly Zhigalov [b. 1941]). Nicholas rejects the idea of a unified Moscow conceptualism, emphasizing “sharp opposition” within “the picture of conceptualist unity” she attributes to Boris Groys (35). Nicholas’s book contrasts her chosen artists against those Moscow conceptualists that are more established in the literature, to bring scholarly attention to the younger generation and to argue for an “expanded picture of the movement as a whole” (19).

In her Introduction, Nicholas highlights efforts at communication with the Soviet public as key to the direction she is describing. She suggests that this direction was initiated by Vitalii Komar (b. 1943) and Aleksandr Melamid (b. 1945) shortly before their emigration in 1977 and emphasizes humor and play. Accordingly, Nicholas calls for a “rereading of Moscow Conceptualism” (22), correcting for the lack of attention on this emphasis within the scholarship on the movement.

Chapter 1 attempts such a rereading by focusing on the Nest group’s installation and performance Hatching a Spirit from the sanctioned exhibition of unofficial art at the VDNKh House of Culture in 1975, following the public-relations disaster of the 1974 “Bulldozer Exhibition” for the Soviet authorities, bringing bulldozers down on the exhibiting artists. At the VDNKh, the artists installed a large bird’s nest and attempted to hatch a spirit of the new age on it from eggs, inviting the audience to help. Nicholas frames the work within the larger debates around modernism, postmodernism, and conceptualism in Moscow’s artistic milieu, arguing that it reveals the limits of the circulating terminology.

In Ch. 2, Nicholas focuses on logocentrism, which she shows to be central to the work of the older artists but deconstructed in the work of Nest, Albert, Stolpovskaya, and Zakharov. Showing resonances between Moscow conceptualist practices and the work of western figures like Christo and Kosuth, Nicholas argues that these resonances show the younger Moscow conceptualists’ desire to expand “the conversation beyond the boundaries of their insular community” (111).

In Ch. 3, Nicholas explores the Moscow conceptualists’ performances engaging “intimacy” and “public tenderness” (112). Such performances mix play with work, with the artists sweeping the street, cleaning apartments, and otherwise entangling artmaking and volunteer labor. Play and the breakdown of hierarchies characterize the new artistic direction, opening the movement up, re-orienting it towards existential relatability, and supplanting the heroic artist-genius with “play with the notion of household drudgery and Soviet byt” (155). In Ch. 4, the conclusion, Nicholas addresses the present moment, arguing that the Moscow conceptualists’ humorous engagement with the everyday and with the public explains the lasting influence of Moscow conceptualism on contemporary Russian art.

Nicholas makes a daring intervention in the field, inscribing the younger generation within the greater legacy of Moscow conceptualism. However, her attempt to draw sharp lines between her artists and the more established Kabakov and Monastyrski occasionally becomes problematic as Nicholas portrays the older artists as hermetic and humorless modernists obsessed with the transcendental and with commanding control, while crediting all humor, criticality, and openness to play to the younger generation. Kabakov and Monastyrski were perhaps not ha-ha funny, but their works are also witty and playful, from collective actions structured like gentle pranks to Kabakov’s alter-egos lampooning various Soviet existential tropes. Kabakov’s always mingles the transcendental with the meager, and Monastyrski’s commands are always designed to be elidable (consider Ten Appearances [1981] when Nikita Alekseev failed to come back to the action, heading home instead, and causing Monastyrski to panic that his friend was lost in the snowy woods). Humor and play are constants within “both” Moscow conceptualisms. Conversely, insularity is apparent in works by Nest that Nicholas presents as unpretentious. In Nest’s Art to the Masses (1978), which begins the book, the artists bear a red banner with an inscrutable scribble based on the work of Franz Kline precisely to flummox the uninitiated. If there is a joke here, it is that the masses will never get the art brought to them: it remarks on its own failure to deliver. Nest’s audience were still mostly other Moscow conceptualists privy to the esoteric joke. Moscow conceptualism cleaves together as much as it cleaves apart. At the same time, Nicholas opens the sometimes museified field of Moscow conceptualism up for new debates and explorations.