Reports from Underground. An alternative history of unofficial culture in the 1970s and 1980s in the USSR

In Russian history, the period of the 1970s? 1980s is the time when the Soviet state entered the phase of active internal decay. The official ideology suffered the collapse: the concepts on which it was built rapidly lost their original meaning, and the rituals turned into a demonstrative formality. What did the "underground" culture in those years? How were the circles of conceptualists and postmodernists who were in the late 1980s a great success on Western art markets formed? And what did the Western press write about them? The new book of George Kizwalter continues the case, begun in the collection "Time of Hopes, the Time of Illusions": the heroes of the era are simultaneously telling about the unquestioned art of 1970-1980 (including F. Infante, L. Rubinstein, V. Komar, A. Melamid, Mlamid, . Chernyshov and others), the author himself and the western periodicals of those years. As a result, the reader opens with a voluminous picture of artistic life and the unexpected "new" episodes of a familiar story, prompting to reconsider the established look at this period. Georgy Kizwalter is an artist, writer, representative of the Moscow conceptual school, participant in the creative group "Collective Actions" from 1976 to 1989