Manuel Alcayde, email conversation, 2017. Except where noted, direct quotations are taken from conversations and email exchanges with the artists during January and February 2017.
Luis Camnitzer, New Art of Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 168.
Sven Gundlakh, “The Show Must Go On” (1983), in Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84, eds. Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, and David Morris (London: Afterall Books, 2017).
As quoted by Myroslava M. Mudrak, “Lost in the widening cracks and now resurfaced: Dissidence in Ukranian painting,” in Nonconformist Art: The Soviet experience 1956–1986, eds. Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 137.
According to the account of Kornely Zelinsky, held in the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI), folder 1604, cited in Robert H. McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (London: Macmillan, 1988), 154.
The Museum of American Art, itself housed since 2004 in an east Berlin apartment block, has done much work to reconstruct these specific environments and analyze these dynamics. I am grateful to the technical assistant of the Museum for conversations that informed the present text.
Sven Gundlakh, “Pictures from an Exhibition,” A–Ya magazine 5 (1983).
The artists add: “There is another reading of this object-text—explicit to any Soviet onlooker; Seva Nekrasov, a poet and essayist of the MANI circle, called our Chair the best formula of Soviet reality he ever knew. That is the very essence of the Soviet form of Socialism or collectivism if you like: nothing belongs to you because it always belongs to everyone—that is, to nobody. ‘I’ vs. ‘WE,’ where ‘WE’ does not exist because of a lack of ‘I’ while ‘I’ cannot be realized because of the lack of ‘WE.’ In other words, ‘only the dead know Brooklyn.’”
N. Alekseev, letter to Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn, February 18, 1983. Archive of M. and V. Tupitsyn.
Gundlakh, “The Show Must Go On.”
An apartment show held in Albert’s apartment in 1979 gathered together all the main participants of APTART.
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, “Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc,” in Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, eds. D. Crowley and S. E. Reid (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 13.
They invited contributions from Novi Kolektivizem, Goran Đorđević, Mladen Stlinović and Milivoj Bijelić, Laibach, Retrovision, and Kozmokineticni kabinet Noordung.
See “Parallel Chronologies: An Archive of East European Exhibitions,” available at →; and Notatki z Podziemia / Notes From the Underground, ed. David Crowley and Daniel Muzyczuk (Łódź: Muzeum Sztuki, 2016).
For an example of the former, see Shut Down LD50 Gallery, in London →; for the latter, see Boyle Heights Aliana Anti Artwashing Y Desplazamiento (Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement), in Los Angeles →; or see the various anti-gentrification alliances and strategies developed by Collective Research Initiatives Trust (CRIT) in Mumbai →.
The flow of information here was asymmetrical: New York artists, critics, and curators would have been aware of APTART by the mid-’80s (largely through the advocacy of Margarita and Victor Tupitsyn), but New York’s underground art scene—as well as Havana’s—was more or less off the radar of Moscow artists.
Miguel A. Lopez, “Discarded Knowledge: Peripheral Bodies and Clandestine Signals in the 1980s War in Peru,” trans. Megan Hanley, in Removed from the Crowd: Unexpected Encounters I, eds. Ivana Bago, Antonia Majača, and Vesna Vukovič (Zagreb: BLOK, 2011), 116.
See →.
A version of this text will appear in the forthcoming book Anti-Shows: APTART 1982–84, edited by Margarita Tupitsyn, Victor Tupitsyn, and David Morris, published in the Exhibition Histories series by Afterall Books in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.