In 1986, the Soviet government created a statute enabling citizens to form associations and clubs for the first time since the 1920s. This-and the 1988 law on cooperatives which permitted private enterprise-gave rise to the first official organizations created by unofficial artists, as well as the beginning of a vibrant gallery scene. Run by artists, curators, and cultural entrepreneurs, these spaces unleashed the creative energy that now characterizes early post-Soviet Russia. Access Moscow examines the key role which the first independent galleries played in the emergence of Moscow's art scene in the 1990s. Through historical texts from leading practitioners of the period-some of which are translated into English for the first time-and essays by Valentin Diaconov, Kate Fowle, Andrei Kovalev, and Elena Selina, this book provides a first-hand account of an art community in formation. A chronology of art and political events shows the development of art life in Moscow over the course of the decade. Access Moscow is the second in a new series of books by Garage Museum of Contemporary Art on research and materials in Garage Archive Collection.

Since the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Russian artist Erik Bulatov has investigated the potential of painting as social commentary. A founder of the school of Moscow Conceptualism-alongside Ilya Kabakov, Collective Actions, and Komar & Melamid among others-Bulatov developed what has been described as conceptual painting, using text and image to explore spatial preoccupations that mirror his understanding of social relations. This book follows the making of the artist's largest work to date: a thirty-two-feet high monumental diptych made in his trademark graphic style, reminiscent of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky's advertising posters from the 1920s. Introducing an innovative assessment of Bulatov's oeuvre, this richly illustrated publication includes an essay by Garage curator Snejana Krasteva exploring his use of monumental scale, an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and several of Bulatov's texts spanning the period 1978-2006, which are translated into English for the first time.

What is contemporary curatorial thought? Current discourse on the topic is heating up with a new cocktail of bold ideas and ethical imperatives. These include: cooperative curating, especially with artists; the reimagination of museums; curating as knowledge production; the historicization of exhibition-making; and commitment to extra-artworld participatory activism. Less obvious, but increasingly of concern, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators and the challenge of curating contemporaneity itself. In these five essays, art historian and theorist Terry Smith surveys the international landscape of current thinking by curators; explores a number of exhibitions that show contemporaneity in recent, present and past art; describes the enormous growth world wide of exhibition infrastructure and the instability that haunts it; re-examines the contribution of artist-curators and questions the rise of curators utilizing artistic strategies; and, finally, assesses a number of key tendencies in curating as responses to contemporary conditions. "Thinking Contemporary Curating "is the first book to comprehensively chart the variety of practices of curating undertaken today, and to think through, systematically, what is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought.

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 they 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 100th 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. 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.

A comprehensive study of one of the most versatile artists and acute observers of our time, who fuses art and fashion American artist Sterling Ruby works in a large variety of media, including sculpture, ceramics, painting, and video art. Ruby is influenced by a wide range of sources, including marginalized societies, maximum-security prisons, modernist architecture, artefacts and antiquities, graffiti, waste and consumption, and urban gangs. Through these, he examines the psychological space where individual expression confronts social constraint.