Moscow Conceptualists

To preserve one's identity in this situation, one had to create a separate value system, including a system of aesthetic values."

The central figures of the movement were Ilya Kabakov, Irina Nakhova, Viktor Pivovarov, Eric Bulatov, Andrei Monastyrski, Komar and Melamid, poets Vsevolod Nekrasov (ru), Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Anna Alchuk, Timur Kibirov, artist and prose writer Vladimir Sorokin, and also such writers as Viktor Yerofeyev and Julia Kissina. Mikhail Epstein explains why conceptualism is particularly appropriate to the culture and history of Russia, but also how it differs from Western Conceptualism: In the West, conceptualism substitutes "one thing for another" — a real object for its verbal description. But in Russia the object that should be replaced is simply absent.values." Epstein quotes Ilya Kabakov: The Moscow Conceptualist artists faced difficulties exhibiting their work in the cultural atmosphere of the late Soviet Union. At the Manezh exhibit of 1962, which featured the work of many aesthetic precursors to the Moscow Conceptualists, then-Party first secretary Nikita Khrushchev excoriated the art and artists he saw there. In 1974, at the infamous Bulldozer Exhibition, many Moscow Conceptualist artists had their work destroyed when the Soviet authorities brought in bulldozers to clear the field in which the exhibition was held. The art movement was largely ignored outside of the Soviet Union, and within it, it was confined to a narrow circle of Moscow artists and their friends.