Arseny Zhilyaev

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Arseny Zhilyaev (Russian: Арсений Александрович Жиляев; born June 26, 1984, Voronezh) is a Russian contemporary artist known for his projects that speculate on the possible future histories of art, using the museum as a medium.

Biography

Arseny Zhilyaev
Arseniy Zhilyaev.jpg Arseniy Zhilyaev.jpg
Born	June 26, 1984 (1984-06-26) (age 39) Voronezh, USSR
🏫 Education	Voronezh State University, Valand Academy
💼 Occupation
Known for	Installation art, post-conceptual art, parafiction, appropriation (art)
🌐 Website	https://www.museumofmuseums.art/
🥚 Twitter	Twitter=

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Born on June 26, 1984 in Voronezh.

In 2006 he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy and Psychology of the Voronezh State University. From 2006 to 2007 Zhilyaev studied at the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art and in 2010 he graduated from the Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden.

According to art critic Valentin Diaconov, by the end of the 2000s Zhilyaev became the "helmsman" of the New Boring generation. In early works (Rational Egoism.., ‘Labour’ Market, 'October' Radio) the artist addresses the problems of cultural production and precarization of creative workers. The first exhibition using the museum as a medium Zhilyaev made in 2009 in Voronezh intitled New Museum of Revolution. This was the project where the time loop, which later became an important part of the artist's methodology, was used. Viewers found themselves in an indefinite future in the museum's exposition, which told about its past, that is, a time close to the temporality of the viewers themselves. A time shift of this kind made it possible to look at the present from a distance, to defamiliarize it and highlighting certain tendencies of the current moment.

Two projects initiated in 2011 Pedagogical Poem (organized with Ilya Budraitskis, Katerina Chuchalina and the project team) and the Museum of Proletarian Culture. The Industrialization of Bohemia continued to develop this approach. In addition the artist turns to the study and re-actualization of the practices of early Soviet marxist museology, in particular to the experiments of the school of Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov. Both projects were devoted to the critical use of the museum as a medium, seeking to re-actualize its Marxist understanding. Initially conceived as research-based initiatives, they coincided with the largest street mobilization against unfair elections, as well as the organization of the Russian version of the Occupy movement. This led to the growth of the activist component of the projects and crucial transformation their structure. The Pedagogical Poem was shaped a series of educational workshops and artistic interventions in the former Museum of the Revolution "Red Presnya". Due to a political conflict with the museum's management, the originally planned additions to the permanent exposition was canceled, and the results of the educational workshops were presented in the form of an archival proposal called the Archive of the Future Museum of History.

The Museum of Proletarian Culture. The Industrialization of Bohemia dealt with a different dilemma. The exhibition was planned in one of the main and conservative museums in Russia, the Tretyakov Gallery, and was supposed to be a free reconstruction of Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov's "complex Marxist exhibition", created in an imaginary future after the proletarian revolution. However, the beginning of street protests raised the question of the value of a purely research and speculative project. As a result, an educational stand was placed in the center of the exposition explaining how non-hierarchical assemblies are held in the Moscow Occupy Abay camp, as well as a manifesto of requirements developed in it. Thus, the real efforts of the protesters were inscribed in the imaginary history of emancipatory proletarian (often amateur and folk art) as the crown of creative activity, overcoming the boundaries of art and life.

Installation view of Arseny Zhilyaev's "M.I.R.: New Pathes to the Objects" at Kadist Foundation, Paris in 2014

Zhilyaev’s fictional museum: M.I.R.: New Paths to the Objects, was shown at the Kadist Foundation in Paris in 2014. It depicted the world to come as Vladimir Putin's Gesamtkunstwerk represented at the absurdist Russian History Museum. On the wall one was able to see a chronology of avant-garde art: from Collective Actions to Pussy Riot and Putin as an artist as well. Boris Groys in his text "Becoming a Meteorite" writes the following about the project:

"In the museum one begins to understand that, as stated by Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message.” The goal of Arseniy Zhilyaev’s Museum of Russian History is precisely to reveal the commonality of the medium behind the individual messages that circulate in the contemporary Russian media space. Thus, this project aims to musealize contemporaneity and to let its language, its medium carry its own message."

The version shown in San Francisco some month later, which coincided with the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of war in eastern Ukraine, included a chapter criticizing Russia's imperialist aggression. The project's title M.I.R.: Polite Guests from the Future used an ironic reference to the Russian troops involved in the occupation. Discussing Russian art of 2010s in Flash Art magazine, marxist art critic Alexandra Novozhenova said:

"What interests me in Zhilyaev’s art is that he produces all-inclusive frame-like structures. He is a dominant artist who subjugates the most significant manifestations of mass media discourse on political art, appropriates entire timelines and art histories and adds his own signature. One could criticize this strategy, but strangely enough the impudence and megalomania in his claims to the totalitarian appropriation of discourse is actually what constitutes the very artistic strength of his practice. It is hard to imagine how one could appropriate this media discourse, but he finds a way to do so. So in a sense his practice reverses the reductive damage done to Russian art by mass media: Zhilyaev extracts activism, already simplified by the media, from its mediatic context and locates it within a larger historical framework that itself becomes the actual object of his art: his art object is an appropriated media metanarrative."

In 2014, during the conference "Setting as Spatial Strategy" dedicated to an exhibit "A Story of Two Museums: An Ethnographic Exhibition" at the James Gallery, CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Zhilyaev met the "former Yugoslav artist" Goran Đorđević (who was working at that time as a technical assistant at the Museum of American Art in Berlin), as well as David Hildebrand Wilson from the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles. The methodology of de-artization of art, considering it as a special type of human activity rooted in the capitalist mode of production, applied by the Museum of American Art (МоАА), seemed close, from the point of view of Zhilyaev, to the method of the Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov sociological school. This fact led to a long-term fruitful cooperation and in particular to a joint exhibition of the Center for Experimental Museology and MoAA, Berlin Moscow Diaries. The project focused on the diaries of Walter Benjamin and Alfred Barr, who visited the capital of the young Soviet state in the 1920s. Their non-meeting, according to the organizers, led to the birth of two versions of the development of art. One was embodied in the canon of Western modernism designed by Alfred Barr for a display at the MoMA in New York. The second formed the basis of the avant-garde model of art by Walter Benjamin, which transcends the boundaries of institutions. In addition the exhibition reconstructed the Kazemir Malevich room in the "Cubism and Abstract Art" show at MoMA, curated by Alfred Barr, and a Moscow display of the artist's works at the Tretyakov Gallery in 1920s by Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov. Acquaintance with the work of David Hildebrand Wilson contributed to the emergence of Zhilyaev's interest in interpreting the museum in the philosophy of Russian cosmism and Nikolai Fedorov. One of the rooms of the Museum of Jurassic Technology's exhibition in the New York dealt with this issue. Thus starting from 2014, Zhilyaev has been making projects dedicated to the critical perception of the topic. As part of a joint venetian exhibition with Mark Dion Future Histories he showed a dystopian museum of the life origin organized on planet Earth after humanity has spread in outer space. In its halls, one could see "folk crafts" from different parts of the "intergalactic empire" of the Russian Space Federation, and in a souvenir shop it was possible to order a "vintage" body for the resurrection "Yuri-1" (based on the anatomy of Yuri Gagarin).

Russian artist Anatoly Osmolovsky participates in the performance of the Institute for Mastering of Time as part of Arseny Zhilyaev’s exhibition “Monotony of the Pattern Recognizer” in 2021

Since the late 2010s, the artist has turned to the study of time by means of LARPing and instruction-based art. His Monotony of the Pattern Recognizer, according to Valentin Diaconov, "seems to position itself as the first, last, and only museum of this postcapitalist future" where "our laborless descendants may find that going inside will be too much work, and that museums are sites of the unpaid, qualified labor of recognizing and interpreting images."

Zhilyaev is the editor of the anthology Avant-Garde Museology (e-flux, University of Minnesota Press, V-a-c Press, 2015), the co-founder of the Institute for Mastering of Time (with Asya Volodina) and the Institute of the Cosmos (with Anton Vidokle), a follower of the Museum of Museums, Venice and a member of Moscow Art Magazine's editorial board.

Lives and works in Venice.

Curatorial Projects

The exhibition Machine and Natasha, which became one of the first examples of the reflection of gentrification and transformation of labour forms in the Russian context, was curated by Arseny Zhilyaev in 2009 at the CCI Farbika in Moscow. The exposition located in the hall with a large paper machine (it was dismantled during the exhibition) was built on the opposition of the history of the machine and its operator Natalya (the name was hidden at the request of the worker). One of the CCI curators, Olga Shirokostup, described the project as follows:

Zhilyaev had his studio in the Oktyabr technical paper factory (known as the Fabrika Center for Creative Industries) and watched the transformations taking place there for several years. The artist found the factory at the end of its industrial life - at that time there was the only workshop that functioned only one month in a year, and the few remaining employees were transferred to a new job, which was to ensure the viability of the small creative cluster that replaced it. The artist's first project, Machine and Natasha, was essentially based on the memoirs of the worker Natalya, who had worked on the machine for more than twenty years, and the pieces of artists who created small monuments to the situation.

Subsequently, three more exhibitions devoted to labor relations in the system of art were held at the CCI Fabrika under the curation of the artist. The Labour movement (under joint curating with Sergei Khachaturov) explored the connection between art and the image of the working class. The Employment Record Book talked about how artists earn money. Rare Species focused on their professional development. In 2013, Zhilyaev completed his collaboration with the institution curated the Moscow version of the large-scale international project Living as Form (The Nomadic Version). The original exhibition was created by curator Nato Thompson in collaboration with 25 colleagues from around the world and New York-based nonprofit arts organization Creative Time and Independent Curators International. The version of the project shown at the CCI Farbika was supplemented with works from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Kharkiv and Bishkek

Together with Maria Chehonadskih, the artist curated the inaugural exhibition of the Voronezh Center for Contemporary Art We Will Continue to Act. In 2020, Arseny Zhilyaev, Dmitry Vrubel and curator Ekaterina Guseva created a group VR-exhibition Beneath the Reality, the Beach

References

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