Museum of Proletarian Culture: The Industialization of Bohemia by Arseniy Zhilyaev

Try and imagine what a museum of creativity looks like. This book tells of a challenging exhibition held in one of the major Russian museums-the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Arseniy Zhilyaev created a conceptual project for an imaginary museum. The viewer sees into the future after the liberation/revolution and is confronted with a radically different outlook on the history of twentieth-century art. At the core of the exhibition, there turns out to be a complex dialectic in the relationship between museum and artist: how does an artist’s work come to be exhibited in a museum? When and why does an artist engage in artistic creation outside the museum walls? Is the museum the space in which a «happening» takes place? The book includes texts by Russian and foreign art critics as well as a number of previously untranslated Soviet avant-garde texts about museums and proletarian folklore.