Garage International Publishing Program

Ekaterina Suverina, International Publishing Program Coordinator:

The installation of Rashid Johnson’s project Within Our Gates, created as a Garage Atrium Commission, was witnessed by many visitors, and also by the team that worked on the book—so we saw the work in the making from the very beginning. We had a chance to see what Rashid Johnson is like as an artist and see what has informed his understanding of art.

And of course, the first thing that has informed it was minimalism. All objects in Rashid Johnson’s installation were fixed onto a minimalist grid that brings to mind figures like Rosalind Krauss and Sol LeWitt. That was the base on which he arranged plants, books and other carefully selected objects. You can learn how and why he did that from the book. It explains why minimalism was important to him in this work, and where the idea of tropical plants came from. All objects in the installation referred to the long history of human rights—the history of the other: they included books on Africa published in the Soviet Union and books like Black Skin, White Masks by post-colonial author Frantz Fanon. You will see why Rashid Johnson drew parallels between the history of human rights in Russia and the USA, what the Russian Revolution had to do with it—as well as the struggle of African Americans for the right to be admitted to any bar. You will see how all that connects to Rashid Johnson’s personal history, and why a part of the artist’s own collection of books and magazines was also on display. We tried to fit everything into one small book. Although it is devoted to one work, it is a work that reflects on Rashid Johnson’s entire career as an artist who has built many installations and, most importantly, a researcher who explores his African American roots, his American identity and his identity as a citizen of a country.

Sasha Obukhova, Curator of Garage Archive Collection:

The book New Work was published to coincide with Erik Bulatov’s Garage Atrium Commission in 2015. The project by one of the leaders of Moscow contemporary art consisted of two monumental paintings that read “come to Garage!” and combined the aesthetics of Russian constructivism of the 1920s with Bulatov’s own signature style developed in the 1970s. As many other artists of the post-war era, Bulatov is little known in the West, and even in Russia. The book produced by Garage compensates for the lack of information on the artist. Along with materials on the project for Garage, it contains an in-depth interview with acclaimed critic and curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist, which automatically places Bulatov among the stars on the map of international contemporary art. It also features an article on Bulatov by Garage curator Snejana Krasteva as well as many archive materials—photographs and texts of the 1970s and 80s, translated into English to be made accessible to the Western reader. Indeed, a wonderful artist, Erik Bulatov is also an art theorist—a theorist of painting, which has been his medium of choice for a long time. His writings offer insight into the history of several styles within Russian contemporary art: Moscow Conceptualism, Sots Art—and the development of the great tradition of painting.

Sasha Obukhova, Curator of Garage Archive Collection:

Edited by Kate Fowle and Ruth Addison, Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986–1996 was made by a large team of authors, including Garage staff and those who took part in the events described in the edition. What is the book about? In the ten years from the announcement of perestroika and glasnost to the first Russian presidential election in 1996, there was two historical turns that transformed the world around us. This publication looks at how Soviet and then Russian Art adapted to the international context within this decade. Some exhibitions described in the book were imported into the country in various ways. Those included shows by the biggest artists from the West, which introduced many Russian viewers to this strange phenomenon we call contemporary art. The book also describes exhibitions of Russian Avant-Garde and Socialist Realism in the West and the reaction of Western public to those events—to the strange phenomena that had never before been shown in such detail and scope. Finally, the book speaks about exhibitions of Russian contemporary art in Western Europe and the USA from 1986 to 1996. You can see Russian artists learning to speak the language of new international contemporary art when you read these interviews with curators and participants of those exhibitions and articles from catalogues published a long time ago in very limited editions. In fact, this is another book in the series of publications based on materials from Garage Archive, which was created not only to tell the history of Russian contemporary art, but also to show the documents and the evidence of all those myths and legends that now surround this history.

Sasha Obukhova, Curator of Garage Archive Collection:

Access Moscow: The Art Life of a City Revealed, edited by Kate Fowle, is essentially an adapted version of the two-volume Reconstruction. 1990–2000, which was published from 2012 to 2014. It looks at the history of Moscow art galleries and the art scene in general in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union: an incredible decade that saw the infrastructure of contemporary art rebuilt from scratch. Translated and adapted for the English-speaking reader, this collection presents a chronicle of the scene, including exhibitions in museums and galleries, as well as actionism.
It also paints a detailed picture of the leading Moscow galleries of the era: institutions that have shaped the art world that we can witness today. The book contains archive materials and excerpts from newspapers, rare photographs, exhibition views and portraits of artists. It also includes materials from the unique collection Who Is Who in Moscow Art, published in 1992 and re-published in 1993, in which the leaders of the art world commented on contemporary developments in art. This was 25 years ago, and it’s fascinating to reread it today, because some things in Moscow art have changed dramatically—and other things have not changed at all. It’s a very interesting collection of archival documents and traces of the era.