The Artist's Book. Independent Publishing Practices. A Thematic Selection by Garage

This thematic selection by Garage features artist’s books, documents from the Museum’s collections related to the culture of samizdat in the Soviet period, and contemporary works that build on this culture. It also includes publications and printed materials (flyers, booklets, invitations) created by artists as artworks and designed for public and often non‑commercial distribution.

The selection covers a broad range of artist’s publications, archive materials, books and book objects, photo albums, and so on, in which artistic practices intersect with the culture of books and publishing and in some cases archival work. The featured publications reflect various approaches to working with manuscript and printed materials. They can be linked to strategies of archiving and self‑archiving in the unofficial artistic environment; formal experiments with books as cultural artifacts un the late 1980s and early 1990s; performative and activist practices of the post‑perestroika decades; and interest in new publishing formats, such as photobooks and zines, in the 2000s and 2010s.

Here you can manuscripts, albums, and anthologies by unofficial artists (Ilya Kabakov, Dmitri Prigov, Andrei Monastyrski, and Collective Actions); books from the “new wave” of the 1980s in Moscow ad Leningrad (publications by Toadstool Group and members of the New Artists movement); and materials by representatives of Moscow Actionism, the New Academy of Fine Arts, and Factory of Found Clothes.

The collection of zines published in Russian cities (Togliatti, St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Moscow) over the past three decades numbers several hundred.

Artist’s books are represented by works by the leading lights of the genre, Leonid Tishkov, Mikhail Pogarsky, Vera Khlebnikova, and others, which exist in the Garage collection alongside those of the new generation of authors (MishMash, Pavla Markova, Aleksei Shchigalev) and books created specially for Garage as part of the project Single Copy.