Useless Actions and Senseless Laughter: On Moscow Conceptualist Art and Politics

Through a series of close readings of an album by Ilʼia Kabakov and actions by the groups Collective Actions (Kollektivnye deistviia) and Mukhomor, this article considers the place of laughter in the work of the Moscow Conceptualist circle. Distinguishing between a metaphysically-oriented laughter in the 1970s and a carnivalesque or kynic laughter in the 1980s, the article rejects the easy identification of Moscow Conceptualismʼs ironic laughter with a social and political critique of the Soviet Union, and instead locates these different strains of Moscow Conceptualist practice in the shifting artistic and political contexts of the last two Soviet decades.