Art Between Affective Memorisation and the Bureaucracy of the Archive: From Aleksej Kručenych to Contemporary Russian Artists

The combination of avant-garde and archive seems to be a rather odd one. However, Aleksei's Kruchenykh's entire career is marked by an unusual archival and bibliographical activity, which resulted in, for example, thirty editions of Unpublished Khlebnikov, fourteen editions of Maiakovskii Lives and long series of albums (with autographs, pieces of poems, drawings, photographs) of the main representatives of the early Russian avant-garde. In the 1960s-1980s we find “archival art” in the work of Ilya Kabakov, Igor Palmin and Vadim Zakharov.