Looking in the Wrong Direction: Emptiness and the Aesthetic Feeling in the Early Works of Collective Actions

This thesis examines the early works of Soviet conceptual performance art group Collective Actions, founded in 1976, and focuses on the way the group employed the concept of “emptiness” as a motif throughout its practice. Notions of nothingness, emptiness, and dematerialization dominate the visual language of much conceptual art in post-war Western and late-Soviet contexts and articulate a critical position vis-à-vis the old, assumed to be retrograde, notions of structure, State, and aesthetic form. I argue that the performance art practices of Collective Actions negotiate a productive relationship between emptiness and collectivity through artistic practice that relies on, at the time suspect, categories of structure, composition, and social form, articulating conditions for an aesthetic experience.