ABSTRACT
This chapter reconsiders the temporal framing of contemporary Russian art by focusing on recent projects by two Moscow artists, Elena Elagina and Igor Makarevich. As general questions of terminology juxtaposing unofficial and official art, waves of avant-gardes historical and contemporary, remain inadequate to understanding the particular choices and frameworks adopted by Russian artists, especially after the dissolution of the USSR. I probe their engagement with what François Hartog has described as distinctive “regimes of historicity.” I propose a related form of historical self-consciousness that might be called stratigraphic rather than anachronic in the sense that the artworks discussed are shown to be related to each other. not through a singular unfolding of causal connections, nor do they embrace a universal theory of time. They are linked, rather, through a creative approach that resembles archaeological excavation of the past in which layers and materialities become confused and exposed. Elagina and Makarevich’s installations position the viewer precariously looking backward, while remaining aware that at least one future, already written, continues to haunt the present. For each artist, methodologies intermingle and the choices they make in interweaving temporal modalities provide an ethical means of addressing the complexity of our historical encounters with the past.
