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# The Garage Museum opens a new season of open storage with "Art on the Frequency of the 1980s", running until 23 September
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/muzei-garazh-otkryl-novyi-sezon-otkrytogo-khraneniia-proektom-iskusstvo-na-chastote-1980-kh-kotoryi-budet-idti-do-23-sentiabria/
- Published: 2026-06-11T17:46:41.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:25:51.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Art, Moscow, Museums, Observations, Saint Petersburg

I did not attend the guided tour, only chatted with friends, but that will not stop me from dissecting the curatorial conception.

First, given that we are dealing not with an exhibition but with a format for the temporary display of part of the museum's collection within its open storage programme, it would be a mistake to expect a reconstruction of the era; prepare to see only some traces of it. As for chronology, as I understood it, the eighties are stretched in both directions, to the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties. The state of contemporary art in these years is described not as a confrontation between the authorities and artists but as a media underground with the usual set, from rock music and pop culture to studios parallel to the official ones and stars of its own. Somewhere around here arise Solovyov's "Assa", the Leningrad "New Composers" and the parallel cinema of the Aleinikov brothers.

But. It turns out that nonconformism boils down to a shared artistic milieu and a way of life, without any substantial ideological content or any conflict. One can even hear the curatorial line that "the time of the bulldozers has passed". And if one follows this logic, the collection of motley chapters turns into a nostalgic bohemian chronicle. Since in the period described the state's direct violence against unofficial art had ended, and a hole in a stand or an action at the VDNKh no longer cost anyone not only their freedom but even their job, the earlier gestures look and read differently too. Risk and direct threat were part of the statement, and without that pressure the very same gatherings in a nest in the middle of a crowded place are perceived as an in-crowd diversion. Rather like the overwhelming majority of contemporary art today.

One of the semantic centres of the display is precisely the reconstruction of the action "Hatching the Spirit" by the group of Donskoy, Roshal and Skersis, which afterwards became the group "Gnezdo" ("The Nest"). Probably this is the earliest point of entry into the eighties; after all, the best-known hatching took place in September 1975 in the "House of Culture" pavilion at the VDNKh. And from Moscow in 1975, with its squats in Khokhlovsky Lane and studios in Furmanny, the project strides off to Leningrad: TEII, "Nol Object", the "Assa" gallery on Voinov Street, the "New Artists", the "New Composers".

Probably it has turned out to be not the brightest of what has already been shown in open storage. The most characteristic point, and the one that best matches my own impressions, is that the unofficial art of the 80s is shown not in the spirit of heroic resistance but simply as a story of artists fitting into the media wave of their era, on which they will go on sailing. As for the diffusion of art and society life, it is a very recognisable Moscow phenomenon, and it would be funny if the curators had deliberately been ironic in this way and sprinkled the art objects with glitter: who was friends with whom, who listened to what, where they gathered and how they posed for the camera. And it turns out that in the eighties we have a nonconformism domesticated and made bohemian for consumption by the ladies of the glossy magazines.

In short, if the time of the bulldozers is passing, then by the same logic comes the time of tanks, or the time of wheeled carts selling candy floss in front of the house of culture?

![](https://theparnassian.com/content/images/2026/09/photo_20788@11-06-2026_20-46-41.jpg)