Artist:
Yuri Avvakumov (born Tiraspol, Moldova, 1957; lives and works in Moscow, Russia) and Yuri Kuzin.

Materials:
Silk-screen print on newspaper.

Description:
Print on newspaper of Tatlin’s Monument to the III International (1919–20). Avvakumov was one of the “paper architects” working during the 1980s who could not successfully build anything.

Described on the artist’s website as “a special installation (scaffolding, fire escapes, andcrane boom) for risk-free testing of manned flying devices. Design for the Gorky Park.”

“Yuri Avvakumov dedicated his [‘Temporary Monuments’] series to Soviet constructivism and its key protagonists. The title of the series is an oxymoron: its objects depict temporary structures (such as construction scaffoldings and industrial cranes) that are removed after the monuments are erected. Besides, their sizes are not at all monumental, and their location—unlike that of real monuments—changes all the time.

“One shouldn’t also overlook the fact that the title of the series continues the logic of the term ‘paper architecture’ coined by Avvakumov earlier. The term referred to projects of the author himself and his colleagues who participated in international competitions of conceptual architecture and were receiving numerous awards during the 1980s. However, unlike the ‘paper’ projects, the ‘temporary monuments’ were not ordered by any customers but were, rather, created by the author as fundamentally unrealizable conceptual models.”
—”Artists and Works,” Stella Art Foundation.