Artist:
Chto Delat [What Is to Be Done?] [Tsaplya Olga Egorova, Nina Gasteva, Artiom Magun, Nikolay Oleynikov, Natalia Pershina/Glucklya, Alexey Penzin, David Riff, Alexander Skidan, Oxana Timofeeva, Dmitry Vilensky] (collective founded in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Russia).

Description:
Illustration by Australian artist Zanny Begg for the front page of the newspaper Chto delat? (What Is to Be Done?), issue no. 17 titled “Debates on the Avant-Garde,” by the collective Chto Delat. The issue featured essays and interviews by John Roberts, Jacques Rancière, Zanny Begg, Dmitry Vilensky, Yvette Brackman, David Riff, Alexei Penzin, Markus Degerman, Igor Chubarov, and Brian Holmes. This issue was co-produced by WorkMethod, Paris, with the support of American Center Foundation, and Frac Île-de-France/Le Plateau, Paris. It was produced in the context of “Société Anonyme,” a project curated by Thomas Boutoux, Natasa Petresin and François Piron, 2007.

“[…] Many people today see the avant-garde as something discredited by the Soviet experience where the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ rapidly degenerated into a ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’ a totalitarian situation the ‘one no many yeses’ of the anti-capitalist movement has explicitly sought to reject. But despite the anti-vanguardist principles of the ‘movement of movements’—which it must be noted is as much a rebellion against the old left of Stalinism and its universal claims to truth as it is against the neo-liberal new right—we believe that some of the essential content of the avant-garde is crucial for an understanding of contemporary art.”
—Zanny Begg and Dmitry Vilensky, “On the Possibility of Avant-Garde Composition in Contemporary Art,” Newspaper of the Platform ‘Chto Delat?/What Is to Be Done?,’ no. 17 (2007): n.p.