KOLLEKTIVNYE DEYSTVIYA (COLLECTIVE ACTIONS). THE DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE ACTIONS, Photo and Video

JOURNEYS TO THE COUNTRYSIDE. VOLUME NINE

104. FLIGHTS TO THE MOON

The audience (more than 20 people) were brought to the edge of the field on which there was an island of snow that had not yet melted. 8 black-and-white A0 photocopies of pages 16, 23, 26, 31, 42, 44, 46 and 77 of Flash Art No. 76-77, 1977 were placed in a row onto the thawing snow. Five of these pages contained material on artists that had participated in Documenta 6 (Oppenheim, Rinke, Serra and others), two pages contained material on Beuys and Schwarzkogler, and one page from another section of the magazine contained photographs and descriptive texts of CA’s actions from 1976, including “Appearance”, “Lieblich”, and “Tent”. “Appearance” and “Lieblich” were carried out on the same field in Izmailovsky Park on which the action described here took place.

A black sheet of the same size (A0) was inserted into the center of this row of photocopies and a globe of the moon with a diameter of 32 cm was placed onto it. On this globe, there were small red dots that marked the places in which space-ships had landed, labeled with the names of the space-ships and the dates of their landing in the same red color. After the spectators had become familiar with this installation, they were given envelopes in the format of A5, which were labeled with the letters “KD” (=CA) and the date of the action. These envelopes contained fragments of A3 photocopies of the same pages of Flash Art (each envelope contained one fragment).

After the audience’s departure from the field, the installation with the photocopies (covered with snow) and the globe were left behind at the scene of the happening.

For the audience, the action was held under the working title “Luna Park”: the little red dots largely remained unnoticed and the action’s organizers made no mention of the chronical connotation between them and the large red letters “KD” on the factographic envelopes as an important aesthetic underplot. (This connection is only made manifest on the level of the descriptive text at hand and its name “Flights to the Moon”).

Moscow, Izmailovsky Park

11.04.2005.

A. Monastyrski, N. Panitkov, S. Romashko, E. Elagina, I. Makarevich