The Body as Stratum: Excavatory Gestures in Moscow Conceptualism

This article re-examines late-Soviet Moscow Conceptualism as a current that cultivated gestures analogous to extraction, rather than as a practice that merely represented energy resources. Against approaches that center on oil imagery in post-Soviet art―exemplified by Maria Engström’s discussion of “oil aesthetics” and its genealogy from Timur Novikov―the article argues that the disappearance of the heroic extractor from representation does not eliminate the question of the artist’s body. If the Brezhnev era is reused as a symbolic resource by artists’ gesture, then the embodied work must also be considered. From this point, the paper proposes three emphases:（1）the artist’s body can function as a stratum that accumulates authority;（2）records, images, and even schemes can become fossil-like resources that act back on the body; and（3）the long duration of Moscow Conceptualist practice makes temporal exposure―sedimentation, deformation, and return―central to analysis.