Empty Action: Labour and Free Time in the Art of Collective Actions

The first monograph on the artists group "Collective Actions", one of the most significant enterprises of modern and contemporary Russian art, studies their guiding esoteric principle of 'Empty action'. Departing from the seemingly mundane fact that their practice emerged in their free time from full-time employment for the Soviet State in a period of stagnating industrialisation, Marina Gerber identifies Empty action as a form of "art after work". The result is a comprehensive and profound investigation of the artistic and socio-historical context of Collective Actions' practice that bears some significance for contemporary debates on art and labour in a post-industrial age.