Moscow concept artist Vladimir Arkhipov concentrates his work on the idea of the museum, the traditional sanctuary for keeping and presenting material goods of civilization. He realistically imitates museum forms of collecting, archiving and exhibiting. The artist fictitiously follows scientific rules of cultural anthropological field research regarding collecting, and he fictitiously collects the adequate objects, as they are the generally accepted goods of civilization. He does not aim at the precious documents connected with precious material and high symbolic value, but at anti-art, cheap substitutes for simple commodities, somehow assembled from worthless material, ludicrous in their appearance, helpful in the moment of need, rarely shaped consciously. There arises a crucial aspect of social reality, the uncollected, unknown, the hidden, the ugly, even insults to society become part of an art installation. An anti-museum with anti-artworks in Moscow in the cellar of a dilapidated multi-storey dwelling house, with a murderous staircase without electric light, refers as an art experiment to the questionability of museum collections as well as the large sector of social and cultural reality. The collected objects appear in the installation together with the interview texts as Readymades, presented as artworks, referring to their own history, though alienated from their purpose, and as sets of an imaginary museum, which can be multiplied, supplemented and arranged at pleasure. Arkhipov takes the opposite path to that of his famous Moscow artist colleague and predecessor Ilya Kabakov, who also includes everyday life scenes and situations in the former Soviet Union. Whereas Kabakov aims at the “Total Installation” where the objects are collected or prepared according to this purpose, for Arkhipov the collected object stands as the focus of interest, provoking the awareness of life. There is more room for individual imagination this way. Socialist realism is an essential, though despised part of the cultural heritage of the Soviet Union. Socialist realism, glorifyingly depicting the way of life of the ordinary people, stylising the worker, farmer, revolutionary as heroes, shedding the bright light of socialism over the scenery, had imprinted on the public taste since Stalin. Not unimpressed by this heritage of Russian Culture, Arkhipov turns around the line of argument: his heroes are the ordinary people, too, but they are shown in the role of individualists, who react to the levelling pressure of an almighty state, to the humiliating conditions of life and the chronic lack of commodities by ingenuity and originality in the struggle of everyday life. Although the collection was, at the beginning, almost nostalgically devoted to those non-official reminiscences, Arkhipov enlarged and generalized it to a worldwide scope in later years in order to find confirmation for his thesis of everyday ingenuity, people creating individual artefacts in spite or independent of an all-regulating social system (as was the case in the Soviet Union) or of the pressure to consume the rule of media in the Western societies. From a cultural-sociological point of view this collection opens up very interesting aspects. Arkhipov actually did valuable field research, even though he never intended to meet scientific standards, which might be helpful for the interpretation and evaluation of the intellectual and material civilization of the Soviet Union. Though culture is normally a question of the upper social level, Arkhipov finds it in the majority of ordinary people. The poetry of the collection has already been mentioned by other authors, presenting the sculptures rough to diligent, copied to genial, unusual to ridiculous, owing their form only to their purpose and the materials incidentally at hand, pre-civilization makeshifts to perfect artefacts. However, the texts and interviews which Arkhipov took along with the objects from the owners or authors, mostly play a secondary role in consideration. But they are worth a closer look, being of interest as incredibly poetic finds and revealing documents. 23 texts are published in this catalogue. Out of the interviews they have been distilled by the artist, apparently keeping strictly to the original wording. In their language they are mostly awkward, crude, stuttering, enriched by swearing. They minutely describe the making of the object, the need leading to it, the material, which came along somehow, its functional quality, its use and stay during the years. You learn much about the social status of the speaker, about his vanity, his joy about the fact that a piece regarded as worthless even by himself grasps the attention of an artist. You also learn much about the way of life in the Soviet Union, about the shameful lack of goods especially in the countryside, where you even couldn’t get a bath plug; about the comradeship in the plants, where friends spent months constructing a wireless set and could finally listen to the Voice of America; about the boredom of a pensioner, who still wants to be useful und knits brooms out of superfluous cords; about dissatisfactory water supply, which makes the use of the WC a sort of Russian roulette; about mice and rats in the dachas, which are so numerous you need a double mousetrap for them; about the habit to give presents to women on March 8, mostly household gadgets; about parsimony prohibiting you from buying a piece you could make yourself; about the problems resulting from bringing an ill child to the grandparents where it does not like to stay; about a national game where yearlong practice, great ability and special sticks are required, for the wood for which you have to travel to the Caucasus or the Crime, if necessary; about frozen village ponds and young ice hockey players, who broke bought sticks too quickly and played for a rouble; about water pollution of the river Volga, where formerly fishermen illegally caught sturgeon with self-made harpoons, while nowadays there are only swarms of bony, inedible fish; about the weight of socialist shovels and the great hurricane in Moscow, after which a yard keeper, while clearing the debris, found a traffic sign which he turned into a light handy snow shovel; about the damaged transmission belt of a sewing machine, which could not be replaced successfully either by sewing one or by a duty-journey to Tula; about missing water pipes in the region of Arkhangelsk, under which conditions it’s good to have a yoke to carry the water, about the endless passages in the Metro of Moscow, which can be used via small cards to learn English vocabulary… This is a wonderful merry-go-round of texts, in their naïve directness, their poetic density, and their unsentimental seriousness as if leading the reader up to the highest tower of the Kremlin and showing him a wide range of the land and its people. These texts are part of a collection of interviews and consequently part of an art installation. They cannot claim any literary value and can’t be related to any author in the sense of literature. They exist as readymades, as do the objects, not more and not less. And yet you wish them readers, who enjoy their richness in detail, their directness and vitality.