An exhibition at the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg reminds us that since the dawn of modernism objects have played a crucial role in art, blurring the line between everyday life and artistic expression. From early 20th century collages to contemporary installations, artists have redefined materiality, questioning how objects gain meaning and transform from the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The State Russian Museum in St Petersburg has opened an ambitious show ‘Assemblage. Object. Installation’ a long time in the planning and combines works from its own holdings with loans from local contemporary artists and galleries. The halls in the Marble Palace are filled with a variety of different three-dimensional artworks which serve to remind the visitors that encounters and experiences with the notion of óbjectness´ are a distinguishing factor of what we understand as art today.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the object invaded oil painting and quickly occupied a place on a par with the image. Such liberating processes in art are at once demanding and novel and remind me of horror films where strange substances incarnate themselves and break through into the ´real´ world. What was started by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963), who used collage in their paintings and were the first to combine painting with real objects, was quickly adopted by Duchamp, whose ready-made/objet trouvé of 1913-17 instantly triggered a revolution. Most of the works made during the initial heroic period before the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925 have been lost, surviving only in photographs and film, and the same happened to counter-reliefs by Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) created in 1914-17 and the three-dimensional constructions of Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956). The replicas of these objects, now reproduced in museums and art historical literature, were created at the turn of the 1960s at virtually the same time as the emergence of conceptualism, which argues that the meaning and value of an object is determined by its institutional framework.

Rosalind Krauss, describing the nature and mode of influence of collage in her essay ´In the Name of Picasso´, observes: “The collage element obscures the master plane only to represent that plane in the form of a depiction. If the element is the literalization of figure against field, it is so as a figure of the field it must literally occlude,” and generally the same applies to assemblage, except that with three-dimensional objects the boundaries between different plastic media are much more problematised.

We have all scoured flea markets looking for bargains, hoping to find the sort of things you might see in a museum which at home would only require a little creative intervention, like good lighting or an unusual angle - this emotion is not new, ostensibly experienced by American artist Joseph Cornell (1903–1972). If objects could come alive like in fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson or Pavel Pepperstein then we could hear how an object with an interesting history which has evolved over time and is ready to lose its practical everyday function to sit in an exhibition display, to become inanimate and objectify itself and so quietly end its life in a museum.

The exhibition at the State Russian Museum organises objects according to genres in art and their formal, plastic properties, but it is also possible to categorise them by their function into four groups: the first is object as pure form, the second sculpture, the third the object as a collector's item, and the fourth the object as a useless gift.

A Marcel Duchamp ´Fountain´ is a masterpiece which belongs to its era and cannot reappear a hundred years after it was made, and it is challenging to find examples of the same pure expressiveness in the works of contemporary artists today. Among St Petersburg based artists working in this vein, is Pyotr Bely (b. 1971), who makes art out of concrete pipe rings or disc saws. The avant-garde admiration for things that belong to and reflect back the era in which they were made is coupled with a kind of elegiac reflection: the concrete rings in ´Butterfly(1in2)´, from 2021-24 narrate the history of Brutalist architecture and the urban environment that emerged under its influence; when added to splashes of paint on the gallery walls, the installations of pointed steel discs in ´Eclipse, Pause´ (2011) and Teeth (2015), , also become a commentary on the expressiveness of action painting.

The sculptural object is represented by the work of Konstantin Simun (1934–2019) a Soviet sculptor who made the ´Broken Ring´ (1966) an outstanding World War II memorial in the minimalist style, on the shore of Lake Ladoga. For this work, the artist was remarkably given relative freedom of expression within the Soviet system. During the second half of his life Simun lived and worked in the USA and was one of the first to transform discarded plastic canisters into archaic masks and expressive heads that shared formal features with the art of Ernst Neizvestny (1925–2016). They can be seen as a kind of Recycle art. Simun's undisputed masterpiece is a still life made from three objects: ´The Glass´ (1986), a quartz glass prism on a stone block, later joined by a wax-cast ´Hard Smoked Sausage´ (2011) and stone Bread with knife.

The artist duo Alexander and Olga Florensky, both born in 1960, are collectors of bric-a-brac. Starting in the mid-1980s as members of the popular St. Petersburg art group Mitki, these two artists, known for their work in traditional media, joined together in the mid 1990s to create art using vintage objects found in flea markets. ´Movement Towards YYE´ (1996), ´Mobile Bestiary´ (1998), ´Cult Structures´ (2005) are all characterised by the poetics of postmodernism and close attention to marginal artistic phenomena allows them to speculate and invent stories and characters, with whom they inhabited whole worlds.

Vadim Voinov (1940-2015) initially studied history, but in the late 1970s he started exploring buildings in the historical heart of Leningrad which were due to be demolished where he gathered everyday objects that had no monetary value and made art out of them calling his creations ‘functio-collages’, a sort of subspecies of assemblage. Almost all these works are dedicated to tragedies in the twentieth century which Voinov himself experienced – he came from the family of a Communist party official repressed in 1949. There are elements of the Russian avant-garde permeating these works which illustrates Boris Groys' thesis about the connectedness of the avant-garde and totalitarianism. These old objects only have minor changes, the transformation they experience is more on the level of semantics through the juxtapositions of different objects and how they overlap which relates to popular notions of ‘cultural layer’ and ‘historical process’. Voinov's art is so closely tied up with its time and place that it would be difficult to understand it without any knowledge of Soviet history and everyday life.

Most works by artist Kirill Khrustalev (b. 1971) are embodied metaphors encapsulated perhaps best by Daniil Kharms who wrote in 1939: “For example, a stick to one end of which is attached a wooden ball and to the other end a wooden cube. Such a stick can be held in your hand or, if you put it down, it is absolutely indifferent where. Such a stick is not suitable for anything else.” Khrustalev's works exist at the intersection of minimalism and Art Brut in a small space at the intersection of the visual and the poetic and become the product of the artist´s own intense, reclusive lifestyle.

So, throughout the last century, the object brought into the studio by the artist, gradually adapted itself to a new artistic function, was absorbed into it entirely, and evolved from being a simple object with a pure form into a useless gift. An object that has been in the hands of an artist becomes like a zombie no longer capable of anything, and even after breaking free from aesthetic constraints, it is doomed to be an object that is incomprehensible and unnecessary in practical life, an object that belongs only in a museum.