Abstract

Perestroika art did not simply epitomise a neo-romantic revival of avant-garde sensibility at the twilight of Soviet modernity; it subjected to aesthetic scrutiny the normative—rather than the negative—construction of sexuality. Two artistic phenomena, Konstantin Goncharov (1969–1998) and the Factory of Found Clothes (1995–2014), interrogated sexuality as a normative construct grounded in the aesthetics of bodily acts. In the textile practices of both Goncharov and the Factory, subjectivity emerged not as a coherent self but as a liminal formation—a non-self that, through acts of self-possession and self-alienation, subtly infiltrated and expanded the very fabric of materiality. These artists experimented with textile art as a means of over-identifying with the artwork itself, endowing it with anthropomorphic qualities, personal attributes, and imagined biographies. As the body of the art object fused with that of an imagined heroine from a bygone world—the Gymnasium Girl—its aesthetically mediated subjectivity was eclipsed by a projected potential for transcendence. This process exposes the paradox of invoking art objects as vessels for reclaiming subjectivity within a world already saturated by objectification and alienation.