On the occasion of Igor' Cholin's 100th birthday: Edition Aspei's (Bochum) selection of works between avant-garde and conceptualism

The following article was originally meant to be a review of the German Cholin edition. During my correspondence with the editors the text developed in dependence on my reception process: I started to read Cholin in an intertextual chain of (post-)avant-garde art and life practices that are situated around documentarism. Cholin's poetics builds upon language experiments of Zaumniki and the absurd writing of Oberiu. Besides, I argue, we can also find some references to the simultaneously emerged, yet contrary avant-gardistic movement of Factography. Cholin's mediators reinforce this tradition as they set in motion the continuation of the factographic discourse via Moscow Conceptualism and its reception aesthetics in (Western) Germany and in Western Europe. The edition by aspei applies practices of publishing, translating and researching next to artistic ones, thus integrating documenting as well as commenting.