Within the span of only four years, two books on the same subject and with almost identical titles were published on two sides of Europe: Hans Prinzhorn's Artistry of the Mentally Ill (Berlin, 1922) and Pavel Ivanovich Karpov's Creativity of the Mentally Ill (Moscow, 1926). Whereas the first book was recognized as one of the key steps in the “discovery” of the psychotic art and its eventual mainstreaming, the second one quickly fell into obscurity. Its author perished in Stalinist purges of the 1930s, together with a number of his colleagues from the Russian Academy of Artistic Science (RAKhN, 1921-1931), in which he served as the head of the Commission for the Creativity of Mentally Ill. This article is the first in-depth study of Karpov's book and his theory of creativity, which he based on his extensive collection of the works of his patients (which was also lost in the purges). The article argues that his approach to psychotic art is completely independent from Prinzhorn's. Instead, it places this book in the context of the specific form of Kunstwissenschaft that was practiced in RAKhN, suggesting that this placement is of primary importance for understanding Karpov's methods and aims. More specifically, the article argues that in his research on the creativity of the mentally ill, Karpov engages in a productive dialogue with the philosopher and prominent RAKhN member Gustav Shpet's work on epistemology from the same period. The result is an original contribution to the clinical literature on art of the mentally ill patients.

Between 1974 and 1975, Zoran Popović, a conceptual artist from Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and his wife Jasna Tijardović, an art historian, spent a year in New York. During that time they engaged closely with the New York Art and Language group. This friendship and collaboration resulted in a rare instance of East-West exchange in Conceptual art: Popović and Tijardović published both co-authored and individual articles in the US journal The Fox , and members of Art and Language (Mel Ramsden, Michael Corris, and Jill Breakstone) gave a seminar in Belgrade's Student Cultural Center in the fall of 1975. One of the most important outcomes of this exchange is Zoran Popović's film Struggle in New York—Борба у Њујорку , which he made on his return visit to New York in the fall of 1976, and which features the members of New York Art and Language and other artists and activists from the downtown Manhattan art scene of the mid-1970s. This essay argues that in this film, Popović uses documentary techniques to establish a space for the display of radical artistic practices that engaged in a vigorous critique of art institutions. In so doing this film marks a limit position of institutional critique that approaches the idea of the abolishment and abandonment of art practice altogether. Further, the essay explores some differences between Conceptual art practice in Yugoslavia and the United States, arguing that Popović uses the crisis that tore the New York Art and Language group apart to address the unraveling of politicized Conceptual art practice in Belgrade's Student Cultural Center.