Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980 9780755604906, 9781848859487

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LIST OF FIGURES

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6. 7.

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Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), John Cage, and some of Afrika’s artistfriends, Water Music, performance in Afrika’s studio, Leningrad, 1989 Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), John Cage, and some of Afrika’s artist-friends, Water Music Performance in Afrika’s studio, Leningrad, 1989 Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and John Cage in Afrika’s studio, Leningrad, 1989 Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and Sergei Anufriev, performance at the Vera Mukhina statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman, Moscow, 1990 Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and Sergei Anufriev, performance at the Vera Mukhina statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman, Moscow, 1990 Republican Psychiatric Hospital No. 1, Simferopol, Ukraine Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), Works from the exhibition Heroes of the Soviet Union, Republican Psychiatric Hospital No. 1, Simferopol, Ukraine, 1993 Oleg Kulik, Deep into Russia, performance in Dubrovky, Russia, 1991

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LIST OF FIGURES

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

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Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener, Mad Dog (The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus), performance in front of the Guelman Gallery, Moscow, 1994 Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener, Mad Dog (The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus), performance in front of the Guelman Gallery, Moscow, 1994 Oleg Kulik, Reservoir Dog, performance in front of the Kunsthaus, Zurich, 1995 Oleg Kulik, Dog House, performance at the Interpol exhibition, Färgfabriken Center for Contemporary Art and Architecture, Stockholm, 1996 Oleg Kulik, I Bite America and America Bites Me, performance at the Deitch Gallery, New York City, 1997 Oleg Kulik, Family of the Future, performance and installation/ exhibition, Moscow, 1997 Oleg Kulik, Kulik versus Koraz, performance in Alma-Aty, Kazakhstan, 1997 Oleg Kulik, I Cannot Keep Silent Anymore, performance in front of the European Parliament, Strasbourg, 1996 Oleg Kulik, Deep into Russia, installation at the Venice Biennale, 1997 Miervaldis Polis, Bronze Man, performance in Riga, 1987 Miervaldis Polis, Bronze Man, performance in Riga, 1987 Miervaldis Polis, Bronze Man, performance in Riga, 1987 Miervaldis Polis and Roi Varra, Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre”; The Bronze Man and the Delegate of the White Man in Helsinki, performance in Helsinki, 1990 Miervaldis Polis, The Miervaldis Polis Memorial Room, exhibition in Riga Gallery, 1995 Gints Gabraˉns, Poster for Starix: The Reality Show, Riga, 2001 Gints Gabraˉns, Installation of the Starix exhibit at the São Paolo Biennale, 2004

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

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Gints Gabraˉns, Starix: How to Get on TV, video-lecture, 2004 Gints Gabraˉns, Starix, “Before and after” image, 2004 Zbigniew Libera, Game with Mother, video, 1987 Zbigniew Libera with patients in the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Pabianice, 1986 Zbigniew Libera, Someone Else, c. 1986 (2006) Zbigniew Libera, Intimate Rituals (film still), 1984 Zbigniew Libera, You Can Shave the Baby, 1995 Zbigniew Libera, Delivery Bed: Play Kit for Girls, 1996 Zbigniew Libera, Body Master (II), 1998 Katarzyna Kozyra, The Men’s Bathhouse (film still), performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1999 Katarzyna Kozyra, The Men’s Bathhouse (film still), performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1999 Katarzyna Kozyra, photograph of the artist disguised as a man for The Men’s Bathhouse, performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1999 Katarzyna Kozyra, The Women’s Bathhouse (film still), performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1997 Katarzyna Kozyra, Blood Ties, part of The Outdoor Gallery: By the Art Marketing Syndicate, 1999

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LIST OF PLATES

1. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), Flag, c. 1995 2. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), Flag, c. 1995 3. Oleg Kulik, Family of the Future, performance and installation/ exhibition, Moscow, 1997 4. Miervaldis Polis, Bronze Man, performance in Riga, 1987 5. Miervaldis Polis, Bronze Peoples’ Collective Begging (Latvia’s Gold), performance in Bremen, 1989 6. Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Za¯bers, The Bronze Man Becomes the White Man, performance in Riga, 1992 7. Miervaldis Polis and Roi Varra, Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre”; The Bronze Man and the Delegate of the White Man in Helsinki, performance in Helsinki, 1990 8. Miervaldis Polis, Raphael and Polis, nd 9. Gints Gabraˉns, Starix, montage of Starix’s television appearances, 2004 10. Zbigniew Libera, How to Train the Girls (film still), 1987 11. Zbigniew Libera, How to Train the Girls (film still), 1987 12. Katarzyna Kozyra, Tribute to Gloria Viagra (film still), performance in Berlin, Germany, 2005

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The road that led me to performance art in Russia and Eastern Europe has been long and circuitous. I never imagined that my first visit to Moscow, in the summer of 1996, would have been so auspicious. While my fellow travellers from the University of South Carolina M.A. program were combing the Pushkin, Tretyakov, and other major art museums that the city has to offer, my friend Robert and I were stumbling through off-the-beaten-path neighbourhoods in search of contemporary art. Clutching a tattered photocopy of an Art in America article on Moscow’s new commercial galleries (of which there were really only a handful to choose from in those days), we wandered up and down the same street, asking passersby in my (at that time) broken Russian where such-and-such address was. When we finally found the gallery, which I remember as a small garage at the back of an abandoned courtyard, we walked in to find a stage filled with naked men, and an audience deeply enthralled by their performance. After it ended (I can neither recall what it was about nor what it consisted of, except for the naked men), Robert and I attracted a great deal of attention as the only Americans in the room. I can’t say that this initial performance was so inspiring that I ran off to do a Ph.D. on performance art in Russia; life is never that straightforward. From South Carolina, I moved to Poland, in search of Eastern Europe, and perhaps my family’s Eastern European roots. It was there that I learned a new language, and a lot about a new culture. I started

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my Ph.D. at Rutgers in 2002, doing my dissertation under the guidance of Jane Sharp. It is her that I have to thank for seeing this project through from start to finish, from the very early papers that I wrote in her Theories of the Avant-Garde class, to the dissertation, on which this book is based, and even after. Jane has always been there to give me art-historical guidance and professional advice. I am also grateful to my dissertation committee members, Andrés Zervigón, Alla Rosenfeld, and Gerald Pirog, for their invaluable advice that helped me to turn my project from a dissertation into a book. As this project began as my Ph.D. dissertation, it has received a considerable amount of funding, over the years. While still at Rutgers, I found support for it both from within the university and from external sources. First, my Ph.D. studies were supported by a generous three-year Norton and Nancy Dodge Graduate Assistantship. The graduate school awarded me Summer Research Funds in 2003 and 2004 to conduct research abroad, and in 2004 and 2007–08 I received a Mary Bartlet Cowdry Fund award for dissertation research from the art history department. In 2004, I was awarded Title VIII Funds to attend the University of Illinois’s Russian and East European Center Summer Research Lab, which enabled me to exhaust the resources available to me in the U.S. Also in 2004, an American Council for Learned Society’s Language Training Grant enabled me to study Latvian in Riga, and that same year a J. William Fulbright Fellowship gave me the opportunity to spend the following year there, researching my dissertation. I also received a Kosciuszko Foundation Graduate Study and Research Grant in 2005, to spend time doing research in Poland. One year in Latvia turned into five, and I am very fortunate to have spent so much time living and working in that country, which has given me great insight into all aspects of my research. I am eternally grateful to all of the friends and colleagues I met along the way at the Latvian National Museum of Art, the Latvian Artists’ Union, the Institute of Art History of the Latvian Academy of Art, and, most of all, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. Shortly after finishing my Ph.D., I left Latvia to begin my professional academic career at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Starting a new job in a

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new country is difficult even in the best of circumstances, but I am extremely grateful to all of my wonderful colleagues who not only supported me in my teaching role, but also in my research, giving me the time and space to complete my book, and always offering invaluable advice along the way. Funding for the project continued, and the dissertation began to grow into a true book manuscript. This project has changed and morphed considerably from the original dissertation, and much of that is owed to more time spent in the field with support of funding from sources both within the University of Aberdeen and without. I have received numerous research travel grants from the School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy Research Committee, as well as one from the College of Arts and Social Sciences. I also received support from the Small Grant Fund from the College of Arts and Social Sciences, with which I was able to travel to Stockholm to present part of one chapter of the book at the International Council for Central and East European Studies VIII World Congress. The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland has not only supported the development of this project with a Research Travel Grant in 2009–10, but has also made the color illustrations in this volume possible, with the help of the Trust’s Illustration Grant. Also, part of the copy-editing was funded by an Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies Emerging Scholar Research Grant. Finally, the British Academy has supported this publication with an Overseas Conference Travel Grant, which enabled me to present part of this book in the form of a conference paper at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies in Boston in 2009. Furthermore, the substantial funds from the Small Research Grant that I was awarded from the British Academy in 2010 enabled a final trip to each of my research centers, during which I had meetings with each of the six artists featured in the book. This book never would have been possible without the cooperation, help, and enthusiasm of these artists, to whom I am forever indebted. All of the artists have given me countless hours of audience with them, fielded numerous and often difficult questions, supplied me with documents and materials for research, books, computer files, and videos,

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as well as many of the images published in this publication. They have welcomed me into their homes and studios, hosted me, and allowed me to trundle through their belongings in order to uncover precious materials that, I hope, have not been previously unearthed. Thus, to Sergei, Oleg, Miervaldis, Gints, Zbigniew, and Kasia—a huge thank you, spasibo, paldies, and dzie˛kuje˛. Much of my primary and secondary source material has been mined from the archives at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art in Riga, and the Warsaw Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle. The staff at both have always been extremely helpful, and I am grateful for being able to make copious photocopies and scan images as needed not only for this book, but also for my dissertation and other publications. The hours and hours of interviews that I conducted with these artists was just the first step. I never could have utilized the material from those interviews as thoroughly as I did without the intrepid assistance of my two transcribers, Piotr Karski and Edgars Vansovicˇs, who typed up hours of interview material that ranged from very interesting to very lengthy, and, at times, even comical. Furthermore, it was their eyes that ensured not only that my ı¯’s were dotted, but that all of the wily diacritical marks were in place in this book. Dzie˛ki, Piotr, and paldies and spasibo, Edgars. In terms of emotional support, I am eternally grateful to all of my friends who have been so encouraging throughout the years. I have been fortunate to live in so many places across the globe, and everywhere I go I am lucky to find the kindred spirits who have helped me along the way. I would also like to give a special thanks to my thorough and fastidious copy-editor and indexer, Jane Friedman. This book is, of course, for my parents, who have always supported me in every decision, and with everything I have ever done, from changing my major in college from music to art history, to giving me the freedom to move halfway across the country, and then the world, yet always welcoming me home. But this book is also for one special person who may not have been there when this book began, but certainly saw me through its completion—Matt.

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A NOTE ON TRANSLATION

All translations in the book are by the author, unless otherwise noted. All the interviews were conducted in the artists’ native languages of Russian, Latvian, or Polish, with the exception of those with Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and the art critic and curator Viktor Mazin (who was involved in Afrika’s Crimania project), which were conducted in English

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INTRODUCTION PERFORMANCE ART, EAST AND WEST

The role of performance art in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century remains largely unexamined. This book will be one of the first attempts to critically evaluate the function of performance art in the transition from Communism to capitalism in Russia and Eastern Europe, through a series of case studies that closely analyze the work of six contemporary performance artists from the region. This is a subject that has been understudied, due both to lack of access to archives and artists in Eastern bloc countries during the Cold War, and foreign scholars’ lack of knowledge of the local languages. My aim is not to produce a survey text of performance art in the region, but rather a close study of six prominent and internationally recognized performance artists in Russia, Latvia, and Poland: Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and Oleg Kulik from Russia, Miervaldis Polis and Gints Gabra¯ns from Latvia, and Zbigniew Libera and Katarzyna Kozyra from Poland. Although none work exclusively as performance artists, each of these individuals has used performance at certain stages in their careers to work through regionally and temporally pertinent socio-historical issues for both themselves and their audiences. As such, the performances can provide insight into the experiences of those living under Communism and its aftermath in the countries in question, as well as how Russian and Eastern European performance art distinguishes itself from the genre as it developed in the West.

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Chapter one investigates the role of performance art in relation to the question of post-Soviet identity. It focuses on the work of two performance artists in Russia working in the 1990s: Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) from St. Petersburg and Oleg Kulik of Moscow. From Afrika’s two-week-long stay in a mental institution (1993), to Kulik’s “Russian Dog” performances (1993–97), wherein the artist appeared in public, naked, barking, and jumping around like a dog, both artists use performance to work through issues surrounding the search for a new national-cultural Russian identity in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chapter two concentrates on Latvia’s two leading performance artists from the standpoint of the issue of truth versus facade, and their works’ relevance to contemporary Latvian audiences. It takes as its focus Miervaldis Polis’s Bronze Man (1987–92) and Gints Gabra¯ns’s Starix (2000–04) performance projects. Bronze Man involved Polis being painted and fully attired in bronze, and walking through the center of Riga in that manner. The effect was that of a living, breathing statue that could walk and move, yet was convincing as a statue when immobile, prompting viewers to question the truth behind the character’s appearance, at a time when Latvian citizens were beginning to do the same with regard to the history of their country and its unlawful incorporation into the Soviet Union. In Starix, Gabra¯ns selected a homeless man from the streets of Riga and turned him into a television star, by using every avenue available for him to appear in the mass media. Just as Polis’s performance did during the era of perestroika, Gabra¯ns’s post-Soviet project reminds viewers that the man behind the suit may not be all that he appears to be. In chapter three, I probe the use of performance to address the topic of gender identity and formation in late- and post-Communist Poland. I concentrate on the Polish artists Zbigniew Libera and Katarzyna Kozyra, both of whose work reflects a sustained concern with these issues. In 1987, Libera staged the performance How to Train the Girls, where he filmed a young girl being given various “feminine” objects to play with, such as lipstick, a purse, and high-heeled shoes, to explore the process of indoctrination into the female identity. Ten years later, Kozyra entered a woman’s bathhouse in Hungary and filmed the

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women there, acting naturally, outside of the “male gaze.” In 1999, she embodied this process herself, as she disguised herself as a man and entered a men’s bathhouse, also in Hungary, in a performance entitled The Men’s Bathhouse.

Performance Art in the West In her seminal 1979 text on the subject, Roselee Goldberg defined performance art as “live art by artists,”1 by which she means work unfolding in time and space, as opposed to objects such as paintings or sculptures. Performance art often involved the artist’s use of his or her own body in the work, as well as the involvement of the audience or spectators. The performance was thus fleeting and temporal, as opposed to being fixed and lasting, as a two-dimensional work of art. Performance art became a preferred genre in the West in the 1960s, as a way for artists to reclaim art, for both audiences and for themselves, and remove it from the commodified space of the gallery. Dissatisfied with the commercialization of the art object, artists aimed to create works that could not be bought or sold. Theorists on the subject regard the proliferation of performance art at that time as significant in the shift from modernism to postmodernism, marking a change in accepted notions of art production and reception, from one that was artist- and object-centered, to an ephemeral phenomenon that broke down the barriers between art and life, and artwork (as well as artist) and viewer, and in fact became dependent on the presence of the viewer for its realization.2 Consequently, performance art in the West has become one of the most over-theorized genres in art history. According to Goldberg, the origins of contemporary performance art may be traced back to the Futurist evenings in Milan and the Dada activities at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, as well as the activities and manifestoes of Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova in St. Petersburg, all of which took place during the second decade of the twentieth century. At that time, many artists embraced the avant-garde aim to destroy the art of the past and create a new art form for the future. Whether it was the Italian Futurist promise to “destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind”3 and “put the spectator in the centre of the

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picture,”4 or the Russian Futurists’ program to “decorate life” and “paint themselves,”5 all of these artistic manifestations had in common several themes that would eventually come to define the medium known as performance art in the later part of the century: the use of time and space as formal and integral elements in the artwork, the artist’s use of his or her own body as a significant component of the work, the reliance on chance, and the use of shock tactics to seize the audience’s attention. All of these strategies would be taken up in the 1960s and 1970s by artists who created works exclusively in this genre. In 1952, John Cage created one of the first performance art pieces at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. While the term “happening” hadn’t yet been invented, nor the genre of performance art fully developed, this was the work that paved the way for new types of artistic experimentation during the second half of the twentieth century. Untitled Event, or Untitled Theatre Piece No. 1, as it was later referred to, involved a variety of artists and performers engaged in individual acts simultaneously, with the audience surrounding them, as opposed to being set apart from them by a stage. While the performance was “scored,” to indicate the time in which each action would take place, artists were meant to improvise or create their own acts individually, so that “there would be no causal relationship between one incident and the next,” and that “anything that happened after that happened in the observer himself.”6 Thus, chance and audience involvement were essentially written into the performance, which included the following: Cage reading a text on the relationship between music and Zen Buddhism, from a step ladder; Robert Rauschenberg playing old records on a gramophone, and later projecting slides onto the ceiling of the venue, the dining hall at Black Mountain College; the pianist and experimental composer David Tudor playing a prepared piano,7 then later pouring water from one bucket to another; Merce Cunningham dancing through the aisles of the audience being chased by a dog; all the while there were whistles blowing, babies crying, and waiters serving coffee to the audience.8 All of the events happened more or less spontaneously, although there was an overriding rubric to the chaos. Performers acted both among and in front of audience members, in an attempt to blur the line between artist and viewer.

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Allan Kaprow continued this line of experimentation in the happenings that he developed in the 1950s and 1960s. 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) was similarly scored, and also involved the audience in the artwork. For example, the gallery was divided into three sections, and after each “part,” a bell would ring and the audience would have to move to another section. Thus, no two people’s perception of the performance would be the same, because each audience member would literally see something different. For Kaprow, the audience’s involvement was of particular importance, declaring as he had in a 1959 statement that “the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.”9 The aim was to merge artwork and audience, so that the division between the two would be blurred. From there, he stated, “it follows that audiences should be eliminated entirely [italics his].”10 We can see this unfold in his 1964 piece Household, where the viewers became participants, and vice versa. Driving to a garbage dump on the outskirts of Ithaca, New York, a convoy of men and a separate convoy of women arrived at the site of the performance to build a tower and a nest, respectively. The performance ended with the men destroying the nest, the women licking jam off the cars, and the onlookers eating jam sandwiches, thus participating in (and literally consuming) the event as well.11 The artist also brought other performances to upstate New York (for example A Service to the Dead II, 1962, and Gas, 1966), literally and dramatically removing them from both the gallery and commodified realm of New York City. One can trace a trajectory from the Surrealist automatic drawings and parlor games such as Exquisite Corpse, where each participant contributes a line to a poem or a portion of a drawing to the finished product, to Jackson Pollock’s action painting of the 1940s and 1950s, through to Kaprow’s happenings.12 Indeed, Kaprow’s 1958 essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” informs us of the influence of the Abstract Expressionist’s art-making process on his own work. Kaprow stated that to grasp a Pollock’s impact properly, we must be acrobats, constantly shuttling between an identification with the hands and body that flung the paint and stood “in” the canvas, and submission to the objective markings, allowing them to entangle

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and assault us. This instability is indeed far from the idea of a “complete” painting. The artist, the spectator, and the outer world are much too interchangeably involved here.13 Kaprow emphasizes the importance of the performative14 aspect of Pollock’s work, and introduces the notion that the viewer must identify with those actions, and be “in” the artist’s painting along with him. While the Futurists had endeavored to place the viewer at the center of their paintings, Pollock made it happen, by literally working from inside the canvas. In this way, the line between artist, artwork, and audience ultimately becomes blurred, or, as Kaprow had envisioned, “fluid and indistinct.” Kaprow’s direct use of Pollock’s work in the development of his happenings thus cements the link between performance art and painting, suggesting the growth of the former out of the latter, a significant difference from how it developed in the East. In the interwar years, painting resumed its place as the predominant art form on both sides of the Atlantic. The influx of immigrants to the United States from Europe, fleeing both World War II and the Holocaust, led to the ascendancy of the New York School, with Pollock at its helm.15 Still, the seeds of performance art had been planted before the action painter’s rise to fame, with the experiment in artistic production at Black Mountain College, which began with the avant-garde methods in teaching and approach to art-making, and culminated in Cage’s 1952 performance. Once Kaprow recognized the performative elements in Pollock’s painting, he developed his own type of performance-based art that eventually came to be known as happenings.16 Indeed, some of Kaprow’s earlier works were installations that were meant to recreate the canvas in three or four dimensions, for example, his Rearrangeable Panels, from 1957, which the viewers could shift into varying arrangements according to their preferences, changing the order of the panels, or the shape—for example, configuring them so as to form a box. Apple Shrine (1960) was an installation and total art environment that visitors could walk through and, at the end, select a piece to take away with them (a real apple or a fake one).

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INTRODUCTION

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By the 1960s and 1970s, a wide range of artists in both Western Europe and the United States began to utilize performance art as their primary genre,17 choosing to create works that took place in time and space,18 as opposed to producing objects and paintings that could be hung on walls, exhibited, or bought and sold commercially. Vito Acconci, for example, considered space the element that activated a performance, utilizing both his own body and the bodies of others in his work. Seed Bed, from 1971, involved the artist lying under a ramp in a New York City gallery. As visitors entered the gallery space, the artist masturbated and conveyed his fantasies about them via a microphone that he had under the stage with him. Viewers became unwitting participants in his piece, their presence in the gallery space activating the performance, which, in turn, activated his fantasies, and thus his artistic “creation,” in both senses of the word. Following Piece, 1969, also involved unsuspecting participants. The artist would encounter people on the street and then follow them until they entered a private space, at which point the performance would end. Chris Burden was interested in testing his own personal limits in his performances. Shoot, from 1973, involved the artist being shot in the arm by a friend. While the bullet was meant to simply graze the artist’s skin, he flinched, which caused the bullet to actually penetrate his arm. In this sense, chance became the key element in the performance, as the outcome could not have been predicted. Five-Day Locker Piece (1971) tested the limits of the man’s survival, as the artist had himself shut in a locker for five days without any food or water. Performance artists such as Burden often took advantage of the live aspect of performance, combined with the use of their bodies as instruments, to explore the extremes of human existence. Following the establishment of the first feminist art education program in the United States, at California State University in Fresno, in 1970, women artists began to embrace performance as a unique genre that was not only free from the commodified realm of the gallery, but also not dominated by male artists, as painting and sculpture traditionally were. For example, during Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 performance, Interior Scroll, the artist pulled a text from her vagina, thus enabling it to speak. She covered her body in paint, outlined it, and

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even adopted several poses traditional to figure drawing classes, poses that women, as models, would often assume. Shigeko Kubota’s 1965 performance Vagina Painting, which predates Schneemann’s by ten years, involved the artist attaching a paintbrush to her underpants to create an action painting, similar to those produced by artists such as Jackson Pollock. In this performance, the artist’s vagina was meant to be seen as creating the painting; much like in Schneemann’s work, the female organ was given a voice. Both of these artists utilized performance art to recover painting from the phallo-centric masculine hand and claim a space for themselves in the male-dominated art world.19 Thus, feminist performance artists were able to reclaim their bodies from the patriarchal art world, where their bodies had simply served as objects of the male gaze. Their chosen medium enabled them to become active agents, acting out issues related to gender formation and identity, gender roles, and female social issues. In Western Europe, as well, the genre of performance art developed in its own right.20 Artists such as Yves Klein created performances that utilized female models as living paintbrushes, solidifying the link between painting and performance. Other performances by Klein, for example Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959–62), dealt with the issue of exchange and monetary value of the work of art. In this piece, the artist sold empty spaces in the city of Paris in exchange for gold. He then asked each buyer to burn the certificate of ownership, in exchange for which he threw half of the gold into the Seine, in order to maintain equilibrium between that which was bought and sold. At his 1958 exhibition at the Iris Clert Gallery, The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void, the artist exhibited nothing at all. Visitors crammed into the empty gallery, whose walls had simply been painted white, on the opening night of April 28. With no works on view, there was nothing to buy or sell; thus, the artwork could not acquire a market value.21 Other artists chose more extreme means of expressing themselves through performance. The Viennese Actionists became renowned for the graphic and violent nature of their performances, which often involved the exposure and presence of bodily fluids in order to create a more visceral experience for both artist and viewer. The Actionists’

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performances had also grown out of painting. In his 1964 Material Action Manifesto, Otto Mühl, a member of the group, stated that “material action is painting that has spread beyond the picture surface. The human body, a laid table or a room becomes the picture surface. Time is added to the dimension of the body and space.”22 In 1962, another member of the group, Hermann Nitsch, created the Orgy Mystery Theater, which involved human beings participating in animal sacrifices, being covered in animal blood and body parts, all within the context of acts resembling ancient rituals. The Viennese Actionists were interested in creating performances so extreme in nature that they provided a transgressive experience for those participating. The idea was that through the experience of the performance, both artist and viewer would undergo a life-changing catharsis. Their work tapped into the Futurist principle of using shock as a tactical device, not necessarily to repulse the audience, but to move them to react, no matter how negatively. This strategy recalls the Symbolist rallying cry, “épater le bourgeois” [to shock the middle class], the idea being that the masses had become complacent in their everyday, consumer-driven existence, and that it would take an artist of the advanced guard to shock them out of this state and move them forward. Joseph Beuys also focused on the transgressive properties that performance art could engender. Beuys adopted the role of the shaman, and his work is highly autobiographical, yet also meant to function as a form of healing. He traces his artistic birth back to an experience that he was said to have had as a pilot for the German Luftwaffe during World War II, when his plane was shot down and he was rescued by Crimean Tatars. They wrapped him in fat and felt, and in doing so, saved his life; because of the significance of this experience, these elements recur in the artist’s performances and installations.23 Beuys’s performances aimed at catharsis, but more through accessing and unification with the primitive world, as opposed to the purging methods of the Actionists. In How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965), the artist covered his head in honey and gold leaf and walked around a gallery with a dead hare, whispering explanations of the pictures contained within to the animal. In this performance, the audience was kept at a distance, outside of the gallery. All of the elements

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of the performance were of symbolic importance: the hare represented “incarnation,” and unification with the earth, insofar as it can bury itself there; honey was the product of the ideal society—that of bees; and gold was connected with alchemy.24 In 1974, the artist traveled to New York to create I Like America and America Likes Me, a performance during which he spent three days coexisting with a wild coyote in the space of a gallery. For the artist, the coyote represented what America had been before it was colonized and urbanized by European settlers. The performance, then, was a symbolic reconciliation with the animal, which for Beuys represented the healing of a trauma. Similar to Burden, the Yugoslavian artist Marina Abramovic25 sought to take her transgressive experiences to the very extreme, putting herself in harm’s way in order to achieve catharsis or physical or psychological transformation. She involved her audience in this process as well, especially in her series of Rhythm performances, in which the artist explored the limits of the body and the boundaries of the unconscious. In Rhythm 0, from 1974, she put the viewers in charge of her life, providing them with seventy-two objects to use on her naked body—some of which could cause pleasure (for example, rose petals), others pain (a knife, a revolver). In a dramatic moment of the performance, one of the participants held the loaded gun to her head; another viewer valiantly wielded it away from that person, thus possibly saving Abramovic’s life. In Rhythm 2, from the same year, the artist took her life into her hands when she ingested two pills, one after the other—one for catatonia, which caused seizures in her healthy body, yet left her mind clear, and another for depression, which left her unconscious. In Rhythm 5, the artist lay recumbent at the center of a burning five-pointed star and passed out from smoke inhalation. Speaking to the significance of testing her limits as an artist in pieces like this, Abramovic explained, “it strengthened me. I built mental and physical constructions which could withstand the performance.”26 Utilizing the body as the main instrument in performance art meant that, in testing certain limits, artists potentially faced injury or even death. Other artists employed their own bodies in performance as their only means of gaining access to the art world. In The Singing Sculpture,

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from 1969, Gilbert and George sought to surmount the impenetrability of the gallery system in London, after their graduation from St. Martin’s School of Art. Covering their faces and hands in metallic paint, the pair exhibited themselves as the artwork—they were living, breathing bronze sculptures. In one of the first instantiations of the performance, in 1970, the artists stood on a table at the Nigel Greenwood Gallery in London, singing along to a recording of the 1930s Flanagan and Allen song “Underneath the Arches,” which was about the merits of living rough. Not only did Gilbert and George eliminate the boundary between artist and artwork, but also between art and life. Indeed, this is a concept that they carry over into their large-scale photo collages that they produce to this day, as the artists maintain that everything that they see and encounter in their everyday lives has the potential to become part of their work.

Performance Art and Postmodernism Much ink has been spilt analyzing the development, predominance, proliferation, and implications of performance art in the West, both in its earlier incarnations associated with Dada and Futurism, and its later manifestations once it had become a full-fledged genre in the 1970s. While I make no attempt to dismantle these arguments, I enumerate several here, in order to situate Eastern European performance art among them. According to Goldberg, the performance art associated with the Futurist movement in the early twentieth century “was more manifesto than practice, more propaganda than actual production.”27 What the actions of the Futurists and Dadaists have in common is their use of shock to jar the viewer out of his/her everyday stupor, an element that both Peter Bürger and Renato Poggioli have recognized as a significant element of the avant-garde. Poggioli has stated that the avant-garde artist must “agitate against something or someone. The something may be the academy, tradition; the something may be a master whose teaching and example, whose prestige and authority, are considered wrong or harmful. More often than not, the someone is that collective individual called the public.”28 Furthermore, both groups were attempting to “reintegrate art into the praxis of life,”29 to

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use Bürger’s term, from which it was thought art had become regrettably disconnected. In effect, these artists were reacting to the institutionalization of art that had occurred over the past several centuries, and expressing their desire to break free from that yolk. We can perceive in Kaprow’s work a significant shift in the conception of the artwork from a creation that is object-based and artistcentered, to one that exists temporally and relies on the presence of the viewer for its realization. Amelia Jones has recognized this shift, specifically with regard to body art, as that which “instantiate[s] the dislocation or decentering of the Cartesian subject of modernism,”30 and believes that “this dislocation is... the most profound transformation constitutive of what we have come to call postmodernism.”31 In fact, Jones, among others, identifies performance and body art as “constitutive of postmodernism because of their fundamental subversion of modernism’s assumption that fixed meanings are determinable through the formal structure of the work alone.”32 Indeed, Peggy Phelan insists on the presence of the viewer to experience a performance, asserting that it cannot be reproduced, even with the use of photography or video, and that even a retelling of the performance, in either written or oral form, cannot capture what was meant to be experienced by the original performance.33 In his essay “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried has also identified the performative aspect of Minimal or Literalist Art, as he calls it, as a critical element in the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the visual arts. The physical and temporal experience of perambulating a Minimalist sculpture was, for him, more “theatrical,” as opposed to the still viewing of an Abstract Expressionist painting, which was simply “present.”34 He stated that “whereas in previous art ‘what is to be had from the work is located strictly within [it],’ the experience of literalist art is of an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.”35 While Fried’s essay focused on the Minimalist trend of sculpture that grew out of post-painterly abstraction, others have drawn similar conclusions with regard to performance art itself, insofar as it subverts the idea of a fixed and stable meaning of the work of art, as well as the traditional artist/viewer hierarchy.36 Fried’s recognition of a temporal element to a work of art is an acknowledgment of

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a considerable change in art-making practices, with the performative element being at the center of that move. The effect of creating a work of art that exists only in time, in the presence of the viewer, is that the work of art cannot itself become captured by the market and commodified—it cannot be bought or sold. Although Bürger insists that a true avant-garde can no longer exist, as its art will always end up being co-opted by the art market, Henry M. Sayre maintains that it is those “nontraditional genres,” such as performance art and body art, which maintain their avant-garde quality insofar as they do not produce objects.37 While Bürger claims that avant-garde art eventually comes to be reduced to a mere product that then “loses its character as anti-art and becomes, in the museum, an autonomous work among others,”38 Sayre asserts in The Object of Performance (1989) that “a large body of work has been produced, in the last two decades, which has not lost its avant-garde status, not given itself over to the market and to bourgeois taste, or at least not meaningfully. But this work has not, by and large, been painting.”39 For Sayre, it is performance art that carries on the tradition of the avantgarde, by existing outside of the market system. While this point can be debated, the thesis has particular relevance when dealing with performance art from the East. These conclusions by Jones, Phelan, Bürger, Goldberg, and Sayre beg the questions: what happens to an avant-garde produced by a society that does not have a commodity culture, let alone an art market? Furthermore, where can we place a tradition of performance that does not grow out of painting? What happens to these theories regarding performance art when the creation of performances arises not out of a desire to preference the viewer or resist commodification, but is simply a necessary condition of existence for the survival of artistic experiment? How can we assess a performance art that arises from societies that did not experience the same shift from modernism to postmodernism as was experienced in the West? These are the questions that this book, in presenting specific case studies of artistic performances from Russia and Eastern Europe created in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, attempts to at least raise and address, if not yet answer.

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East and West This book uses the term “East” to refer to the areas of Russia and Europe that for the greater part of the twentieth century came under the Soviet sphere of influence, namely, the countries of the former Soviet Union and its satellites. Thus, of the countries treated in this study, Russia and Latvia are part of the former, while Poland belongs to the latter category. The terms “East” and “West” are admittedly loaded ones, and many before me have attempted to define, deal with, unpack, and unravel them.40 In light of post-structuralist theories such as deconstruction,41 we know that these binaries are easily exploded when we realize the dependence of the dominant of the pair for its existence. While some have argued for the irrelevance of this binary,42 the terms East and West delineate geographic, political, and ideological categories that cannot be ignored. Whether or not these terms maintain any credence in contemporary academic circles remains to be seen; however, they are certainly very real to artists in the region in question, and especially to the artists in this study, who are not only aware of the division, but also engage with and invoke it in their work. Polis, for example, recalls being unable to travel abroad to the West during the Soviet period, and Afrika, Kulik, and Gabra¯ns specifically address the East–West binary in their work.43 Therefore, it is not this book’s mission to dismantle this binary, but to work within it, acknowledging the terms East and West as encompassing economic and social boundaries between European countries that experienced single-party state socialism, and the rest of Europe and North America.44 As Bojana Pejic´ has recently stated, “with very few exceptions, editors and contributors to the publications mapping art in Eastern Europe seem to be aware that writing histories of art is not geographically neutral.”45 It is therefore with this awareness that this text is being written. While some, such as Susan Buck-Morss, argue for the recognition of the similarity of experience between East and West, others, such as Victor Tupitsyn, would like to maintain the distinction of the “Eastern” (in his case, specifically “Soviet”) experience, as something so removed from Western experience that it cannot be translated. In Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West, Buck-Morss

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juxtaposes a variety of elements of visual culture from both sides of the divide (the image of King Kong on top of the Empire State Building with that of Lenin atop Boris Iofan’s plan for the Palace of Soviets, for example), pointing out the confluence of experience, emotions, and aims between the two poles, and suggesting that capitalism and socialism were in some ways two sides of the same coin. In her words, in its construction of desire, industrial modernity offers as a substitute for human fulfilment the illusion of omnipotence. Its form under capitalism is the consumer illusion of instant gratification, while long-term needs go unattended and social security is so precarious that unemployment strikes with the fate of a natural catastrophe. Under the Soviet style of socialism, the situation is reversed: the illusion is that the state will provide total security (in return for total dependency), while there is no control over immediate satisfactions.46 Buck-Morss not only challenges us to acknowledge similarities, but also effectively attempts to overthrow the Cold War binary of East and West. In The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia, however, Tupitsyn sets forth the view that “socialist realism is not transportable,”47 because it was meant to be viewed with the “communal optic” (his term)48 common to all Soviet citizens who had been under the influence of the all-pervasive communal way of life. Shared language and understanding is the result, and, as he describes it, “we may assert that the communal unconscious is structured like communal speech, and on the strength of the clichédness of the latter, almost everything that is displaced into the unconscious—save for the prelingual (the infantile period of life)—coincides to a significant degree for the majority of communal dwellers.”49 It follows, then, that this would necessitate an examination of the art produced by these countries that takes into account these different social circumstances and political backgrounds. There are other arguments for a so-called “Third Way” approach, as an escape from the East–West binary that still acknowledges those

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two terms. Elisabeth Sussman refers to this as a “post Cold War ‘third zone’ or state of hybridity between East and West,”50 and reminds us that there is in fact a cross-pollination between the two, that it is not only that the East refers to the West, but that Western artists, too, see and learn from the East. This liminality of position arrives out of the unique character of the East, categorized by Rasto Mocnik as “a timed space. Correlatively, the ‘timeless,’ ” as opposed to the West, which is “a non-space: it is what all the local spaces are to be measured against.”51 With the notion of the West being relatively fixed, the East, then, becomes less stable, and relative. Pat Simpson has also characterized the current situation in terms of a subtle difference with the past, explaining, “the centre has to some extent shifted to a virtual space of globalised flows of capital and information.”52 Magda Cârneci reminds us, in fact, that “there are many Eastern Europes; there is a geographical, a historical, a political, but also a cultural one.”53 Thus, while we cannot deny that the East exists—either as a concept or a real (lived) experience—we must also understand that it is an unstable concept, whose meaning hinges precisely on what is being discussed. Marina Gržinic´, in fact, feels that East and West are terms that are produced during the process of evaluating a work of art: “East and West are not positive entities. They are produced already in the interpretation process. You are producing them, you are actually codifying, you are establishing the territory—what is East and West.”54 While I do not overtly engage with these terms and their meanings, according to Gržinic´’s notion, my text then by default engenders them. Insofar as performance art was such a crucial element in the shift from modernism to postmodernism in the West, it is necessary to address the situation of postmodernism in the East. Buck-Morss has discussed the disputes over the meaning of the term among scholars in East and West in the epilogue to Dreamworld and Catastrophe,55 describing a meeting that took place in Dubrovnik in 1990. According to her, we seemed, generally, to be reviving the official polarization between Eastern and Western discourses but this time with the positions reversed, the “East” using every stereotype of the Cold

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War to characterize its own totally unique, totally totalitarian past, and the “West” mouthing a standard criticism of capitalist, commodity culture that would have been acceptable in the USSR long before glasnost.56 The source of the dispute was mainly the fact that each country represented at the meeting claimed to have experienced both modernism and the transition to postmodernism in decidedly different manners; thus, their definitions of the terms were duly affected. Scholars such as Aleš Erjavec, Mikhail Epstein, and Boris Groys57 have addressed the issue of what postmodernism could mean in countries that experienced extended periods of modernism, for example, those under totalitarian rule in the East. Erjavec has noted that it was not until the late 1980s and early 1990s that Eastern Europe began to witness the appropriation of ideas of Western postmodernism, which gradually began to replace the dominant influence of German and French philosophy.58 In Postmodernism and the Post-Socialist Condition, Erjavec and others examine the distinctive manifestations of postmodernism in the visual arts in post-socialist countries during the late twentieth century, the time of their transition to capitalism. In his introduction to the book, he states that “postsocialist postmodernism. . . possessed different traits than postmodernism in the West because the cultures and societies in which it sprang up were different.”59 He maintains that artists in different countries utilized postmodernism to different ends, and as a result the phenomenon varied from country to country. Furthermore, while postmodernism in the East may resemble manifestations of the postmodern as it developed in the West, Erjavec asserts that “because of specific conditions such as cultural appropriation and frequent eclecticism that existed in the different countries even before they became socialist, there was already a fertile ground of orientations, techniques, and procedures that ensured its growth.”60 Thus, although Eastern European postmodernism may appear as simply an appropriation of the Western version, different social and historical circumstances render it a different species entirely, in terms of impetus and interpretation—a similar argument that I make with regard to performance art.

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There are also a variety of theories concerning the temporal location of Eastern European postmodernism. Elisabeth Sussman argues that “Soviet conceptualism. . . can be thought of as a form of postmodernism,”61 in its critique of the utopian dream, thus placing the origins of postmodernism in Russia in the 1970s, roughly in line with the West. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover pinpoints the shift as having occurred earlier, identifying the rediscovery of the Other, following the thaw, as having led to the emergence of postmodern trends in Russia.62 Others, however, such as Zdenka Badovinac and Joseph Backstein, locate the postmodern turn in the East to the 1980s, with the advent of perestroika and glasnost. As Backstein argues, “in the late 1980s, Russia (or the Soviet Union as it was then), returned to the condition of Modernity,”63 insofar as, due to the great socio-political shift at that time, art was restored to its privileged role and position in society. He notes that this beginning coincided with the end of postmodernism in the West, thus marking a cultural lag. Badovinac, however, sees the 1980s as the time when “the belief in great ideologies started to crumble. Together with this we also saw the decline of the construct of the autonomous individual, the myth of the artist from previous decades,”64 which would make that period decidedly postmodern, according to Western definitions. Alexander Genis also traces this development to the shift in reality resulting from perestroika.65 Just as each of these writers recognizes the need for a distinction with regard to the brand of postmodernism that developed in socialist countries in Europe, my book aims to re-examine the specific postmodern phenomenon of performance art in light of this distinction.

Historiography Decades of state control over art, art history, and “criticism” (insofar as it existed in the Soviet and people’s republics) has rendered problematic the very notion of an art discourse in the East, and Western scholars’ lack of local languages, combined with limited access to these countries during the Cold War, resulted in a deficiency of publishing on art in the region.66 This situation has begun to be remedied with publications that have appeared since the break-up of the Soviet

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Union, although scholars on both sides of the divide are scrambling to make up for lost time, writing, analysis, and historicization.67 While a number of surveys and exhibition catalogues appeared in the 1980s and 1990s, in recent years more in-depth texts, anthologies, and analyses have emerged, which are slowly beginning to fill the lamentable gap in scholarship on the region. My book participates in the growth of this field by contributing scholarship that both complements and supplements existing publications. Two of the most significant anthologies published in the new millennium are Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl’s Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s, and East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe, by the IRWIN Group, part of the NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst, or New Slovenian Art) movement. While both of these publications aim at specificity over generalization, the sheer volume and breadth of material covered in each renders that feat difficult. Primary Documents is an essential contribution to the field, as it presents several “primary documents” to the English-speaking world for the first time. They include documentation of the controversy surrounding the infamous 1974 “Bulldozer Exhibition,” complete with the New York Times article that broke the story; transcripts of the dialogues in the media surrounding the controversy of Katarzyna Kozyra’s diploma work, Pyramid of Animals; as well as the written exchanges in the art press over the sensation caused by Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener at the 1997 Interpol exhibition in Stockholm. Primary Documents is an excellent starting point for those seeking knowledge in this newly emergent field. My text aims to probe further by limiting the number of case studies to six artists from three countries. My book also attempts to do what the writers of East Art Map set out to do in theirs, but achieved only to varying degrees. Their book functions as an encyclopaedia of art from Russia and Eastern Europe, written by local art historians and critics from each country, with several critical essays by scholars in the field. In the introduction, the writers express their desire to juxtapose key “Eastern” artists, artworks, and artistic events to their Western counterparts. They admit, however, that although they had asked “selectors to describe their chosen artists

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and works in relation to both local and international artistic production, only a few of them actually did this.”68 They further confess that “rather little has been done in the way of making serious comparisons between the Eastern and Western European context for art production. In this area, a no man’s land continues to exist that divides one half of the continent from the other.”69 My book, then, will attempt to populate that no-man’s-land, in its deliberate juxtaposition of specific cases of performance art practices in the East and in the West. Piotr Piotrowski’s recent study, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989,70 forms an interesting parallel to my work in terms of both structure and method. Piotrowski’s text deals with the resurgence of the avant-garde in selected countries in Eastern Europe, such as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Romania. His is one of the first major comparative studies of contemporary artistic practice in Eastern Europe. Piotrowski makes it clear that his aim is not to present an all-inclusive history of modern art in Eastern Europe, but rather “a selective, comparative analysis of significant art historic and artistic problems.”71 While Piotrowski’s endeavor is much more far-reaching than mine, temporally, geographically, and stylistically, our aim is similar in scope: a comparative look at art produced by different artists in countries directly affected by state-sponsored socialism in the twentieth century. Whereas Piotrowski focuses on the so-called “satellite countries” of Eastern Europe, as well as the breakaway nation of Yugoslavia, mine targets three European countries located in various regions of the former Soviet Union: Russia, the seat and center; Latvia, a republic of the USSR; and Poland, a satellite nation. While Piotrowski concentrates on the early and late socialist period in Eastern Europe (1945–89), mine takes as its focus the late to post-socialist period (roughly 1980–2005). Piotrowski does include a chapter on the development of contemporary avant-garde practices in the region, such as body and performance art, but while he concentrates on the emergence of those practices in Poland and the other nations of his study, mine targets specific performances in Russia, Latvia, and Poland. Furthermore, his chapter on body art focuses on artists such as Natalia LL (Poland), Sanja Ivekovic

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(Yugoslavia), and Marina Abramovic (Yugoslavia), as well as featuring a section on male body art. While Piotrowski provides a comprehensive study of those practices in Eastern Europe in one chapter of his book, my text specifically addresses this contemporary practice of performance art, and utilizes a case study analysis to form a tightly focused examination. Piotrowski’s significant contribution to the field has in many ways firmly established the comparative method as the way forward in terms of conceptualizing and framing this new area of study—the contemporary art of Russia and Eastern Europe. Aside from these significant scholarly publications in the field, it is necessary to mention a number of noteworthy exhibitions that have taken place over the last twenty years that have also contributed to the growth of the field, through an attempt to categorize developments in the art of the region, and pinpoint common trends as well as divergences in artistic practice. Bojana Pejic´’s After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe, at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, in 1999, and, more recently, her exhibition Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, at the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien [Museum of Modern Art] in Vienna, in 2009 (and at the Zache˛ta Narodowa Galeria Sztuki [Zache˛ta National Gallery of Art] in Warsaw, in 2010), are two major exhibitions that attempt to examine various trends among contemporary artists in the East. While After the Wall looked more generally at contemporary art production in Eastern Europe and Russia, Gender Check focused specifically on artwork that dealt with issues of sexual and gender identity in the postwar period. With regard to performance art in the region, Zdenka Badovinac’s Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present, which took place at the Moderna galerija Ljubljana [Museum of Modern Art], in Slovenia, in 1998, remains one of the first and only survey studies of body art in Eastern Europe and Russia. The exhibition catalogues produced in correlation with these exhibitions have been invaluable resources, foundational texts that represent the first steps in the field of art history in the direction of my study.72 The literature on performance art in the West is vast. This book builds on texts by Roselee Goldberg, Amelia Jones, Peggy Phelan, and others who have created the discourse on performance in the

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West. What is glaringly absent from these texts, however, is reference to performance artists and performance art pieces from the East, although there are some exceptions to the rule. Kristine Stiles’s essay “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions” deals with significant Czech artists such as Milan Knížák and Peter Stembera, the Romanian performance artist Ion Grigorescu, and the Polish artist Jerzy Beres. Oleg Kulik appears in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones’s anthology The Artist’s Body, and Adrian Heathfield’s Live: Art and Performance. The Yugoslav artist Marina Abramovic appears in several critical essays, although her situation is somewhat different, as she emigrated to the West (to the Netherlands) in the late 1970s. Still, Goldberg’s revised anthology, which remains the primary introductory text on the genre, only devotes one page to performance art manifestations in Eastern Europe and Russia after World War II.73

Performance Art in the East All artistic production in the Soviet Union came under state control in 1932, when Joseph Stalin introduced the doctrine of Socialist Realism at the Seventeenth Party Conference of the Soviet Communist Party. Two years later, the concept was codified by Andrei Zhdanov in his speech to the Soviet Writers’ Congress, the first official proclamation of the method of Socialist Realism in the arts. As a result of these pronouncements, the pluralism of the avant-garde was suppressed, as throughout the duration of Soviet rule artists were expected to strictly conform to the dictates of Socialist Realism, with its emphasis on depicting the “radiant” Communist future.74 In his 1934 speech, Zhdanov criticized “bourgeois” art, opposing it to the new Soviet art that artists were to produce. While Stalin called on writers to become “engineers of the human soul,”75 it was Zhdanov who outlined how they were to do so, in terms of the style and subject matter to treat in their work. As for the latter, only those individuals typically considered heroes of the Soviet state, such as workers, farmers, and political leaders, were considered acceptable.76 Zhdanov went on to describe the way in which these subjects were to be depicted, using the techniques of realism, as opposed to abstraction or expressionism. He stated that

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the artist must “depict reality in its revolutionary development,”77 meaning that the subject was to be interpreted in a manner that was realistic, but also dynamic, so as to inspire the viewer. Finally, a work of art needed to exhibit the three main concepts of ideinost [ideological commitment], partiinost [party-mindedness], and narodnost [national/ popular spirit].78 It was Zhdanov’s proclamation that set the standard for all artists in the Soviet Union, excluding all subject matter that was not socialist in content and ideological in message, and all styles other than realism, from the realm of possibilities available to Soviet artists.79 The restructuring of the system of governance in the arts, which also took place in 1932, was designed to ensure that artists adhered to these guidelines. This was announced in the decree “On the Reorganization of Literary and Art Institutions,” which consolidated party control over the arts, specifying “that all independent or unofficial art and literary groups be liquidated and replaced by unions. . . carrying out Party policy.”80 The party policy that they enforced, then, was Socialist Realism. In her survey of the visual arts during the Soviet period, Elena Kornetchuk described the All-Russian Cooperative of Artists (Vsekokhudozhnik), formed as a result of the 1932 decree, as having had “the greatest daily impact on Soviet professional artists, since it [was] their major official employer.”81 This meant that artists were paid for services rendered; commissions were provided by the state, for works of art to be completed in accordance with the guidelines of Socialist Realism. Furthermore, artists received studios and art supplies that would not have been available to them otherwise. Anyone who was not a member of the Artists’ Union and wanted supplies had no other alternative than to steal them, or illegally share with friends who were members of the Union. Thus, in the East, unlike in Western Europe and the United States, artists did not have an art market to deal with, since art was controlled, commissioned, and owned by the state. As far as performance, amid the official hegemony of Socialist Realism, this medium was often to take the form of social critique. Instead of creating performances that questioned the function of the art object, as in the West, artists in the East frequently created works that related to local issues within the context of the late- or

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post-Communist era.82 Furthermore, insofar as experimental art was by default “agitating against something” (to reference Poggioli)—in this case, governmental control over the arts—performance art was not obliged to fill that need in artistic practice. Operating within a wholly disparate set of social and political circumstances, artists in the East utilized performance art to reclaim both public space and the body from the control of the state, and engage with issues that they would not be able to address in their paintings, and which would be considered taboo in official contexts.83 A painting that criticized the state would not have even been allowed into an exhibit in the first place, or would have been quickly censored;84 however, a performance that erupted spontaneously on the street could not be as easily silenced. For example, the Orange Alternative happenings that took place in Poland in the 1980s attracted attention because of the fact that they disrupted the daily order on the streets. And when the police came to break them up, this only added to the sensation. Furthermore, especially during the perestroika era, these types of interventions often took place in public view, allowing the man on the street to witness these critiques taking place within the realm of art, which only regular gallery-goers could see if presented in the traditional form of a painting or sculpture. Performance art that took place in private spaces, however (which they often did), enabled the continuation of artistic experiment that would have been otherwise suppressed by official bodies. In this sense, unlike in the West, where performance grew out of painting, in the East it had an entirely different provenance. Performance was not only a strategy, but a necessity of existence. For many, it was one of the few means available to them to pursue artistic experiment. While artists in the West strove to create art that could not be bought or sold on the market, in the East the creation of a work of art without an object that could make it traceable back to the owner, had a different appeal. Furthermore, events such as exhibitions had already taken on a performative aspect, a phenomenon quite different from in the West. As art criticism as we know it in the West did not exist in publication, artistic discourse took place among artists at exhibitions. And because unofficial art exhibitions were not open to the general public, their successful staging relied on the presence of

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the invited viewers—the artists themselves and their friends—for their realization.85 Eventually, in Moscow in the 1980s, this gave rise to a distinctive type of called AptArt (this is discussed in further detail in chapter one). Thus, it could also be said that in the East, performance art grew out of events such as these. Since performance art in the East developed in a culture that did not have the same experience of market-driven capitalism as in the West, it follows that it resulted in a different manifestation of the genre.86 Zdenka Badovinac has observed that in the absence of a market, “art in the East has referred to itself and has used its own language.”87 She further maintains that while practices may appear similar in East and West, one can discern their difference in the “invisible and nonsignified,”88 meaning, as she states, that “similar gestures are read differently in different spaces.”89 For example, we know that whereas the creation of an abstract painting in the East in the 1950s might have been read as a political gesture, the same action would not have been understand as such at that time in the West. Ilya Kabakov’s statement on installation represents a further example of the difference in the trajectories of modern and contemporary art, East and West: the origins of Western and Eastern European installations are different. As far as I can judge, the roots of Western installation lie in Happenings and Actions; the installation is actually the remains of events frozen in time, like the installations of Beuys, Kounellis and Merz. The origins of the East European installation lies in painting.90 Similarly, while performance art in the West grew out of painting, I highlight how in the East it has subtly different origins, for example, exhibitions or art festivals, as is discussed in subsequent chapters. Much performance art in the West was focused on social critique, as well. Most notably, feminist artists often used performance art to address issues of gender and inequality among the sexes. For example, the work of Carolee Schneemann, Eleanor Antin, the Fluxus artist Shigeko Kubota, not to mention the Guerrilla Girls, all foregrounded matters related to gender identity in contemporary society, utilizing

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a medium that was not a male-dominated tradition: performance art. These protests within the rubric of performance art took place within the full-fledged democracies of Western Europe and North America. However, when similar actions took place in the East—be they related to social issues, such as gender, or political ones—they occurred within societies where state-sponsored socialism prohibited public protest or dissent. Thus, while activist performance art in the West functioned in concert with the social protest that was taking place in the 1960s and 1970s, that same activism, operating within the frame of absent democracies, in effect collided with the existing socio-political structure, thus giving it the possibility to rebuild or reshape it. The development of the genre of performance art varies from country to country, and even city to city, in the former Soviet Union and its sphere of influence. These trajectories are addressed in the individual chapters, which each present an overview of performance art in the country in question prior to the featured performances themselves. For example, while the work of the Collective Actions group can be considered relevant to the development of performance art by Moscow artists, in St. Petersburg, there were different artistic influences to speak of, for example, the experimental film and music scene, which I highlight in my chapter on Afrika and Kulik. In Latvia, the hippie counterculture was unofficially led by Andris Grı¯nbergs, who is regarded as one of the country’s first performance artists. In Poland, there were a variety of influences, from the theatrical performances of Tadeusz Kantor, to the political protests of artists following the establishment of Martial Law in 1981.

Methods My methodology is socio-historical, insofar as I examine these performances as they relate to the social and political context within which they were created. In doing so, I evaluate the changing circumstances in which art was produced in the late and post-Communist era. By examining performances by artists in contiguous but contrasting countries of the former Communist region of Europe, I aim to demonstrate how divergent experiences of late and post-socialism

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were uniquely manifested in the visual arts. While, until now, studies of performance art have focused primarily on its development in the West, my aim is to build on the numerous theoretical texts available on Western performance art and offer critical examination of the manner in which it developed in Russia and Eastern Europe, in an attempt to broaden the scope of art history and offer a more nuanced understanding of twentieth-century performance art. The fact that artists in the East were using performance art to respond to social issues makes a socio-historical analysis not only viable, but essential. As Kristine Stiles described performance art actions in the West: Removing art from purely formalist concerns and the commodification of objects, artists employing action sought to reengage both themselves and spectators in an active experience by reconnecting art (as behaviour) to the behaviour of viewers. Art actions and their related objects move through the body of the artist in his/her material circumstance to the viewer in the social world. Such action-objects are the carriers of that information enlivened by action. They announce that it is never enough to simply look at the object of an action without entering into a committed relation, a situation in which the object draws viewers back to actions completing the cycle of relations between acting subjects, objects, and viewing subjects.91 Insofar as performance artists sought to connect their work with the social, to use the artwork to engage with or comment on the society that surrounded it, it is necessary to examine these works from within that context. In his essay “Negativity of Culture,” Erjavec compares the postmodern art of developing nations with that of the West, stating that “in the developing countries, then, art and culture today. . . carry not the detached, depoliticized, or often unimpressive, even forced, and sincerity-wise dubious political or personal messages that we encounter so often in the contemporary developed world, but possess social, political, and even national impact and import,”92 which makes the case for analysis from within the socio-historical context

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that the art was produced. I use a case study approach to thoroughly examine the work of several of the most prominent performance artists in each of these countries, in order to demonstrate how, although their work bears resemblance to the genre that developed in the West in the 1970s, this art form is significantly different in Russia and Eastern Europe due to the completely different set of social circumstances in which artists were operating. My research on the six artists in my study has brought to light new materials gleaned from sources that are only available in local languages, such as exhibition reviews, journal articles, and interviews.93 In order to reconstruct the histories of the performances treated in the book, in addition to rare primary source material, my study relies heavily on my own personal interviews with the artists in their native languages (Russian, Latvian, and Polish), which provide crucial information due to the nascent state of the field. In fact, many of these projects, for example, several of Afrika’s performances and Polis’s Bronze Man performances, exist only as oral histories. Even regarding actions that have been more carefully documented, such as those by Kulik and Kozyra, there are significant gaps in information and knowledge of their details. My interviews and conversations with the artists, which took place over the past several years, aim to fill those gaps, with regard to the specific performances discussed in this book. By including statements by the artists, I hope that this book makes another significant contribution as a new body of primary source text, in the form of transcribed dialogue. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Peggy Phelan highlights the fact that one of the challenges of writing about performance art is that the object of analysis disappears in its ephemerality. She highlights the paradox of writing about a work of art that claims to not be reproducible, and notes that any documentation of the act (in the form of a photograph or video) ceases to be a performance.94 In Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, she stated that “in this sense, performance theory and criticism are instances of writing history.”95 Indeed, this is a history—the history of performance art in Russia and Eastern Europe—that not only craves, but needs to be written. I would argue that because the performances discussed in this book, as with the

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majority of performance works produced in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late and post-Communist period, were created not out of a desire to produce something undocumentable, unrecordable, or unsellable, the lack of documentation and historicization is not a result of their ontology, but rather the simple result of historical circumstances. In the case of some artists, such as Afrika or Polis, their performances went undocumented because of the time and conditions under which they were created. For others, such as Kulik and Kozyra, who are now becoming more well-known in the West, the gaps in the available information on their work are the result of the above-mentioned lack of scholarship in the field. Thus, despite Phelan’s argument that “the desire to preserve and represent the performance event is a desire we should resist,”96 in the case of Russia and Eastern Europe, the writing of these performances—of these histories—is essential. This book not only documents the performances, but charts moments in history that would have been otherwise irrevocably lost, and as such can also help us understand significant shifts and changes that occurred during those moments. The lack of critical material on these artists in English or otherwise cannot be overstated. I address the absence of focused studies in the art-historical literature by employing this method of comparison by country and region. My method of interpretation is to engage limited primary sources in local contextualization of artistic performances, and then juxtapose these nascent histories with performances that have taken place in the West. It is my hope that this juxtaposition will reveal where these comparisons fall short, and demonstrate the need for a more expansive consideration of the genre. Furthermore, I hope that examining these works in their social context will reveal the fact that Western theories developed to contextualize performance art are insufficient when used with regard to performance art from the East.97 By focusing on why performance was important at this decisive moment in history and highlighting the significance of performance to these artists in the East, I attempt to offer a nuanced understanding of the lingering efficacy of avant-garde practices in this region. Support for these methods of interpretation can be witnessed in various statements by scholars in both the fields of Eastern European

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art history and performance art. Boris Groys, for example, has argued for a contextual approach to the art from the region. In his words, “today, artists from all over the world employ the same forms and procedures, but they use them in varying cultural and political contexts. . . from the outset an artist can and must expect the viewer to regard the context in which he produces his art as an intrinsic dimension of his work.”98 While this contextualization is one aspect of my study, I also aim to negotiate the challenge identified by Ekaterina Dyogot, “to avoid both the compulsory comparison with the so called ‘West’—which would imply an assumption of dependence—and the total rejection of any comparisons under the motto of ‘cultural specificity’ and validation of the ‘local.’ ”99 With my juxtapositions, I do not wish to suggest any such dependence on the West; however, I present histories and artworks that may be more familiar to readers in the West, in order to demonstrate how similar artistic expressions can have different meanings and implications depending on the context in which they were created. I am particularly partial to Marina Gržinic´’s idea of “infecting” the dominant discourse of the West with the relatively unknown and undiscovered art of the East. Gržinic´ calls for art historians and critics “to develop a process by which to ‘infect’ the very institution of art history and cultural theory in Europe with new—Eastern European—ideas and proposals.”100 To my mind, this approach implies not a strict 1:1 juxtaposition, nor a denial, but rather a gradual seeping in of the East to the West, so that while the two histories remain separate and distinct, they begin to travel along the same course following the end of the Cold War. This book, at least, is an attempt at that method. Inasmuch as performance art itself aimed to break with tradition and develop a new method of artistic expression, it only follows that new methods of analysis and interpretation be developed with which to discuss and assess it. Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson have worked toward this end in Performing the Body/Performing the Text, expressing the objective of “focusing on interpretation as an exchange or negotiation.”101 Indeed, they maintain that “since meaning is negotiated between and across subjects through language, it can never be fully secured: meaning comes to be understood as a negotiated

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domain, in flux and contingent on social and personal investments and contexts.”102 Insofar as meaning is unstable and not fixed, it echoes the intrinsic nature of performance art itself. It then follows, for Jones and Stephenson, that “interpretation itself is worked out as a performance between artists (as creators, performers, and spectators of their work) and spectators (whether ‘professional’ or non-specialist).”103 In this vein, my interviews participate in this performance that is the creation of meaning, insofar as I question the artists in an effort to determine not only the precise makeup of the performance (in the case of those that were not recorded), but also the artist’s motivations, feelings during and after the performance, as well as retrospectively (now), and his or her own observations throughout the duration of the performance, all of which contribute to the ultimate understanding of the piece. This method recognizes the significance of the artist’s statements in the interpretive process, a significance that in fact emerged during the Soviet period, as a result of the specific experience of producing unofficial art in the Soviet Union. In the absence of an art market, artists produced artworks for themselves and their contemporaries; in the absence of an art-critical discourse, they produced the discourse themselves. Boris Groys feels that this “collective or groupbased character”104 is one phenomenon that distinguishes the art of the East from contemporary Western art. Ilya Kabakov supported this by stating, “deprived of a genuine viewer, critic or historian, the author unwittingly became them himself, trying to guess what his works meant ‘objectively.’ ”105 Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl support Kabakov’s claim, reminding us that art criticism as we know it in the West hardly existed in these Communist countries; therefore, “much of the most interesting art writing comes not from art historians or critics but from artists themselves.”106 Ekaterina Dyogot builds on Groys’s observation, going so far as to say that “if the contemporary international art system is built around the individual artwork. . . then the Soviet system, in which there were no galleries and no private collections whatsoever (except for practically illegal ones), was built around the figure of the artist.”107 Thus, while Western art history and criticism has, in the last century, moved away from preferencing the artist’s biography and personal statements in the method

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of interpretation, my work directly engages with these as materials, stemming from their significance in the specific context from which the artists and their works originated. The choice of artists from three countries occupying central and peripheral ranks within the Soviet sphere of influence provides fertile ground for comparison of the divergent experiences of Communism throughout the region. The scope of this study enables an examination of performance art as it occurred in both the center of the Soviet Union (Russia), as well as in its so-called peripheries, in nations such as Latvia and Poland. While these three nations are distinctive, they also share commonalities that make them not only suitable, but ideal for comparison. For example, Russia and Poland are both Slavic nations, yet host different Christian traditions— Russia being Orthodox and Poland, Roman Catholic. Latvia is a Baltic nation, and shares neither language nor tradition with Russia or Poland, but has a complicated history with both nations. Parts of Latvia were once included in the great Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Latgalia, the southernmost region of Latvia, has a significant Polish minority.108 Furthermore, until 1919, the territory that is now the Republic of Latvia was part of the Russian Empire, and from 1939 until 1991 it was part of the Soviet Union; thus, because of forced migration, a large percentage of its inhabitants are Russian-speaking. The temporal framework of this study allows me to trace performances by these key artists from the late socialist to the early post-socialist period. This tightly focused timeframe of just over two decades spans the breakdown and ultimate collapse of Communist rule in Europe, from the perestroika era in the 1980s through to the immediate post-Communist period in the 1990s and early 2000s, including the NATO enlargements of 1999 and 2004, when Poland and Latvia, respectively, were added, as well as the 2004 European Union expansion, when both Poland and Latvia were included. The artists in this study are not intended to represent their nation or generation, but have been selected because their work shares similar concerns relevant to the experiences of Communism in each country, and uses performance art to navigate the changing landscape around them. I do not mean to suggest that these six figures present the only concerns of artists or performance artists in each country. Although

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one can detect a definite trend toward dealing with gender issues and body image in Polish art in the 1990s, and while Libera’s and Kozyra’s work has been selected as representative of that trend, one could also identify artists in Russia or Latvia addressing such themes. The aim here, however, is to examine these key performances and demonstrate how they embody artists’ responses to a critical social need in the contemporary context from which they emerged, thus linking the social conditions in the countries in question with the artistic performances that address them. It is for this reason that this use of case studies has been employed, in order to be able to perform an in-depth analysis on selected pieces of work, as opposed to making broader statements or assessments regarding performance art in these countries—statements for which it is simply too early, stemming from the nascent state of the field. Each of these artists is internationally recognized: Afrika, Kulik, Gabra¯ns, and Kozyra have all represented their respective nations at the Venice Biennale in recent years, and Libera was selected to do so as well, although he ultimately decided not to participate in the exhibition because he would not have been allowed to exhibit one of his works.109 Kulik, Libera, and Kozyra were also featured in the 2009–10 show Gender Check. Having mainly retired from public life and avantgarde activity, Polis received more international attention in the 1980s than now. For example, his work was part of the major 1989 German exhibition Riga: Latvian Avant-Garde. This text contextualizes their work within both the Communist and post-Communist backdrop against which they were working, as well as within the context of performance art in their own countries. This book attempts to make the case for a redefinition of performance art that takes into account the strand of the genre that developed in the former Communist countries of Russia and Eastern Europe. Each case study demonstrates how artists in Russia, Latvia, and Poland “performed the East” both during and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. It is only after the nuances of performance art in the East are rediscovered that we can begin to forge an understanding of performance art, East and West.

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CHAPTER 1 AFRIKA AND THE RUSSIAN DOG: PERFORMING POST-SOVIET IDENTITY IN RUSSIA

Two new characters rose to prominence in the Russian art world of the early to mid-1990s: an artist named Afrika and a wild canine with peculiarly human features who came to be known as the “Russian Dog.” Both attempted to negotiate the changing face of Russian society in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the medium of performance art. With newly fashioned names and identities, these figures navigated the post-Soviet landscape in search of a new national-cultural identity for both Russia and themselves. Throughout his career, Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) has used the mental institution as an incubator for his artistic ideas, entering into it at critical moments to explore not only mental illness, but also the structure and function of language. His evocatively titled Crimania project was the climax of this exploration, concluding with the artist’s largest solo exhibition to date, held at the Museum für angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Art),1 Vienna, in 1995. The Russian Dog was the alter ego of the artist Oleg Kulik, who regards his “canine” performances as cathartic experiences that he used to work through questions and concerns about his individual identity, as well as his place as an artist in post-Soviet Russia. Afrika’s stay in the mental

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institution and Kulik’s Russian Dog are the focus of this chapter, which will examine these two very different artists’ use of performance as a healing process for dealing with the issue of Russian national-cultural identity in the 1990s.

The Issue of Russian Identity Russian identity in the post-Soviet period is an issue at once fraught and complex, largely stemming from Russia’s central role in the workings of the Soviet Union.2 Throughout its roughly three-quarter-century-long existence, nationalist rhetoric forged a Soviet identity, not a Russian one. Unlike in the other republics, where local cultural identities were preserved, even if underground, Russian national identity was subsumed into the Soviet one.3 Perhaps paradoxically, this occurred because of Russia’s role as the administrative core of the Soviet Union; being the seat of that Union, Russia did not allow civic Russians4 to maintain their own individual national-cultural identities. Russians’ role in the development and leadership of the Soviet Union was contradictory. Mark Sandle has described them as both “victims and executioners,”5 because, while they were the ones largely responsible for creating a Soviet identity for themselves and others, it was this process that prevented them from cultivating a distinct, Russian one.6 The process of Sovietization meant that individual nationalities and cultures were forcibly repressed in an attempt to create a unifying Soviet identity. Although the official language of the Soviet Union was Russian, and many had understood Soviet and Russian identity to be one and the same, Russian traditions were not, in fact, celebrated above all others. As Sandle explains: The Russian people suffered as a result of the Soviet experience: their history, culture, traditions and social structure were all but destroyed by the Sovietisation policies of the CPSU. At the same time, the Russians were identified as the dominant and exploitative group who benefited from the USSR. The USSR was then an unusual empire. The dominant language was Russian, and yet the Russian people did not have the institutions and agencies

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accorded to other ethnic groups: an Academy of Sciences, KGB and a Communist Party.7 If anything, as Ilya Prizel has observed, “the Russian national identity that evolved during the Soviet period, on the elite level, especially after World War II, was organically linked to the imperial Soviet identity.”8 Later, it was Brezhnev who probed further into the nation’s past, when, “confronted with a deepening ideological atrophy, [he] came to rely on Imperial Great Russian nationalism as a means to legitimize the regime, reverting to some of the verbiage of the period of high Stalinism.”9 Since national-cultural identity10 is connected to shared customs, traditions, and language, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the infrastructure that held those elements in place collapsed as well. The swift break-up of the Soviet Union, along with the absence of any contingency plan for rebuilding a national identity in the absence of the Soviet one, left Russian citizens at a loss for dealing with the weak sense of national and cultural identity that was the legacy of the Soviet empire. The subsequent search for Russian national-cultural identity became central to Russia’s survival in the post-Soviet era. In 1999, Oksana Oracheva described this search as “one of the most significant issues facing Russia today.”11 This was echoed by Prizel, who argued that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, “for the Russians there awaited the no less daunting task of finding a post-imperial identity and destiny.”12 Seen in this light, Afrika’s and Kulik’s search for a lost identity were not only personal statements, but the artists’ attempts to speak for the nation as a whole. With no consistent model of national identity on which to draw, Russian national-cultural identity was experienced as a personal and collective crisis in the aftermath of the loss of the Soviet one. Since national identity had previously been associated with two defeated empires, the pre-Soviet Russian one and the Soviet one, in the immediate post-Soviet era, Russians now concerned themselves first and foremost with the creation of new terms of self-representation.13 The lack of a stable foundation upon which to formulate a Russian national identity makes the task much more daunting than for the other post-Soviet nations.14 For this reason, Sandle see Russians as both victors and losers.

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The creation of an independent nation known as the Russian Federation presented the unique opportunity to develop a new Russian cultural and national identity. But this came with its share of problems as well. In fact, according to Simon Dixon, “the creation of the Russian Federation, far from dispelling any anxiety about Russian national identity, has merely served to deepen it, and the ‘Russian question,’ rather than being definitely answered by the collapse of the Soviet Union, has instead been given a new lease on life.”15 Compounding this issue was the fact that there was no clear strategy for reconstructing a national identity out of the former imperial one. With no plan for the cultivation of a new Russian identity, many artists, writers, and other cultural figures, Afrika and Kulik among them, took it upon themselves to explore the issue of national self-definition.16 Also problematic for the development of a national-cultural identity in the post-Soviet period, as Antje Herrberg and Ulf Hedetoft have argued, is Russia’s reliance on the “other” for self-definition.17 The fact that many nations that used to be part of the Soviet Union or the Warsaw Pact have since joined NATO and the European Union, is a development whose impact cannot be overstated.18 The so-called “defection” of former Soviet republics to the side of the Soviet Union’s former enemies, has left a much larger and more powerful “other” for Russia to define itself against, in order to eke out its own identity.19 The era following the Soviet collapse was one of vast uncertainty in Russia and the former Soviet republics. Dixon considers the constitutional crisis of 1993, which involved a political standoff between President Boris Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament that had to be resolved by military intervention, as the apex of Russian political instability.20 He notes that in a random sampling of 1,655 Russians surveyed, on December 3, 1993, 42 percent feared both a complete loss of order and the country’s descent into anarchy. It was perhaps no coincidence that Afrika’s and Kulik’s projects were launched right around this apex of uncertainty; the Crimania performance took place in 1993, and the MAK exhibition in 1995, just on the heels of that period; Kulik’s first Russian Dog performance occurred in 1994 in Moscow.

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Writing several years later, Oracheva claimed that many Russians are becoming increasingly depressed and frustrated by economic difficulties. . . the break-up of the Soviet state and lack of clear definition of a new political space coupled with the loss of an established national identity that in the past was mostly associated with the Soviet one is also making matters worse.21 Furthermore, she felt that a collective identity “can provide adequate psychological security,”22 and is therefore a relevant and crucial issue facing Russians in the post-Soviet period. Both Afrika’s and Kulik’s projects share these concerns, and, I argue, attempt to resolve them. While a sense of national-cultural identity was one factor that pushed the nations of the Soviet republics to struggle for their independence from the Soviet Union, in Russia it played no such role in the break-up. In fact, Sandle describes nationalist feeling as “a consequence rather than a cause of the collapse of communism in Russia,”23 mainly because of the “low-levels of national consciousness and national self-awareness amongst the Russian people.”24 This was quite the opposite situation in places such as Latvia. The Latvian fight for independence was centrally motivated by the quest for national identity. Latvians invoked the existence of an autonomous Latvian state prior to World War II, characterizing its assimilation into the Soviet Union as an aberration. Yet Latvians’ sense of national identity was bolstered by the Soviet occupation, which, in the words of Andrei Tsygankov, only exacerbated “the Latvian sense of ‘non-Russianness’ or ‘non-Sovietness.’ ”25 Thus, while Latvia emerged from the Soviet collapse with a strengthened and reinvigorated sense of national identity, Russia suffered from the opposite problem: the struggle not only to establish, but also ultimately define, an identity independent of the former Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. Another obstacle standing in the way of a post-Soviet Russian identity is the Sovietization of the Russian language. As various scholars have argued,26 the Russian language was and remains a vital component of Russian identity. Russian culture is often described as logocentric, meaning that the word takes precedence over other cultural

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symbols or markers. Dean S. Worth considers language even more central to the concept of the Russian identity than to other national identities, arguing that “to be Russian is primarily to have Russian as one’s mother tongue.”27 Because the Russian language was absorbed by the Soviet variant, this significant aspect of identity was not able to develop during the Soviet years. The symbolic, unifying, communicating power that the Soviet language obtained has consequently posed problems for the redevelopment of a Russian identity in the post-Soviet era.28 The crisis in language, therefore, points to the crisis in identity, and can in fact be considered one of its sources. Although it is clear that, as James H. Billington has stated, within the Russian empire “there was neither ethnic nor linguistic unity,”29 there was indeed a unifying language in the Soviet Union: Russian. And while the lexicon and syntax employed in official discourse was indeed that of the Russian language, what it was used to communicate were Soviet ideas and phenomena. A newly developed lexicon of words, acronyms, and phrases was used to identify Soviet institutions, leaders, events, and places. The collapse of the Soviet Union thus resulted in the existence of an entire language that now seemed irrelevant and obsolete. Whereas in the non-Russian republics, people reverted to the use of their native language for official communication, in Russia, the shift was quite different, in that it took place within the same language: the Russian words used to communicate Soviet ideas had to be replaced with Russian words to express concepts relevant to the newly emergent Russian Federation.30 Afrika’s and Kulik’s decision to study and explore language and communication in connection with the post-Soviet Russian identity crisis is driven by this process. Afrika’s time in the mental institution was an examination of the very language, symbols, and signs that had functioned in the creation and development of a Soviet identity. Following this investigation, Afrika appropriated the elements that he had salvaged from the Soviet Union and combined them with cultural markers from the capitalist West, in the process creating new, post-Soviet cultural symbols that could form the basis of a post-Soviet identity for his fellow Russians. Kulik, however, chose to access the pre-lingual stage of development,31 by becoming and acting like an

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animal. For him, interactions with his fellow human beings, in both East and West, contributed to the emergence and understanding of his own individual sense of self, outside of the domain of language. For both Afrika and Kulik, working with language and cultural symbols seemed to hold the key to the development of a new Russian identity. Their focus became this very quest for an identity, just as it was for Russians in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. The use of performance art to work through this issue is not surprising, considering the historical connection between body and performance art and self-definition. Peggy Phelan has argued that because we tend to read performances as identities (à la Judith Butler), it is “increasingly difficult to insist on the distinction between acts of creation and identities.”32 Amelia Jones has also explored the manner in which the visual arts are used to depict the self. She states that since “the rise of modern imaging technologies (roughly speaking, the early nineteenth century) it has consistently been those people who we call artists who push these technologies to limits that otherwise wouldn’t or couldn’t have been imagined in order to interrogate the very limits of subjectivity itself,”33 by creating artworks, including performance and video, that “enact the self.” Thus, it follows that the artists in this study commandeered the genre of performance art to explore these issues of post-Soviet identity. By honing in on this concern for Russians of all classes and educational backgrounds, the artists posit their own goals in terms that can have relevance for the nation as a whole.

Performance Art in Russia Restrictions on the creation and exhibition of art in the Soviet Union forced independent-minded artists to find not only alternative ways of expressing themselves, but also alternative venues at which to show and display their work. These circumstances had an impact on the development of all artistic media, especially nontraditional genres such as performance art. Because artistic performance, as we know it in the West, was not condoned by the authorities as an acceptable form of artistic expression, any public display or occurrence at an exhibition, witnessed by officials, could potentially be prohibited. Thus,

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starting in the 1970s, artists took to the countryside, far away from the watchful eyes of the KGB, to stage their performances. Much as Allan Kaprow held performances such as Household (1964) in upstate New York, far from the commercialized gallery sphere of the city,34 performance art in Russia also developed as a way to take art to a freer, less politicized space.35 The primary group of artists who promoted these ideas through their actions were part of the Moscow-based group Kollektivnye Deistviia [K/D; Collective Actions], formed by Andrei Monastyrsky in 1975.36 The performances of Collective Actions followed a definite pattern: individuals were informed of their participation in a forthcoming action by an invitation to a remote location in the countryside, on the outskirts of Moscow. These individuals traveled independently by train to the specified location, where they awaited further instructions or were met at the station by another participant, who then brought them to the location of the action. Once the performance was over, everyone would return home. The performances involved actions ranging from the very simple to the rather complex. Appearance, from 1976, consisted of two participants emerging from a forest, walking toward the viewers, and handing them notes confirming their presence at the action.37 Liblikh, from the same year, simply involved burying an electric bell in the snow, which chimed during the viewers’ presence, and continued until after they left.38 More complicated arrangements can be found in performances such as The Third Variant, from 1978.39 Performances as ephemeral and ambiguous as these, leaving the interpretation open to every viewer present, and without any clear ideological content or Socialist Realist program, would have been censored had they taken place in the city, within closer proximity to the authorities. Just as with Allan Kaprow’s happenings, the events by Collective Actions were carefully organized, planned, and even timed, yet insofar as they were live, they allowed for the element of chance to take over once the action had begun. Unlike Kaprow’s happenings, however, the source for this type of art was not action painting or installation art, but rather, drawings—more specifically, the albums of the Moscow Conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov. As an official artist, Kabakov illustrated children’s books by day and created his own personal

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stories, for himself and friends, by night. The albums would be read aloud in his studio to other members of the Moscow Conceptualism circle—an event that constituted a significant element of the work. In Kabakov’s words, “the whole point of the albums is in the turning of the pages. . . Time goes by in the albums. . . leafing through them takes up our real time.”40 In addition to holding performances in the countryside, the other option explored by Soviet independent artists was staging performances behind the closed doors of a person’s private apartment. In the 1980s, artists’ response to the strict governmental policies concerning the exhibition and display of works of art gave rise to an entire genre: AptArt, or Apartment Art. Consisting of artworks that could not be displayed publicly, in official exhibitions, AptArt was created expressly for exhibition in artists’ apartments. Notification of the exhibition times and spaces was done via word-of-mouth, and to a small, select group.41 Apartment exhibitions arose out of necessity—artists’ need to find a space to exhibit work that would be considered unacceptable within the rubric of Socialist Realism. Thus, whereas in the 1970s, independent artists moved to the countryside in their quest for an alternative space for art, in the 1980s, they were able to return to the cities with the development of AptArt.42 In the absence of a critical discourse available in published format, AptArt exhibitions took on a performative element in and of themselves, insofar as artists would discuss the works in situ, in lieu of a written body of work about them.43 Those present were at once critics and curators, artists and audience. While the Moscow-based group Collective Actions was perhaps the most prolific and well-known artistic body that staged performances in Russia, different trends emerged in Leningrad.44 Much of the experimental activity there was centered on abstract painting, although there was a contingent of artists, musicians, and filmmakers that represented another side of the Leningrad nonconformist art scene. In the 1980s, a group of artists gathered around an unofficial leader by the name of Timur Novikov.45 In 1985, they were officially codified as the Novye Khudozhniki [New Artists], which, in 1989, developed into the Novaia Akademiia Iziashnikh Iskusstvo [NIAA; New

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Academy of Fine Arts],46 with the aim of promoting and maintaining classical aesthetics in contemporary artistic practice. Novikov was cognizant of the classical traditions on which his city was built, as the once newly Westernized capital of the Russian Empire. Maintaining that “it was not an accident that the Russian coat of arms is a Roman double eagle symbolizing Western and Eastern Empires,”47 he sought to restore classical artistic practices in Russia, preserving both local traditions and Western classical ideals.48 This was one strategy, in the waning days of the Soviet empire, of developing a new identity for Russian artists. In fact, Olesya Turkina sees this movement as reflecting “the pro-Imperial moods in the [sic] post-Soviet society.”49 In addition to their return to classical painting, Novikov and members of his circle engaged in activities such as alternative filmmaking, punk rock music, and absurdist ballets, of which Afrika was a central figure and participant. Like many of their Russian and European avant-garde predecessors, their aim was not the creation of performance art per se, but rather the fusing of art and life.

Afrika Originally from Novorossiisk, on the Black Sea, Sergei Bugaev moved to Leningrad in 1982, when he was just a teenager, to join his friend and fellow artist Georgii Gurianov. Shortly after his arrival, he acquired the nickname “Afrika” from one of his mentors, Boris Grebenshchikov, a singer and songwriter in the Russian underground music group Akvarium and a central figure in the Leningrad underground art scene.50 He quickly fell in with the artists in Novikov’s circle, and became involved in artistic pursuits, although he neither attended art school nor belonged to the official Artists’ Union. Afrika circumvented these apparent obstacles in a variety of ways. First, he paid a friend of Novikov’s to marry him so that he could be officially registered as a resident of Leningrad.51 Next, to avoid the charges of “parasitism,” he found a job as a lifeguard at a boating station, but instead of going to work he paid someone to sign in for him every day.52 In 1982, another friend of Novikov’s, Sergei Kuriokhin, created the rock group Pop Mekhanika, which was more interested in

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experimenting with sound and performing than creating hits. Afrika was a part of this group and even toured internationally with them, to Stockholm, Berlin, and Liverpool, in 1989.53 Also around that same time, the painter Viktor Tsoi formed the group Kino, with Gurianov, a member of the New Artists, as their drummer. This group eventually went on to be featured in Sergei Solovyev’s cult film ASSA, which starred Afrika in the lead role of a bohemian artist and lead singer in a rock group whose character’s name was Bananan, and whose life resembled Afrika’s in many ways.54 ASSA was a groundbreaking film in the 1980s.55 Upon its release in 1987, ASSA gained a popular following, both because it was one of the first perestroika-era films to feature nonconformist artists in the cast, and because it presented an alternative picture of Soviet life, replete with American-style mobsters and underground music. The fact that this was an official film produced by Mosfilm, the oldest film studio in Russia,56 directed by an official filmmaker, Solovyev, and not an underground production, meant that average, everyday viewers could see the bohemian world of nonconformist artists right before their very eyes. Indeed, the film made Afrika an instant cult hero and popular figure, and to this day he remains so in Russia and throughout the former Soviet Union, stemming from the ASSA legacy.57 Afrika also participated in a well-known project by Sergei Kuriokhin, a TV program entitled Lenin Was a Mushroom (Lenin-Grib), which was broadcast on Leningrad television in May 1991. This televised hoax was a one-off show dedicated to proving that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, leader of the October Revolution, was actually a mushroom. Afrika was referred to by name on the show as the great-grandson of the Russian poet Andrei Bely, because they share the same surname (Bely’s real name was Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev).58 Afrika commented on the fact that the popularity of ASSA and Lenin Was a Mushroom enabled him to reach broader audiences with his artistic work. In his words, “fortunately, thanks to ASSA and my film background, I can express some ideas publicly, and [create] projects that are connected to formal art, and I can get them [the public] personally involved.”59 In 1989, Afrika, Novikov, and several of their artist-friends had the good fortune to meet John Cage when he was touring the Soviet

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Figure 1. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), John Cage, and some of Afrika’s artist-friends. Water Music. Performance in Afrika’s studio, Leningrad, 1989. John Cage is seen pouring water. Courtesy of the artist

Union. Following a performance in Leningrad, the artists went backstage to meet their personal hero, and Cage agreed to visit Afrika’s studio the next day.60 On the way to the studio, they found a bottle in the street,61 and then used it to create an impromptu performance entitled Water Music, somewhat reminiscent of Cage’s first performance at Black Mountain College in 1952, Untitled Event, as well as Tomas Schmit’s 1962 Fluxus performance, Cycle for Water Buckets, as all involved the pouring of water (figure 1). In Water Music, the artists transferred water from one bottle to another, meant to represent East and West—the East was represented by a bottle that once contained Stolichnaya vodka, and the West by a Smirnoff bottle.62 The performance took place in front of a copy of Malevich’s Black Square— one of the most enduring symbols of the historical Russian avantgarde—propped up by Cage (figure 2). Following the performance, Cage remained in Afrika’s studio and conversed with the artists there (figure 3). Afrika considers Cage to be one of his main and most significant teachers.63 In fact, he has commented that instead of learning in art school or university, he learned from the masters themselves.64

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Figure 2. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika), John Cage, and some of Afrika’s artist-friends. Water Music. Performance in Afrika’s studio, Leningrad, 1989. John Cage is seen in front of a copy of Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. Courtesy of the artist

The artist’s next significant foray into performance art took place in 1990, just before the official break-up of the Soviet Union. Together with the artist Sergei Anufriev, Afrika climbed to the base of Vera Mukhina’s famous statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman (1937) and proceeded to steal the panel from between the kolkhoz farmer’s legs (figure 4). The panel, which represented her vagina, was in fact created as an entry hatch, as it was secured to the statue with a hinge, presumably allowing access either for repairs or construction. The artist recalls that the two did not originally set out to steal the panel (“We didn’t know that it was

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Figure 3. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and John Cage in Afrika’s studio, Leningrad, 1989. Courtesy of the artist

Figure 4. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and Sergei Anufriev. Performance at the Vera Mukhina statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman, Moscow, 1990. Courtesy of the artist

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Figure 5. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika) and Sergei Anufriev. Performance at the Vera Mukhina statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman, Moscow, 1990. Courtesy of the artist

on a hinge”),65 and that it was only when they arrived at the base of the statue that they found a ladder there, by which they were able to climb up to reach the panel in the first place (figure 5). Afrika climbed to the top of the ladder and then proceeded to “penetrate” the farmer, entering what would be her vaginal canal.66 The artist eventually used the panel in his installation Donaldestruction, as the bob on a pendulum that was meant to swing between East and West.67 Afrika’s Crimania According to Mikhail Ryklin, after the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Afrika complained of depression resulting from his loss of identity as a Soviet citizen, and mentioned the desire to have his friend, the French psychotherapist Félix Guattari, psychoanalyze him to relieve

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Figure 6. Republican Psychiatric Hospital No. 1, Simferopol, Ukraine. The lower floor is the men’s ward, where Afrika stayed during his performance Crimania. Photograph taken by the author in 2008

his suffering.68 In February 1993, as part of an artistic performance, Afrika committed himself to Republican Psychiatric Hospital No. 1 in Simferopol, Crimea, where he remained for three weeks, interacting with and living among the patients as one of them (figure 6).69 He chose this hospital not only because he had an invitation from the head doctor there, Professor Viktor Samokhvalov, but also because of the great art-historical significance of the Crimean Peninsula, as the location (mythical or otherwise) of Joseph Beuys’s rebirth as an artist. Furthermore, Crimea held a special historical significance, with regard to both Russia and the Soviet Union. Although Afrika defines his own experience as a “performance,” his activities while living in the mental institution were witnessed only by the other patients and the staff of the hospital.70 The sole outside observer, the Russian art critic and curator Viktor Mazin, acted as the patient’s relative; only he and five staff members knew that this was part of an artistic project. The second part of the Crimania project was Afrika’s major solo exhibition that took place two years later at MAK in Vienna, entitled Crimania: Icons, Monuments,

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Mazàfaka. Much of the work exhibited came directly from Afrika’s stay in the mental institution in 1993, including artwork that he produced there, together with his fellow patients, and the work that he did during the two years following the performance that was largely shaped by his experiences in the hospital. The exhibition also consisted of installations and displays of Afrika’s collections of Soviet memorabilia, such as busts of Lenin, flags, banners, and medals, and was accompanied by a catalogue that chronicled the observations of the performance by the doctor (Samokhvalov), the patient (Afrika), and the patient’s “relative” (Mazin). The installation was a retrospective of the artist’s work to date, as well as an exploration of language and sign systems that was the result of Afrika’s research in the mental institution. Crimania was Afrika’s attempt to come to terms with the period of uncertainty following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he labeled the era of “Great Aphasia,” or “pseudo-aphasia,”71 in recognition of the dissolution of shared tropes and values in Soviet official as well as public discourse. Aphasia is a language disturbance, in particular, the loss of the ability to use words, to connect signifier (the word) and signified (the concept). Afrika described it as “the powerful vacation of language structures,”72 because of the afflicted person’s inability to communicate with those whose speech is unaffected. His work with language is indebted to the Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, who undertook a similar study of language fifty years earlier. Afrika’s fascination with the linguist runs deep, and much of his study, in Crimania, owes a great debt to him. Jakobson is important to Afrika not only for his investigations of language, but because for the artist, he is the figure who linked exploration of language with literature, psychology, anthropology, and other disciplines.73 While clinical aphasia is usually the result of an injury to the brain, aphasia can also appear in a symbolic sense, following the disruption of a structure that keeps a sign system intact, of which the dissolution of the Soviet Union, providing the catalyst for the Great Aphasia, is a case in point. By December 1991, after the Soviet republics had one by one declared their independence, Mikhail Gorbachev had no other

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choice but to resign as President of the USSR, having become a leader without a country. The Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag was lowered from the Kremlin; it had likewise become a national flag without a nation. Citizens removed other symbols that ceased to have meaning, among the most famous being the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Cheka (precursor to the KGB), which was taken from its pedestal in front of the KGB headquarters in Moscow. In time, the government was forced to change street names, and state agencies replaced their acronyms. For example, KGB became FSB.74 Once the totalitarian structure had been dismantled, the sign system that underlay it no longer had the same impact or effect; the socially determined meanings of the signs were no longer relevant to the current situation. They continued to communicate values that now belonged to the past, not the present. As an example of what this aphasic language entailed in Russia in the early 1990s, I cite an extended quotation from Adele Marie Barker’s essay “Rereading Russia,” regarding a taxi ride she took in 1993, and the difficulty of finding an address because street names had been changed. As she recounts: Sometime in the spring of 1993, I had occasion to spend more than an hour in a cab with a Moscow taxi driver hurling and honking his way through the streets in our mutual quest for an address that had been given to me. After an hour of precipitous stops—as the driver leaned out, hailed passersby, asked for directions, and engaged in protracted discussions over how to find the elusive address—we arrived at our destination, only to have the embarrassed driver confess that he knew all along where the address was and would have gotten us there sooner if only the “bastards” at the top hadn’t changed the names of all the streets in Moscow.75 Barker’s quote comments on the perplexing situation of being in a place where the names of everything around you are changing rapidly, and new words are being introduced daily. She writes that the taxi ride is symptomatic of the “disorienting surface changes that abound in

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post-Soviet society. Streets metamorphose, their ‘old’ familiar revolutionary names giving way to even older, less familiar names from the pre-Revolutionary past.”76 In fact, it was not uncommon at that time for conversants to be talking about the same exact thing but using different proper names, especially with regard to street names. Other post-Soviet linguistic phenomena include the transliteration of English words and phrases into Russian and/or Cyrillic, for example “Parking,” or the Russian hypermarket called “OK” (O’KEЙ). Perhaps one of the more perplexing is a coffeehouse chain named Kofe Hauz (Кофe Xayз), wherein the first word (kofe) is the Russian word for coffee, yet the second is the English word “house” transliterated into Cyrillic.77 This aphasic hybrid requires knowledge of both English and Russian to grasp the meaning of the name.78 As part of the narrative that the participants created for Crimania, Viktor Mazin argued that the stay in the mental hospital was necessary because of the condition with which he, the critic and curator Olesya Turkina,79 and Afrika himself, had diagnosed the artist: Obsessional Representational Syndrome, or ORS, which Mazin defined as having symptoms similar to Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but where the obsession specifically lies in the creation of art objects. Mazin stated that the condition of ORS resulted from Afrika’s realization, in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, that he was, in fact, part of the art market.80 The artist understood the consequence of this situation as two-fold: one, that he had to constantly produce; and two, that what he produced had to be recognizable, a “signature” by which gallerists and collectors might recognize the identity of the artist as well as his individuality.81 As Mazin explained, the artist who successfully integrates himself into the art world becomes a compulsive creator, for in order to survive and make a living, “you have to copy yourself all the time.”82 ORS thus resulted from the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as its precursor, perestroika, which gave rise to policies that allowed gallerists and art collectors to travel to Russia and purchase art for Western collections. Mazin noted that this had begun in the late 1980s, and that by the time of Crimania, Afrika was already a part of the market, with his own gallerist in New York, Paul Judelson.83

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By focusing on mental illness, language, and symbols, Afrika utilized the performance and the subsequent exhibition to explore the new circumstances that were reshaping both his and his contemporaries’ experiences of and relation to culture and politics during the period immediately following the break-up of the Soviet Union. Afrika also pursued the question of whether his experiences during Crimania could have a universal relevance for his contemporaries or his viewers in general, in a postmodern, post-Soviet, global world. Although the performance itself was a very personal one, the artist was aware that any further personal development would be employed in his future projects on alternative language systems, to reach a larger public. In Crimania, the artist also explored the connection between pathology and creativity. By making the setting of his performance a mental institution, he was able to examine those issues in a location that foregrounded his mental state above all else. The performance laid the groundwork for Afrika’s work with signs and symbols that he has continued throughout his career, even to this day.

The Location of Crimania Immediately after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the coexistence of old and new cultural markers, such as currencies, passports, and names, created a situation that was confusing and unsettling. As Afrika noted with regard to Ukraine, the location of Crimania, the people living there. . . were then unable to fully understand where they are situated, which currency system exists around them and what citizenship they have because, although the area was acknowledged to be part of the Ukraine, Soviet passports were still valid and were actually the only ones that existed.84 Afrika recognized this uncertainty because he experienced it himself, and identified with it. This is one of the reasons that Afrika chose to locate his performance in Simferopol: the local residents’ quest echoed his own—the search for a new identity out of the ashes of the old Soviet one. The artist also complained of “a feeling of uncertainty,

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confusion about ‘which country I live in,’ ”85 having journeyed from Leningrad to a place where doubt and ambiguity were felt even more acutely; thus, his own insecurity prompted his deliberate strategy to examine these uncertainties up close. Another major reason for selecting Simferopol as the site of his performance was the Crimean peninsula’s historical and art-historical significance. Crimea was the location of such landmark events as the Yalta Conference in 1945, and Gorbachev’s house arrest in 1991. It was also there that Afrika’s avant-garde precursor, Joseph Beuys, claims to have experienced his artistic birth, following his 1944 plane crash in the region and subsequent rescue by Tatars. Although the facts behind the mythology of the Beuys plane crash are still in question,86 in choosing this locale for his performance Afrika both participates in and sustains the Beuys myth, using the Crimean peninsula for his own journey of self-discovery. While Beuys constantly referred back to the plane crash as the source of his inspiration as an artist, utilizing materials such as fat and felt, which he claims the Tatars used to save his life and keep him warm, one can observe Afrika’s use of similar strategies in his own work. For example, mirroring Beuys’s habitual display of his felt suit, Afrika put his hospital pajamas on display in the exhibition Doctor and Patient: Memory and Amnesia, held in Pori, Finland, in 1996, and curated by Mazin and Turkina. Peter Noever, the curator of Crimania, referred directly to the German artist in the exhibition catalogue, writing that when he visited Afrika in Simferopol, he observed that Crimeans, even those not necessarily interested in art, still spoke of Beuys with reverence. They “ ‘breathed his spirit,’ regarded him as ‘their son,’ guarded his secret (‘only pathologically interested art historians would attempt to find the ‘truth’ ’).”87 Afrika and his cohorts also reportedly made a pilgrimage to the crash site during one of their visits to Crimea.88 It should also be noted that Crimea (Yalta) was the location for the filming of much of ASSA; thus, it bears significance as a venue that Afrika has revisited throughout his artistic career. Afrika uses the location as both an arthistorical referent for his audience, and a point of departure for his own work, which shares some of Beuys’s aims.

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Afrika chose to stage the performance in a mental institution for very specific reasons, as well, mainly because the hierarchical system that existed within the hospital accurately reflected the one operating outside of it, in everyday life. As a patient there, he could observe a microcosm of that structure as it was contained in a circumscribed space. The artist described the psychiatric hospital as a small-scale replica of the outside world, in the same way that any microorganism is the copy of the larger system in which it is placed. The hospital is a mimetic system of the social structure within which it exists. The difference between doctors and patients is just as big as the gap between the government of a state and its normal citizens, between the celebrant and a congregation in a church.89 The patients in the hospital were all diagnosed with some form of mental illness; they were all suffering from an emotional trauma, a condition analogous to the mental suffering that Afrika was enduring, and that he imagined his compatriots to be experiencing as well, since the break-up of the Soviet Union. By studying this condition in a mental institution, the artist could observe how the dynamics of this trauma, and the healing of it, were played out in a smaller version of society—the hospital. Furthermore, Mazin claimed that the mental hospital was a crucial setting for the performance because the patients experienced the sociopolitical changes that were going on around them much more intensely than the relatively mentally healthy. Mazin feels that this is true of the residents of any mental institution, at any point in time. In his words, “the patients, they are not prophets, but still they are much more sensitive than so-called ‘regular’ people to the processes in society.”90 He also stated that if, for example, “you want to understand what is going on now in society. . . the best thing would be precisely to go to the psychiatric hospital and talk to the patients to understand the most difficult and most sensitive questions about society in general.”91 As a case in point, Mazin cited a system of exchange that had developed in the hospital at the time that he and Afrika were there.

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He said that “in the hospital they were producing their own money,”92 for use within the walls of the institution. He recalled that almost immediately after his and Afrika’s arrival, one man asked if he could exchange this worthless paper hospital money for dollars, an action that mirrored events taking place outside the hospital, where average citizens were attempting to exchange a less stable currency (rubles) for what was then a more stable one (U.S. dollars). While the patients may not have been aware of the specificities concerning the fall of the Soviet Union and the socio-political and economic changes occurring as a result, Mazin maintains that they could feel the effects of a major shift taking place more acutely than those outside the walls of the hospital did.93 Although those in the West diagnosed with schizophrenia and other serious mental illnesses are also often institutionalized, mental hospitals and this particular illness had a special place in the Soviet Union. Schizophrenia was the diagnosis of choice for those suspected of being political dissidents or enemies of the state. The special classification of “sluggishly progressing schizophrenia” was created during the Brezhnev era, so that the government could confine those said to be afflicted with it to a sanatorium, in order to silence them or curtail their rebellious activity.94 Mazin recalls being “surprised” at how quickly Afrika was diagnosed as schizophrenic.95 When asked whether now, some fifteen years later, he believes in the credibility of the diagnosis, he responded in the negative.96 Although he has great respect for Professor Samokhvalov (the doctor who diagnosed Afrika), he realizes now that this diagnosis was most likely the result of the Soviet legacy and its impact on psychiatry and mental health, and reflects the ease and frequency with which this label was applied to nearly every case of mental illness. This is exemplified in Afrika’s previous stay in a mental institution, prior to his Crimania performance, in the early 1980s. At the time, Russia was at war with Afghanistan, and Afrika was summoned for his mandatory military service. As a pacifist, the artist did not want to risk being sent off to fight, so he went to the conscription office with his mother and some of his paintings. His mother implored the officers to excuse him from his military service due to his mental

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instability, using his artwork as evidence. After viewing the paintings, the officers agreed, and had Afrika sent to a mental institution, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.97 Mazin has described that in the hospital, Afrika taught the other patients to eat flowers and do other “crazy things.” As a result, his case was considered the most severe in the hospital, but because of his antics, which disrupted the order and the peace of the other patients, he was forced to leave.98 For Mazin, this story embodies the contradictions in the Soviet mental health system, in which the seemingly sickest patient in the hospital was set free. As an underground artist himself, Afrika bore many similarities to those dissidents who had previously been classified as schizophrenics. By committing himself to a mental institution after the end of the Soviet era, Afrika was able to explore the Soviet legacy in regard to mental illness and the approach to psychology and psychiatry.

The Goals of Crimania The idea for Crimania was conceived following a 1992 conference entitled “The Soul and the Human Image,” which Afrika and Mazin had participated in upon the invitation of Professor Samokhvalov, a professor of ethology.99 Afrika described his conception of the performance as follows: I started to contemplate the idea of hospitalizing a person in order to observe his behavior under clinical conditions, where, thanks to such symmetrical systems like the doctor-patient relationship, very powerful systems of information exchange would be developed under conditions which both differ greatly from normal life and have much in common with it.100 The observation of the patient would have three aspects to it: the observation of the patient by the doctor; the self-observation of the patient; and the observation of the interaction between doctor and patient by a third party, in this case, a person acting as the patient’s relative during the performance. This tripartite group, officially termed the “S. A. Bugaev Group,” consisted of Afrika, the patient; Viktor Mazin, Afrika’s

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friend acting as his relative; and Professor Viktor Samokhvalov, the head doctor at the hospital. In the exhibition catalogue, all of the participants stated what they each hoped to achieve in the experiment. Although these aims roughly coincided with one another, each participant had his own focus. Afrika was concerned with his own mental state, as well as the development of visual images, including signs and symbols; the latter was of particular importance because at the time of the performance, he was starting to prepare his forthcoming major solo exhibition at MAK. Samokhvalov’s emphasis was on the manner in which art evolves and new symbols are created, and on a method of experiment known as endospection, or, examination from within, and Mazin’s focus was on ORS. Afrika stated that for him, the Crimania performance was about the “obsession of creating an exhibition,”101 a reference to what Mazin had previously observed regarding Afrika’s sudden realization (as an artist) that he was part of the art market, and the ensuing pressure on him to produce. More specifically, Afrika described his goal in the experiment as follows: “to describe, as completely and thoroughly as possible, the system of mood and behavior of the artist since this was relevant to the preparations for the exhibition at the MAK.”102 This echoes Mazin’s statement about ORS, with regard to the artist being forced to produce, and to produce a signature style. The hospital performance was only the first part of his investigation, with the eventual exhibition being the end result of the performance. For the artist, the timing of the performance was significant, as it could only have occurred at that specific historical moment in order to be of any relevance. His hospitalization took place during a period of great socio-political change, after the great “empire” that was the Soviet Union had fallen, and new countries were being created (or recreated) in its place. The artist described this as “the dissociation of a remarkably powerful social structure [that created] circumstances of geopolitical changes comparable in size to the end of the Roman Empire.”103 For Afrika, one of the consequences of the changes was his feeling of identity loss, a feeling that motivated him to study its effects on him not only personally, but also artistically.

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Afrika’s and Samokhvalov’s interest in the creation and evolution of new sign systems was relevant and topical, stemming from the changes in sign systems that were occurring in the former Soviet republics. Afrika’s avant-garde predecessors had worked under similar circumstances. During the 1910s and 1920s, avant-garde artists in Russia, especially the Constructivists, were striving to generate a new, alternative sign system, one that would be completely transparent, the forms clearly and efficiently conveying the ideals of the nascent Communist state. Afrika revered artists such as Vladimir Mayakovskii, Kazimir Malevich, and El Lissitzky for their experiments with language, words, and symbols in the post-Revolutionary era. He credited Mayakovskii with developing the language of Soviet socialism, describing him as “in some sense, the creator of the sign system on whose grandiose ruins we are currently standing.”104 Now that Russia had undergone another great upheaval, the newly emergent Russian Federation was in need of its own, equivalent language. With his studies of sign systems, Afrika hoped to remedy this situation, to develop a new, alternative method of communication105 relevant to the current socio-political climate. Samokhvalov’s involvement with Crimania enabled him to firmly establish the link between mental illness and creativity, between the development of symbols and the artist’s behavior; he concluded that “art develops because the behavior (language) of its creators develops.”106 Accordingly, he distinguished four paths for the evolution of art—modifying, conservative, regressive, and progressive107— all of which result in the emergence of new symbols. He even went so far as to characterize the creation of a new symbol as “virtually impossible without the rearrangement of a pathological condition.”108 Mazin’s conclusions were less definitive. He kept a journal of each day that Afrika spent in the hospital, with comments ranging from the most banal—the weather outside, his own fever—to observations of Afrika’s health, mental state, and activities in the ward, and discussions of issues such as ORS or the collapse of the Soviet Union. But even focusing on the experience of the performance itself and the physical results, he found the epistemological results of the project difficult to pinpoint, explaining, “on the one hand, of course it’s a great experience, but on the other hand, you can’t be cured by psychiatry,

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you can be even more damaged, so, we can’t speak about the results in the sense of a cure.”109 For him, the emphasis was on the experience of the performance itself, with the emotional or psychological results remaining unclear.

Tangible Results of Crimania: The Wall Newspaper and the Exhibition Heroes of the Soviet Union In addition to such epistemological conclusions, Crimania also had more tangible results: a wall newspaper created by the patients and displayed in the psychiatric ward during Afrika’s final week in the hospital, and two other exhibits—Heroes of the Soviet Union, which occurred at the end of the three-week-long performance in the room for the chronically ill patients, and Crimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazàfaka, which took place two years later in a more conventional venue, the MAK in Vienna. Created during the time set aside for work therapy, the wall newspaper was envisioned as an activity on which all of the patients could work together. The newspaper would consist of articles about the events of the hospital; Afrika started by making a large white poster with pieces of colored paper for the article. The newspaper was similar to, but more ambitious than, the regular work therapy projects at the hospital, which were usually along the lines of having the patients glue labels (i.e., “Set of Knives”) onto cardboard boxes designed to hold the objects in question. The patients were initially quite enthusiastic about the newspaper, hoping that it would improve the situation in the hospital.110 Afrika also had high hopes for the project, conceiving of the patients’ collaborative work as something that would provide encouragement and motivation. He felt that it “would provoke a type of behavior in the clinic that would inspire all those around to think that an especially important work would be done in the ward, namely the creation of works of art.”111 Afrika also felt that this collaborative effort “would change not only the relationship between doctors and patients and the relationships among the patients, but also the relationship between the outside world and the hospital.”112 He hoped that by working

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on the wall newspaper with the patients, he would gain insight into the hierarchies that existed among them—that, in effect, the project would “produce fluctuations in the social structure of the ward, thus capturing the difficult and ambiguous situation that existed.”113 Finally, Afrika hoped that organizing such group activities would lead to discoveries regarding the nature of the various types of relationships that existed in everyday society. Ultimately, however, the newspaper was a failure, because it produced too strong a reaction in the patients. In Afrika’s words, the newspaper “caused an upsurge of conflicts among its readers, because it made them think about themselves somehow as inadequate individuals and their hospital stay to be a witness of that.”114 So Afrika dropped this collective endeavor to focus on his individual project, an exhibition in the ward that would be entitled Heroes of the Soviet Union. The exhibition was called Heroes of the Soviet Union after the book that Viktor Mazin brought to the artist during the third week of the performance, which contained, in Mazin’s words, “an endless number of small portraits”115 of the heroes mentioned in the title. Those featured in the book had received the highest honor awarded by the USSR, Hero of the Soviet Union (Geroi Sovetskogo Soiuza), for honorable deeds in the service of the country. The artist prepared the materials for the exhibition on his own, during work therapy in the ward. In many ways, his work was similar to what the patients did in work therapy, as it consisted of cutting out photographs of “heroes” of the former Soviet Union from Mazin’s book and gluing them onto a cardboard background (figure 7). For the exhibition, Afrika placed a sheet of cardboard with photographs of the heroes on it above each bed. The exhibition, which took place in what was referred to as the “menagerie,” or the room for the chronically ill, was attended by Professor Samokhvalov; Irina Stroevskaia, the nurse in charge of the ward; some assistants; Peter Noever, curator at the MAK; his wife, Ixy; Mazin, and Afrika himself. The exhibition took place on February 23, which was both the date of Afrika’s upcoming release from the hospital, and Soviet Army and Navy Day, which had been an official Soviet holiday. Although this was no longer a state holiday, many citizens, especially those in the

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Figure 7. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika). Works from the exhibition Heroes of the Soviet Union, Republican Psychiatric Hospital No. 1, Simferopol, Ukraine, 1993. Photograph taken by the author in the artist’s studio, 2008

hospital, still regarded the day with fondness and acknowledged the day privately. In his notes on the performance, the artist tells us that this day was a holiday for all the men of the former Soviet Union, regardless of whether they had served in the army or not.116 He wrote

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that the mood in the hospital was festive, and that a number of the patients reacted positively to the exhibition, and specifically to this connection to the holiday.117 Thus, these images were meaningful to many who at that time were struggling to comprehend the new social and political reality in which they found themselves. Despite the fact the portraits were of people who were no longer “heroes,” and that the viewers may not have known exactly who they were, they still had significance. Most of all, they were a reminder of the past, of a relatively more stable time in their history, and were thus something known and recognizable—images that were comforting during a time of uncertainty. Afrika would continue to explore the idea of exhibiting symbols from the former Soviet Union in his 1995 exhibition at the MAK in Vienna. It should be recalled that the original impetus behind Afrika’s stay in the mental institution was the depression that he claimed to have suffered after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Afrika was not only searching for some kind of national identity along with his compatriots. Afrika’s own artistic identity had been formed in the 1980s, during the Soviet period, as a nonconformist artist and member of the artistic underground. He was even christened then—given his artistic name by Grebenshchikov, a prominent member of the underground. Now that the official institutions against which Afrika and his cohort were rebelling were no more, the artist was faced with the need to cultivate a new identity as an artist in a free, democratic state. In the Crimania catalogue, Mazin recounts his and Afrika’s witnessing of the destruction of Soviet mosaics in the train station in Kiev, on their way to Crimea, commenting on the loss of these artworks that were both important symbols of Soviet might and ideology, as well as great works of art in and of themselves. Mosaics such as these were part of an extensive campaign of public monumental art and propaganda commissioned by the state, and created by artists for the people; as such, they constitute a significant part of the cultural legacy of the Soviet Union. In an interview, Mazin observed that the destruction of these mosaics “was really too much, because it was not just a memory of the Soviet Union but it’s also an aesthetic part of the surroundings. To destroy all of the monuments, it’s probably—well, it’s out of the question.”118 Mazin added that the loss of these symbols amounted to

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a loss of Afrika’s sense of self, because of the fact that, like it or not, they (the symbols), and the ideology they represented, were also a part of him. He explained that when these symbols were “part of the totalitarian system [one] just want[ed] to destroy [them], but when you destroy [them] you start to understand that you are destroying yourself, because it’s all about identification with the system.”119 He described Afrika and his artistic contemporaries as the “funny fighters against the Soviet Union,”120 because of the fact that they were not outright dissidents, but members of the punk movement and alternative art and music scene that was largely tolerated by the government in the 1980s. Crimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazàfaka Two years after Afrika’s performance in Simferopol, the artist mounted the exhibition Crimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazàfaka, which was the result of the artist’s two-year long exploration of signs, sign systems, the evolution of images, and his own personal psyche that he had begun there in 1993.121 After having amassed a collection of Soviet banners, the artist attempted to recycle the images contained therein and adapt them to the new circumstances of the country, to create a new, postSoviet cultural heritage. Following conversations with patients in the hospital as to what new flags could look like, Afrika left intact the original components of the banners, while adding other figures or symbols, layering them. He inserted familiar imagery from different times and places—the CNN logo, figures of Roman soldiers, and stylized Byzantine angels, to name a few. By recontextualizing the images, Afrika neutralized the Soviet symbols, placing them side by side with other signs representing various periods and aspects of human culture. The effect was one of cataloguing, whereby the Soviet images on the banners were relegated to the annals of history, from which the added symbols had come themselves. In the process, Afrika deprived the flags of their old meaning, while arriving at ambiguous new meanings. With the reworked banners, the artist has essentially created a visual equivalent to the glossolalia, or nonsensical language, of aphasia. In plate 1, the artist added two naked bodies on either side of the original image of a double portrait of Lenin and Stalin. Afrika

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mentioned that this imagery was directly inspired by the patients in the mental institution, because whenever he asked them what to add to the flags, the answer almost always contained a reference to a naked body; he said that this was very common among mental patients. Afrika juxtaposed the two leaders, looking eagerly yet sternly toward the envisioned Communist future, with playful and ridiculous looking stick-figures. With this combination, Afrika disengaged the Soviet meaning of the banner, shifting the tone from ceremonious to playful. In a similar manner, in plate 2, the artist placed cartoon figures from East and West—Neznaika122 and Donald Duck—on either side of the state seal of the Soviet Union. The two sets of imagery in both banners belong to the realm of popular culture, each from its own side of the globe (and Iron Curtain). The text that the artist added to each also confirms the aphasia of the images: in the former, he has written “Jakobson will be,” and in the latter, “This is not Jakobson.” By bringing together these disparate symbols in the banners, Afrika unites them physically, but fails to set forth a new message. By merging the Soviet and Western symbols, he invokes a new language that is still in the process of being developed. Indeed, Afrika’s project is one that continues up until this day. Most recently, in September 2008, on the fifteenth anniversary of Crimania, the artist spent twenty-four hours in an isolation cell in the psychiatric ward of the Academic Medical Center in Amsterdam, for a performance entitled Protection. The work was part of Inertia, a project organized by Erik Hagoort examining current avant-garde movements in Russia and the Netherlands. The artist’s statements concerning the ideas underlying the performance echo those that were behind the original Crimania performance as well: “art needs to be protected against itself. Artists are driven by the ambition to be discovered by [the] art business. This ‘frenzy’ damages the artists and their art. Someone needs to intervene.”123 After signing himself into the hospital, the artist was brought newspapers to look at in his cell. He performed a meditation on them by dripping the coffee and orange juice offered him onto the pages; the artist explained that on that day, Sarah Palin, the Republican Party’s candidate for vice president in then forthcoming

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U.S. presidential election dominated the headlines, distracting him from his thoughts, and resulting in the destructive collage on the front page of the newspaper.124

Conclusions Viktor Mazin has already noted the parallels between Afrika’s threeweek stay in a mental hospital and Joseph Beuys’s 1974 performance at the Rene Block Gallery, I Like America and America Likes Me, in which Beuys spent three days coexisting with a wild coyote. According to Mazin, “both rituals involve placing oneself alongside the ‘inhuman’ and the ‘wild’ (animal/insane). The wildness of Beuys is homologous with the nature of Afrika who instantly establishes ‘hypnotic’ contact with members of the animal kingdom.”125 While some may take issue with the comparison between a wild coyote and the patients of a mental institution, nevertheless, in both cases the artist was attempting to find a common language with a being that communicated in another language, by immersing himself in the life of that other. Whereas Beuys brought the animal to his world, Afrika entered the patients’ space as one of them. Like Beuys, Afrika created his Crimania performance as a response to a trauma—in this case, the trauma of the break-up of the Soviet Union. In the same way that Beuys attempted to use his art to heal postwar German citizens and help them come to terms with the guilt surrounding the Holocaust, Afrika undertook the Crimania project with the aim of dealing with the loss of identity that accompanied the loss of territory and status. Furthermore, both artists deployed old symbols—Beuys fat, felt, and straw, and Afrika, Soviet banners and medals—in a new context, as a way of working through the trauma. Finally, both artists sought to use their performances as a way to remake themselves or refashion a new identity, a natural result of the healing process. Beuys believed in the social function of art, and the ability of art to effect change. These ideas were present not only in his performances, which took the form of a ritual aimed at healing, but also in his endeavors outside the realm of art, which included teaching

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and involvement in politics.126 Because he believed that his actions could heal German society, he aimed to reach as much of that society as he could, making his art and ideas as public as possible. In a 1995 volume on Beuys,127 Donald Kuspit responds to criticism by Benjamin Buchloh and others that Beuys was a mere showman. He describes Beuys as presenting himself as a facilitator of “a redemptive, psycho-moral as well as physical change—a change from sickness to health, from near death to vigorous life—in German society.”128 Elsewhere in that same volume, Kuspit likens Beuys’s relationship to his audience to that between a shepherd and his flock, stating that the “psychic drama of warmth and intimacy between artist and audience bespeaks the healing intention of Beuys’ art—its therapeutic mission.”129 Kuspit concludes that Beuys is able to heal others because of the processes he undergoes in order to heal himself, arguing that those who see him only as a spectacle do not believe in that power of change that Beuys did; “they find it impossible to believe that one can change oneself without waiting for society to change itself, and that the change in oneself can cause significant social change.”130 For Kuspit, Beuys was not only healing himself, but also the symbols that he engages with in his art—universal social symbols. In Kuspit’s words, Beuys “restores them to personal as well as social significance. He in effect heals them.”131 It is through all of Beuys’s acts and performances that the artist comes to heal himself, the symbols that speak to his society, and, ultimately, it is hoped, that society itself. Much like Beuys, Afrika’s work aims to heal the self. Also like Beuys, Afrika engages with one of the original forms of performance art—shamanistic ritual. While Beuys addressed his work to the masses, Afrika’s more private performance does not come with a prognosis for a future healed society. Instead, it remains a symptom of the time in which it was created. Still, much like Beuys’s shepherd to the flocks, Afrika aims to reach a wide audience of followers, as evinced in his involvement with ASSA and Lenin Was a Mushroom. Ultimately, Afrika neither discovers nor offers a new language, but exposes the existing language system in Russia for what it is—a system that is ailing, although functioning. The Soviet language of socialism only

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functioned within that system, and when the infrastructure that supported the system was destroyed, the language that it had created became, for the most part, a relic. In the same way, once the symbols of the system, such as the busts of Lenin, were removed and placed in a collection, their original meaning was displaced. Afrika has labeled the period just after their removal the “Time of Great Aphasia” both because old symbols were awaiting new meanings, and because postSoviet Russia as a whole was awaiting the emergence of new symbols. By preserving these Soviet symbols and incorporating them into his art, he makes them part of a new language that is still in the process of development. At the same time, the assortment of signs that he creates are a witness to the atrophy of language that was occurring at the time. In this sense, Crimania presents us not with the dystopia that we may expect; the participants’ conclusions—or lack thereof—keep us open to the possibility of creating a new language, without yet presenting one in its completed state.

Oleg Kulik The Russian Dog Oleg Kulik is internationally known for his “Russian Dog” performances. Appearing naked and on all fours, growling at the public, and sometimes biting them, the artist’s reputation as a “wild animal” in many ways occludes the essence of his project. Kulik’s search for Russian identity is in many ways a traditionally modernist one, recalling the early-twentieth-century artists who looked to the “primitive”—in all its myriad varieties—for a purer, more essential and authentic mode of expression.132 Kulik refers to his project as “zoophrenia,” which for the artist connotes a union between man and animal; it goes beyond the merging of human and wild beast, to aim at the understanding of, and unification with, the Other.133 As a Russian artist, for Kulik this “Other” is none other than the West. In his struggle to find himself in a world that, in the 1990s, was in theory no longer divided according to the bipolar dichotomy of the Cold War, he began to look to an inner reconciliation with his Other

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that he hoped would translate into a similar reconciliation on a more global level—between Russian and its Other, man and his Other, and, essentially, between East and West. Just as Afrika’s project began as part of the artist’s realization that he was becoming part of the art market, Kulik’s is likewise rooted in this phenomenon. His search resembles Afrika’s in that it is a personal, inward-looking journey that the artist hopes will translate into a collective healing and harmonic coexistence for all of mankind. Whereas Afrika uses the mental institution and the mentally ill “other” to explore language, its breakdown, and anticipated reconstruction, Kulik uses the animal world to explore the primitive pre-lingual world. The artist has not, in fact, limited himself to dogs—he has also become a bird, lived among pigeons, run free with wild horses, loved a goat, absolved fish, sacrificed a pig, stuck his head in a cow’s vagina, and examined primates.134 He has done this using the medium of performance, because for him it is the only “honest”135 form of art. Before the Russian Dog Like Afrika, Kulik’s artistic home is an adopted city. Born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine, the artist moved to Moscow in 1988, when he was twenty-seven. Unlike Afrika, however, Kulik was formally trained as an artist, having graduated from the Kiev Art School in 1979. His early career was spent working as a curator at the Regina Gallery in Moscow—one of the first commercial galleries to open in Russia after the end of the Soviet Union—from 1990 to 1993. In many ways, his approach to his art reflects this curatorial background, as Kulik is a master at self-promotion, keeping his own vast archive of printed material on his work, from the press and mass media, to an extensive library of his artistic performances and creations. Kulik’s work is part of the movement within Moscow Actionism known as “Moscow Radicalism,” which Antonio Geusa has described as referring to “a group of young, politically committed artists that appeared on the art scene of the capital in the first half of the nineteennineties,”136 and links to the dramatic transformations taking place in all areas of society at that time. While Kulik was aware of the

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conceptual art and actions being staged in Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s, he chose to act outside of that circle, creating a more visceral and aggressive type of art in the 1990s. As he stated with regard to his Mad Dog performance, his first public appearance as a dog, “[among other motivations,] it was also my reaction to Moscow Conceptualism, with its sectarian exclusiveness.”137 Thus, in contrast to those of the Moscow Conceptualist circle, Kulik’s performances were intended to have relevance for and be accessible to all. Kulik’s journey as an artist began, much like those of Beuys and Afrika, with a rebirth. As with Afrika, it occurred in the opposite manner in which a birth is meant to occur, with the artist entering the vaginal canal as opposed to coming out of it. While Afrika crawled into the body of the kolkhoz farmer, Kulik’s head penetrated the vagina of a cow on July 16, 1993 (figure 8). As he described it, “[With this action,] I have closed the theme of reality for myself. For the time being, at least. Just as Malevich closed the theme of painting with his Black Square. Inside the cow I realized that there is no reality, and that means that reality is still to be discovered.”138 Kulik recognizes Beuys’s art-historical significance, asserting that his contribution came in the

Figure 8. Oleg Kulik. Deep into Russia. Performance in Dubrovky, Russia, 1991. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

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form of social activism.139 In fact, he acknowledges this debt to Beuys not only by mirroring the German artist’s actions (in some instances), but also in statements such as the following: “what this art is, isn’t clear. I can’t sell it. That doesn’t interest me. I have arrived at the next level, the creation of community. Beuys [created] social sculpture. He didn’t say how it would be. So, I am creating social sculptures.”140 But it all started with the rebirth from a cow. The Russian Dog Performances Kulik’s first performance as a dog occurred on November 23, 1994, in a piece entitled Mad Dog (The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus),141 in front of the Guelman Gallery in Moscow (figure 9). He appeared completely naked on that cold Moscow November day; the packing tape that was wrapped around his toes, hands, and knees was his only protection from the harsh pavement on which he crawled. He was held back by a leash, attached to his dog collar, by fellow artist Alexander

Figure 9. Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener. Mad Dog (The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus). Performance in front of the Guelman Gallery, Moscow, 1994. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

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Figure 10. Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener. Mad Dog (The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus). Performance in front of the Guelman Gallery, Moscow, 1994. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

Brener (figure 10). A crowd of onlookers gathered to witness the event, as the artist went wild, barking and chasing both spectators and cars. Kulik stopped traffic by jumping in front of and on top of cars. By the end of the performance, Kulik was hoarse from barking. Although Kulik said that it felt like an hour, the performance lasted just seven minutes—an experience of “absolute transgression,”142 as he later described it. He said that he lost his breath, and doesn’t remember parts of it, having blacked out. Beforehand, the artist was anxious about the performance (“I thought it would be stupid”),143 and recalls delaying the start of the performance as long as he could. Nevertheless, he took it quite seriously—“the artist is naked and sincere.”144 During the course of the seven minutes, Kulik jumped on a Swedish journalist, as well as a moving car. “I attacked a car because it was moving—it was absolute instinct,”145 he recalled, thus proving that he had, in fact, arrived at the primitive, animalistic roots that he had been seeking. “They say I almost died,”146 he commented. Thus, in a manner similar to the performances of Marina Abramovic

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(Rhythm 0, Rhythm 2, both 1974) or Chris Burden (Shoot, Five-Day Locker Piece, both 1971), the artist pushed himself to his limits—the brink of death—in order to achieve transgression. Kulik described Mad Dog as the classic battle of nature versus nurture, with Kulik, as a dog, representing nature, and Brener, who read poetry aloud during the performance, culture.147 For Kulik, this first performance as a dog both introduces and sums up his entire artistic program—the battle to unify the binaries that divide us; the need for man to return to nature, to the pre-lingual state; and the validity of pre-lingual or non-lingual expression as represented by the animal world.148 Mad Dog was also about the myth of the West for Russian artists, specifically for Kulik, who had not lived or worked abroad at that point. He recalled a story about a Japanese dog named Hachiko, whose master had died, although the dog could not comprehend it; no one could explain to the dog that the man was dead. Kulik described the situation in Russia in the early 1990s similarly, as an “overall crisis in democratic illusions. Those who had left were returning from the West. They said it was terrible, that they had no money. But I had inner joy . . . The master was alive—just like it was for that dog.”149 Still believing in the myth of utopia in the West, the artist found performance art the most suitable medium to express his convictions, and the dichotomy of experience between him and his compatriots. “I wanted to paint it, to cut from glass, but it didn’t work.”150 Instead, he chose performance as a more direct means of expression. As a man-dog, Kulik was acting outside of social taboos—in this way, he arrived at a true essence of being. For him, the “naked man on all fours [is a] pure man in pure form,”151 despite the artist’s insistence that he is in fact not a man, but a dog. Kulik considers this the next step in the move toward primitivism, a development that had commenced in Russia one century prior with the likes of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. Akin to Paul Gauguin’s and Pablo Picasso’s appropriation of the primitive art of Tahiti or Africa, Goncharova and Larionov invoked “primitive” art gleaned from the “exotic” other,152 in this case, by drawing on traditional Russian folk arts, such as lubki [broadsheets], icons, and even signboards and cookies. Kulik went even further back, however, to before the advent of

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civilization, to arrive at man’s animalistic origins in nature. He spoke of continuing Goncharova and Larionov’s project, explaining, “I am leaving civilization, which has given me a number of instruments and things that are necessary not to use against people, but for them.”153 In this sense, Kulik uses the mechanism or the system of art in order to return to the primitive—insofar as his appearances as the Russian dog take place within an artistic sphere. Thomas McEvilley has noted the roots of performance art in the primitive, not only in the shamanistic gestures of Paleolithic cultures, but also the ritually based art of the Neolithic age.154 By reaching back to the oldest known rituals, Kulik is able to utilize the performances in a manner in which they can be of use to his fellow man—in the same way that artists such as Gauguin and Picasso commandeered the art of the so-called “primitive” people to bring their viewers to a more harmonious relationship with society and themselves. A year after the Mad Dog performance, Kulik the dog traveled to Zurich, Switzerland, where he staged his Reservoir Dog performance in front of the Kunsthaus, at the opening of an exhibition entitled Signs and Wonder. In a recorded interview, the artist described the situation as somewhat confusing—he had been invited to the exhibition to participate, but when he arrived, it appeared that he had in fact not been included in the show, which featured artists such as Cindy Sherman, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, the performance artist Vito Acconci, and even the internationally renowned Russian émigré artist Ilya Kabakov. Sasha Shumov, one of the curators of the exhibition, had invited the artist, signing the chief curator’s name to the letter, but when Kulik arrived in Zurich, that curator did not know who he was. The artist decided to carry out his performance anyway, which is why the performance took place outside of the exhibition hall. “I didn’t exist as an artist there—the most important people in the art world told me so. Thus, I could do whatever I wanted.”155 He even commented that he knew that after this event, the curator would not only know him, but would never forget him.156 During the performance, Kulik squatted outside, howled and growled at the visitors, his aggressive nature effectively preventing them from entering. In true canine fashion, he defecated in a public square, and even bit some

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passersby. He continued his doggie antics until he was eventually arrested by the police. The artist arrived in front of the gallery on March 30, 1995, the day of the opening. As with his Moscow performance, it was cold outside: 34° Fahrenheit. He undressed behind a statue by the Italian artist Mario Merz, and proceeded to cover himself in oil for divers, to keep warm. He described the distinct contrast between the clean, tidy city of Zurich and himself, a naked man in oil—“we felt like bums,”157 he recalled, referring to himself and the entourage that was with him, filming the performance. It was a performance event in the utmost sense of the word, insofar as it was spontaneous and not sanctioned by the curators of the show. Furthermore, the artist commented on the fact that he had no idea how to start or finish the action. In fact, he was thankful that the police arrived, because they ended the performance.158 Not knowing how else to begin, he started by howling. Once again, the artist stopped traffic, but this time it was a cyclist riding by, who fell off his bike at the site of the man-dog, and then stopped to watch. The first person to attempt to enter the exhibition was the Swiss multimedia artist David Weiss. Kulik remembers jumping at him, almost in an embrace, to prevent him from going into the building. The performance lasted for forty-seven minutes, during which time the artist barked, jumped on people, bit their legs, grabbed at their tickets, and even relieved himself in public.159 He recalls that he almost broke his neck when he tripped, as he was attached to the ground by the chain and dog collar. Most likely because of the fact that Kulik was creating a nuisance and preventing guests from entering the exhibition hall, the museum called the police on the artist. “The police saved me, they finished my performance,” the artist recalled. “I was exhausted.”160 When the police arrived, they didn’t know what to do. In fact, the video footage shows the police standing around, holding Kulik by his leash, hesitating before dragging him to the police van (figure 11). A debate ensued—members of the audience that had gathered to watch the performance told the police to let him go, proclaiming that he was an artist, and that this was art. Indeed, the police themselves did continue the performance before finishing it, as they treated Kulik not as a man,

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Figure 11. Oleg Kulik. Reservoir Dog. Performance in front of the Kunsthaus, Zurich, 1995. Kulik is here being arrested by the Zurich police, which followed after he barked and even bit some passersby during the performance. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

by forcing him upright on two feet and holding him with his arms behind his back as one would do to arrest a person; rather, they acted as if he were, in fact, a dog, holding his leash, leading him to the police van with it, and hoisting him into the vehicle by holding his dog collar. But the police were not in any way sympathetic to postmodern art practices such as performance, as these actions might suggest. Kulik described the officers as “small bulldogs,” and commented that “the Swiss police, like the Germans, are used to dealing with degenerate art”;161 thus, their treatment of him was not at all kind. The threat of bodily harm during the performance continued after the artist was arrested. Kulik was first taken to a nearby police station, where he was given some clothes, and then recalls being driven

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out of the city, watching it grow “darker and darker”162 outside. He was brought into a house and kicked into a room, where he was interrogated, with the help of an interpreter. It was then that the artist realized that “the dog-play was over.”163 The police asked the artist his name, and what he did. When he responded that he was an artist, one of the police officers, whom Kulik described as “not in uniform, but with gold chains and guns,”164 interjected, “you’re not an artist. You’re shit.”165 This line recalls Nikita Khrushchev’s vitriol toward artists such as Ernst Neizvestny and Eli Beliutin at the 1962 exhibition Thirty Years of Moscow Art, held at the Manezh exhibition hall in Moscow, when the Soviet leader was shown some examples of unofficial painting and sculpture, as opposed to the state-prescribed Socialist Realism he may have been expecting.166 Ironically, the consequences for Kulik’s act in Switzerland’s largest city in the 1990s were more severe than those for the unofficial artists in Russia following the Manezh show. Those artists had received a mere wrist-slap in the form of public humiliation from Khrushchev, but none were sent to prison (as they most likely would have been during the Stalin era). Kulik was charged with “exhibitionism, defecation in public, aggression, attacks,”167 which carried the penalty of either one year in prison or a fine. Despite the potential punishment, Kulik was released from the police station and set free after two hours. Kulik’s catalogue raisonné describes Reservoir Dog as his “protest against the transformation of an artist’s life into material value, against art as a commodity.”168 In the true spirit of performance art, Kulik created an artwork that could neither be bought nor sold, nor sit lifelessly in the halls of a museum. Similar to the Mad Dog performance, here Kulik was in fact acting as a guard dog. “I wanted to protect the audience from that terrible art,”169 he stated, referring to the works on view in Signs and Wonder. He explained, “Art should be focused on a human being, his life, feelings, sufferings.”170 Kulik specifically targeted Switzerland in this performance, where the commercialization of art is, for him, quite acutely felt; in his words, “the marketing approach to art is especially vivid in Switzerland. Everything is safe and abstract, one can keep it in a bank. But this experiment of spirit shows dirt and pain, not shop windows.”171 Kulik’s Reservoir Dog performance, then, participates in and continues the tradition of reacting against the commercialization of art,

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which Western artists had begun in the 1960s and 1970s, demonstrating that those arguments are still relevant and meaningful thirty years later. Perhaps because he is a Russian artist who has been operating within the Western art market only since the 1990s, this commercial aspect of art is felt that much more profoundly. In 1996, Kulik was invited by the artist Ernst Billgren to present his Russian Dog performance at the Interpol exhibition at the Färgfabriken Center for Contemporary Art and Architecture in Stockholm (figure 12),172 an exhibition based on the idea of East–West exchange and communication.173 Although reluctant to attend the event, the artist was persuaded, as the curators had already built him a dog house.174 When he was first asked to reproduce the performance at Interpol, he replied that this idea had already been realized. In a statement about the performance, similar to one that Marcel Duchamp had issued several decades

Figure 12. Oleg Kulik. Dog House. Performance at the Interpol exhibition, Färgfabriken Center for Contemporary Art and Architecture, Stockholm, 1996. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

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earlier regarding his readymades,175 Kulik insisted that he “didn’t want to monopolize it.”176 He even warned the curators of exactly what the performance would entail: “it’s not a game. I can even bite.”177 He asked the curators whether they had heard about what had happened in Zurich, the attacks that the dog had made on the spectators, and the eventual involvement of the police. They had, and their response, as Kulik recounts, was simply, “we want the same.”178 The performance at the opening of the Interpol exhibition—which was entitled Dog House—began abruptly, with Kulik the dog jumping on one of the first people to enter the exhibition, biting him, and seizing his genitals. The man, whom Kulik reported used to be a paratrooper, responded by grabbing the artist’s Adam’s apple. The man-dog recovered from the attack, regained his breath, and remained in the exhibition hall until he started to get cold. He decided to use the shelter provided him by the curators and stayed in the dog house for thirty minutes, to warm up. He drank some wine from his dog bowl, a drink that he had requested. He was feeling content, warm, and relaxed in his dog shelter, when a visitor to the exhibition “crossed the line,” both literally and figuratively, and started to pull the chain by which Kulik was attached to the floor. Although reluctant to leave the dog house, Kulik recalled that because the man “crossed the line, a dog should do his duty.”179 Indeed, there was a clearly demarcated boundary surrounding the area for Kulik’s performance, including a sign that warned, “Beware of the dog.” But as the visitor, a man named Leonard Lindquist, chose to ignore this warning, he was duly attacked. Kulik jumped on Lindquist, who screamed when he fell. The artist reports being “shocked by the sound, and so I bit him. He squealed. I had bitten his flesh. I even ran away from the way he squealed.”180 Stockholm’s emergency services were called, and when they arrived they gave the man an injection that cost 200 Euros, for which the man demanded compensation from the Ministry of Culture, along with other punitive damages from the “harm that Russian art had caused him.”181 Although the curators had invited Kulik to stage the performance much in the manner as he had in Zurich, when this actually came to pass, curators and audiences alike found the artist’s aggression intolerable and unacceptable.182 The performance ended, once again, with Kulik’s arrest.

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Dog House was very much about the East–West binary, the tensions and dichotomies between the two. The exhibition itself set out to promote East–West dialogue, by inviting artists from both sides of the divide to participate. Kulik’s performance has often been interpreted on the most basic of levels, meaning that, as a Russian, he couldn’t be anything but the “wild, animal Other,” a Russian dog. Indeed, this is one aspect of the performance, but it was the one that many who responded to it chose to focus on. Kulik’s act was reduced to senseless aggression, which was only compounded by another event that took place at the exhibition, when Alexander Brener destroyed a work of art by the Chinese artist Wenda Gu, as part of an impromptu performance at the opening.183 Soon after Dog House, a series of open letters went back and forth in the art press, both in defense of and against Kulik’s action. As Eda Cˇufer and Viktor Misiano have devoted an entire publication to this event,184 and since these letters have been reproduced in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl’s anthology Primary Documents, as well as discussed quite often elsewhere—to the extent of being the only point of discussion on Kulik’s dog performances—I will not address them at length here. The exchange can be summarized by the conclusion reached by the philosopher, sociologist, and psychoanalytic theorist Renata Salecl, who stated that “the trauma of the West in regard to Russia in recent years is that the West regards Russia as a superpower, but only on the condition that it does not act as one. And, in regard to Kulik’s performance, the West finds aesthetic pleasure in observing the Russian ‘dog,’ but only on condition that he does not behave in a truly dog-like manner.”185 Kulik echoes that sentiment in his statement, “even as a dog you should be obedient. Like in the West: you poop, and clean it. One shouldn’t break the convention.”186 The performance was also about communication, and the inability to communicate across borders, be they linguistic, geographic, or inter-speciel. Salecl reminds us that for Foucault, among others, communication is a form of power struggle.187 She also writes that one could understand violence and destruction as a method of communication, and thus “if the organizers of Interpol want to have dialog as the form of the exhibition, they should not be too surprised if some artists

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use violence and destruction as a mode of communication.”188 In fact, Kulik had anticipated the communication difficulties in advance of the performance: I had this idea that communication between East and West was impossible, that it was impossible because the people weren’t equal. If you pay money, and I earn something from you, then I can be a dog, a real dog, a good dog. And if I take on the role of a dog, you tell me, “Go, I will pay you money.” There is no communication. And that’s why I kept silent and stayed in my dog house. I was dangerous, I was aggressive, I wouldn’t come out.189 Indeed, the circumstances surrounding Dog House were rather prescriptive. The curators of the show wanted Kulik to behave as an aggressor, and essentially ordered a Russian dog performance, thus in a sense commodifying it—precisely the artist’s opposite intention in creating it in the first place. With performance art, however, even if the same act is repeated, the outcome is inevitably always different, as the fact that it takes place in real time means that the results will change depending on the location, conditions, and, most importantly, audience. Kulik described his feelings following the Stockholm performance: “it had an effect on me. I was in shock for three days, as if I had committed something horrible. But I was a true artist.”190 Despite the curators’ efforts, neither they, nor the artist himself, could predict the constitution or outcome of the performance beforehand. Kulik explained his actions in “Why Have I Bitten a Man?,” a text written in 1996, under pressure from the organizational committee of the Manifesta 1 exhibition.191 He wrote that he arrived at the “animal” after searching for something more human, basic, and essential: “for me human stopped being associated with the notions ‘alive,’ ‘feeling,’ and ‘understanding,’ and started to be associated with the notions ‘artificial’ and ‘dangerous.’ ”192 As he stated, “my standing on hands and knees is a conscious falling out of a human horizon, connected with a feeling of the end of anthropocentrism, with a crisis of not just contemporary art but contemporary culture on the whole.”193 In stark contrast to Afrika’s artist-shaman performance, wherein he enters a

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mental institution in an attempt to heal the collective ills of society, Kulik’s actions toward his fellow man might seem aggressive. In many ways, Kulik is simply giving Western audiences what they expect of him—as an artist from the wild and untamed “East,” he cannot be seen as anything but an animal, a Russian dog. Viktor Misiano, the Russian curator of the Interpol exhibition, has even remarked, in defense of Kulik, that “in the vacuum of democracy, conflict has become the most effective method of acquiring an identity.”194 Ekaterina Dyogot, however, sees the schizophrenia of the post-Soviet art world as the cause of this violent behavior, explaining that the Russian artist feels “like a kamikaze of representation, crashed by the machine of symbol production. And to preserve himself or herself as a subject, he or she can find a way out only by becoming a virus, destroying the whole system.”195 In fact, we now know that these acts were not committed for the mere sake of aggression, but rather as part of the artist’s own personal journey of self-discovery. Salecl has addressed Kulik’s arrest in Stockholm, and the significance of the fact that it was at the police station that he began to speak again. It was there that “he did not want to be treated like a dog— without the right to explain his action.”196 When the Zurich police arrested Kulik they arrested him as a dog, holding him by his leash, but once interrogated, he had to speak in a language that could be understood by all present—and it was the same in Stockholm. Salecl remarks that in the Middle Ages, animals were held responsible for their actions, and even put on trial, yet in contemporary society, “since the dog is regarded as property, this also implies the responsibility of the owner: it is the owner who is prosecuted if his or her dog bites people.”197 In this regard, it follows that Kulik was made to represent all of Russia for his acts, as it was Russia, his “owner,” in a certain sense of the term, who would be responsible for his wild behavior, and have to pay the price. In 1974, Kulik’s avant-garde forefather, Joseph Beuys, spent three days peacefully coexisting with the wild, animal “other”—a coyote—in the Rene Block Gallery in New York. More than twenty years later, in 1997, Oleg Kulik recreated that performance by becoming the animal himself. Similar to what Beuys had originally done, Kulik

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was escorted from New York’s JFK Airport directly to a downtown gallery (this time the Deitch Gallery), where he remained in a cage for two weeks. As the artist recounted, “I had the idea of a different version—a wild animal comes to Europe but leaves just as wild.”198 Visitors could enter the cage where he lived, but were made to wear protective clothing. The title of the performance was also a nod to Beuys: I Bite America and America Bites Me.199 Despite the fact that this was the fourth major instantiation of the Russian Dog performance, Kulik recalls still being reluctant both to do the performance and to appear in front of an audience naked, as a dog. “I was embarrassed. It was like a laboratory. I was performing as a dog, but in fact it was a naked man on all fours. I couldn’t face them for three days.”200 When he finally did approach the window of the cage, he was surprised to see a large crowd of people gathered there— and then “I got even more embarrassed,”201 he recalls. The performance unfolded in a much different manner than the Moscow, Zurich, or Stockholm versions thereof. Kulik attributes this to the differences between Europeans and Americans, as well as to the fact that audiences were “prepared”202 for the events to come, having already heard about the other performances. In this sense, some of the spontaneity of the idea of the performance had dissipated—but not all. Kulik described his expectations of and responses to the New York performance as follows: “I expected [the people] to react like in Europe, in Russia—police, irony, he’s-an-idiot attitude. But people were really interested. I saw compassion and tenderness. The American way of thinking involves game elements, while the European one is depressive: nothing can be trusted.”203 While for much of the performance, visitors to the cage were friendly and accepting (figure 13),204 at one point, things could have taken a turn for the worse, although Kulik was unaware of this until afterward. One day, a man entered Kulik’s cage with an American flag; the artist remembered noticing that it was a very beautiful flag, the stars and stripes carefully sewn together, as opposed to a cheap printed version. The man appeared to want to wrap Kulik in the flag, but within seconds, one of the curators of the exhibition removed him from the cage. Apparently, the man had intended to set both the

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Figure 13. Oleg Kulik. I Bite America and America Bites Me. Performance at the Deitch Gallery, New York City, 1997. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

flag, and Kulik, on fire. Even though this element of danger was not written into the performance, it underscores the aspect of risk that all performance artists face when they surrender themselves to their audiences. Other Dogs Although the New York performance was the final major dog performance by Kulik, he did appear as a canine in several other instances, in actions that are significant when one considers the artist’s overall project. Kulik appeared as a dog in 1996 in Berlin, in a performance entitled I Love Europe, She Does Not Love Me Back, which took place in a small park near the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, not far from the Berlin Wall. Kulik squatted in the center of a grassy circle, surrounded by twelve real dogs held on leashes by their masters. Kulik stood at attention next to an EU flag, which had been raised in the center of the grassy area, sacrificially offering himself to Europe as the wild Other. According to the artist, “Europe needs the image of an enemy in order to achieve real unification. ‘I love Europe’ means that I am

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ready to propose myself as this symbolic enemy. If all dogs are united by attacking me, they will notice the resemblance of my dog collar to the symbol of United Europe.”205 Now that the Cold War division of East and West no longer officially exists, Kulik, as the Russian dog, offered himself up as a physical manifestation of what the Berlin Wall once symbolically represented. In 1997, the same year as his New York performance, Kulik created an installation, film, and photo series entitled Family of the Future, which consisted of photographs of Kulik interacting with his actual dog, a Neapolitan Mastiff named Bucks (plate 3),206 in a canine-friendly environment. The video shows Oleg Kulik (the man) returning from a hardday’s work, presumably at the office, as his business attire and briefcase would suggest. As he enters the constructed living room where Bucks sits, watching TV, Kulik proceeds to undress, a process that symbolizes the man’s transformation into his canine persona. The man interacts playfully with the dog while undressing, and once the transformation is complete, he carries on TV-watching and wrestling with the dog. In the photographs, the two are depicted in various settings. One image shows them laying on the floor, with Kulik reading a book entitled Homo Ludens,207 a reference to the necessity of play in society. Other images show the two out for a walk in the countryside—not man and man’s best friend, but man as man’s best friend. The environment that Kulik had built for the installation was also canine-friendly—all of the furniture is low to the ground so that the dogs can utilize couches, beds, and shelves, just as humans do (figure 14). The installation demonstrates that despite the Russian Dog’s aggression in the previously mentioned performances, Kulik’s project is in fact a utopian vision, involving the entire “family of the future,” where human beings freely and happily commingle with their canine friends.208 For him, once humans and animals can achieve this kind of intimacy, the result will be a harmonious familial relationship for all. In his words, “the family of the future, an inter-species family, implies permanent emotional comfort. That is why it is extremely important for us to defend the right to have a family of this kind where you can put to test and work out new notions concerning emotional and psychological satisfaction, the future happiness of all living creatures.”209

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Figure 14. Oleg Kulik. Family of the Future. Performance and installation/ exhibition, Moscow, 1997. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

It is only outside of language that there can be common understanding between not only humans and animals, but also among humans, a tenet that provides the foundation for the performance. In this sense, both Afrika’s and Kulik’s performances function as linguistic rituals of self-definition and redefinition. Living up to his original intention not to exploit the performance, the artist no longer appears as the Russian Dog. The performance has served its utility; the artist, and perhaps also society, no longer has a need for it. Kulik stressed the importance of returning from the non-lingual animal world, especially in terms of his ability to translate his experiences to make them relevant for others. In his words, “it is quite easy to leave the human/social context but it is important to have a return ticket. Otherwise this experience cannot be passed on to anybody.”210 Like Beuys, the artist considered the societal relevance of his experiences of prime importance to his project. Kulik’s work since the 1990s has shifted rather dramatically to installations (photographic and object-based), but his object-based art still adheres to the original program that had begun with the dog performances. When questioned about this shift, the artist affirmed that all of the work is related.

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It was evolutional. My performances of the early ‘90s were a reaction to the cultural layer that was disappearing right under my feet. A Dogman [sic] is a dubious figure, which stays outside culture, outside institutions, posing a question as to what culture and institutions are. I don’t think that it is just a problem of the Post-Soviet space and no other. This problem refers to the place of man in this world. . . It is hard to be a man, but it is harder not to be one. Deep in my heart I am still a dog, but I’m no longer weak in my mad fury. I’m strong in deep compassion for other living beings.211 Kulik’s performances were about the search for space not only for man in the animal world, but also for the animal in the world of man. Much like with Afrika’s project, this is a mission that the artist may never ultimately fulfill, in practical terms, although Kulik has stated that his personal search for himself was completed through his performances as the Russian Dog. Like Afrika, the artist can serve as a model for determining how society may arrive at a sense of self-definition and individual integration in the post-Soviet era. Other Animals Although Kulik is perhaps best known for his Russian Dog performances, he has not restricted himself to solely imitating his canine friend.212 Nor is his artistic oeuvre limited to performance art. The artist has a wide range of work that varies from performances as other animals (a bird, a goat), with other animals (a cock, carp, wild horses), with other people (native inhabitants of the Gobi Desert), as well as a number of pieces that could fit within the category of political activism. All of these works remain centered on Kulik’s main theme of harmony with the animal Other. Even his two-dimensional work problematizes these issues regarding the splitting of the self, between ego and id, conscious and subconscious, and between binaries. For his 1997 performance in Alma-Aty, Kazakhstan, Kulik versus Koraz, the artist engaged in a cock fight with another bird by wearing

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a stuffed cock on his head (figure 15). The performance didn’t turn out as the artist planned, as the (real) bird died of shock.213 The struggle was again meant to represent the man’s confrontation with his Other. Alter Aegis, from 1995, tackled a similar issue, as Kulik, disguised as a goat, battled with his alter ego, represented by Kulik’s friend Alexei Tabashov, dressed in a suit. This battle reached its climax in a performance that he repeated several times in 1997 and 1998, entitled Two Kuliks. Here Kulik-the man (his conscious self) and Kulikthe animal (his subconscious) were both represented by the artist. As the live Kulik attempts to paint his self-portrait, a recorded image of the artist (his subconscious) yells at him to be “normal.”214 These internal struggles were eventually transferred to Kulik’s two-dimensional work, for example, the photographic series Alice versus Lolita (1999–2000), wherein Alice represents the artist’s subconscious, and Lolita, his conscious mind. In these pieces, Kulik still “performs,” insofar as his naked, exposed body remains present in the images, double-exposed to reveal the swirling figures of Alice or Lolita within him.215 It is the animal world, however, and animals themselves, who

Figure 15. Oleg Kulik. Kulik versus Koraz. Performance in Alma-Aty, Kazakhstan, 1997. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

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do not have these inner conflicts, according to Kulik, and it is for this reason that we are to look to them as a model on which to base our lives, for how we might live in harmony with ourselves and with one another.216 As the artist explains, “For animals there is only the Other, and not an abstract one. . . what people like about animals is their wild naturalness.”217 In his 1995 performance Missionary, the artist appeared as a holy man, absolving live carp before they were sent off to the market to be sold, killed, and eaten. For Kulik, this was significant, as he meant to demonstrate the fact that animals do, in fact, have souls.218 But the performance was also a sort of penance for the artist, as it took place outside, in a tank of freezing cold water, in Moscow in late October. In a reversal of Beuys’s strategy of bringing a wild animal into the space of the gallery, in his 1998 performance it was the artist who changed environments and braved the elements. In Breton Horses,219 the artist lived for one month in the open countryside with a pack of wild horses. He transferred this commingling with the Other to the wild terrain of Mongolia in his 2005 project, Gobi Test (The Unbearable Charm of Mongolia), wherein he spent a period of time, in both summer and winter, living with the native people of Mongolia. For Kulik, the latter were the ultimate embodiment of man living in harmony with nature, in conditions to which all should aspire.220 Also similar to Beuys, Kulik attempted to infuse his artistic performances with an element of social activism, mainly with regard to his interest in animal-related causes. In 1995, he ran for Russian president as the sole representative of his self-created Party of Animals. The campaign consisted of public appearances and advertising posters, where Kulik appeared either naked (I Am a Beast Now!, 1995), or as a goat (Political Animal, 1997).221 He appeared at several protests against cruelty to animals (Political Look of Man, Zoocentrism Experiment, both 1995), the culmination of which was I Cannot Keep Silent Anymore,222 in front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg in 1996. The performance was staged in defense of British cows, which were, at that time, being slaughtered following the outbreak of Mad Cow Disease. The action started with the artist once again naked, on all fours, barking loudly, next to a cow draped in the Union Jack. It ended with the artist

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being branded across the chest with a ring of stars like that of the EU flag (figure 16).223 Kulik attempted to use his Party of Animals not only to work toward an integrated human identity, but also to fight for the rights of animals, and of all living beings. Kulik’s animal activism spans the length of his career. In fact, it was one year prior to the artist’s rebirth through a cow’s vagina that the artist created a performance that set the stage for his Zoophrenia project. In an action entitled Piggly Wiggly Making Presents, held on April 11, 1992, the artist slaughtered a pig at the Regina Gallery in Moscow.224 While such an act would seem counter to the artist’s raison d’être, he explained that it was a response to the parliamentary discussions regarding the death penalty immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He explained that most supported the idea

Figure 16. Oleg Kulik. I Cannot Keep Silent Anymore. Performance in front of the European Parliament, Strasbourg, 1996. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

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of retaining the death penalty as the highest form of punishment, as it had been during the Soviet era: “in the ‘90s, our parliament, under Gorbachev, was discussing the death penalty, and not one person— not one—voted against it. 100 percent of the deputies were for the death penalty.”225 The performance, then, was meant to call attention to what it means to take another life. The artist’s Ten Commandments of Zoophrenia, written in 1998, set forth the basic ideas of Kulik’s artistic philosophy, revealing that his animal activism is more than simply an altruistic affair; it is an overarching life program that the artist sees as a solution to man’s (including post-Soviet man’s) identity problems.226 Zoophrenia makes clear that the artist regards a union between man and animal as the way forward both for the achievement of harmony within the world, and within man himself. For Kulik, this project is complicated by the fact that animals are not members of society: “constitutionally and legally, they have no rights, and that means that I also have no rights.”227 Thus, the artist’s aim is to achieve equality, harmony, and legal rights for all living creatures. Essentially, for Kulik, as the Russian dog, to be given legal rights and accepted as an equal implies the acquisition of voice and agency in the Western world, of which he aims to be a part—not only as a person, but also as an artist. It is important to consider the fact that when Kulik refers to the rights of animals, he is by default referring to himself as a man-dog, a Russian dog, who occupies a subordinate position in the East–West divide in the post-Soviet era. Both Kulik and Brener were denounced following the Interpol exhibition, denounced because even though the West accepts them as the wild other, they may remain so as long as they do not act. Even the circumstances surrounding the four main Russian Dog performances underscore this point: in Moscow, there were no consequences for his actions. In Zurich, Kulik performed outdoors as in Moscow, but the consequences were more severe—he was arrested at the end of the performance. Although in Moscow the artist had been invited to perform in front of the Guelman Gallery and in Zurich he had no such invitation, nevertheless, the Swiss police did not accept the views expressed by the onlookers in front of the Kunsthaus that he was an artist engaged in an artistic performance. In Stockholm, Kulik had

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been invited for his aggressive and daring acts, but provided with a dog house and a barrier to keep his aggression contained. It was not Kulik who crossed the barrier, but the Swedish audience member who taunted him. Nevertheless, Kulik was still arrested. In New York, the dog house grew into an entire cage; thus, the space that contained him expanded. Further elements were added to the performance to protect the audience from this “aggressor”—visitors could interact with the man-dog, so long as they agreed to wear a protective suit. Still, it was Kulik who was most in danger at that show, stemming from the man with the flag, who nearly set him on fire. When invited to the West, Kulik is allowed to behave as a dog, although his wild aggression must be contained. When his hostility manifests itself, there are consequences—he is sent to a dog house, placed in a cage, and visitors are restricted. The element of language, or the absence thereof during the dog performances, is crucial to our understanding of them. Kulik feels that “intra-species languages, such as the languages of bees, ants, dogs, or English, could only meet the demands of individual species. We need an inter-species language to solve political and legal problems.”228 When asked whether the greatest obstacle for the family of the future was a linguistic one, he responded in the affirmative, stating that “language is an illness,”229 and compared the human use of language with the animal’s possession of instinct: We have lost the instinct that one finds in animals. In humans, instinct manifests itself in language. Not just in words, but in constructions, forms—him, her, state, money, good—masculine form, feminine form. All of these constructions that control us, if we look beyond them, are nothing really (fignia), just an illness. I put myself in this world of animals to understand what is human. Put yourself in the position of a dog, and you’ll understand who people are.230 Kulik commented on the experience of existing outside the linguistic sphere when during his 1997 project Pavlov’s Dog he lived for two weeks completely without language, subjecting himself to a series of

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tests, one of which involved being shown works of art as a slide show. Although the experience was difficult, he also stated that “many of my functions started to work better [through the course of the experiment]. . . I began to anticipate events. . . At first it was painful, and then unbelievable. You don’t think of the next day, you live only for now. It’s as if you don’t exist.”231 Existing outside of language, the artist experienced wholeness in the sense that an animal does, being in harmony with himself and his surroundings. Like Afrika, Kulik utilizes performance art to grapple with issues that can be considered symptomatic of the post-Soviet condition: the tensions and conflicts between East and West, and the new concern with self-definition. Kulik felt that the lack of a sense of self was not only a symptom of the post-Soviet era, but of the postmodern era as well. Thus, his project aims to solve both problems simultaneously—the resolution of the post-Soviet Russian identity question in particular and the more general postmodern identity crisis. Kulik considers the dichotomy between East and West a crucial issue, with regard to a sense of identity in post-Soviet Russia. He mentioned that when he first started working, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he saw the world in terms of this split, although his view has changed since then. Initially, he felt that a dialogue between East and West was not possible, that people on both sides of the divide were too different, likening those in the East to small children. When the West first opened up to Russia, he said that we were in shock. Then Russia couldn’t understand the West, and couldn’t agree. In the West, people were cynical, grown-up, big, experienced. And we were like children, maybe aggressive children, not well-behaved. A lot of it was an illusion—the West is so good and capable, everything they do is good and pure. And then it turned out that it wasn’t so—it’s just business. And the Russian people were very offended. It’s all a child complex; we’re used to having Papa Stalin, who solved everything, Papa Lenin, Papa Putin, Papa Yeltsin, Papa Gorbachev.232 He describes what followed as the uncomfortable situation of when a child is suddenly asked to stand on his own two feet and be responsible

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for himself, but isn’t ready, and feels as if he can’t, being forced to “become an adult,” like it or not. It is for this reason, he says, that he utilized a hybrid in his work, describing himself as “an animal-man, who found himself suddenly in another culture, and he doesn’t understand a thing. . . I simply got down on all fours.”233 Taking on the character and position of the man-dog, Kulik was enacting the situation of all Russians who suddenly found themselves on the open market, in a world that was opening itself to the West. There was no common language, and no sense of common behavior; the only thing to do was to get down on all fours and submit. Perhaps Kulik’s most poignant act of submission came not as a dog, but as an armadillo, in a 2003 performance at the Tate Modern in London. In Armadillo for Your Show, the artist covered his naked body with mirrored tiles, and suspended himself from the ceiling, turning himself into an art object that was both seen and not seen, visible and invisible at the same time. Adrian Heathfield wrote that in doing so, the artist turned himself into something that was “liminal, without identity.”234 Kulik himself observed this liminality, describing the gallery space as “separated into two different spaces (above and under). The border of these two spaces disappears in the ever-changing reflections and patches of light on the surface of the body.”235 While, on the one hand, the mirror ball denies Kulik’s corporeality, on the other, in becoming a still, immobile object, the artist reverses the original aims of performance art, which sought to deny the object. Here, Kulik thus becomes an object for consumption by the West, as displayed in Western museums. Kulik recognizes the role that he has to play in Russian artistic culture as the so-called Russian Dog, stating that “in Russian art as a dog I am aggressive, dangerous, representing some kind of subconscious of Russia. . . It’s a problem of self-identification, you have to assert yourself.”236 Indeed, the problem of self-identification becomes most acute when that against which you have been defining yourself changes or disappears, as we witnessed with Afrika, when the officialdom that his dissident activity was aimed against was eliminated. For Kulik, the process of becoming a dog has been a process of the artist, and the man behind the artist, discovering

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his self, following this elimination. For Gesine Drews-Sylla, among others, he represents a specific split identity, “the split identity of a people who had both the power to enforce and the fate to endure the ‘experimental’ realization of a utopian project, as well as ‘democratic’ change.”237 Thus, like with Afrika, the project was essentially a search for an individual, integrated self out of a divided or schizophrenic post-Soviet one. With regard to his search, Kulik revealed that “a strange sort of revolution occurred; I didn’t find myself, but I found other people.”238 These “other people” were significant in this process of self-discovery, as evinced by his later statement to that effect: “whereas earlier I was looking for myself, in the end I found it [my ‘self’] through the other.”239 Becoming an animal also represented the chance for Kulik to become the Other, to step outside of himself and examine his position from another point of view, in the same way that Afrika was able to examine the psyche of the post-Soviet Russian by becoming a patient in a mental institution. In fact, Kulik commented that he “put himself in the position of a dog to understand humans.”240 After having carried out the Russian Dog performances, the mission is complete, and the actions are no longer necessary. Whereas Kulik set out to understand the world and create harmony among man, taking on the role of shaman, just as Beuys and Afrika did, in the end, he feels that he achieved a sense of self-discovery. I found myself through the dog, and you will find yourself through the horse, or through the killer-whale, or through another person, it doesn’t matter; open up your consciousness. . . I wanted to understand how the world was put together and to create greater harmony. I survived it myself, and it is no longer necessary for me. I already found myself.241 The artist maintains that it is only in nature that we can find balance,242 and it is the post-Soviet world, based on Western capitalism and free trade, that necessitates a journey to the animal world. Kulik invokes the Biblical reference of doing unto others, describing this as directly opposed to the business model: “loving others as you

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would love yourself is the end of business. Business is founded on not loving others. The entire economy is built on that principle.”243 Kulik stresses the fact that it was the mechanism of performance that led him to self-discovery, and specifically the act of becoming a dog. In his words: How can we save the world, how can we become happy, cheerful. . . how can we do this? It’s very simple, and I can prove it. I proved that I was a dog, and that wasn’t simple. If everyone did this kind of performance at least once, the world would become a far better place. Everyone would be beautiful, solid. They would simply go naked into the streets and hold their tongues, so that they couldn’t say anything. After fifteen minutes, they would go through such stress that they would love everyone, be satisfied with everything.244 For Kulik, this type of transgressive experience is necessary for not only self-definition, but for arriving at inner peace and harmony. His descriptions of the experience of becoming a dog and coexisting with humans outside of language convey the fact that through this catharsis, the artist was purged of all of the excesses and self-consciousness that keep us unhappy and out of harmony with ourselves, one another, and the world.245 He advocates this method of self-discovery for all mankind. In fact, in his Deep into Russia exhibition at the 1997 Venice Biennale, he enabled his viewers to follow in the footsteps of his rebirth, by having them insert their heads into the backside of a cow (figure 17). In this case, however, the cow is an inanimate, manufactured one, and the viewer is forced to place his head at the rear in order to watch the video being projected on a monitor located inside the cow’s body. When asked about the role that pain played in his performances—the pain involved in appearing naked in the cold of winter, being submerged in cold water with fish, being branded, and even the pain of witnessing the death of another animal—the artist replied that it is significant with regard to his art. “I have thought a lot about pain, and it is difficult to explain, although it is a very important question.”246

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Figure 17. Oleg Kulik. Deep into Russia. Installation at the Venice Biennale, 1997. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

The artist sees pain and suffering as an integral part of life, as a crucial element in the process of self-development. “You are relative. In ten years. . . you will be different. But for this you will need to go through suffering, changes. . . if you say ‘I am,’ ‘I want,’ then that is suffering, that is pain.”247 And you have to enter into that pain. “Pain is a very important part of it. I didn’t want pain, but through pain I became different.”248 Amelia Jones has also discussed the role that pain has played in the history of performance art, positioning the suffering body “on the edge of sociality,”249 which would further Other the already Othered and identity-lacking Kulik. She also identified the performance of pain as “a crucial strategy to imprint the psychic sufferings of individual and collective subjects on to the social screen,”250 which is precisely what both Kulik’s and Afrika’s projects aim to do. Furthermore, with regard to the pain experienced by artists in performance, Lea Vergine has stated that “those who are in pain will tell you that they have the right to be taken seriously.”251 Thus, while Kulik’s project may initially appear tongue-in-cheek, upon closer examination, we realize that the consequences for such performances are, in fact, grave. Kulik did experience pain; he suffered and changed as a result of it, but the nirvana for him would only come later.

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The artist acknowledges the significance of his use of performance in his project, and maintains that performance art is the only honest form of art: “it is the only art that asks questions—what is art, what is life, where are we, what can art do.”252 For Kulik, and for many other performance artists, the art form is considered most truthful because of the belief that it is most closely integrated into life. In fact, this was the original impetus behind the introduction of the genre in the early years of the twentieth century by the Futurist and Dada artists. Kulik himself stated that “it wasn’t that I wanted to unite [art and life], I wanted to create a symbiosis. . . So that these two things wouldn’t be distinguished from one another, so that there wouldn’t be this kind of combination, so that it would be one integrated whole.”253 This is significantly different from painting and sculpture, wherein the object is disconnected from both the artist and the audience. In the same way that language serves as a barrier and disconnect between ourselves and the reality of experience, so, too, do objects exist beyond a gap from ourselves. Kulik sees performance as a type of “behavior, a form of secular religion. A religion without God, where God is you. Straightforward. That’s why now I don’t create product art—I create a space where God lives.”254 Despite Kulik and his work being outside of the trajectory of modern Western art, this statement bears echoes of the Futurists’ desire to put the viewer at the center of the painting, which eventually continued with Jackson Pollock’s being “in his painting,” and ultimately led to Allan Kaprow’s desire to “keep the line between art and life as fluid as possible,” and to eliminate the audience entirely. Kulik utilized performance art as his preferred genre both for the catharsis it provided him as the artist, as well as the shock that it gave to his audiences, remarking that “as a performance artist, I crossed these borders, these borders that were rather conventional for me; I broke taboos and made them no longer exist for me. I can get undressed without pathos, I can be one.”255 The artist confirms the role that performance art can play in bringing about changes in society. Kulik’s performances marked a radical change in Russian performance art, heralding the next phase in the takeover of public space that had begun with Collective Actions. While in the 1970s, those artists restricted their actions to the countryside, and in the 1980s, the Apt

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artists returned to the city with their clandestine art exhibitions, in the 1990s, artists such as Kulik were finally able to reclaim public space, as witnessed in Mad Dog in 1994, among other radical performance pieces and exhibitions. Viktor Misiano comments on this Radical Actionism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union: “during the catastrophic and heroic 1990s, reality was perceived as something empty and borderless; it was a scene of realization of bright and aggressive projects. An individual was not watching reality: he conquered, privatized and created it.”256 The artist also felt that the opening of these spaces created a need for artists to act. As he stated, “it seemed that the artist was allowed to make gestures in Russia. Moreover, these were obligatory.”257 Thus, Kulik’s actions participated in the development of agency on the part of Russian post-Soviet artists. Both Afrika and Kulik used performance to navigate their way through the uncharted territory of post-Soviet Russia. Through their performances, they explore the possibilities offered by alternate identities and the play between East and West, in order to arrive at a solution to the question of a new Russian identity.258 Whereas Afrika’s is a project that is still underway, as the artist has not yet discovered the new post-Soviet language that he was seeking, Kulik feels that his use of transgression and catharsis through performance helped him to achieve his aim—the discovery of the self. He offers this solution to his audiences, and recommends that each undergo a similar transgressive experience, in order to realize the self. Just as performance art is temporal and ambiguous, so, too, are the solutions sought, as each artist continues to perform, throughout his career, a new Russian identity.

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CHAPTER 2 THE BRONZE MAN AND THE HOMELESS MAN: PERFORMING APPEARANCE IN LATVIA

This chapter presents the story of two Latvian men who appeared on the streets of Riga nearly two decades apart. The temporal disjuncture between them is not nearly as dramatic as the cultural and social one, because while one walked the streets as a living statue, the other was a homeless man who eventually became a TV star. The Bronze Man perambulated the streets of Riga, Bremen, and even Helsinki in the late 1980s and early 1990s, echoing the ubiquitous bronze statues that graced the skylines of Soviet cities at that time; however, the homeless man, named Starix, was a product of the post-Soviet era, when fame and fortune could come at an easy price, stemming from the influx of advertising and mass media. Both were part of artistic performances: The Bronze Man (1987–92), by Miervaldis Polis, and Starix (2000–04), by Gints Gabra¯ns. A close scrutiny of the two reveals how surfaces can be deceiving, and that only through careful examination can one arrive at the truth behind the facade. In fact, both demonstrate a deliberate strategy on the part of the artists of exposing those surfaces for what they are. The Bronze Man’s appearance came at a time when Latvian citizens were beginning to do just that by demanding the facts behind their country’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, and arguing for

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independence on the basis that Latvia’s annexation was illicit and unlawful, while Starix rose to fame within the context of a fully independent Latvia. His presence served as a reminder of the danger of false idols, and the ease with which deceptions can take place, even in full-fledged democracies.

The Movement for Latvian Independence The late 1980s in Latvia was the time of the Third Awakening, when citizens began to demand democracy in society, recognition of Latvia as an independent state, and acknowledgment of the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, a non-aggression pact signed between Nazi Germany and the USSR on August 23, 1939, which left Latvia under Soviet control after World War II.1 Amid perestroika and Gorbachev’s other liberalizing policies, Latvians began to organize themselves into activist groups, such as Helsinki ‘86, the Latvian People’s Front, and the Latvian National Independence Movement, devoted to exposing the inconsistencies between the Soviet version of reality and the lived one, and fighting for Latvia’s recognition as an autonomous state. Their actions often took the form of public manifestations and demonstrations, culminating in the “Baltic Chain,” on August 23, 1989. On this day, citizens from all three Baltic republics formed a human chain that stretched from Tallinn to Vilnius, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Molotov– Ribbentrop Pact. Artists and cultural groups were behind many of the Latvian protests and resistance movements in the late 1980s. In fact, according to Juris Dreifelds, it was these groups that launched the process of national awakening and rebirth. One of the first such groups was Skandinieki, a folk-culture association that toured Latvia reviving local songs and traditions.2 The idea was to revitalize and restore long-standing cultural traditions in order to bolster the argument that Latvia was an independent nation with a distinct culture of its own,3 unlawfully annexed into the Soviet Union. The famous debate over the construction of a hydroelectric power plant on Latvia’s largest river, the Daugava, occurred largely on the

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pages of the monthly journal Literatu¯ra un Ma¯ksla [Literature and Art]. In October 1986, the journal published an article by a teacher, Dainis I¯va¯ns, and a computer specialist, Artu¯rs Snips, protesting the construction.4 The writers objected to the plant for environmental and economic, as well as cultural, reasons. The Daugava River has special significance for the Latvian people because it is written into much of their national folklore and mythology; according to legend, Riga was built when Kristaps the Great carried people from one bank of the Daugava to the other, and began the settlement on the river’s right bank, which was to become the city of Riga. The response to the article was overwhelming—the journal received over seven hundred letters as well as thirty thousand signatures of support.5 Artis Pabriks and Aldis Purs, among others,6 see this as “the first success story of Latvian collective action against Soviet authorities”7 because of the fact that by the following year, the USSR Council of Ministers passed a ruling to halt construction of the dam.8 Latvians regarded the proposed dam as a personal, cultural, and environmental threat that they were not willing to condone, and it was Gorbachev’s reforms that enabled them to speak out on the matter, organize collective action, and influence governmental decision-making.9 Indeed, Pabriks and Purs cite the activities of Latvia’s creative unions as comprising the second phase10 of the Latvian pro-independence movement of the 1980s. Under the rubric of cultural institutions, intellectuals began to press for an open and honest discussion of Latvia’s postwar past. Instead of the whitewashed official version presented by the Soviet Communist Party, Latvians began to insist on the historically accurate account. Pabriks and Purs cite the June 1988 Writers’ Union Plenum as one of the first instances of a public discussion in Latvia concerning the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states. They described the journalist Mavriks Vulfsons’s statement that Latvia was “violently occupied” by Soviet military forces as “the first official challenge of the legitimacy of Soviet power in Latvia.”11 The speeches from the Plenum were published in Latvian newspapers for the public to see.12 This marked the beginning of the whittling away of Soviet ideology, the effects of which were felt not only in Latvia, but in ripples throughout the USSR. The effort to expose the truth behind the

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Soviet government’s doctored version of Latvian history was a process in which artists and cultural figures played a vital role. The launching of open discussion in the public arena opened up possibilities for other public manifestations. The first “Calendar Demonstration” took place in Riga on June 14, 1987. On that day, about 5,000 people gathered in front of the Freedom Monument13 to commemorate the Soviet deportations of Latvian citizens in June 1941.14 Following that first protest, subsequent demonstrations were held on dates marking other significant events in Latvian history, such as the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and Latvian Independence Day (November 18).15 Unlike the Writers’ Union Plenum and cultural protection groups, the Calendar Demonstrations were not organized by the intelligentsia, but by Latvian working-class youth.16 The combined efforts of both cultural leaders and ordinary citizens eventually compelled the authorities to revisit the inconsistencies in Latvian history and reassess the party line.17 The climax of the Calendar Demonstrations was the Baltic Chain, held on August 23, 1989, in which approximately two million people created a 370-mile human chain across the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The purpose was to call attention to the common historical fate that the three countries had suffered as a result of the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, placing them under Soviet rule. The Baltic Chain was another instance of people “taking to the streets,” but this time on a massive scale. In many ways, Polis’s Bronze Man performances of the late 1980s and early 1990s functioned in concert with the public demonstrations of political opinion that were taking place at that time.18 The performances set out to underscore the dichotomy between the lived Soviet reality and the way it was presented in propaganda and the media, and to do so by questioning this contradiction in front of audiences of average citizens. This is quite different from the manner in which performance art was utilized in the West, where it operated within the bounds of established democracies. In Latvia, however, artists had the opportunity to participate in the creation of the emerging democracies as they developed, especially when creating works of art that engaged with current relevant issues in the socio-political sphere.

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State Control of the Arts in Soviet Latvia Socialist Realism, the official style of Soviet art from 1934 onward, never really took hold in Latvia, for several reasons. Perhaps the most important one was the fact that Latvia had only come under Soviet control in 1940, and thus had remained artistically independent prior to that point. Džemma Skulme, a central figure in the Latvian art world and president of the Latvian Artists’ Union in the 1980s, remembers the situation as being different in Riga than in other areas of the Soviet Union. In an interview with Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, she explained, “we were free until 1940, so we had around twenty more years of freedom than Soviet artists. Therefore, we were able to maintain our own traditions because we had a memory of the past.”19 This “past” included the early-twentieth-century Latvian avant-garde movement, whose artists worked in a range of modernist styles, such as Expressionism and Cubism.20 While the Soviet government made intense efforts to suppress the modernist legacy in Russia, this task was more difficult in republics like Latvia, which had been an independent country during the state’s initial crackdown on the arts in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Aleksis Osmanis has described the takeover of Latvian art by the Communist Party as only partly successful. Although artists had to adhere to the dictates passed down from the Latvian Artists’ Union, their dedication to promoting the socialist way of life was not strong, largely because they were the inhabitants of an occupied country. Osmanis has stated that “we almost cannot speak of real, ideally and artistically fully-fledged, socialist realist art in Latvia.”21 Socialist Realism’s shorter incubation period in Latvia meant that there was less for artists to rebel against. Thus, the concept of dissident art, as such, did not really exist in Latvia, at least not to the degree that it did in Russia and other Soviet republics,22 where controls were more strictly enforced.23

Performance Art in Latvia By the 1970s, artists throughout the Eastern bloc had begun to experiment with performance art in underground art circles, the most notable

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example being the Moscow-based group Collective Actions. However, this was not so much the case in Latvia, whose unofficial art movement, such as it was, had no strongly developed tradition of performance or conceptual art. Unlike painting, for example, a medium that saw radical experimentation in the late Soviet period, performance was never a leading art form for Latvia’s independent artists.24 In 2002, Solvita Krese, Director of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, explained, Latvian artists have never tried to shock the society by means of direct, provocative manifestations that would reflect a critical view about the social-political situation and its consequences—as displayed by a single person or a layer of society. In comparison with other post-soviet territories Latvia is nearly devoid of “socart”25 samples, radical political manifestations or direct critical commentary.26 Nonetheless, there were important developments in Latvian performance art in the 1970s. The most notable figure in the Latvian performance art scene of that time was Andris Grı¯nbergs, who was at the center of a flourishing hippie Riga subculture,27 and who throughout the decade organized a number of actions, featuring a changing cast of characters as collaborators.28 Grı¯nbergs is also credited with staging the first happening in Latvia.29 This occurred in 1972, when Grı¯nbergs married his partner, Inta Jaunzeme, in the Latvian countryside. The two-day event was entitled The Wedding of Jesus Christ, with Grı¯nbergs assuming the messianic role of Christ. As with Collective Actions’ performances, happenings such as these often took place outside of the city, away from the watchful eye of the KGB. The following year, Grı¯nbergs organized Green Wedding, which was in some ways a reprisal of the previous performance, except that the wedding procession began in Riga’s city center, in Old Town, and moved out to the countryside from there. The artist recalls that observers and passersby jeered at him and his cohort, because of their long hair and hippie style of dress.30 Following the production of his film Self-Portrait (1972), Grı¯nbergs’s apartment was raided by the KGB.31 After this

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event, because of fear of further repercussions, he created most of his performances in remote locations or in the countryside. More than anything, however, these experiments by Grı¯nbergs represent the only opportunity for the artist to freely express himself in a society that was strictly controlled and surveilled by the authorities. As the leader of Latvia’s hippie subculture, he recalls having to wear one set of clothes on the street and bring his other, more eccentric clothing (that he designed himself) to change into, when attending a party or a friend’s house, for example.32 The actions and performances created by Grı¯nbergs and his circle, outside of the city, were a vehicle for the artists to express themselves unencumbered by state restrictions. Similar to the move that was witnessed in Russia, from Collective Actions’ performances in the countryside in the 1970s to AptArt exhibitions in cities in the 1980s, it was not until the 1980s, following the Brezhnev era, that Latvian artists began to engage in nonconformist activity in central settings such as the city, namely, Riga. A 1984 Riga exhibition marked a turning point in unofficial art production in Latvia. Nature. Environment. Man (Daba. Vide. Cilve¯ks) took place in St. Peter’s Church in the heart of the Old Town, and included a number of installations, multimedia works, and pantomime shows, presented alongside more traditional artistic forms, such as paintings and prints.33 According to Ja¯nis Borgs, the exhibition “marked a significant paradigmatic change on the almost 40-year-long road from penned-up orthodox Soviet art to liberated modernist expression approaching Western perception.”34 He maintained that “although Soviet Latvia had since the late 1950s witnessed many ‘excesses’ of modernistic art, until that day there had been nothing to match the scale and force of conviction”35 seen in Nature. Environment. Man. The exhibition drew huge crowds; over fifty thousand people attended within the span of less than a month.36 Set to remain open for three weeks, the show was forced to close one week early following a visit from an East German delegation, a group of people Borgs described as “more pious than the Pope.”37 The visitors threatened to inform Moscow about the “ ‘massive invasion of bourgeois ideology’38 in a fraternal Soviet Republic,”39 so the authorities had no choice but to shut down the exhibition.40 It was not only the exhibition venue

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(a church) that brought about its demise, but also the fact that one of the installations was a modern interpretation of The Last Supper. Entitled The Third Table for Ourselves, this was a collaborative piece created by a team of artists wherein the faces of the twelve apostles seated at the table were plaster casts of the artists themselves. The participants in Nature. Environment. Man included Polis, and his experiments with performance date back to around the time of the exhibition. Nature. Environment. Man was organized within the context of the Art Days, an all-encompassing arts festival that had been an ongoing tradition since 1959, but truly began to be cultivated during the Brezhnev era. The festival was held during a few weeks each April, and involved exhibitions and performances, both in- and out of doors. Artists opened their studios and entertained audiences. During these days, censorship was partially lifted, and cities all across Latvia had a carnival-like atmosphere. According to Mark Allen Svede, the annual Art Days evolved over the years into such a large, complicated enterprise that artists and curators began to regard it as an opportunity to present nonconformist work. Not only was government monitoring at its most diffuse during the week-long, republic-wide programming, but also funding was more likely to underwrite spectacle.41 During the 1980s, artists in Latvia took advantage of the Art Days as an opportunity to stage performances, create installations, and even experiment with kinetic and environmental art.42 Although some of the more experimental shows were closed by the authorities,43 and some of the artists were detained, for the most part the risk that anyone would interfere was considerably lessened as the decade progressed. In addition to the Art Days, it is worth mentioning the Riga Pantomime Theater, which was established in 1956, and in which many visual artists during the Soviet period, took part.44 Like with the Art Days, artists engaged in experimental activity and improvisation there. All of these phenomena, from Nature. Environment. Man to the Art Days and the Pantomime Theater, provided a venue for the avant-garde activity that otherwise could not take place in official realms during the pre-perestroika era.

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The Bronze Man Miervaldis Polis’s Artistic Beginnings and Earliest Forays into Performance Born in 1948 and having received his artistic training in the 1960s and 1970s, as an artist, Miervaldis Polis was very much a product of the Soviet era. He graduated from the Monumental Painting Division of the Latvian Academy of Art in 1975; essentially, he was trained to paint large-scale Socialist Realist paintings. When asked what he learned at the Art Academy, however, he replied that it had not taught him anything at all.45 Although he was instructed to paint in a technically accurate naturalistic manner, he considers himself primarily self-taught. Indeed, Polis and his wife at the time, Lı¯ga Purmale, were largely responsible for the development of Photorealism in Latvia. Polis and Purmale were associated with the artists in Grı¯nbergs’s social circle; because of Polis’s long hair and style of dress, he was considered a hippie.46 While this reputation did him no favors in the eyes of the state, he was never arrested nor persecuted for being a nonconformist. It was around the time of the Nature. Environment. Man exhibition that the artist began creating spontaneous performances with his friends in cafés and artist hangouts in Riga, such as the Goat (Kaza), the Planetarium, and God’s Ear (Dieva Ausis).47 It was not until the first Bronze Man performance in 1987, however, that he took these activities into the public sphere. Polis’s first performance dates to as early as 1963,48 when he and several of his friends in ninth grade at the Ja¯nis Rozenta¯ls Art School “sacrificed themselves” to their Latvian language and literature teacher, Hilda Blunava. It all began with a portrait that Polis had drawn of her, a “profile with a snake’s tongue.”49 From there, according to Polis’s account, everything “happened spontaneously.”50 Raimonds Lı¯cı¯tis, one of the participants in the performance, described it as follows: Polis drew a portrait of her as a sort of icon, just fooling around. And so we set up this picture, with candles and black drapery. It was as if there was an altar before us. I don’t remember exactly

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what was placed there. But I remember that I acted as if I were giving sacrifices to Hilda at that altar. There were six people standing all around me with knives, while I was laying there. Then we photographed it. At the end, I was laying there with Hilda above me. . . it lasted about an hour.51 The artists insist that this wasn’t “performance art,” as that term didn’t exist at that time, but Polis referred to it, retrospectively, as a “happening.”52 When asked why they photographed this event, Lı¯cı¯tis responded that they understood its significance: “it’s good that we photographed it. . . I guess we all decided that it was an important moment, and it needed to be captured and preserved in that way. Because after that we didn’t organize any more events such as this.”53 Indeed, the young artists did get in trouble for this venture into performance art, although not with the authorities. As the members of the group were still teenagers, their parents were alerted. As Lı¯cı¯tis recalls, “they could have expelled us from school. Our parents could have been called in. It was no laughing matter.”54 After graduating from the Rozenta¯ls Art School in 1966, Polis completed his mandatory two-year military service in the Soviet Army. Upon his return to Latvia, he entered the Latvian Academy of Art, from which he graduated in 1975. The year prior to his graduation, however, Polis and Purmale organized a showing of their unofficial Photorealist painting, at the Riga Printmakers’ Photo Club. The exhibition was significant both because it featured works that did not fit into the rubric of Socialist Realism, and was the first showing of Photorealist work in Latvia. Although this was not an official art exhibition, it was technically allowed because of the fact that, as students, they were not yet professional artists. Explains Polis, “The Photo Club allowed us to exhibit, because the Central Committee of the city realized that we were amateurs, and they allowed amateurs [to show their work].”55 But the artist again got into trouble, this time with the officialdom, when someone reported to the KGB that there was a painting in the exhibition that poked fun at Lenin.56 As a result, the exhibition was closed down and the committee called in to investigate. Furthermore, several artists criticized their paintings as “bourgeois photorealism.”57

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Polis’s subversions in the art world would continue after this episode, but still within the realm of painting.58 The artist did not return to his experiments with performance art until 1984, when he staged a performance at the Planetarium Café in Riga.59 Similar to the 1963 performance, the café performance again happened spontaneously (it “started out as a joke”60), with Polis and his fellow artists deciding to do a parody of a Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, with each of them playing a different role. The artists sat at the table, and Polis attempted to divvy out the parts, although they didn’t know who would play Romeo. The result was a half-hour of improvisation and “waiting for Romeo,”61 as the artist described it. After the performance, Polis codified his work in this area.62 The artist has given various names to his performance oeuvre, including “spontaneous theater”63 and “wrapped theater.” (ietinaˉmais teaˉtris).64 In Polis’s formulation, “spontaneous theater” may be defined as the recognition of the roles that we play in everyday life as we observe—and are in turn observed by—the people around us. As he describes it, “spontaneous theater is what is always visible. It starts the moment we begin to notice the movements of the events happening around us.”65 He described a situation where one person notices a woman on the street and starts to consider whether her earrings suit her or not. That person thus starts to think like a director, imagining what role she would play, what she would say. In Polis’s words, “In essence, this is theater that is taking place. . . when we observe a situation from the side, and what we think about it.”66 For him, “performance” is simply what occurs every day in real life, in cafés, on the streets, in our nearest surroundings. It is for this reason that he also uses the term “wrapped theater,” which refers to the idea that performance is portable, that is, has everything that it needs to exist all wrapped up within the artist or performer. The Bronze Man Performances In August 1987, Polis was approached by a West German television director,67 who asked him to perform an action in Riga: walk around

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Figure 18. Miervaldis Polis. Bronze Man. Performance in Riga, 1987. Polis is here getting painted bronze in preparation for the performance. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

the city painted bronze.68 What this director had in mind was just for Polis to color his face bronze, in the manner of a mime, but Polis took it upon himself to make the transformation more extensive. He painted not only his face, but also his hair and hands bronze (all with the help of friends); he also donned a bronze suit (figure 18).69 From his flat in the Riga suburb of Aˉgenskalns, he boarded a city bus, and proceeded to walk around the city center, completely silent, just walking and observing those observing him. He alighted the bus just outside the city center near Tallinas Street, entered a café, and ordered a bronze drink—an apple juice that had been pre-ordered for him by a friend (figure 19). He also smoked a bronze cigarette. From there, he began his stroll through the city center, down L,en,ina Street,70 through Kirov Park,71 past the University, the Opera, and into the Old Town (plate 4). When he arrived at Philharmonic Square,72 he found a temporary resting place on an empty pedestal in front of the Small Guildhall and stood there for a few minutes, immobile: a living, breathing statue. Occasionally, his arms remained at his side, and from time to time he adopted the pose of an imperial ruler.

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Figure 19. Miervaldis Polis. Bronze Man. Performance in Riga, 1987. Polis is here seen drinking a bronze drink—a glass of apple juice. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

It should come as no surprise that this unusual man attracted a great deal of attention.73 This was Soviet Latvia, and although it was the age of Gorbachev and perestroika, assertions of individuality, outside of the collective—at least one as extreme as this—were still relatively rare. Thus, the Bronze Man was forced to run down a side street (Va¯gnera Street) to escape the crowds that had gathered and were following him at this point. From there, he caught the bus back to Polis’s flat across the river.74 The reactions to the Bronze Man, on the part of those who witnessed it firsthand, were various and sundry. Although the entire performance was filmed by the German director (figure 20),75 none of it was broadcast on television in Latvia; it was either viewed by those who happened to be there to witness it in person, or learned about afterward by others, through hearsay. Polis recalls that when he stood atop the pedestal in front of the Small Guildhall, some cried out “Lenin,

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Lenin!,”76 thinking that the performance was an homage or reference to the Bolshevik leader. One journalist quoted Polis as recalling that when the Bronze Man boarded the bus to go home, some ladies asked him for his address.77 As Polis remembered it, these women “fell in love with him—fell in love with him because of the bronze.”78 According to one account, a Russian in the crowd, upon witnessing the spectacle of the Riga man bedecked in gold, remarked, “Oh, look, the Americans have come!”79 Polis also recalled another memorable audience member, “a little girl in the crowd that followed me, staying close to me all the time; I allowed her to attract attention. You could see how she really wanted to touch this strange man, but was afraid to.”80 Such reactions were most significant to Polis, and, indeed, what interested him most as the creator of the performance. He once explained, “I always wait for the viewers’ reactions like a psychological revelation, and this aspect of my work is quite similar to a test.”81 But for Polis, it is not a test that one can pass or fail. The fact that each viewer walks away with a different observation about the piece is precisely the artist’s aim: “I think that the work of art is very meaningful. Each sees something different in it, and that is absolutely natural. The work is an object independent of me, which lives its own life.”82 Performance art was relatively new to Latvia at the time of the Bronze Man performances, as was the idea of the individual, subjective interpretation of a work of art—at least among the general (as opposed to art-viewing) public. In these performances, Polis presented these relatively new concepts to a population that was not used to such ways of thinking, by confronting them face-to-face with such ideas. With regard to the Bronze Man performance, Polis stated that “this work visualizes man’s inherent tendency to glorify and be glorified, the inclination for power, immortality, and fame. Of course, interpretations can vary.”83 He first conceived of creating a bronze man in 1975, when he fashioned a mask of his own face by covering it with bronze powder, and then creating a painting of the image to look like a death mask—a monument to himself. At the time of the performance, monuments to Communist leaders still

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Figure 20. Miervaldis Polis. Bronze Man. Performance in Riga, 1987. Polis is seen being filmed on his walk. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

dotted the landscape of the country, and every city had its obligatory Lenin statue somewhere in the city center; Riga’s was on L,en,ina Street, across from the Intourist Hotel.84 The similarities between the Bronze Man and those statues were obvious and calculated. Polis stated that the idea of a man covered in bronze paint was a direct reference to the bronze statues that marked all Soviet cities, including Riga. Although, as noted earlier, some observers of Polis’s walk thought that he was specifically referencing Lenin, the artist maintains that his image was meant to evoke bronze statues of historical figures in general, including those from ancient Greece and Rome,85 as well as those located throughout the Soviet Union. The comparison between Polis’s performance and Soviet bronze statues goes beyond that of physical resemblance; it extends to the way that Polis transformed himself into the Bronze Man. Polis’s act of applying a layer of paint to his body and clothes parallels the manner in which bronze statues were first produced in post-Revolutionary Russia. Many of the monuments that were constructed in the USSR went up quickly or were cheaply produced—they were often made of plaster with a layer of patina applied over the surface,

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much like the bronze paint that was applied to Polis’s skin. The production of these statues dates back to 1918, the year of Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda, the purpose of which, according to Anatoly Lunacharsky, was “to set up monuments to outstanding persons in the field of revolutionary and social activity, philosophy, literature, science and art.”86 The emphasis, however, was on quantity, not quality, and many of these monuments were created in haste. As Christina Lodder writes in her study of Russian Constructivism, The monuments, to be set up “in suitable corners of the capital,” were to “serve the aim of extensive propaganda, rather than the aim of immortalization.” They were to be made of cheap temporary materials such as plaster and terracotta, although later it was hoped to replace them in more permanent materials. Primary consideration was to be given to “the quantity and expressive qualities of these monuments.”87 The painted bronze surface of these statues hid the cheap plaster underneath—making them a physical analogue to verbal gestures of the Soviet state. While the statues were presented as one thing—solid, sturdy, even expensive, metal—a slight scratch at the surface would reveal the less stable reality underneath, in the same way that revealing the truth about Latvian history would quickly upend the grand narrative of the Soviet state as both Latvia’s savior in World War II, and that which brought prosperity and stability to the nation. The Bronze Man’s emergence in Riga underscores the fact that appearances can be deceiving, and that it is only when you probe further that you can get at the truth behind them.88 The other element of Polis’s action recalling the Lenin Plan for Monumental Propaganda is the element of performance itself. The newly created statues were all intended to have an official public unveiling, replete with speeches, ceremonies, and festivities, together comprising the propagandistic message. According to Lodder, These statues combined with plaques affixed to buildings, the ceremonial unveilings and festive musical accompaniments

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gave the impression that the Plan for Monumental Propaganda advocated and embodied an idea of a synthesis of the arts, of painting, architecture, sculpture and music, on the streets of the city. This concept of artistic synthesis and taking art out into the streets had already been present in the decorations and activities of the revolutionary festivals. The Plan for Monumental Propaganda gave it a more permanent character.89 Polis likewise took his own version of monumental propaganda out into the streets. But his version sought to overturn the intended message of the statues created as part of Lenin’s program. The 1987 performance of the Bronze Man would be followed by several others, in various locales. In 1989, together with five of his artist-compatriots, Polis staged a performance entitled Bronze Peoples’ Collective Begging (Bronzas cilve¯ ku kolektı¯ va¯ ubagošana), or Latvia’s Gold (Latvijas Zelts) in the Market Square of Riga’s sister city, Bremen, Germany (plate 5). The group was in Bremen to participate in the exhibition Riga: Latvian Avant-Garde. The action was synchronized to take place at the exact same time that another group of “bronze men” were “begging” in Cathedral Square in Riga, but since the performance was to occur on a Latvian remembrance day (June 17, the anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Latvia in 1940), the Riga group decided not to stage its performance. With regard to the 1989 action, Polis stated, “all art and culture is begging. One shouldn’t have to be ashamed of that.”90 For the artist, this meant that creating art is not something practical or necessary for everyday survival—or, as he succinctly put it, “You can’t eat an artwork.”91 Thus, within the rubric of an artistic performance, he made no distinction between “begging” in the form of painting a picture in order to earn money to buy food, and literally standing on the street and begging for money to eat. Indeed, the artists used the cash that they collected to purchase drinks at a pub afterward. Polis recalls that he and another artist collected the equivalent of 60 to 80 U.S. dollars, and that the others collected less.92 In 1990, the Bronze Man traveled to Finland to meet a doppelganger of sorts—the White Man, Roi Vaara. The artist was invited to

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Finland by Vaara to create the two-day performance Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre”; The Bronze Man and the Delegate of the White Man in Helsinki (plate 7; figure 21).93 Their “summit” occurred on August 22–23, just a few weeks prior to the September 9 Helsinki Summit, between U.S. President George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev—an event that Polis later described as another summit between a white man (Bush) and a bronze man (Gorbachev), although at the time Polis was not aware that the meeting was to take place.94 Calling their meeting the “International Summit of Phantoms,” Polis and Vaara developed the concept of “phantom art” there. The term reflects Polis’s understanding of art and reality. He explains, “this is the phantom age, the age of phantom art. All of these performances are phantom art.”95 For Polis, this referred to the fact that everyone’s perception of reality is different, and what each person sees is merely a reflection of his perception of the world. Polis’s ideas on phantom art predate, and invite comparison with, Jean Baudrillard’s writings on the simulacrum. Furthermore, Simulacra and Simulation96 was

Figure 21. Miervaldis Polis and Roi Vaara. Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre”; The Bronze Man and the Delegate of the White Man in Helsinki. Performance in Helsinki, 1990. Polis and Vaara are pictured here with Harri Holkeri, Prime Minister of Finland (far right). Photograph by Sakari Viika; courtesy of Sakari Viika

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only translated into Latvian in 2000. But when Polis speaks about these ideas now, he draws parallels between his concept of phantom art and the Baudrillardian simulacrum, In Polis’s words, “this is the phantom age, the age of the simulacrum. I only read this [book] later, two or three years after it was translated into Latvian. Indeed, all of the provocation of this age is phantom art. They call it simulacrum.”97 Polis’s and Vaara’s so-called “summit” began on August 22 in Helsinki University’s main hall, when the Bronze Man and the White Man had an official meeting with the Finnish prime minister, Harri Holkeri, and his wife. This was the first time that a Latvian citizen had met with an official of the Finnish government, at least since the beginning of the Cold War. In fact, the schedule that had been laid out for the performance resembled one that would be drafted for this type of official state visit. Following the meeting, the artists officially opened the annual arts and cultural festival in Helsinki. The second day of the summit consisted of official talks between the Bronze Man and the White Man, during which they codified their theories on “phantom art” and established the International Phantom Association.98 Then, the two walked around Helsinki’s city center together, much like the walk Polis took in the 1987 Bronze Man performance, this time visiting the city’s parliament building and cathedral, and lunching at the popular restaurant Kappeli.99 They also met with members of the press and the representatives of various embassies.100 For Polis, the meeting between a bronze man and a white man was significant because of his understanding of the term “white man,” which he describes as a “free man,” mainly in reference to the times of slavery in the West.101 By contrast, a “bronze man,” both literally and symbolically, represented a person who was not free; as a Soviet citizen, Polis did not share the same freedoms as his cohort Vaara. He recreated himself as a bronze man because of bronze’s associations with the bronze statues erected in every Soviet city, a reminder of both the Cult of Personality and the repressive regime that installed those statues. Polis saw the meeting between himself and Vaara as a parallel to that between Gorbachev and Bush, when another man of bronze,

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from the Soviet Union, met with a white man, a representative of the free Western world.102 By summer of 1991, it was clear that Latvia’s entry into the free market was inevitable. On May 4, 1990, members of the new Latvian Parliament, headed by Latvia’s Popular Front, had announced their intention to declare Latvia’s independence from the Soviet Union. And on August 8, 1991, just weeks before the Politburo coup against Gorbachev, and the parliament vote that ended the transition period, thus officially restoring the nation’s independence, Polis and his artistic contemporary Vilnis Za¯bers created a performance that anticipated the advent of a free market economy in Latvia. In the center of Riga, just on the edge of the Old Town, by the Laima Clock—in the shadow of Riga’s Freedom Monument—the two artists stood selling sunflowers seeds from bags marked with the name of a new brand that they had co-created: Miervaldis Polis & Vilnis Za¯bers 08.08.91. Polis appeared as the Bronze Man, in his usual costume.103 In this performance, Za¯bers sold plain black seeds for rubles, while the Bronze Man sold bronze seeds for one dollar per glass. In fact, this was in many ways a competition between the bronze buying power of the Soviet era and the new era of Western-style capitalism that was soon to be ushered in. According to the artist, the old black seeds initially sold better than the bronze ones that were meant to be from the capitalist system; Za¯bers sold about ninety glasses of seeds, and earned ninety rubles. This was probably because of both practicality and convenience: the old ones were still edible, cheaper, and much easier to purchase using local currency.104 But toward the end of the performance, a foreigner came and purchased one glass of the bronze seeds for five dollars. As Polis stated, “I won, because with those five dollars I got more than one hundred rubles at the current exchange rate.”105 The two artists attracted considerable attention on that hot summer’s day in August. While Za¯bers handled the incoming orders for seeds, Polis fielded questions from the passersby. When someone in the crowed inquired as to why he had painted himself bronze, he replied, “I can’t wait for them to build me a bronze statue, so I am standing like a living statue.”106 This response indicates that Polis created the

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reality that he wanted for himself, whether it was possible or not— and implicitly suggests to the audience that it do the same. In fact, this is precisely what those who took part in the late 1980s Latvian independence movements were doing—taking their destiny into their own hands. When asked why he was selling seeds, Polis responded, “all of today’s millionaires started from something small. And sunflower seeds are quite small.”107 Although the possibility of becoming a millionaire in Latvia only emerged in the early 1990s, when the Communist system was coming to an end, Polis’s gesture is ironic, as becoming a millionaire is difficult under any circumstances, much less during this time of transformation, and still less so through the sale of sunflower seeds. While in theory it was possible, within the framework of a free market, to become wealthy through private business and entrepreneurship, the Latvian economy, like many of the other post-Soviet economies, was in a rocky state during the early years of statehood, including rapid inflation as well as a massive rise in unemployment. Thus, Polis’s attempt to become rich through his sunflower seed sale was no more or less likely to succeed than any other entrepreneurial enterprise at the time. Polis’s Untitled “Tank” Performance On August 23, 1991, while citizens lit bonfires across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to commemorate the second anniversary of the Baltic Chain, Polis started his own symbolic fire in front of the Lenin statue in the center of Riga. He set a remote-controlled toy Russian tank on fire, and gave the controls to a young boy that happened to be standing there. The artist then disappeared into the crowd to observe the reactions of the onlookers. In a 1995 interview, Polis described this as the most interesting event of his life: Once, a few years ago, there was the “Baltic Chain” action. That night, people all over the Baltics built bonfires. I found a green tank with a remote control, and set out for the Freedom Monument.108 Then I took turpentine, soaked the tank in it, and

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lit it on fire. I gave the controls to a little boy and disappeared into the crowd of people. The public was delighted, and no one noticed me. I like when people naturally join in like that. It’s kind of like a performance—it’s there one moment and gone the next.109 This event occurred just two days after the failed Moscow coup and the Latvian Parliament’s monumental votes on two scores: in support of full independence from the Soviet Union and banning the Communist Party. Polis recalls that this was also the day that Alfre¯ds Rubiks,110 First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party, was arrested for treason for his support of the Soviet suppression of the Latvian and other republics’ independence movements. He remembered people going to the Central Committee headquarters in Riga,111 where Rubiks was arrested, to watch the Soviet flag be replaced by the Latvian one.112 This was just a few weeks before international recognition (including that of the Soviet Union, which occurred on September 7) of Latvia’s independence. As with the Bronze Man performances, Polis claims to have been more interested in the audience’s reaction and participation than with the political play he set in motion. It was for this reason that he vanished into the background, in order to observe the response to what he had started. Nevertheless, the two went hand in hand. The public was no doubt intrigued, and possibly even delighted, by the sight of an army tank, toy or otherwise, being set on fire. At that time, the Soviet Army was still stationed in Latvia, ready to take action if public manifestations became too disruptive.113 While an action as overt as this one most likely would not have been tolerated just ten years earlier, by 1991 Latvians were exercising newfound freedoms virtually on a daily basis, in order to effect change in their government. Polis’s action was part of this development, but occurring in the artistic realm, which afforded him perhaps greater leeway and protection. Before Polis lit the tank on fire, he simply steered it through the crowd with the remote control. Speaking about the performance, he recalled that two women from the crowd noticed him commandeering the tank and remarked, “Surely, that must be one of those artists doing

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that; no one else would be able to.”114 Polis’s understanding of this comment was that if anyone else had been able to do such a thing, then there would be no need for artists in society.115 Furthermore, he feels that this statement shows how greatly artists were valued during the Soviet era, and how it was specifically visual artists (as opposed, say, to writers or musicians) who were allowed more freedom of creative expression.116 The woman’s statement also confirms the fact that ordinary citizens still considered such public actions and gestures against the government (in this case, the Soviet military presence in Latvia) as something that was really only possible within the arena of culture. In the political realm, such actions could be carried out by only the truly daring, since such a public outcry could have been (and in fact was) punishable by arrest or detainment.117 Polis, moving freely among the crowd with his toy tank, did so as an artist. Without making an explicitly political statement, he was able to contribute to the discussion that was taking place on a political level, since he did so from within the context of a work of art. This episode demonstrates the fact that many artists, especially in the late Soviet period, were able to capitalize on their status by operating from a liminal position in Soviet society—outside of both the everyday and the official/political realms. For example, on the evening of August 23, 1991, Polis was not simply an average citizen observing the events transpiring around him. He was himself creating an event parallel to official events, but one that nonetheless remained removed from that official realm. At different points in time in Soviet history, from Khrushchev’s encounter with Ernst Neizvestny at the 1962 Moscow Manezh show,118 to the aftermath of the 1974 Bulldozer Exhibition, nonconformist artists in the Soviet era managed to expand the limits of art. Occurring at the end of Soviet rule in Latvia, Polis’s actions carried on this legacy, operating in concert with those working on a governmental level to achieve greater liberty and independence for all Latvians. The Bronze Man in Post-Soviet Latvia In the summer of 1992, after Latvia had regained its independence, the Bronze Man made his final appearance—and disappearance—in

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Riga, in the performance The Bronze Man Becomes the White Man (plate 6). With, once again, Za¯bers’s help, the (Communist) bronze man became the (free) white man, with Za¯bers applying a layer of white paint over the artist’s already bronze-coated body. The idea for the performance came from Polis, who described a bronze man’s transformation into a white man as symbolic of the transition from Communism to free-market democracy. In his words, “before, we were Communists; now, we are men. Before we were bronze men; now we are white.”119 Polis recalls that he prepared himself for the performance at fellow artist Dace Liela¯’s studio on Maza¯ Mone¯tu Street in the Old Town, and that when he came out to do the performance he was approached by art critic Ja¯nis Borgs, who was with three people who worked for Swedish television. Upon seeing the bronze-covered man, they begged Polis to walk over to the pedestal from which Riga’s Lenin statue had recently been removed, and stand there as if he were the statue. At first Za¯bers did not want to go, but the Swedes were insistent; Polis convinced his friend by getting the Swedish visitors to agree to buy them beer afterward, for their trouble.120 Then, the whole entourage followed the Bronze Man from the Old Town to the pedestal, which was just ten minutes away on foot. Polis has stated that this impromptu action again caused quite a stir. As he stood on the pedestal at the intersection of Brı¯vı¯ bas and Elizabetes Streets for the foreigners to photograph him, he heard cars and buses screech to a stop on the surrounding streets. Just like Kulik had done in his Reservoir Dog performance, Polis had managed to stop traffic; he noticed that there was a green light, yet everyone in the cars and buses was waiting and staring at him as he stood there.121 Polis had succeeded, although unintentionally, in creating a deception for the viewers of this performance. Aware that the Lenin statue had been removed quite recently, passersby wondered whether a new Lenin statue had come to replace it. Polis mentioned one man who approached him, saying, “Damn, some Russian has gone and put up a little statue in Lenin’s place.”122 It turned out that this man was an acquaintance of his, a neighbor from his childhood who had recently returned from deportation to Siberia. The man happened to be carrying a shovel, and

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looked angry. Polis recounts the curious sight of seeing, on one side of him, this man, an ethnic Latvian who expressed his indignation at the thought of another Soviet bronze statue being erected in Lenin’s place (and of whom Polis was genuinely fearful, given that he was carrying a shovel!), and, on the other side, seeing a person wearing Soviet military orders, whom he felt appeared to be supportive of the former Soviet government and a new monument to that regime. Upon Polis’s return to Cathedral Square, Za¯bers covered his bronzed friend with a layer of white paint, to mark the end of an era. Now that Latvia was an independent state and no longer governed by Soviet rule, the Bronze Man had become free. Polis later commented that once he painted himself white, “there could never be another Bronze Man.”123 In the same way that Kulik’s dog performances had served their purpose, Polis also ceased creating Bronze Man performances when they had ultimately served theirs. While most of the false idols, in the form of bronze statues, were quickly dismantled in many former Communist countries, the Bronze Man was also displaced, by being painted white. In this sense, the artist’s role had changed with the times. While during the Soviet occupation he was a walking bronze statue, echoing those that could be seen on the streets all around him, now he, like other artists, would have to find a new role to play in society. Since the roles of the official and the ordinary citizen had changed, so, too, would that of the artist. In fact, Polis conceived of a final performance as the Bronze Man, wherein he would lie in a bronze coffin on the spot where the Lenin statue had stood. However, that never came to pass due to his and Za¯bers’s falling-out following The Bronze Man Becomes the White Man. According to Polis, Za¯bers was the one who had concerned himself with the practical matters of the performances, and it was also Za¯bers who provided the impetus spurring Polis to see his ideas through. In 1994, Za¯bers died, leaving Polis without the same motivation to continue as the Bronze Man.124 Yet, as it turns out, Polis did make one last appearance as the Bronze Man, in a 1999 performance entitled Bronze Man Tourist, which took place at Ohio State University, during his artist’s residency funded by the Ohio Arts Council.125

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Conclusions In a society that for nearly fifty years had been collectivized and homogenized under repressive Soviet rule, Polis’s performances as the Bronze Man constituted a startling reassertion of an individual, unique identity, for both artist and viewer. Not only did the artist stand out from the crowd, but the viewer, too, was forced to interpret or make sense of this act, upon encountering it on the street. The work of art during the Soviet period, however, was meant to be unequivocal and unambiguous. The official style of Socialist Realism tolerated only one interpretation of the work of art: the message of the bright Communist future.126 Consequently, performance art, like many other modern and postmodern art forms, from abstraction to conceptualism, wasn’t accepted within its rubric, being ephemeral and ambiguous, subject to various interpretations. Because each viewer literally sees a performance from his or her own point of view, each interpretation cannot but be individual and unique, as opposed to any official, state-prescribed one.127 Thus, the Bronze Man performances compelled its audiences to abandon the passive viewing that was promoted in the Soviet era, and actively work to make sense of the sight of a man dressed all in bronze in Riga’s city center. Furthermore, in becoming a bronze statue that can breathe and walk, yet is convincing as a statue when stationary, the Bronze Man prompted viewers to question the truth behind the appearances with which they were presented. As such, the Bronze Man performances paralleled changes taking place in Latvia at that time, when citizens were closely scrutinizing and questioning the false layers applied to the history of their country. Inconsistencies abounded in Latvian society during the Soviet period, and not just in the form of plaster statues or flesh-and-blood men that were painted bronze. Astute viewers of Polis’s performance could draw parallels between this discrepancy and others. First, there was the official party line regarding Latvia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union, which was that Latvia had asked to be, and willingly became, a part of the Soviet Union. In order to give the appearance of legitimacy to the puppet government installed by the Soviets in

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June 1940, a new “People’s Parliament” was elected, although the conditions surrounding this election were questionable.128 Only one party was permitted on the ballots—the People’s Labor Party—and any slogans suggesting that Latvia was to be incorporated into the Soviet Union were banned.129 The results of the election were clearly falsified,130 as the candidates were elected with nearly 100 percent of the votes, and, in some cases, exactly 100 percent. The newly elected parliament subsequently requested that Latvia be admitted into the Soviet Union. The request was met, and Latvia was annexed as a Soviet Socialist Republic in August of that year.131 Second, there was the discrepancy between the lived reality of the Soviet experience, and that which was proclaimed on paper. Pabriks and Purs, for example, note how Soviet ideologues inflated statistics and exaggerated data to show that the Latvian economy had flourished after its incorporation. For example, Soviet economic figures of 1986 show production in Latvia having increased by 4,600 percent, the GNP by 1,150 percent, and social labor productivity by 1,009 percent, all since 1940.132 Such figures were belied by the everyday reality experienced by Latvians, many of whom were unhappy with their living conditions under Soviet rule. While in the 1930s Latvia had one of the strongest and fastest growing economies in Europe, living standards decreased significantly following the Soviet takeover. Beginning in the 1960s, there were frequent food shortages that caused people to wonder about the great disparity between the high rate of production and the actual products available. For Pabriks and Purs, “economic difference between the Soviet center and Latvia was one of the rational sources of centrifugal force making many Latvians feel sceptical about the Soviet system and urging them to search for alternative perspectives.”133 The Latvian audiences of Polis’s performances, recognizing inconsistency in their everyday lives, could easily connect with and relate to those evoked in the artist’s work. The Bronze Man appeared on the streets of Riga at a time when average citizens were organizing mass demonstrations in the heart of the capital and forming human chains that stretched across all of the Baltics. In examining Western performance art in the context of the

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activist and social protest movements that were taking place on the other side of the Atlantic two decades earlier, Amelia Jones has stressed that “overtly performative bodies in visual arts practices must be seen as coextensive with the activist bodies of the rights movements.”134 Indeed, Polis’s performance parallels activist performances that took place in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, yet with one distinct difference. Citizens in Western countries were not deprived of the right to peacefully protest or voice their opinion. In the West, such expressions of dissent worked in concert with the basic human rights that citizens of all free Western societies shared. In the East, however, people utilized the mechanism of performance—be it artistic performance or political demonstration—to express ideas that could not otherwise be voiced in official discourse.

Polis and the West Polis’s work evokes parallels with that of several Western artists. These include the British artistic pair Gilbert and George, who painted themselves bronze in The Singing Sculpture (1969), as well as Joseph Beuys, who covered his face in gold leaf in How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965).135 However, both of these Western artworks were created at least in part in reaction to the commodity culture of the Western world. Gilbert and George’s Singing Sculpture can be seen as a protest against the elitism of the London gallery world; instead of creating a work that could be judged acceptable for exhibit or not, they became the art and put themselves on exhibit.136 Beuys’s project was about the alienation caused by contemporary society, and his work seeks to reunite the human with his animalistic and primitive roots, through the use of ritual. The art world in Latvia, however, never had the chance to become commercialized, due to the nearly half-century of Communist rule. For an artist like Polis, who trained and worked during the Soviet period, the opportunity to create works such as these was nonexistent during the 1970s and early 1980s, when Western artists were developing ideas rooted in the work of Beuys and others. In the West, by the 1990s, performance art had been replaced as the dominant genre and

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had also evolved beyond its initial concerns of breaking free from the frame of the painting and from the gallery. As perestroika and Latvian independence brought with them the opportunity to experiment, Polis did so, but without the same implications of a modernist critique implicit in the work of Western artists. In many ways, Polis’s performances and exhibitions were examples of democracy in action in a newly formed democracy.

Painting as Performance When asked whether he was aware of the performances of Beuys or Gilbert and George when he embarked on his Bronze Man adventures in the 1980s, Polis will tell you that he was not. In fact, in interviews the artist has often mixed up different artists and their performances.137 Even the Latvian precursors to Polis’s performance, for example, the happenings of Andris Grı¯nbergs and Inta Grı¯nberga, do not prove a convincing source for the artist’s work, as they represent examples of escape from Soviet control over daily life rather than a more targeted artistic strategy. Rather, I would suggest that one can note a performative element in Polis’s work from the start of his career as a painter in the 1970s.138 In most of his paintings, the artist used his skill at mimesis and illusionism to attempt to convince the viewer, at least momentarily, of the veracity of his images, mainly by using the technique of trompe l’oeil. In the series Illusions on the Pages of a Book about Venice, from the 1970s, for example, the artist used trompe l’oeil to insert his self-portrait into pictures from pages of an actual guidebook about the city. Later, in the Island of Colossi series, he invented his own island, similar to Easter Island, which was populated with giant ruins of colossi, modelled on the artist’s own finger. Eventually, by the 1980s, the artist and his finger “travelled” to Dallas and Houston, in a series of works in which Polis painted himself and the giant finger onto photographs of those Texas cities, which he had cut out of Western art magazines. Without ever leaving Latvia, the artist managed to traverse the globe, by painting himself into Venetian, Texan, and fictional landscapes. The artist was

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an armchair traveller, with pictures of his journey as proof of where he had been. In the 1980s, he developed this method of insertion, and used the technique to travel through the canon of art history, inserting his countenance onto the pages of a coffee table book about the history of Western art. In some images, for example, Raphael and Polis (plate 8), he strikes a simple deadpan pose, nodding to the viewer; in others, such as Polis and Caravaggio, he joins the dramatic action in the latter artist’s Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598–1599), reacting to what is taking place. Unable to travel to Venice, the artist painted himself into its cityscape. And unable to participate in the trajectory of Western art history, owing to his position as an artist in the Soviet Union, he painted himself as part of it, essentially performing art history by engaging in a dialogue with the Old Masters themselves.

Polis and Performance When Allan Kaprow expressed a desire to make the line between art and life fluid and indistinct,139 his ultimate aim was the elimination of the audience altogether. In his words, “all the elements—people, space, the particular materials and characters of the environment, time—can in this way be integrated. And the last shred of theatrical convention disappears.”140 This was meant to be the end of the artist controlling the discourse with the audience. Instead of preferencing the artist, the viewer would be free to determine and create the meaning of the art work, and art would be indistinguishable from the life taking place around us every day. From there followed the proliferation of performance art as a genre, which artists commandeered in order to create works of art that could not be commodified. As an artist working in a country with no art market to speak of, Polis, however, used performance as a way to step out of his painting and engage with his audience. He sees performance as a way of creating a situation that will allow for interactions between artist and audience to take place. As Polis explained, “I always wait for the viewers’ reactions like a psychological revelation, and this aspect of my work

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is quite similar to a test.”141 He describes the process of relating to an artist when viewing his painting: “when I consider a Leonardo da Vinci painting. . . I ‘have contact’ with the author himself. In Madonna Litta I ‘see’ Leonardo, and I identify with him, that is, with his ‘I,’ I ‘get to know’ him.”142 For Polis, performance enabled the artist to have a more direct exchange with his viewer, and involve him in a visceral experience of the artwork. We have already seen how the artist’s own definitions of performance art include a consideration of the theatrical aspect of everyday life. In all of his work, Polis creates a mis-en-scène for his audience, with the artist as director, and this strategy extends from his paintings to his later performances. This desire to communicate and commingle with his audience is most evident in two of his performances from the 1990s, when the artist put himself, and his life, on exhibit. The first of these manifestations came in April 1992, when Polis, together with Vilnis Za¯bers, mounted The Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Za¯bers Exhibition in the Kolonna Gallery in Riga. Visitors attending the opening of the exhibition saw only white walls, and the two artists decked out in their finest attire. A small blurb about the exhibition in Sestdiena, the Saturday supplement to Riga’s largest daily newspaper, mentioned that Polis had told journalists that “an exhibition without artwork was organized so that no one would be disappointed. There is always someone who doesn’t like a certain artist’s work. So there won’t be anything that someone won’t like.”143 Although no art objects were exhibited at the gallery, at least at the opening it appeared that it was the artists who were on display.144 Both were there to mingle and speak with the attendees of the reception. This concept was developed further in Polis’s exhibition at the Riga Gallery in 1995. For two weeks in late February and early March of that year, Polis moved his entire studio into the gallery, just on the edge of the Old Town, for the exhibit The Miervaldis Polis Memorial Room (figure 22).145 For this show, Polis turned the gallery into an exact replica of his workplace, complete with furniture and all other accoutrements, including the artist himself. For a few hours every day during the course of the exhibition, Polis made himself part of the exhibit, by sitting in the gallery. Mainly his friends would come to keep him company, but many others who were merely interested in

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Figure 22. Miervaldis Polis. The Miervaldis Polis Memorial Room. Exhibition in Riga Gallery, 1995. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art

meeting the artist came as well, to ask him questions and see how he lived. Public officials also came to view the exhibition, including the Prime Minister of Latvia, Maris Gailis. These exhibitions represent precisely the type of performative quality that typifies Polis’s oeuvre. In both painting and performance, he opens up the artwork to his audience and creates a participatory form of art in which the artist is very much present and at the center of his work. This performance, however, is not the same type of extension of the frame of the painting as envisaged by Kaprow or Otto Mühl (of the Viennese Actionists), however. Rather, it is a desire on the part of the artist to connect and interact with his viewers, as opposed to a wish for the viewer to be at the center of the artwork. Latvia’s Court Painter It is interesting to note that in the post-Soviet period, Polis ceased creating artistic performances and has instead concentrated on his painting. Perhaps stemming from his fame and popularity that

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resulted from his public persona of the 1980s, or because of his exceptionally precise style of realism, since the 1990s the artist has received a number of commissions to paint family and individual portraits for Latvia’s nouveau riche. He has even been commissioned to paint the official portraits of the first two freely elected Latvian presidents of the post-Soviet period, Guntis Ulmanis and Vaira Vı¯ k,e-Freiberga.146 The artist has thus become known as Latvia’s court painter (galma portretists),147 and makes a living entirely from these commissions. In many ways, his fate is a product of the post-Soviet era, with an emergent upper class able to afford expensive purchases in a status- and price-driven art market. For Polis, however, it is merely a question of survival, as the commercial art market has replaced the state as the artist’s patron. Weary from the publicity surrounding his Bronze Man performances, Polis has since “retired” from public life by moving to his humble country house in the Padure suburb of Kuldiga, a small town in the eastern part of Latvia.148

Starix: The Homeless Man Who Became a TV Star Nearly two decades after the appearance of the Bronze Man on the streets of Riga, another Latvian man emerged who became equally iconic, although through entirely different means. While Polis’s Bronze Man was in many ways self-made, the product of one artist’s fanciful imagination and use of body paint, Starix was a character that was the recreation of a man—a homeless man—by the artist Gints Gabra¯ns.149 Unlike Polis, who used his own body in performance, Gabra¯ns selected a homeless man from the streets of Riga, from the tunnel that connects the Riga Train Station with the city center. He cleaned the man up, groomed him, gave him a suntan, a shave, and a new set of clothes. The artist even gave him a new name, or a stage name, “Starix”—a Russian slang word meaning “old man,” which is usually transliterated as stariks. Gabra¯ns grounds the performance in Latvia by spelling the suffix of the man’s name with the same three letters that serve as the code for the Riga International Airport, RIX.

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Unlike Polis, who received his artistic training during the Soviet period, Gabra¯ns attended art school after perestroika, having received his degree from the Latvian Academy of Art in Riga in 1995. Although performance was still not a dominant art form in Latvia at that time, there were certainly no prohibitions against it in the 1990s, as there had been during the Soviet era. By 1991, Latvia had completed its process of officially becoming an independent and autonomous nation. As a parliamentary democracy, the arts no longer came under state control, and a plurality of visual practice once again existed in the visual arts. Gabra¯ns was actually trained as a scenographer, and is in fact an accomplished set designer. He has also worked in television; thus, his interest in it as an artistic medium is not surprising.150 As a visual artist, his work spans a variety of genres, from painting and performance to conceptual and installation art. His Starix project arose out of his interest in the mass media and the possibilities it afforded everyday citizens of becoming famous. Gints Gabra¯ns Born in 1971 in Valmiera, the artist spent his youth in Liepa¯ja—a city in Latvia known for its artistic subculture—and graduated from the Secondary School of Applied Art there in 1989, just two years after Polis’s first Bronze Man performance. Gabra¯ns moved to Riga just as Latvia was gaining its independence from the Soviet Union, and just as an art market was beginning to develop in the country. As in many post-Soviet cities, a Soros Center for Contemporary Art was established in Riga (now the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art), in 1993, which soon began hosting exhibitions and open competitions to stimulate contemporary art activity in the country. An anecdote from those days gives the sense that Gabra¯ns immediately and instinctively understood how the system worked, having perceived that the merit of a proposal was to be found more in the professionalism of its appearance than in its contents. He advised his friends to submit their proposals neatly typed and presented in a

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plastic folio. As fellow artist Mi13.5 ptelis Fišers recounts, Gabra¯ns told him, “you have to write the application on paper”. . . at the stationer’s shop there were all of these items we didn’t yet know about, those awful sleeves that you have to place documents in, and also the plastic covers. “You have to put the papers in these sleeves and fasten them together, and it is completely immaterial what the content is—if you do it this way, it will work.”151 Although his friends didn’t understand why, they followed his advice, and, as it happened, the proposals in the folios were the ones that won. Gabra¯ns’s understanding of contemporary art practice being more about appearance than substance extends beyond the act of creation and into the realm of the art market, a skill that wasn’t necessarily taught but was more intuitive. Like with Polis’s, Gabra¯ns’s initial foray into performance art started with a bit of fun with his classmates, when he was living in Liepa¯ja. The act was simple: the group carried a bag of peat moss around town. When asked about the action, Gabra¯ns responded that it was just tomfoolery: “it wasn’t a work of art. It’s simply that as time passes, things get renamed. . . I don’t remember the context, but surely we were just fooling around. A joke. There was no point to this bag of peat; it was just for fun.”152 Yet in a previous interview he admitted that now it could be referred to as an artistic act.153 In many ways, this tendency to rename or retroactively name events after their significance is realized bears resemblance to the circumstances surrounding John Cage’s first happening, Untitled Event, from 1952. This event, too, could also be described as “fooling around,” but within the prescribed rubric set forth by Cage; its significance was only acknowledged retrospectively, once performance art had become a recognized artistic genre. Only then was it cited as one of the “first” pieces of performance art, or at least a precursor to it. When asked whether the action with the bag of peat was a performance, Gabra¯ns responded, “at the time, it was just for fun. Nowadays, looking back, one could call it art. But it’s like that

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with many things. In a way, things are devoid of meaning, until we assign them their importance.”154 In one of his more serious early pieces as an artist, Gabra¯ns sought to expose the selection process for exhibitions in Latvia for what it was. In his submission for the 1994 exhibition State (Valsts), the artist obtained a small microphone and placed it in the room at the Soros Center for Contemporary Art where the decisions were made. When it was time for Gabra¯ns’s submission to be discussed, the envelope containing his proposal was opened to reveal the fact that one of the shelves in the office contained a radio transmitter, which was broadcasting the live conversation to the artists in their favorite local hangout in the Old Town of Riga, M6.155 As Gabra¯ns recalls, “There it was—some got up quietly, others started to swear. They said that I would never get any money anymore. They told me that later. That because of this I was through. Of course, I wasn’t through.”156 He even recalls that he and his friends didn’t really listen to the broadcast. Although the artist was subpoenaed by a Latvian court, in the end he didn’t get in trouble for the incident; nevertheless, the microphone wasn’t returned.157 Thus, even early on in his career, the artist was interested in the mechanisms that took place “behind the scenes,” the machinations that occur all the time, without our awareness, yet that create the cultural infrastructure that surrounds us every day. The Starix Project That the name Starix refers to a character of Gabra¯ns’s creation, as opposed to a person, is underscored by the circumstances surrounding the performance, as it evolved. Since the artist gave the homeless man a stage name, this meant that the role could be played by virtually anyone—so long as he or she could fit into the suit the character was supposed to wear. In point of fact, Starix was not one, but two men. The first one, named Vale¯rijs Nikolaevich, played the part of Starix until he died, sometime in 2002.158 He was subsequently replaced by Igors Grigorjevs, the man whose image most Latvian audiences are familiar with, having had more TV appearances than the first one. That there would be two men playing the role of Starix had already

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been part of Gabra¯ns’s conception, and although he certainly did not envisage the actual death of either of the participants, the theme of death had already been written into the script for the film that the artist had intended with regard to the project. In his original plan for the piece, there would be two men playing Starix to emphasize the fact that his fame was simply based on appearance, not on the substance of the man wearing the suit. In order for the role to change hands, Gabra¯ns was going to create a fake death of the first man playing Starix. As Gabra¯ns reports, “there were a lot of coincidences [with regard to this aspect of the project]. . . the fact that he died. . . and exactly at that moment. It was really strange.”159 The artist was referring to the fact that the final scene that he filmed with Vale¯rijs was centered on the theme of death. When the artist filmed it, he was aware that this would be the last time that the first Starix (Vale¯rijs) would be involved with the project, but, as it turns out, “the final shot was the final shot,”160 as he died shortly afterward. Changing the man behind the suit was necessary for the successful completion of the project, especially with regard to the image of Starix. According to the artist, I realized that in order to get that. . . pure image. . . I would need another person, one who maybe looked the same but who would have much greater potential to become something. With [the first one,] that would have been more difficult. I saw that I couldn’t take him that far. The second one looked exactly the same, and had the same story, but the difference [between them] was huge. The first one had that prisoner’s history, with drinking and the like, and the other one had a completely different background story; he was educated, and it wasn’t because of drinking, but because of other reasons that he lived in [a hovel].161 In a rare scripted moment of the project, Gabra¯ns staged a scene where he would be speaking to Vale¯rijs as if he were already dead, thus paving the way for Igors to take over the role. But the final scene of Vale¯rijs’s part in the Starix project was never completed, partly because of the man’s drinking, and partly because of his untimely death. Gabra¯ns

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recalls that he showed up for the filming “so drunk, that we put the text aside. . . because it wasn’t worth it”162; they simply filmed the man with the intention of recording and editing in the spoken text at a later time, but Vale¯rijs died before this was possible. The artist learned of the man’s death after looking for him several times in his “usual spot,” in the tunnels near the main railway station. After several unsuccessful attempts to find him, Ga¯brans learned from one of Vale¯rijs’s acquaintances that he had died.163 In a project about the importance of appearances, it is only fitting that the artist’s selection of the homeless man was itself based on appearances. Gabra¯ns described the process of selecting the two men as similar to that of casting a film,164 except that it “occurred in a different manner, walking through the streets and looking, and trying to guess. . . according to looks, if this or that person would work or not.”165 He recalls that looks were the only thing he had to go on: “I didn’t have any other prior conversations. I wasn’t able to do that.”166 Gabra¯ns also mentioned that it was important that the homeless person in question be a male rather than a female. Although the artist couldn’t say precisely why, he did say that he “couldn’t imagine” doing the project with a woman, because of the difference between the experience of a homeless male and a homeless female. He explains, “[homelessness] happens differently with [women], and there are different reasons. And it is much gloomier that women are lowered to that position.”167 He went on to say that when women become homeless, they fall “so deeply” that he didn’t think he could manage to do the project with a woman. He also added that men are “more exemplary of that kind of life.”168 Gabra¯ns worked on Starix from 2000 to 2004, using mass media, advertising, radio, and television to bring fame to an otherwise anonymous and homeless Rigan. The man first appeared in an advertising campaign that began in April 2001, for the exhibition Contemporary Utopia, which was organized by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art169 (figure 23). As Anda Buševica wrote in an article about the exhibition in Diena, Latvia’s largest daily newspaper. At the moment, Starix is popular in his own environment, but one might imagine that after a few weeks it will be completely

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Figure 23. Gints Gabra¯ns. Poster for Starix: The Reality Show, Riga, 2001. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

different—the No Star Entertainment Galactic AD agency will start its advertising campaign a few days before the opening of the Contemporary Utopia exhibition—before April 5. Rigans will be told about Starix through advertising posters; people who live in the country—through radio and TV, and there will also be stickers and flyers with information about the products of the campaign and the main events, for example, Starix’s smashing reality show, which guarantees Starix’s fame and name recognition all over Latvia.170 The posters were in fact advertisements for a reality show that didn’t exist, or, rather, a self-reflexive reality show, in which the posters themselves were the show that revealed the character of Starix to the rest of Latvia, through media publicity. Even the name of the advertising agency that “produced” the posters was fake—according to the artist, the No Star Entertainment Galactic Agency AD was an entirely made-up name.171 The advertisement was for a reality show that seemed to be occurring.172 The posters were put up around town by a group of “punks,”173 with the aim of mass distribution. The aim was to convince

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people that there was an actual reality show going on, one that took place in the train station tunnel, yet in actuality, the posters were the endgame—at least for this part of the project. Following the campaign and exhibition, the “media stuntman,” as he was referred to by Gabra¯ns in the performance, began to appear on television in a variety of capacities. In some broadcasts, he simply appeared as a spectator in the background, and in others he actually had a speaking role. After appearing at several public demonstrations, his face became recognizable on the evening news, and he even acquired the status of a “professional picketer” by newscasters.174 At the same time that Starix played the leading role on his own “reality show,” orchestrated by Gabra¯ns, he also made a guest appearance on several other (actual) reality shows that were broadcast on Latvian television then, resulting in a kind of reality show within a reality show. Very early on in the project, in an interview with Diena, Vale¯rijs (the first Starix) admitted that, due to all the publicity, people recognized him when they saw him in the street: “I walk through the Old Town, and someone comes out of a hotel and says, ‘Hey old man, aren’t you the one from the poster?’ ”175 As this statement suggests, the marketing campaign was successful, and Starix’s image became widely known. Gabra¯ns was invited to represent Latvia at the twenty-sixth São Paolo Biennale in 2004 with Starix. His installation consisted of a summary of the project, because, as he said, it had been ongoing throughout the past four years. “My work is always in process; therefore, it changes—only now it seems finished,”176 he stated in a 2004 interview. The video on display at São Paolo was shown on four television screens arranged in a circle, with the screens visible from the inside (figure 24). Each television monitor rested on a stand that was actually a cardboard cut-out of Starix himself, in his usual outfit—a white suit and sunglasses—appearing to hold in his hands the instrument responsible for his rise to fame: the television. The video displays the various instances of Starix’s appearance on television, with a fastpaced video montage of his transformation interspersed among those clips, demarcating the various chapters in the man’s life on TV. The montage begins with Starix in his “original” state as a homeless man,

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Figure 24. Gints Gabra¯ns. Installation of the Starix exhibit at the São Paolo Biennale, 2004. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

then flashes to scenes of him getting a haircut, manicure, and electrolysis; visiting a solarium; undergoing a variety of spa and wellness treatments; and finally participating in a photo shoot in the ballroom at Runda¯le Palace.177 Vale¯rijs’s own story is perhaps not an uncommon one. A chauffeur during the Soviet era, he lost his license owing to a reckless lifestyle: “they took it away in 1981. For drinking, of course. When I got back from the zone [prison],178 I started working near my home as a docker, but everyone there drank, and that’s how it all fell apart,”179 he explained in a 2001 interview. The details of how the man ended up homeless are not entirely clear,180 but Gabra¯ns was aware of the fact that he had been in jail.181 The story of the second Starix, however, is a much more common one in many post-Soviet countries, and certainly in post-Soviet Latvia, as his homelessness was a product of lost documents, which resulted in lost property.182 Although the precise details are not known, Igors lost his apartment through some type of scam. As Gabra¯ns stated, “There were a lot of swindlers during the changeover, and it wasn’t just some subtle type of fraud, but fraud together with banditry as well.”183

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He said that Igors “lost everything in the con with the apartment, and that without his documents at that time it was rather rough.”184 Thus, an integral part of the project was the artist’s effort to retrieve Igors’s documents, and give the man his life back. The artist attempted to change his life in two ways: first, by transforming his appearance so that he would look like a man of fame and fortune, then broadcasting that image throughout the mass media to turn him into a star, and, second, by returning the man’s identity to him, in the form of the documentation that gave him the right to an apartment and a job. This aspect of the project exposed the bureaucratic system in Latvia for what it was, and revealed the difficulties in altering the situation for a person in Igors’s position. As difficult as it was for the artist to retrieve Igors’s documents, Gabra¯ns feels that it would have been impossible for the homeless man to do so on his own. Not only did it take an incredible amount of time and money, but one’s appearance was a decisive factor in the process. The artist mentioned that he couldn’t even imagine how a person from the street, whom they wouldn’t even allow into those offices, could do it. At that time, the bureaucracy was such that I really don’t think it was possible for these people to manage to sort through it. . . it’s a vicious circle; he was living on the street, and he couldn’t work because he didn’t have his documents. But, in order to try to obtain his documents, he needed money. And with those homeless people at that time. . . the most often-told story was that they didn’t have their documents, and that is the reason for why they didn’t have anything. . . and they also couldn’t do anything about it.185 While money was a significant factor in the ability to complete the process of obtaining the documents, the physical appearance of the person doing so needed to be of a certain caliber simply to get through the door and start it. In the end, Gabra¯ns even hired a lawyer to speed up the process, and spent a portion of the project’s money on Igors’s papers. The homeless man’s spots on television range from his being filmed as a passive bystander in the crowd to actively participating with a

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speaking role (plate 9). He was filmed taking part in a mass at the Church of Jesus, in the Moscow suburb of Riga, easily spotted among the other parishioners on account of his white suit and sunglasses, which remained on his face despite the fact that he was at mass, indoors. He could also be seen occupying a front-row seat at the live broadcast of a musical performance on the LTV1 (Latvian Television channel 1) music show “The Barn” (Siena Sk,u¯nis).186 His appearance on the show “Happy Birthday!” (Daudz Laimes!) was the result of his sending in a picture and asking the announcers to wish Igors Grigorjevs (the second Starix) a happy birthday “from his friends and colleagues,”187 an ironic message given that he sent the wishes to himself. The media stuntman also entered a picture of himself and his cat into a photo competition run by the TV3 series “The Farm,” (Ferma) which invited viewers to send in photos of themselves with their pets. As one can imagine, the image, like the birthday greeting, was also a ruse, since the homeless man did not, in reality, have a pet cat. Starix was also given a voice by the media. He was interviewed participating in two public demonstrations—one against the Iraq War in front of the Parliament building in Riga’s Old Town, and one against Latvia’s entrance into the European Union in front of the Cabinet of Ministers building (both in 2003). His views are neither surprising nor revolutionary. About the Iraq War, Starix had this to say: “America got what it wanted! Now let them put their own house in order.”188 With regard to the EU accession, he also referenced the United States: “The EU offers no solutions. Americans want to have a war—let them go ahead! No one can say anything against it. Then what’s the use of the EU? Why do we have to join another stagnating system? One union was enough!”189 Starix was able to test his appeal as a new bachelor on the scene when he made an appearance on the reality show “The Factory” (Fabrika)—a show similar to “Big Brother” in the West—in response to one of the star’s requests for potential suitors. Three bachelors were invited onto the show to give the woman, named Bella, flowers or gifts, after which they were subjected to a series of questions by her (in a manner similar to that of the 1970s and 1980s American TV show “The Dating Game”). At the end of the show, she made her decision

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as to which man she preferred. When Igors was asked to give his life motto, he stated that it was “to live in harmony with myself and the surrounding world. Try not to do to others what you wouldn’t like them to do to you. That’s the most important. Try to find the good in people, even the bad ones. There’s something worth discovering in everyone.”190 Once again, his statements are neither profound nor original, yet he is given a voice because of the fact that he is famous, and he is famous because he is on TV. Given that his fame is simply the result of his having been chosen by Gabra¯ns, this notion that there is “something worth discovering in everyone” resonates as meaningless. Indeed, Igors’s own statements reveal that it was not that there was “something worth discovering” in him that helped him to achieve fame, but rather that he was merely discovered, and quite randomly at that. In the end, he was among the two bachelors who were rejected by Bella. Gabra¯ns sees the Starix project as being divided into three parts. In the first stage of the project, viewers were unaware that Starix was a fabrication. He appeared on TV in a variety of instances, yet no one knew that this was part of an artistic project. By the end of the project, television began to seek Starix out, in order to use his image consciously as an example of media fame. The beginning of this second phase was marked by Starix’s invitation to appear on the LTV1 current affairs show “Viss Notiek” [Everything Is Happening] when the topic of discussion was, appropriately, fame. According to the artist, “the first stage was when the television didn’t know. The second was when I gave ‘Everything Is Happening’ my materials and they created something from it.”191 The artist stated that when he was contacted by the show, he agreed to give them all of the items that he had collected throughout the project, which mainly consisted of recordings of Starix’s myriad TV appearances that Gabra¯ns had recorded himself, from his own television, at home.192 The final stage of the project was when Gabra¯ns produced a short film for the TV program “Kuˉ lenis” [Somersault], in which the artist finally put “all of his cards on the table,”193 by including interviews with the two characters playing Starix, and also including a recording of a trip to the morgue and the pauper’s grave in which Vale¯rijs was buried. Gabra¯ns described

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this third and final phase as the one in which the entire project was upended and the artist became the director. Whereas in the first phase Starix’s rise to fame was in fact real, and the result of the artist simply putting his character before the eye of the media, relinquishing control, in the third and final phase, the artist reclaimed agency, yet attempted to disguise that fact. As he said, “I was directing, but I made it look as if it were real.”194 Perhaps the most telling of Starix’s appearances came during this second phase of the project, on the TV program “Everything Is Happening.” Before turning the discussion to Gabra¯ns’s project Starix, the TV presenter interviewed Raimonds Pauls, Latvia’s most beloved songwriter and musician, and certainly one of its most iconic and recognizable figures, regardless of age or ethnicity. In his interview, Pauls asserted, “in show business, a star with no popularity is like a corpse,”195 a statement that is indeed ironic given the fact that the first Starix had died by that time. Nevertheless, the show used Starix as an example of a person who has made the media “dance to his whistle,” and described the media stuntman as a “man with no special talents, high ranks, or rich relatives. Still, Starix conquers all that he desires— every TV show or channel. . . The media quotes him, although he doesn’t say anything.”196 Starix is acknowledged as being part of the phenomenon whereby anyone can be famous for doing anything— even for doing nothing at all. Finally, one of Starix’s most poignant appearances attests not only to the success of Gabra¯ns’s project, but also to the artist’s success in staging a convincing scene, and triumphant deception. Sometime toward the end of the project, Gabra¯ns was selected to receive an award for his work in the theater, for best set design (the artist does not recall which particular set design the award was for). At the awards ceremony, a televised VIP-only affair, similar to the Academy Awards, it was Starix, not Gabra¯ns, who walked up to the stage and received the award, when Gabra¯ns’s name was called. The presenter, who did not know Gabra¯ns personally, nor by appearance, was obviously fooled by the man’s sleek appearance, and as she handed Starix the award she commented that although she hadn’t yet worked with him (meaning Gabra¯ns) in the theater, she looked forward to doing so in the future,

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ending her speech with, “Congratulations, Gints!”197 In fact, in the video one can hear audience members laughing, as a portion of the audience did in fact know the artist, and thus that the man on stage was not him, yet the majority of them were unaware of any discrepancy taking place. Gabra¯ns mentioned that he hadn’t worked in the theater very much, so there were quite a few people there that didn’t know what he looked like.198 In the end, it was the man who made his living creating fantastical theater sets that fashioned the greatest theater piece of all, by producing a character that could even replace him. Although the prize was for his set designs, the bigger prize was certainly the deception that he successfully pulled off. Just as Polis had managed to convince passersby of the creation of a new Lenin statue on the streets of Riga in 1992, so, too, did Gabra¯ns’s creation convince viewers of something other than what it appeared to be. Toward the end of the project, the artist consciously moved art into life when he organized a video-lecture and exhibition at the House of Culture in Il,g‘ uciems, a small suburb on the outskirts of Riga. The exhibition was on view for two weeks, and the pinnacle of the event was a roundtable discussion led by Roberts Gobzin, š, a popular and well-known figure in the Latvian music scene; local public relations experts also participated. In the video-lecture, How to Get on TV, the artist used Starix as an example of how a person with no talent or special skills could become famous (figure 25). As a result of a brainstorming session that took place during the roundtable discussion, the PR experts identified the three main strategies for achieving fame, which they referred to as “the three K’s”: the qualitative (kvalitatı¯vo), meaning that a person’s talent or success at what he does would get him public recognition by the mass media; the harmful (kaitı¯go), which, as Gabra¯ns described it, is “the shortest path to the goal, and is connected with something provocative or a criminal act”;199 and, finally, the quantitative (kvantitatı¯vo), or repetition. As Gabra¯ns himself stated, “Starix got on television using the quantitative method, which is useful to the widest circle of those interested.”200 The efficacy of Gabra¯ns’s project is reflected in the fact that the artist was able to use Starix as a model for others—real, everyday people seeking media fame in Latvia. The exhibition and

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Figure 25. Gints Gabra¯ns. Starix: How to Get on TV Video-lecture, 2004. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

roundtable discussion were both open to the public, to those interested in learning how to get on TV and become famous themselves, in the same manner as Starix. As Gabra¯ns recalls, the general public was interested and did attend: “thankfully, there were some locals that came, not . . . [just] artists.”201 Gabra¯ns and the West In the West, the concept of fame is most closely associated with Andy Warhol and his 1968 claim that in the future, everyone would have fifteen minutes of theirs. Indeed, it follows from the postmodern and Pop Art notion that if anything can be art, and anyone can be an artist, then anyone can be famous as well. While Latvia did not experience the transition from modernism to postmodernism in the same manner as Western nations, it had certainly caught up with the West by the 1990s, after independence had brought mass media, advertising campaigns, and, by the millennium, even reality shows to the post-Soviet nation. Among others, Latvia has its own version of reality shows familiar in the West, such as “Survivor,” the Latvian version of

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which is called “The Robinsons,” after the characters in “The Swiss Family Robinson”; the Latvian version of “American Idol,” entitled “Hello, Ju¯rmala!” (the title is in English in the original); a version of “The Apprentice,” entitled “Where Are you Headed?” (Kurp Dodies?), whereby youth are given the opportunity to try out various professions; and even “Dancing with the Stars” (Dejo ar Zvaigzni). In the post-Soviet era, ordinary Latvian citizens do, in fact, have the same opportunities for fame that are afforded those in the West, even a homeless man like Starix. In actuality, at the time that Gabra¯ns started the project, reality shows in Latvia were not yet popular. Thus in a similarly prophetic manner to Warhol, Gabra¯ns created an imitation of reality shows in Latvia before there were any such shows to imitate. The artist commented on the “comical situation, wherein Latvia, which has no reality shows at all, has a parody of one, knowing that in a few years’ time they will be all over the TV.”202 The artist described a similar situation in Latvia during the immediate post-Soviet period. He mentioned how it was in Liepa¯ja, where he lived until 1989: “at that time, the change of perception happened in a very forced way; there was the idea that everything immediately had to be as it was abroad [in the West], but there were no concrete ideas as to how it should be, because no one had been abroad.”203 He described the opening of a new club in Liepa¯ja, which was meant to be a type of “elitist” club, the type that in the West one couldn’t get into without the proper attire. So rules were made that guests of this club had to enter wearing suits, and the live musical acts, such as the well-known rock group Lı¯vi, would also perform in suits or tuxedos. While the guests were required to maintain the appearances of Westernness and refinement, their behavior contradicted the facade that they presented. As Gabra¯ns described it, “the events that took place were these Liepa¯ja drunkfests. People drank from plastic cups . . . got drunk and vomited in the corners.”204 Even the suits that people wore were not particularly fashionable at the time. Thus, there was a massive discrepancy between what took place in reality—what Gabra¯ns referred to as the “old aesthetic” of reckless drunkenness— and the Western, modern, and cultivated appearance that these clubs wanted to present. Even in the post-Soviet period, appearances aren’t

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always what they seem. Just as with the plastic folios in which the artist was required to present his work, the shiny, polished exterior represented, as Gabra¯ns described it, a “new-age man,”205 which postSoviet people thought they were supposed to be. While those who choose to participate in a reality show do so of their own volition, seeking fame, money, or simply the thrill that comes with completing some of the daunting tasks presented, neither Vale¯rijs and Igors nor Gabra¯ns were involved in this venture for the fame that it brought them. Gabra¯ns denies that fame was a personal motivator for completing the project; rather, he stated that he had “simply seen a situation that is really important to a large number of people, and deduced real value from that opportunity.”206 In fact, he noticed how people “have an attitude of deep piety and humility toward [fame],”207 and wanted not only to draw attention to it, but also to problematize it. He stated that “showing how to get on a TV broadcast is not that complicated, and turning it into a funny game dispels the religious aura of the media and provides the opportunity to think about how to create your life yourself.”208 In this way, Gabra¯ns’s Starix project is a model for the public that comes complete with instructions, for how to achieve not only fame, but also how to create your own unique and individual identity. In the post-Soviet era, it is no longer something as extreme as a bronze suit that is necessary to achieve such goals—an everyday white one, together with a well-thought-out strategy, will do.

Conclusions Gabra¯ns’s Starix performance participates in the discourse on the real and the fake that Polis initiated with the Bronze Man nearly twenty years prior. The obvious truth of the matter is that both Starix characters were in fact nameless, faceless inhabitants of Riga until they were cleaned up and groomed for television. One could argue that Starix’s rise to fame was dependent on his having the proper appearance, or at least a clean, as opposed to scruffy, one. The “before and after” image that was reproduced as part of the project, makes this clear (figure 26). The tattered old man dressed in rags, with an unkempt beard and sullen look on his face, might elicit sympathy from passersby in the

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Figure 26. Gints Gabra¯ns. Starix. “Before and after” image, 2004. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

train tunnel, or persuade others to quicken their gait as they walk by him in the wee hours of the night. The clean-shaven man with the neatly-trimmed and stylish goatee, chic and perfectly tailored white suit, and super-cool sunglasses conveys the message that this was a man who was born for TV, fame, or at least some kind of recognition. Even a detail as subtle as the background against which he was photographed indicates this: the former, against the crumbling brick and mortar edifices of the Old Town—the most popular place in Riga for vagrants and beggars, because of the large number of tourists there— versus the marble and gilt walls of Runda¯le Palace. Even the rays of sunlight that beam across Starix’s exterior cast a positive light on this newly reformed man. A careful consideration of the reality behind these two images, however, reveals that just as the bronze layer of paint applied to Polis’s skin can be peeled back to reveal the real, fleshand-blood man underneath, so, too, does Starix’s white suit belie the vagabond wearing it, not to mention the fact that it clothed not one, but two men.

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When asked why Gabra¯ns had dressed the man this way, he responded that it was all part of the plan. “That was one of the strategies—find a crowd and at the same time make him stand out from it, for example, by being all dressed in white. At the pickets, it was always him that they interviewed.”209 The sunglasses were also an important component of Starix’s costume, as they leveled the individuality of the men playing the role. “I used the sunglasses because of the fact that people are similar—one can find two similar people, but when you put sunglasses on that can elide the differences.”210 One interviewer commented that Starix looked like a member of the nouveau riche, the white suit and the shaved head being key signifiers of one’s economic standing in the post-Soviet era, especially in the 1990s in Latvia. It is interesting to note that while Polis’s Bronze Man was painted white to signify the transition to a free, democratic society, Gabra¯ns’s homeless man in a white suit embodies that very ideal.211 Nevertheless, Starix is rather conspicuous everywhere he goes, but in a manner that often borders on the comical.212 Watching the clips from How to Get on TV, one observes how he immediately draws attention to himself as someone different, without even doing anything. Starix stands out from the crowd so much so that he might as well be wearing a bronze suit with a bronze-painted face, as Polis did years earlier. With his iconic white suit and sunglasses, night or day, Starix is just as much a unique self-made man as the Bronze Man was in the 1980s. Polis’s performance shook people out of their everyday stupor, yet Gabra¯ns’s goes one step further and gives his viewers the tools and motivation to become the artists and creators of their own fame, and their own lives, themselves. While media fame is most certainly a product of post-Soviet reality, the iconic status of both the Bronze Man and Starix among the Latvian public today demonstrates the fact that word of mouth and hearsay, which account for the popularity of Polis’s performance, functioned as the Soviet-era version of a marketing campaign. In fact, the announcer on “Everything Is Happening” referenced Polis’s fame, stating that “friendship with Miervaldis Polis or other artists is not necessarily the only way to conquer TV.”213 Indeed, although the video of Polis’s 1987 jaunt around Riga is irrevocably lost, his reputation was nonetheless made and has even endured through the twenty-first century.

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Gabra¯ns’s project uses the mechanisms at work in the media to expose it for what it is—a creator of reality that we may either choose to believe or not. In an interview that predates the Starix project, the artist explained, “we live in the constructed world. What’s fascinating is that art is totally constructed, too, and that a second artificial thing breaks the rhythm.”214 In a skillfully clever move, the artist turned reality back in on itself, creating an imitation of reality in order to call that reality into question. This is a leitmotif that continues throughout his oeuvre. “With me, it’s often this way—simulating; I suggest what has not yet happened. When I play Starix, it returns to reality. It also creates doubts about what is reality, and if it can even be cultivated.”215 His work becomes significant when we consider the fact that the artist is operating in a post-Soviet space, where the press and media are considered to be relatively free in comparison to that of the tightly controlled Soviet era. The artist compared the different uses of television: Originally, in television, like other mediums, there were various models: subscription TV for a subscription rate, TV that was overtly commercial and advertising oriented, and TV in totalitarian regimes, which serves as a medium for the ideology of the ruling party. However, in time it became clear that TV is based on advertising. And, if this structure exists, then television has to maintain its viewer. In this case, the structure foresees the situation where it has to deal with those people who are critical or resist it.216 In the Soviet era, reality was created by the state, and broadcast to the masses not only through the state-controlled and state-owned mass media, but also through the arts, which were restricted under the policy of Socialist Realism. However in the post-Soviet era, it was still the media that created and determined reality for its viewers; it was simply oriented toward different aims. Just as Western artists initially used performance art to evade the commodity culture, Gabra¯ns uses his performance to call attention to the role of the media in contemporary society, with its offer of fame and celebrity status as its main product. It is often the case that viewers interpret Gabra¯ns’s art, and specifically this project, as a type of social art, or anthropological art project,

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stemming from the fact that it was centered on the rehabilitation of a homeless man. For Gabra¯ns, this wasn’t the primary aim of the project, but simply one aspect of it. Although the artist helped Igors to reclaim his identity papers, according to the artist, he continued to live in his hovel.217 Gabra¯ns kept in touch with him, but reports that the last time he tried to call Igors, the cell phone on which he had previously been able to reach him belonged to someone else, and so contact was completely lost.218 While Gabra¯ns doesn’t necessarily use the term “performance art” to describe the project, he is not bothered by the application of the label to describe it.219 Interestingly enough, his work is described by Latvian art historians as relating to Pop, Conceptual, Dada, and Neo-Avant-Garde art.220 Still, the artist’s methods bear many similarities with the genre of performance art, and its efficacy is in fact linked to many of those elements, most notably the element of chance and the mutability or flexibility of the project as it progressed. Just as Allan Kaprow’s happenings were strictly scripted so as to provide a framework, yet flexible enough to allow events to unfold naturally and spontaneously within that framework, so, too, did Starix evolve according to a general plan, yet the incarnation of the final product developed naturally, as a reaction and response to the real-life elements that affected it. As Gabra¯ns himself has explained, there has to be this open and dynamic system. . . the main thing is that the work has to be planned in an unfinished manner, so that there are these open moments, when it isn’t finished, isolated, or stopped, and that this situation might bring about the further evolution of the work, that it can create a situation. This was absolutely necessary with Starix—it only worked in a way that it wasn’t controlled to the end; otherwise, I would have stopped; for example, if Starix knew what he would be asked on those shows, or if he reacted to a situation because I gave him a text, I think it would look out of place, and those producing the [television] programs would remove it, and the project wouldn’t have succeeded.221

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Thus, while his TV appearances were planned, and his image was rigorously controlled by the artist, it was important that the character of Starix act unscripted, in the same manner that Cage and Kaprow did not necessarily instruct their audiences, but simply provided them the framework within which to act. In this sense, the choice of the man to play the role of Starix was crucial, as it had to be someone that Gabra¯ns could work with throughout the duration of the project, and in fact the artist saw both Vale¯rijs and Igors as his “partners” in creating it.222 This accords with his previous statement concerning his realization, with regard to Vale¯rijs, that he wouldn’t have been able to take the project as far with him as he had wanted to, which is why he had to find another person to replace him. Gabra¯ns was aware that at the time he was in fact utilizing a new type of art form that had not yet been truly recognized in Latvia. In fact, this also contributed to its success. He mentioned that the project wasn’t deemed important at first: in the year 2000, this type of art form wasn’t really accepted. It wasn’t considered serious, and it really wasn’t understood what I was working on. In the end, it was only when I was really tired of it all and started to work on something else that it became relevant in Latvia and everyone was ready to give me money [for it], but I said that I didn’t want to work on the project any longer.223 Indeed, Gabra¯ns was thankful for the fact that the project went unnoticed, as he was thus able to send Starix to a vast array of TV broadcasts on which to appear. When Starix was invited to appear on “Everything Is Happening,” the artist was aware that he wouldn’t have been able to send him anywhere else, because by that time the man behind the mask had already been exposed.224 The element of play was also at work in the project; as the artist stated: It’s like a game. There are different events. You throw a ball and if you don’t catch it and throw it back, then it doesn’t happen. In

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that way I know—what would be good, what one shouldn’t do, what one should do. That is learned. For a lot of things that are revolutionary at one moment, the target audience becomes used to it, and it then becomes the norm and good taste.225 Thus, the artist’s use of play with his audience challenges their notions not only with regard to the art object, but also with regard to the illusions created by television and mass media that determine our understanding of the reality surrounding us. In this sense, Gabra¯ns participates in the true avant-garde tradition of using shock to jar his viewers out of their everyday existence, compelling them to participate in the creation of meaning alongside him. Like Polis, Gabra¯ns’s interest in the various permutations of reality does not start and end with this one performance. In fact, one can identify this as a thread running throughout his work, from his early conceptual pieces to his later and more recent work with light and light installations. From his 1997 Internet-based piece Sveroid Congregation (Sveroid Draudze), in which he created a fake Web site where one could calculate their “holy birth sphere,”226 to his 2007 contribution to the fifty-second Venice Biennale, Paramirrors, consisting of a mirror that reflected polarized light, which would make the viewer looking at it become more beautiful, the artist’s work continues to revolve around the theme of appearance.227 Although, for all intents and purposes, his work appears incredibly diverse, this main theme resounds from all corners of his creation. The artist even commented that “it is all the same.”228 His light installations, for example, create walls of smoke and light that viewers are meant to test and doubt, appearing solid, although they are simply made of light. When asked why light was so important to him, he responded, “it would appear that for the most part we perceive all information through sight. One could ask whether what we see is really what is there. Working with light and the visible, I try to show the invisible,”229 a statement that precisely echoes one of the outcomes of the Starix project.230 In Gabra¯ns’s 1999 project with Monika Pormale, the two artists set up a matchmaking agency, entitled Riga Dating Agency, whereby Latvians could include their photographs in an exhibition, together

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with their contact details, for foreigners to get in touch if they were interested in making a “love connection.”231 The idea was not necessarily to match up suitors with their potential mates, but simply to create a mechanism through which everyday citizens could put themselves out there. Much like Starix presaged the coming of reality shows in Latvia, Riga Dating Agency predated the proliferation of dating Web sites in the country. The artists did not follow the connections made, although they did hear of one wedding that was supposed to take place as a result of the project (the artists themselves are not sure whether the connection was in fact made through their Dating Agency, however).232 In this work, the artists explore not only the mass media, but also personal advertisements and contemporary matchmaking agencies.233 The art historian Hele¯na Demakova has identified several shifts and significant landmark dates with regard to the development of Latvian contemporary art, noting the impact of Latvian independence and the influx of mass media and new techniques on post-Soviet artists. In her view, the performance and experimental art created in the 1970s was “marginal. However, the artistic innovations of the late 1980s were of a more mainstream character and culminated in 1988 with the exhibition Riga: Latvian Avant-Garde, in the Berlin Kunsthalle,”234 in which Polis was represented. The performances and artworks created in conjunction with the exhibition were noticeably more radical than previously seen in Latvia, and bore the mark of the increased freedoms that artists were experiencing. Demakova also noted that in the 1990s, with the free circulation of information, artists’ focus shifted from “the reaction to the former ideology. . . [to] a critique of ideology in general.”235 She further commented that in the 1990s, artists became curators, incorporating the context of an artwork within the artwork itself, which is a trend evident throughout that decade in Eastern Europe and Russia. We can see this shift exemplified by Gabra¯ns’s Starix project, which was an all-encompassing venture that included a critique not of Soviet ideology, but of mass media in general, which Demakova also identified as a recurrent theme in postSoviet art. In her words, Latvian artists in the 1990s “are interested in exposing the strategies of the media, highlighting the power structures in consumer society, the phenomena of subcultures and media

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synthesis.”236 Furthermore, she observed a “newly reclaimed public space”237 that could be witnessed in the art of the 1990s, which no doubt began with Polis’s initial foray into the public spaces of Riga in 1987 as the Bronze Man, and ultimately led to a similarly far-reaching project such as Starix. Polis’s Bronze Man performance drew attention to the fact that appearances can be deceiving, at a time when Latvian citizens were beginning to call attention to that fact with regard to the history of their own country. Although Polis believed that the Bronze Man had no place in Latvia after the country regained independence, Gabra¯ns’s project reveals that the concept still has relevance in contemporary Latvian society. While the Bronze Man underscored the fact that Soviet idols, along with their ideology, were more artifice than not, Starix presents a cautionary tale about fame and fortune in post-Soviet Latvia, a statement that is even more poignant in light of what happened to the country in the years following the Starix project. While Latvia became part of the European Union in 2004 and experienced rapid economic growth, even being dubbed a “Baltic Tiger,” in 2008 the country experienced a sudden and rapid economic downturn, concurrent with the global economic crisis, leading to near-bankruptcy in 2009. In the post-Soviet era, it is not only the appearance of wealth and prosperity that can be revealed as false, but also fame and popularity that can be exposed as essentially unwarranted. Both Polis’s and Gabra¯ns’s performances served as wake-up calls to their audiences, jarring them from their passive daily existence and asking them to participate in the creation of meaning. Furthermore, their performances represent a novel approach to the genre of performance art in the West, demonstrating the unique contribution of Latvian artists on the global art scene. This story is not simply a tale of the Bronze Man and a homeless man, but rather the chronicle of a country in transition, from Soviet to post-Soviet, Communist to capitalist, Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic to independent EU member state.

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CHAPTER 3 FILMING YOUNG GIRLS AND OLDER MEN: PERFORMING GENDER IN POLAND

The work of Zbigniew Libera and Katarzyna Kozyra has consistently focused on the socio-cultural factors affecting the development of gender identity, both in highlighting traditional gender roles in Polish society, and revealing them for the construct that they are, as opposed to being inherent or biological traits. Both artists have utilized performance art as a vehicle to capture the processes by which gender identity is formed, maintained, and perceived—a topic of special importance to Polish citizens both before and after the fall of Communism in Poland, where traditional gender roles have been, and continue to be, prescribed by the Catholic Church. In 1987, in one of the first pieces of video art in Poland, Zbigniew Libera documented the manner in which a young girl becomes indoctrinated into her role as a female, by filming her being given various “feminine” objects to play with, such as lipstick, pearls, and high-heeled shoes. Exactly one decade later, in 1997, Katarzyna Kozyra entered a female bathhouse in Budapest, Hungary, and filmed the women there acting naturally, outside of the “male Gaze.”1 Two years later, in a project that represented Poland at the forty-eighth Venice Biennale, Kozyra herself was filmed, disguised as a man in a men’s bathhouse. All three projects, How to Train the Girls, by Libera, and The Women’s Bathhouse

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and The Men’s Bathhouse, by Kozyra, use performance to explore gender formation in late-Communist and post-Communist Poland.

Polish National Identity, Catholicism, and Gender Roles Polish national identity has historically been strongly tied not only to Christianity, but also to Roman Catholicism. This stems from a number of factors connected to significant points in Polish history, namely the time of the Partitions (1772–95), World War II, the Communist period (1952–89), and the post-independence period in the 1990s. According to most statistics, since World War II, Poland has been around 96–97 percent Roman Catholic.2 The strong links between Polish nationalism and Roman Catholicism, however, date back to a much earlier time, when the percentage was not even so great. In her outline of the development of Polish nationalism, Genevieve Zubrzycki traces the phenomenon back to 1795, the time of the third partition of Poland. After the country was finally eliminated from the map and no longer existed as an independent nation, the concept of Poland was expected to live on regardless of whether or not it had a physical land mass behind the name.3 As Norman Davies reminds us, “the Partitions were widely described in religious metaphors and allegories: it was the period of ‘Babylonian Captivity,’ the ‘Descent into the Tomb,’ and ‘the Time on the Cross.’ ”4 According to Zubrzycki, Poland was “transformed into the Christ of nations,”5 and the nation was therefore a martyr waiting for resurrection. She defines this period as the time when “the symbiosis between Catholicism and Polishness, and between the church and civil society, was achieved through a long process in which national identity was Catholicized and Catholicism was nationalized.”6 The foundation that was laid during the long years when Poland was partitioned (1795– 1918) held fast for the remainder of the twentieth century, during both the years of independence, as well as during Communist rule. Once the Polish nation was reinstated in 1918, following the collapse of the empires that had divided it up among themselves in the eighteenth century, the task then became to reestablish a national and cultural identity where there had been none for over one hundred years. According to statistics, the partitions had a definite effect on

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the cultural makeup of Poland, with ethnic Poles constituting only 64 percent of the population at the time of independence.7 One of the factors that could unify Poles was their religion. The Polish politician and statesman Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) was perhaps best known for the promulgation of this idea of the connection between Polish nationalism and Polish Catholicism, in his development of the concept of the Polak-katolik, or “Polish-Catholic,” which made these two concepts virtually inseparable. This close connection between Polish national identity and the church was only strengthened during World War II, as it was the church that fought a strong resistance against the Nazis.8 Following the extermination of most of Poland’s Jewish and other minority populations during World War II, by 1946 Polish Catholics comprised 96 percent of the nation’s population,9 thus further reinforcing the close identification of Polish nationalism with the Roman Catholic Church. The idea of the Polak-katolik intensified during Poland’s period of Communist rule (1952–89).10 As during World War II, the church constituted an opposition to the regime and afforded citizens a safe space from which to resist.11 The church even provided a haven for artists during the Communist period, as a number of alternative art exhibitions were held in churches during the 1970s and 1980s.12 It also goes without saying that the Roman Catholic Church is often cited as having played a significant role in bringing an end to Communist rule not only in Poland, but in Eastern Europe as well. The election of Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul II in 1978, and his official papal visit to Poland in 1979, emboldened the Polish people in their efforts to seek independence from Communist rule. Zubrzycki refers to these two events as “the midwife of the Solidarity movement,”13 because having a Pole as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church inspired national self-confidence, and also because his visit could be seen as a symbolic act of support for the Polish nation in its struggle against an oppressive ruler. It was the Church that eventually provided the inspiration and support for Poles to fight for their freedom, beginning with the founding of Solidarity in 1980. Once Communist rule had ended, in 1989, the Church continued to exercise its influence over society and insist on its position at

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the forefront of Polish politics. Evidence of this can be seen in the passing of the Law on Radio and Television in 1992, which stated that all public radio and TV programs should respect the Christian belief system; the concordat between the Vatican and the Polish Republic, signed in 1993 and ratified in 1998; and the Church’s role in the rewriting of the Polish Constitution, which was adopted in 1997. All of these events reflect a desire on the part of the Church to impose traditional Christian values on a free, democratic society. In fact, the preamble of the new Polish Constitution refers explicitly to “the Christian heritage of the nation,” a point whose inclusion the church had specifically argued for. Furthermore, it also declared that “relations between the Republic of Poland and the Roman Catholic Church shall be determined by international treaty concluded with the Holy See,”14 thus paving the way for the signing of the concordat between the two authorities. The fact that Christianity is written into the constitution only underscores Poles’ symbiotic relationship with the Church, while the concordat guarantees the latter’s authority within the state. Unlike in post-Soviet Russia, where the search for a new national-cultural identity is ongoing, in Poland—despite its hundred-year-long partition—there exists a powerful and unrelenting sense of Polish identity, which is inextricably linked to the nation’s Roman Catholic heritage. The passing of the Law on Radio and Television in 1992 demonstrates the scope of the Church’s influence. One of the cornerstones of a democracy is freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In Poland, however, one of the new democracies in Europe after the fall of Communism, freedom of speech has been slightly curtailed by a law that requires broadcasters to “respect the religious feelings of their audience and especially to respect the Christian value system.”15 Although this law didn’t specifically limit artistic production, it sent a strong message to Polish society that, at least in state-run media, free speech was not completely free. This law was in fact used to put limits on creative activity in 2002, when the artist Dorota Nieznalska was taken to court by the League of Polish Families for “insulting religious feelings” with her photograph Passion, which consisted of a photograph of male genitals within

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a frame shaped like a cross. She was found guilty in 2003, sentenced to six months of community service for her “blasphemy,” and forced to pay a fine of 2,000 Polish Złoty (roughly equivalent to $500). She was the first artist in Poland ever to be convicted for creating and exhibiting a work of art. This event not only demonstrates that Catholicism is deeply enmeshed in Polish society, but also just how deep that involvement remains.16 The Catholic Church is committed to reinforcing the traditional values of the family, and the traditional gender roles that go along with it. In that vein, feminism and any kind of feminist values are seen as anathema to the Church. Whereas before 1989, the chief enemy of the Church was the Communist government, after independence, the Church had to find a new one, and thus it found a worthy candidate for opposition with “liberals.” According to Francis Millard, in the post-Communist period, one can witness the Church’s horror at many changes taking place in society, also seen as a direct consequence of liberal thinking, itself linked to capitalism. Often such changes touched the church’s moral concerns. “Pornography” and erotica in the media, sex-shop kiosks in the street markets, open discussion of sex education and contraception, feminist ideas, groups propounding the rights of homosexuals, varied manifestations of consumerism—were all anathema to church hierarchs [italics mine].17 The fact that Millard groups feminism and women’s rights together with pornography and erotica demonstrates his perception of the Church’s understanding of that movement. He even goes so far as to say that it was generally agreed that feminism was “a term of abuse,” and that Catholic groups provided “a strong countervailing force”18 to the few women’s groups that were formed in the early 1990s. Consequently, women in post-Communist Poland were considered a potentially dangerous or damaging social force that required monitoring and even censorship. In fact, according to Ewa Hauser, the ideological program of Catholic nationalists is, in fact, “directed against women’s equality.”19 The Church, as the moral voice and authority over

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society in Poland, was the force that took it upon itself to deal with these issues and reinforce women’s traditional roles. Furthermore, the fact that “liberal thinking” is regarded as linked to the influence of Western capitalism provides an interesting nuance to the dynamic of artistic activity in relation to the capitalist system. Whereas Western artists were seen as acting against the mechanisms of commodification in the 1960s and 1970s, Polish artists since the 1990s have engaged with a language enabled by the Western system. While artists support that capitalist system, it is the Catholic Church that aims to silence its authority in the newly democratic Poland. In many ways this is a reversal of what occurred in the West, where capitalism and artistic production were considered at variance with one another. At least in Poland, if the liberalism that the capitalist system introduced was the enemy of the Church, it was certainly the friend of the artist in terms of freedom of expression and speech. Much like Poland’s Christianity, traditional female roles are also deeply ingrained in Polish society and Polish national identity. While this dynamic exists in many other Western countries, the consequences are significantly different in Poland, because of the role of the Catholic Church. The myth of the Polish mother depicts women as homemakers and wives, sacrificing their individuality for the good of the family. Although she presents the image of a strong woman, she is nevertheless “expected to give up her personal aspirations and interests for the sake of the family and the nation.”20 She is denied agency herself, and can only support the actions of her husbands or sons. If a woman does have agency, then she must be gender-less. This idea is codified in the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz’s Death of a Colonel (1831), which depicts a female military hero, Emilia Plater, who is only able to achieve outstanding feats on the battlefield because she is disguised as a man. In many ways, this narrative bears a striking similarity to Kozyra’s performance, wherein the artist had to take on the attributes of a male to gain access to a men’s bathhouse, demonstrating how gender delimits access and agency. The Mickiewicz poem is required fifth-grade reading in the Polish curriculum today,21 and serves as one of the vehicles for the acceptance of traditional gender roles in everyday Polish society.

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Despite the Church’s strong anti-feminist stance and the general public’s indoctrination in traditional gender roles, in the 1990s, contemporary Polish artists made an attempt to create a new space, within the public arena, for the contemporary Polish woman. Exploring the proliferation of installation art by women artists in post-Communist Poland, Elz˙bieta Matynia argues that it is this medium that provoked discussion not only about women’s art specifically, but also about women’s roles in society in general. Matynia’s thesis is that the very language of installations the artists use facilitates their entry into a direct debate with the public, the media, political and cultural organizations, and finally with the past. Polish women artists today have launched a major effort to rework a syndrome of Polish culture that has been dominant for two centuries, by moving away from a preoccupation with issues of national identity and sovereignty to an attention to active, postnational citizenship, the key agency in a democratic polity.22 Matynia notes how the actions of women artists in Poland in the 1990s, insofar as they took an active role toward the shaping of a new democracy, bear a striking resemblance to dissident activities of the Communist period. For Matynia, both the dissident artists of the 1970s and 1980s, and the women artists of the 1990s, “exploited a grey area within the triangle of the preferred/permitted/forbidden, where in effect they could begin to function as a realm of dissent, emancipation and dialogue.”23 In their use of performance, which takes over public spaces in a similar manner to installation art, Libera and Kozyra are part of this group of artists pushing the boundaries of everyday norms, in their own way contributing to the shaping of a new democracy in post-Communist Poland.

State Control of the Arts in Communist-Era Poland In Poland, the political situation was quite different than in Latvia or Russia. First of all, like in Latvia, the country had experienced a much shorter period of Stalinist rule in comparison to Russia, as it only

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became a Communist People’s Republic in 1952. Second, the extent to which Soviet policy was enforced in Poland was also considerably less in comparison to the Soviet republics. In Poland, Khrushchev’s thaw meant new leadership; in 1956, the Stalinist leader Bolesław Bierut died, and was replaced by the politically more moderate Władysław Gomułka. That meant that for artists, there had been less than a decade of the imposition of Socialist Realism as the dominant style,24 making it relatively easier at this time to return to the modernist and avant-garde traditions of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet, as in all Iron Curtain countries, genres such as conceptual and performance art were still not officially tolerated by the Polish Artists’ Union. These types of expression developed primarily outside of the official sphere, by artists in insular communities and circles, in studios and unofficial meeting places. Solidarity was founded in Gdan´sk, Poland, in September 1980, as the first independent, self-governing trade union, and thus the first non-Communist union in the Eastern bloc. This was an extraordinary feat for a nation under Communist rule, and its significance was not lost on ordinary Poles, including artists.25 December 1981 witnessed the Congress of Polish Culture, in which representatives of the creative arts pushed for artists to generate new work that addressed the Polish people in their current situation.26 Thus, the move for greater freedom that came with Solidarity prompted artists to do the same in their work, by addressing their audiences more directly. Given the eventual inroads made by Solidarity, there was also the sense that this type of protest could actually make a difference. From World War II through the 1960s, Polish artists generally refrained from any political engagement in their work. There were two main reasons for this, the first being that at this time, the government did not officially tolerate any type of art that veered from the state-endorsed Socialist Realism. Consequently, any form of experimentation in art was considered extreme enough to be a political statement in and of itself.27 Abstraction, installation art, performance, and the like were radical in their own right; therefore, there was no need to make any overtly political pronouncements otherwise. Relatedly, in direct defiance of the ideological imperative of Socialist Realism,

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independent Polish artists at this time generally created work devoid of political content. Thus, Wojciech Włodarczyk contends, “artists working in the twenty-five years between Socialist Realism and Solidarity, whatever the artistic attitude, consistently defended the principle of the autonomous nature of a work of art and this was understood as a form of protest against the official brand of ideologized culture and, by extension, a sign of protest against the authorities.”28 Whatever their political convictions, Polish artists emphasized the importance of their artistic “freedom,” no matter what the cause. All of this changed in the 1970s, with the emergence of a type of art known as “Soc Art,” or “New Socialist Realism.”29 Łukasz Ronduda has noted that, following the Gdan´sk Shipyard Protests of 1970, “a far-reaching critical stance toward the Communist regime can be discerned” in Polish artistic culture, reflecting “attempts to redefine the relationship between art and politics undertaken in these artistic strategies.”30 Artists such as KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemysław Kwiek), among others, began to question the values of the Communist state, combining that questioning with the use of the language of contemporary art, employing genres such as minimalism, conceptualism, and performance. The situation in the arts changed again after both the emergence of Solidarity, and first party secretary Wojciech Jaruzelski’s declaration of Martial Law,31 on December 13, 1981, the latter of which represented an attempt to curtail the activities of Solidarity. The institution of a police state severely restricted the everyday lives of Polish citizens, and constrained artists,32 who responded by foregrounding their political stance in their work. Włodarczyk maintains that “whereas before August 1980 taking a political position had been considered unworthy of a true artist, after December 1981 it was regarded as both a duty and evidence of personal integrity.”33 He even goes so far as to say, “the year 1980 separates two totally different worlds in Polish art, or so it seems from today’s perspective: two different sets of artistic personalities, two distinct concepts of meaning in a work of art and of its place and role in culture.”34 But as seen in the work of Libera and his circle, independent artists pursued another option as well in response to political developments: turning inward and concentrating on more personal issues and private forms of artistic expression.

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Performance Art in Poland Poland has a strong tradition of alternative and experimental theater, one dating back to the period of the Second Republic (1918–39), during the interwar period when Poland was still an independent nation. This tradition was briefly interrupted during World War II, but managed to resume, albeit with varying degrees of experimentation, after the war, even once the Communist government was in place. This occurred largely through the work of Tadeusz Kantor, the famous Polish artist and theater director. Kantor’s aims were both experimentation and the breaking down of various boundaries—between the visual arts and theater, and between art and life—in a manner similar to Cage and Kaprow. Kathleen Cioffi described his performances as “something partway between a Kaprow-style happening and a theater piece,”35 citing his 1967 production of The Water Hen (1921), where waiters served coffee and eggs to the audience throughout the performance, which took place with the house lights turned on and with actors interacting with the viewers.36 From 1971 to 1987, the artistic team KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik37 and her partner, Przemysław Kwiek) created and presented artistic performances under the rubric of their Workshop of Action, Documentation, and Diffusion (Pracownia Działan´, Dokumentacji i Upowszechniania). These actions were performed for small local audiences in cities such as Warsaw, Lublin, and Kraków, and the documentation of them was of great importance. One of their performances was based on the theme of passports, addressing the issue of these artists’ inability to travel abroad, due to governmental restrictions, as well as the general condition of artists in Polish society (Monument without a Passport, 1978).38 Anda Rottenberg has described KwieKulik’s actions39 from this time as having two important stages: “first, they would create a performance for a very small group of viewers, which was very precisely documented, and next they would spread this documentation far and wide, in the form of hand-made postcards that would be sent to people in the art world.”40 KwieKulik’s performances, in effect, had two audiences: those that were present for the initial performance and those that saw it in its documented form.

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The same can be said with regard to the happenings, performances, and conceptual art creations that took place and were exhibited at Ewa Partum’s Address Gallery (Adres Galeria), in Łódz´ . Measuring only four square meters, and located in the space beneath a staircase at the Polish Artists’ Union building, the gallery could only house a small number of selected guests. Much of the activity that took place at the Address Gallery was disseminated via mail art, enabling those who were not able to travel to Łódz´ to participate in the activities remotely, as it were.41 While Polish performances in the 1970s may have generally addressed small and private audiences, stemming from fear of censorship and possible police action such as arrest, in the period after the founding of Solidarity and the implementation of Martial Law artists became more vocal and more open about expressing their political opinions. Some pushed for freedom by taking their art into the streets, performing for a wider audience—the general public. A number of groups were formed in the 1980s that staged happenings, performances, and actions on the streets of Warsaw, Wrocław, Łódz´ , and other major cities in Poland. These groups included Orange Alternative, Gruppa, and even a protest group called Freedom and Peace. The artistic group Łódz´ Kaliska, named after the city’s railway station, engaged in anarchic neo-Dada activities, as in their first action, from 1979, in which the artists created a disturbance on the main street in Łódz´ by partitioning the street with a black band, and then proceeding to throw a white sheet over bystanders and beat them. Orange Alternative,42 perhaps the best known of these politicallymotivated performance groups, was founded in 1981 in the university town of Wrocław, by Waldemar Maria Frydrych, who was known as “The Major.”43 He had degrees in both history and art history, and led his followers in performing what Cioffi refers to as “hybrid guerilla theater/conceptual art.”44 Orange Alternative referred to its actions as “Socialist Surrealism,”45 as the group addressed and underscored the absurdity of everyday life in the socialist system. Using day-today reality as its material, Orange Alternative organized happenings on Communist and Polish holidays, as well as themed happenings, based on social issues of the time, for example, Who’s Afraid of the

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Toilet Paper? (October 1, 1987). The Major invited anyone interested to come to S´widnicka Street, where most of the happenings took place, and bring toilet paper, shaving cream, and even sanitary napkins—all items extremely difficult to come by in those days—and share them by distributing them equally among all who were present. Most of the happenings occurred in the same manner: members of Orange Alternative began by distributing leaflets to passersby on S´widnicka Street, the main shopping street in the city center, where the event would later occur. Just as happened with Kulik’s performances in the 1990s, the happening usually ended when the police started making arrests.46 During some performances, the militia unwittingly became characters in the event, as in the November 6, 1987, happening The Taking of the Winter Palace, a restaging of The Storming of the Winter Palace, a mass spectacle created in 1920 to recreate the events of the 1917 Russian February and October Revolutions. When the police began arresting those who had come to take part, they found themselves playing the role of the palace guards, completely unaware they were doing so. Orange Alternative never sought permission to stage these events, which is why they were stopped by the militia, and participants were arrested. According to Mirosław Pe˛czak, the members of the group felt that “the streets belong to us,”47 reflecting an assertion of citizens’ right to public spaces that did not exist under Communist rule. Also according to Pe˛czak, Orange Alternative’s actions sought “to induce the sort of creative street unrest which shatters common stereotypes held not only by the State and ‘average Poles’, but also by the Catholic Church and the opposition.”48 Indeed, the Orange Alternative performances turned everyday life upside-down, creating a carnival atmosphere for viewers and performers alike. By mocking the militia, the state, and the Party, the group empowered audience members who otherwise were powerless to act against these governing bodies. Audiences became so involved that they began to participate in the entertainment themselves. The Orange Alternative performances and happenings were similar to the Art Days festivals in Latvia not only for their celebratory atmosphere, but also because of the fact that, as art, they were removed

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from the everyday. This created an environment in which artists and citizens felt that they were able to act in ways that they otherwise could not, under normal circumstances. Furthermore, the performances served to make people aware of their role in the everyday “theater of the absurd” going on around them, by underscoring that absurdity. They also functioned as an equalizer, reducing the differences between artist and audience member, as well as attempting to level the difference between everyday citizen and the authorities. Thus, the tradition of performance art was seemingly much stronger in Poland in general than it was in Latvia, a fact that is still true to this day. It is the reaction to these performances by the Polish public, however, that has shifted with the times. Anda Rottenberg, for example, connects the work of Orange Alternative and Łódz´ Kaliska to the resistance movement in Poland in the 1980s, and notes how the Polish public’s response to their work changed after the fall of Communism. In the early years of the democratic government in Poland, the Major ran for president, although his campaign was unsuccessful. “Society had lost its sense of humor,”49 Rottenberg commented, indicating that while such avant-garde activity was tolerated and even welcomed during the Communist period, after the return of a democratic government to the nation attitudes and approaches toward avant-garde activity aimed against the regime or the status quo were—perhaps surprisingly—more rigid and less tolerant. The Work of Zbigniew Libera: Girls Young and Old Much like Afrika, Zbigniew Libera’s training came from his mentors, colleagues, and the artistic circle to which he belonged, as opposed to any formal schooling in art. After spending a year studying pedagogy at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun´, he dropped out and returned to his home town of Łódz´, where he became associated with a group of artists that had come together to create Kultura Zrzuty, a term that is difficult to translate. The word zrzuty comes from the Polish idiomatic expression zrobic´ zrzutke˛, meaning “to pass the hat around.”

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Kultura Zrzuty has been translated as “pitch-in culture,” or “throw-in culture,” referring to the fact that none of the members at the time had any money, and that they made do with what they had, creating art from untraditional methods and means.50 Łukasz Ronduda has described Kultura Zrzuty as “based on the culture of sharing. . . a kind of survival strategy,”51 and compared it to the punk strand of art, similar to the punk group that Afrika had been involved with in St. Petersburg in the late 1980s. Łódz´ Kaliska was part of this movement, the activities of which have been described as anarchistic, punk, and neo-Dada.52 Beginning in 1982, these artists began to display their work in Strych [The Attic], a gathering place for “unofficial” artists in Łódz´ at the time. As Libera has stated, Strych was a place which could only with difficulty be called a gallery, it was a meeting-place, in the then current political situation—martial law—it was above all a place in which you could position yourself outside the choices which reality was imposing on you: in other words either exhibiting in church circles or in official circles, which would have meant aligning yourself with the side of the authorities, the Communists.53 It is important to note that Libera occupied this liminal position— neither official nor unofficial—as this has bearing on the reception of his work in the 1980s. The Kultura Zrzuty and Strych groups comprised an entity of their own—neither part of the contingent of official artists sanctioned by the state, nor part of the “official” dissident movement supported by the Catholic Church. Piotr Piotrowski has named this group the “third circuit,”54 insofar as it forged its own path outside of the primary choices of official and unofficial. He described Strych as “the space of the artist-bohemian, the accursed artist, one of the most mystical-sentimental figures, out of a nineteenth-century Künstlerroman [artist’s novel] and modernist mythology.”55 Because of the “romantic” and spiritual qualities of his work, Ronduda has even described Libera’s art as “ ‘suspended’ between two important streams of the Polish unofficial art of the eighties,”56 those of Church art and Kultura Zrzuty, which did not manifest this romantic approach.

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The type of art that the Kultura Zrzuty and Strych artists promoted came to be called “Private Art (Sztuka Prywatna),”57 and was intended primarily to be viewed by their inner circle. Ronduda describes this art that developed in the 1980s as having appeared “in reaction to the rationalized art of the seventies,”58 with its more inward-looking and personal approach. Private Art also bears similarities to the performances of Collective Actions or the AptArt exhibitions in Russia, insofar as its audience was selective and limited. Libera described it as a type of art created for the sake of its creation, not for any potential audience. In an interview with the . art historian Łukasz Gorczyca and the artist Artur Zmijewski, he explained the concept as follows: we did everything only for ourselves, for our circle. The only reason we made art was to show it to a circumscribed group of contemporaries. There were no more than two hundred people in all of Poland associated with Strych. At that time, there weren’t a lot of places where one could show interesting art, meaning unofficial and not at church. So people came to Strych from Kraków, Warsaw, or Koszalin [a city in northern Poland].59 The artist recounts how the members of the group would play games or pull pranks, which “perfectly illustrated our contemporary relationship to society, including mine. We used these works for the realization of art within life, in contrary to traditional art. . . And it wasn’t public art!”60 Libera feels that most of the art that he produced in the 1980s fell into this category of Private Art. As an example, one of the artist’s first actions, Home Performance, from 1984, comprised six photographs documenting a performance that he did in his own home, a simulation of suicide, and the only known viewers were his mother and his friend Romek.61 At one unfortunate moment, however, Libera’s work did interest the police. In August 1982, the artist was arrested for “designing, printing and distributing anti-regime leaflets and posters.”62 He had created printed matter supporting Solidarity, and protest posters for those killed in the 1981 miners’ strike in Wujek.63 He was turned in by a

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friend, and sentenced to one and a half years in prison.64 The artist considers this a formative experience, and although he was deemed a political prisoner, for the first six months of his sentence he was held in a prison for common criminals. Ronduda feels that this “created his permanent awareness of the ongoing threat of both physical (assault and rape) and psychological harm,”65 which, in turn, created a “tenuous position of the self [that] amplified Libera’s insecurity and awareness of his own weakness, fantasies of power, fear and terror.”66 However, the artist maintained that it was precisely this experience that liberated him, as well. “Such an experience freed me from fear. The worst thing is that you are afraid of what you don’t know, but when you know something, then you fear it less.”67 Much like Afrika’s time in the mental institution, which was a microcosm of Russian society in the post-Soviet era, Ronduda compares Libera’s time in prison to the communal experience of living in “prison” under Martial Law.68 This early formative experience came to shape Libera’s artistic practice, not only in terms of his exploration of the mechanisms of control that shape our sense of self-definition, but also in the sense of motivating the artist’s own personal search for the self. How to Train the Girls In 1987, Zbigniew Libera created How to Train the Girls ( Jak tresuje sie˛ dziewczynki), a piece that could be understood as video art, but is here considered a performance piece that has been captured on video. The film depicts an older woman handing various items, usually identified with females, to a four-year-old girl (plates 10, 11). In one segment of the twenty-minute film, the woman shows the child a pair of clip-on earrings, holding them up to her ears, then moves them away. Eventually, she puts the flower-shaped plastic earrings on her ears, leaving the girl to admire them. She adjusts the girl’s pearl necklace, looped around her neck several times, it being too large for a small child. Next, the woman gives her a tube of lipstick. The girl examines it, removes the lid, and continues to stare at it. Eventually, she tries applying the lipstick to her lips herself. After the first attempt, she smiles—possibly pleased with the result—then applies some more. Eventually, she leaves the frame of the camera to

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go examine herself in the mirror, at which point the image starts to blur, the girl in the scene merging with the mirror reflection of herself, echoing the manner in which one’s actual body becomes subsumed by one’s perception of oneself, as seen through a reflection— either by way of a mirror, or via images that are reflected back at us through others. According to the artist, “the girl, who was probably encountering these objects for the first time, was at first disoriented, and possibly even frightened.”69 Indeed, she examines the earrings with awe and wonder. The woman in the film guided the child, “pointed her to the mirror, and instructed her as to how to use the various items.”70 There is no narration to the twenty-minute film, only the artist’s own ominous-sounding music playing in the background. Libera stated that the music in fact provides the commentary: “the role of the commentary is played by the sound here; I needed something that wouldn’t be considered music. In the end I recorded the soundtrack using an electric heater, a rod, the distortion pedal on the guitar.”71 Looking back on the piece, the artist described it as a “phenomenal example of the processes that of course we are aware of, but never notice—not being aware of their presence in our lives,”72 meaning, the processes by which we acquire our gender identity, by learning how to dress, how to fashion ourselves as males or females, and by adopting the “appropriate” behaviors for our respective genders. This early work by Libera is greatly indebted to Michel Foucault’s theories on the way in which human beings are conditioned by overriding societal relations, namely, who controls the discourse and how. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault asserted, “power and knowledge directly imply one another. . . there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations,”73 meaning that those who are in possession of knowledge and power essentially control the behavior and identity of others, by structuring society in the manner that conforms with their beliefs. Further, he determined that the power exercised on the body is located “in a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity. . . a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction

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or the conquest of a territory.”74 In Libera’s understanding, Foucault “demonstrated how social productions, such as clothing, manufacture the body, attitude, character, personality,”75 echoing Foucault’s words that these power relations “go right down into the depths of society.”76 Thus, the people and structures that we encounter every day not only shape our experiences, but also come to create and influence our own personal identities. Libera’s work highlights one such structure in society in How to Train the Girls: that governing the development of gender identity. Libera’s project also demonstrates in artistic terms what the feminist theorist Judith Butler has stated with regard to gender being performative, as opposed to biological or genetic. In Gender Trouble, she argued that “gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts [italics hers].”77 Butler is referring precisely to those virtually unnoticeable acts that we perform every day, without realizing it, which not only constitute gender for ourselves, but also enable us to understand the gender of others. Although Butler was not referencing performance art per se, insofar as she describes gender as identity “constituted in time,” it follows that performance, as an artistic act that also takes place in the temporal sphere, is a suitable genre with which to explore and expose gender identity for what it is.78 In How to Train the Girls, Libera documents the first of many repeated acts done by women every day—putting on makeup, ornamenting oneself with jewelry, putting items into a purse—thus capturing the very inception of one’s gender identity. Butler has written that “the action of gender requires a performance that is repeated”79; thus the perpetuation of these acts, taught to the girl by her mother, will eventually come to constitute her gender identity as female. This notion of drawing attention to phenomena that we are aware of, but might not otherwise notice, can be witnessed in another performance that dates from the same year as How to Train the Girls. Game with Mother, from 1987, is a nineteen-minute video that documents an interaction that the artist had with his mother in her home (figure 27).

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Figure 27. Zbigniew Libera. Game with Mother, video, 1987. Installation (1990): 19 minutes, 9 seconds. VHS, television, original furniture, objects (doily, watering can), and board with pencil drawing. Courtesy of the artist

On top of the television, the mother had placed a doily, on which were two toy dogs and a basket. The dogs had legs that one could bend, and, as a joke, Libera bent the dogs’ legs to make it look as though they were urinating into the basket. Several months later, he returned home, only to find that his mother had put the legs back so that the dogs appeared to be standing up straight. He changed the legs again, and his mother would change them back. The game went on for several months, and the artist said that he would return home simply to find out what his mother had done with the dogs’ legs. He stated that he even “suspected that mother was aware of this game, but she wasn’t.”80 It was then that he started to film the game, with a hidden camera. The piece is displayed on a television placed sideways, in order to capture both the top of the television and the images displayed on the television, to indicate the passage of time. Libera’s and his mother’s

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hands appear alternately at the top of the screen, each changing the dogs’ legs back to the desired position. The artist speaks about this piece in more general terms, explaining, “we take part in this type of game our entire lives; I’ve observed it and I still observe it, games with matches or with places on buses. It’s very difficult to document.”81 The artist was able to capture this phenomenon, however, by recording what began as an impromptu game with his own mother. Libera mentions that the idea for How to Train the Girls stemmed from his interest in investigative journalism, specifically referencing Günter Wallraff, a German undercover journalist who reported on human rights violations by living among the homeless, alcoholics, and migrant workers. This type of journalism appealed to Libera, who said, “I imagined that my experience could be similar, because then I was looking at all applications for the use of the camera.”82 It was not simply the fact that the camera could capture this moment of indoctrination, but also the manner in which it did so—for example, his use of slow-motion in How to Train the Girls was an attempt to dramatize or emphasize the event. As the artist commented, with regard to the subject documented in the film, This was probably the first time ever that you could see something like this. Somebody else’s hands demonstrate how to use lipstick, and then lead a girl to a small mirror. When I made it, I thought, this is so trivial! But when you watch the scenes in slow-motion, I thought, this is the customary training. Over time, I discovered that not everyone sees that and knows that. The camera may reveal the most gray, non-visible gestures.83 The use of video was also important to the artist because of its immediacy. Similar to Kulik’s statements about performance, Libera mentioned that he started to use film because “it seemed to me that it was the cheapest and simplest means, not only economically, but also aesthetically.”84 Libera was in fact one of the first artists in Poland to use video in his work,85 as in the 1980s, video cameras were rare and difficult to obtain

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for private usage. In 1983, just after his release from prison, he went to visit a former cellmate, who took him to view the film “Woodstock.” As he recalls, “from that moment on, I knew that I needed to have some kind of video equipment. . . I for one saw it as a great documentary medium.”86 As an artist, Libera considered himself an observer or ethnographer—one who notices things from the outside without commentary. He began this type of study when working not as an artist, but as an art therapist in a mental institution, in Pabianice in 1986 (figure 28). Although he had no previous education in psychotherapy, the artist was trained for the job by the doctors in the hospital. Essentially, he was in charge of the patients during their free time, and had the task of supervising them in the creation of art projects. Like Afrika, Libera cites his work with patients as a source of creative inspiration.

Figure 28. Zbigniew Libera with patients in the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Pabianice, 1986. Courtesy of the artist

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With regard to How to Train the Girls, the artist noted that it was in the hospital that he realized that environment conditions us to be who we are, and shapes the manner in which we perform gender: In the hospital I was able to observe what happens with the patients, in the course of their illness. After a while I realized that most cases were victims of their environments, to which they would not or could not adapt. I started to see this outside the hospital with women, men, children, etc. And from there came the film.87 Just as with Afrika, the mental institution provided the perfect microcosm for examining the mechanisms at work in human relations and development. In fact, not only did his observations in the mental institution influence his artistic production, but also like Afrika he brought his artistic production into the hospital, and created art with the patients. He commented, “it often happened that [Jerzy] Truszkowski88 and I, together with other colleagues, would paint together with the patients. The main point was not the painting itself, we needed the paintings as decorations for our musical activities, on the borders of performance.”89 Libera himself recalls growing up in an environment where rigid gender roles were enforced and maintained. He drew a parallel between the “training” that the girl in the video experienced, and his own indoctrination into the male world. In one interview, he recalled that his favorite toy from his childhood was something deemed quintessentially “female”: a doll. He recounted, “it took me thirty years to remember that my favorite toy, which I had for three or four years, was a doll. But my mom made me ashamed, saying that boys do not play with such toys. I hid that doll, and never played with it. However, this doll had done its job. It created a gap.”90 A gap, he later explained, between his own male gender identity and that of a female.91 For Ronduda, How to Train the Girls is about a type of transaction that takes place all the time in our everyday lives. In his words, the video examines “the various systems of exchange that define any

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relationship, transitional and fraught with anxiety, between the self and the world. One pole of this relationship is absolute rectification of the self by the reality of influence; the other pole is its transformation into a poetic exchange of gifts.”92 It is precisely this type of exchange that Kultura Zrzuty was based on, and that formed the foundation of Libera’s exploration of relationships. Thus, all of these forces—the artistic circle of Kultura Zrzuty, the artist’s time in prison, and his work in the mental institution—came together to influence Libera’s work exploring questions of the self in terms of being defined by the Other, by one’s surroundings. Just as Kulik sought to explore the Other in attempt to find himself, Libera’s art investigates the superstructures surrounding us that come to define both ourselves and our relationships. Ronduda also sees these investigations by Libera as a search for his own personal sense of selfhood, citing not only the artist’s experience of being in prison, but also the general situation following the establishment of Martial Law in Poland. He explained, “the difficult state in the socio-political sphere corresponded with the crisis in the philosophical-artistic sphere. . . this kind of situation had forced people to the effort of self-creation, to take control over building one’s identity, and to create personal self-utopias.”93 We can see this when we examine some of Libera’s other work, for example Someone Else, from 1986, a series of three photographs of Libera dressed up as a woman, wearing makeup and fishnet stockings, with an open blouse revealing his (still) male chest; images in which the artist is poised at the border of male and female identity (figure 29). Even one of his very first works, For Art (1982), is a double photograph of the artist taken just after having shaved his head, which he had deemed a work of art. Looking at the work retrospectively, the artist considers it prophetic; during the 1980s, a shaven head had associations with prisoners, and one week after creating the photograph, Libera was arrested. The artist’s manipulation of his appearance in terms of dress or hairstyle suggests a search on the part of Libera for a self-defining look. How to Train the Girls attracted little attention when it was first completed and shown, which, on the one hand, Libera finds regrettable. “No one noticed it. It was only in the second half of the ‘90s that

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Figure 29. Zbigniew Libera. Someone Else, c. 1986 (2006) From series of three photographs. 28.5 × 39.5 cm. Courtesy of the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

there were speeches about that subject [feminism]. The Americans, with their developed feminist theory, were needed to interpret it. We didn’t want to discuss it with each other.”94 Feminist theory of the period, however, was insufficient in that it did not address the overarching issue of gender roles, but specifically focused on the role of females in society. Libera commented, “it’s a pity, because stemming from this imported language, we arrived at the idea that only women are subjected to grooming, but that’s not true. Boys are groomed, too, only it is tightly masked.”95 In a statement echoing both Foucault and Butler, the artist maintains that “we are all molded. Everything is the result of necessity. I believe that there is no free will.”96 Libera’s work, then, recognizes the systems governing self-definition and, more specifically, the core of the self: gender identity, and in doing so unmasks them. Intimate Rituals and Mystical Perseverance How to Train the Girls was not Libera’s first video. His first works in this medium were created in 1984, when the artist had just obtained his

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video camera: Intimate Rituals (Obrze˛dy intymne) and Mystical Perseverance (Perseweracja mistyczna), dealing with the issue of old age and death.97 Libera filmed an aged and dying woman in order to call attention to processes that we would ordinarily prefer to ignore. The woman in question was his own ailing grandmother, Regina G. In Intimate Rituals, Libera documents himself, a young man of twenty-five, taking care of his grandmother on her deathbed. The film contains twelve minutes of the artist bathing her, changing her adult diapers, and feeding her (figure 30). In the fifty-minute film Mystical Perseverance, the grandmother is filmed spinning her bedpan around on the floor in a ritual that the artist believes was meant to replace her saying the Rosary, which the woman could no longer do, because of her debilitated state. There is a hypnotic and meditative quality to the video, much more peaceful imagery than that presented in Intimate Rituals. The artist mentioned that he had considered filming her death, for which he was present, but decided against it. “I was there with her during her agony, which was an intense enough experience that I decided not to use the video camera.”98 He completed Intimate Rituals the year of her death, in 1984.

Figure 30. Zbigniew Libera. Intimate Rituals (film still), 1984. Recording of performance: video, 12 minutes, edited to 5. Courtesy of the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

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Within the category of Private Art, there was another type of art . important to the Strych circle—“Embarrassing Art” (Sztuka Zenuja˛ca). Libera’s fellow artist Marek Janiak considered Intimate Rituals the best example of this type of art, because when you watch it, “you are ashamed; the work evokes embarrassment, confusion, distracting the viewer from his normal flow of thought.”99 The significance of inducing such emotions is the fact that the viewing subject endures an experience that can change his perceptions, and possibly alter his beliefs. Libera feels that “embarrassment is a neural and brain response, which, probably through the internal injection of the appropriate chemicals, blocks something, or activates an alarm, as a signal that we are crossing a certain border, or at least approaching one.”100 It also means that we are dealing with a taboo subject; thus, “our guard is raised, which makes us embarrassed, because we don’t know how to react.”101 He likens this to the epiphany that one gets from making a mistake, or the learning that occurs from, for example, falling down: “the fascinating moments when skating come not from when we are moving along well, but when we crash. The strangeness and confusion when we are in the middle of a mistake, in some exceptional ‘unfinished’ state, in an unknown situation, is something beautiful.”102 Just like for Kulik, the art of transgression and boundary crossing is an important factor in Libera’s oeuvre. When asked how he felt about traversing the boundaries of intimacy in making the films about his grandmother, he replied, “I am already beyond it. I spent a year in prison. Taking care of my grandmother was the first thing that I experienced after leaving under amnesty in 1983.”103 As this and other comments suggest, being in prison changed the artist’s attitude toward public and private space: There’s a strip search, where you have to put all of your personal belongings on the floor, for example, my drawings and notes; in prison, watching people in very intimate situations altered my attitude toward these matters. For me, there was no longer any sort of intimacy that could be hidden in any space. Suddenly, as if something expanded, I realized that nothing is intimate; everything you can see is for show. There is no reason to hide it.104

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Because his mother worked long hours as a nurse,105 she had no choice but to leave the care of her mother to her son. According to Libera, filming the scenes caring for his grandmother was merely incidental, as it did not change the nature of what he was doing; in many ways, he regards his film project as simply documenting the final stages of his grandmother’s life, and his own interactions with her. In his words, “Me caring for my grandmother happened whether I wanted to or not. I shed a repugnance of the body. Filming was a kind of purification; I can say that the body isn’t bad, old age isn’t bad, death isn’t evil.”106 The reaction to the two films indicates the degree to which they broke taboos and crossed boundaries. Although the films were neither widely shown nor widely known in Poland at the time, the responses among those who did see them demonstrate the efficacy of Libera’s project. Intimate Rituals, in particular, is unabashedly graphic. The images of his grandmother’s withered body, barely able to act on its own, are poignant; the shots of her laying naked and spread-eagle on the bed while Libera changes her diaper, wiping her genitals, in the rote movement of an action performed several times every day, are disturbing and difficult to watch. Even the scenes of him feeding what appears to be porridge into her toothless mouth are somehow unsettling. Reactions to the film, which was first shown to members of Strych in 1986, varied from shock and abhorrence to the denial that it was a work of art at all. Subsequently, museums and galleries refused to show it, feeling that it was simply too much. The effect was similar abroad, as well; as Libera recounted, fellow artist Adam Rzepecki brought Intimate Rituals to Stockholm to be shown as part of a photography exhibition, and one visitor covered the television with a coat, so that it couldn’t be viewed.107 In 1987, Libera was invited to show the film to a private audience consisting of the employees of the Museum of Art in Łódz´ . The artist remembered that “some people did not talk to me after that for many years.”108 In particular, he recalled one person who didn’t like the fact that in at least one instance, Libera filmed his grandmother, rather than helping her. “There is a scene in the film where my grandmother is lying on the floor and looking for something nearby with her hand. It looked rather dramatic, and Ms. M. held a grudge against me for not putting away

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the camera and picking up my grandma!”109 That same year, there was a biennale in Zielona Góra, Poland, and those who knew and valued Libera’s films nonetheless didn’t want to show Intimate Rituals, stating that it was “too intense.”110 Libera decided to present How to Train the Girls, and in fact it was the only video exhibited at the biennale. Regarding all of his works on display there, the artist remembers, “people didn’t know how to take them, or what was going on.”111 Even among the small and restricted audience of Private Art, the works were seen as controversial.

From Performance to Object: The Corrective Devices The significance of these early films notwithstanding, Libera is primarily known for his more visible works from the 1990s—the series of Corrective Devices that he began in 1994, the most famous of which was the Lego Concentration Camp, which sparked controversy in the media, and even prevented him from representing Poland at the 1997 Venice Biennale. The same principles that were at work in How to Train the Girls can be seen in the Corrective Devices, and in many ways these works are the physical manifestation of the ideas expressed in the artist’s earlier video performance. In a surprising reversal from the evolution of Polis’s work, where the artist realized his paintings first, and his performances only after perestroika, with Libera, the private nature of his performances, and the intimate makeup of the audiences, meant that the artist could create performances dealing with controversial issues in the 1980s, even after Martial Law had made the atmosphere for dissidence seemingly more perilous. Furthermore, the scarcity of materials in Poland at that time precluded the creation of physical objects of the nature and scale that he would make in the 1990s—the Corrective Devices consisting mainly of toys and machines made to look as if they were mass-produced, something that would not have been possible for an artist during the Communist period. Among the first Corrective Devices were Ken’s Aunt, a full-figured Barbie doll, complete with wide hips and a girdle (produced as a series of twenty-four, 1994), and You Can Shave the Baby, a plastic gingerhaired baby doll that, in addition to a full mop of curly hair on top

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of her head, also had fully-grown pubic hair, as well as hair sprouting from her armpits and on her legs (ten dolls, 1995) (figure 31). There was also Delivery Bed: Play Kit for Girls, a child-sized gurney, complete with stirrups, that young girls could potentially use to play “giving birth” to a baby (produced as a series of three, 1996) (figure 32). Instead of a birthing bed, the boys have Body Master (1998), two weight-lifting machines designed for use by boys aged seven to nine (figure 33). The device is fully functional, although the weights are made of paper. Thus, according to the artist, “one can only exercise the psyche of the child”112 by using this machine.113 Lego Concentration Camp, from 1996, was a series of seven different Lego sets, from which the user could build a concentration camp. The camps were not specifically Nazi concentration camps, but were meant to represent any such camp. The artist obtained the Legos from the Danish company, and reconfigured the sets so that the camps could be built using pieces that had originally been intended to construct other things. For example, the prisoners were taken from a “Pirate” set, and the roles of the oppressors were played by figures from the “Police Station” kit.114 Jan Stanisław Wojciechowski,

Figure 31. Zbigniew Libera. You Can Shave the Baby, 1995. Ten dolls in cardboard boxes, each 55.9 × 40.6 × 25.4 cm. Courtesy of the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

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Figure 32. Zbigniew Libera. Delivery Bed: Play Kit for Girls, 1996. Three pieces, each 120 × 80 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

curator of the Polish Pavilion at the forty-seventh Venice Biennale, gave the artist an ultimatum when he found out that Libera, who had been selected to represent his nation there, wished to exhibit Lego Concentration Camp: the artist could come, but the Legos “must stay behind.”115 Interestingly enough, however, the curator was willing to allow the piece to be reproduced in the catalogue for the Biennale, along with the other Corrective Devices that he would have allowed

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Figure 33. Zbigniew Libera. Body Master (II), 1998. Two exercise machines, doublesided advertisement, 11.4 × 45.7 × 71.1 cm. Courtesy of the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

to be exhibited.116 The artist felt that he had no choice but to resign from the exhibition altogether. Although it might seem ironic that the performances and videos that Libera created in Communist Poland during the period immediately following both the institution of Martial Law and his arrest and imprisonment met with less controversy than the objects produced in a free and democratic Poland in the 1990s, this phenomenon is indicative of the political situation and atmosphere in Poland in the 1980s, versus the 1990s. Ronduda describes Libera as being part of the “lost generation of the eighties. . . whose most creative years of life fell on the idle and depressive time of martial law in Poland.”117 About this generation, Hanna Wróblewska commented, “the media ignored them, first because of censorship (1980s) and later because it was preoccupied

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with social and political events (the turn of the 1990s).”118 Thus, the provocative nature of Libera’s work could only take full effect when the works reached the greater public in the years following the fall of Communism, when it appeared that the values of Western capitalism were the new enemy against which to fight. In both the performances and the objects, the artist was addressing the processes of gender identity formation as a result of the mechanisms that are constantly at work in society. By creating objects, the artist introduced an additional element to his critique, that of the free market, which only became relevant in Poland after the fall of Communism in the late 1980s. Whereas the films and performances from the 1980s fit into the category of Private Art—so much so that it didn’t matter whether they were viewed by an audience—the works of the 1990s were very much a part of not only the art market in general, but also the free market on which Poland was then beginning to trade. It is for this reason that they also contain within them a political aspect different from the earlier works. While the previous works were political by default, simply by having been created outside of officialdom, the later works were deliberately political, stemming from the fact that they explicitly addressed both the influence of the new free market in Poland on an understanding of the self, as well as the issue of the creation of objects by artists, and their existence in an object-centered world. Libera considers his toys, the Corrective Devices, documents that reflect and comment on contemporary society and its operating mechanisms. Just as he used his videos to draw attention to subjects that we are aware of but might not otherwise notice, his objects call into question the structures around which contemporary life is built. For Libera, there is little difference between a baby doll that cries or closes its eyes, enabling a little girl to “play” mother, and a gurney that allows her to play at the first stage of motherhood, giving birth. Likewise, dividing children’s toys according to gender—dolls for girls and cars for boys, for example—indoctrinates them into their adult male and female roles no less than a baby doll that can teach a young girl about shaving her legs, or a tiny weight set for teaching a young boy about how to grow up to be a “big, strong man.” With

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regard to Lego Concentration Camp, the artist underscores the fact that the children who grew up to build actual concentration camps were, at one time, children, playing with and building other types of similar constructions. Libera’s intent is not to indict or criticize contemporary society, but rather to lay bare the systems that govern it. Libera’s focus on dolls, toys, and children’s games relates to their function in our society. As our earliest learning tools, they teach us not only how society functions, but also how to interact and exist within it. The artist feels that “toys are generally educational, and it’s this aspect that fascinates me the most. With toys you can influence children. My toys are mainly targeted at adults, of course, the people who make the toys that introduce children to the world.”119 In fact, Libera maintains that it is through these very toys that we can understand ourselves,120 as dolls instruct us in how to be, dress, and behave. “The entire world is built around dolls. A whole world has been invented around [the notion that] what they say is ‘cool,’ [that they help teach] what is expected of you, how you should look, what you should think, how you should entertain yourself.”121 Whereas in his earlier work, Libera used the actual body to address these issues, his later works address these ideas through objects. Libera mentioned this transition from bodies to objects occurring around the death of his mother in the 1990s. With regard to How to Train the Girls, he stated that his interest lay in “problems such as exercise, fashion, enhancement, general education. Because what is more real than the body?”122 But with the death of his mother, he recalls that “getting rid of her 120 pairs of shoes, 60 coats, which took me a year, made me realize that after the death of someone it is not enough to put them in a coffin, but one has to pack all these things that you collected in your life, which are also part of your body.”123 He commented that this shift from the metaphysical to the physical was a way to produce something even more real: “this experience led me in another direction. I felt that the metaphorical art that I had been doing up until then had made no sense, and that I would begin to copy the process of producing actual things and create objects that one could actually use.”124 In the same manner that

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his videos documented the mechanisms at work in society, his objects also reflected this system. Instead of perpetuating the official myths regarding the ideal life in a Communist state, Libera sought to create a new type of mythology, one based on universal principles of human existence, factors common to all, at least in the modern Western world. As Norman Kleeblatt wrote in Mirroring Evil, “Libera sees how seemingly harmless items may pose serious psychological questions about gender, sexuality and childhood. This is the logical outgrowth of his earlier works that engage with Foucault’s notion of moral orthopedics to question societal conventions of beauty and propriety.”125 In fact, it is from the discomfort or embarrassment that Libera speaks of, that these questions arise. The questions that he raises reveal as much about human nature and the inner workings of the mind as the objects themselves do. According to the artist, “my work demonstrates the way the human mind functions. It reveals the illusions to which we succumb, which, in turn, evoke astonishment and embarrassment in us. A work of art cannot be accused of anything improper, because it is the person who is guilty.”126 In this sense, regardless of the means that he uses, the ultimate aim is essentially the same—to explore human nature, and the systems that govern it. Libera’s more recent work continues these explorations in the same vein, focusing on images, vision and memory, and the reality that is shaped by contemporary media. For example, his Positives series presents the viewer with photographs that resemble familiar scenes. They are images that would have originally been considered “negative,” for example, prisoners in a concentration camp. Libera, however, converts them into something “positive,” as in the case of the camp prisoners, by having the models smile at us from behind the barbed wire fence (Residents, 2002, based on a 1945 Russian film still). His untitled series from 2003–06 is a display of photographs of photographs of famous architectural monuments, taken from an oblique angle, in order to explore the effects of peripheral vision. Likewise, a similar series, La Vue (2004–06), is composed of close-up photographs of pages from magazines, made to appear as landscapes. Similar to the manner in

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which Gabra¯ns moved from the performance of appearance with Starix to an exploration of vision, perception, and sight in his later installations, Libera, too, continues to be fascinated by the manner in which our surroundings and relationships affect our development, as well as how our perception, which is quite often mediated through sight, influences our negotiation of these surroundings. He currently lives in Prague, however, having had enough of the debates and arguments about “the cross,” meaning the influence of the Catholic Church, in contemporary Polish society.127 Katarzyna Kozyra: The Men’s Bathhouse and the Women’s Bathhouse In 1999, Kozyra represented Poland at the forty-eighth Venice Biennale with the video installation The Men’s Bathhouse (Łaz´nia me˛ska), just two years after Libera was prevented from representing Poland with his Lego Concentration Camp. In order to realize the piece, Kozyra (with the aid of two cameramen) surreptitiously filmed the visitors to the men’s section of the Gellert Bathhouse in Budapest (figure 34). The artist herself was also present in the film, disguised as a man (figure 35). The installation of the work consisted of four simultaneous projections of eight minutes each onto four screens mounted within an octagonal architectural structure, which suggested the interior of a bathhouse. The films documented what was going on inside the bathhouse—the men walking around, chatting, and socializing, Kozyra among them (figure 36). The projections were visible from both sides of the screen. Accompanying these images was a short three-minute film documenting the artist’s transformation into a man, which was shown on a monitor at the entrance to the gallery.128 The Men’s Bathhouse was neither Kozyra’s first visit to a bathhouse, nor was it her first experience involving the filming of bathers using a hidden camera. In 1997, Kozrya completed The Women’s Bathhouse (Łaz´nia), which involved the artist entering the woman’s section of the Gellert, also in Budapest, and filming the visitors with a camera hidden in a plastic bag (figure 37). Although the artist was present in the bathhouse, she is not present in the video, as she was the one

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Figure 34. Katarzyna Kozyra. The Men’s Bathhouse (film still). Performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1999. Courtesy of the artist

filming the scenes. This work was exhibited at the Zache˛ta Gallery in Warsaw in 1997. The installation consisted of a main screen showing a four-minute looped projection of scenes shot by Kozyra in the bathhouse, as well as five television monitors showing unedited films. Reproductions of well-known artworks were edited into the main projection, for example, Ingres’s Turkish Bath and Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders.129 With regard to both works, the artist was reproached in the Polish popular press for violating the privacy and dignity of the visitors to the bathhouse, since she filmed them without their knowledge or permission. Nor did she ask the subjects for their permission to exhibit the images after she had filmed them. With The Women’s Bathhouse, Kozyra was also admonished for presenting women who were old, wrinkled, and aging, instead of showing the types of idealized female bodies that viewers were accustomed to seeing in advertisements, films, and magazines. The Men’s Bathhouse received even

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Figure 35. Katarzyna Kozyra. The Men’s Bathhouse (film still). Performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1999. Courtesy of the artist

harsher criticism, because of the fact that it represented Poland at one of the most prestigious international art venues, the Venice Biennale. Many could not accept the idea of a woman wearing a rubber penis in performance as a work of art. Furthermore, detractors were concerned that taxpayers’ money had gone to making this rubber phallus, focusing solely on this element of the performance. In stark contrast was the reception by art critics and historians in Poland (and abroad), who praised Kozyra for her deft questioning and overturning of cultural norms. The divided response is a reflection of the transitional period in Poland, the conservatism and traditionalism of the previous era giving way to newly democratic and global ways of thinking. In a country where citizens were just beginning to understand the meaning of (and be able to exercise) their newfound right to free speech, what they encountered was the familiar problem (in the West) of people with conflicting sets of interests arguing on opposite sides of that shared right.

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Figure 36. Katarzyna Kozyra, photograph of the artist disguised as a man for The Men’s Bathhouse. Performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1999. Courtesy of the artist

Figure 37. Katarzyna Kozyra. The Women’s Bathhouse (film still). Performance in the Gellert Bathhouse, Budapest, 1997. Courtesy of the artist

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Kozyra’s Artistic Background Kozyra, as an artist, was not entirely a product of the Communist system in Poland. She received her artistic training in Poland in the post-perestroika period. She attended the Warsaw Fine Arts Academy from 1988 to 1993, graduating from the sculpture department under the tutelage of Grzegorz Kowalski.130 As a child, however, she had spent a great deal of time abroad. In 1966, when she was three years old, her family moved to Austria, where they stayed for five years. They then returned to Poland for two years, and thereafter moved to Munich, where they spent six years. It was only in 1980, when Kozyra was seventeen, that her family moved back to Poland permanently.131 Although she claims to never have been interested in art theory, being more interested in the physical aspects of creation, she decided to study under Kowalski at the Arts Academy, because he was, according to her, known to be one of the most intelligent professors at the university.132 She also emphasized her freedom to express herself in Kowalski’s studio—“everything was allowed, including performance. Anything that you wanted, you could simply do.”133 Kozyra recalls feeling completely free regarding what she could create as an artist, how she could create it, and with what materials. The only limitations were with regard to access to and exposure to performance and conceptual art in the West, as well as the theory that went along with it, including feminism. According to her, students at the Arts Academy in the late 1980s and early 1990s were not taught feminist art theory. In her words, “during my time in school there was no such thing as lessons in feminism. That only started to become popular a few years ago. When I was at the Academy, I didn’t know anything about those things. But nevertheless, Kowalski taught us something about conceptualism.”134 In her day, art history and the philosophy of art ended somewhere around the 1940s and 1950s,135 and thus her theoretical lessons with Kowalski were the closest that she was able to come to learning about Western art theory and methodology. Despite the fact that she went on to work primarily in performance, her initial interest was in sculpture. Speaking about her

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student days, she commented, “I really didn’t know anything about [performance] and I had never really seen it, and frankly wasn’t interested in it.”136 Kozyra’s very first exhibition, occurring just as she was beginning her professional career, caused a great scandal that was played out in the popular press and on television.137 In fact, this was among the first public controversies surrounding a work of art in post-Communist Poland. In 1993, Kozyra presented her diploma work Pyramid of Animals as part of her MFA show in Warsaw.138 The piece was a sculpture consisting of four taxidermied animals—a horse, dog, cat, and rooster— stacked one on top of the other, reminiscent of the same image from the Brothers Grimm tale “The Bremen Town Musicians.” The statue was accompanied by a video that documented the slaughter and process of preserving the horse. The attack on the artist began with a television program, “Animals” (Zwierza˛t), broadcast in July of that same year. Her work was presented on the show, and the artist was accused of cruelty to animals and immorality for having killed the animals to use in a sculpture. For Kozyra, however, the work was about this very cycle of life, and the killing that goes on every day behind closed doors, to make our dinner meat and handbags. The video documentation for the film was meant to illustrate that process, and bring it to light, much in the manner of Oleg Kulik’s Piggly-Wiggly Making Presents.139

The Controversy Surrounding The Men’s Bathhouse After it was announced that Kozyra’s Men’s Bathhouse had been selected to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale, a series of articles, essays, and letters to the editor appeared in the Polish popular press criticizing and questioning the work. The main participants were educated citizens, professors in the humanities—although with admittedly no background in art, art history, or art criticism. They were people who claimed to be speaking for the average Polish citizen. The response to those critiques by art historians, art critics, and curators, both in Poland and abroad, was in support of the work and recognition of its investigation of gender roles and gender identity in

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contemporary society. Criticism focused on the artist’s use of a fake penis to create the work, which, for many, reduced it to mere pornography. The fact that the piece represented the Polish nation at such a prestigious venue added insult to injury, with detractors questioning the taste of the jury, and asking whether the work could even be considered a work of art at all. The use of taxpayers’ money to fund it was a major point of contention, especially since those opposed to it felt that the piece in no way represented the Polish nation. Those who supported the work felt that citizens’ lack of knowledge about contemporary art practices, combined with the inherent conservatism of the Polish people in general, were the main issues that stirred this controversy. As noted, the most controversial item of Kozyra’s performance was the element by which she gained access to the bathhouse, the rub. ber phallus. In an opinion piece in the conservative newspaper Zycie entitled “But what about Good Taste?” the editor, Łukasz Warzecha, described The Men’s Bathhouse as nothing more than pornography. As he deprecatingly explains: A woman glues on a fake moustache and beard, fake chest hair, and a fake penis, and after that she goes into a men’s bathhouse and observes the people bathing, filming them with a hidden camera. What the heck is that? Someone naïve could think that it is a porn film from a second-rate video shop. He would even show it in a way that had no connection with art, and this new face in contemporary Polish art would be foreign to him.140 His final statement demonstrates that he felt that the work by no means represented Polish art, given that a “naïve” viewer would not observe anything particularly Polish about it. Among the critics who commented on the use of the phallus was Zbigniew Górniak, who wrote, “it’s enough to go to a sex shop to be convinced of the fact that a rubber dildo costs much, much less”141 than the performance did. Several other journalists who focused on this element came up with humorous quips and catchy titles for their articles, such as “Success

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with a Rubber,” and “Lady with a Phallus,” to both poke fun at and debase the work. Concentrating on the phallus, these writers seemed to feel that it was the fake penis, as opposed to the work of art of which it was a part, which would be representing Poland at a major international art exhibition. In an interview, Warzecha posed the question thus to Vice Minister of Culture, Sławomir Ratajsky: “how do you feel as a minister of the country that will be represented by Katarzyna Kozyra’s film with a glued-on penis?”142 In his article on the piece, Piotr Gadzinowski, Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the satirical weekly Nie, asked, “can the Republic of Poland be represented by a dick abroad? Be represented respectably? All the more that it is a dick of the most subjective sort, because it’s a female one. Additionally, it is a fake dick.”143 The fake penis, symbolizing the sex that the artist was not, was highly offensive to these critics not only because of the fact that Kozrya, as a woman, had no right to possess it, but also for the fact that she exhibited this gender identifier as her own, at an international art exhibition.144 Many questioned whether The Men’s Bathhouse was, in fact, a work of art at all, commenting that it seemed to be more about scandal than anything else. Articles criticizing the piece contained comments such as “ ‘I provoke, I provoke, I provoke’—it seems that Kozyra is screaming this with her work,”145 and “the most irritating thing is the fact that her works are called art.”146 Ryszard Legutko, a professor of philosophy, went so far as to say that the scandal surrounding Kozyra’s work was confirmation that “the visual arts community today is in chaos. . . A completely nihilist aesthetic is currently dominating the plastic arts, which is allowed. . . to appear in an unhygienically great number of various artistic trends.”147 Stanisław Tabisz, a painter himself, said that he found the work “too hopelessly stupid, and in a certain sense pathological, because it is dependent on primitive and futile phallo-genital shock.”148 Because Kozyra’s work did not conform to the type of traditional fine arts that Poles might have been used to at the time, Tabisz, like many others, found it threatening, as it challenged his long-held notions as to what art should be, look like, and how it should function in the world. An issue common to all discussions in the press was that of funding. Many of Kozyra’s critics were outraged by the fact that this work

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had been paid for by public tax money—although in actuality it was supported by both public and private funds. The Polish Ministry of Culture awarded the Polish representative of the Venice Biennale the sum of 200,000 Polish Złoty (approximately $65,000), which was not enough to complete the project. The remaining monies of 30,000 PLN (roughly $9,700) came from a private source: a new fashion magazine called Max. Nevertheless, both Polish political parties149 were criticized for providing financial support to Kozyra’s project. Tabisz called The Men’s Bathhouse “the most common piece of nonsense paid for by public money,”150 and informed readers that the 200,000 PLN awarded to Kozyra by the Polish Ministry of Culture was more money than the entire Polish Artists’ Union received in one year.151 From these comments, it is clear that the work’s detractors felt that a monetary value could be placed on art and that one work of art could be more deserving of support than another, although these writers did not explain, exactly, on what basis they would determine a work’s merit or value. For these writers, because they, as Polish citizens acting as the voice of the people (insofar as they were educated in matters of culture and the humanities and writing for major newspaper publications) didn’t regard Kozyra’s Men’s Bathhouse performance as art meant that public funds shouldn’t be used to send the work to an art exhibition, much less one where it would be representing the nation as a whole.152

The Catholic Church and the Controversy over Kozyra’s Work The influence of the Church provides one explanation for the strong negative reactions to The Men’s Bathhouse. Indeed, Halina Filipowicz has made this connection with regard to the state of Polish theater after 1989. According to her, it is the Church’s hold on society that has given rise to this conservative atmosphere and approach toward the arts, citing the 1993 anti-abortion law153 as evidence of Poland’s acceptance of conventional attitudes, and stating that “post-communist Poland has embraced predominantly nonliberal values, as evinced by the imposition of religious instruction in public schools and restrictions on divorce and women’s reproductive rights.”154 In her opinion, it

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follows that “what emerged from the quiet revolution155 in Poland is a very traditional culture rooted in religious fundamentalism, patriarchal mythology, and exclusivist ethno-nationalism.”156 Filipowicz cites this as explanation for the rise of traditional and conservative theater practices in post-Communist Poland. This idea is echoed in Kozyra’s own remarks on the increased influence of the Catholic Church in the mid- to late 1990s. In her words, “before, [in the early 1990s,] Catholicism wasn’t as dominant—it has only started to dominate recently. Now it’s really grown to almost a perversion. It was just after Communism that the Church really started to grow.”157 She also indicts the Catholic Church for Polish citizens’ lack of knowledge, and what she considers a provincial approach to issues. She feels that Poles aren’t necessarily conservative, but instead rather parochial; they have a very low level of knowledge. Europeans have almost the same level of knowledge and style, but in Poland it has gotten really bad. And it’s because of all of these Catholics, who go to church and listen to this nonsense—of course, it’s not all nonsense. . . but they even try to manipulate people, for example, in the elections. They have too much power.158 Indeed, this power became very real for Kozyra when her 1995 photographic piece Blood Ties (Wie˛zy Krwi), was censored, when two of its panels were exhibited on billboards in public spaces throughout Poland in 1999, as part of a project called The Outdoor Gallery: By the Art Marketing Syndicate (Galerie Zewne˛trzne AMS) (figure 38).159 The piece consisted of four large-scale photographs of the artist and her sister, arranged in a square. In one of the photographs, Kozyra herself is photographed lying naked on a red half-moon; in the other, her crippled sister lies flat on a background of a red cross. The work was initially conceived as a protest piece against the war in the former Yugoslavia, specifically with regard to the victimization of women during the war. Kozyra was attacked for using the copyrighted symbol of the Red Cross and the red half-moon, and also for combining

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Figure 38. Katarzyna Kozyra. Blood Ties, part of The Outdoor Gallery: By the Art Marketing Syndicate, 1999. Photo piece installed on public billboards throughout Poland and censored with whitewash over the naked bodies. Courtesy of the artist

imagery of naked female bodies with a religious symbol (the cross). As this poster display took place during the year of Pope John Paul II’s visit to his homeland, upon learning that the posters would be displayed on city streets, religious and municipal organizations launched a media campaign against them. In response to public pressure, AMS, a Poznan´-based company that owns billboards through Poland, was forced to work out a compromise with the artist to cover the naked women.160 The discrepancy between the responses to Libera’s work in the 1980s and to Kozyra’s work in the 1990s is indicative of the different climates in which each artist was working. While during the Communist period, official lines were drawn to indicate what was and what was not tolerated in terms of artistic production, experimental forms of creative expression, and even exploration into feminist ideas, were unofficially tolerated, both by the public and the authorities.161 Adam Szymczyk, co-founder of the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, has gone so far as to say that “the protagonists of the new state behave much more oppressively against artistic border crossings than the communists ever would have.”162 Libera also commented that nowadays, in the years

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since 1989, there is not necessarily more freedom, as democratization would suggest, but rather an “appearance of freedom,” because of the fact that “everything has been very tightly enclosed in institutions, institutionalized,”163 and it is these institutions that create the patterns and frameworks into which art is made to fit. He contrasts this with the situation in the 1980s, when “we were aware that we were making something meaningless, something that was only for us, so we could do what we wanted, without reference to anything. . . meaning without thinking, for example, that someone would buy this, or that it would be shown in London.”164 Indeed, one could argue that it was both the absence of the art market and the tolerance of dissidence that granted artists more artistic freedom (or at least the semblance of it) in the 1980s, than in the 1990s. It was not, however, the appearance of the art market in the two decades following the fall of Communism that created a significant shift in artistic production, but rather the solidification of the role of the Catholic Church in Polish society.

The Reception of The Men’s Bathhouse in Venice In contrast to its reception in Poland, The Men’s Bathhouse was met with praise in Venice. Reporting from Venice, Dorota Jarecka, an art critic and writer for Gazeta Wyborcza, commented on the fact that The Men’s Bathhouse was received favorably at the Biennale, where it prompted a discussion about art and its boundaries, rather than causing controversy for its content. As she wrote: In Venice, it wasn’t a scandal. No one saw any kind of provocation in Kozrya’s work. No one was offended. No one was shocked by the fact that there were naked men in the film. Instead, they talked about the way the film was made (with a hidden camera)—not in the context of a scandal, but as a continuation of the long-time discussion about what is allowed and what is not allowed in a documentary film.165 In fact, Jarecka cites Oleg Kulik’s Russian Dog performance in the Russian Pavilion of two years prior,166 which, unlike Kozyra’s work in

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Poland, was accepted as art without question in Russia. In her article, Jarecka also mentions other equally or more “shocking” works that could be seen at the forty-eighth Biennale. As for Kozyra, she was pleased with the reaction of the audiences in Venice, remarking that although viewers asked questions about her piece, they took it seriously as a work of art; their queries were a result of engagement with the work, as opposed to accusation. In her words, “I met some great people in Venice, and my Men’s Bathhouse was very well received. . . People often questioned me critically, with rhetorical questions, but they spoke seriously, without aggressiveness.”167 This reception was significant to the artist, because of the fact that viewers questioned her, but “without malice.”168 Not only was The Men’s Bathhouse well-received in Venice by spectators, it also received an honorable mention by the judges. The jury awarded Kozyra that accolade because of the manner in which the artist “explores and examines the authoritarian predominance of the male territory and unites elements of performance and mise en scène.”169 Western audiences evaluated Kozyra’s work according to its merits, instead of responding with indignation regarding the method of presentation. Because the work corresponds to contemporary art practices familiar in the West, the Biennale viewers had the necessary vocabulary with which to respond to the work of art. Furthermore, the piece echoed and developed the challenge to notions of gender and beauty that had already been undertaken by feminist and conceptual artists in the West in the 1960s and 1970s. When asked about the Ministry’s opinion of Kozyra’s work, Sławomir Ratajsky, the Polish Vice Minister of Culture, tried to remind readers of Z˙ycie that the Biennale presents the most modern and experimental works of art that a country has to offer. While conceding that some might find this work controversial,170 he said that “the Biennale is mainly a celebration of the avant-garde. We have to take that into consideration. And the work of Katarzyna Kozyra is characteristic because it is avant-garde, so you can’t condemn it.”171 The discrepancy between critics’ reactions in Poland and abroad points to a crucial difference between the operation of these avant-garde techniques and strategies in the East and in the West. While in the West, artists had

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posed similar challenges to the status quo, utilizing performance art since the 1960s, in Poland, critical art from that time had taken the form of protest against the (Communist) government. Now that its art had different concerns to address, such as gender and its image in the mass media, the Polish public began to take issue. Furthermore, in the West, the avant-garde had become accepted by society, whereas that had not yet happened in Poland, where there was a protracted period of modernism. . The comments of two writers in Zycie reflect a particular attitude toward the avant-garde and its tactics. They suggested that those who chose Kozyra’s work were more interested in its shock value than its artistic merit, asking whether “local [Polish] art curators rely more on the effect of artistic provocation—with bad taste, in the opinion of many—than the actual value of an artistic work.”172 This statement reveals that the two writers considered shock and artistic value as two separate and mutually exclusive qualities. Kozyra, however, was aware that shock could be used as a strategy, as evinced by her response when asked about its function: “thanks to art, communication comes out of it [the shock]—a communication deeper than what you can see materially.”173 She recognized that the issues that she dealt with were often difficult ones, which people generally try to avoid. In her art, however, she asks viewers to confront and face the issues head-on. Kozyra explained, “people try to run from things that are difficult or uncomfortable. That’s why I am not supposed to show them these things. In the end I didn’t do it at their expense, but at my own. I terrorized them a bit.”174 This statement resembles those behind the concept of the Embarrassing Art that Libera produced in the 1980s, and the idea of the necessity of confrontation with difficult ideas through art. Kozyra indicates that she is aware of the consequences of her strategies, and the fact that that in order to motivate her viewers to think, she had to risk rejection by those very viewers. In fact, the debates that sprang up surrounding Kozyra’s work are evidence of the efficacy of the artist’s tactics, and the necessity of these debates in contemporary Poland. Magdalena Ujma points out that although the negative response to Kozyra’s work was difficult for the artist, it is also what she originally intended, and thus indicates

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her success. In Ujma’s words, “she managed to overcome the sluggishness of the Polish public and awaken them to a discussion about contemporary art,”175 a statement that echoes the aims of the historical avant-garde. Anda Rottenberg considers this discussion an important outcome of the work, because of the fact that “knowledge of contemporary art is very weak in Poland—the gap between the average level of knowledge of art in Poland and in other countries is huge.”176 The artist herself was pleased that the piece provoked audiences to think, asserting, “it’s worse when art has no influence. If something has no affect on me, it’s like it isn’t real, it’s unimportant; I can’t enter into a dialogue with it.”177 Others, however, lamented the quality of the actual discussion surrounding the work. For example, Aneta Prasał criticized the media178 for its refusal to take part in a productive dialogue, and for overlooking the key issues. In her opinion, the members of the media were “unwilling to engage in an actual discussion about art, but they are willing to moralize, flatter popular taste, and look for sensational themes. They move away from being informational and toward simplification, generalization, and falsification.”179 For example, none of the articles on The Men’s Bathhouse published in Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s second leading daily and arguably one of the most influential newspapers in the country, contained any serious probing of the issues that Kozyra’s piece raised, nor even a questioning of the meaning of the work, beyond the discussion of its mechanics and the circumstances in which was exhibited. At that time, many of Kozyra’s supporters who could have provoked interesting and engaging discussion were still young art historians and critics who hadn’t yet acquired a voice in Poland.180

Gender Trouble in Poland By adopting the appearance, and genitals, of a man, and entering a male-only space, Kozyra demonstrated that gender, as opposed to sex, was a mere social construct, just as Libera had done with his video and Corrective Devices of several years prior. Kozyra, however, used her own body for the experiment, performing the male gender herself. This revelation was in complete opposition to the stability and order

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that comprised the very foundation of Polish society at that time. By challenging that order, she challenged the constancy of the world of her critics as well. As a consequence, they felt threatened, and, in a defensive move, accused her work of not being a work of art at all. Yet Kozyra’s and Libera’s work goes much further than simply upsetting the status quo. Because it was the Church that upheld these traditional gender roles and values in Polish society, and because the Church is so closely linked with Polish national identity, their work poses a threat to the very core of that Polish society and national identity itself. Furthermore, since it was the Church that was so instrumental in the overthrow of Communism, to go against that body once Poland had finally achieved its independence from Soviet control could be viewed as tantamount to treason. One can make comparisons between Kozyra’s art and work by Western feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s, for example, Carolee Schneemann, Hannah Wilke, and Eleanor Antin. The comparison, however, would be a superficial one, because of Poland’s social and cultural climate in the 1990s.181 Kozyra has asserted that she was unaware of Western feminist art practice until the late 1990s, when she began to read books on the subject. Even in Kowalski’s studio, students were not taught feminist theory. It was only later, around 1996, that the artist started reading texts on Western feminism, although she denies that they were influential on her work. As she recalls, “I only started reading all of those specialist texts [about feminism] that one is supposed to read in ‘96, ‘97, or ‘98. I had to adapt to it all so quickly that I wasn’t completely sure what exactly it was all about.”182 In fact, by that point she had already created Olympia.183 When asked whether she had been aware of Schneemann’s and Robert Morris’s 1964 recreation of the Manet original (entitled Site), she replied that at the time, she was not.184 According to Kozyra, her ideas are her own, and she does not cite any particular artist, feminist or otherwise, as an influence on her work. The rise of feminist art in the West, specifically in North America, coincided with the women’s rights movements in the United States and Europe. Performance art was a preferred genre with feminist artists in the West, as it was already outside the mainstream, and performance artists themselves were engaged in challenging the consumerist culture

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that modernism had brought with it. Women performance artists in the West also rejected the modernist tradition, as they saw it as a system of hierarchy and power that was predominantly masculine. Schneemann even stated, “I realized there were only two roles offered for me to fulfill: either that of ‘pornographer’ or that of emissary of Aphrodite,”185 a comment which in fact has echoes in the reception of Kozyra’s art in Poland in the 1990s (which reduced her work to pornography), as well as the critique that the artist made of these expected roles.186 Women performance artists sought to introduce the feminine self into artistic practice and to press for greater representation in galleries, museums, and at universities.187 Furthermore, by underscoring the active role of women as artists, as opposed to passive objects or models, women performance artists in the States were critiquing the traditional subject/ object binary within art, and reclaiming the female body from an object of male fantasy. As Amelia Jones has stated, “precisely because feminist body artists enact themselves in relation to the long-standing Western codes of female objectification, they unhinge the gendered opposition structuring conventional models of art production and interpretation (female/object versus male/acting subject).”188 The woman artist as a moving, speaking subject thus challenged the patriarchal Gaze that had been present in visual imagery for centuries. In contemporary Poland, the notion of “woman” had been shaped by both the postwar socialist state and the Church. Under Communist rule, women were considered equal and said to benefit from considerable equality of rights; while this was true in theory, the reality was much different, and in some cases, quite the opposite. As Piotr Piotrowski has noted, “all the Stalinist and post-Stalinist political regimes adopted definite anti-female policies, often under the guise of spectacular gestures.”189 Thus, the government cultivated a myth of equality of women in its ideology. The guise of equality masked what was actually a traditional hierarchical and patriarchal structure, much like the one that women artists in the West had been opposing in the 1960s, further complicating the development of a feminist movement in Poland. Thus, Kozyra and Libera were faced with a dual task: to challenge the traditional social order, as well as the socialist rhetoric about equality between the sexes.

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In Poland, the Communist ideology was further complicated by the Catholic Church, whose sway over Polish society has already been discussed. The Church cultivated the image of Matka-Polska [Mother Poland], a woman who was at the same time a domestic mother and mother to (and therefore protector of) the nation. Kowalczyk has described this woman as one who “looked after the Polish home and was a guardian of national values.”190 In her view, “the Polish Church strengthened the model of a traditionally passive woman, who can realize herself only in her home and family.”191 After Polish independence, the Church maintained its strong support among the population, as it was seen to have helped bring an end to Communism and thus regarded as the savior of the Polish nation. It was these ideas—the false notion of equality under socialism and the concept of Mother Poland—that Polish artists were challenging with their work resembling Western feminist art. In addition to issues of nationalism and the Church, female as well as male Polish artists had to deal with the legacy of state control over the body and its consequent attitudes toward nudity, especially with regard to the male body. Thus, the body as used in performance art in Poland by both male and female artists took on a political dimension. Just as women artists in the West used their bodies in performance to reclaim them from the male Gaze and patriarchal control, artists in the East used their bodies in performance as a way to reclaim the body from the state, and also to reclaim public spaces. Under Communism, any public action was at risk of being caught by surveillance, which is why artists creating performances usually did so in private. Zdenka Badinovac’s analysis of work by a Serbian and a Romanian artist, both of which involved the male artists exposing themselves, can be useful in understanding the specific connotation of the body as it is used in performance art in Eastern Europe: in the East, where the threat of police surveillance and censorship was omnipresent, people were very cautious about their public behavior and communication. It is true that the public exposure of what was private was (and still is) also limited in democratic environments, but this is ascribed primarily to public morals.

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One of the essential differences between East and West lies in the fact that similar gestures are read differently in different spaces.192 The use of the body in performance art in the East, then, can be described as a reaction against ideology and state control over public space and expression, as opposed to the market and commodity culture, as it was in the West.193 Furthermore, feminism, and the rights that women were seeking following liberation from the state, were much different in the East. Pat Simpson reminds us that after 1989, freedom for post-Communist women meant “freedom from being property of the state, and from being constrained to work or to participate in government and Party structures under a quota system,”194 quite the opposite of what women’s liberation entailed in the West. Furthermore, the post-Communist condition meant the “freedom to occupy what Western feminists would view as traditional, patriarchally defined spaces of femininity—decoration, mother, domestic slave, whore.”195 Indeed, the necessity of employment during the Communist period precluded some of those roles, as did the absence of consumer beauty goods and fashion items. Consequently, for many, feminism seemed an irrelevance imported from the West. In this sense, the so-called feminist art that we encounter in the East was faced with several challenges on many fronts. In the absence of a commodity culture, the female body became a singular commodity or object of consumption, insofar as it is always already so.196 In becoming an activist body, in the case of Kozyra, it also had the potential to become commodified.197 Thus, the Eastern female body, in the 1990s, faced a triple threat—to break free from the commodification that was the objectification of the female body to which women had been subjected for centuries, and escape from a new type of objectification that came with the post-1989 influx of Western imagery and media images, while also freeing the body from its pre-1989 objectification by the state. In this sense, it is no wonder that a work by Kozyra could be seen as so subversive, yet at the same time so powerful, in that it required particular force to tackle all of these sources of attack from all sides—East and West, past and present, Church and state.

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It is for this reason that the label of “feminist art” is a tricky one with regard to Polish art, as what may appear to be “feminist” to Western observers is usually placed under the rubric of Critical Art in Poland.198 Ronduda, among others, has hailed Libera as being the “father of Polish critical art of the 90s,”199 and, indeed, elements of his Embarrassing Art of the 1980s can be seen in this later development.200 Piotrowski has defined Critical Art as that which—in true avant-garde fashion—“knocks us out of our automatic mode of looking and thinking, revealing the functioning of hidden structures and relationships of which we are not always conscious,”201 which is precisely what How to Train the Girls, the Corrective Devices, and the Bathhouse performances all aim to do. Kowalczyk points out that male artists address gender issues in their work as well, which makes the term Critical Art a more accurate label. In her formulation: In the 70s and even 80s the Polish socio-political background was not favorable to feminism. The feminist art that appeared was influenced by Western feminist tendencies, which unfortunately often resulted in simplified imitations that did not refer to issues rooted in Polish reality. Moreover Polish artists have not come up with feminist programs and theory related to their own unique position. Some of the most prominent women artists have denied having any connection with feminism. This trend however was connected with lack of a public art discourse in Poland, and a lack of critical tendencies. The situation started changing after the collapse of communism in 1989, when feminism started developing a more fully self-conscious program of artistic actions. Defining one’s own identity, questions of body and lately analyzing ways of disciplining the body through consumer culture are the main questions of feminist and critical art in the 1990s. I should add that I prefer the notion of “critical art” as it seems to me more precise.202 She goes on to cite male artists, such as Libera, who also address the issue of gender and society. Since both male and female artists were engaged in the critique of the social determination of gender and standards of beauty created by media imagery, in Poland this art took

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the form of social critique in general, as opposed to being limited to a specifically feminist agenda. Indeed, like Libera, Kozyra feels that both men and women are subject to the same degree of pressure to live up to a certain ideal in contemporary society. With her Bathhouse videos, Kozyra stated that she wanted “to show people how women really look, because there is always this ‘imagined’ [ideal] woman.”203 She wanted to share these images “so that women wouldn’t feel pressured to be any certain thing [for example, live up to an imaginary ideal]. For them, it is a kind of pressure.”204 Indeed, this echoes what the Los Angeles performance artist Cheri Gaulke stated about the natural connection between women and performance art: “performance art is not a difficult concept to us [women]. We’re on stage every moment of our lives. Acting like women. Performance is a declaration of the self.”205 Kozyra, however, feels that a similar type of stress exists for men in modern society, and her Men’s Bathhouse attempts to provide liberation for them, as well. Not only do modern men have anxieties about their appearance, but they also must provide for their families and be strong for them.206 Furthermore, there is the demand to conform to the role of the heterosexual male. This is especially true in contemporary Polish society, where traditional values regarding gender roles and the family remain thoroughly engrained. As Kozyra stated with regard to The Men’s Bathhouse: You know, the men didn’t look any better than the women; everyone looks the way they look. . . But there is something in our society that says that men have to look good, earn a good living. They have to in order to support their family. I mean, I don’t know if they have to or don’t have to, but that’s the way it is. They also have to be sexually ready. So they also have a certain role to play. The only thing is that men don’t really have anything to protect themselves with, because women have started to protect themselves with feminism. . . but I think that men should start to protect themselves as well.207 This echoes Libera’s statement about boys and girls being confined to their respective gender roles at an early age, and his memory of

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his mother not allowing him to play with a doll. In this sense, both Kozyra’s and Libera’s work was not simply about releasing women from their roles, but about releasing individuals from their respective gender roles in society, regardless of their sex. One can draw parallels between Kozyra’s change of gender and that by the American artist Eleanor Antin, in her series of performances, starting in 1972, entitled The King.208 Whereas Kozyra simply adopted the guise of a man in order to create one performance, The Men’s Bathhouse, Antin adopted an entire persona known as The King.209 In some ways, Antin’s King bears more resemblance to Polis’s Bronze Man, in that it was an actual character that reappeared in a particular place (in Antin’s case, Solana Beach, San Diego, California) and interacted with its public. Like Polis’s work, The King performances also took a on a political dimension at times, for example, in The Battle of the Bluffs (1975–78), which was created in response to the potential destruction of some rare pine trees for the sake of real estate development. Kozyra’s performance does bear some superficial resemblance to Antin’s. Like Kozyra did in the exhibition, Antin included documentation of her transformation into a man, by the application of a fake beard, for one of her first performances in 1972. The Battle of the Bluffs, like The Men’s Bathhouse, also represented the artist’s country at the Venice Biennale—in 1976. In both pieces, the artists demonstrate that gender is a social, as opposed to biological, construct, and that one can become male by adopting the behavior and appearance of a man. As Howard N. Fox wrote about Antin’s work, “to become a man, she had not needed to change her sex but only her gender—that culturally codified matrix of behavioral traits and norms that define one as ‘male’ or ‘female’—by adapting imaginatively to the behavior that suggested a man.”210 But whereas Antin adopted the role of the archetypal male, one occupying a position at the pinnacle of power and agency, Kozyra maintains that her role did not give her any feeling of security or superiority, although it did afford her the agency required to enter the private men’s space of the bathhouse. “Sticking a cock on didn’t make me feel like a guy! I have no idea what it feels like being a guy. Being a woman I felt terribly ashamed among men. Even though I was disguised, I felt totally naked.”211 While Kozyra’s costume cloaked her, at the same time it

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exposed her, underscoring the difference between actually being a man in society, and simply acting or appearing as one. Like with Libera’s childhood doll, it created a gap between the male and female realms. It was not only her appearance, but more so the context, that made others believe that she was a man. As she put it: I was wearing a cap that made me invisible—how rewarding to make fools out of men. A woman “dresses up” as a man. And it works, even though everybody there observes everybody else. Nobody can tell she’s a woman. You know what I think? It’s a sauna for guys. So even if the towel fell off my tits, they’d never even think there was someone of the opposite sex there with them: that the dude with the tits was a broad. Their conviction that I was a guy cloaked me better than any disguise.212 This is also quite different from Antin’s King, who appeared in public spaces considered gender-neutral. Kozyra entered a space that was gendered as masculine, a place reserved only for men. Whereas for Butler, it is the temporal element, as well as recurrence of the acts, that constitutes gender, Kozyra introduces the element of a gendered space that was so crucial to the success of her project. This space, too, was part of her costume or disguise, as it also enabled others to believe that she was a man. While Critical Art presented something relatively new to Polish art audiences in the 1990s, it also indicated a radical shift in art practices by artists in the country in general, which coincided with the regaining of independence in 1989. Insofar as in the 1980s the “critical” art that was produced was largely either nationalistic or anti-Communist in nature, most viewers supported the rebellious, anti-establishment content of the work, no matter how avant-garde it was. Indeed, Elz.bieta Matynia contended that Polish women artists in the 1990s attempted to use their art to shift the discourse from a focus on national identity to a post-Communist one. In her words, Polish women artists today have launched a major effort to rework a syndrome of Polish culture that has been dominant for

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two centuries, by moving away from a preoccupation with issues of national identity and sovereignty to an attention to active, post-national citizenship, the key agency in a democracy.213 Ewa Hauser recognized the role that artists could play in the 1990s, when “Poland is now busy re-defining the context of its national identity and restructuring the meaning of gender within it.”214 Kozyra’s work, like Libera’s, participates in this restructuring and redefinition, by challenging commonly-held notions in Poland. In this sense, it resembles the projects of Afrika and Kulik, although unlike the Russian artists, Kozyra did not specifically identify the reshaping of identity as one of her goals. In the 1990s, then, the status quo was actually the open, democratic, free-market, capitalist-consumerist society that the nation’s inhabitants had fought for throughout the Communist period. Those who opposed that system, or any of the features that came along with it, by default opposed the democracy that Poles had sought for decades, as well as the Church, having led the fight for it. Whereas Rottenberg held that during Communism it was considered an obligation to defy the government, in word, mind, or deed, she also noted how that conviction had changed dramatically after independence: “the vivid and dynamic art scene which developed in opposition to communism gave way to the everyday toil of putting forward values more enduring than topical gestures.”215 While the Communist system brought with it its own set of problems to contend with for both artist and citizen alike, so, too, did the post-Communist period. Artists were among the first to engage in a critique of the new capitalist society, which included an attack on mass media, advertising, and consumerism. Kowalczyk has gone so far as to call these “threats for human freedom,”216 which only appeared after 1989. Instead of accepting the value system that the media promoted, critical artists in Poland suggested their own, alternative value system. The new system represented the much- and long-coveted freedom for Poles, which was also supported by the Church, in that it promoted similar views on women in society. Consequently, any attack on it was considered unpatriotic, and unwelcome.

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Insofar as Kozyra’s work, according to Kowalczyk, attempts to upset that “universal order of things” and challenge the so-called “unchangeable ethical code,”217 for her, this work is extremely important, because of the fact that it remains within the realm of art, and as such can work to challenge the notions of beauty and gender set forth by the mass media. In her words, “it is precisely contemporary art that can rupture this canon, bringing female bodies, which ‘are different from the dominating norms and expectations,’218 into visibility, as it did with The Women’s Bathhouse. In this way it poses questions about these very norms.”219 Like Libera’s oeuvre, Kozyra’s highlights the hidden mechanisms at work in society, thus raising questions about them, as opposed to offering any answers. The fact that her work caused such controversy is evidence of the need for a confrontation, and such questioning, in order to move forward the discourse on women, body image, and gender construction in contemporary Polish society. The lack of knowledge of feminist and gender theory in Poland in the 1990s can be considered critical to the nature of the reception of Kozyra’s work. Mira Marody and Anna Giza-Poleszczuk’s 1992 study of this topic determined that most women in Poland at the time believed gender to be a biological, as opposed to social, construct.220 Kozyra’s work (and Libera’s in the 1990s), then, would have been among the first to propose to the general public that it was otherwise. In this sense, in Poland, feminist ideas were introduced to the population first through art, as opposed to having filtered down from academic discourses to the public sector, through activist groups, for example, as happened in the West. Thus these views could be seen to have been imposed on the public, as opposed to the public co-opting them for themselves. Indeed, Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk discuss the fact that since 1989, women have been forced to choose between old and new roles,221 and that choice is not always clear, with conflicting possibilities coming from home and abroad, from the Church and from the West, from history and from the media. Kozyra, in her Bathhouse performances, presented one option; in Piotrowski’s view, in both pieces, she “played a phallic role,”222 insofar as she acquired agency, and filmed/looked, as opposed to simply being looked at. In this sense, her performance coincides with the feminist performance

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art that we are familiar with from the West, wherein women became what acted, as opposed to being acted upon. The striking difference, however, is the precise moment in which this performance occurred, when market capitalism forced women into new roles, yet without the language and self-possession with which to negotiate them. One of the strongest objections viewers had to the bathhouse pieces was the fact that Kozyra filmed these people in a private space, without their permission. This discussion also has particular relevance for a post-Communist society, as both public and private space were under constant scrutiny in Communist-era Poland,223 making privacy a coveted item, often identified with the free and democratic West. Kozyra, like Libera before her, exposes privacy for the myth that it is, even in Western society. While those who grew up in Communist-era Poland feared a different kind of surveillance, Western society is in no way free from the violation of its private space as well. Kowalczyk feels that the very idea of a bathhouse challenges the notion of a division into public and private, and that Kozyra highlights the superficiality of this division and brings it to our attention: The artist was accused of infringing on the privacy of the women filmed, but the filming took place in a public bathhouse. This makes us reflect on the current divisions, in popular consciousness, of the spheres of public and private, on the meaning of this division and its ambiguity. Even the institution of public baths blurs the distinction between public and private.224 Just as Libera did with Intimate Rituals, Kozyra exposes the reality that privacy, much like the images of women presented to us in magazines, is an illusion—it doesn’t exist, although we would like to believe that it does. In Kowalczyk’s words, “in contemporary culture the image of privacy presented in the public sphere is always constructed, even if by style and mass media. That means that that ‘privacy’ is a fake product, a product for sale (in the form of gossip, intrigues).”225 Once again, Kozyra has smashed our hopes, interfered with our possibility of believing in the illusions with which we are presented, not only by the mass media. While critics blamed her for taking advantage

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of women by filming them, the artist recalled that women came up to her following the opening of The Women’s Bathhouse in Warsaw to thank her for showing women as they really are. Kozyra thought that she could also do the same for men, by showing them in their natural state, asserting, “it’s not just because I’m a woman that I’m showing women; as a woman, I can just as well show beautiful men. Because it has nothing to do with my gender.”226 Kozyra’s performance demonstrates the fact that she refused to be limited by her gender from making an artwork that she wanted to make, simply because only men were allowed in the men’s bathhouse. The notion of beauty has particular relevance in post-Communist Poland. Izabela Kowalczyk has proposed that beauty was a “subversive category in the East,”227 reminding us that this category must be treated differently when looking at socialist states, where a commodity culture did not exist in the same form as in the West. In this sense, both Kozyra’s and Libera’s insistence on the recognition of the real body that exists beneath the doctored and enhanced version could prove threatening to the average viewer, for whom the beautiful body remains a myth that needs to be perpetuated. Indeed, Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk have identified the connection between attractiveness and success for women in post-Communist Poland, mentioning classified advertisements seeking “young, attractive women.” Furthermore, they mention companies that have dress codes and contracts requiring women to come to work with their nails painted and legs depilated.228 They also noted a similar situation for men, with a new image being fashioned for them by the post-1989 Polish media, as “strong, attractive, individualistic and dominating.”229 In the same way that Polis and Gabra¯ns disclosed the truth behind false appearances for their viewers, so, too, do Kozyra and Libera. In choosing to reveal beauty and attractiveness as a construct, as much as gender is, they force their viewers to confront what it means to put on an appearance for one’s public. For Magdalena Ujma, the strong reactions to Kozyra’s work only confirm the conservatism and traditional tenets of Polish society: “these reactions attest to the fresh reception of what in other places stopped shocking a long time ago. It attests to a provincialism,

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which wouldn’t be so bad in and of itself, if it didn’t come from the steam of xenophobia.”230 Ujma’s mention of xenophobia echoes a statement made by Piotrowksi, wherein he pinpointed both nationalism and globalism as two issues plaguing post-Communist Europe. For him, the former is an effect of the latter, a defense mechanism in order to preserve the known identity—“a defense of the identity of margins,”231 stating that “nationalisms can be more or less closed, more or less defensive, surrounded by the walls separating them from all the ‘others.’ ”232 In this sense, the defensiveness of Polish viewers of Kozyra’s art can be seen as a mechanism used to preserve Polish society as it was defined at the time. Any major paradigm shift or change in ideology is in fact a disruption to the order of things, which, in light of this fact, makes the strong reaction of Polish viewers understandable.

After The Bathhouse Kozyra continues to utilize the mechanism of performance in her current work. At the time of writing, she had just recently finished a major four-year-long project entitled In Art Dreams Come True, which was a total work of art, in that it took over the artist’s life, completely blurring the lines between professional and private life.233 During the project, Kozyra shadowed a Berlin drag queen, Gloria Viagra, and an opera singer, known as The Maestro. The aim of the project was for Kozyra to learn how to “be a woman” from the drag queen, and how to be an opera diva from the maestro. The artist learned to apply makeup, dress in drag, and sing. The project culminated in a number of live performances of operatic productions for real audiences. On Gloria Viagra’s birthday, she performed a striptease in a gay club. Dressed as a drag queen, she proceeded to remove her clothes; upon removing her underpants, she revealed her fake penis (a moment that I hope was not missed on those who objected to the cost of the phallus when it was used in The Men’s Bathhouse, as the performance is clear evidence that the taxpayers got their money’s worth, it having been used for not one performance, but two). As the coup de grace to her piece, she grabbed the rubber phallus, ripped it from her body, and placed it in

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the handbag that had been dangling from her wrist throughout the duration of the performance (plate 12). While Kozyra’s performances as a drag queen go one step further in demonstrating the performance of gender (with Kozyra as a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman), her operatic performances focus on the performance and masquerade that is life. The artist demonstrates that a human being, with the correct training and guidance—and repetition of acts, to reference Butler—can learn to be anything, thus proving the assertion in the title of the piece, that in art, dreams can come true. With regard to her opera singing, she stated that “you simply have to maintain the attitude [and] you can sell any old crap.”234 The same goes for gender, and more specifically, femininity, which, Kozyra stated, “always fascinated me somehow, interested me, but I thought it was a shame that I couldn’t experience it at all.”235 At which point, Gloria Viagra came in to the project, stating that she would groom her to be a woman, but “not like me—I will help you to find yourself.”236 Thus, Kozyra’s journey in performing gender, performing as both an opera singer and as a drag queen, ultimately resulted in her performing herself. Just as Kulik completely exposed himself, both in a literal and figurative sense, to his viewers, Kozyra, too, in performing out of her comfort zone as an opera singer, or stripping at a gay club, took risks as an artist, for the sake of creating a more profound experience for herself as a person, as well as her viewers. She compared her singing performances to those witnessed on television reality shows such as “American Idol,” where at times the performances can be so amateurish and awful that they become embarrassing. Reflecting on her own performance, she stated, “that’s also quite an interesting aspect for me: to strip the audience of this comfortableness and give it this feeling of embarrassment.”237 Much like Libera’s deliberately Embarrassing Art of the 1980s, Kozyra’s work returns to those original avant-garde principles, with the aim of achieving a more authentic experience, for both artist and audience.238 Kozyra’s work is not explicitly political, yet it was nevertheless received as such by her detractors, who saw her art as an affront to the Polish status quo in the 1990s, with its strict standards of beauty and

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gender hierarchy. While Kozyra aimed to communicate effectively to her viewers,239 many of them did not have the tools to identify with contemporary art practices, and thus rejected the work categorically, stating that it was incomprehensible as art. Their denunciation of the work, however, is a clear indication of the efficacy of her critique of social norms in Poland at the time. While Polis’s Bronze Man performances made a statement against the system that his audience had opposed since World War II, Kozyra attacked the foundation of the society that Poles had been trying to build since that same time. Whereas Afrika and Kulik aimed to rebuild a Russian idea from the crumbling Soviet one, Kozyra’s work challenged and provoked the stable sense of the Polish self that had long gone unquestioned. Regardless of the criticism her performances received, they nevertheless sparked a discussion with regard to the limits of art, and thereby also stimulated viewers to consider the issues that she presented in her work with regard to images of women and gender identity. In this sense, her viewers, even in receiving her work negatively, nevertheless still participated in the new democracy that was emerging in Poland in the 1990s. Kozyra, however, has chosen to exit those debates; like Libera, she has relocated abroad, currently living and working in Berlin. The work of both Libera and Kozyra highlights the significance of gender roles in contemporary Polish society, and, by revealing the mechanisms behind those identities, exposes them as mere constructs, as opposed to inherent or biological traits. While post-structuralist and feminist theorists had explored similar ideas several years prior, Polish society did not experience these discourses as broadly and consistently as in the West. Not only were these rigid gender roles and identities deeply woven into the fabric of Polish society, but they were part of the very core of the Polish national identity, which was largely based on its Roman Catholic background. As the Church had seen Poland through the Partitions, World War II, and single-party state socialism, to challenge the ideals of that Church would not only smack of ungratefulness, but would be near an act of betrayal. While Libera created his work under the rubric of Private Art, to small and specialized audiences in the 1980s, it remained largely unseen and therefore uncriticized, until he began producing more publicly known works of

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art in the 1990s. Kozyra’s Critical Art contained similar challenges and provocations of the Embarrassing Art of the 1980s, but because her work was created and exposed in a more public sphere (just as with Libera’s work from the 1990s), it therefore sparked more controversy. The sensations surrounding both of these artists’ work in the 1990s (as well as surrounding other Polish artists), are a testament to the efficacy of their projects, demonstrating that they indeed shook the Polish belief system to its very core. These performances of gender had relevance for audiences in Communist and post-Communist Poland alike, and the debates that their work set off in the 1990s helped shape that democracy in the Republic of Poland and advance these new ideas in the early years of its development.

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In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism, David Ross posed the question as to whether the transformations in Russia and Eastern Europe from Communism to capitalism would prove to have similar influences on art practices in the East, as capitalism had had in the West, in the immediate post–World War II era.1 We have seen how the disenchantment with consumerism and the commodification of the art object led to the development of postmodern art practices such as performance art in Western Europe and the United States. In Russia and Eastern Europe, similar practices emerged as well, but under a different set of socio-political circumstances. The performances discussed in this book are situated in varying temporal and geographic locations throughout the former Soviet sphere of influence; thus, this case study treatment of them in no way attempts to make any broader claim regarding performance art in the East. However, the analysis of these particular events in light of the changing social and cultural landscape continues to beg the question posed by Ross. In the same way that it was only in the 1990s that performance art in the West began to be conceptualized and theorized as one of the turning points in the shift to postmodernism, the time is now ripe, twenty years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, for that type of theoretical analysis and codification of performance art in the East. It is my hope that this book represents one of the first steps in that direction.

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Alexei Yurchak has postulated what he identified as a “performative shift” that took place in Soviet society around the 1950s. While Yurchak discusses the performative with regard to everyday life in the Soviet Union, as opposed to performance art per se, his ideas (like those of Judith Butler with regard to gender) can nuance our understanding of performance art in post-Communist countries. Yurchak believes that in the late-socialist period, the performing of ritualized acts, of acting as if they had relevance or meaning, became increasingly important, mainly for the possibilities that those actions afforded as a consequence—for example, participating in elections, attending official meetings and parades, or even artists becoming members of Artists’ Unions in order to obtain materials and a studio.2 For Yurchak, the fact that people performed these acts consciously did not make those rituals meaningless; rather, “the performative reproduction of the form of rituals and speech acts actually enabled the emergence of diverse, multiple, and unpredictable meanings in everyday life, including those that did not correspond to the constative meanings of authoritative discourse,”3 meaning that this in fact widened the scope of opportunities available, rather than narrowing them. Similar to what Butler has argued with regard to gender and sex, for Yurchak, the engagement with the performative allowed for the displacement of the constative meanings of the ritual being enacted. In this sense, the relevance of the literal or true meaning of the act is momentarily suspended, in the same way that gender can be performed, regardless of the sex of the individual engaging in the act. Following Yurchak’s view of the significance of the performative in everyday life in the former Soviet Union, this can then add another layer to our understanding of the use of performance art in the East to address current and relevant social issues—for example, to perform identity, appearance, or gender. In this sense, the performances in this book mirror the performative element present in everyday life, bringing these artistic acts that much closer to the real, making that line between art and life even more— again invoking Allan Kaprow—fluid and indistinct. The breakdown of the Soviet system, however, began when citizens ceased acting as if, and began performing other acts instead. For example, in Latvia, people began to organize mass demonstrations to

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assert their desire for independence. They stopped believing in the appearances before them, demanding that the truth be recognized. These new performances—public demonstrations—asserted the constative meanings of everyday acts, rather than ignoring them. Thus, Miervaldis Polis’s Bronze Man performance told the tale of the real meaning behind the bronze statues surrounding Soviet citizens in their cities, while his compatriots filled the streets to demand recognition of the truth regarding Latvia’s incorporation into the USSR. Once the Soviet system was dismantled, the transformation to a free-market, democratic society did not take place overnight. Indeed, most of the countries of the former Soviet Union and its satellites are still in the process of development, and some of the reconstruction has been inadvertently handled by artists whose work has participated in the shaping of these new societies. In Russia, for example, without any alternative program to develop a new sense of national-cultural identity in the newly emergent Russian Federation, two artists developed their own plan to create a new post-Soviet identity. Both Afrika and Oleg Kulik attempted to perform that identity in lieu of experiencing an actual one. In post-Communist Poland, a new society was unearthed when the old government was voted out of power, yet traditional family values, held in place by the Church, remained. Zbigniew Libera and Katarzyna Kozyra performed gender by acting as if, as Butler has informed us, it is not biological or inherent, as most Poles would have believed. They forced viewers, and the general public (insofar as much of their work became a subject of public debate), to confront the constative meaning of gender in post-Communist, postmodern Poland. Piotr Piotrowski has discussed how the fall of the Berlin Wall dealt a final death blow to the grand binaries of modernism. While acknowledging that the critique of the Cartesian subject began years before 1989, he held that “the effects of that critique within global culture can be discerned only in the last few decades of the twentieth century.”4 For him, the collapse of the East/West binary consequently sheds light on the collapse of the male/female one, among others, and vice versa. In his words: “one might say that the deconstruction of gender in the last two decades of the twentieth century overlapped with the fall of communism and its consequences, which implies a

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general revision of the perception of the world.”5 Thus, according to that view, projects such as Libera’s and Kozyra’s encapsulate the postmodern project in Eastern Europe par excellence. In fact, each of the projects in this study can be seen as an attempt to negotiate some form of a binary. Afrika and Kulik attempted to reconcile the loss of the self predicated by the notional loss of the East/West dichotomy. Polis and Gabraˉns concerned themselves with the discrepancy between the surface appearance and the truth beneath, aiming to pinpoint a true self that existed outside of official rhetoric, or, in Gabraˉns’s case, the rhetoric promoted by the media. While they focused on the deconstruction and reconstruction of the self in terms of national-cultural identity, Libera and Kozyra probed the core of identity without regard for geographical boundaries: gender. That their studies coincided with the dismantling of the great binaries of the twentieth century only underscores the significance of their quest. What all of this demonstrates, then, is not that the avant-garde is dead or destined to repeat itself, as Peter Bürger, Hal Foster, and Rosalind Krauss,6 for example, have argued, but that the production and consumption of art can and did have real consequences in developing nations from the former Communist countries of Russia and Eastern Europe. In the Soviet period, it may seem that those consequences were felt more acutely, in that artists risked persecution by the authorities for making works of art that did not conform to official requirements. However, in the late- and post-Communist periods, artists had the possibility to engage with much wider audiences, and impact public thought and opinion through contact with their art. This was certainly the case with Polis’s and Gabraˉns’s work, which reached a vast number of people, in the case of the former through hearsay and word-of-mouth, and in the case of the latter through the use of the mass media. Libera’s and Kozyra’s work from the 1990s received significant attention in the popular press, and many believe that their work launched a true discussion on the nature of the work of art in post-Communist Poland. Afrika is convinced that his appearances in ASSA and Lenin Was a Mushroom created a place for his voice to be heard among the general public in Russia, and Kulik’s work as a curator and internationally renowned artist guarantees that his

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work will have impact across a wider spectrum of society, in both East and West. The subversive nature of performance art in Russia and Eastern Europe in general, and of these six performances in particular— Crimania, The Russian Dog, The Bronze Man, Starix, How to Train the Girls (as well as the Corrective Devices that followed), and The Men’s Bathhouse (as well as The Women’s Bathhouse)—also take on a striking character when considered in light of Rebecca Schneider’s conceptualization of the “explicit body.” While Schneider specifically examined feminist performance art in her study, we may venture to view this theory in light of the East/West discourse that has been highlighted throughout this study. In her work, Schneider examined the “explosive literality at the heart of much feminist performance art and performative actions,”7 creating the term “explicit body” as a way to address “the ways such work aims to explicate bodies in social relation.”8 In her research, she identified several recurring elements in explicit body performance: first, that much of it “replays, across the body of the artist as stage, the historical drama of gender or race”9; second, that many artists “critically engage ways of seeing,”10 ways that had relegated women to be seen but not see. Third, she noted that the artists in question “often tug at the plumb lines marking bodies for gender, race, and class in order to expose their link with representational structures of desire in commodity capitalism.”11 Finally, Schneider identified the artists’ engagement with shock and the primitive. One can note similar themes within the works discussed in this book, namely, the engagement with ways of seeing (Polis, Gabraˉns), and the use of shock and the primitive (Kulik, Libera, Kozyra). I would, however, nuance Schneider’s descriptions, arguing that the artists in this study were also interested in the “replaying of the historical drama” of East and West, and “tugging at the plumb lines marking bodies” as Eastern or Western. Taken in this context, the acts of the feminist body in performance bear resemblance to the acts of the Eastern body in performance, in its quest for liberation from the state, from traditional modes of being seen as Other, a reclaiming of agency, and a desire for some form of integration into the (Western) art world. Schneider sees explicit body performance artists as those who

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“have deployed the material body to collide literal renderings against Symbolic Orders of meaning,”12 which is precisely what each of the artists in this study have done. Whether it was the literal rendering of identity, appearance, or gender, the dynamism of all of these works of art resides in the fact that they collided the Real (constative) with the Symbolic (performative) in order to explode dominant and prevailing hierarchies and open up the world of their viewers to something new—be it a new national-cultural, individual, or gender identity. Thus, while we can note superficial similarities between the performance art created in Russia and Eastern Europe with that of the West, different social circumstances created different artistic and social needs, which artists in these countries responded to by deploying what they believed to be one of the most direct modes of communication with their viewers, as well as the most visceral manner of engaging with these ideas. Thus, to paraphrase Zdenka Badovinac, similar gestures should be read differently in different spaces.13 In light of these ideas, we can see how each of the artists in this study, in his or her own way, in effect performed the East, playing out dramas of local socio-historical significance and cultural relevance by utilizing the genre of performance art. The probing of the specific issues of national-cultural identity, appearance, and gender at key moments in their respective countries’ history brought those issues to the fore and gave rise to discourses among the general public in ways that otherwise may not have occurred had the artists been operating in official spheres. The specific atmosphere in each of their working environments produced diverse responses to the pressures of the rapidly-changing socio-political environments of their localities; their work stands as a testament to that volatile and confusing period. In this sense, each project was both a reaction to, as well as a product of, the changing social times of which the artists were an integral part. Considering the significance of these performances, it goes without saying that the field of art history needs a redefinition of performance art that takes into consideration art produced in the former Communist “East.” This is a critical assessment that is long overdue. Although it is now more than twenty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, art historians have yet to revisit and revise existing definitions

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and understandings of contemporary art; this project is but one attempt to rectify this situation by doing so with regard to the specific genre of performance art. We are all too familiar with the contribution that Western performance artists have made to not only postmodern art, but postmodern culture in general. The case studies in this text have demonstrated how artists in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and Russia performed the East, forming their own variation of and contribution to the genre, necessitating a reconceptualization of performance art, East and West.

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NOTES

Introduction Performance Art, East and West 1 Roselee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001, second revised edition), 9. 2 See Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); C. Carr, On Edge: Performance at the End of the Twentieth Century (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993); Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993); Robyn Brentano and Olivia Georgia, eds., Outside the Frame: Performance and the Object; A History of Performance Art in the USA since 1950 (Cleveland: Cleveland Centre for Contemporary Art, 1994); Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 3 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 2003), 148. 4 Umberto Boccioni et al., “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” (1910), in Harrison and Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 151. 5 Ilya Zdanevich and Mikhail Larionov, “Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist Manifesto” (1913), in John Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 87–91. 6 As quoted in Goldberg, Performance Art, 126. 7 A prepared piano is one that has had its sound altered by placing objects between the strings or hammers. While John Cage popularized the term, other musicians, such as Erik Satie, had also used the technique prior to him.

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8 As described in Goldberg, Performance Art, 126–127. 9 Allan Kaprow, “Assemblages, Environments and Happenings” (1959–61), in Harrison and Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 720. 10 Ibid., 722. 11 As described in Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 100–103. 12 See for reference Paul Schimmel, “Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998); Thomas McEvilley, “Anti-Art as Ethics: Themes and Strategies,” in Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Postmodernism (New York: McPherson and Company, 2005), 217–232; and Goldberg, Performance Art. 13 Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (1958), as published in Jeff Kelley, ed., Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 5. 14 A reference to J. L. Austin’s use of the term to denote speech acts (J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). For a discussion of performance art and performativity, see Meike Bal, “Setting the Stage: The Subject Mise-en-Scene,” in Peter Pakesh, ed., Videodreams: Between the Cinematic and the Theatrical (Cologne: Walther König, 2004), 29–47. 15 See for example Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 16 Kaprow had also attended some of John Cage’s classes at the New School for Social Research in New York. 17 See Goldberg, Performance Art, chapters six and seven; Roselee Goldberg and Laurie Anderson, Performance: Live Art since the 60s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 26; and McEvilley, “Anti-Art as Ethics,” 227. 18 For an interesting discussion of what one scholar sees as the three fundamental formal elements of performance art—stillness, repetition, and inconsistency—see Anthony Howell, The Analysis of Performance Art (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1999). 19 It is worth mentioning that both of these artists were involved with Fluxus, an international network of artists that came together in the 1960s to create alternative art and performances. The group was mainly held in place by its leader, George Maciunas, who, interestingly enough, is of Lithuanian origin. 20 Although much could be said with regard to the differences between the development of performance art in North America and Western Europe,

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22

23 24

25

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27 28 29 30 31 32 33

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that is not the purpose of this book. I am simply mentioning performance artists on both continents in the West that have relevance for the Russian and Eastern European artists in this study. There was an enormous publicity campaign surrounding the exhibition, and over three thousand people flocked to the gallery for the opening. Blue cocktails were served, but aside from that, nothing more occurred. The exhibition was open for two weeks, and about two hundred people per day came to see the empty gallery. For more on Yves Klein, see Hannah Weitemeier, Yves Klein, 1928–1962: International Klein Blue (London: Taschen, 2001); Pierre Restanay, Yves Klein: Fire at the Heart of the Void (Putnam: Spring Publications, 2005). Otto Mühl, “Material Action Manifesto 1964,” in Malcolm Green, ed., Brus Mühl Nitsch Schwarzkogler: Writings of the Viennese Actionists (London: Atlas Press, 1999), 87. The fact that the truth behind the myth surrounding the plane crash and its aftermath has been questioned is addressed in chapter one. For more on Beuys, see for example Alain Borer, The Essential Joseph Beuys (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997); Mark Rosenthal, Sean Rainbird, and Claudia Schmuckli, Joseph Beuys: Actions, Vitrines, Environments (London: Tate Publications, 2005). Although Abramovic is Yugoslavian, she emigrated to the Netherlands in the 1976, at the start of her artistic career. She is currently based in New York, and despite her Eastern origins can be regarded as a Western performance artist, given that the majority of her work was created in, and related to, the West. Marina Abramovic, “Time-Space-Energy or Talking about Asystemic Thinking,” interview with Velimir Abramovic, in Thomas McEvilley et al., eds., Marina Abramovic: Artist Body: Performances 1969–1998 (Milan: Ediziono Charta, 1998), 406. Goldberg, Performance Art, 11 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), 25–26. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 22. Jones, Body Art, 1. Ibid. Ibid., 21. See Peggy Phelan, “Introduction: Ends of Performance,” in Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, eds., Ends of Performance (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 1–22. A work of performance art does not always need an audience

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present for its completion, however. A case in point is Vito Acconci’s Step Piece (1970), which took place in the artist’s studio, without an audience present, although it was documented photographically. Every morning, he stepped off and onto a stool, until he had to stop from exhaustion. Progress reports were distributed to the art public. While Fried’s article specifically discusses the phenomenon of Minimal Art, Roselee Goldberg, among others, believes that there is an implicit connection between conceptual art and performance, insofar as both are based on the idea, and sometimes the idea is performed (performance art), while at other times it is made material in the form of an object (Minimal Art). See Goldberg, Performance Art, 7. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Harrison and Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 838–839. See Sayre, The Object of Performance; Carr, On Edge; Phelan, Unmarked; Jones, Body Art. Thomas McEvilley supports this view as well, stating that “the wave of antiart that led into Conceptual and Performance Art has been more successful than any artistic movement since the Renaissance,” in The Triumph of AntiArt, 351. Rebecca Schneider also queries this notion, stating that she finds it “telling that the avant-garde and the option of ‘shock’ that it championed should die just as women, artists of color, and gay and lesbian artists began to make critically incisive political art under their own gender-, race-, and preference-marked banners,” in The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 4. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 57. Sayre, The Object of Performance, 12–13. See for example the following essays in the catalogue for the 1999 exhibition After the Wall: Bojana Pejic´, “The Dialectics of Normality”; David Elliott, “Looking Things in the Face”; Piotr Piotrowski, “The Grey Zone of Europe,” all in Bojana Pejic´, ed., After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), 16–28, 29–34, 35–41; Aleš Erjavec, “The East and West of Art in the Era of Biennales,” in Aleš Erjavec, Postmodernism, Postsocialism, and Beyond (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 173–188; see also Pat Simpson’s defense of the use of the terms East and West insofar as they are “elements of external norms signified in language,” in “Peripheralising Patriarchy? Gender and Identity in Post-Soviet Art: A View from the West,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 393. For an interesting discussion of German art in East and West during the period of the Cold War, see Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).

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41 For example, Jacques Derrida’s 1967 essay on decentering, “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” 42 For example, Susan Buck-Morss, in Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), to be discussed below, as well as Alexei Yurchak, whose project aims to discover a language with which to discuss Eastern Europe not in terms of binaries: Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 4–10. 43 Even Igor Zabel, in “Dialogue,” has argued that the Interpol scandal, which divided the art world in terms of East and West (and which is discussed in chapter one), is evidence of the fact that the East–West division still exists. In Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 354–361. 44 Indeed, this is how Hoptman and Pospiszyl define the terms in their introduction to Primary Documents, 9. 45 Bojana Pejic´, “Proletarians of All Countries, who Washes Your Socks? Equality, Dominance and Difference in Eastern European Art,” in Edit Andras, Keti Chukrov, and Branko Dimitrijevija, eds., Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), 20. 46 Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 205. 47 Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious: Communal (Post)Modernism in Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 13. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 25. 50 Elisabeth Sussman, “The Third Zone: Soviet ‘Postmodernism,’ ” in David A. Ross, ed., Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 62. 51 Rasto Mocnik, “EAST!,” in IRWIN, East Art Map: Contemporary Art and Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 343. 52 Simpson, “Peripheralising Patriarchy?,” 393. 53 Magda Cârneci, “Another Image of Eastern Europe,” Revue Roumaine d’Histoire de l’Art XXX (1993): 43. As quoted in Piotr Piotrowski, “ ‘Framing’ of the Central Europe,” in Zdenka Badovinac, ed., 2000+ Art East Collection (Bolzano/ Vienna: Folio Verlag, 2001), 19. Piotrowski even argues that Eastern Europe could represent more “genuine” European values than those in the West, as its culture has remained untainted by “commercial conditioning” (20). 54 Marina Gržinic´, as quoted in a panel discussion (No. 3) in Mind the Map! History Is Not Given: A Critical Anthology Based on the Symposium (Berlin:

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Revolver, 2006), 72. For other “codifications” of Eastern Europe similar to my own, see Hoptman and Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents; Piotrowski, “ ‘Framing’ of the Central Europe,” to name a few. Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 230–278. Ibid., 237. Throughout his work on the East, Groys has argued for a reassessment of the assumptions that we take for granted on the region. In The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), for example, he argues that Stalin’s project of building socialism was in fact a continuation of the avant-garde program launched by artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko in the 1910s; thus, the reason for the discontinuation of this line of artistic experiment, and its being subsumed by Socialist Realism, stemmed from that fact that it would have essentially been competing with Stalin’s plan for hegemonic totality. In Art Power (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), Groys continues this reassessment, arguing for a reconsideration of politically motivated art, and suggesting that it is not so different from commodity art. Groys’s reevaluations of Soviet art necessitate a rethinking of the terms “modern” and “postmodern” in the East. Aleš Erjavec, Postmodernism, Postsocialism and Beyond (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), vii–viii. Aleš Erjavec, “Introduction,” in Aleš Erjavec, ed., Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition: Politicised Art under Late Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 20. Ibid., 18. Sussman, “The Third Zone,” 63. Also see for reference the exhibition catalogue Jo Anna Isaak, ed., Layers: Contemporary Collage from St. Petersburg, Russia (Baltimore: University of Maryland, 1995). The exhibition examines post-Soviet artists who the curators refer to as “deconstructionists” (and thus postmodern) insofar as they play with the signs and symbols of Soviet culture in their work. Sergei Bugaev’s (Afrika’s) banners are included in the exhibition. Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, “The 1960s and the Rediscovery of the Other in Russian Culture: Andrei Bitov,” in Mikhail N. Epstein, Alexander A. Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover, eds., Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 31–86. Joseph Backstein, “Waterloo Bridge (The Philosophy of Perestroika),” in Joseph Backstein, Ekaterina Dyogot, and Boris Groys, eds., Glasnost: Soviet Non-Conformist Art from the 1980s (London: Haunch of Venison, 2010), 43. Zdenka Badovinac, “Body and the East,” in Zdenka Badovinac, ed., Body and the East: From the 1960s to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 16.

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65 Alexander Genis, “Perestroika as a Shift in Literary Paradigm,” in Epstein, Genis, and Vladiv-Glover, eds., Russian Postmodernism, 87–102. 66 Hoptman and Pospiszyl acknowledge this in their introduction to Primary Documents, 9. 67 Eda Cˇufer discusses this issue in “Enjoy Me, Abuse Me, I Am Your Artist: Cultural Politics, Their Monuments, Their Ruins,” in IRWIN, East Art Map, 362–376, commenting on the “powerlessness of post-communist countries to democratize themselves through their own historical, intellectual and creative resources” (364), and furthermore stating that “the socialist regimes did not cultivate the artistic, scientific and political criticality that would have allowed them to articulate and reflect how society was being perceived by its own members” (369). She also observes that it wasn’t that artistic movements that developed in the East were inaccessible, but rather that “one of the rules of the Western art system’s historical narrative in the twentieth century is that it includes only those outsiders who came inside,” meaning, those artists (such as Ilya Kabakov, Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, and the like), who emigrated (375). 68 IRWIN, East Art Map, 13. 69 Ibid., 14. One rather successful example of this type of juxtaposition was the exhibition It’s the Real Thing: Soviet & Post-Soviet Sots Art & American Pop Art. See Regina Khidekel, ed., It’s the Real Thing: Soviet & Post-Soviet Sots Art & American Pop Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); See also Helena Demakova, “Stylistic Parallels in Western and Latvian Contemporary Art in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century,” in Sylvija Grosa, ed., Latvijas ma¯ksla starptautisko sakaru konteksta¯ (Riga: Neputns, 2000), 164–175. 70 Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989 (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). One might also mention his more recent book, Art and Democracy in Post-communist Europe (London: Reaktion, 2012), published as this book went to press. 71 Ibid., 9. 72 Badovinac, “Body and the East”; Pejic´, After the Wall; Andras, Chukrov, and Dimitrijevija, eds., Gender Check. 73 The 3rd revised edition of her text, published in 2011, contains brief discussions of Russian and Czech performance art. 74 For a discussion of the impact of these policies on the arts, see Margaret A. Rose, “Avant-Garde Versus ‘Agroculture’: Problems of the Avant-Garde—From Lenin to Stalin and After,” in Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx & the Visual Arts (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Christine Lindey, Art in the Cold War (New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1990); Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1991); Gleb Prokhorov, Art under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting, 1930–1950

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(Roseville: Craftsman House, 1995). For a nuanced discussion of the policy of Socialist Realism, see Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); and Evgeny Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). The avant-garde was most actively suppressed during the Stalin era, however after the Khrushchev thaw artists began to feel safer to experiment with unofficial artistic production in their free time. However, it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union that these policies were officially abandoned in favor of the freedom of expression that came with the new democracy. Joseph Stalin, “Speech at the Home of Maxim Gorky” (October 26, 1932), as quoted in “From Andrei Zhdanov’s Speech,” in Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, 293. Andrei Zhdanov, “Speech to the Soviet Writers’ Congress” (1934), republished in The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 20. Ibid., 21. See Leonard Heller, “A World of Prettiness,” in Lahusen and Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism Without Shores, 51–75. Once the Soviet Union was expanded, following World War II, to include satellite nations such as Latvia and Poland, artistic production in those countries, as well, also came under state control, and thus artists in those countries had to also adhere to the tenets of Socialist Realism. Paul Sjeklocha and Igor Mead, Unofficial Art in the Soviet Union (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 42. Elena Kornetchuk, “Soviet Art and the State,” in Norma Roberts, ed., The Quest for Self-Expression: Painting in Moscow and Leningrad, 1965–1990 (Columbus: Columbus Museum of Art, 1990), 17. That is not to say that all performance art in the East was responding to social issues. Most notably, the works of Collective Actions (discussed in chapter one) were not specifically politically motivated. However, it can be said that performance artists in the East could not and did not respond to the commercialization of art in the manner that they did in the West. Claudia Mesch examines the manner in which performance art in East Germany contributed to the process of destabilization in the late 1970s and 1980s, which eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. See “Performance West and East: The Freedom of Failure,” in Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin Wall, 162–205. A case in point is a painting by Miervaldis Polis that was thought to be criticizing Lenin; this is discussed in chapter two.

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85 See for example Komar and Melamid, “The Barren Flowers of Evil,” in Hoptman and Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents, 258–271, as well as other statements by the artists to that effect. 86 Ekaterina Dyogot discusses the effects of the lack of a commodity culture on artistic production in Russia, stating that because artworks were created in a “non-competitive zone,” they were similar to objects created for people by their families, and served to create a sense of community. See “Still Soviet, Becoming Art,” in Backstein, Dyogot, and Groys, eds., Glasnost. 39. Cˇufer made this observation, with regard to the problems associated with comparing Eastern and Western conceptualism, in “Enjoy Me, Abuse Me, I Am Your Artist,” 373; and David A. Ross also discusses this disconnect with regard to Moscow Conceptualism, and the fact that it differed from its Western counterpart stemming from the different political circumstances out of which it emerged. See David A. Ross, “Provisional Reading: Notes for an Exhibition,” in Ross, ed., Between Spring and Summer, 22. 87 Badovinac, “Body and the East,” in Body and the East, 15. 88 Ibid., 16. 89 Ibid. 90 Ilya Kabakov, in Robert Storr, “An interview with Ilya Kabakov,” Art in America 83, no. 1 (January 1995): 125. 91 Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,” in Ferguson, ed., Out of Actions, 230. 92 Aleš Erjavec, “The Negativity of Culture,” in Erjavec, Postmodernism, Postsocialism and Beyond, 167. 93 For an interesting juxtaposition to my study, see “Dialogues and Border Crossings,” the second chapter of Johannes Birringer’s Performance on the Edge: Transformations of Culture (London: Athalone Press, 2000), 67–148. Birringer chronicles the dialogue on performance in areas undergoing significant socio-political shifts, such as Berlin, Germany, and Sarajevo. 94 See Peggy Phelan, “The Ontology of Performance: Representation Without Reproduction,” in Phelan, Unmarked, 146–166. 95 Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 96 Ibid., 3 97 Marina Gržinic´ discusses a similar disconnect between theory/criticism and the artwork in Slovenia, in “On the Re-Politicisation of Art Through Contamination,” IRWIN, East Art Map, 477–486. 98 Boris Groys, “Back from the Future,” in Badovinac, ed., 2000+ Art East Collection, 9. 99 Ekaterina Dyogot’s professor’s statement, in Mind the Map!, 147.

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100 Marina Gržinic´, “Mind the Map! A Conceptual and Political Map!,” in ibid., 19. 101 Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, “Introduction,” in Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson, eds., Performing the Body/Performing the Text (New York: Routledge, 1999), 2. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid., 4. 104 Groys, in Badovinac, ed., 2000+ Art East Collection, 13. 105 Ilya Kabakov, in foreword to Hoptman and Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents, 8. 106 Hoptman and Pospiszyl, introduction to Primary Documents, 9. 107 Dyogot, in Backstein, Dyogot, and Groys, eds., Glasnost, 39. 108 The Latgalian dialect bears similarities to Polish, and this region is predominantly Roman Catholic, whereas the remainder of Latvia is primarily Protestant. 109 The Polish curator prohibited him from exhibiting his Lego Concentration Camp, a set of Lego blocks with which one could potentially build a Nazi concentration camp. This is discussed in chapter three.

Chapter 1 Afrika and the Russian Dog: Performing Post-Soviet Identity in Russia 1 Hereafter, this institution will be referred to by the acronym “MAK.” 2 For the purposes of this book, I will be focusing on the identity question during and after the Soviet period, although the “Russian question” has also been addressed in regard to the pre-Soviet era and the construction of an Imperial, as opposed to ethnic, identity. See Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552–1917 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Robert Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial Identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002); and Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians (New York: Belknap Press, 2003). For cross-reference with post-colonial literature, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006). On the issue of East European identity in the post-Communist period, see Michael D. Kennedy, ed., Envisioning Eastern Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). 3 This idea is supported by others, such as Simon Dixon, in “The Russians and the Russian Question,” in Graham Smith, ed., The Nationalities Question in the Post-Soviet States (New York: Longman, 1996), 62; and Antje Herrberg and Ulf Hedetoft, in “Russia and the European Other: Searching for a

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Post-Soviet Identity,” in Antje Herrberg, ed., Which Identity for Which Europe? (Aalborg: Aalborg University, 1998), 86. Russians distinguish between ethnic Russians (russkii) and civic Russians (rossiiskii), or inhabitants of the territory of Russia, the latter including people who live in Russia but are of various ethnicities, including Chechen and Tatar. See Dixon, “The Russians and the Russian Question,” 47–48. Mark Sandle, “Search for a National Identity: Intellectual Debates in Post-Soviet Russia,” in Christopher Williams and Thanasis D. Sfikas, eds., Ethnicity and Nationalism in East Central Europe and the Balkans (Cambridge, England: Ashgate Publishers, 1999), 68. This idea is supported by others, such as Dixon, “The Russians and the Russian Question,” 62, and Herrberg and Hedetoft, “Russia and the European Other,” 86. Sandle, “Search for a National Identity,” 68. Ilya Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy: Nationalism and Leadership in Poland, Russia and Ukraine (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press: 1998), 180–181. Ibid., 181. For the purposes of this book, “national identity” refers to national-cultural identity, as opposed to ethnic or civic-statist identity. As Orlando Figes has stated, this identity involves “a Russian temperament, a set of native customs and beliefs, something visceral, emotional, instinctive, passed on down the generations, which has helped to shape the personality and bind together the community.” Figes, Natasha’s Dance, xxx. The question of ethnic versus civic identity is a separate issue that is also of concern to contemporary Russia, but will not be discussed in this text. Oksana Oracheva, “The Ideology of Russian Nationalism,” in Williams and Sfikas, eds., Ethnicity and Nationalism, 47. Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy, 219–220. It was a feat that would take time, however, and, indeed, is still in process. To again quote Prizel, “as with all other former empires, the process of devising a new post-imperial paradigm is slow and fitful. Russia’s weak national identity compounded by its close association with an imperial identity makes the process of ‘nationalization’ particularly protracted.” Ibid., 182. Geoffrey Hosking also addresses this issue in both Russia and Russia and the Russians. Hosking also makes this point in the chapter “From Perestroika to Russian Federation,” in Russia and the Russians, 569–614. Dixon, “The Russians and the Russian Question,” 47.

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16 See, for example, Hosking, Russia, as well as Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (London: Penguin, 1998); and Prizel, National Identity and Foreign Policy, 181–182. 17 See Herrberg and Hedetoft, “Russia and the European Other”; C. S. Browning also discusses this issue of “othering” in “The Region-Building Approach Revisited: The Continued Othering of Russia in Discourses of Region-Building in the European North,” Geopolitics 8, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 45–71. 18 These include the Baltic states and other Eastern European countries, such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and even Romania and Bulgaria. See Herrberg and Hedetoft, “Russia and the European Other,” 98. Stephen Carter has described Russia as having suffered a “triple defeat,” in that it lost both its outer and inner empire (Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the republics), and also suffered the defeat of Communism in the Cold War. See Stephen K. Carter, “Russian Nationalism and Russian Politics in the 1990s,” in Williams and Sfikas, eds., Ethnicity and Nationalism, 91. 19 See Carter, “Russian Nationalism and Russian Politics in the 1990s,” 98. 20 See Dixon, “The Russians and the Russian Question,” 64. 21 Oracheva, “The Ideology of Russian Nationalism,” 47. See also Sergei Alex. Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), especially the introduction, “ ‘We Have No Motherland,’ ” 1–14. 22 Oracheva, “The Ideology of Russian Nationalism,” 47. For more on the issue of the trauma of the Soviet experience, see Jacob D. Lindy and Robert Jay Lifton, eds., Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2001). 23 Sandle, “Search for a National Identity,” 68. 24 Ibid., 68. 25 Andrei P. Tsygankov, Pathways after Empire: National Identity and Foreign Economic Policy in the Post-Soviet World (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 47. 26 See Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism & Contemporary Russian Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 97. See also Simon Franklin and Emma Widdis, National Identity in Russian Culture: An Introduction (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 132; and Thomas Seifrid, The Word Made Self (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 27 Dean S. Worth, “Language,” in Nicholas Rzhevsky, ed., Modern Russian Culture (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 19.

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28 See for example Herrberg and Hedetoft, “Russia and the European Other,” 91. 29 James H. Billington, Russia in Search of Itself (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004), 3. 30 This is not to oversimplify the situation, however. Certainly in other republics, where Russian superseded local languages, the problem became a question of handling the residual Russian words that had come to describe specific Soviet concepts, which could not be expressed as succinctly in local languages. 31 For Jacques Lacan, the acquisition of language marks the entrance to the Symbolic Order from the Real, which is characterized by the awareness of desire, and thus lack. Whereas in the Real phase of development (prior to the Mirror Phase), the human subject is characterized by a sense of wholeness, in the Symbolic Phase we begin to be plagued by a sense of incompleteness; language is one element that separates us from our desires, keeping objects one step removed by their linguistic signifiers. Lacan argued that a trauma can cause us to recognize the reality of our existence, and thus return us to the phase of the Real. Julia Kristeva believes that it is the Abject that causes this return. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller and translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988); Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 32 Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 33 Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (New York: Routledge, 2006), xvii. 34 One can also note formal similarities between the performance art of Collective Actions and Western genres such as Earthworks and Site Art. 35 Margarita Tupitsyn has described this as “culturizing nature”—as opposed to “naturalizing culture”—in her essay “The Decade ‘B.C.’ (Before Chernenko) in Contemporary Russian Art,” in Norton Dodge, ed., Apt Art: Moscow Vanguard in the 80’s (Mechanicsville: Cremona Foundation; 1985), 5. 36 The other three founding members were Nikita Alekseev, Georgii Kizevalter, and Nikolai Panitkov. Collective Actions was an important development in Moscow Conceptualism. For recent publications on Moscow Conceptualism, see Boris Groys, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010); Matthew Jesse Jackson, The Experimental Group: Ilya Kabakov, Moscow Conceptualism, Soviet Avant-Gardes (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2010); and Alla Rosenfeld, ed., Moscow Conceptualism in Context

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(New Brunswick and New York: Zimmerli Art Museum and Prestel, 2011). See Tupitsyn, “The Decade ‘B.C,’ ” 8. Ibid. Tupitsyn has described the events of the action as follows: “Twenty viewers were seated in a field close to a forest. From the right side of the forest appeared a participant dressed in a violet costume. He walked through the field and lay down in a ditch. After three minutes of so-called ‘empty-action,’ a second participant, in a similar costume, stood up from a second ditch thirty meters from the first. Where his head should have been was an orange balloon. He pierced the balloon with a stick, and the explosion released a cloud of white dust. ‘Headless,’ he then returned to the ditch. Simultaneously the first participant, already back in street clothes, arose from his ditch and went into the woods. The ‘empty action’ of the ‘headless’ participant (lying in the ditch) continued until the audience left the field.” See ibid. Ilya Kabakov, “Vsia sut’ v perelistovanii” (The Whole Point is the Turning of the Pages), manuscript (Private collection, Moscow), as quoted in Ekaterina Bobrinskaia, “Moscow Conceptual Performance Art in the 1970s,” in Rosenfeld, ed., Moscow Conceptualism in Context, 155. A further difference between Western performance art and the genre as it evolved among Moscow conceptual artists lay in the creation of “action objects,” which “occupied an intermediate position between action art and artistic object” (ibid., 162). Examples of these are Collective Actions’ Slogans (1970s and early 1980s), in which the artists displayed slogans, reminiscent of Soviet propaganda, in unusual locations; also, the cube poems of Rimma Gerlovina, which were nonsensical texts written on the sides of cubes that the audience was asked to play with and assemble. For a description of this phenomenon, see “An Apartment Exhibition,” in Kathrin Becker, ed., Self-Identification: Positions in St. Petersburg Art from 1970 until today (Kiel: Stadtgalerie im Sophienhof, 1995), 52–54. Although apartment exhibitions had been taking place since the 1970s, it was only in the 1980s that AptArt truly took hold as a distinct genre and style. Margarita Tupitsyn has identified this trend as having been launched by members of Collective Actions who formed a group called MANI [Moscow Archive of the New Art], when they began showing work regularly in Nikita Alekseev’s apartment on the outskirts of Moscow. Tupitsyn, “The Decade ‘B.C,’ ” 10. See statements to this effect by Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid in “The Barren Flowers of Evil,” and by Ilya Kabakov, “Foreword,” in Laura Hoptman and Tomásˇ Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents (Cambridge,

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Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 258–271, 7–8. In a roundtable discussion at the SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art, the Polish artist Zofia Kulik mentioned that with regard to her artistic activities and performances in the 1970s, she craved a “witness” to those events, in the absence of any available form of art history or art criticism. Although she created performances and works of art, there was no one to criticize, historicize, or respond to them in any concrete manner (London, Courtauld Institute of Art, October 23, 2010). For discussions on distinctions between unofficial art in Moscow and Leningrad during the Soviet period, see Ekaterina Andreeva, “Gay Art,” and Victor Tupitsyn, “A Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg—Part I,” both in Becker, ed., Self-Identification, 100–116, 117–125; Victor Tupitsyn, “Pushmi-pullyu: St. Petersburg-and-Moscow,” in Victor Tupitsyn, The Museological Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 187–201. For more on Timur Novikov and his influence on the Leningrad/St. Petersburg artistic scenes, see Timur’s Territory (St. Petersburg: State Hermitage Museum, 2002); Ekaterina Andreeva, ed., Timur: “Vrat’ tol’ko pravdu!” (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2007). Xenia Novikova has also created a Web site about the artist: www.timurnovikov.ru. Novikov and friends also formed the Friends of Maiakovskii Club. Timur Novikov, interview with Juliy Dvorkin, “My Repentance of Malevich” (A State Russian TV-Radio Co. Production), published in Nelly Podgorskaya, ed., Timur Novikov, (St. Petersburg: Spaudos Konturai UAB, undated), 59. See also Novikov’s writings: Novyi Russkii Klassitsizm (St. Petersburg: Palace Editions, 1998); Timur Novikov Leksii (St. Petersburg: New Academy of Fine Arts/Gallery D-137, 2003). In fact, this echoes the turn-of-the-century World of Art group’s aim of uniting Western innovation with Russian artistic developments. Olesya Turkina, “St. Petersburg’s Neo-Academism. Revival of the Great Story,” http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/worldofart/english/0001/tekst_olesya_ ang.htm, accessed October 10, 2010. Also quoted in Antonio Geusa, History of Russian Video Art, Volume 1 (Moscow: Moscow Museum of Modern Art, 2007), 49. Bugaev developed an interested in reggae music and all things “African” as a result of Grebenshchikov’s influence, and the musician eventually named one of his albums, “Radio Afrika” (1983), as well as one of its songs, “Captain Afrika,” after Bugaev. See Andrew Solomon, The Irony Tower (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 136. This was also confirmed by Afrika in conversation with the author, July 2009.

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52 See Solomon, The Irony Tower, 136. This was common practice during the Soviet period; see Alexei Yurchak on “Boiler Rooms,” in Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 151–155. When, in 1987, the authorities finally found out about Afrika’s negligence on the job and his sham marriage, it was too late for there to be any repercussions. By then, he had already landed the lead role in ASSA, and had his official papers to leave for Crimea, where it was being filmed. The KGB interrogated Afrika, but when he produced the papers, there was nothing that they could do, so they were forced to let him go. 53 Solomon, The Irony Tower, 133. 54 For example, in the film, Bananan created strange devices such as a “communication tube” (a simple cardboard tube that one can use to communicate one’s feelings with others); made abstract, dream-like paintings; and performed outlandish rock music wearing crazy costumes, much as Afrika did in real life. Viktor Mazin even commented on the parallels between the two, in an interview with the author, September 23, 2007. 55 For more on ASSA, see Boris Barabanov, ASSA: Kniga peremen (St. Petersburg: Amfora, 2008). For a discussion on the various types of heroes offered by post-Soviet film, including Bananan, see Birgit Beumers, “To Moscow! To Moscow? The Russian Hero and the Loss of the Centre,” in Birgit Beumers, ed., Russia on Reels: The Russian Idea in Post-Soviet Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 1999), 76–87. 56 Mosfilm was established shortly after the Soviet Union itself was, in 1923, and produced over three thousand films by the end of the Cold War. Because it was responsible for producing most of the classic (and official) films of the Soviet era, it is significant that ASSA was also produced under this label. 57 The significance of this film cannot be overstated, as ASSA is remembered fondly to this day by virtually everyone who was around to see it on its release in 1987. Solovyev made a sequel to the film twenty years later, in 2007. Although Afrika has a cameo role in that film, the lead role went to another artist and rock musician who is nowadays as controversial as Afrika and Pop Mekhanika were in the 1980s, Sergei Shnurov from the group Leningrad. The film, 2ASSA2, came out in March 2008. 58 Afrika, in an interview with the author, December 24, 2007. 59 Afrika, in an interview with the author, September 23, 2007. 60 As stated by Afrika in conversation with the author, July 2009. 61 Louis Grachos, “Afrika as Phenomenon,” in Louis Grachos, ed., Afrika, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, Fisher Gallery, 1991), 17.

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62 As stated by Afrika in conversation with the author, July 2009. 63 Afrika also designed the costumes for a performance by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1989. 64 Other notable Westerners Afrika has met include Jacques Derrida, who came to his studio in the early 1990s, and with whom he was close, and the French psychotherapist Félix Guattari, whose apartment he stayed at in Paris in 1991. 65 Afrika, in conversation with the author, July 2009. 66 Insofar as the statue had been originally assembled in Paris, for the 1937 International Exposition, then disassembled and reassembled upon its return to Moscow, Victor Tupitsyn has observed that this act cannot be considered an original penetration, but simply a “mimetic act,” in V. Tupitsyn, “A Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg,” 189–191. 67 The artist no longer uses the original panel in his installations, explaining that it is too precious, and that he is worried about it being damaged or stolen. The panel remains in his studio, and may be viewed only with great care. 68 Mikhail Ryklin, “The Artist in the Collection and the World,” in Peter Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika: Crimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazàfaka (Ostfildern: Cantz Verlag, 1995), 16. 69 Alexander Liucii, Senior Researcher at the Russian Institute of Culture Research, published a book on the history of Crimea, which devoted one chapter to Afrika’s performance. See for reference Alexander Liucii, Nasledie Krima: Geosofiia, tekstual’nost’, identichnost’ (Moscow: Russkii impul’s, 2007). 70 While some critics have accused the artist of the exploitation of the hospital patients, in fact for its duration Afrika was considered, and treated, as one of them. Furthermore, the artist maintained close contact with the inhabitants of the institution following the performance, revisiting the site every few years. I addressed this issue in my conversations with the artist, Mazin, and Samokhvalov, and did not get the sense that any of them handled this situation in any way that could be considered inappropriate. 71 Afrika, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 64. 72 Sergei Bugaev Afrika and Viktor Mazin, “The Reflection of the Rebus and Stochastic Oscillations,” in Sergei Bugaev Afrika—Rebus (New York: Paul Judelson Arts, 1994), 19. 73 Afrika, in conversation with the author, July 2003. One of Jakobson’s contributions to the study of linguistics is his revision of the work of the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. After demonstrating that human linguistic activity is founded on the two axes of selection and combination, he applied that finding to the condition of aphasia, and concluded that aphasia either affected the axis of selection (those affected could not select the appropriate

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word to use) or combination (the person could not put his words together in a comprehensible sentence). See Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in David Lodge, ed., Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (Harlow: Pearson Education, Ltd., 2000), 56–59; and Roman Jakobson, Child Aphasia and Phonological Universals (Paris: Mouton, 1968). KGB stands for Komitet gosudarstvennoi bezopasnosti [Committee for State Security] and FSB, Federal Security Service [Federalnaia Sluzhba Bezopasnosti]. Adele Marie Barker, “Rereading Russia,” in Adele Marie Barker, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society since Gorbachev (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 3. Ibid. This is even more perplexing because of the fact in Russia there is the tradition of using the word “house” to refer to a shop, as in Dom Knigi [House of Books]. The cafe could just as easily been called Dom Kofe [House of Coffee], for example. Admittedly, none of these represent clinical examples of aphasia. In a true case of aphasia, the person speaking would think that he was speaking in clear and logical phrases, but to all others, his speech would sound like nonsense. Afrika uses the term “aphasia” to refer to this linguistic phenomenon in post-Soviet Russia in a symbolic sense. As in the example with the taxi driver, the passenger thought she was communicating one thing, while the taxi driver understood another. A similar situation could occur with a reader of the Kofe Hauz sign, who might misunderstand its meaning if he does not understand the linguistic play at work in the name. See also “Repatriating Capitalism: Fragmented Society and Global Connections” (chapter one) in Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair, 15–78. Mazin, Turkina, and Afrika have collaborated on several projects, including the publication of a journal of art theory and criticism called Kabinet, and the establishment of the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg. Mazin, in an interview with the author, September 16, 2007. Insofar as Mazin was a participant in the performance, he does not speak for Afrika (in fact, their views and appraisals of the performance sometimes differ), yet contributes another layer to the performance. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Afrika, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 62–63. In fact, at the time the Russian and Ukrainian governments were still arguing over which country would maintain control of the Crimean peninsula, once an independent

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republic of the USSR (1921–45) that had been “returned” to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954. Afrika, as quoted in Viktor Pavlovich Samokhvalov, “The Conception of a Fundamentally New Symbol: The Artist as an Object of Science and Art,” in ibid., 55. The plane crash is said to have occurred outside Sevastopol, which sits southwest of Simferopol, on the Crimean coast. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh has discredited the facts of the Beuys story in his article “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol; Preliminary Notes for a Critique,” Artforum 18, no. 5 (January 1980): 35–43. Peter Noever, “Between Two Worlds: An Act of Self-Assertion,” in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 5. As stated by Viktor Samokhvalov, in conversation with the author, March 2008, and confirmed by Afrika, in conversation with the author, July 2009. Afrika, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 62. Mazin, in an interview with the author, September 16, 2007. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Whether or not these views are accurate in terms of clinical psychology, the participants in Crimania held them to be true, and thus they form a part of the basis of the performance. Vera Rich, “Soviet Union Admits to Abuses of Psychiatry,” New Scientist Magazine 1795 (November 16, 1991): 13. See also Robert van Voren, Cold War in Psychiatry: Human Factors, Secret Actors (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010). Van Voren notes that this was a “handy” diagnosis, because of the fact that the symptoms were mild and slow to present, but progressed to more serious symptoms later. The 1973 World Health Organization Pilot Study on Schizophrenia reported that schizophrenia was diagnosed more frequently in the USSR than in any other country in the world. (Van Voren, Cold War in Psychiatry, 96–97.) Mazin, in an interview with the author, September 16, 2007. Ibid. As confirmed by the artist in conversation with the author, July 2009. Mazin, in an interview with the author, September 16, 2007. Ethology is, according to him, “the science studying the biological origins and evolution of human and animal behavior under non-experimental, natural conditions.” Samokhvalov, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 48. Afrika, in ibid., 63. Afrika, in a conversation with the author, March 2005; also, Mazin, in an interview with the author, September 16, 2007.

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102 Afrika, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 64. 103 Ibid. 104 Sergei Bugaev Afrika and Viktor Mazin, “Within the Spheres of Interimagery,” in ibid., 9. 105 The artist is never entirely clear as to what that new language would entail, although suggests that it would be an amalgam of Soviet and post-Soviet signs and symbols. 106 Samokhvalov, in ibid., 60. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 Mazin, in an interview with the author, September 16, 2007. 110 Afrika, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 67. 111 Ibid., 66. 112 Ibid. 113 Ibid. 114 Ibid., 68. 115 Viktor Mazin, in e-mail correspondence with the author, February 7, 2011. 116 In many of the Soviet republics, Soviet Army and Navy Day was unofficially considered “Men’s Day,” insofar as it preceded the more popularly celebrated International Women’s Day, on March 8. 117 Afrika, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 69. 118 Mazin, in an interview with the author, September 16, 2007. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 As the purpose of this chapter is to discuss Afrika’s engagement with performance art, I will forgo a detailed analysis of objects on exhibit at MAK in 1995. 122 Neznaika (roughly translated as Dunno, or Know-Nothing) is the anti-hero created by children’s writer Nikolai Nosov, and could be considered a Soviet equivalent to Donald Duck. 123 Statement by Afrika on the Inertia Web site, http://www.inertia-art.nl/ Inertia_Bugaev_2008.html; accessed October 10, 2010. 124 Afrika, in conversation with the author, July 2009. 125 Mazin, in Noever, ed., Sergei Bugaev Afrika, 29. 126 For example, Beuys was one of the founders of the Green Party in Germany. 127 Donald Kuspit, “Joseph Beuys: Between Showman and Shaman,” in David Thistlewood, ed., Joseph Beuys: Diverging Critiques (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1995), 27–49. 128 Ibid., 37. 129 Donald Kuspit, “Joseph Beuys: The Body of the Artist,” in Thistlewood, ed., Joseph Beuys, 96.

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130 Kuspit, “Joseph Beuys: Between Showman and Shaman,” in ibid., 47. 131 Ibid., 43. 132 On primitivism in modern art, see William Rubin, ed., “Primitivism” in 20th-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984); Robert Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Boston: Belknap Press, 1986); Charles Harrison, Francis Frascina, and Gill Perry, Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction: The Early 20th Century (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1993). 133 Oleg Kulik, “Ten Commandments of Zoofrenia,” in Mila Bredikhina and Oleg Kulik, Oleg Kulik: Nothing Inhuman is Alien to Me (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2007), 189. 134 Kulik Is a Bird, in Fact (St. Petersburg, 1995); Pigeonloft (Warsaw, 2000); Breton Horses (France, 1998); Meet My Boyfriend Charles (Moscow, 1994); Missionary. Dedicated to Francis of Assisi (Moscow, 1995); Piggly Wiggly Making Presents (Moscow, 1992); Deep into Russia (Village of Dubrovky, 1993); Dead Monkeys, or Memento Mori (1998). 135 Oleg Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 136 Geusa, History of Russian Video Art, 98. 137 Oleg Kulik, “Return Tickets,” in Adrian Heathfield, ed., Live: Art and Performance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 56. 138 Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 38. 139 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 140 Ibid. 141 The performance, whose original Russian title is Veshenyi pes, ili poslednoe tabu, ohraniaemoe odinokim serberom, is translated as The Last Taboo Guarded by Alone Cerber in Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 58–59. The title is a reference to Cerberus, the three-headed beast in Greek mythology employed as the watchdog of Hades, who united this world with the next. 142 Oleg Kulik, as stated in Evgeny Mitta, Oleg Kulik: Contemporary Art Anthology (DVD) (Paris: Gallery Rabouan Moussion, 2008). 143 Kulik, in ibid. 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid. 146 Ibid. 147 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 148 Olesya Turkina and Viktor Mazin also describe the post-Soviet loss of identity as involving a return to the pre-symbolic order, concomitant with the collapse of “Great Stories,” and thus the symbolic father and the “great Other.” See Olesya Turkina and Viktor Mazin, “In the Time when Great Stories Collapse,” in Bojana Pejic´, ed., After the Wall: Art and Culture in Post-Communist Europe

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(Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), 74–79; and also Olesya Turkina, “Russia in Search of New Identity: Art Identifies Conflict,” Kabinet Kartiny Mira II (St. Petersburg: Skifia, 2001), 84–90; English translation: http://www.klys.se/ worldconference/papers/Olesya_Turkina.htm, accessed September 24, 2010. Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. Ibid. The artist’s early two-dimensional work involved sculptures made from transparent plastic. Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. The fact that Gauguin was idealizing (as opposed to appropriating) the Tahitian world that he inhabited, making it correspond to his imagined ideal of the place, is not of consequence here; I mention this fact simply because artists such as Goncharova were aware of, and in many cases referencing, his work. Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. Thomas McEvilley, “Anti-Art as Ethics: Themes and Strategies,” in Thomas McEvilley, The Triumph of Anti-Art: Conceptual and Performance Art in the Formation of Post-Modernism (Kingston: McPherson and Company, 2005), 218–19. Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. In many ways, this comment echoes the sentiment of artists working in the Soviet Union, where restrictions on artistic production (perhaps ironically) resulted in a significant amount of freedom for artists creating work underground. Ibid. Ibid. This bears resemblance to the performances and actions of Orange Alternative in Wrocław, Poland, in the 1980s, when the police would intervene and break up the performances (discussed in chapter three of this volume). While it might be easy to dismiss such an act as a form of vagrancy or misconduct, the manner in which Kulik described it presents the matter in a different light—as a truly transgressive and cathartic act for the artist. “I hadn’t pooped for two days ... It’s difficult to poop in public. I wanted to show a nasty dog. I did the most disgusting thing, there was the poop, and the pee,” (Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik) he recalled, with laughter. While the artist can smile at the event retrospectively, his comment also reveals the gravity of the act, as evinced in the careful preparation for it, and the acknowledgment that it was not something that came naturally or easy to him, despite being a man-dog. Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik.. Ibid. Ibid.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. In 1962, in what can only be described as a set-up, officials from the Ministry of Culture invited the controversial independent artist Eli Beliutin, along with his students, to exhibit their work at the official exhibition Thirty Years of Moscow Art, already in progress at the Manezh Exhibition Hall, near Red Square in Moscow. Instead of official works in the Socialist Realist mode, these artists exhibited their unofficial work, consisting of abstract paintings and sculptures. On December 1, Nikita Khrushchev himself visited the exhibition and was given a tour, during which he made several infamous comments regarding the artworks, and even confronted several of the artists in the exhibition. He notoriously called the artists “pederasts,” and complained that the state was paying for the “dog shit” that they had produced. For a summary of the events, and a transcript of this dialogue, see Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 101–105; and for a more recent reevaluation of the significance of this event, see Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 673–716. Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. Kulik, in Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 85. Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. Ibid. Ibid. Kulik was not originally part of the Interpol project, and was only invited to join later—a point of criticism that arose later, after the scandal, by those who had been involved with the project from the start. As stated by Viktor Misiano, the idea of the Interpol project was to “allow the exhibition to proceed from an actual dialogue between artists, to change the role of the curator to the mediation of the disputing sides, to question the very phenomenon of exhibitions.” Viktor Misiano, “Interpol: the Apology of Defeat,” in Eda Cˇufer and Viktor Misiano, Interpol: The Art Exhibition which Divided East and West (Ljubljana: IRWIN; Moscow: Moscow Art Magazine, 2000), 43. He later stated that “purely symbolically, the staging of Interpol has become a metaphor for the establishment of a New Europe” (ibid., 44). Because of the distinct differences between artists East and West, Misiano felt that this could only “stimulate dialogue” (ibid., 45). Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik.

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175 Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades,’ ” lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, October 19, 1961, published in: Art and Artists 1, no. 4 (July 1966). 176 Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. 177 Ibid. 178 Ibid. 179 Ibid. 180 Ibid. 181 Ibid. 182 Kulik and Bredikhina have noted that aggression also took place on the “artist-curator” axis, as one of the curators of the show, Jan Å´man, “kicked the dog in the face with heavy ankle boots.” Oleg Kulik and Mila Bredikhina, “The Lessons of Stockholm,” in Cˇufer and Misiano, Interpol, 34. 183 For more on Brener’s “destructive” approach to artistic creation, see Alexander Brener and Barbara Schurz, The Art of Destruction (Postojna: Cˇukgraf, 2005); and Alexander Brener and Barabara Schurz, Bukaka Spat Here (London: Vargas Organisation, 2002). 184 Cˇufer and Misiano, Interpol. 185 Renata Salecl, “Love Me, Love My Dog: Psychoanalysis and the Animal/ Human Divide,” in Renata Salecl, (per)versions of love and hate (London: Verso, 2000), 106. 186 Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. 187 Salecl, “Love Me, Love My Dog,” 105; the reference is to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). 188 Ibid., 105–106. 189 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 190 Ibid. 191 As stated in Cˇufer and Misiano, Interpol, 37. 192 Oleg Kulik, “Why Have I Bitten a Man,” in Hoptman and Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents, 349. 193 Ibid. 194 Viktor Misiano, “Response to an Open Letter to the Art World,” in Hoptman and Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents, 348. Kulik also argues for the “democratic law of the jungle,” which he sees as a more efficient society than our current (human) one. See Salecl, “Love Me, Love My Dog,” 107. 195 Ekaterina Dyogot, “The Revenge of the Background,” in Hoptman and Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents, 341. 196 Salecl, “Love Me, Love My Dog,” 109. 197 Ibid. 198 Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik.

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199 The original Beuys performance was entitled I Like America and America Likes Me. 200 Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. 201 Ibid. 202 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 203 Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. 204 The visual artist Susan Silas went so far as to send him a “love letter.” See “A Love Letter to Oleg Kulik, a Prince among Men, a Man among Dogs,” in Oleg Kulik Art Animal (Manchester, England: Cornerhouse Publications, 2001), 59–60. 205 Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 140. 206 The name, a reference to the American slang term for dollars, is in fact a common household pet name in post-Soviet Russia. 207 Homo Ludens is a book written by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in 1938, which stresses the importance of play in culture and society. 208 Gesine Drews-Sylla points out how Kulik’s project relates to Mikhail Epstein’s characterization of the post-conceptual generation as seeking to resurrect utopia following its own death. Gesine Drews-Sylla, “The Human Dog Oleg Kulik,” in Jane Costlow and Amy Nelson, eds., Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010), 239. 209 Mila Bredikhina, “On the Urgent Problems of the Family of the Future,” interview with Oleg Kulik, in Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 192. 210 Kulik, in Heathfield, ed., Live, 56. 211 Oleg Kulik, in an interview with Petar C´ukovic´, in Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 258. 212 In order to keep this chapter focused on Kulik’s Russian Dog performances, I will forgo an in-depth discussion of his other performances or two-dimensional work here, although I feel that his performances as other animals and with other animals, as well as his political activism and two-dimensional work, all support this main program that the artist launched with the Russian Dog. 213 The artist commented on how awful he felt that the bird had died, which was not his intention for the performance in any way. He believes that the bird was shocked because of the fact that he was confronted by a man appearing as a bird. In his discussion of shamanistic performances, Thomas McEvilley noted events in which the performer would “drum, dance, speak animal and bird languages.” McEvilley, “Anti-Art as Ethics,” 218; thus, Kulik’s performances can also be said to have something of the shamanistic in them.

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214 Kulik, in Mitta, Oleg Kulik. Incidentally, the performance of Two Kuliks in Riga nearly ended in disaster, when Kulik badly cut himself smashing the glass onto which his image was projected. The artist lost a significant amount of blood, and was rushed to the emergency room. When the artist returned from the hospital, he found that the audience had waited at the venue for him to return and finish the performance. 215 I view these photographs as “performative” in the same manner that Cindy Sherman’s disguised photographic portraits are. Kulik himself also maintains that these projects continue his explorations into anthropocentrism that he had begun with his performances. Heathfield, ed., Live, 56. 216 As confirmed in an interview with Kulik by the author, August 1, 2009. 217 Ibid. 218 Ibid. 219 The performance, whose original Russian title is Loshadi Bretany, is translated as On Horses Bretagne in Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 195. 220 In an interview with the author, the artist described the people he witnessed in Mongolia as an example of a near-perfect human society, in that they existed so close to nature. He also mentioned the fact that the people there were not separated from the means of production in the sense that, although they hunted and killed animals, they only killed as many as they needed for survival. August 1, 2009. 221 Drews-Sylla sees this as mocking the lack of democracy in post-Soviet Russia, although I see it as part of Kulik’s greater project of self-definition. See DrewsSylla, “The Human Dog Oleg Kulik,” 248. 222 The performance, whose original Russian title is Ne mogu molchat’!, is translated as I Cannot Keep Silence Any More in Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 143. 223 The scar remained on his chest for five years. The artist commented on the fact that these brands are meant to last that long, although they invariably outlive the cattle that they mark, once the animals are slaughtered for consumption. Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 224 This event in fact caused a media scandal in Russia at the time. After being broadcast on Russia’s First TV channel, people came to picket the area near the gallery, to protest the killing of animals for spectacle. Geusa, History of Russian Video Art, 102. 225 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 226 For more of Kulik’s writings, see Dmitri Bavilski, Skotomizatsiia: Dialogi s Olegom Kulikom (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 2004). 227 Bredikhina and Kulik, Oleg Kulik, 183. 228 Ibid.

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229 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. Indeed, Salecl reminds us that while animals are driven by self-preservation, humans, because of language, are “marked by a force of self-annihilation, i.e. the death drive.” Salecl, “Love Me, Love My Dog,” 108. 230 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. This echoes Lacan’s idea of the linguistic/Symbolic sphere versus the pre-lingual sphere of the Real. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid. These sentiments are echoed by others, such as Victor Tupitsyn, in “Goblinesque Art of Afrika: Late 1980s–Early 1990s “BC.” (Before Coup),” in Grachos, , ed., Afrika, 35. 233 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 234 Adrian Heathfield, “Alive,” in Heathfield, ed., Live, 13. 235 Kulik, in ibid., 56. 236 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 237 Drews-Sylla, “The Human Dog Oleg Kulik,” 240. 238 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 239 Ibid. For Dyogot, he is the embodiment of the “voiceless Other,” which is, of course, Russia. Dyogot, “The Revenge of the Background,” 340. 240 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 241 Ibid. 242 Ibid. 243 Ibid. 244 Ibid. 245 Thus while some, such as Drews-Sylla, question the artist’s sincerity with this project and wonder whether to take him seriously or not, in conversation with him, the artist spoke with great seriousness about these performances. See Drews-Sylla, “The Human Dog Oleg Kulik,” 251. 246 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 247 Ibid. This follows from Lacan’s association with language and the Symbolic order being marked by desire and lack. 248 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 249 Amelia Jones, “Survey,” in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, eds., The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 32. 250 Ibid., 32. 251 Lea Vergine, Body Art and Performance (Milan: Skira, 2000), 8. 252 Kulik, in an interview with the author, August 1, 2009. 253 Ibid. 254 Ibid. 255 Ibid. 256 Viktor Misiano, as quoted in Geusa, History of Russian Video Art, 98.

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257 Kulik, in Heathfield, ed., Live, 55. 258 Interestingly, Ted Hopf has identified four new identity discourses that appeared in Russia in 1999, at the end of the period of the post-Soviet identity crisis discussed at the beginning of this chapter. The four identities are as follows: the New Western Russian, which considered Russia to be Western; its opposite, the New Soviet Russian, which understood Russia as inexorably linked to its Soviet past/Soviet identity; the Liberal Essentialist, which understood Russia as unique; and the Liberal Relativist, which posited the idea of a single, unified self as impossible and characterizes Russia as a pastiche. See Ted Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics: Identities & Foreign Policies, Moscow, 1955 and 1999 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), xv.

Chapter 2 The Bronze Man and the Homeless Man: Performing Appearance in Latvia 1 At the beginning of World War II, on June 17, 1940, the USSR invaded Latvia, and annexed the country as the fifteenth republic of the Soviet Union on August 5 of that same year. The occupation was interrupted when in June, 1941, Nazi Germany attacked the USSR and invaded Latvia, occupying Riga on July 1. In October 1944, the Red Army returned, and the Soviet Union occupied Latvia until the nation declared its independence, on May 4, 1990. 2 The writers of History of Latvia: the Twentieth Century have noted the important role that artists and intellectuals played in this period of Latvian history. Appearing in 2006, this was the first comprehensive history of Latvia in the twentieth century published in the nation since independence. See Daina Bleiere, Ilgvars Butulis, Inesis Feldmanis, Aivars Stranga, and Antonijs Zunda, History of Latvia: the Twentieth Century (Riga: Jumava, 2006). 3 This is a strategy that has been used throughout history to make a claim for a culture’s validity as an independent nation. It was the strategy deployed by Latvian intellectuals during the Second Awakening of the early nineteenth century, who used Latvian literature, folk traditions, and visual art as evidence of a distinct culture deserving of its own nationhood. 4 See Bleiere, Butulis, Feldmanis, Stranga, and Zunda, History of Latvia, 52. 5 See Artis Pabriks and Aldis Purs, Latvia: The Challenges of Change (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 52. 6 Juris Dreifelds also shares this opinion. See Juris Dreifelds, Latvia in Transition (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 55. 7 Pabriks and Purs, Latvia, 52. 8 Dreifelds also describes this event as a “litmus test” of the sincerity of Gorbachev’s reforms, in Latvia in Transition, 55.

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9 Pabriks and Purs, Latvia, 52. It is not only in Latvia where artists held such sway. The infamous “Bulldozer Exhibition,” which took place in Moscow in 1974 and made the front page of the New York Times, is another example of the cultural sector’s role in gaining ground for civil liberties in the society as a whole. It was not so much that politics were displaced to culture per se, but that artists who fought for freedom of expression and the right to exhibit their work were by default fighting for freedom of expression for their compatriots in all sectors. For further discussion of these issues, see Sirje Helme, “Nationalism and Dissent: Art and Politics in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania under the Soviets,” in Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge, eds., Art of the Baltics (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 6–16; and Alfonsas Andriuškevicˇius, “The Phenomenon of Nonconformist Art,” in Rosenfeld and Dodge, eds., Art of the Baltics, 25–29; as well as Elena Kornetchuk, “Soviet Art Under Government Control,” in Alla Rosenfeld and Norton T. Dodge, eds., From Gulag to Glasnost: Nonconformist Art of the Soviet Union (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 36–48. 10 They consider the period 1986–88 the first phase of the pro-independence movement, which included ecological protests as well as the Calendar Demonstrations. 11 Pabriks and Purs, Latvia, 53. 12 This event echoed the 1986 Chautauqua Conference, held at Latvia’s seaside resort, Ju¯rmala, in which Jack Matlock, senior consultant to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, delivered a speech stating that the United States did not and would not recognize Latvia’s incorporation into the Soviet Union; the speech was also televised in Latvia. 13 The Freedom Monument (Brı¯ vı¯bas Piemnieklis) was created by Ka¯rlis Za¯le and unveiled in 1935, during Latvia’s brief period of independence between the two world wars. The renowned Russian sculptor Vera Mukhina took a liking to it and urged that it remain in place even after the Soviet takeover, which it did. The monument consists of a female figure (meant to represent Latvia) holding up three stars, which represented the three regions of Latvia that existed at the time (today there are four regions). During the occupation, the Soviet government appropriated it as its own monument, stating that the statue represented Mother Russia holding up the three Baltic states. 14 See Pabriks and Purs, Latvia, 52–53. 15 This marked the first establishment of the Latvian nation on November 18, 1919. 16 See Dreifelds, Latvia in Transition, 56. 17 Ibid.

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18 Roselee Goldberg has written about performance art in Western Europe and the U.S. as participating in the social protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. See Roselee Goldberg and Laurie Anderson, Performance: Live Art since the 60s (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2004), 36–61. For example, the Situationist International, a French performance and conceptual art group, was involved in the 1968 Paris protests, and feminist performance art in the U.S. was intimately linked with the women’s rights movements there. Amelia Jones also discusses the connection between performance art and activist groups in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, describing it as the “authentic” activist body, in her introduction to Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, eds., The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon, 2006), 29–32; Kristine Stiles also discusses this connection in “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,” in Russell Ferguson, ed., Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949–1979 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 235. 19 Džemma Skulme, interviewed by Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, in Renee Baigell and Matthew Baigell, eds., Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews After Perestroika (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 66. 20 For example, Je¯kabs Kazaks, Uga Skulme, and Nikla¯vs Strunke, to name a few. 21 Aleksis Osmanis, “Ideology of Power and Transformations in Latvian Painting,” in Inese Baranovska and Sandra Krastina, eds., Painting: Witnesses of an Age (Riga: Latvian Artists’ Union, 2002), 31. 22 This has also been discussed by Mark Allen Svede in “When Worlds Collide: On Comparing Three Baltic Art Scenarios,” in Rosenfeld and Dodge, eds., Art of the Baltics, 17. 23 See Skulme, in Baigell and Baigell, eds., Soviet Dissident Artists, 67. 24 Although Latvia was considered to be the location of one of the most radical and liberal approaches to painting during the late Soviet period, this was not the case with performance art. It is only recently that a survey has appeared on performance art in Latvia. See Zane Matule, Performance Art in Latvia, 1963–2009 (Riga: Neputns, 2009) (103 pages). 25 The reference is either to Russian Sots Art and Polish Soc Art, both politically motivated types of artistic production. 26 Solvita Krese, “You See, Bread-and-Butter Are Political, Too,” Mare Articum 2, no. 11 (2002): 30. 27 See Mark Allen Svede, “Many Easels, some Abandoned: Latvian Art after Socialist Realism” in Rosenfeld and Dodge, eds., Art of the Baltics, 207. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Andris Grı¯nbergs, in conversation with the author, February 2009.

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31 The film contains scenes of nudity, sexual intercourse, and homosexual intimacy, all of which were prohibited in the Soviet Union. 32 Grı¯nbergs, in conversation with the author, May 2011. 33 The precursor to this exhibition took place in 1972, in the Institute of Scientific Technical Information and Propaganda (now the Riga Stock Exchange) on Cathedral Square. It was entitled Celebration (Sve¯tki), and was part of the exhibition Ninth Show of Works by Young Artists. Celebration contained a number of unconventional artworks such as abstract sculptures and mobiles, all of which was allowed because of the fact that it took place within the context of a “design exhibition,” as opposed to that of painting or sculpture. See Ja¯nis Borgs, “The Cock on St. Peter’s Steeple Sings Its Early Song: Free Art: A Soviet Product?,” in Inese Baranovska, ed., Nature. Environment. Man, 1984 (Riga: Artists’ Union of Latvia, 2004), 30. 34 Ibid., 19. 35 Ibid. 36 According to the State Archives of Latvia, col. no. 232, reg. no. 1, file no. 700, minutes no. 21, as mentioned by Ramona Umblija, “The Event 1984: Measuring Time with Asides,” Baranovska, ed., Nature. Environment. Man, 70 and 72 (note 6). 37 Borgs, “The Cock on St. Peter’s Steeple Sings Its Early Song,” 40. 38 The reference is to Andrei Zhdanov’s 1932 speech to the Soviet Writers’ Union, where he criticized “bourgeois” art, and set it in opposition to the new Soviet art that artists of the Soviet Union were to produce. 39 Borgs, “The Cock on St. Peter’s Steeple Sings Its Early Song,” 40. 40 Polis feels that the Church had more objections to the exhibition than the Communist government, and that it was the former that forced the latter to shut the exhibition down. In his words, “It was the Church that asked to close the exhibition ... the Church asked. And then the Cheka [KGB] did it.” Later, he stated that this was because the artists had created an altar, and at that time “the Church didn’t have any power [to close the exhibition]. The power was in the hands of the Communists.” Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 41 Svede, “Many Easels, some Abandoned,” 256. 42 Svede mentions a piece that he describes as “kinetic environmental art,” a fifteen-feet-high version of a Lithuanian mobile that was installed in Riga’s Cathedral Square during the 1983 Art Days. Entitled Puzurs, it was created by Valdis Celms and Eduards Milašs. Ibid. 43 For example, a group show by Andris Breže, Ivars Mailı¯tis, Oja¯rs Pe¯tersons, and Juris Putra¯ms was closed during the 1985 festival, and in 1987, the artist Ol,egs Tillbergs was escorted away from his installation/performance

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44

45 46

47

48

49 50 51 52 53

PERFORMING THE EAST

piece that he, Sarmı¯te Ma¯lin,a, and Sergejs Davidos set up in Philharmonic Square. Ibid. Anda Kl,avin,a, “On the Edge of Art and Life: Meaning of Bohemia in Latvian Art from 60s to 80s,” paper presented at the SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art, London, Courtauld Institute of Art, October 23, 2010. See also Vilnis Ve¯jš “Lesson 1: Performing Arts,” in Ieva Astahovska and Vilnis Ve¯jš, eds. Un Citi: virzieni mekle¯jumi ma¯kslinieki Latvija¯ 1960–1984 (Riga: Laikmetı¯gaˉs Maˉkslas Centrs, 2010), 24–25. Polis, in conversation with the author, August 2003. For a discussion of Riga’s hippie movement and its sartorial adventures, see Mark Allen Svede, “All You Need Is Lovebeads: Latvia’s Hippies Undress for Success,” in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (London: Berg, 2000), 189–208; Mark Allen Svede, “Twiggy and Trotsky, or, what the Soviet Dandy Will Be Wearing This Next Five-Year Plan,” in Susan FillinYeh, ed., Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York and London: New York University Press, 2001), 243–269; and Valpe¯ters Eižens, Nenocenze¯ tie: Alternatı¯ va¯ kultu¯ra Latvija¯; XX gs. 60-tie un 70-tie gadi (Latvia: Latvijas Vestnesis, 2010). Miervaldis Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. It was also in the 1980s that the Latvian Artists’ Union came under the progressive-minded leadership of Džemma Skulme, which left more room for experimentation among the Union members. Polis actually traces his performance activity to an even earlier childhood stunt, when he and a friend stood in the doorway of his apartment building and mooned the passersby. In an interview with the author (September 8, 2007), he mentioned the 1995 American film Braveheart, where he noticed a similar scene, asserting that this type of “performance” has existed for thousands of years, including in Tsarist Russia, as well as fairy tales. He considers his performances part of this tradition, as opposed to having derived from art-historical traditions in Western Europe or the United States. It is interesting to note that Peggy Phelan also referred to a childhood act as her first performance. In her case, it was the tearing off of pieces of a pop-up book on anatomy. See Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–2. Polis, in an interview with the author, July 9, 2009. Ibid. Raimonds Lı¯cı¯tis, in an interview with the author, July 7, 2009. Polis, in an interview with the author, July 9, 2009 Lı¯cı¯tis, in an interview with the author, July 7, 2009.

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54 Ibid. 55 Polis, in an interview with the author, July 9, 2009. 56 The painting depicted a marching band with only the central figure, a trombone player, painted in black and white (the rest was in color). One of the visitors to the exhibit thought that the trombone player resembled Lenin, and assumed that this was meant to be a disparaging portrayal of him, given that he was painted in black and white. Polis maintains that this was a simple image of a brass band, and that he did not model the central figure on Lenin at all. 57 Polis, in an interview with the author, July 9, 2009. 58 Polis distinguishes performance as something separate from art (ma¯ksla) and craft (amats), and considers his painting to be both of the latter (art and craft). At several times during the course of this interview with Polis, he distinguished between his performances and his art, meaning his paintings. At one point, he stated that people were not interested in his “art,” only in his performances. He also said that his performances “had nothing to do with art,” and that they “were not art.” Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 59 This café was located in the planetarium, which was housed in the Russian Orthodox church on l,en,ina Street (currently Brı¯vı¯ bas Street) in the center of Riga. During the Soviet era, it was not uncommon for religious buildings to be used for purposes other than originally intended. 60 Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 61 Polis, in a conversation with the author, February 2, 2011. 62 Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 63 This comes from Polis’s CV, for example, as published in Anda Rottenberg, ed., Personal Time: Art of Estonia Latvia and Lithuania, 1945–1996, exh. cat. (Warsaw: Zache˛ta Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1996), 103. 64 Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 The artist doesn’t recall the exact date of the performance or the name of the director, although he mentioned that the director was from the ZDF German Television network, and worked for a major cultural television program in Germany, called “Aspect.” Polis, in a conversation with the author, February 2, 2011. 68 The German director offered to pay Polis for his efforts, but the artist refused. He did not consider this type of action or performance related to his artistic activity. Since he already had a job—he was employed by the state as a painter—he didn’t accept money for this one. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007.

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69 It is interesting to note that, because of the scarcity of materials in the Soviet Union, the artist had difficulty in obtaining the bronze paint for the performance. He recalls that several friends had to help him, and he finally ended up using a special kind of paint made from gelatin by an artist named Andris Grı¯nbergs (different from the founder of the first happening), who worked in the theater. 70 This is now Brı¯vı¯ bas Street or “Freedom” Street. 71 This is now the Ve¯rmanes Gardens. 72 This is now Lı¯vu Square. 73 While in the 1980s urban Westerners would have been accustomed to the presence of street performers clad entirely in bronze, gold, or silver outfits, working for spare change, Rigans had never seen such a thing. 74 Polis described this route to the author in an interview, September 8, 2007. Incidentally, in that same interview the artist mentioned that following the performance, the bus driver, who drove the public bus that Polis had taken to the city center, was later called in by the KGB; Polis himself was not questioned. He mentioned that they just wanted to ask the driver whether he thought the artist was imitating Lenin or not. 75 There are no remaining copies of the film of this first Bronze Man performance. According to Polis, it was stolen around 1991. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 76 As confirmed by the artist in a conversation with the author, August 2004, and also cited in Dasha Vishnevskaia, “Pokhozhdenia bronzovogo cheloveka Polisa,” Subbota (September 20, 1997): 21. 77 Their exact words were, “Sweetie, tell us your address!” In ibid., 21. 78 Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 79 Ilze Ka¯rkluvalka, “Miervaldis Polis sava¯ personalizsta¯de¯,” Talsu Ve¯ stis (July 27, 2000): unpaginated. 80 Miervaldis Polis, “Miervaldis Interve¯ Poli,” Ma¯ksla 1 (1988): 20. 81 Ibid. 82 Miervaldis Polis, “No karneva¯la lı¯ dz izsta¯dei,” interview by Hardijs Ledin,š, Liesma 87, no. 4 (undated): 21. 83 Polis, “Miervaldis Interve¯ Poli,” 19. 84 This was the Hotel Latvija during most of the post-Soviet period, and has recently become the Radisson Blu Hotel Latvija. 85 Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. 86 As quoted in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1983), 53. Some of the figures included, for example, not only Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Lenin, but also the writer and theorist of socialism Alexander Herzen, the philosopher Nikolai

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NOTES

87 88

89 90 91 92 93

94 95 96 97 98 99

100

101

263

Chernyshevskii, the founders of the German Communist Party Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht, as well as cultural figures such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the icon painter Andrei Rublev. Ibid., 53. Polis was aware of the parallels between his painting himself bronze and the painting of the plaster statues. He mentions the fact that the Soviet Union had its own “perversion” of the bronze statues erected to leaders throughout the Western world. In his words, “The idea was about the erecting of monuments in general ... It was the Greeks who created the greatest masterworks of the highest technical quality, in bronze. The power behind such a creation as the Athena statue—that was real power. But in the Soviet period they made these statues from plaster, and perverted them with horrible bronze paint of low quality, as if it were gold.” Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. Lodder, 54. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. Ibid. Ibid. Vaara had been performing as the White Man since the early 1980s. A friend of his had heard about Polis’s performance in Riga, and suggested to Vaara that he team up with the Bronze Man to do a performance together. Roi Vaara, in conversation with the author, February 16, 2011. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. Ibid. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. “Egoinfo Pazin,ojums,” Literatu¯ra un Ma¯ksla (September 8, 1990): 3. Vaara mentioned that he had a lot of great ideas for the performance that never came to pass. Since the performance only lasted for two days, there was very little time to realize all of his plans. One idea that he had was to have the Finnish Army present, and organize an official procession of the White Man and the Bronze Man through a line-up of soldiers onto a Navy ship. Vaara, in conversation with the author, February 16, 2011. For a summary of the events, see “Egoinfo Pazin,ojums,” 3. Although the article mentions that the artists met with embassy representatives, Polis does not recall such a meeting. Polis, in a phone conversation with the author, February 2, 2011. Polis is not certain as to whether this interpretation would have been grasped by viewers in both Finland and Latvia at the time, but at least, he said, it

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102

103

104 105 106 107 108

109

110

111 112 113

PERFORMING THE EAST

made them think. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. For Vaara, however, the significance of the White Man was similar to Polis’s conception. He remarked that in his early days as a performance artist, he was looking for something interesting to do. Since he is a white man, he decided to highlight that by painting himself white, bringing his “whiteness” to the fore. In this way, he could highlight the everyday activity of walking through the streets as this character. Furthermore, he stated that for him the White Man was somewhat like a ghost, floating through the city. Vaara, in conversation with the author, February 16, 2011. Polis, in conversation with the author, June 2005. It is interesting to note that Roi Vaara also did a performance as the White Man in front of the White House, in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s. It is interesting to note that the Bronze Man was also wearing what appeared to be military orders, which he had appropriated for his own purposes, and which some in the crowd had misconstrued as Soviet orders. Although the pins did look like Soviet orders, the artist actually created the design himself, and had them cast for this purpose. During the Soviet period, it was illegal to have foreign currency such as U.S. dollars. Polis, in W: Par Vilni Za¯beru, 1963–1994 (Riga: Latvian Artist’s Union Gallery, 2003), 55. Polis, in “Ka¯ kl,u¯t par miljona¯ru?,” interview by Andris Bergmanis, Sestdiena (August 17, 1991): unpaginated. Ibid. Although Polis stated that he “set out for” the Freedom Monument, he told me in a more recent interview that he actually set the tank on fire in front of the Lenin statue. He remembers that he initially planned to carry out the performance in front of the Freedom Monument, but later reconsidered, thinking that it would be too crowded there. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. Miervalids Polis, “M. Polis: Ma¯ksla¯ nav svarı¯gi, vai tu dzen naglas vai glezno,” interview by Solvita Vil,uma, Pašvaldı¯bas Zin,as (Rı¯gas Kurzemes r.) 1 (January 9, 1995): 7. Alfre¯ds Rubiks was the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Latvian Communist Party in 1990–91. After his arrest he served six years in prison, and was released in 1997. This is now the World Trade Center (Pasaules Tirzniecı¯ bas Centrs). Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. It is interesting to note that also in 1991, the Czech artist David Cˇerný famously painted the tank of a World War II memorial pink. It was the Monument to

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NOTES

114

115 116 117

118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

126

127

128

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Soviet Tank Crews, consisting of a sculpture that included an actual Red Army tank. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. Polis recounted the same story in a conversation with Matule, in her Performance Art in Latvia, 56–58. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. Ibid. In Latvia in the late 1980s, during the times of the Calendar Demonstrations, citizens were often arrested or detained for such seemingly simple acts as laying flowers at the base of the Freedom Monument. See footnote 166 in chapter one for further details about the events associated with this exhibition. Polis, in an interview with the author, September 8, 2007. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. The artist had initially planned to travel to Ohio dressed as the Bronze Man, but ultimately decided against it, given the difficulty of the logistics and lengthy travel time between Latvia and the U.S. Although it is widely agreed that artists in Latvia did not adhere to the doctrine of Socialist Realism as strictly as in other Soviet republics, the reference here is to the official policy of Socialist Realism, as it was meant to be implemented throughout the Soviet Union. Although Socialist Realist works of art could potentially have different interpretations, the aim of the rubric (however unfeasible) was to create works of art that immediately conveyed a singular message, be it with regard to support for the Party, the reinforcement of state ideology, or celebrating the victories of Communism. Insofar as paintings or monumental sculptures were seen from largely the same or similar physical viewpoint by all viewers, a single, or relatively similar, interpretation was much more likely than with regard to a performance, which takes place in time and space, making it much more interpretively variable. The Latvian constitution (Satversme) was violated on several counts: first, because the time period between the announcement of the elections and their occurrence was too short; second, because the constitution stated that elections to the Parliament (Saeima) must take place in October; and, finally, because of the fact that no other lists of candidates, other than those in the People’s Labor Party, were permitted, thus guaranteeing victory for

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129 130 131 132 133 134 135

136 137

138

139

140 141 142 143 144

PERFORMING THE EAST

the latter. See Bleiere, Butulis, Feldmanis, Stranga, and Zunda, History of Latvia, 245. Ibid. See ibid., 246. Ibid., 243–249. See Pabriks and Purs, Latvia, 49. Ibid., 50. Amelia Jones, “Survey,” in Warr and Jones, eds., The Artist’s Body, 29. Kristine Stiles also makes this connection in “Uncorrupted Joy,” 235. One could also draw parallels between Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre” and Günter Brus’s 1965 Vienna Walk, when he walked through the center of Vienna painted entirely in white, his body symbolically split in two by a black line painted along the length of his body. The Singing Sculpture was first performed as Our New Sculpture at St. Martin’s School of Art, London, in 1969. At one point he claimed to have heard only of Allan Kaprow and Andy Warhol in the 1970s and 1980s, but not Joseph Beuys or Gilbert and George, for example. At another point he stated that he had only learned about Joseph Beuys later, but when he mentioned the artist, said that he was aware that he had “painted himself white,” an error that revealed his actual lack of knowledge of the artist. For an in-depth discussion of Polis’s paintings, see my article “Truth and Trompe L’Oeil: Miervaldis Polis’ Paintings in the Context of Late-Soviet Latvia,” Ma¯kslas Ve¯ sture un Teorija 11 (March 2009): 34–45. Allan Kaprow, “Assemblages, Environments and Happenings” (1959–61), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds., Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers: 2003), 720. Ibid., 722. Polis, “Miervaldis Interve¯ Poli,” 20. Ibid., 19. Miervaldis Polis, as quoted in “Izsta¯de bez darbiem,” Sestdiena (April 11, 1992): unpaginated. A precursor to this exhibition was a spontaneous performance that he and Za¯bers created one day when they met each other on the street. Another acquaintance of theirs walked by and asked what they were doing, and they responded, “This is a performance, called ‘meeting’ (tikšana¯s).” As other acquaintances passed them, they repeated the phrase. It was at this “meeting” that the artists came up with the idea for the sunflower seed performance. As recounted by Polis in W: Par Vilni Za¯beru, 55.

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145 The Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Zaˉbers Exhibition can be compared with Yves Klein’s Le Vide (1957), and Miervaldis Polis Memorial Room contrasted with Arman’s Le Plein (1960), or even Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte en valise (1935–41). Again, however, Polis’s work bears only superficial resemblance to these manifestations, as the underlying concepts of their Western “counterparts” are markedly different, given the context of their inception and display. Polis himself denies any awareness of these pieces at the time that he was at work on The Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Zaˉbers Exhibition and Miervaldis Polis Memorial Room. 146 As this book went to press it had been just announced that artist Ritums Ivanovs received the commission to paint the portrait of former president Valdis Zatlers (in office 2007-2011). 147 For example, Niks Volma¯rs’s article “Miervaldis Polis, the Most Expensive Court Portrait-Painter” (Da¯rga¯kais galma portretists Miervaldis Polis), Priva¯ta Dzı¯ ve (October 28, 2003): 23–26. 148 In conversation with the author (August 2003), Polis stated that he has had enough of publicity, press, and requests for interviews. He accepts only one or two commissions per year, as that is often how long it takes to complete them, because of his painstaking methods. He is able to live off these commissions and maintains a quiet, simple existence in the Latvian countryside. 149 An interesting comparison would be with the Polish artist Pawel Althamer’s Observer (1992), wherein the artist invited homeless people to sit on a downtown sidewalk wearing a badge that said “Obserwator” on it, which is the name of a daily newspaper in Poland. The piece was Althamer’s response to the newspaper’s advertising campaign. See Paula von den Bosch, Charles Esche, Joanna Mytkowska, and Andrzej Przywara, eds., Pawel Althamer: The Vincent Award (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2005), 96. 150 Gabra¯ns worked on a television show entitled “That’s Life” for about a year. As recounted in an interview with Ieva Auzin,a, “Mı¯ lestı¯ ba un patiesı¯ bu,” Studija 2, no. 11 (2000): 10. 151 Mik,elis Fišers, in Viestarts Gailišs, “Discipline¯ts bohe¯mietis,” Sestdiena (January 19–25, 2003): 18–19. 152 Gints Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. 153 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Auzin,a, 10. 154 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. 155 M6 was a popular gallery and artist hangout in the 1990s. Miervaldis Polis is also known to have frequented it. 156 Gabra¯ns, as quoted in an interview with Gailišs, “Discipline¯ts bohe¯mietis,” 18. 157 Ibid. Although the article mentions that the artist was subpoenaed, Gabra¯ns himself does not recall that. He mentioned that the curators at the Soros

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159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168

169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

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Center were “angry,” but that no legal proceedings ensued. Gabra¯ns, in a conversation with the author, February 2, 2011. Vale¯rijs died on October 27, 2001, and is buried in a pauper’s grave in the Jaunciems Cemetary, on the outskirts of Riga. While the circumstances surrounding the death of the first Starix and his replacement by a second may pose a host of ethical questions, it is not my aim to discuss them here. Incidentally, these facts are never mentioned in the popular press, and do not seem to be popularly known, thus emphasizing the notion that it is the character, not the person, who became famous. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Whether or not this view is accurate either statistically or sociologically is not of issue here. It is the artist’s belief, and a belief upon which he created the project. See for reference Frank Wagner, ed., Contemporary Utopia, exh. cat. (Riga: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2001). Anda Buševica, “Divi no trı¯sdesmit diviem,” Diena (2000): unpaginated. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. In fact, the artist cannot recall what the letters “AD” stood for, if anything at all. Ibid. Ibid. In one instance, an announcer, when reporting the news, mentioned that a “professional picketer” had been present at the protest. Vale¯rijs (Starix), interview with Uldis Rudaks, “Trosknis,” Diena (Izklaide) (May 27, 2001): unpaginated. Gints Gabra¯ns, in Agnese Kusmane, “Ka¯ nokl,u¯t TV?” Neatkarı¯ga¯ Rı¯ta Avı¯ze Latvijai (December 18, 2004): unpaginated. Runda¯le Palace was built by Rastrelli in the eighteenth century as the summer home for the Duke of Courland. During the Soviet era, the Rococo structure fell into disrepair, but was restored to much of its former glory following Latvian independence. Thus, the opulent settings are fitting for a man who embodies the post-Soviet dream.

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178 During the Soviet era, ‘The Zone’ was Russian slang for gulag or work camp; nowadays it remains slang for prison. 179 Vale¯rijs (Starix), interview with Rudaks, unpaginated. 180 Gabra¯ns himself is not entirely clear as to the circumstances surrounding Vale¯rijs’s situation. 181 Gabra¯ns, in a conversation with the author, April 30, 2009. 182 After Latvia became an independent nation, apartments that had been reallocated during the Soviet period were returned to their rightful owners, and communal apartments were privatized. Although for the most part this transition went smoothly, there were some who lost out on having their own apartment, especially if they were without their documents. 183 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. 184 Ibid. 185 Ibid. 186 This is a TV variety show that features live musical acts broadcast on television, with a live audience. 187 Excerpt from the television show “Happy Birthday!” shown in Gabra¯ns’s How to Get on TV video project, shown at the São Paolo Biennale, 2004. This short segment invited viewers to send in birthday greetings to their friends and family. 188 Excerpt from TV5 show “Riga Online” (Latvia), shown in Gabra¯ns, How to Get on TV. 189 Excerpt from LTV1 News broadcast (Latvia), shown in Gabra¯ns, How to Get on TV. 190 Excerpt from TV5 show “Fabrika” (Latvia), shown in Gabra¯ns, How to Get on TV. 191 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid. 194 Ibid. 195 Raimonds Pauls, speaking on “Everything Is Happening,” shown in Gabra¯ns’s project How to Get on TV. 196 Excerpt from “Everything Is Happening,” shown in Gabra¯ns, How to Get on TV. 197 Excerpt from “Everything Is Happening,” shown in Gabra¯ns, How to Get on TV. 198 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. 199 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Kusmane, unpaginated. 200 Ibid.

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270 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220

221 222 223

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Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. An interesting statement in light of the Soviet concept of developing a “new Soviet man.” Gabra¯ns, in Kusmane, “Ka¯ nokl,u¯t TV?,” unpaginated. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. However, Gabra¯ns did not mention that this was an inspiration for his decision to clothe Starix in a white suit. The artist agreed that humor was an element of the project. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. Excerpt from “Everything Is Happening,” shown in Ga¯brans, How to Get on TV. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Aija Zarin,a, “Gabra¯ns-14326z,” Literatu¯ra. Ma¯ksla. Me¯ s (April 9–16, 1998): unpaginated. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Gailišs, unpaginated. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Auzin,a, 10. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Artis Svece, “Mu¯su Cilve¯ks Vene¯cija¯.” Diena: Kultu¯ras Diena (June 29, 2007): 5. Gabra¯ns, as reported in a conversation with the author, April 30, 2009. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. See for example “Gints Gabra¯ns Ma¯kslinieka Radoša¯ Darbı¯ba” (no author; descriptive text about the artist’s work available from the documentation center at the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia) or Ieva Auzin,a, “Mı¯ lestı¯ ba un patiesı¯ bu,” Studija 2, no. 11 (2000): 8–15. Inga Šteimane has also referred to the artistic production of Latvia’s “Second Generation” of conceptual artists (those operating in the 1990s, with the First Generation having worked in the 1980s), of which Gabra¯ns is a part, as “message art,” by which she means that the aims of this conceptual art were no longer abstract (as they were in the 1980s) but oriented toward communication, and that the message was no longer a critique of socialism (also as it had been in the 1980s). Inga Šteimane, Ja¯nis Vin,k,elis (Riga: Neputns, 2003), 78–79. Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. Ibid. Ibid.

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224 Ibid. 225 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Zarin,a, unpaginated. This statement also echoes statements by Peter Bürger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) or Hal Foster with regard to society’s co-opting of the avant-garde. See Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). 226 The Web site even had a function whereby one could (attempt to) purchase this information by use of a credit card. The artist was not out to defraud people, but simply to fool them. When one’s credit card details were entered and the appropriate button to pay was pushed, the site automatically led the viewer back to the start without having taken any money. 227 For reference, see the exhibition catalogue Ieva Astahovska, ed., Gints Gabra¯ns: Paramirrors (Riga: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2007). 228 Gabra¯ns, in an interview with the author, July 6, 2009. 229 Gints Gabra¯ns, in an interview with Ja¯nis Taurin,š, “Atoms of Thought,” in Ja¯nis Taurin,š, Gints Gabra¯ns (Riga: Neputns, 2008), 36. 230 The art historian Ieva Astahovska has also highlighted this in her essay “Catching Sight of the Invisible,” in Astahovska, ed., Gints Gabra¯ns, unpaginated. 231 It is interesting to compare this project with Serbian artist Tanja Ostojic´’s 2000–03 online performance, Looking for a European Husband, in which the artist actively sought a man from Western Europe to marry her, in order to obtain an EU passport. As a result of the project, she married a man from Cologne, Germany, whom she divorced in 2005. 232 Monika Pormale, in conversation with the author, July 10, 2009. 233 This project also predated Riga’s becoming known as a “sex tourism” capital in Eastern Europe. 234 Hele¯na Demakova, “From the Rape of Europa...,” in Hele¯na Demakova, Other Conversations (Riga: Visual Communication Department, 2002), 303. 235 Hele¯na Demakova, “The Expansion of the Notion of Art in Latvia with Regard to the Social and Political Changes of the 1990s,” in Demakova, Other Conversations, 409. It is interesting to note this shift, which was in some ways presaged by the Russian Sots artists. While in the 1970s, Sots artists identified a parallel between the mechanisms of Soviet propaganda and Western advertising, artists who in the 1990s turned their focus to Western advertising and mass media were doing so quite possibly because they also recognized those links. 236 Demakova, “From the Rape of Europa...,” 319.

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237 Demakova, “The Expansion of the Notion of Art in Latvia,” 423–425. For more on Latvian art of the 1990s, see Ieva Astahovska, ed., Nineties: Contemporary Art in Latvia (Riga: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2010).

Chapter 3 Filming Young Girls and Older Men: Performing Gender in Poland 1

2

3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

The references to the Gaze throughout this chapter correspond to Jacques Lacan’s concept of the field of the Gaze as outlined in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), 109. This idea has been further explored by the visual arts theorist Laura Mulvey, who introduced the concept of “the male Gaze,” postulating that depending on the way a film or other work of art is presented, viewers, regardless of their gender, may be forced to see those objects through “male” eyes. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6–18. Lacan’s conception of the Gaze, however, is not gendered; for him, all human beings are all located within the field of the Gaze. See Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 11; Marjorie Castle and Ray Taras, Democracy in Poland (Cambridge, Mass.: Westview Press, 2002), 158–159. “Genealogy of Polish Nationalism,” in Genevieve Zubrzycki, Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 43–44. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, Volume 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 18. Zubrzycki, Crosses of Auschwitz, 46. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 55. Timothy A. Byrnes, “The Catholic Church and Poland’s Return to Europe,” East European Quarterly 30 (Winter 1996): 434. Davies, Heart of Europe, 11. See Zubrzycki, Crosses of Auschwitz, 57. See ibid., 63. See Donald Pirie, “Introduction,” in Donald Pirie, Jekaterina Young, and Christopher Carrell, eds., Polish Realities: The Arts in Poland, 1980–1989 (Glasgow: Third Eye Center, 1990), 8–29. Zubrzycki, Crosses of Auschwitz, 66. Article 25, paragraph 4 of the preamble to the Polish Constitution, as quoted in Byrnes, “The Catholic Church and Poland’s Return to Europe,” 32.

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15 As quoted in Francis Millard, Polish Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 1999), 135. 16 This case provides an interesting parallel to recent events that have occurred in Russia. In July 2010, the curators Andrei Erofeev and Yuri Samodurov were convicted of blasphemy and offending religious sentiment, for their organization of the exhibition Forbidden Art 2006, which featured, among other works, Alexander Kosolapov’s 1989 Caviar-Icon, an icon cover with the central figure of Mary replaced by caviar. 17 Millard, Polish Politics and Society, 126. 18 Ibid., 121. 19 Ewa Hauser, “Traditions of Patriotism, Questions of Gender,” Genders 22 (Postcommunism and the Body Politic) (1995): 81. It is also worth mentioning the abortion debate that took place in Poland during the 1990s. Abortion had been legal in Poland since 1956. In 1993, however, a strict anti-abortion law was passed, which has remained in place until this day. This demonstrates not only the Church’s strong influence on public policy, but also the anti-feminist stance of the Church that legislators are more than willing to comply with. See Byrnes, “The Catholic Church and Poland’s Return to Europe,” 436–438; and the chapter “The Political Role of the Catholic Church,” in Millard, Polish Politics and Society, 124–142. 20 Urszula Nowakowska and Emilia Piwnik, “Women in the Family,” in Urszula Nowakowska, ed., Polish Women in the ‘90s: The Report by the Women’s Rights Center (Warsaw: Women’s Rights Center, 2000), 105. 21 See Hauser, “Traditions of Patriotism,” 86. 22 Elz.bieta Matynia, “Feminist Art and Democratic Culture: Debates on the New Poland,” Polish Arts Journal 79 (2005): 2. 23 Ibid., 5. For more on gender and the body in Eastern European art, see Ewa Griger, “The Gendered Body as Raw Material for Women Artists of Central Eastern Europe After Communism,” in Janet Elise Johnson and Jean C. Robinson, eds., Living Gender After Communism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 80–104. 24 For a description of the steps taken toward reform in the visual arts following World War II, see Andrzej Paczkowski, The Spring Will be Ours: Poland and the Poles from Occupation to Freedom (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 258. See also Piotr Piotrowski, “Art Versus History; History Versus Art,” in Anda Rottenberg, ed., Art from Poland, 1945–1996 (Warsaw: Galerija Sztuki Współczesnej Zache˛ta, 1997), 209–257; and Anda Rottenberg, “Between Institution and Tradition: The Artist in Search of Freedom,” in Laura J. Hoptman, ed., Beyond Belief: Contemporary Art from East Central Europe (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1995), 25–34.

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25 Pirie, “Introduction,” in Pirie, Young, and Carrell, eds., Polish Realities, 16. 26 Andrzej Kijowski, speech at the Congress of Polish Culture, Palace of Culture and Science, Warsaw, December 12, 1981, published in Kultura 6 (1982): 12–13. 27 Wojciech Włodarczyk, “Visual Arts,” in Pirie, Young and Carrell, eds., Polish Realities, 74. 28 Ibid. 29 According to Łukasz Ronduda, the artist Zygmunt Piotrowski referred to his artistic and political activity as “New Socialist Realism,” while KwieKulik used the terms “Soc Art” or “New Red Art.” Łukasz Ronduda, “Soc Art, or The Attempt at Revitalising the Avant-Garde Strategies in the Polish Art of the 1970s,” in Łukasz Ronduda and Florian Zeyfang, eds., 1, 2, 3... Avant-Gardes: Film/Art between Experiment and Archive (Warsaw: Centre for Contemporary Art, 2007), 41. For more on Polish art of this time, see Łukasz Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s (Jelenia Gora: Polski Western, 2009). 30 Ronduda, “Soc Art,” 40. 31 One of the effects of Martial Law (1981–83) was, in fact, a war on Polish art and artists, as all exhibitions were canceled, the Artists’ Union was abolished, artistic magazines were closed down, and many artists were arrested. 32 See Włodarczyk, “Visual Arts,” 81. 33 Ibid., 82. 34 Ibid., 74. 35 Kathleen M. Cioffi, Alternative Theatre in Poland, 1954–1989 (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1996), 44. 36 Some writers have drawn attention to the connections between Kantor’s work and that of Libera and Kozyra; see, for example, Hanna Wróblewska, Jaroslaw Suchan, and Sabine Folie, The Impossible Theatre: Performativity in the Works of Pawel Althamer, Tadeusz Kantor, Katarzyna Kozrya, Robert . Kus´mirowski, and Artur Zmijewski (Warsaw: Zache˛ta National Gallery of Art, 2006). However, Libera himself insists that Kantor was not a significant influence, citing other artists, such as Jan S´widzin´ski, Andrzej Partum, or Zofia Kulik, who inspired him and his work (Zbigniew Libera, interview with Katarzyna Bielas and Dorota Jarecka, “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” Duz.y Format [February 9, 2004]: 12). Libera feels that Kantor did not represent the type of art that he espoused, because the latter had held a privileged position in the People’s Republic of Poland. Hanna Wróblewska feels that contemporary Polish artists oppose Kantor’s work because it is seen as too individualistic and “demiurgic” (see Wróblewska, “Not Tadeusz Kantor ... ,” in Wróblewska, Suchan, and Folie, The Impossible Theatre, 12.)

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37 Zbigniew Libera lived with KwieKulik from 1987 to 1991, and Zofia Kulik used him as a model for her photographic collages. 38 See Anda Rottenberg, Sztuka w Polsce, 1945–2005 (Warsaw: Stentor, 2006), 239. 39 Rottenberg uses the Polish word Akcje [actions] to refer to KwieKulik’s performances, and the artists themselves use the term ‘Activities’ to denote their work. They insist on the original Polish word for it, Działania, which they also capitalize to indicate their specific activity, as opposed to the general term. 40 Rottenberg, Sztuka w Polsce, 239. 41 Dorota Monkiewicz, “The Gallery as an Idea: Participation of Ewa Partum and Her Gallery Address in the Conceptual Network of the Artists from Eastern Europe,” paper presented at the SocialEast Seminar on Networks and Sociability in East European Art,” London, Courtauld Institute of Art, October 23, 2010. 42 For more on Orange Alternative, see the exhibition catalogue, Happening Against Communism by the Orange Alternative (Kraków: International Cultural Centre, 2011). 43 The Major acquired his nickname at a psychiatrist’s office when he was attempting to avoid military service. He addressed the psychiatrist as “Colonel,” and spoke of himself as “Major,” and the name stuck. See “Who’s Afraid of Toilet Paper?,” East European Reporter 3, no. 2 (1998): 41. 44 Cioffi, Alternative Theatre in Poland, 175. 45 The Major, as quoted in “Who’s Afraid of Toilet Paper?,” 40. 46 For a summary of the Orange Alternative movement, see Cioffi, Alternative Theatre in Poland, 174–178. 47 Mirosław Pe˛czak, “The Orange Ones, The Street, and the Background,” Performing Arts Journal 13, no. 2 (1991): 54. 48 Mirosław Pe˛czak, “Youth Culture,” in Pirie, Young and Carrell, eds., Polish Realities, 111. 49 Rottenberg, Sztuka w Polsce, 276. 50 Zbigniew Libera, interview with Bielas and Jarecka, “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 6. 51 Łukasz Ronduda, “Spirituality Is Embarrassing: Zbigniew Libera’s Art in the 1980s,” in Zbigniew Libera (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan School of Art and Design, 2005), 6. 52 See, for example, Piotr Piotrowski, “Zbigniew Libera: Anarchia i krytyka,” in Dorota Monkiewicz, ed., Zbigniew Libera (Warsaw: National Gallery of Art, 2009), 8–18. 53 Zbigniew Libera, in an interview with Bozena Czubak, “The Art of Legalizing . Rebellion” (trans. Tadeusz Z Wolan´ski), Magazyn Sztuki (February–March 1998): 55.

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54 Piotr Piotrowski, Znaczenie Modernizmu: W stronie historii sztuki polskiej po 1945 roku (Poznan´: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 1999), 220. 55 Ibid., 231. 56 Łukasz Ronduda, “Spirituality Can Embarrass: About the Life and Creation of Zbigniew Libera in the Eighties,” in Stanislaw Rukszy, ed., Towards the Other: Observations and Interventions (Katowice: Gallery of Contemporary Art BWA, 2007), 127. 57 The term was coined by Marek Janiak, a member of Łódz´ Kaliska. 58 Ronduda, “Spirituality Can Embarrass,” 127. . 59 Libera, in an interview with Łukasz Gorczyca and Artur Zmijewski, . . “Artysta nie moze byc´ odpowiedzialny,” in Artur Zmijewski, ed., Drz.a˛ce ciała: Rozmowy z artystami (Bytom: Kronika, 2006), 222. 60 Ibid. 61 As described in Monkiewicz, Zbigniew Libera, 42. 62 Ronduda, “Spirituality Is Embarrassing,” 3. 63 On December 16, 1981, three days after the declaration of Martial Law, proSolidarity miners at the Wujek coal mine near Katowice staged a strike, which was broken up by the government, resulting in the deaths of nine miners. 64 Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 9. 65 Ronduda, “Spirituality Is Embarrassing,” 3. 66 Ibid., 3–4. 67 Libera, in an interview with the author, August 25, 2008. 68 Ronduda, “Spirituality Can Embarrass,” 126. 69 As described in Monkiewicz, Zbigniew Libera, 78. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1977), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995, second edition), 27. 74 Ibid., 26. 75 Libera, in an interview with the author, August 25, 2008. 76 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27. 77 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 140. 78 Butler cites cross-dressing and drag as revealing “the imitative structure of gender,” in ibid., 137. 79 Ibid., 140. It is interesting to consider the significance of repetition to Butler’s theory in the context of Anthony Howell’s designation of repetition as one of the fundamental elements of performance. See The Analysis of Performance Art (Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association, 1999).

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NOTES 80 81 82 83 84 85

86

87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

277

As described in Monkiewicz, Zbigniew Libera, 44 Libera, in “Artysta nie moz.e byc´ odpowiedzialny,” 228. Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 12. Ibid. Zbigniew Libera, in an interview with Andrzej Załe˛ski, Antena Krzyku 1 (2000): 32. Among the others were Józef Robakowski, Zygmunt Rytka, Kazimierz Bendkowski, Pawel Kwiek, and Ryszard Was´ko. Libera cites Wojciech Bruszewski as the first video artist in Poland (Libera, in an interview with Załe˛ski, 32). Zbigniew Libera, in an interview with Adam Szymczyk, “A Conversation with Zbigniew Libera,” Magazyn Sztuki 6, no. 7 (2/3) (1995): 56. Although the artist recognized video as an effective means of capturing his ideas, he stopped making films in the late 1980s, in order to avoid being defined as solely a video artist. Zbigniew Libera, as quoted in Marek Goz´ dziewski, “Zbigniew Libera” (Warsaw: Center for Contemporary Art Archive on Polish Art, undated), unpaginated. Truszkowski was a friend and fellow artist. Together with Libera, he founded the punk rock group Sternenhoch, in the 1980s. Libera, in an interview with Boz.ena Czubak, “The Art of Legalizing Rebellion,” Magazyn Sztuki (February–March 1998): 56. Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 12. Ibid. Ronduda, “Spirituality Is Embarrassing,” 6. Ronduda, “Spirituality Can Embarrass,” 124. Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 12. Libera also confirmed, in an interview with the author (August 23, 2008), that feminist theory didn’t really arrive in Poland until the 1990s. Ibid. Ibid. An interesting comparison to the two films is Kozyra’s Olympia, from 1995, which deals with a similar theme. Libera, as quoted in Monkiewicz, Zbigniew Libera, 56. . Libera, in “Artysta nie moz.e byc´ odpowiedzialny,” in Zmijewski, ed., Drz.a˛ce ciała, 222. Ibid. Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 6. Libera, “Artysta nie moz.e byc´ odpowiedzalny,” 222. The artist likens this to the practices of the Dada artists.

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278 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

114 115 116

117 118

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127

PERFORMING THE EAST

Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 8. Ibid. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 8. Libera, in “Artysta nie moz.e byc´ odpowiedzialny,” 220. Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 6. Libera, in “Artysta nie moz.e byc´ odpowiedzialny,” 220. Ibid. Ibid. As described in Monkiewicz, Zbigniew Libera, 106. Libera’s Corrective Devices were also for adults; for example, his Universal Penis Expander (1995), which is more about the possibility of cross-cultural assimilation in Western society than gender issues. The artist references penis elongation as a tradition in many African societies, and questions whether a person who engages in this type of ritual would be accepted, for instance in political office, in the West. As described in Monkiewicz, Zbigniew Libera, 124. Dean E. Murphy, “An Artist’s Volatile Toy Story,” Los Angeles Times (May 19, 1997): A1. Piotr Sarzyn´ski, “Obóz Koncentracyjny z klocków Lego nadzór,” Polityka 16, no. 2085 (April 19, 1997): 64. While Wojciechowski did not see the merit in the work, others did, including the director of the Warsaw Centre for Contemporary Art, as well as the curators at the Jewish Museum in New York, who bought one of the four sets for its permanent collection. Ronduda, “Spirituality Is Embarrassing,” 124. Hanna Wróblewska, “Polish Art at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, or Right in the Center of Our (Polish) Attention,” in Marek Bartelik, ed., POZA: On the Polishness of Contemporary Art (Hartford: Real Art Ways, 2008), 25. Libera, in Szymczyk, “A Conversation with Zbigniew Libera,” 52. Ibid. Libera, in “Artysta nie moz.e byc´ odpowiedzialny,” 226. Ibid., 224. Libera, in “Przy artys´cie nikt nie jest bezpieczny,” 12. Ibid., 12. Norman L. Kleeblatt, Mirroring Evil, Nazi Imagery: Recent Art (New York: Jewish Museum, 2002), 130. Zbigniew Libera, in an interview with Ewa Kwiecin´ska, “Sztuka jako zakładnik,” Dziennik Łódzki (February 14–15, 2004): 19. Libera, in an interview with the author, August 9, 2010.

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NOTES

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128 The details of this performance have been described in the exhibition catalogue Katarzyna Kozyra: The Men’s Bathhouse (Warsaw: Zache˛ta Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1999). 129 Interestingly, Roselee Goldberg cites this as an instructive way to examine performance art, by, for example, juxtaposing a work by Hannah Wilke with that of Auguste Rodin. See Roselee Goldberg, “One Hundred Years,” in Adrian Heathfield, ed., Live: Art and Performance (New York: Routledge, 2004), 178. 130 Kowalski’s studio is renowned for having produced a number of the leading Polish contemporary artists in the 1990s, for instance, Kozyra, Paweł . Althamer, and Artur Zmijewski. Kowalski ran his studio based on Oskar Hansen’s idea of the Open Form, and encouraged open communication with, and experimentation among, his students. For more on Kowalski and his studio, see Kazimierz Piotrowski, “Grzegorz Kowalski’s Other Pedagogy,” in Rukszy, ed., Towards the Other, 88–90; Łukasz Ronduda, Michał Wolin´ski, and Alex John Wieder, “Games, Actions and Interactions: Film and the Tradition of Oskar Hansen’s Open Form,” in Ronduda and Zeyfang, eds., 1, . 2, 3..., 88–103; Grzegorz Kowalski, interview with Artur Zmijewski, “Jest . . równos´c´, choc´ nie ma równych,” in Artur Zmijewski, Drza˛ce ciała, 166–170; . and “Supplement: Grzegorz Kowalski, Moja historia sztuki,” in Zmijewski, . Drza˛ce ciała, 171–177. 131 Katarzyna Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Ibid. 137 A selection of these debates has been republished in “Pyramid of Animals by Katarzyna Kozyra: Letters and Articles,” in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, eds., Primary Documents: A Sourcebook for Eastern and Central European Art since the 1950s (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 242–255. 138 Hanna Wróblewska considers 1993 a landmark date because of the fact that . not only Kozyra, but also Paweł Althamer, Artur Zmijewski, and Jacek Malinowski all graduated from art school that year, thus commencing the period of Critical Art in Poland. See “Polish Art at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century, or Right in the Center of Our (Polish) Attention,” in Bartelik, ed., POZA, 24. The year 2000 has also been described as a turning point in Polish art, marked by a move away from “heroic criticism,” toward a more ambiguous and ironic playfulness with culture. See Grzegorz Borkowski, Adam Mazur, and Monika Branicka, eds., New Phenomena in

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139

140 141 142

143 144

145 146 147 148 149 150 151

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Polish Art After 2000 (Warsaw: Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski, 2007). In 1996, Kozyra created Olympia as her response to the critics of Pyramid of Animals, after having been diagnosed with Hodgkins disease. In Olympia, Kozyra reconstructed the Manet work; she played the central role herself, replacing the smooth, svelte body of the courtesan with her thin and emaciated one, after she had undergone radiation therapy. In this piece, instead of the young, healthy bodies that we are used to seeing in art and mass media, she shows the infirm and elderly bodies of the artist and another woman, much in the same manner that The Women’s Bathhouse later did. . Łukasz Warzecha, “A Dobry Smak?,” Zycie (June 1, 1999): 18. Zbigniew Górniak, “Sukces z gumy,” Nowa Trybuna Opolska (Opole) 146 (June 25, 1999): unpaginated. Anda Rottenberg and Sławomir Ratajsky, “Teraz Kozyra?,” interview by . Łukasz Warzecha, Zycie (June 1, 1999): 18. Ratajsky responded by defending the jurors and the jury system by which the work was chosen. Piotr Gadzinowski, “Wołek i ochujenie,” Nie (Warsaw) 23 (June 10, 1999): unpaginated. Kozyra’s act of acquiring a phallus is interesting in terms of the Freudian and Lacanian classification of women as representing “lack,” meaning the lack of a phallus or visible sex organs. In this sense, she both acquires a phallus, but, because she appears as a man, she loses her status as female. Thus, even though she rectified this lack she was unable to benefit from it as a woman, since she was perceived to be a man. . A. H. A., W. W. W., “Czy podgla˛danie jest sztuka˛?,” Zycie 121 (May 26, 1999): unpaginated. Górniak, “Sukces z gumy,” unpaginated. . Ryszard Legutko, “Dama z fallusem,” Zycie 142 (June 21, 1999): unpaginated. Stanisław Tabisz, “Bzdet na autostradu sukcesu,” Dziennik Polski (Kraków) 150 (June 30, 1999): 14. The two parties forming a coalition government at the time were the Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) and the Polish People’s Party (PSL). Tabisz, “Bzdet na autostradu sukcesu,” 14. In fact, it was twice as much as the Artists’ Union allotment from the Ministry of Culture, which was then only 10,000 PLN (approximately $4,400). At that time, the Artists’ Union had about 10,000 members working in twenty-two different branches throughout the country. Ibid. Another point of criticism was the fairness of the selection process. Some questioned whether a truly “open” competition was held, or whether the selection

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NOTES

153

154

155 156 157 158

159 160

161

162

281

was based on favoritism. See Joanna Skoczylas, “Sztuka pod narkoza˛,” Trybuna (Warsaw) 83 (April 9, 1999): unpaginated. Anda Rottenberg and the Vice Minister of Culture at the time maintain that the competition was fair (Rottenberg and Ratajsky, “Teraz Kozyra?,” 18), as does Kozyra herself. For a discussion of the abortion law as it related to gender issues in Poland, see the Eleanora Zielin´ska, “Between Ideology, Politics, and Common Sense: The Discourse of Reproductive Rights in Poland,” in Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, eds., Reproducing Gender: Politics, Publics, and Everyday Life After Socialism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 23–57. Halina Filipowicz, “Shifting a Cultural Paradigm: Between the Mystique and the Marketing of Polish Theater,” in Sibelan Forrester, Magdalena J. Zaborowska, and Elena Gapova, eds., Over the Wall/After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures Through an East-West Gaze (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 167. This is a reference to the events of 1989, when the Communists were “quietly” removed from power in Poland’s first free elections since World War II. Filipowicz, “Shifting a Cultural Paradigm,” 167. Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. Ibid. Interestingly enough, the influence of religion can even been seen in connection to Kozyra’s own work. On the day of the opening of the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, at the exact time that her work was officially presented to the public, the private sponsors of The Men’s Bathhouse (the fashion magazine Max) commissioned a mass to be said in Kozyra’s honor, in one of Warsaw’s most prominent churches, S´wie˛tej Katarzyny na Słuz.ewie. Kozyra herself, however, was not aware of the fact that the mass was taking place, although she later mentioned that she recalled hearing about it. From 1998 to 2002, AMS created a project to present public art on its billboards, which were displayed throughout a number of Polish cities. When asked why she agreed to the censoring of her work, she responded that she really had no choice. Either she agreed to the images being covered, or they wouldn’t have been displayed at all. Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. As early as the 1970s, artists such as Natalia LL and Ewa Partum were creating works of art that could be compared with Western feminist art. See the chapters on these two figures, “The Sensual Conceptualism of Natalia LL” and “Ewa Partum: Nondisclosure of the Art, Disclosure of the Artist,” in Ronduda, Polish Art of the 70s, 92–113, 136–155. Adam Szymczyk, as quoted in Susanne Altmann, “Activists on Trial: Feminist Art in Poland; Between Censorship and Activism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, no. 2 (2008): 416.

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163 Libera, in an interview with the author, August 23, 2008. 164 Ibid. For an interesting discussion of the ways in which Polish artists of the 1970s and 1980s both adopted the language and critique of consumerism and altered them to suit their own needs in late-Communist society, see David Crowley’s “The Art of Consumption” in Ronduda and Zeyfang, eds., 1, 2, 3, 16–27. 165 Dorota Jarecka, “Otwartos´c´,” Gazeta Wyborcza 135 (June 14, 1999): 20. 166 Oleg Kulik (with Mila Bredikhina), It’s a Better World, Russian Pavilion, forth-seventh Venice Biennale, 1997. The performance involved Kulik-as-dog observing the visitors to the gallery space and filming them with a special camera that was attached to his head, in order to capture their reactions. 167 Katarzyna Kozyra, “Po nagrodzie na biennale w Wenecji, Strach był we mnie,” interview by Alina Kietrys, Głos Wybrzez.a (Gdan´sk) 116 (June 17, 1999): unpaginated. 168 Ibid. 169 As stated on the artist’s personal Web site, http://www.katarzynakozyra.com. pl/biografia.html; accessed October 29, 2007. 170 In his words: “avant-garde art isn’t accepted by a majority of society.” Rottenberg and Ratajsky, “Teraz Kozyra?,” 18. 171 Ibid. . 172 A. H. A. and W. W. W., “Czy podgla˛danie jest sztuka˛?,” Zycie 121 (May 26, 1999): unpaginated. 173 Katarzyna Kozyra, “Obcy w Łaz´ni,” interview by Iza Wodzin´ska, Gazeta Pomorska (July 21, 1999): 8. 174 “Skandal mimo woli,” Dziennik Łódzki 27 (February 2, 1998): unpaginated. 175 Magdalena Ujma, “Nagos´c´ i nicos´c´,” Kresy (Lublin) 38/39 (September 4, 1999): 254. 176 Anda Rottenberg, “Tabu jest po to aby jej łamac´,” interview by Jerzy Szerszunowicz, Kurier poranny (Białystok) (October 14, 1997): unpaginated. 177 Katarzyna Kozyra, “Was will das weib?,” interview by Monika Adamczyk, Machina 7, no. 28 (July 1998): 80–81. 178 The inadequacy of critical response to Kozyra’s piece is considered to be symptomatic of the Polish press in general, and Prasał was not the only person to take the media to task in what was perceived as its irresponsible handling of art criticism. Libera also criticized the press for its reporting on the work of contemporary artists, specifically Gazeta Wyborcza, where most of the debates regarding Kozyra appeared. Tired of waiting for any real criticism to appear in this publication, Libera created his own newspaper, an exact copy of the Gazeta Wyborcza magazine (the Saturday supplement to the newspaper), and filled it with what he considered to be proper criticism about art, written by the artist, himself (Masters, 1996). Both Prasał’s comment and Libera’s piece indicate the

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NOTES

179 180 181

182 183 184 185 186

187

188

189 190 191 192

193

194 195

283

gap in knowledge among Polish society that made Kozyra’s work less accessible to a local audience. See for reference Kazimierz Piotrowski, “Zbigniew Libera: Art and Ruling Media,” Exit 2, no. 58 (2004): 3358–3360. Others have pointed out that it is specifically Western art practices that caused such a sensation in Poland, yet sex, violence, and murder on TV did not create such a sensation among the general public. See Rottenberg and Ratajsky, “Teraz Kozyra?,” 18; Ujma, “Nagos´c´ i nicos´c´,” 256; Aneta Prasał, “Sztuka prowokacji,” Wprost (July 14, 1999): 113. Prasał, “Sztuka prowokacji,” 113. Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. See Piotr Piotrowski, “Male Artist’s Body: National Identity vs. Identity Politics,” in Hoptman and Pospyszyl, eds., Primary Documents, 226–234; and Izabela Kowalczyk, “Feminist Art in Poland Today,” N. Paradoxa 11 (1999): 12–18. Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. See footnote 139 of this chapter for details. Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. Carolee Schneemann, “The Obscene Body/Politic,” Art Journal (Winter 1991): 29. For Rebecca Schneider, this is also a consequence of the “explicit body” in performance, insofar as the “visceral, tactile body” is the stage of the work. See The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2007), 3. Henry M. Sayre, “A New Person(a): Feminism and the Art of the Seventies,” in Henry Sayre, The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 86–88. Amelia Jones, “The Rhetoric of the Pose: Hannah Wilke,” in Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 152. Piotrowski, “Male Artist’s Body,” 231. Kowalczyk, “Feminist Art in Poland Today,” 13. Ibid. Zdenka Badinovac, “Body and the East,” in Zdenka Badovinac, ed., Body and the East: from the 1960s to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 16. Aneta Szyłak also writes about this in “Ten Years of Disturbance: Polish Art, 1993–2003,” in Contemporary Identities: Current Artistic Creation in Poland (Szczecin: PPH ZAPOL Dmochowski, 2004), 11. Pat Simpson, “Peripheralising Patriarchy? Gender and Identity in Post-Soviet Art: a View from the West,” Oxford Art Journal 27, no. 3 (2004): 408. Ibid., 409.

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196 Catherine Francblin has identified the female body as the “quintessential commodified object,” as quoted by Amelia Jones, in “Survey,” in Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, eds., The Artist’s Body (London: Phaidon Press, 2006), 31. 197 Amelia Jones has identified the ways in which the “authentic” activist body became commodified after the 1980s, in the performances of Laurie Anderson, or even the Spice Girls, for example. See ibid., 31–32. 198 For comparison, see the discussion of the development of feminism in Russian art after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in Margarita Tupitsyn and Martha Rosler, After Perestroika: Kitchenmaids or Stateswomen (New York: Independent Curators, 1993). 199 Ronduda,”Spirituality Is Embarrassing,” 28. 200 Wróblewska also recognizes Libera’s influence on the next generation of Polish artists. She defines the period of Critical Art as taking place within the years 1993–97, beginning with Kozyra’s Pyramid of Animals and ending with her Women’s Bathhouse. The post–Critical Art phase, for her, begins in 1999, with Kozyra’s Men’s Bathhouse, and is defined as something that “obliterates the boundaries between mediums and appeals to the technique of public intervention.” (Wróblewska, in Bartelik, ed., POZA, 27). 201 Piotr Piotrowski, in an interview with Maciej Mazurek, “Wytra˛cic´ z automatyzmu mys´lenia” Znak (December 12, 1998): 146–160. 202 Kowalczyk, “Feminist Art in Poland Today,” 13. Kowalczyk continues to support this view in her work. See Kowalczyk, “The Ambivalent Beauty,” in Edit Andras, Keti Chukrov, and Branko Dimitrijevija, eds., Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), 38–45. 203 Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. 204 Ibid. 205 Cheri Gaulke, as quoted in Josephine Withers, “Feminist Performance Art: Performing, Discovering, Transforming Ourselves,” in Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard, eds., The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s: History and Impact (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 160. 206 Mira Marody and Anna Giza-Poleszczuk discuss this phenomenon of the “revival of masculinity” in post-Communist Poland in their chapter “Changing Images of Identity in Poland: From the Self-Sacrificing to the Self-Investing Woman?,” in Gal and Kligman, eds., Reproducing Gender, 170–171. 207 Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. 208 One can also draw parallels between the American lesbian writer and gay activist Rita Mae Brown’s entering a gay male sauna, the Club Baths, in New York City in 1975. Although she did not wear a rubber phallus, she did

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NOTES

209 210 211

212 213 214 215

216 217 218

219 220 221 222 223

224

225 226 227 228

285

use a fake mustache and codpiece to disguise herself. I would like to thank Andrés Zervigón for bringing this event to my attention. Another parallel can be drawn between Kozyra’s Women’s Bathhouse and Eleanor Antin’s 1972 photo-piece Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, where the artist also used her own body as material, being photographed during a period of three weeks while on a strict diet. See Howard Fox, ed., Eleanor Antin (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), 59–63. Ibid., 61–62. Katarzyna Kozyra, “A Passport into the Male Sanctum,” interview by Artur . Zmijewski, http://katarzynakozyra.pl/main/text/11/mens-bathhouse/; accessed October 9, 2010. Ibid. Elz.bieta Matynia, “Feminist Art and Democratic Culture,” Polish Arts Journal 79 (2005): 2. Hauser, “Traditions of Patriotism,” 78. Anda Rottenberg, “Polish Art in Search of Freedom,” in Anda Rottenberg, Art from Poland, 1945–1996 (Warsaw: Galeria Sztuki Współczesnej Zache˛ta, 1997), 22. Kowalczyk, “Feminist Art in Poland Today,” 13. Ibid. Linda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality, as quoted in Kowalczyk, “Podgla˛danie jako strategia dekonstrukcji obrazu ciała,” Kresy 38/39 (September 4, 1999): 251. Kowalczyk, “Podgla˛danie jako strategia dekonstrukcji obrazu ciała,” 251. Mira Marody and Anna Giza-Poleszczuk, “Changing Images of Identity in Poland,” 151. Ibid., 165. Piotr Piotrowski, “Gender after the Wall,” in Andras, Chukrov, and Dimitrijevija, eds., Gender Check, 239. See David Crowley’s description of the phenomenon in “Warsaw Interiors,” in David Crowley and Susan E. Reid, eds., Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, 183 (Oxford: Berg, 2002). Iza Kowalczyk, “Kozyra, czyli problem,” Magazyn Sztuki 22 (1999): 44. Piotrowski has also noted how men treated the bathhouse, in fact, as a public space. See “Gender after the Wall,” 238–239. Kowalczyk, “Kozyra, czyli problem,” 46. Kozyra, in an interview with the author, September 22, 2007. Kowalczyk, “The Ambivalent Beauty,” 39. Marody and Giza-Poleszczuk, “Changing Images of Identity in Poland,” 169.

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229 Ibid., 170. 230 Ujma, “Nagos´c´ i nicos´c´,” 254. These views are echoed by Maria Janion, as quoted in Filipowicz, “Shifting a Cultural Paradigm,” 164. 231 Piotrowski, “Male Artist’s Body,” 232. 232 Ibid. 233 See for reference Hanna Wróblewska, ed., Katarzyna Kozyra: In Art Dreams Come True (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2007); The Midgets and Hanna Wróblewska, eds., The Midget Gallery: A Guide to the Art System and Art Market (Warsaw: Studio Blok, 2009). 234 Katarzyna Kozyra, in an interview with Sabine Folie, in Wróblewska, Suchan, and Folie, The Impossible Theatre, 57. 235 Ibid., 52. Kozyra had often expressed the fact that for much of her life, she didn’t feel particularly feminine. She even commented that she had been approached by more men in the men’s bathhouse than in real life, at that point. In an interview with the author in April 2010, she remarked on how that had changed following In Art Dreams Come True. 236 Gloria Viagra, as quoted by Katarzyna Kozyra, in an interview with Folie, in ibid., 53. 237 Kozyra, in an interview with Folie, in ibid., 57. 238 Kozyra responding in the affirmative to a question posed by Folie, as to whether she puts herself out on a limb in these embarrassing moments for that reason, in ibid., 64. 239 The artist stated that this was one of her reasons for choosing to utilize the format of video, thinking that her viewers, mainly of the MTV generation, would be able to relate to it. In an interview with the author, September 22, 2007.

Conclusion Performing the East 1 David A. Ross, “Provisional Reading: Notes for an Exhibition,” in David A. Ross, ed., Between Spring and Summer: Soviet Conceptual Art in the Era of Late Communism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 25. 2 During the Soviet period, this “performance” in everyday life was in fact a reality. Polis was a perfunctory member of the Artists’ Union, and Afrika registered for a job that he never actually did, in order to avoid arrest or detainment. 3 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 25. 4 Piotr Piotrowski, “Gender after the Wall,” in Edit Andras, Keti Chukrov, and Branko Dimitrijevija, eds., Gender Check: Femininity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009), 240.

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5 Ibid. 6 Rosalind Krauss, “The Originality of the Avant-Garde,” in Brian Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art [1984], second reprinting, 1996), 13–30. 7 Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 3. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Zdenka Badovinac, ed., 2000 + Art East Collection (Bolzano/Vienna: Folio Verlag, 2001), 16.

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INDEX

abortion, 199, 273n19 Abramovic, Marina, 10, 21, 22, 73, 231n25 Rhythm 0, 10, 72–73 Rhythm 2, 10, 72–73 Rhythm 5, 10 Rhythm series, 10, 72–73 Abstract Expressionism (see also action painting; New York School), 5, 12 abstraction, 22, 25, 42, 125, 164, 244n544, 251n166, 259n33 Acconci, Vito, 7, 74 Following Piece, 7 Seed Bed, 7 Step Piece, 232n33 action painting (see also Abstract Expressionism; New York School), 5–6, 8, 41 Afrika, 1, 14, 28, 29, 33, 244n52, 245n64, 286n2 and ASSA, 44, 67, 225–226, 244n52, 244n54, 244nn56–57 and banners / flags, 50, 64–65, 66, 234n61, 248n121, plate 1, plate 2 Beuys, 49, 54, 66–68, 70, 95, 247n86, 248n126

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and Cage, 44–45, 45, 46, 47 and Jakobson, 50, 65, 245–246n73, plate 2 Kulik and, 2, 14, 26, 34–35, 36, 37, 38, 39–40, 69, 70, 81–82, 86, 87, 93, 94–95, 97, 99, 214, 220, 224, 225–226 and Lenin Was a Mushroom, 44, 67, 225–226 Libera and, 169, 172, 177, 178 and mental institutions / psychiatric wards, 2, 34–35, 39, 48–50, 49, 52–68, 62, 69, 81–82, 95, 172, 178, 245n70 and music, 2, 43–44, 170, 243n50 Works, Crimania, 2, 34, 37, 48–68, 49, 245n70, 246nn79–80, 247n93, 248n105 Donaldestruction, 48, 245n67 Flags, 64–65, 248n121, plate 1, plate 2 Heroes of the Soviet Union, 60, 61–63, 62, 248n116 Protection, 65–66 “Radio Afrika” (music album), 243n50

5/3/2013 7:26:39 PM

INDEX Untitled (Worker and Collective Farm Woman) (with Anufriev), 46–48, 47, 48, 70, 245nn66–67 wall newspaper, 60–61 Water Music, 45, 45, 46 Akvarium, 43 Alekseev, Nikita, 241n36, 242n42 All-Russian Cooperative of Artists, 23 Althamer, Pawel, 279n130, 279n138 Observer, 267n149 Åman, Jan, 252n182 Anderson, Laurie, 284n197 Antin, Eleanor, 25–26, 206 The Battle of the Bluffs, 212–213 Carving: A Traditional Sculpture, 285n208 The King series, 212–213 Anufriev, Sergei, Untitled (Worker and Collective Farm Woman) (with Afrika), 46–48, 47, 48 apartment exhibitions (see AptArt) aphasia, 50–52, 64, 65, 68, 245– 246n73, 246nn77–78 AptArt, 25, 42, 106, 171, 242n42 Arman, Le Plein, 267n145 Artists’ Unions, Latvian, 104, 260n47, 286n2 Polish, 164, 167, 199, 274n31, 280n151 Soviet, 23, 43, 223 Art Marketing Syndicate, The Outdoor Gallery, 200, 201, 281n159 Astahovska, Ieva, 271n230 Austin, J. L., 230n14 avant-garde (see also Futurism; modernism), 3–4, 6, 11–12, 13, 20, 29, 33, 154, 164, 203 Latvian, 104, 107 Russian, 3, 22, 43, 45, 59 Backstein, Joseph, 18 Badovinac, Zdenka, 18, 21, 25, 227

Bryzgel_Index.indd 289

289

Baigell, Matthew, 104 Baigell, Renee, 104 Baltic Chain, 101, 103, 120–121, 126 Baltic states (see also Baltic Chain; Estonia; Lativa; Lithuania), 102, 126, 240n18, 257n13 banners (see Afrika, banners / flags) Barker, Adele Marie, 51–52 bathhouse, Kozyra’s performances in (see Kozyra, Katarzyna, Works, The Men’s Bathhouse; The Women’s Bathhouse) Baudrillard, Jean, 117–118 Beliutin, Eli, and Thirty Years of Moscow Art, 77, 251n166 Bely, Andrei, 44 Bendkowski, Kazimierz, 277n85 Beres, Jerzy, 22 Berlin Wall, 224, 227, 236n83 Kulik’s performance near, 84–85 Beuys, Joseph, 9–10, 25, 66–67, 127, 231n23, 248n126 Afrika and, 49, 54, 66–67, 70, 95, 247n86, 248n126 Kulik and, 70–71, 82–83, 86, 89 Polis and, 127–128, 266n137 Works, How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, 9–10, 127 I Like America and America Likes Me, 10, 66, 83, 253n188 Bierut, Bolesław, 164 Billgren, Ernst, 78 Billington, James H., 39 Birringer, Johannes, 237n93 Black Mountain College, 4, 6, 45 body art, 12, 13, 20–21, 207 Borgs, Jaˉnis, 106, 123 Bredikhina, Mila, 252n182 It’s a Better World (with Kulik), 282n166 Breže, Andris, 259n43

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290

PERFORMING THE EAST

Bremen, Polis’s performance in (see Polis, Miervaldis, Works, Bronze Peoples’ Collective Begging (Latvia’s Gold)) Brener, Alexander, 80 Mad Dog (The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus) (with Kulik), 19, 70, 71–74, 71, 72, 77, 91, 98–99 Brezhnev, Leonid, 36 era of, 56, 106, 107 Brothers Grimm, “The Bremen Town Musicians,” 196 Brown, Rita Mae, 284–285n208 Browning, C. S., 240n17 Brus, Günter, Vienna Walk, 266n135 Bruszewski, Wojciech, 277n85 Buchloh, Benjamin, 67, 247n86 Buck-Morss, Susan, 14–15, 16–17, 233n42 Budapest, Kozyra’s performances in, (see Kozyra, Katarzyna, Works, The Men’s Bathhouse; The Women’s Bathhouse) Bugaev, Boris Nikolaevich (see Bely, Andrei) Bugaev, Sergei (see Afrika) Bulgaria, 240n18 Burden, Chris, 7, 10 Five-Day Locker Piece, 7, 73 Shoot, 7, 73 Bürger, Peter, 11–12, 13, 225, 271n225 Buševica, Anda, 137–138 Bush, George, Polis and Vaara’s reference to, 117, 118–119 Butler, Judith, 40, 174, 180, 213, 219, 223, 224, 276n78, 276n79 Cabaret Voltaire, 3 Cage, John, 153, 166, 229n7, 230n16 Afrika and, 44–45, 45, 46, 47 Works, Untitled Event, 4, 6, 134

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Water Music (with Afrika et al.), 44–45, 45, 46 Calendar Demonstrations (see also Baltic Chain), 103, 257n10, 265n117 Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, Polis’s use of, 129 Cârneci, Magda, 16 Catholic Church (see Poland) Celms, Valdis, Puzurs, 259n42 censorship, 24, 41, 107, 161, 167, 187–188, 200–201, 201, 208–209, 281n160 Cˇerný, David, Pink Tank, 264–265n113 Chautauqua Conference, 257n12 Cheka (see KGB) Chernyshevskii, Nikolai, 262–263n86 Cioffi, Kathleen, 166, 167 Cold War, 1, 15, 16, 18, 30, 68, 85, 118, 240n18, 244n56 Collective Actions, 26, 41, 42, 98, 105, 106, 171, 236n82, 241n34, 241n36, 242n42 Appearance, 41 Liblikh, 41 Slogans, 242n40 The Third Variant, 41 commodity culture / consumerism, 15, 161, 209, 214, 217, 226, 284nn196–197 art and, 3, 5, 7, 9, 13, 16–17, 27, 77, 81, 127, 129, 151, 155–156, 162, 206–207, 209, 210, 222, 234n57, 237n86, 282n164 concentration camps (see Libera, Zbigniew, Works, Lego Concentration Camp) conceptual art / conceptualism (see also Moscow Conceptualism), 18, 70, 105, 125, 133, 152, 164, 165, 167, 195, 203, 232n34, 232n37, 237n86

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INDEX Constructivism, 59, 115 consumerism (see commodity culture / consumerism) controversy / scandal (see Kozyra, Katarzyna, and controversy / scandal) countryside, performances in the, 40–41, 42, 89, 98–99, 105–106 Crimea, 244n52, 245n69, 246–247n84 Beuys and, 9, 49, 54, 247n86 as site of Crimania, 49, 53–54, 247n86 Critical Art, 204, 210, 213, 214, 221, 279n138, 284n200 Cubism, 104 Cˇufer, Eda, 80, 235n67, 237n86 Cunningham, Merce, 4, 245n63 Czechoslovakia / Czech Republic, 20, 240n18 Dada, 3, 11, 98, 152, 277n102 neo-Dada, 167, 170 Davidos, Sergejs, 260n43 Davies, Norman, 158 da Vinci, Leonardo, Madonna Litta, Polis’s reference to, 130 Demakova, Hele¯na, 155–156 Derrida, Jacques, 233n41, 245n64 Dixon, Simon, 37, 238n3 Dmowski, Roman, 159 dolls, 178, 184, 185, 185, 188–189, 211–212, 213 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 263n86 drag, 218–219, 276n78 Dreifelds, Juris, 101, 256n6, 256n8 Drews-Sylla, Gesine, 95, 253n208, 254n221, 255n245 Duchamp, Marcel, 78–79 Boîte en valise, 267n145 Dyogot, Ekaterina, 30, 31, 82, 237n86, 255n239 Dzerzhinsky, Felix, statue of, 51

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291

Earthworks, 241n34 East-West divide, 14, 15–16, 78, 80, 91, 233n43, 251n173 El Lissitzky, 59 Embarrassing Art, 182, 204, 210, 219, 221 Engels, Friedrich, 262n86 environmental art, 107 Epstein, Mikhail, 17, 253n208 Erjavec, Aleš, 17, 27–28 Erofeev, Andrei, 273n16 Estonia, 103, 120 European Union (EU), 32, 37, 142, 156 artists’ references to, 84, 90, 254n223, 271n31 exhibitions and festivals (see also AptArt), After the Wall: Art and Culture in PostCommunist Europe, 21, 232n40 Art Days, 107, 168–169, 259n42, 259–260n43 “Bulldozer Exhibition,” 19, 122, 257n9 Celebration, 259n33 Crimania: Icons, Monuments, Mazàfaka, 34, 37, 49–50, 60, 63, 64–66, 238n1, 248n121 Doctor and Patient: Memory and Amnesia, 54 Forbidden Art 2006, 273n16 Gender Check: Feminity and Masculinity in the Art of Eastern Europe, 21, 33 Heroes of the Soviet Union, 60, 61–63, 62 Interpol, 19, 78, 78–79, 251nn172–173 It’s the Real Thing, 235n69 Layers: Contemporary Collage from St. Petersburg, Russia, 234n61 Manifesta 1, 81 The Miervaldis Polis Memorial Room, 130–131, 131, 267n145 The Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Zaˉbers Exhibition, 130, 266n144, 267n145 Nature. Environment. Man, 106–107, 108, 259n33 Ninth Show of Works by Young Artists, 259n33

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292

PERFORMING THE EAST

exhibitions and festivals (see also AptArt)—Continued Riga: Latvian Avant-Garde, 33, 116, 155 São Paolo Biennale, 139–140, 140 Signs and Wonder, 74, 77 The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, 8 Thirty Years of Moscow Art (Manezh exhibition), 77, 122, 251n166 Venice Biennale, 33, 96, 97, 154, 157, 184, 185–186, 191, 192–193, 196, 199, 212, 281n158, 282n166 Zielona Góra Biennale, 184 experimental theater (see performance art) Expressionism, 22, 104 feminism / feminist theory, Poland and, 161, 163, 207, 210, 215, 220, 273n19, 277n94 Russia and Eastern Europe and, 209 the West and, 195, 203, 206, 208, 281n161 Figes, Orlando, 239n10 Filipowicz, Halina, 199–200 Fišers, Mik¸elis, 134 flags (see Afrika, and banners / flags) Fluxus, 25–26, 45, 230n19 Foster, Hal, 225, 271n225 Foucault, Michel, 80, 173–74, 180, 190, 252n187 Fox, Howard N., 212 Francblin, Catherine, 284n196 Freedom and Peace, 167 Fried, Michael, 12–13, 232n34 Friends of Maiakovskii Club (see Maiakovskii, Vladimir) Frydrych, Waldemar Maria (“The Major”), 167, 168, 169, 274n43 FSB (see KGB) Futurism Italian, 3–4, 6, 9, 11–12, 98 Russian, 4, 9, 11–12, 98

Bryzgel_Index.indd 292

Gabraˉns, Gints, 1, 14, 33 light installations of, 154, 190–191, 271n230 and Polis, 101–102, 132–133, 148, 149, 150, 154, 156, 217, 225, 226 training and early career of, 133–135, 267n150, 267n157 Works, Paramirrors, 154 Riga Dating Agency (with Pormale), 154–155, 271n231, 271n233 Starix, 2, 132, 135–146, 138, 140, 146, 146–154, 149, 155, 157, 190–191, 268n168, 268n174, 268–269n177, 269n187, 270n205, 270nn211–212, 271n225, plate 9 Starix: How to Get on TV, 145, 146, 269n187 Sveroid Congregation, 154, 271n226 Gadzinowski, Piotr, 198 Gailis, Maris, 131 galleries, Address Gallery, 167 Foksal Gallery, 201 Guelman Gallery, 71, 71, 72, 91 Iris Clert Gallery, 8 Kolonna Gallery, 130 Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, 105, 133, 137 M6, 135, 267n155 Nigel Greenwood Gallery, 11 Regina Gallery, 69, 90 Soros Center for Contemporary Art, 133, 135, 267–268n157 Zache˛ta Gallery, 21, 192 Gauguin, Paul, and primitivism, 73, 74, 250n152 Gaulke, Cheri, 211 Gdan´sk, 164, 165 Gdan´sk Shipyard Protests (see Gdan´sk) gender identity / roles (see also Kozyra, Katarzyna; Libera, Zbigniew), 2, 8, 21, 25–26, 157, 161, 162, 163,

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INDEX 173, 174, 178, 180, 188, 196–197, 206, 211–212, 220, 227 Genis, Alexander, 18 Gerlovina, Rimma, cube poems of, 242n40 Geusa, Antonio, 69 Gilbert and George, 10–11, 128, 266n137 Singing Sculpture, 10–11, 127 Giza-Poleszczuk, Anna, 215, 217, 284n206 glasnost (see also Gorbachev, Mikhail), 17, 18 Gobzin¸š, Roberts, 145 Goldberg, Roselee, 3, 11, 13, 21–22, 232n34, 258n18, 279n129 Gomułka, Władysław, 164 Goncharova, Natalia, 3, 73–74, 250n152 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 50–51, 54, 90–91, 119 Kulik’s reference to, 93 Polis and Vaara’s reference to, 117, 118–119 reforms of (see also glasnost; perestroika), 101, 102, 112, 256n8 Gorczyca, Łukasz, 171 Górniak, Zbigniew, 197 Grebenshchikov, Boris, 43, 63, 243n50 Grigorescu, Ion, 22 Grigorjevs, Igors, and Gabraˉns’s Starix, 135–136, 140–143, 148, 152, 153, 269n182 Grı¯nberga, Inta, 128 Grı¯nbergs, Andris, 26, 105–106 Green Wedding, 105 Self-Portrait, 105, 259n31 The Wedding of Jesus Christ, 105 Gržinic´, Marina, 16, 30, 237n97 Groys, Boris, 17, 30, 31, 234n57 Gruppa, 167 Gu, Wenda, 80 Guattari, Félix, 48–49, 245n64 Guerrilla Girls, 25–26 Gurianov, Georgii, 43, 44

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293

Hagoort, Erik, 65 Hansen, Oskar, 279n130 Happenings (see also Cage, John, Works, Untitled Event), 4, 25 at the Address Gallery, 167 Grı¯nbergs and, 24, 128, 262n69 Kaprow and, 5–6, 41, 98, 131, 152, 166 Orange Alternative and, 24, 167–169 Polis’s first performance as, 108–109 Hauser, Ewa, 161, 214 Heathfield, Adrian, 22, 94 Hedetoft, Ulf, 37 Helsinki, Polis’s performance in (see Polis, Miervaldis, Works, Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre”) Helsinki Summit, 117 Herrberg, Antje, 37 Herzen, Alexander, 262n86 Hirst, Damien, 74 Holocaust, 6, 66 Hopf, Ted, 256n258 Hoptman, Laura, 19, 31, 80, 233n44, 235n66 Hosking, Geoffrey, 239nn13–14 Howell, Anthony, 276n79 Huizinga, Johan, 253n207 Hungary (see also Kozyra, Katarzyna, Works, The Men’s Bathouse; The Women’s Bathhouse), 20, 240n18 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Turkish Bath, Kozyra’s use of, 192 installation, 41, 106–107, 163, 259–260n43 Afrika and, 48, 50, 245n67 Beuys and, 9, 25 Gabraˉns and, 133, 139–140, 140, 154, 191 Kabakov on, 25 Kaprow and, 6 Kozyra and, 191–193, 192, 193, 194 Kulik and, 85, 86, 86, 97

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294

PERFORMING THE EAST

Ingres, Jean-AugusteDominique—Continued Libera and, 175 in Poland, 163, 164 Iofan, Boris, Palace of Soviets, 15 Iraq War, Gabraˉns’s reference to, 142 Iron Curtain, 65, 164 Ivekovic, Sanja, 20–21 Jakobson, Roman, Afrika and, 50, 65, 245–246n73 Janiak, Marek, 182, 276n57 Jarecka, Dorota, 202–203 Jaruzelski, Wojciech, 165 Jaunzeme, Inta, 105 Jones, Amelia, 12, 13, 21–22, 30–31, 40, 97, 126–127, 207, 258n18, 284n197 Judelson, Paul, 52 Kabakov, Ilya, 31, 74, 235n67 albums of, 41–42 on installation, 25 Kantor, Tadeusz, influence of, 26, 166, 274n36 The Water Hen, 166 Kaprow, Allan, 6, 12, 266n137 and happenings, 5–6, 41, 98, 129, 131, 152, 153, 166, 223, 230n16 Works, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 5 Apple Shrine, 6 Gas, 5 Household, 5, 41 “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” (essay), 5–6 Rearrangeable Panels, 6 A Service to the Dead II, 5 Starix, 2, 132, 135–146, 138, 140, 146, 146–154, 149, 155, 157, 190–191, 268n168, 268n174,

Bryzgel_Index.indd 294

268–269n177, 269n187, 270n205, 270nn211–212, 271n225, plate 9 Kazaks, Je¯kabs, 258n20 KGB, 35–36, 41, 51, 105, 244n52, 246n74 Polis and, 109, 259n40, 261n56, 262n74 Khrushchev, Nikita, 246–247n84 thaw, 164, 236n74 and Thirty Years of Moscow Art, 77, 122, 251n166 kinetic art, 107, 259n42 Kino, 44 Kizevalter, Georgii, 241n36 Kleeblatt, Norman, 190 Klein, Yves, 8, 231n21 Le Vide, 267n145 Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, 8 Knížák, Milan, 22 Komar, Vitaly, 235n67 Koons, Jeff, 74 Kornetchuk, Elena, 23 Kosolapov, Alexander, Caviar-Icon, 273n16 Koszalin, 171 Kounellis, Janis, 25 Kowalczyk, Izabela, 208, 210, 214–215, 216, 217, 284n202 Kowalski, Grzegorz, Kozyra’s training with, 195, 206, 270n30 Kozyra, Katarzyna, 1, 28, 29, 33, 157–158 and Antin, 206, 212–213, 285n208 and controversy / scandal, 196–202, 203–205, 207, 209, 216, 217–218, 219–220, 280n151, 280–281n152, 282–283n178, 283n186 and Critical Art, 210, 213–214, 221, 279n138, 284n200 and Libera, 2–3, 32–33, 163, 201–202, 205–206, 207, 210,

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INDEX 211–212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220–221, 224–225, 226, 274n36, 277n97, 284n200 training and early career of, 195–196, 279n130, 279n138 and Western feminist artists, 206, 212–213, 284–285n208 Works, In Art Dreams Come True, 218–219, 286n235, plate 12 Blood Ties, 200, 201, 281n160 The Men’s Bathhouse, 162, 191–193, 192, 193, 194, 196–199, 202–204, 205–206, 211, 212–213, 215, 279n128, 280n144, 280n151, 280–281n152, 281n158, 284n200, 286n235 Olympia, 206, 277n97, 280n139 Pyramid of Animals, 19, 196 The Women’s Bathhouse, 191–193, 194, 215, 216–217, 284n200, 285n208 Kraków, 166, 171 Krauss, Rosalind, 225 Krese, Solvita, 105 Kristeva, Julia, 241n31 Kubota, Shigeko, 25–26 Vagina Painting, 8 Kulik, Oleg, 1, 22, 28, 29, 33, 179, 182, 219, 226 and Afrika, 2, 14, 26, 34–35, 36, 37, 38, 39–40, 69, 70, 81–82, 86, 87, 93, 94–95, 97, 99, 214, 220, 224, 225–226 arrests of, 75–77, 76, 79, 82, 91–92, 168; and Beuys, 70–71, 82–83, 86, 89, 95, 253n199 as a curator, 69, 226; and the EastWest divide, 91, 93–94, 225 and / as the Other, 73, 80, 84–85, 87–88, 89, 91, 95–96, 97, 179, 182, 226, 249n148

Bryzgel_Index.indd 295

295 other animal performances of, 87–91, 253n212 and political activism, 86, 89–91, 253n212 on post-Soviet Russia, 73, 250n150 and primitivism, 73–74, 250n152 “Russian Dog” performances of, 2, 34, 37, 68–69, 71–84, 91–93, 94–96, 124, 202–203 training and early career of, 69–71 Works, Alice versus Lolita, 88–89, 254n215 Alter Aegis, 88 Armadillo for Your Show, 94 Breton Horses, 89, 254n219 Dead Monkeys, or Memento Mori, 249n134 Deep into Russia, 70, 70, 96, 97, 249n134 Dog House, 19, 78, 78–82, 91–92, 251n172, 252n182, 252n194 Family of the Future, 85–86, 86, 253nn206–208, plate 3 Gobi Test (The Unbearable Charm of Mongolia), 89, 254n220 I Am a Beast Now!, 89 I Bite America and America Bites Me, 82–84, 84, 253n204 I Cannot Keep Silent Anymore, 89–90, 90, 254nn222–223 I Love Europe, She Does Not Love Me Back, 84–85 It’s a Better World (with Bredikhina), 282n166 Kulik Is a Bird, in Fact, 249n134 Kulik versus Koraz, 87–88, 88, 253n213 Mad Dog (The Last Taboo Guarded by the Lone Cerberus) (with Brener), 71, 71–74, 72, 98–99, 249n141, 250n159 Meet My Boyfriend Charles, 249n134 Missionary, 89, 249n134 Pavlov’s Dog, 92–93

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296

PERFORMING THE EAST

Kulik, Oleg—Continued Pigeon Loft, 249n134 Piggly Wiggly Making Presents, 90–91, 196, 254n224 Political Animal, 89, 254n221 Political Look of Man, 89 Reservoir Dog, 74–78, 76, 123, 250n155 Ten Commments of Zoophrenia, 90, 91 Two Kuliks, 88, 254n214 “Why Have I Bitten a Man?” (essay), 81–82 Zoocentrism Experiment, 89 Kulik, Zofia (see KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemisław Kwiek)) Kultura Zrzuty, 169–171, 179 Kuriokhin, Sergei, 43–44 Kuspit, Donald, 67 Kwiek, Pavel, 277n85 Kwiek, Przemisław (see KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemisław Kwiek)) KwieKulik (Zofia Kulik and Przemisław Kwiek), 165, 166, 274n29, 275n37, 275n39 Lacan, Jacques, 241n31, 255n230, 255n247, 272n1, 281n144 Larionov, Mikhail, 3, 73, 74 Latvia, 1, 14, 20, 32, 238n108, 257n15 contemporary artists in, 155–156, 270n220, 271n235 independence movement in, 38, 100–103, 120, 121, 133, 156, 223–224, 256nn2–3, 257n10 and national identity (see also national identity, Latvian), 38 performance art in, 1–3, 26, 32–33, 104–107, 113, 125, 133, 169, 258nn24–25 post-Soviet, 32, 119, 120, 122–123, 132, 140–141, 146, 147–148, 150, 155, 156, 268n177, 269n182 Socialist Realism in, 104, 109, 151, 265n126

Bryzgel_Index.indd 296

Soviet annexation of / occupation of / rule in, 2, 20, 32, 38, 100–101, 102, 115, 116, 122, 125–126, 156, 163–163, 224, 256n1, 257n12, 265–266n128 unofficial art / alternative subculture of, 26, 105–107, 133 Latvian Academy of Art, 108, 109, 133 Law on Radio and Television, 160 Legos (see Libera, Zbigniew, Works, Lego Concentration Camp) Legutko, Ryszard, 198 Lenin, Vladimir (see also Plan for Monumental Propaganda), 14–15 Afrika and imagery of / references to, 44, 50, 64–65, 68, plate 1 Kulik’s reference to, 93 Lenin Was a Mushroom and, 44 Polis and monuments to, 112–114, 120, 123–124, 145, 262n74, 264n108 Polis and painting thought to be depicting, 109, 236n84, 261n56 Leningrad, unofficial art in, 42–43 Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda, Polis’s Bronze Man and, 115–116 Libera, Zbigniew, 1, 33, 165, 210, 211–212, 213, 277n88, 277n94 and Afrika, 169, 172, 177, 178 arrest and imprisonment of, 171–172, 177, 276n63 and Critical Art, 210 and Embarrassing Art, 182, 204, 210, 219, 277n102 and Kantor, 274n36 Kozyra and, 2–3, 32–33, 163, 201–202, 205–206, 207, 210, 211–212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 220–221, 224–225, 226, 274n36, 277n97, 284n200 and Kultura Zrzuty, 169–171, 179

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INDEX and KwieKulik, 275n37 and Martial Law, 170, 179, 184, 187 and mental institutions, 177, 177–178, 179 and Private Art, 171, 188, 220–221, 276n57 and video, 176–177, 180–181, 184, 190, 205, 277nn85–86 Works, Body Master, 185, 187 Corrective Devices series, 184–191, 205, 278n113 Delivery Bed: Play Kit for Girls, 185, 186 For Art, 179 Game with Mother, 174–176, 175 Home Performance, 171 How to Train the Girls, 2, 157–158, 172–174, 176, 178–180, 184, 189, plate 10, plate 11 Intimate Rituals, 180–184, 181, 216, 277n97 Ken’s Aunt, 184–185 La Vue series, 190 Lego Concentration Camp, 184, 185–187, 188–189, 191, 238n109, 278n116 Mystical Perseverance, 180–181, 277n97 Positives series, 190 Residents, 190 Someone Else, 179, 180 Universal Penis Expander, 278n113 You Can Shave the Baby, 184, 185 Liebknecht, Karl, 262–263n86 Lielaˉ, Dace, 123 Lithuania, 103, 120, 230n19, 259n42 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 32 Liucii, Alexander, 245n69 LL, Natalia, 20–21, 281n161 Lodder, Christina, 115–116 Łódz´, 167, 169, 183 Łódz´ Kaliska, 167, 169, 170, 276n57 Lublin, 166

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297

Lunacharsky, Anatoly, 115 Luxembourg, Rosa, 262–263n86 Maciunas, George, 230n19 Maiakovskii, Vladimir, Afrika and, 59 Friends of Maiakovskii Club, 243n46 mail art, 167 Mailı¯tis, Ivars, 259n43 Malevich, Kazimir, 59, 234n57 Black Square, 45, 46, 70 Maˉlina, Sarmı¯te, 259–260n43 Malinowski, Jacek, 279n138 Manet, Edouard, Olympia, Kozyra’s recreation of, 206, 277n97, 280n139 MANI (Moscow Archive of New Art), 242n42 Marody, Mira, 215, 217, 284n206 Martial Law, 165, 172, 276n63 Libera and, 170, 179, 184, 187 Polish artists and, 26, 165, 167, 170, 179, 184, 187–188, 274n31 Marx, Karl, 262n86 mass media (see Gabraˉns, Gints) Matlock, Jack, 257n12 Matynia, Elz.bieta, 163, 213–214 Mazin, Viktor, 244n54, 249–250n148 and Afrika’s Crimania, 49–50, 52, 54, 55–60, 61, 63–64, 66, 245n70, 246nn79–80 McEvilley, Thomas, 74, 232n37, 253n213 Melamid, Alexander, 235n67 mental institutions / psychiatric wards (see also aphasia; schizophrenia), Afrika and, 2, 34–35, 39, 48–50, 49, 52–68, 62, 69, 81–82, 95, 172 Libera and, 177, 177–178, 179 Merz, Mario, 25, 75 Mesch, Claudia, 236n83 Mickiewicz, Adam, Death of a Colonel, 162

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PERFORMING THE EAST

Milašs, Eduards, Puzurs (with Celms), 259n42 Millard, Francis, 161 Minimalism, 165 Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” and, 12, 232n34 Misiano, Viktor, 82, 251n173 Mocnik, Rasto, 16 modernism, 3, 12, 13, 16, 17, 68, 104, 106, 128, 146, 164, 170, 204, 206–207, 224 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 101, 103 Monastyrsky, Andrei, 41 Mongolia, Kulik’s performance in, 89, 254n220 monuments / statues (see also Cˇerný, David, Pink Tank; Dzerzhinsky, Felix; Mukhina, Vera; Plan for Monumental Propaganda), Freedom Monument, 103, 119, 120, 257n13, 265n117 Plan for Monumental Propaganda, 115–116 Polis and, 2, 100, 111–116, 112, 114, 117, 118–121, 123–124, 125, 145, 224, 263n88, 264n108 Morris, Robert, Site (with Schneemann), 206 Moscow, performance art in (see AptArt; Collective Actions) Moscow Actionism, 69 Moscow Conceptualism, 41–42, 70, 237n86, 241–242n36, 242n40 Moscow Radicalism, 69 Mosfilm, 44, 244n56 Mühl, Otto, 9, 131 Mukhina, Vera, 257n13 Worker and Collective Farm Woman, Afrika’s performance at, 46–48, 46, 47, 48, 245nn66–67 Mulvey, Laura, 272n1

Bryzgel_Index.indd 298

music, experimental / underground, 26, 42, 43, 44, 64 groups, 43–44, 244n57, 277n88 national identity (see also Latvia, and national identity; Poland, and national identity; Russia, and national identity), 227, 239n10 Latvian, 38 Polish, 158–160, 162, 163, 206, 213–214, 220, 225 Russian / post-Soviet, 2, 34–40, 43, 48, 53, 58, 63, 66, 68, 82, 91, 93–94, 99, 224, 238nn2–3, 239n4, 239n6, 239n10, 239nn13–14, 240nn16–18, 241n30, 249n148, 256n258 NATO, 32, 37 Neizvestny, Ernst, and Thirty Years of Moscow Art, 77, 122 neo-avant-garde, 152 Neue Slowenische Kunst (see New Slovenian Art) New Academy of Fine Arts, 42–43 New Artists, 42–43, 243n48 New Red Art (see Soc Art) New School for Social Research, 230n16 New Slovenian Art, 19 New Socialist Realism (see Soc Art) newspapers and journals (see also Afrika, works, wall newspaper) Diena, 137–138, 139 Gazeta Wyborcza, 202, 205, 282n178 Kabinet, 246n79 Sestdiena, 130 . Zycie, 197, 203, 204 New York School (see also Abstract Expressionism; action painting), 6 Nieznalska, Dorota, Passion, 160–161

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INDEX Nikolaevich, Vale¯rijs, and Gabraˉns’s Starix, 135–137, 140, 143, 148, 153, 190, 258n158, 268n158, 269n178, 269n180 Nitsch, Hermann, 9 Noever, Peter, 54, 61 nonconformist / underground / unofficial art, 31, 44, 57, 63, 104–105, 108, 122, 236n74, 250n155 exhibitions of, 24–25, 42, 77, 106, 171, 242n42, 251n166 in Latvia, 105, 106–107, 109 in Leningrad, 42–43 in Poland, 170, 171 Nosov, Nikolai, 248n122 Novaia Akademiia Iziashnikh Iskusstvo (see New Academy of Fine Arts) Novikov, Timur, 42–43, 44–45, 243nn45–46 Novye Khudozhniki (see New Artists) Oracheva, Oksana, 36, 38 Orange Alternative, happenings of, 24, 167–169, 250n158 Works, The Taking of the Winter Palace, 168 Who’s Afraid of the Toilet Paper?, 167–168 Osmanis, Aleksis, 104 Pabriks, Artis, 102, 126 Palin, Sarah, 65–66 Panitkov, Nikolai, 241n36 Partum, Andrzej, 274 Partum, Ewa, 167, 281n161 Passmore, George (see Gilbert and George) Pauls, Raimonds, 144 Pe˛czak, Mirosław, 168 Pejic´, Bojana, 14, 21 perestroika (see also Gorbachev, Mikhail), 2, 18, 24, 32, 44, 52, 101, 107, 112, 128, 133, 184, 195

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299

performance art, 230n18, 231–232n33 and conceptual art, 232n34 in Eastern Europe, 1, 23–25, 26–30, 208–209, 222, 223, 226, 227–228 and feminist art, 7–8, 25–26, 206–207, 215–216, 226–227, 258n18 historiography of Russian and East European performance, 18–22, 30–31, 235n69, 235n73 in Latvia, 1–3, 26, 32–33, 104–107, 113, 125, 133, 169, 258nn24–25 in Poland, 2, 26, 32–33, 164, 166–169, 203–204, 208 and postmodernism, 11–18 in Russia, 1, 2, 23–25, 26–30, 32–33, 40–43, 222, 223, 226, 227–228, 242n40 and taboo / transgression, 9, 10, 24, 72–73, 96, 98, 99, 182, 250n159 in the West, 1, 3–11, 5–6, 25–26, 27–28, 103, 126–128, 151, 156, 203–204, 206–207, 222, 227–228, 230–231n20, 242n40, 258n18 Pe¯tersons, Ojaˉrs, 259n43 Phelan, Peggy, 12, 13, 21–22, 28, 29, 40, 260n48 Picasso, Pablo, and primitivism, 73, 74 Piotrowski, Piotr, 20–21, 170, 207, 210, 215, 218, 224–225, 233n53, 285n224 Piotrowski, Zygmunt, 274n29 Poggioli, Renato, 11, 24 Poland, Catholic Church and, 32, 157, 158–163, 168, 170, 191, 199–202, 208, 220, 273n19 feminism / theory and, 161, 163, 207, 210, 215, 220, 273n19, 277n94

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300

PERFORMING THE EAST

Poland—Continued and national identity (see also national identity, Polish), 158–160, 162, 163, 206, 213–214, 220, 225 nonconformist art in, 170, 171 performance art in, 2, 26, 32–33, 164, 166–169, 203–204, 208 Socialist Realism in, 164–165, 236n79 Polis, Miervaldis, 1, 14, 29, 33, 107, 155, 236n84 and Beuys, 127–128, 266n137 Bronze Man performances of, 2, 28, 100–101, 125–127, 132, 148, 156, 212, 220, 224, 267n148 and comparable Western artists, 127–128, 266n137 as “court painter,” 131–132, 267n145 and Gabraˉns, 101–102, 132–133, 148, 149, 150, 154, 156, 217, 225, 226 and the KGB, 109, 259n40, 261n56, 262n74 Kozyra and, 217, 220 Libera and, 184, 217 and monuments / statues, 2, 100, 111–116, 112, 114, 117, 118–121, 123–124, 125, 145, 224, 263n88, 264n108 as a painter, 128–129 and performance, 110, 129–131, 261n58 training and early career of, 108–110, 133, 134, 260n48, 261n59 Works, The Bronze Man, 2, 103, 110–116, 111, 112, 114, 125–126, 133, 148, 150, 156, 261nn67–68, 262n77, 262n84, 262nn69–75, 263n88, plate 4 The Bronze Man Becomes the White Man (with Zaˉbers), 103, 122–124, 150, plate 6

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The Bronze Man Tourist, 124, 265n125 The Bronze Peoples’ Collective Begging (Latvia’s Gold), 103, 116, cover, plate 5 Illusions on the Pages of a Book about Venice series, 128 Island of Colossi series, 128–129 The Miervaldis Polis Memorial Room, 130–131, 131 Miervaldis Polis & Vilnis Zaˉbers 08.08.91 (with Polis), 119–120, 264nn103–104 The Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Zaˉbers Exhibition (with Zaˉbers), 130, 266n144, 267n145 Polis and Caravaggio, 129 Raphael and Polis, 129, plate 8 Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre” (with Vaara), 116–119, 117, 263–264n101, 263n93, 263nn99–100, 266n135, plate 7 Untitled (Tank), 120–122, 264n108, 264nn110–111 Pollock, Jackson, action painting of, 5–6, 8, 98 Pop Art, 146, 152 Pope John Paul II, 159, 201 Pop Mekhanika, 43–44, 244n57 Pormale, Monika, Riga Dating Agency (with Gabraˉns), 154–155 Pornography, Kozyra’s The Men’s Bathhouse criticized as, 197, 207 Pospiszyl, Tomáš, 19, 31, 80, 233n44, 235n66 postmodernism, 3, 12, 13, 16, 17–18, 27, 53, 76, 93, 125, 146, 222, 224–225, 228, 234n57, 234n61 post-painterly abstraction, 12 Prasał, Aneta, 205, 282–283n178

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INDEX primitivism, 68–69 Private Art, 171, 182, 184, 188, 220–221, 276n57 Prizel, Ilya, 36, 239n13, 240n16 Proesch, Gilbert (see Gilbert and George) Propaganda (see also Lenin’s Plan for Monumental Propaganda; monuments / statues), 63, 103, 242n40, 271n235 Psychiatry (see mental institutions / psychiatric wards) Purmale, Lı¯ga, 108, 109 Purs, Aldis, 102, 126 Putin, Vladimir: Kulik’s reference to, 93 Putraˉms, Juris, 259–260n43 Radical Actionism, 99 Rastrelli, Francesco Bartolomeo, Rundaˉle Palace, 268–269n177 Gabraˉns’s use of, 139–140, 149 Ratajsky, Sławomir, 198, 203, 281n152 Rauschenberg, Robert, 4 Reagan, Ronald, 257n12 reality television, 138–139, 142, 146–147, 148, 155, 219 Rembrandt, Susanna and the Elders, Kozyra’s use of, 192 Riga (see also Gabraˉns, Gints, Works, Starix; Polis, Miervaldis, works, Bronze Man), 102, 103, 104 unofficial art / alternative subculture of, 105–107, 108 Riga Pantomime Theater, 107 Robakowski, Józef, 277n85 Rodchenko, Alexander, 234n57 Rodin, Auguste, 279n129 Romania, 20, 240n18 Ronduda, Łukasz, 165, 170, 171, 172, 178–179, 187, 210, 274n29 Ross, David, 222, 237n86 Rubiks, Alfre¯ds, 121, 264n110 Rublev, Andrei, 262–263n86

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Russia (see also performance art, in Russia; Soviet Union), and national identity (see also national identity, Russian), 2, 34–40, 43, 48, 53, 58, 63, 66, 68, 82, 91, 93–94, 99, 224, 238nn2–3, 239n4, 239n6, 239n10, 239nn13–14, 240nn16–18, 241n30, 249n148, 256n258 Russian Federation (see Russia) Ryklin, Mikhail, 48–49 Rytka, Zygmunt, 277n85 Rzepecki, Adam, 183 Salecl, Renata, 80–81, 82, 255n229 Samodurov, Yuri, 273n16 Samokhvalov, Viktor, and Afrika’s Crimania, 49–50, 56, 57–58, 59, 61, 245n70, 247n99 Sandle, Mark, 35–36, 38 Satie, Erik, 229n7 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 245n73 Sayre, Henry M., 13 schizophrenia, diagnosis of, in the Soviet Union, 56–57, 247n94 Schmit, Tomas, Cycle for Water Buckets, 45 Schneemann, Carolee, 25–26, 206, 207 Interior Scroll, 7–8 Site (with Morris), 206 Schneider, Rebecca, 226–227, 232n37, 283n186 shaman / shamanic ritual, 9, 67, 74, 81–82, 95, 253n213 Sherman, Cindy, 74, 254n215 Shnurov, Sergei, 244n57 Shumov, Sasha, 74 Silas, Susan, 253n204 Simferopol, Afrika’s performance in (see Afrika, Works, Crimania) Simpson, Pat, 16, 209, 232n40 Site Art, 241n34

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302

PERFORMING THE EAST

Situationist International, 258n18 Skandinieki, 101 Skulme, Džemma, 104, 260n47 Skulme, Uga, 258n20 Soc Art, 165, 274n29 Socialist Realism, 15, 22–24, 41, 42, 77, 104, 109, 125, 151, 234n57, 236n79, 251n166, 265nn126–127 in Latvia, 104, 109, 151, 265n126 in Poland, 164–165, 236n79 Solidarity, 159, 164, 165, 167, 171, 276n63 Solovyev, Sergei, ASSA, 44, 54, 67, 225–226, 244n52, 244n54, 244nn56–57 Sots Art, 258n25, 271n235 Soviet Union (see also Latvia, Soviet annexation of / occupation of / rule in; monuments / statues; propaganda; Russia, and national identity; schizophrenia; Socialist Realism), 14, 20 break-up / collapse of, 2, 18–19, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39, 46, 48–49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 66, 69, 90, 99, 222, 236n74 performance art in, 39–43 Soviet Writers’ Congress, 22 Spice Girls, 284n197 Stalin, Joseph, 22, 234n57 Afrika and imagery of, 64–65; era, 36, 77, 236n74 Kulik’s reference to, 93 statues (see monuments / statues) Šteimane, Inga, 270n220 Stembera, Peter, 22 Stephenson, Andrew, 30–31 Sternenhoch, 277n88 Stiles, Kristine, 22, 27, 258n18, 266n134 Stockholm, Kulik’s performance in (see Kulik, Oleg, Works, Dog House) Strunke, Niklaˉvs, 258n20 Surrealism, 5

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Sussman, Elisabeth, 16, 18 Svede, Mark Allen, 107, 259n42 S´widzin´ski, Jan, 274n36 Symbolism, 9 Szyłak, Aneta, 283n193 Szymczyk, Adam, 201 Tabisz, Stanisław, 198, 199 Tallinn, 101 tanks (see Cˇerný, David, Pink Tank; Polis, Miervaldis, Works, Untitled (Tank)) Third Awakening, 101 Tillbergs, Olegs, 259–260n43 toys (see also dolls), 120, 121, 122, 175, 178, 184, 188–189, 278n113 transgression, 9, 10, 72–73, 96, 99, 182, 250n159 Truszkowski, Jerzy, 178, 277n88 Tsoi, Viktor, 44 Tsygankov, Andrey, 38 Tudor, David, 4 Tupitsyn, Margarita, 241n35, 242n39, 242n42 Tupitsyn, Victor, 14, 15, 245n66, 255n232 Turkina, Olesya, 43, 52, 54, 246n79, 249n148 Ujma, Magdalena, 204–205, 217–218 Ukraine, 69, 246–247n84 as site of Afrika’s Crimania, 53, 246–247n84 Ulmanis, Guntis, 132 underground art (see nonconformist / underground / unofficial art) unofficial art (see nonconformist / underground / unofficial art) Vaara, Roi, Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre” (with Polis), 116–119, 117, 263n93, 263nn99– 100, 263–264n101, 264n102, plate 7

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INDEX Vergine, Lea, 97 Viagra, Gloria, 218, 219 video (see Libera, Zbigniew, and video) Viennese Actionism, 8–9, 131 Vı¯ k¸e-Freiberga, Vaira, 132 Vilnius, 101 Vladiv-Glover, Slobodanka, 18 Vulfsons, Mavriks, 102 Wallraff, Günter, 176 Warhol, Andy, 146, 147, 266n137 Warr, Tracey, 22 Warsaw, 166, 167, 171, 281n158 Warsaw Pact, 37 Warzecha, Łukasz, 197, 198 Was´ko, Ryszard, 277n85 Weiss, David, 75 Wilke, Hannah, 206, 279n129 Włodarczyk, Wojciech, 165 Wojciechowski, Jan Stanisław, 185–186, 278n118 Wojtyła, Karol (see Pope John Paul II) Women’s rights movements, 206, 258n18 Workshop of Action, Documentation, and Diffusion, 166 World of Art, 243n48 World War II, 6, 9, 22, 36, 38, 101, 115, 158, 159, 164, 166, 220, 222, 236n79, 256n1, 257n13, 264n113, 281n155 Worth, Dean S., 39 Writers’ Union, 259n38 Writers’ Union Plenum, 102, 103

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303

Wróblewska, Hanna, 187–188, 274n36, 279n138, 284n200 Wrocław, as performance site (see Orange Alternative) Yalta Conference, 54 Yeltsin, Boris, 37 Kulik’s reference to, 93 Yugoslavia (see also Abramovic, Marina), 20–21, 200 Yurchak, Alexei, 223, 233n42 Zabel, Igor, 233n43 Zaˉbers, Vilnis, The Bronze Man Becomes the White Man (with Polis), 122–124, plate 6 Miervaldis Polis & Vilnis Zaˉbers 08.08.91 (with Polis), 119–120 The Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Zaˉbers Exhibition (with Polis), 130, 266n144, 267n145 Zaˉle, Kaˉrlis, Freedom Monument, 103, 119, 120, 257n13, 265n117 Zatlers, Valdis, 267n146 Zhdanov, Andrei, and Socialist Realism, 22–23, 259n38 . Zmijewski, Artur, 279n130, 279n138 on Private Art, 171 Zubrzycki, Genevieve, 158, 159

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Plate 1. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika). Flag, c. 1995. Photograph taken by the author in the artist’s studio, 2008

Plate 2. Sergei Bugaev (Afrika). Flag, c. 1995. Photograph taken by the author in the artist’s studio, 2008

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Plate 3. Oleg Kulik. Family of the Future. Performance and installation/exhibition, Moscow, 1997. Courtesy of Galerie Rabouan-Moussion, Paris

Plate 4. Miervaldis Polis. Bronze Man. Performance in Riga, 1987. Polis is pictured walking through the park in front of the Riga Opera House during his jaunt as the Bronze Man. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

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Plate 5. Miervaldis Polis. Bronze People’s Collective Begging (Latvia’s Gold). Performance in Bremen, 1989. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

Plate 6. Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Za¯bers. The Bronze Man Becomes the White Man. Performance in Riga, 1992. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga.

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Plate 7. Miervaldis Polis and Roi Vaara. Summit Conference of the Ambassador of “Ego-Centre”; The Bronze Man and the Delegate of the White Man in Helsinki. Performance in Helsinki, 1990. Photograph by Sakari Viika; courtesy of Sakari Viika

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Plate 8. Miervaldis Polis (Latvian, born 1948) Raphael and Polis, nd Tempera on photolithograph on paper and fiberboard [image] 29.3 × 21.6 cm (11 9/16 × 8 1/2 in.) [sheet] 45.3 × 36.5 cm (17 13/16 × 14 3/8 in.) Collection Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union D04525 Photo by Jack Abraham

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Plate 9. Gints Gabra¯ns. Starix. Montage of Starix’s television appearances, 2004. Courtesy of the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga

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Plate 10. Zbigniew Libera. How to Train the Girls (film still), 1987. Recording of performance: video, sound, 20 minutes. Courtesy of the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

Plate 11. Zbigniew Libera. How to Train the Girls (film still), 1987. Recording of performance: video, sound, 20 minutes. Courtesy of the Raster Gallery, Warsaw

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Plate 12. Katarzyna Kozyra. Tribute to Gloria Viagra (film still). Performance in Berlin, 2005. Part of the multimedia project In Art Dreams Come True, 2003–05. Courtesy of the artist

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