| The second festival of street performances begins in Moscow today The organizer of the street performance festival, again, as last year, was the group of artists “Leto”. Everyone really liked last year's first festival and remembered it - both the loitering public, strict art critics, and even envious fellow artists. Artist Oleg Kulik called performance artists quiet psychos - in comparison with the “violent” 90s. He named it correctly, as always. What did street radicals do then? Kulik himself, who in those days acted as a dog, ran naked through the streets, pounced on people, scared and even bit. Others (Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alexander Brener) violated public order - they climbed onto monuments, set up barricades, shouted loudly, and the like. One of the first post-perestroika performances involved a group of artists laying out a well-known three-letter word on Red Square with their own bodies. The action lasted only a few minutes - the artists, like dissidents, were taken to the police station.
Compared to all this, modern artists are truly quiet. Judge for yourself by what the Leto group staged last year: on Manezhnaya Square, one artist hung out her underwear, another met men, treated them to ice cream and recorded conversations on a tape recorder; an artist in a paper suit appeared at the Leningradsky station and went to St. Petersburg; in the pedestrian crossing under Mokhovaya Street they were treated to pasta in the shape of phalluses; and on Zverev Bridge there was a “light dinner” - the table and chairs were hung over the water. Even from this brief listing it is clear that all the performances (they can be called actions, or they can be called exhibitions) were fun, entertaining and absolutely harmless. Only the policemen who periodically dispersed the artists were angry. Service, of course, is service.
This year, “summer” performances will take place: September 12 on the Kremlin’s Cathedral Square (15.00); 13th - at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (17.00); 14th - at the Novoarbatsky grocery store (19.00); On the 15th - at the Novodevichy cemetery (17.00), on the 16th - on Vorobyovy Gory (17.00). The variety of sites speaks for itself. Nikolay MILK |
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