Translated material
For live bait
Oleg Kulik at the TERRITORIA festival
When the organizers of TERRITORIA called their creation a “contemporary art festival,” the first thing they did was set up not themselves, but the journalists. The editors immediately assigned art reviewers to the event, but it turned out that the program included concerts, films and performances (not counting the comic book exhibition). Good, I suspect, concerts, films and performances, but the concept of “contemporary art” in today’s language marks a fairly specific area - what was produced by artists considered, so to speak, “relevant”. These artists can also make films, organize concerts, and the performance looks like a play. But what is more important is not the genre, but the author’s definition: the author said that this is fine art in its modern version, which means that it is so. The quality of the product is assessed by spectators and experts, but that is another matter. The main thing is that what is created belongs to a very specific sphere.But the boundaries of this sphere are not closed and are completely “non-spherical”. Including in moral and ethical terms. In essence, modern artists are testing all sorts of limitations, trying to break out into the dark spaces of the unknown. So in a medieval engraving, a man standing on his knees pierced the celestial sphere with his head. And so one day Oleg Kulik allegedly stuck his head into the vagina of a cow - no homo sapiens had ever been there before.
It was Oleg Kulik who responded at the TERRITORIYA festival of contemporary art for contemporary art in the truest sense of the word. And he clearly demonstrated all his generic traits, advantages and disadvantages. At the Center named after Vs. Meyerhold Kulik conducted a master class, which ended with the performance “A sandpiper will peck out the sandpiper’s eye.”
The essence of the action, which has already been demonstrated more than once, is a kind of self-therapy, a psychoanalysis session with one’s own hands—more precisely, with one’s own nose. Since Kulik is the name of a bird, the artist puts on a mask with a beak (not a medieval Venetian one, but a completely high-tech one, made of steel and plastic), ending with a brush. On a glass screen with a video projection of his own image, he draws a self-portrait, tracing the contours of his face. At the same time, the face speaks, being, as it were, the embodiment of the author’s confused soul. The face reflects, swears, promises to give up art, and repeats the failure of the artist Kulik. But the persistent artist overcomes all mental tossing and... breaks the glass with a metal beak. Once - in Riga - he broke it with his hand and cut himself terribly. Another time, shrapnel hit my face. In general, an extreme performance. In the spirit of those for which Kulik became famous, when he copulated with a goat, jumped naked, pretending to be a dog, jumped from the fifth floor in the form of a bird, etc. (Video documentation of these feats accompanied the master class, which was more like a meeting with enthusiastic spectators.)
But this time Kulik did not break the glass himself. He did not undress (before he always painted naked, demonstrating his psychological openness to existence). Played mournful Tibetan music. The face on the screen was silent, having stopped swearing dirty. Before this, Oleg Borisovich said that he was no longer involved in art, that he was curating the exhibition “I Believe” for the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, at which artists would speak about the sacred and metaphysical, that he had undergone an initiation rite in Ecuador. He called for kindness and humility. He actually grew a Tolstoyan beard and looked like a street preacher.
And this humble Kulik called on someone from the audience to break the screen with his self-portrait, honorably passing the beak from hand to hand (from nose to nose). A forest of hands rose. The lively girl was the first to jump onto the stage and desperately slammed the glass, shouting: “My name is so-and-so, and his name was Oleg Kulik.” The glass broke. Shards. Ovation. General pleasure. Sitting in the front row, one of the organizers of the festival, extreme director Kirill Serebrennikov, was most pleased.
And suddenly I felt excruciating pain. I remembered Tolstoy’s words (to the question of the beard): “Everyone laughed, but Vanya cried.” Perhaps I have become old and have ceased to be surprised by the spaces of the unknown. For the result of the experiment with Oleg Kulik’s hall was truly unpredictable, and the girl could lose an eye, a hand, and remain disabled. Of course, it would be her fault, but was it worth it for an adult, smart, talented man to provoke a mentally fragile creature? (Here it must be clarified that the target audience of TERRITORIA is students of provincial theater universities.)
Yes, contemporary art breaks all sorts of taboos - and should break them. Yes, the results of border crossings are always unknown. Yes, border zones are the habitat of contemporary artists. Yes, they, the artists, cannot be taken at their word (the blessed Kulik continues to be an extreme sportsman, and even more so than before). Yes, provocation is a legal technique.
But art is not temptation, but skill. Mastery. Mastery of the situation. Control over her. Responsibility at the end of the day. For the artist himself, his body has long been the same material as a brush and paints. But his own, not the viewer’s. This is how actionism differs from terrorism.
If we do not differentiate, we will actually fall into a cognitive crisis and cease to understand what art is. Including modern ones. And where is his TERRITORY? And the territory.