Performing the East

Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland since 1980

Amy Bryzgel

• Verlag: I.B. Tauris
• Jahr: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857733726
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Histoire
• Thema: Histoire de l'Europe de l'Est

Performance art in Western Europe and North America developed in part as a response to the commercialisation of the art object, as artists endeavoured to create works of art that could not be bought or sold. But what are the roots of performance art in Eastern Europe and Russia, where there was no real art market to speak of? While many artworks created in the 'East' may resemble Western performance art practices, their origins, as well as their meaning and significance, is decidedly different. By placing specific performances from Russia, Latvia and Poland from the late- and post-communist periods within a local and international context, this book pinpoints the nuances between performance art East and West. Performance art in Eastern Europe is examined for the first time as agent and chronicle of the transition from Soviet and satellite states to free-market democracies. Drawing upon previously unpublished sources and exclusive interviews with the artists themselves, Amy Bryzgel explores the actions of the period, from Miervaldis Polis's Bronze Man to Oleg Kulik's Russian Dog performances.
Bryzgel demonstrates that in the late-1980s and early 1990s, performance art in Eastern Europe went beyond the modernist critique to express ideas outside the official discourse, shocking and empowering the citizenry, both effecting and mirroring the social changes taking place at the time. Performing the East opens the way to an urgent reassessment of the history, function and meaning of performance art practices in East-Central Europe.

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 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 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.

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.

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 othe...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Translation
• Introduction: Performance Art, East and West
• 1. Afrika and the Russian Dog: Performing Post-Soviet Identity in Russia
• 2. The Bronze Man and the Homeless Man: Performing Appearance in Latvia
• 3. Filming Young Girls and Older Men: Performing Gender in Poland
• Conclusion: Performing the East
• Notes
• Index
• Plates
• eCopyright