|
Special Feature: Latin America: The Last Avant-Garde |
 |
Number 12: (In)efficacy |
| Bad Dog and
the Problems of Domestication: Oleg Kulik’s Performance Art |
|
| By turns cute and ferocious while wheeling about in mud and concrete on all fours in front of the European Union in Brussels, the Russian artist Oleg Kulik still pulled off the neat trick of dragging a stubborn calf chained to his collar with a steel chain in what is now one of his signature acts: the artist-as-dog performance. With the willed intensity of a method actor utterly submerged in a role, the fiercely territorial Kulik, hunched low to the ground, growled, barked, and generally menaced startled pedestrians until police, never known for their tolerance of the unusual, broke the power of the strange performance by applying a pair of cuffs to the very human wrists. On film, the last record of the performance, Kulik is escorted, this time as a man standing on two legs, into the back of a waiting police wagon. This performance, entitled I Can’t Keep Silent Anymore (Stop English Cow’s Genocide), was ostensibly a politically motivated gesture, giving voice to the voiceless, in the debate over the extermination of British cattle herds during the height of the Mad Cow Disease epidemic. At first blush, the scene is ridiculous: a naked man hounding tourists, salarymen, and, if the political point is correctly understood, harassing the odd politicians like any good lobbyist with a cause to pitch. To the calf linked to his neck, Kulik was both guard dog and would-be savior on behalf of the calf’s cousins in England. If verisimilitude is the point of the performance, then Kulik fails miserably because, quite simply, as a dog he comes up short. In none of his performances does he attempt to alter or disguise his human appearance with fur or elongated incisors. His humanness is still intact, albeit subdued in a performance eradicating the critical distance between animal and man. But what is one to make of this performance? Is it a public stunt devoid of real import beyond spectacle? Is the artist-dog merely a vagrant character actor wanting only a script? Kulik does belong to that class of public performers whose art closely resembles what Richard Sennett would approvingly call “confrontational theater,” whose sheer momentum pairs maniacal energy emanating from the performer and the abrasive circumstances that arise from a willed disruption of the placid surface of the quotidian. To Sennett’s mind this approach, this sustained anarchy, is less condescending—and more effective—than the carefully cultivated educational atmosphere of your typical museum that arranges art pedagogically, section by section, period by period.[1] Unsurprisingly, pedestrians in Brussels seemed less enthusiastic, as they offered him a wide berth. Unless clued in to the fact that this was an artistic performance, they could be forgiven if they drew the conclusion that this was a man who had taken leave of his senses. Danger for performer and audience provides one of the main thrusts for this type of art, as it was for Chris Burden when he had an assistant shoot him during a performance. (Kulik himself was hospitalized after cutting himself with glass during one performance.) The outcome of every performance is never clear and the audience is exposed to a certain danger. If they are foolish enough to ignore the posted warnings or wander too close to the fiercely territorial Kulik, a spectator can face a mauling—and in a few cases they have. Kulik is rarely solo on these occasions, and is often accompanied during performances by Mila Bredikhina, who serves as artistic partner, explicator, collaborator, wife, and “trainer.” To judge by his behavior, unacceptable to even the most forgiving pet owner, Kulik sorely needs the discipline. Another doggy performance, 1997’s I Bite America and America Bites Me, brought Kulik to Deitch Projects in New York City. Before taking to the gallery and his appointed “cage,” Bredikhina took him for a walk, leashed, through Brooklyn, where he followed the line of previous performances, never breaking character; a rather unruly presence to those unsuspecting. Once safely in his cage at the Deitch, visitors were invited to feed, observe, and, provided they were brave and willing to don the requisite protective gear, to visit and pet him within the confines of the gallery’s constructed cell. Quiet some moments, affectionate, even tender, during others, Kulik still mounted the occasional unprovoked attack, always leading with his human mouth, as if to issue a reminder that his domestication was, at best, a work in progress. If “theater happens at the moment in which a feeling passes between the actor and the audience,” then this was a performance desperate to conjure theatricality.[2] Never once in this or any other performances does Kulik raise his hand to bring the humiliation to an end or beg for a glass of water in a human language. His will towards transformation is near total. His art, including his non-performance sculptures and paintings, uses animals and the natural world for inspiration. But his act is not only directed towards a non-Russian audience. He has taken his art back to Russia and made it political, running for the presidency as a member of the newly minted Party of Animals, becoming in the short history of Russian democracy, quite possibly, the only candidate to sport horns and, perhaps in a nod to decorum, clothes. Most of Kulik’s art mines the same creative vein with animals as his totemic obsession. He has appeared as Pavlov’s dog in Russia and as an attack dog in Sweden. In one performance that represented something of a departure from the doggy-as-artist motif, Kulik covered himself with reflective mirrors before mounting a narrow platform far above a crowd, mimicking in function, if not strictly in appearance, a dance club’s mirror ball. These performances have garnered him a place at major international exhibitions, including the Manifesta I in Rotterdam, Holland (1996), the Biennal of Istanbul, Turkey (1997), and the Venice Biennial (1997). Kulik’s oeuvre, while perhaps dubiously successful in terms of political significance (the legislation before the European Union, for example, passed), nonetheless illustrates a disruptive trend challenging the curatorial preference for domesticated art and structured performance. Where, after all, does the artist-as-animal belong? Indoors? Outdoors? Kulik wears the leash for a reason and curators have taken note. Since its beginning, performance art generally and body art specifically has been notoriously difficult to slot within the traditional white walled gallery or teaching museum. Performance art cannot be hung; it cannot be mounted on a pedestal. Indeed, obsolescence is a crucial component of the performance. The artist gets up, walks away. And the larger audience, beyond and after the event, experiences the act in miniature, through reconstructions on other types of media. For most performances pieces like Kulik’s exist only on tape or a processed medium like video or through documents, catalogues, or, perhaps, rumor and word of mouth. Performances like these raise a critical question: Is the museum or gallery sufficient to reflect the political or social significance of Kulik’s works, or for that matter any charged performance? (This is not simply a theoretical or academic question for Kulik; it is also a practical one. Organizers of one show in Stockholm, although fully aware of the trouble Kulik stirred up during a previous show in Zurich, nonetheless called the authorities to intervene when Kulik began to bite the assembled visitors and art critics.)[3] Like many challenges to the established art world order during the 1960s, the fundamental debate turns on cultivating spaces large enough to house the range of contemporary expression, from conservative to avant-garde, while exhibiting works encompassing a political or social dimension to “reflect the changes taking place in art and society at large while also meeting the expectations and challenges posed by such an undertaking.”[4] And the challenge, especially in politically contentious times, is to reconcile the disparate demands. Of course, edginess is nothing new in the tradition of performance art, or, as it is alternately known, action art or live art. Artists have taken risks—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—at least since Dada’s heyday of Tristan Tzara and the Cabaret Voltaire in Vienna. In this genre, where open-ended performances can last days or even weeks, artists willfully endure privation and worse as they throw themselves—often literally—bodily into the work. Critics like Roberta Smith have already noted the strong influence of conceptual artists on Kulik, most notably Joseph Beuys, whose fascination with shamanism and the natural world preoccupied his work.[5] Beuys’ performance I Like America and America Likes Me, for example, shares more than a near identical name with Kulik’s own piece. In this 1974 performance, Beuys, a German, flew into New York from Europe, and swathed himself in felt before taking an ambulance to the gallery, where he was placed in a cage with a wild coyote for three days before returning to the airport, again covered in a fresh coat of felt. Not once did his feet touch American soil, nor does it feel necessary to the overall performance for him to have done so. After all, his performance embodies his ambivalence about his experience of America. Here was a European cynical about American imperialism abroad, particularly in the still raging Vietnam conflict, coming to the heart of United States for a performance and dialogue both tender and dangerous. In this dialogue, Beuys did not need to touch America to engage or approach it. Unlike Beuys, Kulik’s art is peculiarly nationalistic. He is a Russian dog. Kulik, along with other Russian artists like Ilya Kabakov, is a member of the new breed emerging from the welter of ‘90s Russia, and it shows; it is practically impossible to separate these artists from their political origins. After all, it was only a few years before the performance in Brussels, on December 26, 1991, that Russia faced a national and lasting trauma in communism’s collapse. The hammer and sickle, ubiquitous symbols of communism since the Revolution, were removed and replaced with the tri-color flag of a new Federation in a bloodless revolution. After decades of nuclear brinkmanship and a sustained global cold war with West, it wasn’t the invention of a more powerful missile or a single move on the geopolitical chessboard. Instead, the Soviet Union declared itself finished without a single shot fired or bomb exploded, done in by internal inconsistencies instead of a final battle with the West. For a proud people accustomed to superpower status, the humiliation of its very public collapse was intensified by its being simultaneously broadcast into Western living rooms. Much to the consternation of some, the revolution was televised. Incipient democracy in Russia embodied a paradox of progress. Russians enjoyed freedoms undreamt of even during the sunniest moments of glasnost, and the government is righting itself after the Soviet collapse and beginning to reassert its influence. Nonetheless, today social ills are laid bare. Besides persistent, gnawing poverty grinding down huge swaths of the population, shocking declines in the life expectancy (vodka plays no small part in this grim statistic), corruption, cronyism, rampant crime, and the vast disparities in wealth between the haves and have-nots serve as reminders that democracy is no guarantor of social equity. Such messy national politics are reflected in Kulik’s unstructured, violent performances. Indeed, Russia’s rich artistic tradition has a long history of conspicuously incorporating political elements into art, often with the state’s blessing. In Russia’s other revolution in 1917, artists like Rodchenko and others bore the standard of an overtly political Constructivism, which was suppressed and replaced by the conscientiously less obscure Socialist Realism. This art’s place was as propaganda, communicating and reifying the communist script for the masses. Kulik, unlike those artists, is not celebrating the birth of a new era or international solidarity with the same zeal (or forced enthusiasm) of artists conscripted into the service of international socialism. He instead captures the fin de siècle attitude pervading ’90s Russia. Kulik leaves open-ended whether the Russian dog man he conjures is a confirmation of the Western conception of the crumbled superpower. If the menace of the Soviet Union has diminished, he suggests, perhaps the wildness of this nuclear-tipped former adversary has been domesticated. Kulik is quite reflective about his own work, which is somewhat surprising given the fact that, at first glance, his performances typically resort to a shocking personal devolution shunning personal rationalizations (at least of the humanistic variety). The ideas that emerge from him and through his wife, who also doubles as an interpreter, is foursquare behind the idea of animal liberation and rights leaning towards radicalism. To return once again to Sennett, he opines “An artist is accepting himself as an authority, a commodity when he’s able to talk about the development of his work. That kind of self-consciousness indicates he has made himself fit for museums.”[6] This is part of the paradox of Kulik’s work—the tension between the verbal and non-verbal, the violent and the rational—that muddies Sennett’s description. On the one hand, Kulik-as-dog embodies a non-humanistic or, to put it more generously, a post-humanistic reason, reliant upon gestures that are non-verbal yet communicative, which are effective at getting “meaning” across, even it invites more interpretations than answers. Kulik-as-artist and Kulik-as-dog (if such a distinction is warranted) is engaged in an artistic dialogue with the audience. And as a Russian dog, his works and concentrated obsessions reflect the national trauma and the wildness that a skeptical West projects onto an “undomesticated” East. But the performances do not entirely reflect a negative dialectic. From an ideological standpoint, Kulik proudly places himself at the vanguard of a nascent post-human epistemology. As Renata Salecl has pointed out, in Kulik’s performance in particular, violence does not necessarily silence or delimit communication; it acts as another avenue of expression. “Dialogue and communication,” she acknowledges, “can involve a great deal of violence. But, on the other hand, someone can understand violence and destruction as a way of communicating.”[7] It is little surprise, then, that so many of the interventions of artists from the East in the context of the West are imbued with real or implied violence. After all, their respective cultures have communicated that way for years. Why shouldn’t artists? Communication, if it is possible at all, is conducted through an orchestrated violence, miles away from a Habermassian ideal speech situation.[8] If, as Richard Sennett believes, “fear is the measure of a passive public,” then the engagement of the artist-dog and all the attendant feeling of anxiety generated from the performance could be an antidote to the symptom of ambivalence.[9] Hans-Ulrich Obrist, curator of the Musee d’Art de la Ville de Paris, for example, encourages a more freewheeling, anarchic approach to an exhibition—an approach more amenable to the wild dynamic of Kulik and other like-minded artists, curators, and gallery owners looking to shake off the malaise of good taste and all that implies: pedagogy, closed meanings, and submissiveness. “Instead of certitude,” Obrist observed that the best exhibitions express “connective possibilities. The question of evolutionary displays. An ongoing life of exhibitions. Exhibitions as complex, dynamic learning systems with feedback loops, basically to renounce the obsolete idea of the curator as a master planner.” [10] The crucial word here is possibility. Kulik gestures towards expressions that generate possibilities at once political and personal. Still, it is the brave curator who invites an unmuzzled Kulik into a gallery. But in a violent world where contact of East and West generates conflict more often than sustained cross-cultural dialogue, Kulik’s willingness to act the dog seems a perfectly rational way to bridge the divide.
Stephen Gardner is pursuing his master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently completing a study of the sermons of John Donne.
Endnotes [1] Dercon, Chris, ed., “The Museum as an
Anarchic Experience: A Conversation Between Richard Sennett and
Chris Dercon.” Theatergarden Bestiarium: The Garden as Theater
as Museum. The MIT Press, 1990), 129. |
