Who are they, The Brotherhood of New Blockheads? How did the art of this almost unknown and for some time already inactive self-proclaimed ‘brotherhood’ from St. Petersburg come to the Zurich Exhibition Hall? And why does it say on the cover of the museum brochure in large letters printed in Russian “go to hell, art lovers”? These are just a few questions that I had in mind when I was entering the exhibition hall.
The Brotherhood of the New Blockheads was founded in 1996 and included a group of artists, philosophers and writers. The common goal of the Brotherhood was the fight against the restrictions imposed by post-Soviet Russian politics on society, and especially on the creators of culture. The most important weapon of the New Blockheads was performance art. They used performance to break the boundaries of the existing categories. Their absurd artistic actions were, so to speak, a knee-jerk reaction to the chaotic events in Russia in the 1990s.
“A dull life gives a dull look, a dull look creates dull art, and that’s the harmony,” said one of the Brotherhood’s founders, Vadim Flyagin. He and the other members of the group (Igor Panin, Sergey Spirikhin, Inga Nagel, Vladimir Kozin, Maxim Raiskin, Oleg Khvostov, Alexander Lyashko) created about 100 different performances during the Brotherhood’s six years of existence. After the breakup of the group, the New Blockheads disappeared from the radar of cultural life in St. Petersburg. No one heard from the Brotherhood in Moscow and St. Petersburg until 2013, when mini-retrospectives were held in both cities. Public recognition and awareness were unimportant to the group members, as a result they did not have any interest in fixating on their actions during their active creative phase and for the Brotherhood of the New Blockheads, the performance was one living art that happened in the here and now. Therefore, for the organization of these exhibitions, a lot of work was done to collect, organize and digitize the archives of the group.
In 2016, during a trip to Moscow, the director of the Zurich Exhibition Hall, Daniel Baumann, visited the Retrospective exhibition of the New Blockheads at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and left amazed by what he had seen. Because of this visit, the group was introduced to an international audience and today visitors can see and appreciate the creative work of the Blockheads in the Exhibition Hall.
The first thing that caught my eye was the number of different photos, videos, objects and texts. One of these photos was showing one of the earlier performances of the BNB. The performance “Learn to see by yourselves” was part of an evening event of the Borey Gallery and was performed in May 1996 by V. Flyagin, S. Spirikhin and I. Panin. The photo shows the three participants, two of them wearing blindfolds with black-inked eyes. They balance a spoon with a burning liquid between their teeth. The performance was created as a free visualization and allusion to a text by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.
“Learn to see by yourselves”
Igor Panin:
This performance was developed according to the principle of three participants, three leaflets of our own composition, three lines of text from Martin Heidegger´s Was heisst Denken? (What does it mean to think?), and three consecutive actions accompanied by a metronome.
Leaflets:
1. The Chiromancy of Blots
2. The Secrets of Indian Cooking
3. A Handbook on How to Draw Winter Landscapes
Actions:
1. Setting fire to a brick
2. The binding of our eyes, eyes marked in ink on the bindings of two participants (the third indicated his eyes with fragments of the bottle glass, attached with tape wound around his head with the help of the non-seeing second participant).
3. Lighting fires in spoons.
Lines from Heidegger:
1. “We enter in a state of what is called thought when we think of ourselves. For this to happen, we have to be ready to learn to think.”
2. “As soon as we start to learn, we immediately understand that we cannot think.”
3. “Yet a man is still considered, and rightly so, a being capable of thought.”
“Single man looking to meet”
Vadim Flyagin’s project “Single man looking to meet” is represented in the exhibition with a photo and a text. The shot captures a middle-aged naked man from behind. As the name of the work suggests, the accompanying text is similar to the popular advertisements for dating. The text does not consist of a few sentences as usual, but contains 98 points, through which the artist describes himself in detail: height, weight, number of teeth. But he does not stop there, he digs deeper and reveals his habits, fears and desires. Flyagin reported that he likes to care for his nails; that he has lived in the back room of the Borey Gallery for four years and considers himself an alcoholic with a psychological addiction, which results in repulsive consequences. However, currently he is aware of this and is fighting against his disease. In random order, he shares the facts of his life: until his 10th year, he slept in the same bed as his mother because he liked to smell her armpits. As a married man, he did not cheat on his wife, and maybe he even loved her. He has not seen his daughter and ex-wife in four years and worries about it.
It seems that the artist tries to describe his nature as precisely as possible in order to understand what distinguishes him as a person and personality: physical data, fears and desires, memories from intimate moments of his life. The project itself was never published as a classified ad. This happened with many other actions of the Blockheads. They often had spontaneous and sometimes ridiculous ideas, but their performative practices reflected the spirit of their time and were an attempt to show everyday life through a prism. The group took on a kind of foolish role: they often went over current social issues, drew the observers into the action, and invited them to live in the here and now.
P.S.In the end, a huge banner painted with small flowers along with the text “go to hell, art lovers”, was spread by the participants of the BNB at the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in St. Petersburg, which acted as a defense of modern art, which is not always understood and accepted by its viewers.
You can visit “The Brotherhood of New Blockheads” exhibition until May 26, 2019.