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234 In Rotterdam in 1996, a new European biennale called Manifesta was established .1 The aim of the Manifesta was to give young artists from all over Europe a platform to present their work, with special emphasis given to projects from Eastern Europe. In its first year, seven Moscow artists visited the event. One was the Russian performance artist Oleg Kulik, a member of so-called Moscow actionism, one of the most active and influential art currents in Russia during the 1990s. Oleg Kulik and his collaborator Mila Bredikhina presented a project called Pavlov’s Dog. Kulik had already played the role of a human dog for the last two years, receiving national and international fame (and notoriety ). After performing as a mad dog (together with Aleksandr Brener) outside the Marat Guelman Gallery in Moscow in 1993, Kulik caused a milder scandal in Zurich in 1995.2 This time he presented himself, naked, as the very same dog in an action called Reservoir Dog at the entrance to the Kunsthaus during the opening of the exhibition Zeichen & Wunder, violently hindering visitors from entering the building.3 A year later, he caused a huge international scandal when, in his dog persona, he bit a man at the Interpol exhibition in Stockholm (Dog House, 1996).4 After this incident the organizers of the Rotterdam Manifesta debated whether or not Kulik should be admitted to the biennale at all. In the end, Kulik was allowed to attend.5 Kulik hadn’t only acted as a dog. He had appeared as a bird on sev13H thehUmAndOgOlegkUlik Grotesque Post-Soviet Animalistic Performances gesine drews-sylla The total humanization of the animal coincides with the total animalization of man. —Giorgio Agamben costlow nelson text4.indd 234 6/23/10 8:40 AM the hUmAn dOg Oleg kUlik————235 eral occasions, had given sermons to carps, and had also acted as a kind of hybrid cow. Together with Vladimir Sorokin, he carried out the project Deep Into Russia in which he displayed pictures of himself pretending to have sexual intercourse with animals.6 He had even founded a political Animal Party.7 However, it was the role of the dog that made him known to a broader public both in Russia and the international art world.8 Kulik’s performances as the dog are situated in a multicontextual, and not exclusively Russian, set of references. Obviously, we can begin with the specifically Russian references that are made in Pavlov’s Dog that lead, via the omnipresent scientist Ivan Pavlov, to Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical masterpiece , Heart of a Dog (Sobach’e serdtse), and to the Soviet attempt at creating a “New Man”—one of the constituting utopian concepts of the young Soviet Union. By then moving to broader cultural references within Kulik ’s artistic system, we can read his actions and performances in a global context. Via Western ecological concepts, these references lead us back to Russian culture, where we conclude with Nikolai Gogol’s grotesque stories. These stories are not only a core element of the Russian cultural heritage— they are also those stories that a school of Russian literary theorists, the formalists, used to develop their classical notion of the grotesque. Kulik’s animal performances can therefore be explained as a version of the grotesque that is deeply rooted in Russian culture, going back to Nikolai Gogol ’s “The Nose” (Nos, 1836). Kulik’s animal actions can be interpreted as a sort of grotesque that is indefinitely polycontextual. This means that his actions function within a realm of undecidedness in which various “serious” frames of meaning (scientific, ethical, political, ecological, and philosophical ) are transformed into a spectacle of indeterminate intent, thus creating an atmosphere of helplessness and confusion. This notion of the spectacle is taken from Giorgio Agamben, who suggests that all historical human forces have been reduced to a mere cultural spectacle, a notion that Kulik’s actions seem to illustrate perfectly. Between Man and Dog—Remains of the Utopian New Man In the Rotterdam project, Kulik once again exhibited himself as a dog inside a museum space. The space was furnished as an experimental laboratory . Together with Dr. A. A. Kamensky, a biologist from Moscow State University, Mila Bredikhina developed a special set of experiments for Kulik to undergo while living as a dog in the laboratory. The “experimental setting” included a maze, a tub, and a structure in which Kulik had to push certain devices in order to receive his food. Other...

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