Camouflage
New Blockheads Cooperative, Alexander Lyashko
- With participation ofVadim Flyagin
- Category
- MediumBlack-and-white photographs, artist’s print, 34 photographs
- Dimensions30 × 40 cm
- Сollection
- Inventory numberМСИГ_ОФ_164/1-164/34_Ф_17/1-17/34
- Acquired from
- Year of acquisition2025
Keywords
About the work
Inspired by the poetics of the OBERIU group and contemporary philosophy, New Blockheads Cooperative regarded life as a performative practice. Over six years of its existence, the group carried out around 70 performances, many of which were documented by photographer Alexander Lyashko. Camouflage is a studio photo session by Lyashko, featuring fellow artist Vadim Flyagin as the model. The project played with the theme of cultural and historical layers that shape and simultaneously consume the artist. This feeling was especially palpable in St. Petersburg, where imperial, Soviet, and post‑Soviet strata collided with European tradition, overlapping, disguising themselves, or entering into conflict. Lyashko photographed Flyagin among found objects: the model sought to blend into ropes, tea bags, and stones from the shore of the Gulf of Finland. Sergei Spirikhin recalled that in sinking into a heterogeneous mass of debris, Flyagin’s figure became a trope of “a new man, entangled in the silt and foam of cultural layers.”
