Let Us Melt the Ice in Our Hearts

Artist and graphic designer Igor Panin is one of the members of the New Blockheads Cooperative, a collective that emerged from Borey Gallery in St. Petersburg and was active from 1996 to 2002. Their artistic strategy implied constructing performative situations in which “blockheadedness” functioned not as a stylistic mask but as a critical tool—a means of dismantling normative codes through the bodily, the mundane, and the absurd. Art critic Ekaterina Degot characterized their role on the local scene as follows: “These orderlies of the art world expressed contempt for didacticism and for the pomposity of the masterpiece. They discovered that very ‘modern gaiety’ (‘la gaîté moderne’) sought by Breton. In their demonstration of idiocy as a form of supreme wisdom, the New Blockheads were heirs to OBERIU. This was a unique position in post‑Soviet St. Petersburg.”

In addition to performances, Igor Panin created ephemeral, self‑destructing installations. Let Us Melt the Ice in Our Hearts was presented at the exhibition Artwork No. 2 (The Russian Gray Wolf) at Art Collegium Gallery during the Anatomy of Contemporary Art of St. Petersburg Festival No. 2, which took place March 25–27, 1999. The festival featured other performances that were pivotal to the history of the Cooperative, including Igor Panin’s Slavic Bazaar and Vadim Flyagin’s Tumbler. For this work, the artist retrieved a block of ice from the Obvodny Canal and placed it on a soft armchair covered with polyethylene and a white sheet; viewers were invited to use the chair as intended.

As in many projects by the New Blockheads, a linguistic cliché was transformed into a performative situation in which “melting the ice” was proposed quite literally—by sitting in the chair.