Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin

(b. 1951 and 1945, Moscow; live and work in New York)

Naked Dress, 1977 (printed 1994)
Performance documentation, 5 photographs on cardboard, 53 х 197 х 3.5 cm
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow

In the unofficial Moscow art scene of the 1970s, partners and collaborators Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin became pioneers of performance—a medium that at that the time was experiencing a “golden age” worldwide. One of the basic expressive tools for many performance artists, from Carolee Schneemann to Marina Abramović, was the naked body, which was intended to create intimate contact with the viewer or shock with its constrained corporeality. In Soviet culture, however, the portrayal of nudity was a taboo subject and therefore the one performance that the Gerlovins did nude, Zoo – Homo Sapiens (1977), could have led to both the performers and the ten or so “trusted” viewers being charged with “the production or marketing of pornographic material.” The corporeality of Western performance was alien to Moscow conceptualism, so in Naked Dress (documentation of the performance Costumes) the artists portray Adam and Eve in the bosom of nature, although the conventionality of their game is emphasized by the sackcloth “naked suits” they wear, which have the contours of the male and female body painted on them. It remains a mystery what lies behind this artistic choice—the desire to depict radical separation from biblical paradise through the fall of the soul into the body or the suppressed sexuality of Russian conceptualism.