The New Blockheads Cooperative Performative object

The first projects by the New Blockheads were collective performances, but by the autumn of 1996—the first year of the group’s existence—the artists decided to organize an exhibition, since each of them also created material works as well as process-based ones.

Sergei Spirikhin turned printed texts into visual art; Vadim Flyagin and Inga Nagel worked with abstract painting and the poetics of found objects; Vladimir Kozin transformed everyday objects into works of contemporary sculpture; Igor Panin revisited his professional experience in graphic and object design and architecture. However, the first exhibition, ironically titled Conservative Realism, showed that their works remained closely connected to their performance practice. 

One wall of the exhibition space at Borey was occupied by Alexander Lyashko’s photo documentation of the group’s performances. Hand-printed silver bromide photographs were exhibited in a very unpretentious way: without frames or glass, sometimes overlaying each other. Another exhibit—an installation of glued-together sheets from Sergei Spirikhin’s literary work—was part of a performance. During the preview, Spirikhin and Vadim Flyagin read the text while tearing the sheets. The installation took its final shape only after the performance. Vladimir Kozin’s work 100 Objects for Moths, preserved and exhibited in this cell, required imaginary transformations. According to Kozin’s idea, the shapes cut out of overcoat felt were to be left in a cave with moths so that they completely disappeared. This never happened, but the potential for such transformation was the main idea of the work.

The New Blockheads invited the audience to reconsider the life-building ambition of the modernist age: instead of a radical transformation of reality through art, they aimed for «micro utopian» shifts that defamiliarized us from the «stupidity» of everyday life. The cell presents examples of several approaches to working with a performative object from the group’s practice.

One approach was based on questioning the idea of «common sense.» For example, in the performance Slavic Bazaar (1999), which referenced the then recent bombings of Belgrade, Igor Panin poured borscht onto a set table, as if he did not know that soup was normally served in bowls. The tablecloth thus became an abstract painting: a red cross on a white background. Another approach was to offer simple tools for turning everyday observations into a performance. Vladimir Kozin showed how to use «viewfinders» made with two crossed wires or glasses with a fixed horizon, suggesting that anyone can make similar tools themselves. The third approach to performative object-making used the marketing model of communicating with the viewer, but made sure it was never successful. For example, Vadim Flyagin put his dating questionnaire in English and German languages on boxes and handed them out to people at a German festival, but, as the phone number he gave there was of a Russian landline, nobody ever responded.