The New Blockheads Cooperative The First Summer

In 1998, a «paraliterary» text «Amateurism of the Summer»,  written by the New Blockheads in 1996 and looking back at the first few months of their work together, was published in the second issue of Maksimka journal of art criticism founded by philosopher and member of the group Maksim Raiskin. This cell features photo and video documentation of five performances that took place from May to August 1996 and were mentioned in «Amateurism.»

The first performance by the New Blockheads took place at an art evening at Borey Gallery in St. Petersburg. At the time, Borey regularly hosted seminars and discussions with writers Arkady Dragomoshchenko, Aleksandr Skidan, and Dmitry Golynko-Volfson and philosophers Aleksandr Sekatsky and Valery Savchuk, among others. The performance titled Learn to See for Yourself was a response to the discursive practices of the circle.

Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s essay «What Is Called Thinking? , ” Vadim Flyagin, Igor Panin, and Sergei Spirikhin, offered a «blockhead» interpretation. Each of them chose a line from Heidegger’s essay to read, made a brochure on a topic they were interested in (Palmistry of Stains, Secrets of Indian Cuisine, A Manual of Drawing Winter Landscapes), and suggested one activity for a collective performance: setting a brick on fire; putting on a blindfold and drawing new eyes on top; holding a burning spoon with one’s teeth while blindfolded. Turning to the logic of the Enlightenment that connected seeing to learning, and following Heidegger’s «we are still not thinking, ” the artists admitted they were «still not seeing» (even the fire right in front of their faces).

Poetic questioning of the functioning of everyday objects became part of the group’s practice. In their performance Do a Sprung in Five Acts, a bike turned upside down became a sound object. In the spirit of situationism, Igor Panin began studying holes that emerged during the reconstruction of Liteiny Prospekt. In Aleksandr Lyashko’s photo documentation, diving to the bottom and resurfacing became an everyday metaphor of death and rebirth. At Vladimir Tolstoy-Kotlyarov’s mail art exhibition, the New Blockheads created their own mail object: during their performance Sandwich they made a parcel out of Vadim Flyagin. 

The best-known work of the group’s «first summer» was the performance The Movement of a Tea Table Toward Sunset. Seven Days of the Journey. The New Blockheads were invited to take part in the 1st International Festival of Experimental Arts and Performance at the St. Petersburg Manege. They decided that the journey to the performance venue could be turned into an event and for one day moved their conversations round the kitchen table into the city. They brought outside a table with a typewriter, which they carried around St. Petersburg during the day. They stopped in a variety of central locations: on the Fontanka Embankment, on the Panteleymonovsky Bridge to the Summer Garden, by the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, on Palace Square. Their final destination was the Manege, where they were to present performances over the days that followed. After the festival, the New Blockheads were noticed by critics and the media and became part of the institutionalized art world.

The New Blockheads Cooperative (1996–2002)

One of the important art spaces in 1990s St. Petersburg was Borey Gallery, run by Tatyana Ponomarenko. Located in a basement in Liteiny Prospekt, it hosted exhibitions, literary evenings, and conferences and had a bookshop that sold the gallery’s own publications. This was the space that brought together the core members of the New Blockheads Cooperative, an art group known for its performances and actions (sometimes spontaneous). Members included Vadim Flyagin, Vladimir Kozin, Alexandr Lyashko, Inga Nagel, Igor Panin, Maksim Raiskin, and Sergei Spirikhin.

In the article «Amateurism of the Summer» (1996) about how the group began, the cooperative described the atmosphere in which they came together as follows: «Nobody knew what was happening in the catacombs of Borey, where we were working to comprehend a blockheadness not invented by us. Were we indeed blockheads? Were we bluffing? No, it seemed that we had really reached the stage of deep sterility, in which a mere thought of work, of pure achievement, turned us into cold corpses. No achievements for us! First of all, who needed our achievements. Second, everything had been achieved before us. Third, our incurable mediocrity did not allow us to achieve anything new, anything perfect.» The self-deprecating and ironic acceptance of their blockhead-ness, mediocrity and unsuccessfulness became their main tool in the creation of works.

Despite their professed renouncement of achievement, the New Blockheads were very productive. Over the seven years of its existence, the group produced a large number of performances and actions, organized over ten solo exhibitions, took part in Russian and international festivals, and became an important phenomenon on the St. Petersburg art scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s. One of their last projects was the opening of the imaginary gallery PARAZIT, followed by the emergence of an artist circle of the same name, which is still active today. 

In 2016, the New Blockheads had a retrospective exhibition at Moscow Museum of Modern Art. In 2025, Garage acquired several works by the group for its collection, as well as the group’s archive to support further studies of their work and method.