Viacheslav Mizin, Alexander Shaburov ("The Blue Noses"), Russia

Two Against the Russian Mafia
2003, Moscow
42’32’’

Project appropriates the form of Russia currently most popular TV-genre – police series. The characters fight the social scarecrows and forms of socioidiocy, from world terrorism and globalism to horoscope reading and pop star crushes.

Viacheslav Mizin, Alexander Shaburov ("The Blue Noses")
 
Viacheslav Mizin

The former paper architect and neo-expressionist painter one fine day got heavily drunk and fell asleep in a snowdrift. Having got half of his lung frost-bitten (1993), Mizin began to pay attention to his own body and its parts as the material for work. The quest for more expressive means of artistic actions brought him to the undisguised demonstration of his cock. Mizin placed it on various objects and photographed, constructing a mythological cycle of life and death of this character. He is propagating the theory of Artistic Imbecility and so-called debilki (intellectual debility works) the absurd correlation of incompatible realia in objects and video-actions. For example, people perform their routine duties, wearing masks of Bin Laden, Bush and Putin.

Alexander Shaburov

When working in the law-court morgue as a photographer, Shaburov gave rise to his own groundwork strategy, trying to arrange his private life in accordance with artistic methods. This means pretending that his trivial round is a sort of artistic activity. Thus, he managed to have his visit to the dentist financed by Soros Foundation in a form of a special artistic grant. An artist, according to Shaburov, ought to make art from any everyday occurrence. Not only birthdays, weddings and funerals, but also the purchase of a TV set, refrigerator or washing machine thus becomes art! A birth of a child turns to a happening, marriage to a performance, moving to another flat to an environment. Shaburov’s Natural Expression of Feelings is a method of the same kind e.g., people go outside in frosty day, having only pants on, and without any artificiality express the highest degree of emotional exertion.