Kulik vs. Kurnikova: The Installation Museum in Moscow’s XL Gallery
by Andrey Kovalev
A stunt-woman’s dummy that resembles Kurnikova turned out to be frighteningly lively: beads of sweat on the forehead, a grin revealing wet gums, real snickers covered with real sand, uplifted skirt exposing mighty muscles. Enclosed in a glass box, the wax dummy mystically drifts above the floor, defying all physical laws. Those interested not only in the star s sexy thighs but also in the mysteries of art, will discover after a closer look that it is the beauty s natural braid attached to the ceiling that keeps the object aloft. The combination of wax’s deathly shine and natural hair creates a shocking effect which is intensified to the highest degree as soon as one notices taxidermic stitches covering the model’s hands, legs, neck and abdomen.
With all the complexity of the performance, Kulik’s message is rather primitive: if stuffed animals are exhibited in museums, why not exhibit a stuffed human? And more it is difficult to be a star under the constant flashing of paparazzis cameras. Another commonplace statement says that every media-based personage has a special media body. In Madame Tussaud’s museum, there are exhibited wax copies of numerous society, criminal and political chronicles heroes. (Kulik s activities with wax figures began after his series of large photographic images displaying his cynical sexual assault against Rasputin, Nicholas the Second and the whole of Russian history exibited at St.Perersburg’s affiliate of Mme Tussaud’s).
But there is yet another statement, which is exceptionally banal this time, saying that such thing as arousing Reuter’s interest requires bringing banality to its highest degree. I can note that Kulik switched to more legal forms of accomplishing art, altough never gave up his old tactics of epatage and scandal. The wild 90s in Russia, when Kulik acted a mad dog, are now over. Now he is becoming more and more alarmed by the fact that within the international scene, "His somewhat exceedingly aggressive actions are only associated with a notion of wild money in Russia being made basically by those who embrace violence as a lifestyle." The quotation belongs to Victor Tupitsyn, American critic and sophisticated philosopher originally from Russia, who supports Moscow conceptualists headed by Ilya Kabakov and who bitterly attacks those of the neo-NEP movement.
The truth is that Kulik actually was the mirror of the Russian Capitalist revolution and reflected step by step the intensive transformations of the new class’s collective body. But the power’s exalted gesticulation of tongues already passed away, along with Boris Yeltsin’s drunken buffoonery in Berlin, which camouflaged the collapse of the Evil Empire and the birth of a new one. Now that the old clown removed his cap, from under it appeared a tragic actor. Oleg Kulik, the bad dog of young Russian capitalism, now concerns himself with the legal decoration of offices and informational flows. There are also rumours saying that this very project of Kulik’s–after completing it with several figures resembling Madonna, Bjork and cosmonaut Gagarin–might somehow appear in the Russian pavillion at Biennale di Venezia.
I can also add that Anna Kurnikova, a simple Russian girl embodying the American dream, is not the best model. After all, Kurnie has not yet won a single championship, and her worldwide fame basically survives because of cheap tabloid stories. But Kulik, despite his naive belief in omnipotent mass media, hasn’t yet succeeded in becoming a Damian Hirst-like superstar either.
