Anatoli Osmolovsky

Mayakovsky-Osmolovsky
Photograph 1993


© Anatoli Osmolowsky

*1969 in Moscow (RU), lives in Moscow (RU)
This theoretician, initiator and artist began with provocative street actions, performances, texts and work in artists’ collectives in the early 1990s. With the Radek Community project Osmolovsky reactivated radical leftist and anarchistic positions in the art field. With the “non-spectacular art” method and ironic objects, he later turned on the commercial misappropriation of art.

The photograph of the performance Mayakowski-Osmolovsky (1993) documents Anatoly Osmolovsky sitting on the shoulders of the huge statue of Vladimir Mayakovski in Moscow. The poet Vladimir Mayakowski was a heroic figure for the avant-garde of the 1920s; later he supported the regime and was posthumously canonised by Stalin. Osmolovsky still believed in left-wing gestures and wanted to rehabilitate the avant-garde. His performance was reminiscent of Dada because it destroyed the discourse prescribed by those in power. Osmolovsky performs memory as a social event: in 1993, he accordingly undertook a journey to Brobdingnag on which Netsezudik is the fictitious protagonist.