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| Another work we want to mention is an intervention at the press conference of Manifesta 3 in Ljubljana. We came to this new European Biennial with leaflets and spray cans. When the press conference started we kind of occupied the panel, sprayed a slogan on the huge screen, made noise and handed out leaflets. The slogan was: “Demolish neo-liberalist multicultural art system now!” Bodyguards came and dragged us out of the hall. Three hours later we were arrested by Slovenian secret police in the streets. Ha-ha-ha-ha! The Necessity Of A Cultural Revolution
(Alexander Brener, Barbara Schurz; 02/2002) | |
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| The crowded opening of „Body and the East" was a big party, with the inevitable Alexander Brener throwing eggs at some important people. One egg hit an important man’s head, and as he happened to be bald, the organic liquid contained in the egg slowly slided down on his shiny head. It was all a big scandal, of course. There also was a buffet for the opening, consisting of a table covered with apparently hand-made sausages, lined up in different colours. The table looked as if covered with intestines. You had to use scissors to cut off the small sausages. They were very tasty. At the buffet, I got the chance to talk to Brener. He proved to be a very friendly person.
The Place where Symptoms become Real: Cosmonauts, Explosives, and Hand-Made Sausages. Impressions from Ljubljana, Slovenia, 7-12 July 1998 by Inke Arns <inke@berlin.snafu.de> Berlin, August 1998
-http://www.projects.v2.nl/~arns/Texts/lju98.html
NO IMAGES!!!
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| One of our key works was done in 1998 in Berlin. There still exists a part of the former Berlin Wall, which is now called “East Side Gallery”. It is not a simple wall. This wall is decorated with official commissioned graffiti. And it is a cultural memorial. But we don’t like memorials and what they stand for. The “East Side Gallery” symbolises the reunification of Germany. But you have to know that together with the reunification of Germany new borders emerged in Europe. And we wanted to make that visible. So we came to the East Side gallery and started to paint with grey colour over the graffiti. As well we stuck leaflets to the wall with the following content: The Necessity Of A Cultural Revolution
(Alexander Brener, Barbara Schurz; 02/2002)
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| Vuk Cosic: Рerformance/exhibition by Alexander Brener and Barbara Schultz in the Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenija. Something was suspicious when during the Mark Pauline lecture (about two weeks ago) the gallery curator Jurij Krpan told me that he is deeply shocked with Brener's tech list. He said Brener asked for few nails to hang some drawings and that's it. And really, Alexander have written a nice and calm manifesto on the gallery wall claiming at the end something like: Long live art, terrorism is the thing of the past.... After we all had a chance to read this, and after we saw several bad (xeroxed) drawings on the wall, a performance started. Barbara has put on a haloween mask and started burning those copies, badly overacting and altogether doing a lousy show for the present photographers and cameramen. After about five minutes of this, Alexander took a similar mask and with a can of spray paint broke the window of the gallery.... As soon as this was done he sat in a supermarket shopping cart and Barbara drove him around the crowded gallery for five minutes while he was screaming.... | |
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|  Drawings from trial: On Saturday morning January 4th 1997,Brener after supposedly travelling to Amsterdam for the express purpose of damaging the painting sprayed a green dollar sign on the work. The oil on canvas painting depicts a white cross on a light grey background and Brener said he intended the dollar sign to appear nailed to the cross.
http://www.renewal.org.au/artcrime/pages/malevich1.html
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| Another work was an attack of the Belo Russian embassy in Moscow with ketchup bottles. At the time a bullshit international scandal took place. During some sport event American sportsmen entered the Belo Russian air space on a balloon and Byelorussia artillery shot them down. Both Americans died and then the Belo Russian authorities tried to cover this incident. I’m not a fan of American sportsmen but I took three bottles of ketchup, invited journalists and started to throw the ketchup into the window of the Belo Russian embassy. Then I was beaten by a policemen and there was a trial but I have an Israeli passport and I escaped. | |
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| Oct. 31, 1996 After about the third speech I began to nod off, but I was roused by the apparition of a man in a Batman T-shirt who stormed the conference yelling "Batman forever!" while swinging a whirring toy, lasso style over his head. Everyone sat in stunned silence until he proceeded to squirt our distinguished hosts in the face with a water gun. As he was being "escorted" out, he threw a handful of flyers into the air which urged everyone to boycott the fair so as not to support an "corrupt elite art mafia." The unrest that resulted from this heroic interruption, performed by Moscow artist Alexander Brener (who has made an even worse fuss before, at the "Interpol" exhibition in Fargfabriken in Stockholm-- see Raphael Rubenstein's report in the April 1996 Art in America) berlin art diary by Mary E. GoldmanNO IMAGES | |
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|  The sepia hairy Wenda Gu still centred, acts like a central point to it all. Brener is setting up a drumkit, so obviously he's going to bang away. The "Purple Prose" gang is here to get the Interpol prize instigated by Cattelan as an art project Y hmm, well, alright. http://www.ljudmila.org/interpol/intro3.h tm  I started my drum performance and then destroyed Wenda Gu's installation. Why his? In my view, it was a symbol of this collapsed and failed project under the idiotic name Y Interpol. Alexander Brener. Ticket that Exploded http://www.ljudmila.org/interpol/intro2.h tm
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| 1995 (with A.Ilievsky and A.Litvin). Contemporary Art Centre, Moscow
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| Guelman gallery, "Brener Alexander, Kulik Oleg, Osmolovskii Anatolii, Dmitrii Petrov, Vladimir Salnikov Marat Guelman, a gallery-owner whose artistic projects are as sharp as newspapers headlines, couldn't fail to respond to the currently fashionable theme of the forthcoming elections. A show-competition that he organized at the Polytechnic Museum was entitled "A Turn-Key Party". A vacant package of registration documents was offered to the attention of the audience. A competitor who would have won after his appearance in public, subsequent debates and a ballot, winding-up the show, would have become an owner of the package. It could have been a leader of a Movement or a Party. A prize package was real. This was not the case, however, with the majority of the competitors who showed off exclusively themselves, their mania and phobia (it has become appropriate to demonstrate those peccadilloes not only at closed in-patient departments), as well as artistic projects." | |
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| (with Ya.Mogutin). Contemporary Art Centre, Moscow
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| Red Sqr., Moscow
  he heroically ascended the elevated space, splendid and powerful, dressed in shorts and boxing gloves, and began to challenge Yeltsin to an honourable duel. These actions allowed for a simple interpretation and had an entirely symbolic nature. In the first case, for example, he explained and studied his own perversities in the area of mono and bisexuality. --http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/urbanaria/a vtor/e/brener.htm In the performance staged at Red Square, Brener clearly expressed his aspirations to a direct involvement in the political sphere. And, he fell into the trap. The action was staged in the vicinity of the place where the renowned Vasilij Bla�eni (St. Basil, a holy fool) once sat. The trap is the one that awaits each artist who abandons the world of his own existence and crosses over to the world of politics which offers solely the position of a beggar, of a fettered loony. Yet let me observe that Brener�s cynics are completely devoid of every cynical aspect: none of his historical downfalls was followed by his resorting to the possibility of saying that he was simply joking for the sake of a joke. --http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/urbanaria/a vtor/e/brener.htm Alexander Brener’s first performances addressed Boris Yeltsin, the Chechen War, and the Orthodox Church. In the winter of 1995, Brener went to Red Square, “stripped down to a pair of boxer shorts, pulled out boxing gloves, and began going through the motions of warming up for a fight, shouting all the while ‘Yeltsin! Come here! Yeltsin! Come here!’” (Akinsha, 1995).--http://www.unt.edu/honors/eaglef eather/2005_Issue/Nersesova3.shtml "During the Russian war campaign in Chechniya, Brener is recorded going to Red Square in boxing get up and shouting in the direction of the Kremlin: 'Yeltsin, come out!'"
http://www.renewal.org.au/artcrime/pages/malevich1.html | |
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| May 11th, 1995  | |
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| (with Unnamed Group). McDonalds, Моscow | |
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| 1994 (with O.Mavromatti and D.Pimenov). M.Guelman’s Gallery, Moscow  | |
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|  One of his first actions was staged at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts where he kneeled before Van Gogh’s painting yelling "Vincent, Vincent!" and then imitated an act of uncontrolled defecation. That was meant as a public admission of impotence and worthlessness in face of Great Art, but nevertheless had little resemblance to real himility. http://www.artinfo.ru/artbank/asp/englis h/search/author/art_type/author_result.a sp?author_id=645&art_type_id=20 | |
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1994 with A.Litvin and A.Revizorov, exhibition-action "Swimming pool"
he masturbated at the diving platform of the recently closed Moscow swimming pool,--http://www.ljudmila.org/scca/urba naria/avtor/e/brener.htm "Perhaps more controversial is his public masturbation on the diving platform of a swimming pool built during socialism on the site of a destroyed orthodox church that saw Brener arrested." http://www.renewal.org.au/artcrime/pages/m alevich1.html | |
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| (Alexandre Brener, Vadim Fishkin), Galerea Medium, Bratislava (Slovakia). May - June 1994. Curators - Hans Knoll and Victor Miziano)
No images, no information!!!!! | |
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| 1994/(?) M.Guelman’s Gallery. Central House of Artists, Moscow J amey Gambrell. Art in America: The post-bulldozer generations - the artistic presence in the former Soviet Union - Report From Russia"Last year Guelman also sponsored Alexander Brener, the bad boy of Moscow's last art season, known for his numerous performances in the buff, which included masturbating at the Moscow swimming pool on the site of the former Church of Christ the Savior [now to be rebuilt: see "Front Page," Nov. '94]. Last summer the gallery showed Brener and another young Moscow artist, Bogdan Mamonov, at the Central Artists House. "Conformists," as the show was called, contrasted Mamonov's large photographic portraits with a physically grueling series of daily performances by Brener, who raced around the space and alternately declaimed classical Russian poetry, screamed, ate raw onions whole, measured his genitals, and stuck pins in his bared posterior. Echoing early 20th-century Russian artists' calls to "throw Pushkin off the ship of modernity," the artists' joint manifesto in the "Conformists" catalogue challenged what they see as the status quo of artists who "learn to paint correctly, as artists did 40-50 years ago ... and carefully trace out their scribbles for each other and a small circle of the initiated."
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| Action at Contemporary Art Centre, Moscow, 1994
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| Action in Pushkin Sqr., Moscow, 1994
„I, Alexandеr Brener, reached a great breakthrough in post Koons art on February 19, 1994. Under the Pushkin statue on Pushkin Square in Moscow, I met with my wife Lyudmila who came to see me from Israel. Under this statue I asked her to carry out an act of love with me. I did not succed as my member did not stand up of which I informed the gathered crowd by shouting: “It doesn’t stand!“ Who else in our contemporary art culture may provide an example of such absolute statement.“ (Khudozhestvenny Zhurnal, iss. 4, 1994)
In his action staged in Pushkin Sqr., when he publicly attempted to commit a sexual act with his wife, he did not confine himself to the role of the Artist violating the conventional limits, but refined it by playing a failure whose wish for public self-assertion ends in a crushing fiasco ("No good!" was the key phrase of that action).
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| 1993, XL Gallery, Moscow  | |
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| August, 1993, in front of the White House (the Russian Parliament), during the days of shooting  A performance made in August, during the days when Eltsin shtoot down the Parliament and took over the White House (the building of the parliament of Russia). The performance is made in front of the curious crowd, which came to watch the tank's shooting. On the background is the burned White Huse. The tanks are situated on a street perpendivular to the street of teh parliament. (from left to right: Vasia Shugalei, Anatolii Osmolovskii, Alexander Brener, Oleg Mavromatti)see also | |
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