1994/(?) M.Guelman’s Gallery. Central House of Artists, Moscow

 
Jamey 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."