"At 3 PM on Sundays, at the Dam, the jesters [skomorokhi] will gift society with pictures!", 1989

This image by artist Antip Odov (the pseudonym of Vladimir Bolotov, 1950-), “Every Sunday at 3 PM at the Dam, the skomorokhi (jesters) will gift society with pictures!” (1989) represents the communal, participatory nature of this radical artistic project, depicting B. U. Kashkin himself as a literally inverted “great leader” who is massively larger than the little people below him. In its stylization of hierarchy, the image recalls 1930s-era portrayals of Stalin and Lenin. 

 

In contrast to these somber and weighty images, however, B.U.Kashkin is shown upside-down and standing on his hands, unstable and ludicrous, above a crowd that is not reverential, but cavorting in joyful, individualistic dance. The artifact, made to be gifted to strangers, exemplifies the ephemeral materiality of perestroika-era art consciously ignoring both the norms of Soviet art and the new market realities of the post-Soviet period—all for the sake of reconstructing a sense of artistic community.