"First Glove" by Alexander Brener

Alexander Brener’s action performance First Glove, took place on February 1st, 1995. Brener challenged Boris Yeltsin, while dressed as a boxer, in the Red Square, in front of the Lobnoye Mesto, popularly believed to be the old beheading place, but actually a podium for delivering the Czar’s commands since its construction under Ivan the Terrible. Brener wore boxing gloves and shorts, with a nude torso, despite the February cold, and repeatedly called for Boris Yeltsin to fight him, seemingly with the intention of using Lobnoye Mesto as the boxing ring. Crying “Yeltsin, come out!” until he was apprehended by the police, Brener attempted to literally fight institutional power, a move linked to his opposition to the on-going war in Chechnya. “He only plays tennis!” sardonically declared Brener, as he was taken away in the police car. The action represents an ambivalent moment, simultaneously progressive and reactionary. On the one hand, Brener directly calls the national leader to account, challenging his power from a symbolic historical site. On the other hand, the call to personal combat at a site associated with the violence of the Czars’ regimes, seems directly regressive, circumventing the normal channels of the Russian democracy and thus dismissing them as insignificant. The action was important in the Moscow contemporary art scene, insofar as it attempted a direct confrontation between political power and performance art. This is reinforced and evidenced by the presence of Marat Guelman, the influential collector and promoter of Russian contemporary art at the event (he is visible in the photograph, handing Brener his coat).