Issue #1 of “Radek”, 1994

The first issue of the magazine Radek represented the formation of a new actionist group called “Netsezudik.” The group included Alexander Brener, Oleg Mavromatti, Anatoly Osmolovsky, Alexander Revizorov, Vasily Shugalei, and Alexei Zabarzhuk and took its name from the word for “extra” or “excess” from the nineteenth-century constructed language Volapük. Netsezudik’s first action took place on 20 October 1993, and was entitled The Shame of October 7th. In the action, the four participants (Osmolovsky, Brener, Mavromatti and Shugalei) exposed their genitals in front of the burned façade of the Russian White House, which still showed the traces of Yeltsin’s bombing during the 1993 Constitutional Crisis. 

 

According to Osmolovsky, the participants wore black T-shirts to match the building’s burned top floors, while the white bottom floors were represented by their denuded bodies. The word “shame” in the title refers to both the participants’ lack of pants and (according to Osmolovsky) the shame of Yeltsin bombarding the White House. It is not clear why 7 October was marked in the action’s title, since the White House was burned on 4 October, and the action took place on the 20th of the same month. The cover of Radek documented the action, while the issue itself offered several interpretations of recent political upheavals in essays by Osmolovsky,  Dmitrii Pimenov, Brener, and others, including an interview with the artists Komar and Melamid and a translated conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.  

 

Multiple actions and performances followed for Netsezudik, including several gallery exhibits: The War Continues in 1993 and Audacious, unfeeling, ignorant, paranoid, untrustworthy, animals, addicts, weird, poor, ideologically worked-on, career-oriented, naive, fashionable, cruel, unreal, unfriendly, mad, stubborn in 1994. Although the group dissolved in 1995, under Osmolovsky’s oversight, Radek would go on to have two more issues, one in 1996 and one in 1998. Osmolovsky created a digital variant of the publication and a website entitled “mailradek” in 1995, shifting the project to an epistolary, email-based format in 1997. 

 

The magazine’s idiosyncratic mix of political commentary on very recent events and transgressive actionist provocation highlights the fundamental eclecticism of post-Soviet media. At the same time, Radek’s disappearance from the public sphere and its move to email shows both the initial enthusiasm of radical artists seeking a more public outlet, and their rapid withdrawal from this public-facing approach and toward the more familiar model of communicating with like-minded addressees.