Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener, Rabid Dog or the last taboo guarded by a lone Cerberus, Nov. 23rd, 1994. The street outside Marat Guelman’s gallery, Moscow.

Oleg Kulik and Alexander Brener’s 1994 action Rabid Dog, or the last taboo guarded by a lone Cerberus, but more commonly known as Man-Dog, represented a key public experiment for both Kulik himself and the gallerist Marat Guelman. Guelman’s gallery hosted not only this action, but numerous other actionist performances throughout the 1990s. In this one, Kulik, stripped nude and acting like an animal, aggressively threw himself at passing people and cars, while Brener, wearing only underwear, restrained him using a large chain. While the Russian tradition of actionism and performance art was well-established going back to the 1970s and the work of the Collective Actions group, Kulik’s aggressive, dehumanized persona and dadaist flair for controversy opened a new chapter for shocking and confrontational performance art. Aimed at scandalizing the domestic audience, this action also drew the attention of the international art community. According to Kulik’s (likely unreliable) account of how the action came to be, he pitched it to Marat Guelman in desperation, offering to literally act as a security guard dog for the gallery. Both the authorities and the international art community noticed and responded to the action. Consequently, for Kulik, the rabid-dog persona became something of a personal calling card, appearing in multiple other actions. For instance, he was arrested in 1995 while performing as a dog in Zurich in an action entitled Reservoir Dog, where he attacked strangers at an entrance to the Zurich Kunsthaus. Arrest also followed his 1996 action Dog House at the “Interpol” exhibition in Stockholm, in which Kulik inhabited a special enclosure, and bit a stranger who approached too close to the artist, ignoring posted warning signs.