The “Kartinnik”/”Picture-man” society at the Dam boardwalk in Sverdlovsk, 1989

In 1989-1991, street artist B. U. Kashkin toured under the name Kartinnik(“Picture-man”), participating in hippie and punk festivals with his “Punk-Skomorokh [jester]” performances. He and a team of younger friends performed impromptu music shows, inviting the audience to participate, played folk instruments, improvised songs, and “won” Kashkin’s paintings from him, by responding to his silly questions (often rhyming or absurdist) to the audience. So, for example, B. U. Kashkin might first recite ‘Sleziatsia malen’kie glazki u krokodil’chika bez laski’ (“With little tears in weepy eyes the crocodile so lonely lies”), with asking for any crocodiles in the crowd, to come up to claim their gift. The first person to claim to be a crocodile received a wooden board painted by B. U. Kashkin’s circle featuring the corresponding poem.

The tours, led by B. U. Kashkin wearing a complicated punk-jester outfit and, often, a T-shirt reading “I am the great Russian poet”—written in English, a choice B. U. Kashkin explained by claiming that “they wouldn’t understand it otherwise”—engaged the public both in counter-cultural contexts like hippie and punk concerts, and in normative public spaces like boardwalks, parks and state-supported concerts and festivals. Artist Alexander Shaburov, who participated in B. U. Kashkin’s performances and wrote B. U. Kashkin (1938-2005): Zhizn’ i tvorchestvo ural’skogo pank-skomorokha (B. U. Kashkin (1938-2005): the life and art of a punk-skomorokh of the Urals) (2015), the definitive book on the artist, recalls a poem that, instead of a crocodile, asked the crowd to volunteer any present KGB agents or snitches. The outcome was an awkward pause before the crowd got in on the joke and someone offered themselves—jokingly or not—in order to get a painting. Here, B. U. Kashkin creates a space for joking about violent reprisals against KGB agents and collaborators, something well within the realm of possibility in the precarious and intensely politicized period of the USSR’s collapse but resolves the joke without violence: the snitches get presents too.

The photographs by Alexander Shaburov show the Kartinnik society creating a friendly public spectacle on Sverdlovsk's dam boardwalk.