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Old Man B.U.Kashkin and Other ‘Clowns’: Trash Art and Street Performance in the Post-Soviet Era

Thu, November 5, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Virtual Convention Platform, Room 4

Abstract

This paper is part of a lightning round, "The Post-Soviet Public Sphere: Assembling a Digital Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s." The paper examines the work of B.U. Kashkin, the “punk-skomorokh” whose performances incorporated poetry, humor, graffiti and appropriation into a cohesive project of anarchic play and community engagement. I argue that B.U. Kashkin’s ludic transgressions represented a vital critique of post-Soviet cynicism and a revitalization of the underground art community at a time when it was simultaneously freed from the burden of active censorship, and deprived of the social conditions that made it necessary.

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