Oleg Borisovich Kulik is a Ukrainian-born Russian performance artist, sculptor, photographer and curator. He is best known for his controversial artistic performances in which he acted like a dog.
Life and art
Kulik was born in Kiev, graduated from Kiev Art School and Kiev Geological Survey College, and was awarded a scholarship by the Berlin Senate in 1996. He lives and works in Moscow. For his performances, Kulik creates a symbolic set of parameters to define the environment which he will inhabit in the persona of a dog, and then devises a series of actions that unfold as a response. The artist describes the dialogue within his practice as "a conscious falling out of the human horizon" which places him on hands and knees. His intention is to describe what he sees as a crisis of contemporary culture, a result of an overly refined cultural language which creates barriers between individuals. Thus, he simplifies his performance language to half of the basic emotional vocabulary of a domestic animal. A recent retrospective of Kulik's work was "Oleg Kulik: Chronicle. 1987–2007" at the Central House of Artists, Moscow. It was exhibited at Rencontres d'Arles festival, France in 2004. As curator of the Regina Gallery, Kulik became known for his unorthodox approaches such as putting paintings on wheels and hiring people to carry the artworks. Kulik considers his best curatorial endeavor to be "Leopards Bursting into a Temple" by Anatoly Osmolovsky in 1992. In this exhibit, two naked people were put into a cell with live leopards walking around them. He had said that he thought the exhibition was a "metaphor for everything new and lively that appears in our life". In 2009, Kulik curated the "Kandinsky Prize in London" at the Louise Blouin Foundation.
Controversy
At the Interpol group exhibition in Stockholm in 1996, he performed in the gallery chained next to a sign reading "dangerous". An international scandal occurred when he not only attacked members of the public who chose to ignore the sign, in one case biting a man, but also attacked other artworks within the exhibition, partially destroying some pieces made by other artists. Kulik thought this was an excusable act, as there was a warning label attached to his performance which people chose to disregard, reasoning that his intention was to divulge his angst at the current cultural crisis through the violent anger of a dog. The incident inspired a scene in the 2017 filmThe Square directed by Ruben Östlund, where animal actorTerry Notary plays a performance artist who imitates an ape.
Artist Susan Silas wrote "A Love Letter to Oleg Kulik, A Prince among Men, a Man among Dogs". She describes visiting Kulik during his performance of "I Bite America and America Bites Me", in which Kulik references Joseph Beuys with an updated reference to the current cultural setting of America. Again, Kulik performed as a dog, this time in a specially built cage, which the spectator would enter wearing protective garb.
