Bulldozer Exhibition
Encyclopedia
Urban forest
An urban forest is a forest or a collection of trees that grow within a city, town or a suburb. In a wider sense it may include any kind of woody plant vegetation growing in and around human settlements. In a narrower sense it describes areas whose ecosystems are inherited from wilderness...
by Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
avant-garde
Russian avant-garde
The Russian avant-garde is an umbrella term used to define the large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russia approximately 1890 to 1930 - although some place its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960...
artists on September 15, 1974. The exhibition was forcefully broken-up by a large police force that included bulldozer
Bulldozer
A bulldozer is a crawler equipped with a substantial metal plate used to push large quantities of soil, sand, rubble, etc., during construction work and typically equipped at the rear with a claw-like device to loosen densely-compacted materials.Bulldozers can be found on a wide range of sites,...
s and water cannon
Water cannon
A water cannon is a device that shoots a high-pressure stream of water. Typically, a water cannon can deliver a large volume of water, often over dozens of metres / hundreds of feet. They are used in firefighting and riot control. Most water cannon fall under the category of a fire...
s, hence the name.
Since the 1930s in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
Socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
had been the one of the artstyles largely supported by the state. All other forms of art were forced underground
Underground art
Underground art, as with underground music and underground film, is a term that seeks to describe art forms that are aloof to the mainstream art world, are illegal, taboo, unconventional, rebellious or revolutionary...
and sometimes prosecuted. One of the attempts to break out of the underground to more public view was the Belyayevo exhibition.
It was organised by two underground artists, Evgeny Rukhin
Evgeny Rukhin
Evgeny Rukhin was a Russian Non-Conformist painter.He was born in Saratov, Russia into a family of scientists. He began painting at the age of twenty, during his geological studies. His paintings were highly controversial. He was Russian Non-conformist artist working in Leningrad in the 1960s and...
and Oscar Rabin (artist). Among the artists taking part in the exhibition were Oleg Tselkov, Eduard Shteinberg, Vladimir Nemukhin
Vladimir Nemukhin
Vladimir Nemukhin is a Russian artist. Nemukhin studied under the direction of Petr E. Sokolov and later Pavel Kuznezov)...
, Lidiya Masterkova
Lidiya Masterkova
Lidia Masterkova - was a Russian-born French painter, non-conformist artist in USSR.Masterkova graduated from the Surikov Art Academy in 1950. A dedicated abstractionist, Masterkova was associated with the Lianozovo Circle along with Oscar Rabin, Vladimir Nemukhin, a diverse group of artists and...
, Klever (Valery), Igor Holin, Borukh (Boris Shteinberg), Koryun Nahapetyan
Koryun Nahapetyan
Koryun Nahapetyan was an Armenian-Russian painter-nonconformist, sociologist, philosopher and public activist, a participant of the Bulldozer Exhibition. He was a member of UNESCO International Federation of Painters....
, Alexandr Zhdanov
Alexandr Zhdanov
Alexandr Pavlovich Zhdanov was a Russian avant-garde painter.He was born in Vyoshenskaya, Soviet Union. Zhdanov was expelled four times from the Grekov Art School in Rostov-on-the-Don but managed to graduate after six years....
, Vladimir Bougrine
Vladimir Bougrine
Vladimir Bougrine also known as Wladimir Bugrin was a Russian painter.-Biography:...
, Eduard Drobitsky (currently, vice-president of Russian Academy of Arts
Imperial Academy of Arts
The Russian Academy of Arts, informally known as the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, was founded in 1757 by Ivan Shuvalov under the name Academy of the Three Noblest Arts. Catherine the Great renamed it the Imperial Academy of Arts and commissioned a new building, completed 25 years later in 1789...
), Edouard Zelenine, and Sots Art
Sots Art
Often referred to as “Soviet Pop Art”, Sots Art originated in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s as a reaction against the official aesthetic doctrine of the state—"Socialist Realism"...
creators Vitaly Komar
Vitaly Komar
Vitaly Komar is a Russian painter and performance artist who was born in Moscow in 1943. He attended an art school in Moscow from 1958 to 1960, after which he studied and graduated from the Moscow High School of Industry. He began cooperating with Alexander Melamid in 1973 and collaborated with him...
and Alexander Melamid
Alexander Melamid
Alexander Melamid is a Russian painter and performance artist who emigrated to New York City from the Soviet Union in 1977 with Vitaly Komar. He was born in Moscow and attended the Stroganov Art Institute, where he collaborated with Komar in the Russian SOTS ART movement...
. It was held on a vacant lot, officially part of an urban forest (лесопарк) in Belyayevo. Attendance consisted of approximately twenty artists and a group of spectators that included relatives, friends of the artists, friends of the friends and some Western journalists. The paintings were installed on makeshift stands made out of dump wood.
The organizer Oscar Rabin told in an interview in London in 2010: "The exhibition was prepared as a political act against the oppressive regime, rather than an artistic event. I knew that we'd be in trouble, that we could be arrested, beaten. There could be public trials. The last two days before the event were very scary, we were anxious about our fate. Knowing that virtually anything can happen to you is frightening." Rabin was arrested and punished with expulsion from Russia, but was allowed to leave with his family to Paris.
Despite the minor size of the event it was considered by the authorities as very serious. They marshalled a large group of attackers that included three bulldozer
Bulldozer
A bulldozer is a crawler equipped with a substantial metal plate used to push large quantities of soil, sand, rubble, etc., during construction work and typically equipped at the rear with a claw-like device to loosen densely-compacted materials.Bulldozers can be found on a wide range of sites,...
s, water cannon
Water cannon
A water cannon is a device that shoots a high-pressure stream of water. Typically, a water cannon can deliver a large volume of water, often over dozens of metres / hundreds of feet. They are used in firefighting and riot control. Most water cannon fall under the category of a fire...
s, dump truck
Dump truck
A dump truck is a truck used for transporting loose material for construction. A typical dump truck is equipped with a hydraulically operated open-box bed hinged at the rear, the front of which can be lifted up to allow the contents to be deposited on the ground behind the truck at the site of...
s and hundreds of off-duty policemen
Militsiya
Militsiya or militia is used as an official name of the civilian police in several former communist states, despite its original military connotation...
. Officially, the group was supposed to be "gardeners" expanding the urban forest, who reacted in spontaneous outrage to the offense against their proletarian sensibilities. It was never denied, though, that they actually got their orders from the KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...
.
The attackers actually destroyed the paintings, beat and arrested the artists, spectators and journalists. One of the most dramatic scenes was Oscar Rabine who actually went through the exhibition hanging to the blade of the bulldozer. One of the attackers, militsia lieutenant
Lieutenant
A lieutenant is a junior commissioned officer in many nations' armed forces. Typically, the rank of lieutenant in naval usage, while still a junior officer rank, is senior to the army rank...
Avdeenko, memorably shouted at the artists: "You should be shot! Only you are not worth the ammunition ..." ("Стрелять вас надо! Только патронов жалко...").
Rabin later told to have relived the horror of seeing art crushed and artists arrested: "It was very frightening … The bulldozer was a symbol of an authoritarian regime just like the Soviet tanks in Prague
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet Union and her main satellite states in the Warsaw Pact – Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic , Hungary and Poland – invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in order to halt Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring political liberalization...
." Two of his own paintings - a landscape and a still life - were among those flattened by bulldozers or burned by the invading KGB.
After the event was widely publicized in the Western media, embarrassed authorities were forced to allow a similar open air exhibition in the Izmailovo urban forest two weeks later on 29 September 1974. The new exhibition of works of 40 artists was held for four hours and was visited by thousands of people (the numbers cited differ from one and a half thousand http://www.gurvic.odessa.ua/staty/04-2/v446.html to twenty-five thousand http://www.gazeta.ru/comments/2004/09/16_a_173228.shtml). A participant in the exhibitions, Boris Zhutkov, has said that the quality of the Izmaylovo paintings was much lower than the paintings in Belyayevo, since in the original exhibition the artists showed the best paintings they had only to have most of them destroyed. The four hours in the forest of the Izmailovo exhibition has often been remembered as "The Half-day of Freedom." The Izmailovo exhibition in turn gave its way to other exhibitions of the nonconformist
Soviet Nonconformist Art
The term Soviet Nonconformist Art refers to art produced in the former Soviet Union from 1953-1986 outside of the rubric of Socialist Realism...
art which were very important in the history of modern Russian art.