SHARMANKA @
GLASGOW GALLERY OF MODERN ART
ALL THESE EXHIBITS temporary ARE ON SHOW AT SHARMANKA GALLERY
"Titanic"
Dedicated to the memory of Margarita Klimova
1994
Eduard Bersudsky:
"TITANIC was built during our exhibition in the McLellan Galleries.
Jock Redburn, the chimney sweep from the Scottish Borders sold me an old butter churn. In the Galashiels scrap yard I found a training bike. I decided to breed them and watch how they would do. The marriage was fruitful: they gave birth to six wooden children in six weeks.
While working I thought about a friend of mine, a small brave woman who spent four years in prison and exile because she read forbidden books. She fell badly ill after that and we invited her to Scotland to try to save her. Everybody here did their best to help: "Amnesty International", doctors and nurses in the Edinburgh Western Infirmary, just ordinary people. It seemed she had won her fight for life.
She went back to Russia and died within two month because there was no blood in the hospital for the transfusion she needed."
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Proletarian Greetings to the Honourable Jean Tinguely
from Master Eduard Bersudsky out of the Cradle of the three Revolutions
(now on loan at SHARMANKA Gallery)
In 1990, a few months after SHARMANKA Kinetic Theatre was launched in St.Petersburg (then - Leningrad) we went to Moscow to see Jean Tinguely's exhibition. It was the first time his art was allowed to be exhibited in Russia - and the first time Eduard saw somebody else's kinetic sculptures..
There we met Tinguely's assistant Sepp Imhof. We showed him some photographs of Eduard's kinemats and were given a wonderful present, a pack of materials, priceless belts, nuts and bolts and the main treasure - a Parvalux Motor. It still drives "Nickodym's" barrel-organ... It was first time we had been in touch with the wonderful circle of our colleagues - crazy folk involved with kinetic sculpture - a generous breed of artist-craftsman-mechanic-etc. Seppie promised to bring Tinguely and all the team to St.Petersburg to see our SHARMANKA theatre a year later. Eduard spent the next year making three machines in the hope of greeting Tinguely with their performance - but two weeks after the first performance we learned from some Swiss tourists that he had died.
The first night of "Proletarian Greetings..." happened to be 19 August 1991, the date of the communist putsch. Tanks were driven towards Moscow and St.Petersburg, people built barricades near the Parliament. All public events including theatrical performances were banned but a group of foreign tourists arrived, we let them in by the back door and played this performance.
Three years later we did show this performance to Niki de Saint Phalle and Sepp Imhof - in Glasgow, at our exhibition in theMacLellan Galleries.
Actually these three kinemats present a crash course on the history of communism in Russia.
In "The Great Idea (Karl Marx)" a small figure, resembling the founder of Communism, but strangely dressed as a Russian peasant, works really hard pushing a handle, accompanied by a popular young pioneers' song (children's communist organisation) composed during the Civil War:
"Fly ahead, oh our locomotive,
Next station is Communism,
No other way have we
With guns in our hands..."
Finally Marx sets in motion some sort of "flying locomotive"... The children's voices turn into a sinister howling sound and everything is swallowed up in blood ... Eventually the contraption comes to halt but Marx continues rotating the handle trying to revive it...
"The Dreamer in the Kremlin" (it is how the British science fiction writer Herbert Wells called Lenin after visiting Russia in the twenties) - a crippled skeleton with tiger teeth tries to control the world from inside his cage, resembling the Kremlin with red stars on the towers as well as the Mausoleum in Red Square - the burial place of Lenin, and for some time, Stalin (until he was moved).
In the messy world of "The Autumn Walk in the Belle Epoch of Perestroika (Meta-Tinguely)" - where even clock hands went mad - a pair of uncomfortable heavy shoes (they were given to Eduard as working gear when he made his living as a boiler man) goes for a stroll whistling something light-hearted. All kinds of horror movie-style hazards interrupt the tune - ghosts of the past that just will not rest in peace - and finally this irresponsible whistling is completely lost in the hell of gunfire...But the shoes are still walking...
