112. EMPTY ACTION

In the center of an empty lot (a triangular area not far from the Sokol’niki metro station and bounded by railroad tracks with lengths of 500 meters, 350 and 300 meters, found with the help of the program Google Earth), on a six meter-long rod, a yellow cord was used to hang an object resembling a triangular “house” made of cardboard with sides slightly larger than A3. Glued to the triangle’s left plane was an A3 sheet with a collage by AM of an early 1950s German (GDR) poster of the VDNKh “Uzbekistan” pavilion (now the “Culture” pavilion) with two pasted images of Soviet wood-carved craftwork from the 1940s-50s: a red star and a model of Gorky’s book Mother; a banner placed at the top of the poster read “Accursed Existence.” The triangle’s right plane carried a photograph of N. S. Khrushchev on the telephone. On the inside plane of the triangle’s base was a map of this location from Google Earth marked with the ordinal number of the action (112).

At the base of the rod on which the object (triangle) hung and spun in the wind at a height of around 4 meters above the ground, was attached an A4 sheet with a text about “empty action” in English (white letters on purple background).

As the participants walked away from the object, a yellow cord was attached to the rod, unwound it to its complete length (80 meters), and an A3 sheet with a text about “empty action” (in Russian) was tied to the end and placed on the ground.

The installation with the rod, the triangle, and the sheets about the “empty action” was left behind in the empty lot.

​

Moscow, near Rusakovskaya Street (Sokol’niki)

18 January 2008

A. Monastyrsky, N. Panitkov, I. Makarevich, E. Elagina, S. Romashko, D. Novgorodova

V. Zakharov, Yu. Leiderman, D. Timofeev, Andrea Schmidt.