Collective actions
POLAROID. For Pavel Peppershtein
By the river Yauza, in the vicinity of Losiny Ostrov (Elk Island), we asked Peppershtein to lie down on a hill. After he laid down on his back, we arranged six bread buns around his head to form a nimbus. We then took a photograph of him in this position with a Polaroid camera. We attached the photograph to a string, which we tied to his finger, and hid the photograph under an umbrella at the foot of the hill. At the end of the action, he was supposed to pull the photograph toward himself.
Next, we handed him the action score, which was made up of two identical childrens’ books of Russian fairy tales sewn to both sides of a piece of cardboard. The books were attached in such a way that only one fairy tale could be read: “The Terrible Goat.” We glued over the beginning of the second fairy tale with pages from a book about Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
We asked Peppershtein to read the fairy tale through a radio microphone and to comment in some way on the texts about Fichte. After giving these instructions, we walked over to the video camera located on another hill (about 40-50 meters away from the hill where Peppershtein was lying). A. Monastyrski would receive the transmission of Peppershtein’s reading and commentary (through a set of headphones) and then repeat out loud after Peppershtein everything that he says, while standing next to the video camera (in other words, the video camera would record Peppershtein’s text as performed by A. Monastyrski). However, the radio microphone did not work, likely due to a line of high-voltage electric power lines running between the two hills.
Still, Peppershtein read the fairy tale and gave his commentary on Fichte in this position, and afterward, he pulled the photograph toward himself, discovering on it himself with a “nimbus of bread.”
Moscow
8.22.1990
S. Hänsgen, A. Monastyrski (with the participation of J. Bakshtein)