50 years ago, on September 15, 1974, one of the most famous and shortest exhibitions of avant-garde artists took place in Moscow, which went down in history under the name “Bulldozer”.
artguide.com
The artists and spectators of the exhibition are dispersed with water from a sprinkler.
In the 1960s and 1970s, avant-garde artists fell out of favor in the USSR. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev visited their exhibition at the Manege, called the works “punctures,” spoke, according to eyewitnesses, in an obscene manner, and demanded that this disgrace be ended. The works of avant-garde artists were completely different from those made by artists who created according to the canons permitted in the country.
After that, those who went beyond socialist realism had great difficulties in showing their work to the public. At that time, all cultural centers in Moscow had regulations prohibiting the organization of such “amateur” events.
The idea of organizing an open-air exhibition (there was no direct prohibition on this) came to two young artists who worked together: Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid. In the summer of 1974, they told their friends about it, including the son of the famous avant-garde artist Oscar Rabin.
The proposal was quite bold: art students had previously exhibited their paintings (usually sketches of collective agricultural and working life) on the streets of the capital. No one had dared to exhibit works by banned avant-garde artists before.
Oscar Rabin agreed to support the initiators of the exhibition. The artists wrote a letter to the Moscow City Hall requesting that they be allowed to “view paintings in the open air in the fall.” The public and journalists, including foreign ones, were invited.
Initially, the avant-garde artists wanted to stage a show on Red Square, but then they chose a more “modest” venue – a vacant lot in Belyaevo (now the exits from the Konkovo metro station are located here), at the intersection of Profsoyuznaya and Ostrovityanova streets. They planned to open the exhibition for only two hours – from 12:00 to 14:00.
Invitation card to the exhibition. Photo: wikipedia.org
The capital’s authorities did not impose an official ban, they only recommended not holding the exhibition. On September 15, about 20 artists arrived in Belyaevo with their works. They were supported by friends and relatives, and journalists from foreign media were preparing to describe the events.
The exhibition did not last even a few minutes. Cars and excavators were brought to the vacant lot in advance. The authorities explained this by saying that they had to carry out a clean-up day on the vacant lot and then plant tree seedlings. The employees who were tidying up the garden turned out to be policemen in disguise.
Many artists did not even have time to get their paintings. The exhibition participants were brutally dispersed (some were arrested), paintings were torn up and trampled on. Facts that went down in history were told by eyewitnesses: one of the journalists had a tooth knocked out with his own camera, Oscar Rabin, who was trapped in a bucket, was carried across the wasteland, and a policeman told the artists that they should be shot, “just a pity for the cartridges.”
This is how the representative of the “second Russian avant-garde” and co-organizer of the Bulldozer Exhibition, artist Valentin Vorobyov, recalled what happened:
Artists on the Belyaevsky wasteland. Photo: olpmos.ru
“The enemy smashed the large plywood of Komar and Melamid with the image of the dog Laika and Solzhenitsyn into firewood and wickedly threw it into the fire. The right and left flanks, throwing art at the mercy of the pogromists, fought to the safe sidewalk… A motley crowd of spectators, divided into groups, walked along the dirty vacant lot, loudly discussing the out-of-the-ordinary incident. Firefighters began the final cleanup of the battlefield, managed to disperse the crowd of artists and curious people, quietly climbed into trucks and disappeared behind the dense forest, plunging into the subway and carriages.”
And Oscar Rabin said that it was “a political act against a repressive regime, and not like an artistic event. I knew that we would have problems, that we could be arrested, beaten… The last two days before the event were very scary, we were worried about your fate.”
The next day, a press conference for foreign journalists was held at the apartment of another co-organizer, Alexander Glezer. It was an international scandal. The New York Times published a front-page report on the exhibition, the illustrations of which were paintings by Komar and Melamid.
Many paintings were destroyed on the spot. Photo: artguide.com
After this, the attitude of the authorities towards avant-garde artists became a little “warmer”: they were finally allowed to show their works. Just two weeks later, an exhibition of painters representing the unofficial art of the USSR was held in Izmailovo. Within four hours it was visited by several thousand spectators. Belyavsky Wasteland was called “Senate Square in the art world”. Although many avant-garde artists were subsequently forced to emigrate from the Union to abroad.
