BOCHUM ACTIONS

POLAROID

For Pavel Peppershtein

By the river Yauza, in the vicinity of “Losiny Ostrov,” we asked Pavel 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 thread, tied it 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 draw the photograph to himself.

Next, we handed him the action’s score, made up of two identical children books of Russian fairy tales sewn to a piece of cardboard on both sides. The books were sewn in such a way that only one fairy tale could be read – “The Terrible Goat.” The first part of the second fairy tale was glued over with pages from a book about Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

We asked Peppershtein to read the fairy tale through a radio microphone and also to comment on the texts about Fichte. After these instructions we walked over to the video camera located on another hill (about 40-50 m away from the hill where Peppershtein was lying). Andrei Monastyrski was to put on ear phones and listen to Peppershtein’s reading and narration through the radio transmission. He was to repeat aloud what Peppershtein was saying while standing beside the video camera (so the video camera could record Peppershtein’s text in the performance of Andrei Monastyrski). However, the radio microphone didn’t work – probably due to a line of high-voltage transmission between the two hills.

Nevertheless, Peppershtein read the fairy tale and gave a commentary on Fichte, and afterwards, he drew the photograph to himself, discovering on it himself with a “nimbus of bread.”

Moscow

8.22.1990

S. Hänsgen, A. Monastyrski (with the participation of J. Bakshtein)