Mixed media installation and performance
Shown as a part of play: a festival of fun
Paradise Row Gallery, London, UK
Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich keeps on exploring the theme of anonymous intercourse between an artist and his audience. His work presented by Marina Abramovic as a part of a special performance project at Manchester international festival this summer, My mouth is a temple, turned the artist into an allabsorbing mouth hole which every visitor could do whatever they wanted to.
New installation/performance by Pavlov-Andreevich touches upon a theme of audience’s identification of an artist – and brings it into this context. Almost any art requires certain love and care from the side of its consumers. Artist seeks audience’s love but some of the artists would want to experience this love in a physical way – on top of material (buying art) and spiritual (adoring art).
Pavlov-Andreevich recalls his childhood with its number one passion - Czech amusement park across the road ('luna-parc') with its endless attractions and hundreds of children browsing around in a useless yet passionate hope for win. It was nearly impossible - kids bowling, a famous claw which was supposed to grasp a prize from a bottom of a glass box, and even a kids shooting gallery - they were all nothing else but a dishonest game making kids dreaming more and more. But the true winners were those Czech adults, park's staff, selling tickets to poor kids - they've been looking at children with a certain degree of annoyance
For Holes of My Glory Pavlov-Andreevich has recreated this experience with gallery's visitors. The curtain hiding a plywood wall was raised with happy music playing, and various male body parts were slowly growing out of multiple [glory] holes. The voice announced: please grab a body part which belongs to the artist. If a visitor made the right choice by grabbing artist's ear (foot, nose, dick etc), there was a happy music playing again, the curtain dropped and a visitor collected their prize inserted in a glass egg from a special drawer in the lower part of the wall. A loser was accompanied with a decent soundtrack on curtain's drop-off. Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich truly believes that identifying an artist in a tactile way would bring every visitor half-way to a mutual understanding between an author and an audience
photos by Irene Kalashnikova