In 1998 the Siberian artists organized a burlesque art-festival. They locked themselves in an old bomb-proof shelter, where they devised projects to celebrate their isolation from the outer world. A name of video-performances series, created here, became the name of newly formed group.

The remoteness from the world cultural centres and the absence of comparatively large receptive groups (like that existing in the metropolis) determined the creative method of The Blue Noses Group. Hence the populism of expressive means and the artists’ striving to make their works comprehensible to everybody: from kids to pensioners. The main genre — short, brutally humorous films.

The national image of Russia as it is seen from the West is not only red stars, gold cupolas, nest-dolls and balalaikas. The mythical Russian of Hollywood movies is a wild destructive bearded man in earflapped hat, a heavy-drinking gangster with “Mother-Russia” being his every other word. This is the very image Siberian artists from The Blue Noses group.

Viacheslav Mizin
The former “paper architect” and neo-expressionist painter one fine day got heavily drunk and fell asleep in the snow-drift. Having got half of his lung frost-bitten (1993), Mizin paid attention to his own body and its parts as the material for work. The quest for the most expressive means of artistic actions brought him to the undisguised demonstration of his cock. Mizin placed it on various objects and photographed, constructing a mythological cycle of life and death of this character. He is propagating the theory of “Artistic Imbecility” and so-called “debiloks” (intellectual debility works) — the absurd correlation of incompatible realias in objects and video-actions. For example, people perform their routine duties, wearing masks of Bin Laden, Bush and Putin.

Alexander Shaburov
When working in the law-court morgue as a photographer, Shaburov gave rise to his own “groundwork strategy”, trying to arrange his private life in accordance with artistic methods. This means pretending that his trivial round is a sort of artistic activity. Thus, he managed to have his visit to the dentist financed by Soros Foundation in a form of a special artistic grant. An artist, according to Shaburov, ought to make art from any everyday occurrence. Not only birthdays, weddings and funerals, but also the purchase of a TV set, refrigerator or washing machine — this is the real art! A birth of a child turns to a happening, marriage — to a performance, moving to another flat — to an environment. Shaburov’s “Natural Expression of Feelings” is a method of the same kind — e.g., people go outside in frosty day, having only pants on, and without any artificiality express the highest degree of emotional exertion.

Dmitry Bulnygin
For a half of his life Bulnygin was giving himself out to be a high-handed provocative lad. Thus, he draw everywhere fascist swastikas, thinking that he in this way protests against totalitarianism, and only in 2000 he found a work for his heart and soul. Since then he devoted all his time and energies to the promotion of his invention — the international Extra Short Films Festival, which is regularly held in Novosibirsk. Only 60-second and shorter films are admitted to this festival.

Konstantin Skotnikov
When teaching at the Institute of Architecture, Skotnikov was mainly busy with usual for young teachers pursuit of girl-students until he acquired a passion for the contemporary art. He’s got a specific interpretation of what he calls “the contemporary art”. The most known of his video-works depicts Skotnikov drawing something or writing the names of traditional arts on the pieces of paper and then thrusting these papers into his arse. The artist rejected painting long ago, but he has no intention to reject “the contemporary art”.

Blue Noses Group on GIF.RU