Vasiliev Yury, Kaliningrad, Russia

 

«Russian Red», 2001, perfomance

 
The project handles one of the most widespread stereotypes of the mass consciousness connected with the perception of the image and history of Russia of the XXth century, both mythological, and ideological – with the totality of the red. The red color for the Russian culture is selectively charismatic. The dramatic quality of the intonations of the red, as a symbol of life and death, reaches its highest degree of tension in the XXth century having changed the vector of concentration from the red as ‘beautiful’ (Red square) and the color of life, sacrifice and heroism (Old Russian icon painting), to the sign of tragic omens (K. Malevich’s “Red square”), of revolutionary frame of minds and reforms (Russian constructivism), later ideologically colored by the 70-year-old epoch of communism building.       
The project is simultaneously focused both on the traditionally historical Russian character of the red color, and on the representation of the totalitarian suggestion of the color, connected with repressions, socialism’s construction sites, bloody wars, communal life, economic decay, social inequality and indifference. This visual and perceptible image-color has got stuck in the collective memory of Russian people as a childhood complex, in spite of the on-going millenium, coming globalization, ecological and man-caused disasters, and it is sharpened by the reincarnated in the late XXth century red flag as one of the firm symbols of the country.