Silent Parade

‍

Action, November 10, 1991

‍

The Venue: Mayakovsky Square – in front of the monument.
Quantity of participants: 10 people were crawling.

‍

The action took place in parallel with protests of various left political parties and organizations (it was not CPRF - the communist party), as far as I remember there as well were anarchists. We crawled from the steps of the entrance of Mayakovskaya subway station to the monument to Mayakovsky. The action was called “Silent Parade” (people called it “Crawling”).

‍

Formal meaning was to create some danger: people were crawling in front of wheels of cars. But it didn’t work, because we already became quite popular and a lot of people came on the action (moreover, there were a lot of gapers from the demonstration), and we were surrounded by a dense ring of spectators. Though cars stood up, we were hidden from them by the crowd. Element of physical danger is also one of the aspects of a public scandal. Beside a protest, we enclosed in all actions the meaning of investigation. We almost never repeated, what had already been find out and confirmed.

‍

Nominal symbolic meaning of the action was the transition from socialism to capitalism. Crawling in November weather assumed to be in the mud. People smeared in mud, had to symbolize this “transition”.

‍

In general, any symbolic meaning is secondary for radical art. There could be hundreds of interpretations. Value (beauty) of such gestures is simplicity, reaching to elementary, accuracy, archetypical themes or precise absurdity.

‍

The most important things for an action are suddenness and a special atmosphere, which is formed by it. There were all this things in crawling along a carriageway people.

‍

Film director Eldar Ryazanov liked this action and he even asked us to repeat it for one of his movies. From my point of view, such gestures-actions can’t be repeated. There are some sense of uncertainty and ingratiatory element in repetition. We didn’t repeat the action for Ryazanov’s movie.

‍