In 1994 he first went down on all fours and barked at visitors – and spent years afterward as the most talked-about performance artist of post-Soviet art.
On November 23, 1994, Oleg Kulik first appeared before the public as a rabid dog – naked, on all fours, on a chain. By then, the artist was so short of money that, by his own account, he crawled to gallerist Marat Gelman and offered to guard the entrance to his gallery in exchange for food. Gelman refused at first, then weighed it over and agreed – and one of the most recognizable images of 1990s Russian art was born.
The loudest scandal came in 1996, at the Interpol exhibition in Stockholm. Kulik performed in a cage next to a sign reading "dangerous," and when visitors ignored it, he bit them; one man was seriously hurt. Other artists' works were also damaged during the same performance. The story made headlines worldwide, and two decades later the episode inspired a scene in Ruben Östlund's film "The Square" (2017).
Playing the dog wasn't always safe for the artist himself: during one performance, a passerby took the warning literally, grabbed the chain, and pressed the collar against Kulik's throat until he lost consciousness for several minutes. Even so, Kulik kept developing his "Zoophrenia" performance cycle for years, drawing on the work of Joseph Beuys and probing the boundary between human and animal.
In 1996, Kulik even ran for president of Russia for the Party of Animals, under the slogan "Animals against savagery" – the election commission rejected his papers at the signature-collection stage after finding cat paw prints and insects on the documents. Today his retrospective "Chronicle. 1987–2007," shown at Moscow's Central House of Artists, remains one of the fullest attempts to trace the artist's path – from curator to "dog-man."
