Human Dog Artist Snaps at Censors.AN eccentric Russian performance artist who likes pretending to be a dog and biting members of the public has complained of censorship in France after police removed from a prestigious art fair in Paris several photographs of him cavorting with animals.
Plainclothes police confiscated 30 photographs by Oleg Kulik after complaints from the public that they were offensive. The pictures, taken in the late 1990s, show Kulik naked on all fours. In some of them he appears to simulate sex with animals.
“Christ also was censored for having said ‘love thy neighbour as you love yourself’,” said Kulik, 47, in an interview. “They took his life away. In my case, they took only my photos.”
Owners of XL, the Moscow art gallery, who were attending the international art fair, were questioned about the collection for several hours by police and complained of being handcuffed.
Martin Bethenod, head of the fair, denied the works were offensive. The art world had been deeply shocked by the raid, he said.
Photographs of Kulik in his kennel, in a pigsty and surrounded by cattle had previously been exhibited in France without any problem, he said, adding that the photographs had “an unquestionable artistic status” and that Kulik’s art is represented in French national collections.
The gallery, he noted, had put up a warning that some people might find the images distasteful.
Jacqueline Moussion, who represents Kulik at her gallery in Paris, called him a “great intellectual” whose art was rooted in the downfall of communism.
“It was a big shock for him, the collapse of communism,” she said.
“He said, ‘I don’t understand the world any more. I’ll rediscover my animal side, my primitive side’.”
Kulik, an example of the extremes to which an artist will go to attract attention, is remembered in Britain for a performance called Armadillo for Your Show in which he dangled from the ceiling of the Tate Modern in 2003, covered in mirrors.
The Tate described him as a “human mirror ball” and called his act a “critique on the worlds of art, entertainment and mass culture and their crucifixion of the artist”.
America, meanwhile, will never forget I Bite America, America Bites Me, a performance in which Kulik spent two weeks in a pen inside a New York gallery growling at visitors. Mila, his wife, played his “keeper”.
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