“Here, Performance Art is Performance Art”: The “Appearance” of Performance Art in Soviet Subculture

Abstract

The chapter provides an overview of the emergence of performance art, action art, and happenings in the Soviet underground since the 1960s. The main question is how a genre that was considered Western and aesthetically suspect was able to arise in the first place. The chapter shows how acting in the underground led, on the one hand, to an art of subversive action that worked primarily with techniques of subversive mimicry, camouflage, and reutilization. On the other hand, the chapter argues thar the work in the underground produced a high degree of self-reflection, which had as its object the “appearance” of the genre and the self-presentation of the artists themselves.