Sergej Kurechin: The Performance of Laughter for the Post-Totalitarian Society of Spectacle. Russian Conceptualist Art in Rendezvous

It can be argued that all we know about Sergei Kurekhin, a man who played a remarkable role on the exuberant scene of Russian Conceptualism, is concerned, in one way or another, with acting and performance. He was a theatrical and musical performer onstage, whether playing solo or with his Pop-Mekhanika ensemble. He was acting at interviews and TV shows, embarking on prolonged quasi-scientific soliloquies in front of bemused audiences. Even his political pursuits seem to have amounted to a kind of deluding buffoonery. Kurekhinʼs many modes of performing always, or nearly always, involved laughter: the probing kind of laughter revelling in the newly found political freedom of action in the Gorbachovian Society of Spectacle and subsequently, in the Yeltsinian reality of “discarded values”. The paper endeavours to trace the origins and uncover the subtleties of Kurekhinʼs facetious attitude in its apparent ubiquity, with a special focus on his contribution to the peculiar Russian phenomenon of stiob that eventually became his primary strategic tool of manipulation.