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Objects on stage (notes from pre-and post-): in this context 'object' should be understood in relation to the concept of 'fractionality'; i.e., the contemporary condition under which most of our experiences are neither real nor imaginary.

Article Excerpt
To begin, I will focus on the Law of Unity and Conflict of Opposites as applied to a variety of constructs, including totality and incompleteness, androgyny and hermaphroditism. (1) These terms should not be confused with one another: whereas androgyny is offered here as a triumph of unity over contradictions--extending to the possibility of symbolic copulation with "oneself" necessary to the reproduction of the totality--the hermaphroditic libido suffers defeat in the attempt to invest itself in itself, since it is unable to overcome the crisis of identification. Unlike the modernist project, from which postmodernism inherited its hermaphroditic incompleteness, androgyny is akin to the Stalinist or Maoist cultural heritage. (2)

Hermaphroditic incompleteness is among those factors which contribute to some artists' lack of responsibility for what they produce. "Responsibility for what? Art is a completely useless thing," one Moscow artist declared in a conversation with me. Another opined that the important thing about any ("true") work of art is that "it cannot be used in any other way." The infantilism of such declarations is explained by the extreme childishness of the male half of the artistic intelligentsia--be it in the former Soviet block countries, or in China. This phenomenon can be described as a procrastination of adulthood.

With the crumbling of the Soviet State in 1991, and with governmental control over arts loosening in China, the procrastination of adulthood has taken yet another turn: many adults (including artists) felt deprived of "parental" protection. This created the phenomenon of overgrown orphans--"children" abandoned by "parents," brutalized and grown wild. In "Becoming-Animal" (1986), Gilles Deleuze appeals to a "zone of indetermination or uncertainty where ... an inhumanity [is] immediately experienced in the body as such." (3) He argues that "not only in the case of autistic children, but for all children ... there is a reality of becoming-animal even though one does not in reality become one." (4) In the case of post-totalitarian (neo-capitalist) culture, "becoming-animal" can be interpreted as the elemental protest against becoming-an-object, i.e., against objectification.

In today's Russia, where cultural infantilism is, at times, bordering on orthodoxy, artistic acts like public masturbation or bestiality have been performed by the so-called telesnicks. (Telesnost is "bodily" in Russian; telesniks are artists who seek bodily joy in aesthetic practices.) In the 90s, the most consistent were Oleg Kulik and Aleksandr Brener. The new breed of telesniks, known as Blue Noses, stage photo sessions in which they pose as Putin, Bush, and Bin Laden to suggest (however grotesquely) that they are sexually involved...

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