The Blue Noses, from 'Mask Show', 2002
British gallerist Matthew Bown was seized at a Moscow airport in October when border guards found satirical photographs in his luggage depicting the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, naked. Matthew Bown, owner of the Matthew Bown Art Gallery in London's Saville Row, was removed from a morning London-bound flight SU241 and held for nine hours of questioning at the Sheremetyevo-2 airport. He eventually flew out at 20.45 that evening.
Customs officials took offence to the art works which Bown had borrowed from the Moscow Marat Guelman gallery the day before. Mr Bown had travelled to Russia to pick up the paintings for the first solo show in London by the Siberian duo Blue Noses (Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov). Blue Noses are known for their politically provocative videos, photographs and performances which parody Russia's past and present. Their targets include political leaders, sexual and political correctness, and the platitudes of art history. The confiscated images are from the series 'Mask Show', which shows the artists in a boudoir, in contorted positions wearing little more than oversized masks of Putin, Bush and Bin Laden. Other confiscated works were The Lady And Death and She's Going On A Date which address taboo issues in the post 9/11 world: the Twin Towers, and a suicide-bomber in burqa wearing suspenders. In the series 'Kitchen Suprematism', abstract compositions of iconic importance to Russian art historians are reduced to humble arrangements of cold meats, cheese and bread.
Blue Noses were born from a loose association of artists active in Siberia in the 1990s. During the 1990s, Mizin delved into performance and action art, making films which parodied the Moscow Actionists. On the eve of the new millennium (31 December 1999), in an attempt to avoid the promised year-zero computer apocalypse, Mizin, Shaburov and friends locked themselves in a bomb-shelter in Novosibirsk and made a series of videos in which they wore blue bottle-tops on their noses. The epithet 'Blue Noses' was coined and stuck to Mizin and Shaburov; they finally gave up trying to shake off the tag in 2003, when they arrived at a hotel to find that they were booked in with the surname Blyunosez. The group have represented Russia at the Venice Biennale and have exhibited widely across the world.
The eleven works Bown was transporting were not allowed to leave the country, even though he possessed the necessary documents to take the works out of Russia. They would continue to be held by the Moscow police at Sheremetevo II airport. 'They wanted to know who the artists were, when the images were made, where the works had come from, and all about the Guelman Gallery,' said Bown. When he asked the reason for his interrogation, he was told by a police officer that the Blue Noses' works 'contain representations of heads of state and this could not pass unnoticed'. They could not allow images which portray state officials 'in a derogatory manner' to leave the country.
The following day, around noon, the Guelman Gallery, situated at Malaya Polyanka 7/7, was invaded by six masked men who destroyed an exhibition of paintings by Georgian artist Alexander Dzhikia, smashed computers and beat gallerist Marat Guelman. Guelman was hospitalised with severe bruising and swelling to the face and other parts of the body and a suspected fracture. 'We were told to face the wall,' says Yevgenia Klaskova who works at the gallery. 'Then three or four masked men took the works off the wall, smashed them and stomped all over them.'
The Guelman Gallery has a history of confrontations with the authorities. It was denounced in January 2005 by 36 State Duma deputies for displaying art at the Moscow Biennale that the parliamentarians deemed 'unpatriotic' and 'offensive.'
On the morning of Tuesday 24 October Matthew Bown in London spoke by telephone with Marat Guelman in Moscow. Guelman was still in pain from the attack. He informed Bown that the prosecutor's office had stated it required ten days to investigate the artworks detained at Sheremetevo airport, making it unlikely that they would arrive in London in time for the planned opening. Officials said the works would be returned to the Guelman Gallery following their inquiry. Undeterred, Mr Bown reprinted the confiscated photographs and put them on show as planned on 9 November.
Laura K Jones is a London-based journalist and a regular news correspondent for Your Gallery magazine.
)
)
)