2014 | Happening
Event: Night of Museums
Venue: Courtyard of the Artists’ House, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Date: 17 May 2014
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade
“Why not? It isn’t every day that a fellow gets a chance to whitewash a fence.”
— Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Setup
For the Night of Museums, the Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade brought Tom Sawyer’s famous whitewashing episode into the courtyard of the Artists’ House.
Visitors were invited to join the work in exchange for an object:
a button,
a dead rat with a string attached,
the largest apple,
a second-hand kite,
and other offerings.
The reference comes from the episode in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which Tom turns the task of whitewashing a fence into something the other boys want to do.
Here, the Brigade turned the same mechanism into a live artistic situation.
Everybody Joins
The Brigade began by whitewashing.
Then the visitors took over.
There were so many people willing to participate that the Brigade soon found itself standing aside, watching the work continue by itself. By the end of the action, all surfaces in the courtyard that were due to be whitewashed had been painted.
The work was no longer being carried out by the artists alone.
It had become a collective activity — initiated by the Brigade, but produced through the participation of everyone who joined.
The museum event became a temporary space of shared work, exchange and play.
Everyone participated. Everything did.
A Situation Instead of an Object
Tom Sawyer Museum does not produce a permanent artwork. Its form is the situation itself: a familiar task, a simple exchange, a crowd, and a shift in who is doing the work.
The Brigade creates the conditions for participation, then lets the situation take over.
Exhibition Context
Tom Sawyer Museum was presented during the Night of Museums in the courtyard of the Artists’ House in Yekaterinburg on 17 May 2014.