Brad sees a man about a dog

Flicking through Contemporary Visual Art No 72, 2005, I saw a picture of a man pretending to be a dog. The man is Russian artist Oleg Kulik, and the photo was a still from his 1995 video work "Reservoir Dog". The story goes that he set himself up outside Zurich's Kunsthaus (old museum), wearing nothing but a studded collar, then proceeded to bark at people as they walked by. He didn't stop there though. He ended up attacking people, doggy style of course(boom boom), until he had to be forcibly removed by police. Great stuff, not that I'd consider doing it myself unless I suddenly developed an uncontrollable meth habit.

There's a classic shot in the mag of him gnawing away at a helpless old man he's dragged to the ground. I couldn't find it on the net (the one above is from a different work of his) but I managed to find some other work in which he also uses acting like a dog as a means of expressing reservations about the ways in which people treat people, animals, and the lengths to which artists will go to draw attention to themselves amongst other stuff.

In a work called "I bite America and America bites me", he spent two weeks in America. On arriving at JFK airport from Russia, he was placed in a waiting animal transport van, then transported to a gallery and enclosed in a purpose built cell where he acted like a nasty dog for 24 hours a day. After two weeks of this he was loaded into the same van, transported back to the Airport and flew back to Russia. An example of taking an idea to the limit then beyond perhaps? http://www.artseensoho.com/Art/DEITCH/kulik97/kulikinfo.html

...and I just found out that he's also stuck his head in a cows vagina, only to discover that "there is no reality"... What a freak.

A further list of his antics can be found at:

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/live_culture/kulik.html