VIKTOR PETROV
"WEIS"
20 minutes, 7/09/2001 at Museum of Contemporary Fine Art

by Denis Romanovski
The performer uses a succession of separate gestures like an inner message. Showing objects; changing clothes; using objects inversely; firing at a ping-pong ball; unwinding red, white and black threads; wrapping his head in fine material of the same colours; cutting out silhouettes of the audience, and embracing them as if this were a long-awaited meeting with everyone present; taking photographs of the audience; and so forth. The sequence is spontaneous, impacting like an avalanche by its sheer quantity of actual gestures and the associations they evoke. Incidentally, the sequence maintains a rhythm of changing primary colours, thus providing a core of form around which the artist seeks contact between the action, his inner world, and the audience.

The artist is declaring art, particularly performance, to be total freedom. Freedom, so often vulgarised by the media that fear primitive, uncontrollable motives, is confidently shown here to be the respiration of creativity on the rise, or in search of new heights. In this respect, Viktor's performance strongly highlights the contrast between an artistic gesture and everyday society, with its ideology, bureaucracy, criminality, etc. One example of this transition is a sharp knife, which the performer brandishes at the surrounding audience in order to cut and strip away the veneer of day-to-day life (with its shell of conventions and fear), and get right up close to the person and embrace them. Likewise, a pistol is aimed first at a ping-pong ball, then a person; we hear laboured breathing through wet material swaddling the performer's head; a handprint fades on a cardboard file for business papers - all methods designed to bare "meaning stereotypes" naked using feelings. They also force the viewer to see the emptiness of those stereotypes, and take a deeper look into themselves and the world of human relations.

Creating his own unconventional language has aided the artist not only to organise his own creativity and reveal his inner space, but also to gain close-range, absolute contact with his audience.

"I see the process as experiencing the time of art. The more, the less and vice versa. The instant of implementation and entry into the process must be rapid, which depends on our will alone. If art is our will, then a strong performance can be achieved. Movements, gestures, sounds - all of them serve to realise energy. The choice of actions is solely the result of oneself, devoid of literary concepts. During performances, I often use chromed metal, silver, glass, talcum powder, synthetic material, water, light, and air. I do not use audiovisual technology because I consider it a mere decoration. The whole thing is like a quest for sincerity." - VIKTOR PETROV