| Address: | Moscow, Russia |
| Contact: | http://www.waytorussia.net/WhatIsRussia/Art.html |
| Similar in Moscow: | Roman Ass Artist, ArtInfo Website, Oleg Kulik Artist |
| Similar Worldwide: | www.livingartroom.com Contemporary fine arts (México) |
For him, the most important is to act. 'One shouldn't only write poems, they should be shouted'.In his first actions, he enforced himself to show the inability of contemporary artists. For example he met with his wife on a winter frosty day on the busy Pushkin square and they tried to make love together in public. But he shouted 'it doesn't work! Nothing works for contemporary artists! only for Jeff Koons and Chichulina...'He went to Pushkin's museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and shited in front of Van Gogh paintings -- to show how impressed he was. He was ruining conferences. He once went half naked in winter in front of the Kremlin and called Eltsin to fight.And it was him who, in January 1997, while visiting Stadejlik museum in Amsterdam, graffitied with a green paintball spray, a dollar sign "$" on Malevich's painting 'Suprematism'. A big green dollar sign on a white cross on a white background. Malevich's painting, for Brener, was a symbol of art business and all the people involved in it: critics, museums, art collectors, gallerists and artists themselves.He hates authority, power of money and sees museums like 'the bastion of cultural power'. He expressed his ideas through the $ graffiti and spent years in a Dutch prison because of that.There he wrote the book 'obosani pistolet' where he tells his beliefs and summarizes all his actions.He talks about democratic art. He dreams that people would go on the streets and protest in silence or in laughter against the 'criminal power' that governs.Brener believes one should express one's beliefs by 'simple, funny, fast, clean hearted, naive actions'. He imagines 'a mass of people gathering on the Red Square and silently picking their nose, then the fat, boring government would shake and fall'. He was born in 1957 in Kazakstan, he hated school, liked to lie under the sun, and to make love in weird places like in a library, on a bench in a park...In 1978 he studied philology in St Petersburg, got married then emigrated to Israel in 1981. He started making some actions there with his wife-For example once they hanged big yellow banners, with black digits painted on them, in the main street of Tel-Aviv on Shabbat's day. It reminded a bit of the yellow numbers on the uniform of concentration camps prisoners. It was hanged down by the police. Brener says he 'fucked' the police in every country where he was.In 1992, he came to live in Moscow. He fast became a conspicuous artist in the little circle of Moscow contemporary art. He was coming to poetic lectures and was reading about sexual illnesses. He found artists were too worried by carrier and money.For him art is like an orgasm, an ejaculation of energy, an amazing ritual.The last thing he was up to - setting a revolution in Mexico.
