NATALIA PERSHINA- YAKIMANSKAYA (Glukla) and OLGA EGOROVA (Olia) are St. Petersburg artists with a show in Moscow at the city-supported Maliy Manege gallery.

Glukla & Olia with Blue Man Blue Man accompanied the artists on several escapades. To get to Documenta X, the three of them evaded the niceties of passports by slipping across the Czech border into Germany. Blue Man kept them warm at night, and came to embody the attributes of an ideal lover. He is big and strong like the blue night sky, and also an irresistible demon.

Environment of Fear (details - click images for enlarged view) The installation Environment of Fear is an exorcism of fear, a theme the artists often revisit. In an action, Poor Lisa, Glukla, and Olia jumped hand-in-hand from a bridge spanning a river; at times they burn their clothes like shamans, or fling them from an open helicopter door. And in Environment of Fear, they come face to face with what they dread most, the demon fear.

The St. Petersburg Zoology Museum is famous for an exhibit of a Mammoth defrosted in 1902. In the halls of desiccated fauna, Glukla & Olia installed wedding gowns with butterfly-like markings of hair. No Food for Butterflies (1:36 min. RealVideo clip)	The dresses reminded London of her grandmother's warning: "a woman is like a white handkerchief, every spot shows."
The word "intelligentsia" is of Russian origin. After Russia defeated Napoleon in 1812, many aristocrats came in contact with the ideas of the European Enlightenment. These western-oriented Russian liberals were the original intelligentsia. The Czar brutally suppressed their attempt to institute reforms.	Viktor Misiano, editor & curator

VIKTOR MISIANO served ten years in a prestigious post at the Pushkin Museum. He was curator of contemporary art, though the museum exhibited no such paintings or sculptures. The bureaucracy did not recognize photography as an art form, and in this medium Misiano was able to bring avant-garde exhibitions to Moscow.	Now Misiano publishes a leading journal devoted to contemporary art, the Moscow Art Magazine.
"Nobody needs knowledge of art anymore," Misiano grieves. "There is no role for priests of culture, intellectuals who know the arts and can interpret them for others."	Covers of Moscow Art Magazine. (click image to see enlarged view)

Misiano on the demise of the intelligentsia. (1:24 min. RealAudio clip)

"Mass culture has superceded intellectual culture, in Russia as elsewhere. The accelerated pace of society does not nourish intellectual reflection."