Happy 13th anniversary to the time Russian art collective Voina painted a giant cock and balls on a bridge opposite the headquarters of the security services in St Petersburg.
Remarkably, “the work, entitled A Dick Held Prisoner at the FSB, was awarded the 400,000 rouble (£8,700) 2010 Innovation prize by the National Centre for Contemporary Arts in Moscow” the following spring.
Even more remarkably, when founder member Leonid Nikolayev, aka Fucked-Up Lyonya, died in 2015, it was not at the hands of said security forces, but the result of misadventure “while cutting timber”.
Given that he “once sprinted through traffic with a bucket on his head” as part of an earlier ‘work’, it is perhaps yet more remarkable that he lasted as long as he did.
Voina also once held “an orgy in Moscow’s Darwin Museum, titled Fucking for Medvedev, and interrupt[ed] a courtroom proceeding to perform a song called All Cops are Bаstards, Remember This.” Oh, and they overturned police cars in St Petersburg, too. Little wonder they needed financial assistance from Banksy, really.
I’m not an art historian, but I think I’d go for the 60-metre phallus as my favourite. Apparently, it took 23 seconds to paint,
timed to perfection between the bridge being closed to traffic and it being raised
…even though Voina member Natalia Sokol had her reservations:
You’ll have noticed the left bollock is rather malformed. That’s because the police targeted the smallest girl we had with us, and Leonid had to rush over to save her before it was finished.
