ABSTRACT
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, indeed, during the years of perestroika that preceded it, Russian radical art practices have been profoundly public and performative in orientation. This chapter examines the Chto Delat school and its practices of intimacy, and focuses on the theme of heroism in Chto Delat's own work. It considers the Zoya performance and the questions it raised about both these aspects of Chto Delat's practice. As an alternative institution, the Chto Delat school aspires to a form of emancipatory practice that does not require the confrontational ethos of actionism to sustain a publicly oriented position. Chto Delat's pedagogical method is not uncontroversial, and it raises a number of questions familiar to readers of Claire Bishop's influential survey of participatory art in Artificial Hells. The Chto Delat school operates at a safer distance from the state machinery, and its tutors are much less optimistic about symbolic forms of heroic intervention.
