Alex Buldakov

Alex Buldakov is a former member of Radek. In many of his works, the master combines the striking visuality typical of bourgeoisie works of art with the desire of a left-wing artist to destroy this glossy and inhuman world. Prosperity and wellbeing are constantly wracked by catastrophes.

In Crash Test (2007), the very catastrophe finds itself in a catastrophic situation – it does not work. The world has grown insensitive to far-out situations; it is too settled and thick-skinned. Buldakov draws cartoon horrors of the modern world. An airplane crashes into a skyscraper, yet the building is unharmed. It keeps striking, until the plane itself smashes up. A missile hits the earth, but there is no explosion. Cars pile up, but only lose tiny parts.

Similarly, New York suffered terrorist attacks on 9/11, wars continue to rage in the twenty-first century, the equivalent of a whole town’s population is killed annually on Russian roads, yet the capitalist world ignores all these shocks and catastrophes. It pauses briefly to mourn, before continuing to accumulate more capital.

That is why Buldakov selects animation to get his message across – because there are no irreversible actions in the cartoon genre. Tom and Jerry batter each other with slabs of concrete or flatten the other with a steamroller, only to get up, shake themselves off, and continue their feud. They are as indestructible as capitalism.