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436 Liudmila Limanskaya expects. However, such frivolity carries a serious fundamental intention—its aim is to eliminate the gap, created by mass culture, between the viewer and performer, and to bring them together in a kind of performance. From a broader, semiotic and cultural perspective, the theatralised ‘hooliganism’ of Moscow actionists revived the aesthetics of fools, jesters and travelling minstrels who exposed themselves in order to ridicule social injustice and vice. These qualities of the Moscow actionists were manifest in their appearance, manner of behaviour and shocking actionist gestures which reached beyond the accepted aesthetical limits of the time. Primitive folk art became an inspiration to street art in the 1990s as artists tried to shock and disrupt the traditions of socialist realism. Images powered by irony and the grotesque lead the way to the change of semiotic codes. The same signs—gestures, poses, mimicry—that had symbolised the revolutionary spirit and heroism, became symbols of deception and trickery and were used to ridicule the characters depicted in the works of art. The image of the ‘builder of communism’, who dominated the art of socialist realism, had become obsolete. But why is there a desire to physically destroy the monuments of the past? Ernst Gombrich wrote about the special magical status of the visual arts: Whilst words are easier understood as conventional signs which one can play with, alter and change without affecting the essence of the being they signify, a picture remains for us for all time a sort of a double, which we dare not damage for fear that we might injure the person or being itself. Image-magic is perhaps the most widespread of all spells. It lives on even in modern civilization, and it can regain its old power, partially at least, if our Ego loses some part of its directing functions. For example, revolutionaries burn the pictures of a ruler... (Gombrich & Kris 1938: 339). In his studies on the history of cartoons Ernst Gombrich focused on the role of the unconscious in grotesque and caricature and pointed out that the functioning of iconic signs in the visual arts in different historical contexts is an expression of a certain kind of sensitivity. An example of this is the change of the semiotic code of Soviet art in the culture of Sots Art: the gestures and poses of the ‘builders of communism’, which personalised the image of the ‘friend’ in socialist realism, were transformed into the grotesques of Russian post-modernism and became a personalisation of the ‘foe’. Mocking the idealised past helps one become free of the pressure of long-standing stereotypes and to oust, with the help of deviant forms of behaviour, the fear of disobeying obsolete standards of behaviour. E. Gombrich explained this by referring to different cultural traditions that operate within their own systems of values and restrict the visualisation of reality through a set of perceptive schemas.
