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Alexander Braner

How’d we ever miss radical performance artist Alexander Brener in our retrospective of museum interventionists? Aside from his shocking antics of public sex in the Moscow streets and defecating in front of a Van Gogh, in his most famous action in 1997, the artist staged a protest against Kazimir Malevich by spray painting a green dollar sign over his work Suprematism at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. He was arrested and served several months in prison. In court, he testified, “The cross is a symbol of suffering, the dollar sign a symbol of trade and merchandise. On humanitarian grounds are the ideas of Jesus Christ of higher significance than those of the money. What I did was not against the painting. I view my act as a dialogue with Malevich.”