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In Dinner Is Served, the food on the tray resembles a rainbowsplattered dessert, with miniature tanks as decorations, and a hammer and sickle on a red star as the cherry on top. The Russian acronym GKChP is spelled out in pastel-colored frosting, and the “dinner” is held by two hands emerging from sleeves decorated by olive branches, a symbol of peace. GKChP stands for the State Emergency Committee that engineered the failed 1991 coup attempt to remove Gorbachev from power. This coup turned out to be a relatively peaceful affair, because the Soviet army made a decision not to fire on citizens but instead to turn their tanks around and defend Russia’s parliament building, the White House. However, on the third day of the coup attempt, several demonstrators were killed and wounded. Mikhail Rozhdestvin, Dinner Is Served, 1991
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Four sets of ballerina legs are drawn in a television-screen frame; the dancers stand before a camouflage-print stage curtain. The legs are positioned to spell out the Russian acronym “GKChP,” which stands for the State Emergency Committee, the group that staged the 1991 failed coup to overthrow Gorbachev. On the bottom left of the screen is the date 19.08.1991, the day of the attempted coup. The sign hanging off a television knob reads, “Quiet! Rehearsal in session!” The painting references the fact that the State Emergency Committee, in one of its first acts, occupied the Moscow television studios and broadcast a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, interrupting the scheduled program. Mikhail Rozhdestvin, Quiet Please—Rehearsal in Session, 1991
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The painting shows a red silhouette of the torso of a pregnant woman in profile, her side marked with a star and hammer and sickle and her stomach emblazened with a white question mark. The title of the 1988 piece, Perestroika, references Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy shift of glasnost (openness) and perestoika (reform) in the Soviet Union. The unborn child, designated with the large question mark, highlights the uncertainty about the future effects and implications of these policies. Alexander Amelin, Perestroika, 1988
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