In Ton-Centre, a former steam-engine depot in Moscow, performance artist Andrey Bartenev and a team of experimental creatives working across disciplines have staged a production in which mannequins take the place of actors.

Art history has long embraced the concept of tableaux vivants, or “living pictures”, a form of pantomime that became particularly popular following the invention of photography. Devotees of the fine arts would recreate the mise-en-scène of famous paintings, photographing themselves in these carefully staged compositions as keepsakes. The guru of Russian performance art, Andrey Bartenev (b. 1965), has turned this tradition on its head. Rather than staging a living picture, he stages “dead nature” — which is, after all, the literal translation of the French term for still life: nature morte. In the opera Joy — A Wedding with a Substituted Bride and Other Incidents, all the roles are played by mannequins, brought to life through an intriguing interplay of lighting and a revolving stage, courtesy of Ton-Centre director and set designer Katya Bochavar, lighting designer Ivan Vinogradov, and designer Holystick.

Above all, however, this “installation with song” is brilliantly animated by a remarkable creative team: celebrated composer Vladimir Rannev; librettist Zhenya Nekrasova; the singers of the contemporary academic music ensemble N’Caged; and, of course, sculptor and costume designer Andrey Bartenev himself.

Set in three parts and lasting forty minutes, the work evokes a kind of inverted Stravinskian opus. Its imagery, drawn from the pagan world of ancient Rus’, calls to mind both The Rite of Spring and Les Noces. Zhenya Nekrasova, winner of several Russian literary prizes, fills the work with folkloric motifs: leaping over bonfires, bathing with mermaids in a moonlit pond, a witch at the wedding, a substituted bride, and the dispelling of dark forces by means of a horned headdress, the kichka. The recitatives and modernist voice-leading of Rannev’s score, meanwhile, recall the satirical Soviet operas of the 1920s and the parodic works of Dmitri Shostakovich. Yet its playful, almost rap-like interjections - built around rhymes that juxtapose the festival of Ivan Kupala with the failure to buy a swimsuit in time - shift the work firmly into the realm of contemporary intellectual glitch-kitsch, recalling the comic-strip language of the new folk theatre.

The still-life motif reaches its climax in the opera’s plot. A witch casts a curse on the betrothed protagonists, Yarina and Andrey, transforming the wedding guests — and Andrey himself — into plastic food containers: a literal “dead nature” of contemporary consumer life. The spell can be broken only by the horns of Yarina’s kichka, a traditional Russian headdress.

Plastic food containers, into which a potpourri of ancient, avant-garde and mass culture is packed away, are among Bartenev’s favourite motifs. Around the perimeter of the hall, the installation is framed by the exhibition The Futurist’s Dessert, or Nails in Sour Cream, which takes visitors on a journey through Bartenev’s performances, beginning with video documentation of his beloved Botanical Ballet of 1992.

In this iconic choreographic work, Bartenev paid homage both to the avant-garde of the Constructivist era and to Fernand Léger’s 1924 film Ballet Mécanique. At the same time, however, he folded the early avant-garde and the folk motifs of the Far North into the syrupy jelly of 1980s and 1990s alternative fashion shows, Jean-Paul Gaultier and the Russian countercultural magazine Ptyuch.

This strange interchange of qualities — the living and the inanimate, the humanistic and the ufological, the high and the low, the epic and the mass-mediated — brings Bartenev’s work, for me, into the realm of camp. The term, widely used today, was famously theorised and popularised by the critic Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay Notes on “Camp”. It describes a particular kind of aestheticism that delights in excess and “flamboyant mannerism”, transforming the serious into the frivolous in pursuit of a new sensibility. In Russia, camp found particularly fertile ground in the 1990s, just as Bartenev’s career was flourishing, becoming closely associated with the party aesthetic surrounding Ptyuch magazine and figures such as the singer Zhanna Aguzarova. Appropriately, collaged portraits of Aguzarova form one of the recurring motifs of the new exhibition at the Ton-Centre.

It is worth noting that the world of camp involves a constant slipping away from fixed categories – serious versus unserious, contrived versus sincere, high versus commercial. Bartenev made an opera with mannequins instead of singers. A year ago, at the Grand Palais in Paris, I happened to see a comparable experiment: the exhibition ´Du cœur à la main´, in which Dolce & Gabbana used their own mannequins, dressed in sumptuous garments, for a stroll through the whole of art history.

Dolce & Gabbana's parades of garments can likewise be likened to lavish theatrical productions involving music, lighting design and video. Here too, the spectre of the operatic still life arises – since the dresses themselves, styled after images of antiquity, became the protagonists. The dazzlingly fine handling of texture and fabric, embroidery referencing the Sistine Madonna or ancient Greek ornamentation or Baroque still lifes, produced the kind of wow effect capable of disarming even the most hardened sceptic.

In Susan Sontag’s thinking, camp is able to break through the wall of alienation between the highly intellectual and the banal. Excessive, boundless prettiness touches hidden chords of the soul, appealing to some basic, almost genetic code of empathy. Just as children's toys are never measured against a standard of good taste, yet still bring warmth and happiness, so excessive beauty offers generous emotion, comparable to the glitter of presents beneath a New Year tree. These fundamental qualities of camp culture make it an excellent interlocutor for the contemporary world, in which the grand narratives of modernism and postmodernism have collapsed and global utopias have crumbled into ruins. Both Dolce & Gabbana and Andrey Bartenev and his team have, in their still-life productions and their catwalk spectacles, found a way to grasp and feel the contemporary stance of honest conversation, in which any dogma becomes mere routine.

The style of the collages on display at the Ton-Centre, and the look of the sculptural figures in the pagan installation, point to yet another source for Andrey Bartenev’s art: psychedelic collage, cut at the crossroads between Dadaism and Pop Art. The art of the psychedelic era takes us back to the 1960s, avidly studied by the Ptyuch generation, Andrey Bartenev among them. All over the world the 1960s and early 1970s marked the discovery of new, previously unknown artistic materials (neon, plastic, cellophane sheeting); the beginnings of video art; the invention of high-tech light-and-sound equipment, deployed, among other places, at Beatles concerts; the first forays into biomorphic form in architecture; and, in short, a serious attempt at a new synthesis of the arts aimed at overcoming their traditional boundaries and transforming spatial architectonics beyond the bounds of ordinary visual experience (today's virtual worlds are an analogue). In the West, this search for a new synthesis of the arts, begun in the sixties, calmly weathered the asceticism of conceptualism and was reborn in architectural design and in the theatrical and sculptural work of Bartenev’s friends Andrew Logan (b. 1945), Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) and Robert Wilson (1941–2025).

As Bartenev told me in a private conversation, the legendary American director Bob Wilson fascinated him as a formidable systematiser: “He’s a mathematician — he has an industrial approach to art. I once suddenly realised that Wilson is a ‘square man’. And I’m a circle.” It seems fitting, then, that Bartenev should stage his gala performance beneath the great circular stone big top of the Ton-Centre.