Photo by Ana Bustilloz/LAist

Driving down La Brea Avenue in Hollywood the other day, I did a double-take when I spotted this amazing gleaming bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

What’s a massive chrome bust of the Bolshevik leader of the October Revolution doing chilling on one of LA’s premiere shopping strips catering to bourgeois hipsters who want to purchase expensive lamps, rugs and designer furniture, you ask?

“Miss Mao Trying to Poise Herself at the Top of Lenin’s Head” is by the Gao Brothers, Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, who have made quite a name for themselves by making controversial art focusing on the mixed legacies of some of world Communism’s historical figures.

From the LA Times:

Their specialty, however, is Mao. The Beijing artists have created works including a sculpture of the former chairman kneeling on the ground (and with a removable head), a series of torso sculptures of Mao sporting large female breasts, and another sculpture depicting Mao in a submissive sexual position.

One of their best-known works is a sculptural installation called “The Execution of Christ,” featuring the Messiah in front of a firing squad. One member of the firing squad is Mao.

Their work also verges into performance art. On their website, the artists report on one such performance in which they smashed one of their big-breasted Mao sculptures while wearing Mao masks.

This sculpture is really amazing. It’s presently sitting in front of the Ace Museum at the corner of La Brea and 4th Street.

 
“Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.” That common platitude seems entirely apropos today, on the 92nd anniversary of the attempted assassination of Communist Russian leader Vladimir Lenin by young Fanya Yefimovna “Fanni” Kaplan.

The Ukranian-born Kaplan was born in 1890 to a Jewish family and joined the Socialist Revolutionaries (or Esers) early on in life. At 16, she was busted for her involvement in a terrorist bomb plot and sent to one of Tsar Nicolas II’s Siberian prison for 11 years. Kaplan’s brutal tenure there was cut short after the February Revolution led by Lenin.

But her disillusionment with the leader came hard and fast, as Lenin’s Bolsheviks sought and succeeded to dissolve the elected Constituent Assembly, a key instrument of democracy during the revolution. Lenin’s move in 1917 to put all power in the hands of the workers councils—or Soviets—convinced Kaplan to take matters into her own hands.

As portrayed in the clip below from Mikhail Romm’s 1939 propaganda film Lenin in 1918, Kaplan got three or so shots off after the leader spoke at a Moscow factory. Lenin, who was 48 years old at the time, was hit in the shoulder and jaw—he survived, but the injuries were thought to contribute to his death by stroke 6 years later.

Fanny was shot dead five days after the attempt at age 28, and within a few hours the Red Terror—a four-year program of mass arrest and execution of counterrevolutionary enemies of the state—had begun.
 

 
Really creative stuff here. UK designer and video artist Chris Lince has put together a fantastic video for his fellow Brits in the group Pig With the Face of a Boy, which describes itself as “the world’s best neo-post-post music hall anti-folk band.”

The song, “A Complete History Of The Soviet Union Through The Eyes Of A Humble Worker, Arranged To The Melody Of Tetris” (that melody is actually the 19th-century Russian folk song “Korbeiniki”) is clever enough, packing a 70-year history into seven minutes. But the metaphor of the famously addictive video game truly comes alive in Lince’s atmospheric vid. He captures the grime, the grit, and the blocks beautifully. I’m not a gigantic fan of satirical musical comedy, but I think this is executed really well.
 

Cake Wrecks recently held a “dead Lenin cake caption contest.”  I say, “Cake eaters of the world unite!”

Thanks Paige!