Magnetic Album «Singing & Crying,» 1989

In the late 1980s, the future artist Shaburov began visiting the basement of the peculiar Sverdlovsk figure, B. U. Kashkin.

During the day, B. U. Kashkin (real name: Evgeny Malakhin) worked as an engineer, but in his free time:

he developed negatives;

he printed giant abstract photos from them;

he carved abstract, icon-like reliefs;

like Jackson Pollock, he splattered paint onto canvases;

he composed poems and compiled them into self-published books,

from which he created the epic «Kashkin’s Education System Equipped with Corresponding Stereotypical Drawings (abbr. KOS USSR).»

After the first informal exhibitions, where people were asked to read his poems, a kind of ensemble formed around B. U. Kashkin. His members would spend the entire week drawing pictures inspired by B. U. Kashkin’s poems on small boards, and on weekends, they would give them away to random listeners during street performances in the square near the TsUM department store.

It is difficult to describe them. B. U. Kashkin declared that art is not a commodity, but a shift in the perception of the world within the mind of the person responding to that art. The format of the performances was also unique—not songs, but an immersion for everyone who wanted to participate.

The ensemble was named the «Picture People Society, ” but it never had a permanent membership. They were invited to all the rock festivals held in the USSR (though on one side of the Ural Mountains), and many of the contemporary rock musicians participated in it.

Shaburov took charge of the „Picture People“ tours and the popularization of B. U. Kashkin. He took his canonical portrait, which was distributed to all newspapers and magazines, and wrote articles about him.

And once, he borrowed a tape recorder from an acquaintance, the artist Pavlov. He brought it down to B. U. Kashkin’s basement and recorded—the first and only—cassette album of his ritualistic gatherings.

Shaburov had never done this before; the musicians couldn’t play, and the singers couldn’t stop, so it turned out how it turned out—please excuse it!