Andrey Bartenev

The Russian avant-garde artist hits London this week. But what, exactly, is he trying to say?

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Before the question of who is Andrey Bartenev, the more immediate one must be, what is Andrey Bartenev? I refer you to the YouTube clip (www.youtube.com/ watch?v=6DrPFMdCjkw) of his recent performance at a benefit by that titan of the avant garde, Robert Wilson. This consisted of an "animal competition", the animals being strangely costumed creatures like escapees from Malevich's Victory over the Sun. The strangest - a giraffe-like figure with very high platforms and three balls on its head - is Bartenev himself, emceeing the show he has choreographed and designed.

A performance artist, then? Well, yes and no. Rewind six months to the Venice Biennale and you would have seen quite a different Bartenev - an installation artist who had visitors queueing around the Giardini for his "glass discotheque", Disco-nnexion, in the Russian pavilion. A decade ago, Bartenev described his work as "happy art", but Disco-nnexion's sea of little glass spheres, each containing a heart and the flickering words "connection lost", didn't feel happy. It made you think of a society whose idea of connectedness has come to consist of clubbing and internet chatrooms.

I put this to Bartenev, 38, by phone to New York. "Exactly," he says. "Before, I always tried to make poetic art, but people didn't understand it. So then I thought discodiscodiscoooo! and suddenly they said, 'Hey, we get this'. It's an easy connection." But isn't the idea of an autonomous loneliness-machine a little, well, apocalyptic? "Yes," Bartenev says. "But it's where we are as a society now. Maybe it's good, no?" Maybe.

Disco-nnexion will be at Riflemaker, 79 Beak Street, London W1 (020 7439 0000), from tomorrow until 23 February

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