Germans go bananas over sheep slaying

There are black eyes and cut lips. There are scores of outraged witnesses. There is a crime scene, stained by a pool of blood. And there is a decapitated corpse. A cut-and-dried case, you might think?

Nothing is that easy in the world of performance art. The sacrifice of a sheep at an art fair in Moscow and the ensuing fight pitted ethics and freedom of expression in a squabble which rivals that over Damien Hirst's notorious cows. It happened at the fair's opening at Moscow's Central House of Artists. The moment they saw performance artists from Kazakhstan bringing in a sheep, a group of German artists became convinced that it was doomed to die. They pleaded for its life. They organised a petition.

One of their number - Simon Stockhausen, son of the composer - played the saxophone to the animal, to calm it down. All in vain. Watched by dozens of horrified guests, the Kazakhs slaughtered the sheep, smeared its entrails over their bodies, and drank the blood from sacrificial cups. It was, one told the Moscow Times, a painless traditional ritual - or legitimate performance art.

The Germans, a group called Banane, disagreed. They specialise in the less bloodthirsty "art" of spraying bananas on world monuments, and have already left their mark on the Kremlin gates. After hearing shrieks from the guests, they stormed the Kazakhs and launched into a five-minute fight in which the exhibit - an abstract affair involving blood, milk and blue water (the colours of the Russian flag) - was wrecked. The Kazakhs have since been banned from the exhibition. But the arguments go on. The Germans are still furious, saying the Kazakhs achieved nothing more meaningful that cruelty. But, worse, they were also passe, as sacrificial art first began in the Sixties. "This kind of sacrificial art is cliched now," said Thomas Baum-Gartel. But the Kazakhs have their defenders, including one of Moscow's top gallery owners, Marat Gelman, host of several Kazakh chicken slayings, who accused the Germans of "shocking snobbery" and ignoring national traditions.