All Very Moving

The term outsider art could have been invented for Eduard Bersudsky. In 1958, as a bored Jewish student in Leningrad, his flippant offer to do his work placement "as far away as possible" earned him a lesson on how far that could be in the Soviet Union: a coal mine in Russia's Arctic north and an army call-up. A stammerer since childhood, Bersudsky was bullied by his colleagues, and he finally stopped speaking entirely.

At the Sharmanka gallery in Glasgow, Scotland, Bersudsky now exhibits 3-D expressions of his inner torments and the life he led as an artistic outcast after his return to Leningrad in 1961. He began carving wood and tinkering with junk and in 1967 produced his first kinetic sculpture of a barrel-organ grinder. "When he saw how it moved, he could never stop making them again," says Tatyana Jakovskaya, Bersudsky's wife, who met the artist in 1988 when he was still living in Leningrad, in a single room crammed with his sad, mad and satirical moving sculptures. Among them is the 3-m-tall Tower of Babel (1989), slung with flywheels that bring to life scores of tiny wooden figures that frantically turn handles, ring bells or pull each other's strings. From a high pulpit, a tiny Vladimir Lenin urges them on; below, a uniformed Joseph Stalin wields a bloody ax.

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Jakovskaya, a theater director, organized his mechanical marvels into a performance called Sharmanka (barrel organ), bathing the works in light, shadow and music, and handing out opera glasses. In the early '90s, artists from Scotland helped Bersudsky, who now speaks again but would rather not, to show Sharmanka abroad and eventually to settle in Glasgow.

Bad memories inform the sculptures he's made ever since—like Titanic (1994), a flapping ship of fools commemorating a friend and former political prisoner who died in Russia in 1994 for want of a blood transfusion—but they have a forward motion to them now, and breathe with the fresh air of life outside the Iron Curtain. tel: (44-141) 552 7080; www.sharmanka.com