Russia –​ Art Resistance and the Conservative-​Authoritarian Zeitgeist

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Russia – Art Resistance and the Conservative-Authoritarian Zeitgeist

This book explores how artistic strategies of resistance have survived under the conservative-authoritarian regime which has been in place in Russia since 2012. It discusses the conditions under which artists work as aesthetics change and the state attempts to define what constitutes good taste. It examines the approaches artists are adopting to resist state oppression and to question the present system and attitudes to art. The book addresses a wide range of issues related to these themes, considers the work of individual artists and includes some discussion of contemporary theatre as well as the visual arts.

Lena Jonson is Associate Professor and a Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.

Andrei Erofeev is a widely published art historian, curator, and former head of the contemporary art section of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia. ii

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71 EU-Russia Relations, 1999–2015 From Courtship to Confrontation Anna-Sophie Maass

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78 Russia – Art Resistance and the Conservative-Authoritarian Zeitgeist Edited by Lena Jonson and Andrei Erofeev iii

Russia – Art Resistance and the Conservative-Authoritarian Zeitgeist

Edited by Lena Jonson and Andrei Erofeev iv

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Lena Jonson and Andrei Erofeev; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Lena Jonson and Andrei Erofeev to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-73301-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-18685-6 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Out of House Publishing v

Contents

List of illustrations vii Notes on contributors x Preface xiii

1 Introduction 1 LENA JONSON

PART I The conservative zeitgeist and Russian cultural policy 25 2 The ‘Russian World’: genetically modified conservatism, or why ‘Russian culture’ matters 27 ILYA KALININ

3 The new conservative cultural policy and visual art 48 LENA JONSON

4 Neo-traditionalist fits with neo-liberal shifts in Russian cultural policy 65 ALEXANDER BIKBOV

5 Daughterland: contemporary Russian messianism and neo-conservative visuality 84 MARIA ENGSTRÖM

6 Cultural policy and conservatism in Hungary: a parallel development 103 ESZTER BABARCZY

PART II The state of affairs: voices from the Russian art scene 125 7 Culture as the enemy: contemporary Russian art under the authoritarian regime 127 ANDREI EROFEEV vi

vi Contents

8 Voices from the art scene: interviews with Russian artists 134 ANDREI EROFEEV AND IRINA KOCHERGINA

PART III Artistic counterstrategies 163

9 Dissensus and ‘shimmering’: tergiversation as politics 165 DANIIL LEIDERMAN

10 Humour as a bulletproof vest: artists embracing an ironic zeitgeist 182 HELENA GOSCILO

11 Demontage of attractions 209 STANISLAV SHURIPA AND ANNA TITOVA

12 Wartime intimacy: Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and the Chto Delat school for engaged art 227 JONATHAN BROOKS PLATT

13 A dilemma for the contemporary artist: the ‘revolutionary pessimism’ of Roman Osminkin 247 MARK LIPOVETSKY

14 Radical art actionism 264 ANDREI EROFEEV

15 Petr Pavlenskii and his actions 271 PER-ARNE BODIN

16 A dialogue about art 279 PETR PAVLENSKII AND PAVEL YASMAN

PART IV Theatre: a parallel development 293

17 Theatre in a period of archaization 295 PAVEL RUDNEV

18 Nonconformist theatre in Russia: past and present 304 KRISTINA MATVIENKO

Index 318 vii

Illustrations

2.1 Monument to Vladimir the Great 33 2.2 The capital city of the Republic of Kalmykiya, Elista. Lenin Square 35 5.1 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, Patria Filia, 2008 90 5.2 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, Patria Philia, 2004 91 5.3 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, Sevastopol Is a Russian City, 2008 93 5.4 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt and Andrei Iryschkov, Read My Lips, 2014 94 5.5 Doping-Pong, The Birth of a Legend, 2013 95 5.6 Doping-Pong, Velikaya (Great Russia), 2015 96 5.7 Dasha Volosevich, still from Cuckoo, 2015 98 5.8 Anonymous, Natalya Poklonskaya as Nyash-Katechon, 2014 98 6.1 The National Theatre with a detail of a free-standing gate by Miklós Melocco, 2002 107 6.2 Monument to the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 revolution by the artist group i-ypszilon, commissioned by the socialist government, 2006 110 6.3 Memorial of the 1956 revolution by Róbert Csíkszentmihályi, 2006 111 6.4 The reconstructed monument to István Tisza, 2014 116 6.5 The building of the House of Terror 117 6.6 The monument for the victims of the German occupation (2014) with protest signs against the monument in the foreground, Szabadság tér, Budapest 118 6.7 Kriszta Nagy, Viktor Orbán, 2014. From her exhibition ‘You Can Hire Me to Paint Your Portrait’, Godot Gallery, 2014 121 8.1 Andrei Kuzkin, Circle-wise, 2008 135 8.2 Andrei Kuzkin, Innovation 2014, 2014 135 8.3 Irina Korina, Patternalism, 2015 137 8.4 Roman Mokrov, To Set Off (from the video Pustitsya v put), 2013 139 8.5 Anatolii Osmolovskii, Have You Done This? No, You Did! (Eto vy sdelali? Net, eto vy sdelali!), 2014 143 viii

viii List of illustrations 8.6 Oleg Kulik (together with Mila Bredikhina), I Bite America and America Bites Me, 1997 145 8.7 Viktoriya Lomasko, Life Everywhere (Vsyudu zhizn), 2015 148 8.8 Vikentii Nilin, Riding the Police (from the Selfie Machine series), 2014 150 8.9 Pussy Riot, Chaika, 2016 152 8.10 Petr Pavlenskii, Carcass (Tusha), 2013 153 8.11 Petr Pavlenskii, Fixation (Fiksatsiya), 2013 154 8.12 Petr Pavlenskii, Freedom (Svoboda), 2014 155 8.13 Petr Pavlenskii, Threat (Ugroza), 2016 155 8.14 Darya Serenko, Silent Picket (Tikhii piket), 2016 158 9.1 Tatyana Antoshina, Olympus 172 9.2 Artem Loskutov, Monstratsiya (Monstration for Mocracy), 2015 178 10.1 Blue Noses, The New Holy Fools (Novye yurodivye), 1999 185 10.2 Blue Noses, Kitchen Suprematism (Kukhonnyi Suprematizm), 2005 186 10.3 Blue Noses, Sex-suprematism, 2005 186 10.4 Blue Noses, Kissing Cops: The Era of Mercy (Tseluyushchiesya militsionery: era miloserdiya), 2005 187 10.5 Blue Noses, Chechen Marilyn (Chechenskaya Merilin), 2005 188 10.6 Blue Noses, Kids from Our Block (Rebyata s nashego Dvora), 2004 189 10.7 Blue Noses, Video Gag, 2007 190 10.8 Blue Noses, The Motherland Knows: An ‘Artist’ Can Offend Anyone (Rodina znaet), 2000s 192 10.9 Sergei Elkin, ‘I Feel Like a Beast of Burden’ 195 10.10 Sergei Elkin, Two powers in collusion, Putin and the Orthodox Church 196 10.11 Sergei Elkin, Putin, Obama, and the Fly 198 10.12 Sergei Elkin, Putin and Baby-Medvedev 199 10.13 Sergei Elkin, Medvedev – the Cinderella 200 10.14 Sergei Elkin, Tajikistan Must Be Destroyed 201 10.15 Sergei Elkin, The Bandar-logs in Russian Eden 202 10.16 Sergei Elkin. Putin and Ukraine 203 11.1 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova, from the project Apocalyptological Congress (Entrance Hall – Spectral Labyrinth), Collage, 2015 210 11.2 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova, from the project Apocalyptological Congress (Congress Hall Chairs Signalling), Collage, 2015 216 12.1 Chto Delat, still from The Excluded 233 12.2 Chto Delat, still from Partisan Songspiel, A Belgrade Story, 2009 234 ix

List of illustrations ix 12.3 Chto Delat School of Engaged Art, Prop from Becoming Zoya 240 12.4 Chto Delat School of Engaged Art, still from Looking for Zoya, I 241 12.5 Chto Delat School of Engaged Art, still from Looking for Zoya, II 242

Table

4.1 Two parallel histories on Russia, 2000–15 72 x

Notes on contributors

Eszter Babarczy is Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, Moholy-Nagy University of Art, Budapest. Since training as a cultural historian and a philosopher in Budapest and New York, she has worked as an academic and journalist/editor. Publications include hundreds of essays and diverse political commentary in the Hungarian- and English-language media over the past thirty years. Alexander Bikbov is Professor and Deputy Head of the Centre for Contemporary Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Philosophy Faculty, Moscow State University. He is also Associate Scholar at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs in Paris, and editor of the interdisciplinary Russian journal, Logos. His most recent book is Grammar of Order: A Historical Sociology of the Concepts That Change Our Reality (in Russian, 2014). Per-Arne Bodin is Professor Emeritus of Slavic languages and literatures at Stockholm University. Among his latest publications are Language, Canonization and Holy Foolishness. Studies in Postsoviet Russian Culture and the Orthodox Tradition (Stockholm Slavic Studies, 38, 2009) and Eternity and Time: Studies in Russian Literature and the Orthodox Tradition (Stockholm University, 2007). Maria Engström is Associate Professor at Dalarna University. Among her publications are numerous articles and essays on topics related to contemporary Russian literature and culture, the Orthodox Church and Russian politics, the post-Soviet right-wing intellectual environment, post-Soviet conservatism in art and politics, Russian utopianism and Soviet science fiction, the Russian language and the new media. Andrei Erofeev is an art historian, curator and former head of the contemporary art section at the Tretyakov Gallery (2002–8). Erofeev regularly contributes articles to Russian art magazines and journals. He curated several of the internationally best-known Russian art exhibitions in Russia and abroad, such as In Complete Disorder, The Kandinsky Award, 2007– 2012 (Barcelona, 2012); Sots Art: Political Art in Russia (Moscow, 2007); Russian Pop Art (Moscow, 2005) and Forbidden Art (Moscow, 2007). xi

Notes on contributors xi During his twenty years at Russian museums Erofeev created the first state collection of Russian contemporary art for a future national contemporary art museum. Helena Goscilo is Professor at the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures, Ohio State University. Among her areas of expertise are Russian culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, visual culture (art, graphics, film), film adaption, gender, Russian folklore, the Russian novel and Bakhtin. Her most recent books include Celebrity and Glamour in Putin’s Russia: Shocking Chic (2012); Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon (2013); and Fade from Red: The Cold War Ex-enemy in Russian and American Film, 1990–2005 (2014) and Russian Aviation, Space Flight, and Visual Culture (2016). Lena Jonson is Associate Professor of Political Science; Senior Associate Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI); former Head of the Russia Research Programme at UI (until 2015) and a former Cultural Counsellor at the Swedish Embassy in Moscow (2005–9). Her most recent book is Art and Protest in Putin’s Russia (2015). Ilya Kalinin is Associate Professor at the Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St Petersburg State University, and at the National Research University ‘Higher School of Economics’. He is also an editor-in-chief of the journal Neprikosnovennyi zapas that focuses on debates on politics and culture (Moscow). He is currently a visiting scholar at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin) and visiting professor at Freie Universitaet, Berlin. Irina Kochergina is an art historian who lives in Moscow. Daniil Leiderman teaches art history at the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University. In 2016, Daniil defended a Ph.D. dissertation entitled ‘Moscow Conceptualism and “Shimmering”: Authority, Anarchism, and Space’ at the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In 2012, Daniil conducted and recorded a series of interviews with artists who participated in Moscow Conceptualism and is now in the process of translating and transcribing these conversations. In 2011, Daniil helped to research and write for Russian Modern, an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Mark Lipovetsky is Professor of Russian studies at the University of Colorado- Boulder. Among his most recent publications are Performing Violence: Literary and Theatrical Experiments of New Russian Drama (2009, with Birgit Beumers; Russian version, 2012) and Charms of Cynical Reason: The Transformations of the Trickster Trope in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (2011). He also authors such books as Paralogies: Transformation of (Post)modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s–2000s (2008); Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos (1999) and Modern xii

xii Notes on contributors Russian Literature: 1950s–1990s (co-authored with Naum Leiderman, 2001). Kristina Matvienko is an art historian, theatre critic and former curator of the Golden Mask Theatre Festival, its special programme Maska+, the Russian New Drama Festival and Russian Case in Moscow. She is currently working at the Elektroteatr Stanislavskii in Moscow as a curator for the School of the Contemporary Audience. Petr Pavlenskii is a Russian art-actionist. He has studied at the St Petersburg Art and Industry Academy (in the section of monumental painting) and at the Pro Arte Foundation for Culture and Art in St Petersburg. In 2012 he founded together with Oksana Shalygina an independent online newspaper dedicated to contemporary art in political contexts. The art actions for which he became famous started in 2012. In 2016 he was nominated to the Innovatsiya art premium for contemporary art, In 2017 he left Russia with his family after threats of legal trial. Jonathan Brooks Platt is Assistant Professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Pittsburgh. He specializes in Russian and Soviet literature, art and culture. His most recent publications include the monograph Greetings, Pushkin! Stalinist Cultural Politics and the Russian National Bard (2016) and the article ‘Snow White and the Enchanted Palace: A Reading of Lenin’s Architectural Cult’ in Representations (2015). Pavel Rudnev is a theatre critic, Professor of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts, and Special Projects Assistant at the Moscow Art Theatre and its school studio. Stanislav Shuripa is an artist, curator and writer on contemporary art and culture as well as a member of the editorial board of the Moscow art magazine, Khudozhestvennii zhurnal. Since 2007 he has been a lecturer at the Institute of Problems of Contemporary Art, Moscow. He is a founding member of the Agency of Singular Investigations. Anna Titova is an artist based in Moscow. In 2014, Titova co-founded the Agency of Singular Investigations, an independent platform for critical engagement with the defining issues around art and creative discourse. Pavel Yasman, was the leader of the preliminary investigation of Petr Pavlenskii with whom Pavlenskii, when interrogated, carried out the conversation on art and politics published in Chapter 16. Yasman thereby became part of Pavlenskii’s art action. Yasman came to the opinion that Pavlenskii’s actions were not against Russian law. He later quit the Investigation Committee (Sledstvennyi komitet) and became a defence lawyer. newgenprepdfxiii

Preface

In raising questions about art and politics, this book attempts to understand ongoing political processes in Russia. The local context always creates a specific local shape, but Russia’s political development since 2012 is not unique. It falls within a conservative-authoritarian trend that today is sweeping many countries across the world. This means that in spite of the book’s focus on Russia, its discussion of the consequences for the arts, and the questions it raises of resistance from within the art sphere under these specific political conditions, should have relevance far beyond Russia’s geographical borders. While attempting to grasp ongoing processes, the authors have arrived at differing opinions. No author can therefore be held responsible for the words of the other authors in this book. The book is interdisciplinary: its authors include artists, art historians, theatre critics, historians, linguists, sociologists and political scientists from Russia, Europe and the United States. Many people have contributed to this volume in various ways. First of all we need to mention the artists who shared with us their thoughts and allowed us to use photos of their artworks. Irina Kochergina should be mentioned as she edited the interviews in Chapter 8 and arranged for the illustrations. Several people have been involved in translating Russian texts into English. We are grateful to them but we especially thank Andrew Mash, who carried out the final editing of the English language. The present volume goes back to an international conference in Stockholm in November 2015 under the title ‘Russian Culture under the Conservative- Authoritarian Regime. Analysis from Within’. The conference was jointly organized by the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Stockholm University and the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities. The academy, together with the Swedish Research Council and the Lars Hierta Memorial Foundation, each gave a grant that made the conference and the preparation of the final book manuscript possible. Not all presentations at the conference are included in the present volume, and some of the contributors did not attend the conference. Still, the discussions at the conference remain a source of inspiration for most of the articles. We therefore want to thank all those who contributed to the interesting and stimulating discussions. xiv 1

1 Introduction

Lena Jonson

What happens to culture and the arts when domestic policy makes a drastic turn and the social atmosphere becomes highly ideologized? How do artists react when the margins for the freedom of political debate and cultural expression become narrower and the pressure increases on culture and the arts to conform? What strategies of resistance might be adopted in art? These questions are discussed below using the case of Russia’s development since May 2012, when Vladimir Putin returned as president bringing with him a political and ideological agenda of conservatism from an authoritarian tradition – an agenda that became even more pronounced in 2014 after the Russian annexation of Crimea. Concerns about what will happen to culture and the arts in this new situation are reflected on in the interviews with Russian contemporary artists in the present book. The artists differ with each other in their reflections and views but share concerns about what happens when new collective myths get a grip and throw society back into the past. What happens to the critical eye of art when censorship and repression return? What happens when people are divided into ‘friends’ and ‘enemies’ in society? How can art tackle a situation in which public life feels like a façade, fake and inauthentic? And how should radical artists react when the authorities copy their methods – playing with shock, provocation, scandal and aggression staged in theatrically performed actions – as they did in the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine? The artists reflect on how to devise survival strategies and develop artistic strategies under the new political conditions, where an ideological hegemony covers society like a wet blanket. The purpose of this book is to discuss some of the artistic strategies of resistance that have been adopted under the conditions of the new official paradigm of neo-conservative authoritarian thought in Russia since 2012. Counterstrategies of the most diverse kind are discussed – from subtle criticism to direct and open dispute. Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus, in the sense of a questioning of the hegemonic consensus, will be a helpful guide. In order to discuss artistic strategies of resistance, we need first to present the political context in which they appear and exist. Russia is rapidly changing as 2

2 Lena Jonson the new official ideology penetrates society. In the interviews for this book, the artists call this an imitation of ideology rather than a genuine one. Whichever is the case, policy is now dressed in the clothes of new political-ideological terms and concepts that were not prevalent in the official Russian vocabulary in the first ten years of Putin’s rule. Developments in Russia have been so rapid that most people today find it difficult to recognize and understand what is going on and even harder to understand where it will all end. The new official Russian conservative-authoritarian paradigm and its pen- etration of society have parallels in several European countries, although the specific context and underlying factors may vary between countries. These developments are the result of both policy from above and processes from below. In Russia it has taken the form of a general backlash and a reactionary response to the break-up of the Soviet Union, the failed reforms of the 1990s and the cynicism that penetrated social life. It might be assumed that the new conservative policy and the new zeitgeist that followed on from the backlash would affect the conditions under which artists work. One important development to be expected would be efforts by the state to twist the perspectives and perceptions of people – to ‘capture the interpretation’ – in order to make it correspond with the new, conservative official world view. This volume therefore starts with the question of how the state tried to take control of the ‘sensory landscape’ – that is, the way in which people perceive and interpret the current order of things – in order to make culture and the arts into instruments for securing, spreading and consolidating the conservative world view. The major issue discussed in this volume, however, is the artistic strategies adopted in response to the current policy and the dominant loyal zeitgeist. What counterstrategies or strategies of resistance exist in the arts to the official paradigm and its perceptions and conceptions? This volume has no ambition to cover all possible artistic counterstrategies. The purpose instead is to stimulate – through a selection of strategies of resistance – a discussion about the relationship between art and politics, and about art resistance under conditions of a strongly ideological regime, in this case a conservative- authoritarian one. The focus is on contemporary visual art, but chapters on theatre are included to illustrate that parallel processes are also taking place in other fields. In the midst of the second decade of the twenty-first century, it even seemed as if theatre had once again become the forerunner with regard to providing intellectual resistance and that theatre therefore became a major target of political criticism by the regime and its conservative supporters. A chapter on events in Hungary is included to show that the political winds blowing in Russia have their equivalents in other countries. There are also similar trends in Europe as nationalist and conservative-authoritarian parties strengthen their influence. Wherever these parties have come to power, it has had consequences for the cultural scene. Nationalist-conservative parties and 3

Introduction 3 regimes usually consider a Kulturkampf to be at the core of their conflict with liberal-oriented opponents; and culture becomes a key arena for a political battle of values.

The conservative-authoritarian policy turn and the dominant zeitgeist How to characterize the new political conditions in which art has operated since 2012? The term ‘conservative-authoritarian’ is used here to characterize the new paradigm that dominates Russian policy. What does it mean in the Russian context? How did this conservative turn come about? What have been the consequences for cultural life? Conflicts over art exhibitions and theatre productions in Russia in the 2000s reflected the fact that a conservative and Orthodox religious paradigm was gradually penetrating the authorities’ view of what art is and what art should be permitted to be exhibited in the public sphere. Only in May 2012, however, was this paradigm made the foundation of official policy. The Russian response to the Maidan revolution in Kiev, its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula in the spring of 2014, was to a large extent the consequence of Putin’s new political agenda. The annexation of Crimea and the Russian military involvement in the war in eastern Ukraine contributed in turn to a drastic change in the whole atmosphere of Russian society into a patriotic euphoria and to what Russian sociologists call ‘a conservative reconsolida- tion around power’ in public opinion (Gudkov 2014). Although this support for the regime can be described as a kind of compensatory pride against a background of the general disillusion felt by ordinary people, it was first and foremost the result of a policy choice at the top and deliberate propaganda to manipulate public opinion. This brings us to the question of the general atmosphere in the society in which this policy was formulated and implemented. We call this atmosphere the zeitgeist and define it as the ‘spirit of the time’ (dieGeistige Situation der Zeit), following Karl Jaspers’ term from his 1931 study, which was translated into English in 1933 as Man in the Modern Age (Jaspers 2010). Speaking in terms of the ‘mental situation of the epoch’, Jaspers understands the zeitgeist as tendencies with regard to ideas about the nature of man and what future mankind is moving towards that influence the way in which the present, past and future are regarded. On the one hand, the zeitgeist can be regarded as the product of ideas and values that come from below, and this support from below is a necessary pre- condition for any state policy to be successfully implemented. On the other hand, the zeitgeist may be the product of a state that is trying to build up and consolidate a new hegemonic consensus. To create loyalty to the regime, the regime needs the active assistance of key institutions such as the media, schools and universities, the church, sport and leisure organizations and, of course, cultural institutions. 4

4 Lena Jonson The conservative turn in Russia found fertile soil in the gap that had emerged between the democratic rhetoric maintained in official discourse in the 1990s and early 2000s and a reality in which reform – twisted and distorted and then interrupted at an early stage – did not bring the expected results. After the Soviet system broke down, the democratic and liberal vision of government at first created euphoria and expectations of a better future. When the government could not deliver, disillusion and despair spread among the population. Ralf Dahrendorf had warned in the early 1990s that the transition from communist societies in Eastern Europe would be a long and thorny path (Dahrendorf 1990). In Russia, brutal reality struck citizens with a feeling that ‘nothing is solid anymore’, and they soon became aware of the gap between official declarations and real life. Cynicism rapidly spread. It is interesting to compare the situation in Russia with the analysis of German society by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. His book Critique of Cynical Reason is based on a study of the Weimar Republic but with reference also to West German society in the 1970s and early 1980s (Sloterdijk 1987). Without in any sense comparing Russian society to German society in a completely different historical epoch, his conclusions are still valuable for gaining a general understanding of what can cause a radical-conservative turn. He argues that a mixture of disillusionment and despair that stemmed from a feeling of emptiness and arbitrary fear gave rise to various reactions in Germany in the late 1910s and 1920s. One result of the awareness of the gap between the official liberal rhetoric at the top and the actual state of things was widespread cynicism. He describes cynicism as ‘one of the categories in which modern unhappy consciousness looks itself in the eye’ (Sloterdijk 1987: 140). Nonetheless, he makes a distinction between a reflective cynicism, which he also calls ‘enlightened false cynicism’, in the sense of being conscious of the real situation but siding with power, the master, the stronger; and kynicism, which instead follows the tradition of an ironic and disrespectful gaze on those in power, from the perspective of the grassroots. We return to this latter perspective below. In a society where ‘rage at having been deceived’1 spread as it did in the Weimar Republic, anti-democratic thinking became ‘only the tip of the ice- berg of social scepticism and private reservations about politics’, and the cynical disposition of society soon developed into manifest aggression (Sloterdijk 1987: 500). In the fluid and insecure state of society, the door was opened to the simplifications offered by political forces of the extreme – in this case the extreme right – to exploit popular frustration. Describing the Weimar Republic, Sloterdijk writes that fraud and expectations of being defrauded became endemic. It was felt as if the untenable and chaotic could emerge from behind any solid illusion. In this state of mind, he writes,

A revolution took place in those deep regions of collective feelings toward life in which the ontology of everyday life was laid out: a dull feeling of the instability of things penetrated into souls, a feeling of lack of 5

Introduction 5 substance, of relativity, of accelerated change, and of involuntary floating from transition to transition. (Sloterdijk 1987: 483)

This feeling of having been deceived resulted in a readiness to turn away from this state of the world, and, he writes, hate was remoulded into acceptance of those politicians who promised the ‘greatest simplifications and the most energetic return to a “substantial” and reliable state of affairs’ (Sloterdijk 1987). Zygmunt Bauman produces a similar analysis of contemporary modern European societies. The feeling of Unsicherheit created from the fluid features of society, according to Bauman, puts people in a state of mind where they are more ready to listen to the alluring tones of authoritarian voices that offer remoulded, partly illusory stability and security (Bauman 1999: 5). To the state of Unsicherheit and cynicism in Russia is added the neo-liberal conditions of a ruthless state capitalism about which many in the Russian intellectual debate now talk. The cynical state of society paved the way for politicians and a politics that propagate a return to ‘absolute’ values of the nation, state, church and family. However, the understanding of these values is captured by a conservative- authoritarian interpretation. In Russia, Putin received public support in 2012 for such an interpretation of the values of patriotism, religious belief and tradition. However, this policy response turned out to be as cynical as the cynicism dominating society. ‘My Moscow peers’, writes Peter Pomerantsev of his experiences of Moscow at the end of the first decade of the 2000s, ‘are filled with a sense that they are both cynical and enlightened’ (2015: 86). It is characteristic of the zeitgeist in a cynical society that cynical egos most often adopt the perspective of the strong, of the person in power, and obey the rules of the game without resistance. Support for the Putin regime seems to a large extent to depend on this kind of cynical consideration. Consequently, people became easy victims of the grand visionary illusions of the regime. Opinion research highlighted a widespread lack of trust in society. Young people were fully aware of the corruption, scandals and theft within the state bureaucracy but believed that the only way to secure their own personal wealth was to become part of the power system. A position in the state system was easily the most coveted. According to Lev Gudkov, the head of the Moscow Levada Centre for opinion research,

Therefore success or an orientation towards well-being, to a high standard of living is followed by cynicism: to achieve well-being at any cost, regardless of the means, and this leads of course not only to moralism but also to a decomposition of society. (Tsvetkova 2016)

The policy response at the top to the cynicism in society is cynical in itself. To those at the top, the Great Inquisitor in Dostoevskii’s The Brothers 6

6 Lena Jonson Karamazov is a role model, according to Sloterdijk. The Great Inquisitor links: ‘a rigorous cynicism of means with an equally rigid moralism of ends’ (Sloterdijk 1987: 192). You use whatever means necessary to achieve the ‘good’ ends. ‘Good and moral ends’ are defined by the master, and, as he pursues his interests, what is good and what is evil may even change place. For the sake of good, any means can be used. Pomerantsev’s book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible presents the Western audience with the quintessence of a policy that is covered with moralist arguments but unethical in its results. For many years Vladislav Surkov, first deputy head of the presidential administration and close to Putin, stood out as the major representative of the cynicism of the Putin regime. Thus, authoritarian-conservatism is to a large extent a Janus face of cynicism dressed in moralism and ‘absolute’ values. This creates a highly specific situation. We use the term ‘conservatism’, which is the term that has been used officially by the Putin regime to characterize policy since 2012 (Nezavisimaya gazeta 2013). It is, however, difficult to pinpoint the characteristics of this Russian conservatism. Conservatism is a wide concept, and the roots of conservative thought are diverse. Modern social-liberal conservatism, which has dominated Western Europe for most of the post-Second World War period, is different from the more conservative Burkean conservatism, and both of these are far away from the radical conservatism of Europe in the interwar period. So what kind of conservatism colours Russian conservatism? While falling back on the Russian tradition of authoritarianism and etatism of both tsarist and Soviet times, which both built on conservative values – albeit on very different political pretexts – on how people should live their daily lives, new inspiration and impulses have been added.2 Russian Orthodoxy has again become a strong component of Russian conservatism. Nonetheless, there are similarities with the conservative-authoritarian tradition in Europe that developed in the late nineteenth century and peaked during the twentieth century, and was more or less buried after the Second World War but is now returning in a somewhat modified form.3 It is therefore not surprising to find components reminiscent of Italian fascism and German Nazism, contemporary ‘new right’ movements in Europe, and nationalist-conservative regimes in Europe, such as the one in Hungary in the 2010s, present in Russian policy. All these movements can be regarded as radical-conservative responses to the challenges to society caused by the consequences of the breakdown of political systems, drastic reform efforts or defeat in war. The hegemonic nodal points of the current Russian conservative consensus therefore correspond to the beliefs of the European conservative- authoritarian tradition: belief in the idea of the nation and the people as a unified and corporate entity, the country’s ‘unique’ national path, the strong leader embodying the state and a unified people, and the interpretation of ‘state sovereignty’ as opposed to international legislation and universal rights.4 To this ideational heritage is also added the image of the persistent enemy – external and internal – working to undermine the country. Here the concepts 7

Introduction 7 of the ‘fifth column’ and the ‘national traitor’ are central. What started during Putin’s early years as a search for a positively formulated official identity of ‘we, the Russians’, became in the 2010s defining oneself negatively by defining the enemy. The Putin regime, writes Lev Gudkov, relies almost exclusively on the mechanism of a ‘negative identity’ for the purpose of discrediting any alternative social order proposed by the opposition. This alternative order, represented by the symbols and values of democracy, liberalism and the rule of law, is perceived by the regime as embodied by the West. According to Gudkov, that is why in the eyes of the regime the ‘organizations of civil society and independent media are labelled foreign “agents”, “enemies of the people”, “undermining elements”, vehicles of alien interests and anti-Russian forces’ (Gudkov 2016). The cynicism of the new conservative ideology must also be understood in the context of Russia’s social-economic condition, where a capitalist hunger for profit has become the driving force in society while no counterforces exist in the form of civil society organizations or a strong public sphere. It is extremely difficult to oppose or respond to the new conservative policy, especially since in an authoritarian society where no opposition is allowed the cynicism of the master can easily get a grip on society. There is nobody in a position to be outraged by the cynicisms of hegemonic power. Sloterdijk writes that ‘The more a modern society appears to be without alternatives, the more it will allow itself to be cynical. In the end it is ironical about its own legitimation. “Basic values” and excuses merge imperceptibly’ (1987: 112). Nonetheless, various moods can at the same time appear in different layers of society. In spite of the fact that the open critics of the regime constitute a tiny minority, alternative and parallel counterstrategies can emanate from discontented groups among the grass roots as well as those who belong to the political elite. Therefore, if a hegemonic power is to maintain control, all possible counterstrategies have to be eliminated. The existence of parallel moods suggests the existence of a certain space for freedom of the individual to perceive and interpret the state of things. Although the gaze of the individual spectator depends to a large extent on the general consensus and the political, social and cultural contexts of society, his gaze is also a product of his own individual understanding. It therefore becomes important to look for pockets of ‘free spaces’ in the Russian cultural scene, where alternative counterstrategies can evolve – and to look for possible resistance strategies in the arts sector.

Aesthetics and the conservative gaze Lev Gudkov argues that the propaganda of the regime in Russia works to create a ‘systemic key’ (sistemnyi klyuch) for interpreting reality in all its crucial aspects – in business, culture, economics, politics, history and the predicted future. In so doing, he says, official propaganda does not create new images but ‘changes the relation between old and well-known structures of 8

8 Lena Jonson conceptions including the register of switching from one level of reality to another’ (Gudkov 2016). By switching between the level of the ordinary existence of daily life and the level of the extraordinary state of war, deep crisis and mobilization, the regime is capable, he argues, of agitating and activating the most important collective values and symbolic ideas in society, which determine the identity of the whole of society. In this way the propaganda appeals to a ‘general construction of reality’ (Gudkov 2016).5 In a similar way, the Russian art historian Aleksander Evangeli argues that a struggle is going on in Russia to ‘capture the interpretation’ (2015). To a large extent, this struggle takes place through the creation of images. The Russian authorities try to control the production of meaning, and for this purpose they attempt to ensure that culture and history are interpreted ‘correctly’. According to Evangeli,

The rhetoric of spiritual bonds [skrepy] is a rhetoric for appropriating the cultural archive in a specific form, which means conquering the means for producing statements. Non-canonical interpretations and the opening up of new thought are perceived by the authorities as challenges, infringements of their propriety, the offending of feelings or groups. (Evangeli 2015)

A number of laws adopted since the summer of 2012 help the authorities to establish its ‘gaze’ as the standard. The ‘right’ interpretation of history is secured with the help of laws against ‘falsification’ of history, which make any questioning of Soviet policy before, during and after the Second World War risky. Russia’s minister of culture, Vladimir Medinskii, has published books to counter the ‘myths about Russia’ and promote the ‘true’ interpretation (Medinskii 2011). The law on the defence of believers against being offended was revised and strengthened in 2013. It has been interpreted by Orthodox fanatics as an invitation to take the law into their own hands, as for example the Orthodox fanatic Dmitrii Enteo and his group God’s Will did when vandalizing artworks by the late Vadim Sidur at an exhibition at the Manezh in Moscow in August 2015. In their chapter, Stas Shuripa and Anna Titova use the term ‘constructivist conservatism’ to describe the essence of the conservative drive in current Russian policy in the sense of an active production of the image of reality. Antoni Gramsci wrote about the struggle for hegemony over the discourse in a society using the example of Italy during the first decades of the twentieth century. In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci characterizes society and the cultural sphere as a competition for values, ideas and hegemonic leadership (Hoare and Nowell 1971). Hegemony is defined as the organizing principle of a ruling class that connects culture and ideology. Its ideas and beliefs are constantly reproduced in society but challenged by alternative, counter- hegemonic ideas and beliefs. Today, social scientists agree that all regimes do their best to uphold their hegemony of values, but semi-authoritarian and 9

Introduction 9 authoritarian regimes do so in particular through force and the manipulation of opinions. In such societies, any questioning of the current hegemonic discourse immediately takes on political overtones. Since Gramsci, a generation of European philosophers have pursued and developed his idea, that of an ongoing ideational struggle in all societies – democratic as well as autocratic, although the degree to and methods by which this struggle is carried out differ. Following in Gramsci’s footsteps, Jacques Rancière relates politics as well as aesthetics to what he calls the distribution of the sensible that follows from the power order in society. This distribution of the sensible ‘produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made or done’ (Rancière 2006: 85). It ‘simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it [society]’ (Rancière 2006: 12). The established distribution of the sensible he calls ‘consensus’, while everything that questions and challenges it he calls ‘dissensus’. Dissensus is ‘a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given’ (Rancière 2010: 69). When society is identified only by what it is supposed to have in common, the concept of a division of society into parts disappears and so does the idea of the right of dissensus to exist. There is no status or place for the ‘excluded’ in the community, and they are therefore perceived as a ‘radical other’, or they who are separated from society for the mere fact of being alien to it. Rancière calls the officially commanded consensus ‘police’. ‘Policing’ is described as the regimentation of society according to a set of instrumental functions that pretend to represent the totality of society, and therefore establish the limits of the ‘visible and the sayable’ (Rancière 2010: 36–7). Consequently, the ‘political’ is when the existing police or consensus is being challenged. A consensus is not static: it undergoes shifts and changes. In order for the authorities to secure and consolidate a hegemonic gaze among broader groups of the population, it may have to revise or fine-tune the consensus. The assumption of this volume is that the Putin regime since 2012 has actively taken on the propagation of a revised and strongly conservative version of the distribution of the sensible, which in its turn creates an incitement for this process to further develop and the revision to proceed. As noted above, the distribution of the sensible, or the ‘general construction of reality’, to use Gudkov’s phrase, refers to aesthetics as well as to politics. Rancière claims that his definition of aesthetics ‘extends aesthetics beyond the strict realm of art to include the conceptual coordinates and modes of visibility operative in the political domain’ (2006: 82). It can be understood as ‘the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience’ (Rancière 2006: 13). Aesthetics is, he argues, a ‘regime of the functioning of art and a matrix of discourse, a form of identifying the specificity of art and a redistribution of the relations between the forms of sensory experience’ (Rancière 2009a: 14). 10

10 Lena Jonson Thus, Rancière’s definition of aesthetics includes both the way in which art functions and the way in which it is being perceived and the matrix of the discourse related to the relations between various forms of sensory experience. Claire Bishop explains the specifics of Rancière’s reworking of the term ‘aesthetics’ by the fact that it concerns aesthesis, a mode of sensible perception proper to artistic production:

Rather than considering the work of art to be autonomous, he draws attention to the autonomy of our experience in relation to art … this freedom suggests the possibility of politics (understood here as dissensus), because the undecidability of aesthetic experience implies a questioning of how the world is organized, and therefore the possibility of changing or redistributing that same world. (Bishop 2009: 27)6

This definition of aesthetics also raises the question of how the hegemonic regime will actively seek to ensure that its division of the sensible dominates. From this perspective, the way it formulates its cultural policy becomes crucial, and the question arises whether the regime also wants to introduce new aesthetic standards as guidelines. Consensus in art usually emphasizes the harmonious fabric of society and may express nostalgia for when ‘everyone is in their place, their class, taken up with the duty allocated to them, and equipped with the sensory and intellectual equipment appropriate to that place and duty’ (Rancière 2009b: 42). Dissensus in art, on the other hand, takes place through aesthetic rupture. Aesthetic rupture is a ‘process of disassociation’ and brings ambiguity. Dissensus in art takes place as a hidden or indirect dispute over the framework of what is given but does not mean the existence of open conflict. Instead, this art withdraws from ready-made conditions of meaning and refuses to create any alternative frames of discourse for art practice. Yet in order to identify dissensus in art one must take account of the social and political context at that specific time and place. Whether this art can be characterized as dissensus art is in the eyes of the beholder, and no fixed criteria exist regarding the relationship between form and content. Several of the Russian artists interviewed in this volume express dejection and concern that Russian contemporary art today is losing its critical dynamism as a consequence of the new political situation in the country. They claim that serious shifts are taking place as art has become used for the glamorous framing of various commercial or other events and that a trend of harmless, decorative and shallow art is taking over. In this way, contemporary art is losing its critical and reflective qualities while at the same time becoming more visible in society. Traditionally, conservative regimes legitimize their aesthetic and artistic preferences by claiming that art must be ‘understood’ by the people and must not be made for the pleasure of any exclusive or narrow elitist group. The 11

Introduction 11 Russian minister of culture uses this argument to marginalize unwanted art objects – usually of modern and contemporary art. The neo-conservative artists presented in this volume (Chapter 5) reflect an offensive counteroffensive by conservatives fighting back against the ‘liberal Western-oriented art’ that they consider to have dominated the Russian contemporary art scene for many years. To them it is a question of a Kulturkampf. Thus, according to Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt,

Without doubt it [liberal pro-Western art] dominates and this is no coincidence – this would not take place by itself – somebody invested in it, introduced this network on to our territory, curated it, and supported it day and night. How can we counter it? First of all by propagating our own – Eurasian, shallow, organic, which adequately describes our reality. (Belyaev-Gintovt 2015)

He envisages a state style that he calls ‘the great Russian, great Eurasian style’. This raises the question of whether there is in Russia an official aesthetics in the making for the purpose of countering ‘liberal Western-oriented’ contemporary art. It might seem that official policy more often formulates prescriptions of what kind of art is not recommended and seldom spells out what art should look like (compare the case of Hungary in this volume). This situation, however, may be slowly changing over time. An interesting question therefore arises: Are new official aesthetic standards evolving as a consequence of the conservative state cultural policy? Revolutionary regimes, whether radically conservative or radically leftist, usually set themselves the ambitious task of completely changing the ‘gaze’ of the population for revolutionary purposes. They therefore force artists to express themselves according to strict aesthetic standards with regard to form and topic. After the revolution in Russia of 1917, a new standard for an official aesthetic was formulated in the early 1930s. A creative plurality had existed for most of the 1920s and only in the early 1930s was ‘Socialist Realism’ made the official yardstick of revolutionary aesthetics (Golomstock 2011; Clark and Dobrenko 2007). Soviet Socialist Realism not only meant a hegemonic division of the sensible in support of the official discourse by prescribing values, visions, themes and topics but also strictly prescribed what artistic forms and means should be used to guarantee this hegemonic interpretation of the order of things. As Daniil Leiderman notes in Chapter 9, Ekaterina Degot writes that ‘Socialist Realist paintings both authenticated the reality they depicted and constituted the mythic narratives through which that reality was perceived’ (Degot 2000: 139). The criteria for Socialist Realism, as the official aesthetic yardstick, were modified after the death of Stalin. Artistic and creative freedom increased, although the margins for freedom fluctuated somewhat with the political conjunctures of the following years. Nonetheless, until the policies of perestroika and glasnost in the late 1980s, the state pursued a policy of 12

12 Lena Jonson generally prescribing the content and forms that were desirable. As a consequence, two parallel art scenes appeared in the early 1960s: official and unofficial, that is, an officially approved art scene and an underground scene of nonconformist art. Andrei Erofeev claims in his chapter that it is the ideational content of the art exhibited or performed publicly that is the most crucial to the current Russian authorities. As long as the correct conservative content is secured – or, as a minimum, the hegemonic consensus is not questioned – any artistic form of language can be used. In other words, ‘anything goes’. This might be called the cynical answer of a regime that propagates absolute moral values, on the one hand, while picking up and exploiting whatever it finds ‘useful’, including what it can take from its opponents and appropriate for the purpose of mobilizing support and loyalty among a younger generation, on the other. Thus, Erofeev argues that the Russian regime has no clear preferences with regard to aesthetic standards but instead relates to the arts in a completely cynical way. The regime’s spin doctors appear to have been inspired by the techniques of radical art actionism and have appropriated these for pro-regime spectacles. Surkov was a strong supporter of contemporary art during his power peak in domestic politics. At the same time, as noted by Pomerantsev, he was also a genius tearing previous associations apart. Thus, instead of linking art to democracy, which is usually the case, Surkov’s motto became to ‘marry authoritarianism and modern art, to use the language of rights and representation to validate tyranny, to recut and paste democratic capitalism until it means the reverse of its original purpose’ (Pomerantsev 2015: 88). However, Surkov was removed from the scene of domestic politics and culture to other fields where his expertise in manipulation were required –to Russian policy on conflict in territories in neighbouring countries. In their chapter, Stas Shuripa and Anna Titova write that in the conservative ‘constructivist’ image of reality past and present have changed places. The past is the ideal while the future is looked on as a threat, and in order to save the present a return to the traditions of the past is considered necessary. This past is not the organic past of classical conservatism, however, but ‘a synthetic past, a shiny collage of the echoes of today’s superstitions’. The development of communication networks and the conservative drive in today’s Russian society open up opportunities for an industry of reality construction, in which the conservative ideals of the past are simulacra and far from the understanding of the ‘organic’ in classical conservatism. In the current conservative zeitgeist in Russian society the radical neo- conservatives analysed by Maria Engström in her chapter take the fears and visions of official conservatism further. These radicals strongly emphasize threats to the present while sharing a dark vision of the future and a strong belief in the idea of Russia’s eschatological mission. The idea of Russia as Katechon/restrainer of the devils of the world – devils which are assumed to 13

Introduction 13 emanate from liberalism and universalism – is strongly pronounced among them and is also visualized in popular culture. Official conservatism implies a ‘new seriousness’, where everything, including art, is understood literally. This gives little or no space to art interventions of an ambiguous or precarious kind that targets anything ‘sacred’ or targets what in one way or another could be perceived as related to power – whether secular or religious. Consequently, jokes, plays or comedy using patriotic, religious or traditional symbols and signs can no longer be undertaken without the artist risking becoming attacked by conservative critics. Such symbols and signs can no longer be used in contexts other than those for which they were originally intended. Ambiguity becomes a sin. The result is that this ‘seriousness’ becomes a request for a certain standard and a certain language or form of expression. At the same time, radical conservatives readily use humour and postmodern playing around as weapons against ‘liberal opponents’ while at the same time lacking an ironic gaze on themselves. Yet, Engström argues, many find the aesthetics of the radical-conservative artists attractive at present. Going beyond the official conservatism, these aesthetics combine the grand-style Stalin aesthetics of the 1930s and 1940s with the radicalism that existed in the 1990s in the circles around Timur Novikov in Leningrad/St Petersburg. This radical conservatism expressed a mix of ideals on classical beauty, imperial style and the homoeroticism of a gay culture that brought about a taste of forbidden transgression into new, unknown and forbidden territories. There is today a new interest in the aesthetics of such art. Although it may seem to challenge the values of dogmatic conservatives, they share the desire for new energy and an enthusiasm for the benefits of the utopian vision of the coming great Russian empire. The question of whether new official aesthetic standards for art are in the making cannot, therefore, be avoided. Will the cultural scene change as a result of the adoption of new criteria on which art, art institutions and art projects will be encouraged and given financial and political support?

Art counterstrategies Already in the spring of 2012 it had become obvious that the new conservative- authoritarian regime was likely to drastically change the conditions for the arts. In the new political situation, supporters of the regime, seeing themselves as forerunners of conservative thought and Orthodox belief, monitored the art scene and intervened by taking the law into their own hands. Cossacks, Orthodox bishops and priests, and activists from various ultra-patriotic and religious groups, such as Narodnyi sobor or Enteo’s God’s Will, tried to prevent art exhibitions and theatre performances by mobilizing followers in demonstrations against them, taking the organizers, curators or theatre directors to court or even vandalizing the art objects on display. The state authorities remained surprisingly passive in these situations, thereby supporting the aggression against the arts. Freedom of expression was further circumscribed 14

14 Lena Jonson by new laws introduced after 2012. Administrative censorship was strengthened, although formal censorship was not reintroduced. Statements in favour of censorship were made by people of official positions as when, during the scandal around the Tannhauser opera in Novosibirsk (see Chapter 17) in the spring of 2015, senior state officials declared that a system of pre-reviewing artworks and theatre plays ought to be introduced in order to prevent conflicts.7 As a result of this development, self-censorship became a reality to a larger degree than previously among people working in the arts. What kind of ‘art resistance’ and ‘counterstrategies’ can exist under such conditions? Before coming to this question let us raise the more general question: What kind of survival strategies can exist in this political situation? Under authoritarian conditions ‘loyalty’ to the regime, in the form of enter- ing into compromises, becomes the mainstream choice.8 ‘Exit’ is an option for those who do not agree with the prevailing paradigm, and many artists have withdrawn from political activities and avoid provocative or outspoken statements in their art. They have gone into internal exile waiting for times to change. Some have even left Russia to live abroad, at least temporarily. A few artists left the art scene in order to let their ‘voice’ be heard directly in a political context. To this latter group belong the members of Pussy Riot, who became political activists more than artists after they were released from jail in early 2014. They turned to defending the rights of people in jail and spreading information on such issues through their website, Mediazona. When she was interviewed for this book together with Petr Verzilov, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova told how, in 2014, ‘In 2014, I formulated the following important point for myself: when the state behaves like a punk, the artist must behave in the opposite way as much as possible … I realised that we have to change our strategy and to start to create institutions [Mediazona]’.9 It is not that political activism is easier in any way, she noted, but it is the only answer to the political situation in the country. ‘We realized that our old language – a bright, carnival-like, childish event – no longer corresponded to the time in which we live. I think that something very similar probably happened with other artists.’ Pussy Riot still makes art from time to time, with direct and open political messages, as the group’s performance, Chaika (the surname of the Russian general procurator whose son was accused of corruption), in 2016 illustrates (see Figure 8.9). Despite feelings of dejection, most artists choose other ways of expressing resistance in their art, openly or indirectly. The interviews with Russian artists in this book reflect their various choices of art strategies. None give examples of plain ‘political art’. Instead, their pieces of art or art performances become political in the sense that they are perceived as politically charged in the specific context of Russian society at this specific time. The use here of the terms ‘art resistance’ and ‘art counterstrategies’ should therefore be understood as a kind of intellectual resistance expressed in artistic approaches that question the predominant official consensus. This resistance may reflect various degrees of dissensus from the very subtle to the open and direct. 15

Introduction 15 Three categories are used to make distinctions between different kinds of dissensus in art: the other gaze, dissent art and engaged art. They differ with regard to how outspoken the artworks are in relation to the official consensus. The line between the categories is not clear-cut, but they can be helpful in providing a rough understanding of the characteristics of various kinds of dissensus art. Art of an other gaze is the subtlest form of challenging established conceptions and might therefore appear to be a wide and vague category. This art might function ‘subversively’ through its ambiguity. These artworks can be read in different ways, with possible interpretations on different levels. They may undermine dominant discourses just by creating uncertainty. Many of the artists participating or mentioned in this volume can be placed in this category: Irina Korina, Anatolii Osmolovskii and Andrei Kuzkin among others. These artists are often followers of, trained in or strongly influenced by the tradition of the school of Moscow Conceptualist art. In his interview, Anatolii Osmolovskii emphasizes his conscious decision to avoid any clear- cut or head-on opposition in his art, favouring instead a use of ‘plastic means and various forms’ as the most relevant way of expressing resistance. In their chapter, the Russian artists Stas Shuripa and Anna Titova, whose art also belongs to ‘an other gaze’, present the methodology they use for their project Agency for Singular Investigations. They call it a ‘de-montage of attractions’, as an inversion of Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ and the latter’s assembling of visual elements for the purpose of organizing the emotions he wanted to arouse in the audience (Rancière 2013: 234). To Eisenstein, a montage should be calculated to produce effects directly on people’s minds. Shuripa and Titova instead use their inverted version as a method to deconstruct the myths, conspiracy theories, lies and various world views spreading in the contemporary world. Their project focuses on ‘the production of meaning through the use of forms of communication characteristic of contemporary communication networks’. At the same time, Shuripa and Titova themselves play with layers of reality-production as they present themselves as employees of a fictive agency of investigations into fictive archives of a fictive past, present and future. There is a strong tradition of playing on ambiguity, raising questions without answers and creating insecurity in Russian contemporary art; and it can be found to varying degrees in all the above-mentioned categories of dissensus art. Chapter 18 on the nonconformist tradition of Russian theatre also illustrates the strong tradition of subtle dissensus. As Kristina Matvienko writes, in Soviet times a tradition of covert nonconformism took shape, which later developed, when political conditions so allowed, into open nonconformism. Nonconformism in the theatre of that time reflected social interest and concern, as did also the small Teatr.doc in the 2000s. No answers are provided: only questions are raised. Matvienko emphasizes that Teatr.doc is not openly political and takes no position in favour of one side or another. 16

16 Lena Jonson Instead, various voices are heard on stage. Yet, such pluralism together with an interest in the issues and problems in the lives of the common people make the theatre ‘political’. A second category, here called dissent art, is characterized by its visible disagreement with the official consensus. By directly challenging official concepts, this ‘dissent’ implies the existence of a diverging view or position. This diverging position is not clearly spelled out, however, and no alternative position is presented. Art in this second category follows a tradition of provocation and rupture dating back to the Soviet underground Sots Art of the 1970s and further back to the early avant-garde of the 1910s. Playing the role of the ‘trickster’, these artists follow – using satire, irony, parody, laughter, mockery and burlesque exaggeration – the traditions of the carnival culture of the Middle Ages. Although the medieval carnival was a circumscribed activity, it contributed to a temporary liberation of the mind from dogmatism and pedantry, and from fear and intimidation in such a strictly regulated society (Bakhtin 2007; Platter 2001: 54–7). The Soviet underground artists of the 1970s and 1980s followed this tradition. Mark Lipovetsky writes in his book Charms of Cynical Reason that ‘transgression, i.e. the breaking of boundaries and reversal of social and cultural norms – is the most important device for tricksters’ (Lipovetsky 2011: 34). In the Soviet underground, the term styob was coined for the overidentification with the target of criticism by mimicking its style and form. It is that kind of exposure to mockery that leads to an irreversible and permanent profanation. The trickster’s method, writes Lipovetsky, is ‘not inversion but deconstruction, the undermining of the system by means of revealing and subverting its logic, a dissembling that comes not from the outside but from within, from a point betwixt and between’ (2011: 31). He concludes, using William Hyne’s formulation, that tricksterish metaplay ‘ruptures the shared consciousness, the societal ethos and consensual validation – in short, the very order of order itself’ (Hynes 1993: 215), quoted by Lipovetsky 2011: 31). As pointed out by Andrei Erofeev, this tradition is strong in Russian contemporary art and is used as a counterstrategy against hegemonic discourses. In 2015, an exhibition in Berlin of contemporary art from Russia, the former republics of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Europe states, curated by David Elliot, the term balagan was used to characterize this playful approach of presenting the world from an upside-down perspective (Elliott 2015). Originally a term from the theatre world, it describes today in colloquial Russian a farce, a fine mess and the most unholy of cock-ups. It is a revolutionary laughter with the promise of a cathartic release. This tradition can be described as the ‘kynical impulse’, as a critical exis- tentialism of satirical consciousness, an approach that can be traced back to Diogenes of Sinope who in Ancient Greece used physiognomic, eloquent gestures rather than words to mock the pretentious, lofty theories and systems of the philosophers of his time. Diogenes represented, according to Peter 17

Introduction 17 Sloterdijk, ‘a suspicious alertness … against importunate holistic doctrines’, and he suggests reviving the tradition of kynicism as a counterstrategy of loud satirical laughter against cynical domination (Sloterdijk 1987: XVII). Sloterdijk, echoed by Lipovetsky, argues that kynicisim provides the only alternative to a hegemonic discourse. In her chapter, Helen Goscilo presents the art group Blue Noses (Sinie nosy), which falls directly into the tradition of the kynical impulse, as does the political caricaturist Sergei Elkin. Goscilo contends ‘that laughter constitutes a parallel alternative to today’s dominant, censor-submissive zeitgeist in Russia, as manifested in a certain strand of contemporary Russian art’. The third category, engaged art, is art that openly and directly intervenes in the public sphere with a direct political message. Nadya Tolokonnikova describes the mission of the art actionism of Pussy Riot in 2008–11:

And our task was (as well as the plain artistic and formal task of developing the language of actionism) to shake the political in the Russians, to come up with relevant criticism and comment on political processes. Standard political approaches like the text or the picket did not work at that time. It was difficult to raise the attention of people with a policy of conformal methods. (Tolokonnikova 2014)

This kind of art can use the trickster’s methods and be playful and joyful, but its message is political and more often both direct and serious. The idea behind the performances by radical art actionists is, writes Erofeev, that the performance is striking and causes a shock as it does not fit into the spectator’s general view of reality. Petr Pavlenskii is today the most obvious example of this kind of dissensus. Although now recognized by a considerable part of the arts community, he was at first perceived as a brave but masochistic lunatic. Notorious for his performance art, he became a symbol of resistance in the Russia of today. His very name was a trigger for conflict and scandal. Nevertheless, his con- sistent actions gained the support of many in the community of contemporary art. His action Threat in November 2015, setting fire to a door of the FSB’s (Federal Security Service’s) main building at Lyublyanka in Moscow, was nominated for the prestigious Innovatsiya art prize. This, however, gave the radical conservatives a reason to unleash a landslide of measures against contemporary art. Darya Serenko’s actions under the name Silent Picket (Tikhii piket) also fall into the category of engaged art. In her actions, Serenko, with nothing but a piece of paper containing handwritten text and a mirror in her hands, managed to get into communication with unknown people whose curiosity she had aroused. In her innocent and unconventional way she managed indirectly to convey a political message. Naming her action ‘silent picket’ gave it a special meaning because demonstrations are circumscribed by the authorities. 18

18 Lena Jonson However, this art should not be confused with what is called ‘engaged’ art or ‘participatory’ art in the West. Russian ‘engaged art’ does not usually provide alternatives to what it is questioning, although open political statements or even direct requests may be included. Nor is it part of an agenda of any political movement. It also differs from Western engaged art as it seldom invites the spectator to become a direct participant in the art process. The art group Chto Delat, which also falls into the category of ‘engaged art’, is an exception in this regard as it has more in common with Western engaged and participatory art. Its pedagogical project of a School for Engaged Art is presented in the chapter by Jonathan Platt. With a theoretical-political platform close to contemporary European Marxism, the Chto Delat group is outspoken in its criticism of the current Russian regime. In line with contemporary European Leftist art activists, Chto Delat works from an agenda of democratization and tries to encourage and build a spirit of collectivism in an atomized Russian society. In this pedagogical ambition, Chto Delat differs from most Russian ‘engaged’ art. The purpose of the school is to teach its students to reflect on issues of myths, perceptions and identification, and through artistic practices create a counterculture based on collectivity, belonging and solidarity, which one day in the unknown future might help to make people act as real political beings. In spite of this ambition, Chto Delat is not primarily a political group but an art collective that aims to get people to reflect. In an intellectual and theoretical artistic language the group presents an alternative to the existing consensus. However, it must be emphasized that engaged art can take on any political colour. The neo-conservative art of Belyaev-Gintovt carries a political message of a radical-conservative-authoritarian utopia. His art falls into the general trend of conservatism but his visions extend far beyond the official conservative consensus. Although Belyaev-Gintovt might play with postmodern ambiguity, he is at the same time deadly serious in his political views. According to Engström, ‘Postmodern irony and indifference, “blink” of meanings combine here into a rather distinctly formulated ideological position and a completely definite view of the future.’ Belyaev-Gintovt’s political engagement in the Eurasian movement underlines his seriousness in political terms. The Russian artists in this book thus differ among themselves in their artistic practices. Yet, to what extent can one talk about their work in terms of ‘strategies of resistance’? To what extent do they make conscious choices between possible strategies? In his interview, Pavel Peppershtein criticizes the provocations by the Moscow actionists in the 1990s for triggering a reactionary response from the authorities. This same argument can be found in contemporary discussions about Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlenskii, while others consider them to be politically brave and even as front runners in the art field. The criticism assumes a conscious choice of behaviour on the part of the artists. This book avoids answering the question of whether there is a conscious choice of resistance strategy by artists. Instead, what is important is whether 19

Introduction 19 their art ‘becomes political’. As has been noted above, it becomes ‘political’ in the eyes of the beholder, who lives in the specific historical context of Russia at this time and interprets art from their own experience and knowledge. Although we use the term ‘strategies of art resistance’, there can be no definite connection between the intention of the artist and the outcome of their piece of art. What was never intended as ‘political’ could still be perceived in such a way. In addition, the ‘political’ in an artwork might be exaggerated just because the times are strongly politicized. The art critic Valentin Dyakonov has commented on how after Crimea, any oppositional gesture, ‘even in a sphere as distant from daily life as contemporary art’, had serious consequences. Every creative act is looked at through the lenses of politics: ‘absolutely every creative act that is taken to the judgment of society is being received as part of both an aesthetic and a political programme of the artist, even if he or she in no way comments on this’ (Dyakonov 2016). In spite of the differences between the artists in this volume, they have much in common. They share the dilemma of questioning and rejecting the official hegemonic discourse while at the same time rejecting any alternative discourse that is pretending to become the alternative discourse. When Ilya Kabakov discusses the work of his colleagues and friends the Sots Art artists of the 1970s, he says that they exposed the language of the symbols, signs and clichés of Soviet ideology, exposed it, twisted it, and thereby demonstrated its emptiness (2008). The effect on the spectator was the cathartic laughter, but these artists never made any effort to replace Soviet ideological language with anything that they would have found more ‘reasonable’. They consciously baulked at this. This tradition has remained strong in the Russian art of dissensus. Thus, there is a strong tradition in art of avoiding falling into the trap of bifurcation between two opposite poles, as a result of which the artwork would lose its ambiguity. The ambiguity of the artwork must be secured. When Osmolovskii talks about his installation about the heroes of the history of the revolution, he emphasizes that it can be given various meanings and that his purpose is to put the audience in an insecure position. He wants the spectator – both the one who applauds and the one who criticizes – to end up with feelings of both victim and an executioner. Both Mark Lipovetsky and Daniil Leiderman refer in their chapters to the influence of Moscow conceptualist art and especially to the poet Dmitrii Prigov on today’s contemporary art in Russia. Prigov, who lived most of his life in Soviet times and then fifteen further years in post-Soviet Russia, devoted his whole artistic life to fighting every aspect of authoritarianism (Bodin 2011). Both Lipovetsky and Leiderman view this constant undermining of all totalitarian pretensions as a possible way out of the dilemma of falling into the eternal trap of opposite poles. Extending the term ‘shimmering’ used to describe Prigov’s strategy of oscillation between mutually exclusive ideological and/or metaphysical discourses, Daniil Leiderman describes this as ‘a counter-ideology, a principled choice of perpetual indecision’ and ‘a political 20

20 Lena Jonson alternative to the binary limits on the sayable and the thinkable’. The point of it, he says, is to maintain the tension between opposite discourses but not to present or to pursue any stable truths. Shimmering is treasonous, rather than confrontational, Leiderman argues:

If politics consists of the articulation of dissensus within the totality of the police, shimmering seeks to temporarily collapse this difference, with the ultimate aim of aggravating it further, and with a genuine investment in ideological mobility as a desirable and achievable goal.

Against this background, Mark Lipovetsky’s analysis of the contemporary Russian poet Roman Osminkin is especially interesting. The work of Osminkin illustrates the dilemma of the contemporary Russian intellectual. On the one hand, Osminkin is a follower of Prigov trying to undermine and disperse the existing cultural hegemony, and all discourses with an ambition of hegemony. On the other, hand he is a follower of the LEF (Left Front of the Arts) strategy of the early 1920s, of trying to establish a new alternative hegemony through a system of practices. Translated into political terms, this becomes a conflict between two strategies of the intelligentsia’s resistance to the conservative-authoritarian regime. According to Lipovetsky:

This dilemma consists of either continuing to struggle, this time against Putin’s conservative cultural hegemony, using the subversive methods that proved effective in the 1970s–1980s, or, in the knowledge that this strategy failed to prevent the return of authoritarianism, adopting Soviet methods for the establishment of one’s own cultural hegemony, formally and discursively modelled after the Soviet one.

At the same time, Lipovetsky argues, that when Osminkin’s oscillates between these two models or strategies without stating a preference for either of them, he mirrors official culture with its current use of a postmodern mix of seemingly incompatible discourses of official neo-conservatism and private liberalism. By exposing conflicting elements next to each other without resolving this conflict, Osminkin acts as a trickster imitating and mocking the authorities and exposing their deepest secrets. Osminkin’s double-talk thus becomes a counterstrategy undermining dominant discourses, although without giving any answers or presenting any alternative. Against this background of a strong tradition of ambiguity in Russian art of dissensus, Petr Pavlenskii’s actions with their direct political message stand out in sharp contrast. Nonetheless, even Pavlenskii turned out to be open to various interpretations, as is shown in the analysis by Per-Arne Bodin in this volume. Art critic Anna Tolstova, who nominated Pavlenskii for the Innovatsiya art prize, explained his violent use of his own body as a metaphor for the lack of freedom in Russian society. She called his action Threat, ‘a 21

Introduction 21 gesture of symbolic strength showing that the first step towards freedom is to set fire to the fear within yourself’ (Tolstova 2016). Pavlenskii’s actions have been both praised and criticized with regard to their artistic qualities, but his actions were also criticized for being une- quivocal and lacking ambiguity. The art critic Gleb Napreenko wrote that Pavlenskii wants to force people to reflect and calls for unpredictable consequences, but in his actions you find instead ‘an ethic where the registered dominates over the unwritten’. Napreenko concludes, ‘Pavlenskii’s actions do not work as paradoxes’. What dominates instead is ‘that which had to be proven’ (Napreenko 2016). Daniil Leiderman, however, argues in his chapter that Pavlenskii’s questioning of the official consensus without presenting an alternative can also be regarded as a kind of shimmering. When Anna Tolstova nominated Pavlenskii for the Innovatsiya prize she claimed that ‘political art’ as a phenomenon had gathered in strength over the past decade even if the number of such artists is limited. However, an art that ‘becomes political’ in the eyes of the beholder is a much larger phenomenon on the Russian contemporary art scene. It is of such art of resistance that this book will tell.

Structure of the book

Part I provides the context – policy and zeitgeist – for contemporary art in Russia since 2012. It presents the efforts by the regime to ‘capture the interpretation’ by forming perceptions. Ilya Kalinin presents the conservative- authoritarian zeitgeist by analysing the new understanding of the concept of ‘Russkii mir’ (the Russian World). Lena Jonson gives an overview of state cultural policy with regard to redirecting visual art into new conservative trajectories. Alexander Bikbov analyses the neo-liberal arguments used by the conservative regime to reorganize cultural policy and the system for financing culture. He emphasizes the current combination of the regime’s neo- traditionalist political agenda and neo-liberal economic demands with regard to its cultural policy. Maria Engström’s focus is the neo-conservative vision that is currently spreading through the art scene and popular culture. The ideas behind it are part of the prevailing official conservative zeitgeist, but it runs ahead as a radical-conservative art avant-garde. In the final chapter in Part I, Eszter Babarczy describes parallel developments outside Russia in an overview of cultural policy in Hungary, where the national-conservative government has changed the cultural landscape. Part II presents voices from the Russian art scene. Andrei Erofeev provides an introduction by analysing the tension between state and contemporary culture in Russia. Interviews with ten well-known Russian artists follow, in which they give their views on the state of affairs in society and on the art scene. Artists are not usually asked to directly analyse what is going on in society and politics. Here, they give their views as both citizens and artists. They share their concerns about what is happening and the possible consequences for 22

22 Lena Jonson their own work as artists and differ in their views on how to respond to the situation. Together, their answers provide a nuanced picture of the complicated situation in Russian society today. Part III presents a selection of artistic counterstrategies. Daniil Leiderman starts by showing how Dmitrii Prigov’s strategy of ‘shimmering’ (oscillation) has influenced several contemporary artists, including art actionists. Helena Goscilo analyses how humour and irony become political weapons, using the examples of the art group Blue Noses and the caricaturist Sergei Elkin. Stas Shuripa and Anna Titova present their own art project investigating the border between communication and artistic practice, and their method of ‘demontage of attractions’ where they focus on issues of the production of meaning, reality construction and image-building. Jonathan Platt analyses the art group Chto Delat. Mark Lipovetsky presents the dilemma of the contemporary Russian artist and intellectual, critical of the current conservative-authoritarian regime, by analysing the poet and video artist Roman Osminkin. This part ends with three brief chapters on political actionism. Andrei Erofeev provides an analysis of radical art actionism based on the examples of Voina, Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlenskii. Per-Arne Bodin looks at Pavlenskii from a completely different angle analysing the religious references in Pavlenskii’s actions. A document of Pavlenskii’s dialogue with his pre-trial interrogator ends Part III. Part IV focuses on theatre to demonstrate that similar trends and developments to those in the field of visual art also exist in other cultural spheres. Pavel Rudnev describes the conservative ideological offensive that resulted in conflict between people in the theatre, on the one hand, and local authorities, the church and representatives of extreme rightist organizations, on the other. Kristina Matvienko writes about the history of the nonconformist tradition in Russian theatre and analyses its specifics.

Notes

1 George Grosz on German society in the 1920s, quoted by Sloterdijk (1987: 403). 2 On the roots of Russian conservatism see Pipes (2005). 3 Note the large interest in the works of Carl Schmitt in Russia in the 2000s. 4 Compare for example works by Karl Dietrich Bracher (1985, 1991). 5 In this way, the regime ‘exploits mass complexes of collective inferiority that have appeared as a kind of compensation as people try to adapt to the arbitrariness of the uncontrolled and corrupted authorities, which are not respected but perceived as being without alternative’ (Gudkov 2016). 6 Compare with Susan C. Haedicke’s (2013: 45) notion that Rancière emphasizes the meeting between the artist and the spectator, claiming that a spectator achieves emancipation or critical awareness by translating what he sees into his own experience, linking it to what he already knows and, through that association, creating new awareness. 7 The day after the theatre director was fired, the deputy head of the presidential administration, Magomedov, said that it would be better to arrange preliminary screenings of plays in order to avoid scandals since the ‘repertoire of a theatre 23

Introduction 23 must not include productions which produce splits in society’. This observation was repeated by Medinskii’s deputy, Aristarkhov. Putin’s press secretary, Dmitrii Peskov, said that ‘the state has the right to expect from creative collectives that they put on correct productions’. In mid-January, the ministry of culture said it was preparing a bill that would ban public distribution of films considered to ‘defile national culture, create a threat to national unity or undermine the foundations of the constitutional order’ (Gazeta 2015). 8 The concepts are from Albert O. Hirschman (1990). 9 See also Nadya Tolokonnikova (2014).

References Bakhtin, Mikhail (2007) Rabelais och skrattets historia [Swedish translation of Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kultura Srednevekovya i Renessansa], Riga: Anthropos. Bauman, Zygmunt (1999) In Search of Politics, Cambridge: Blackwell Press. Belyaev-Gintovt, Aleksei (2015) ‘Stolitsa nashei Rodiny: Moskva, granitsy utochnyay- otsya’ (Interview), Novorosinform, 6 November 2015. Available at www.novorosinform.org/comments/id/850. Bishop, Claire (2009) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, London and New York: Verso. Bodin, Per-Arne (2011) ‘The Poet Dmitry Prigov Before and After the Fall of the Soviet Union’, Postcolonial Europe, 10 October. Available at www.postcolonial-europe.eu/ sv/studies/ 97- the- poet- dmitry- prigov- before- and- after- the -fall- of- the- Soviet- Union . Bracher, Karl Dietrich (1985) The Age of Ideologies: A History of Political Thought in the Twentieth Century, London: Methuen. —— (1991) The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and Consequences of National Socialism, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Clark, Katerina and Evgeny Dobrenko (eds.) (2007) Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Dahrendorf, Ralf (1990) Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, New York: Times Books. Degot, Ekaterina (2000) Russkoe iskustvo XX veka, Moscow: Trilistnik. Dyakonov, Valentin (2016) ‘Esli snova “Voina”: Kulturnaya politika’, Kommersant, 19 February. Available at http://kommersant.ru/doc/2919006. Elliott, David (ed.) (2015) Balagan!!! Contemporary Art from the Soviet Union and Other Mythical Places, Berlin: Momentum. Evangeli, Aleksander (2015) ‘Simptomatika reaktsii: 6 tezisov o rossiiskom iskusstve. Sotsialno-politicheskii kontekst i sovremennoe iskusstvo v Rossii’. Video lecture, 26 November 2015. Available at https://yadi.sk/i/5o9siASGkjkp5. Gazeta (2015) ‘Zachem gosudarstvo idet v teatr’, Gazeta, 30 March. Available at http:// m.gazeta.ru/comments/2015/03/30_e_6619417.shtml. Golomstock, Igor (2011) Totalitarian Art, London and New York: Overlook Duckworth. Gudkov, Lev (2014) ‘Seichas Rossiya zhivet v epokhu bezvremenya’, Levada Centre, 5 November. Available at www.levada.ru/2014/11/05/sejchas-rossiya-zhivet-v- epohu-bezvremenya. —— (2016) ‘Sledy porazheniya: Pochemu effekt propagandy budet oshchushchatsya eshche dolgo’, Slon, 20 February. Available at https://slon.ru/posts/64280, reposted at www.levada.ru/2016/02/24/sledy-porazheniya/print/. Haedicke, Susan C. (2013) Contemporary Street Arts in Europe: Aesthetics and Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 24

24 Lena Jonson Hirschman, Albert O. (1990) Exit, Voice and Loyalty, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hoare, Quentin and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, New York: International Publishers. Hynes, William (1993) ‘Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: A Heuristic Guide’, in William Hynes (ed.), Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts and Criticisms, Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, pp. 33–45. Jaspers, Karl (2010) Man in the Modern Age, London and New York: Routledge. First published 1933. Kabakov, Ilya (2008) 60–70e: Zapiski o neofitsialnoi zhizni v Moskve, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Lipovetsky, Mark (2011) Charms of Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformation in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture, Boston, Mass.: Academic Studies Press. Medinskii, Vladimir (2011) Voina: Mify o Rossii, 1939–1945, Moscow: Olma Media grupp. Napreenko, Gleb (2016) ‘Chego ne uchel Pavlenskii. Pismo Gleba Napreenko o teme chetvertogo nomera “Raznoglasii”, i o tom, pochemu Petru Pavlenskomu ne khvataet syurrealizma’, Colta, 23 May. Available at www.colta.ru/articles/raznoglasiya/ 11139. Nezavisimaya gazeta (2013) ‘Prezident vzyal kurs na konzervatism’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 30 December. Available at www.ng.ru/politics/2013–12–30/3_conservative. html. Pipes, Richard (2005) Russian Conservatism and its Critics: A Study in Political Culture, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Platter, Charles (2001) ‘Novelistic Discourse in Aristophanes’, in Peter I. Barta and Paul Allen Miller (eds.), Carnivalizing Difference: Bakhtin and the Other, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 51–78. Pomerantsev, Peter (2015) Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, London: Faber & Faber. Rancière, Jacques (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London and New York: Continuum. —— (2009a) Aesthetics and its Discontent, Cambridge: Polity. —— (2009b) The Emancipated Spectator, London and New York: Verso. —— (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, London: MPG Books Group. —— (2013) Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, London and New York: Verso. Sloterdijk, Peter (1987) Critique of Cynical Reason, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Tolokonnikova, Nadya (2014) Facebook post, 7 August. Available at www.facebook. com/tolokno/posts/792897714074449:0 Tolstova, Anna (2016) ‘Zachem bylo nominirovat Petra Pavlenskogo na “Innovatsiyu”? Anna Tolstova o tom, chto vo vsekh nominatsiyakh pobedil odin chelovek’, Colta, 19 May. Available at www.colta.ru/articles/art/11116. Tsvetkova, Roza (2016) ‘Lev Gudkov: “Molodym v strane ne khvataet vozdukha” ’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 1 March. Available at www.ng.ru/ng_politics/2016–03–01/9_ young.html. 25

Part I The conservative zeitgeist and Russian cultural policy 26 27

2 The ‘Russian World’ Genetically modified conservatism, or

why ‘Russian culture’ matters1

Ilya Kalinin

And in reference to our people, our country has sucked in like a vacuum cleaner representatives of various ethnic groups, nations, nationalities. By the way, this is the basis not only for the creation of our cultural code, but also of our extraordinarily potent genetic code, because during all these centuries and even millennia an exchange of genes and mixed marriages have taken place. And it is precisely this genetic code that has almost certainly constituted one of our main competitive advantages in the contemporary world. It is very flexible, but also very resilient. We don’t even feel this, but it is probably so. (Putin 2014b)

Russian culture as national idea Russia’s search for a national idea, which has continued uninterrupted for the past two decades, has finally achieved its goal.2 The national idea has been found in Russian culture; or, more precisely, in a specific formulation of the concept of ‘Russian culture’. Recognition of national identity by means of belonging to a common culture makes it possible to eliminate (actually to ignore) a variety of social divisions, be they ethnic, religious, social or political. The idea of a common culture, in which the term ‘Russian’ refers not to ethnic and not even to national in the sense of the state but to a civilizational frame, makes it universal and opens up prospects for an integrated political community. The drawback to this concept is that the borders of the political community, when based on cultural identity of a civilizational scale, rarely if ever coincide with the borders of the state. Even more, the essentialist paradigm that underlies cultural identity, when formulated in terms of tradition, legacy, historical past or the spiritual wellsprings of the nation, encounters an inevitable contradiction with civic identity, as regulated by formal-legal norms. The organic universalism of national culture triumphs over the abstract universalism of legal rationality. The roots of patriotic spirituality turn out to lie in the territories of neighbouring states, and demands for a more acceptable symbolic and cultural legitimization of official calls for their annexation become more important than any strategic military considerations of the national interest. As a result, the past becomes more 28

28 Ilya Kalinin important than the present and the future, and culture is revealed as a continuation of politics and becomes a euphemism for war. An orientation towards cultural identity as the lynchpin of the post- imperial political community problematizes the borders that mark territories in what was recently the undivided space of the empire. Culture, identified with historical legacy, makes it possible to imagine in the present that which is in fact already bygone days. Furthermore, it makes it possible to present that which never existed as an organic reality rooted in the historical past. In a certain sense, it makes it possible to renounce history as a movement arising from political transformations, social shifts, reorientations of value and epistemology. The 2014 presidential decree on the ‘Bases of State Cultural Politics’ addresses precisely this ‘social mission’ of culture:

The unity of scholarship, education and the arts lays the foundation for an understanding of the social mission of culture as an instrument for the transfer to new generations of the collection of moral, ethical and aesthetic values that constitute the core of the national character. (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki 2014)

A question arises as to the epistemological status of this ‘national culture’ on which the state cultural policy is based and to which the discourse of state patriotism has referred more and more frequently since the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century –more or less beginning with the prepara- tions for the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War, or the ‘Great Patriotic War’ as it is known in Russia. Is it even possible to locate ‘national culture’ and ‘historical tradition’ somewhere outside of the form state institutions have presented them to society? In other words, is the ‘collection of moral, ethical and aesthetic values’ presented by the current cultural-patriotic hegemony organic and internally coherent? Or is it just a syntetic and occasional constellation statist in its content, conservative in its rhetoric and bureaucratic in its functioning? The analysis must focus not on the diagnosis and description of the conservative turn to traditional values but on illumination of the constructive principles of that organic tradition to which contemporary Russian conservatism appeals, in particular in its statist version. Shifting attention to the actual language of conservatism makes it possible to discover the mechanics of the invention of tradition within this discourse that seeks its roots in the historical past. Analysis of the means of articulation deployed by contemporary state conservatism reveals an absence of foundations at the very site from which, according to the visions of classical conservatism, the organic forms of national culture should arise.3 For this reason, we must consider not the political and cultural effects of conservative ideology but, rather, the specific form of the conservative discourse in which rhetoric masks a deeper belief in the limitless possibilities of social constructivism and in which tradition becomes a matter of administrative management rather than substance. What is called a ‘conservative turn’ in contemporary Russia is a project in which the ‘letter’ of 29

The ‘Russian World’ 29 devotion to the native soil takes on the ‘spirit’ of genetic engineering. In place of the ‘organic forms’ of the conservatism of the past we are dealing with ‘genetically modified products’ grown in the laboratories of cultural politics. According to the conceptions of the Foundations of State Cultural Policy, culture is a means for the rebroadcast of values sanctified by tradition –values that constitute the core of national identity, while history is redefined as the process of the vigilant preservation of legacy, and politics transforms all of this into the actual guideposts for intentional actions directed towards the reconstruction of that which has been lost.4 Culture is transformed into a museum, preserving the past in a compositional arrangement that suits the purposes of the present day and, according to a selective axiological regime, makes it possible for descendants to symbolically utilize their ancestors in a manner profitable for themselves.5 History as a series of periods that stand in tension each with each other, in the form of the negation of one set of forms and meanings by another, is driven out of the ‘museumified’ space of ministerial culture, which houses instead a constructed national tradition that erases the significatory and historical contextual distinctions among its constitutive elements. Only one opposition remains: ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’. Within the sphere of ‘ours’, internal distinctions of any kind can no longer exist. What is ours consists of ‘one and the same’ matter – various expressions of love of the fatherland in both peaceful and military undertakings, which makes it possible to recode just about anything into the language of patriotism, but also leads to its absolute affective and significatory inflation. Long ago, the literary critic, scholar and founder of Russian formalism, Viktor Shklovskii, described the transformation of the cultural tradition into a neutral resource of readymade forms as a cemetery: ‘The reconciliation and simultaneous coexistence of all artistic eras in the soul of the passé-ist is in many ways similar to a cemetery, where the dead no longer fight war among themselves’ (Shklovskii 1990: 42). In our case the term ‘passéist’ may be replaced with ‘state-certified patriot’. Truly, in such a cemetery of culture the dead no longer fight war among themselves, especially if they have themselves become monuments.6 In Staraya Ladoga, on 12 September 2015, the Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinskii, formally dedicated a monument ‘to the founders of Russian statehood’, the princes Ryurik and Oleg: ‘this five-metre tall bronze sculpture presents the figures of the princes, leaning on their shields, representing in this way the defence of the state, the power and might of the Russian people’.7 Naturally, we cannot expect the same degree of sophistica- tion from national-historical symbols as we can from reflexive historical consciousness. Otherwise, just about everything in this description would elicit questions. What possible relation can these Scandinavian knights have for ‘the Russian people’? And what ‘Russian people’ are we speaking about in the ninth century anyway? Nonetheless, the level of historical consciousness that underwrites this symbol of ‘the power and might of the Russian people’ is in every way in inverse proportion to the five-metre height of the monument: ‘It is surprising’, exclaimed the minister of culture, ‘that it is only now that we 30

30 Ilya Kalinin are dedicating this monument to the founders of the Russian state, Ryurik and Oleg. But it is not surprising at all that we do so precisely here, in Staraya Ladoga, from where ancient Rus, and subsequently Russia, began to expand its domains outwards to the Barents Sea, the Black Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and upwards into the heights of outer space’.8 In critical Russian commentary, it has become commonplace to express surprise at the words of Medinskii, the holder of a doctorate on history. It is sufficient to refer here to one of the major debates in Russian historiography and political thought, which has continued since the founding of modern Russian historiography in the eighteenth century to the above-mentioned commemoration of the founding of the Russian state.9 Periodically there has been heated public debate over the so-called Norman theory of the provenance of Russian statehood: whether the traditions of these non-Slavic princes were the first source of state institutions in ancient Rus, or whether the state was built on native, Slavic principles. It is curious to note that with their official dedication to this monument to ‘the founders of the Russian state’, the authorities have affirmed the Norman theory, thereby taking up the position that has for three centuries been considered the anti-patriotic, Westernizing and, at times, liberal one. Of course, it is perfectly clear that there can be no discussion here of Westernization or liberalism. It is not even the case that the national-patriotic sentiments of the Slavs were overshadowed by the regime’s desire to confirm the date of the formation of the Russian state in order to commemorate 1,150 years of statehood in 2012, the same year as the protest movements wound down. Rather, because, as indicated above, the contemporary discourse on patriotic hegemony simply does not recognize distinctions, all debates and oppositions may be resolved in a totalizing and nonsensical pseudo-historical synthesis: The Scandinavians Ryurik and Oleg are the personifications of the might of the Russian people;Staraya Ladoga becomes the capital of Kievan Rus; Russia recognizes no barriers and can expand outwards and upwards to the Pacific Ocean, but also to outer space. The fabri- cated tradition provides a thousand-year prehistory. ‘Genetic modification’, installed into the ‘genetic code of the nation’, to borrow a term from Putin, becomes the basis for the contemporary conservative hegemony. Using Eastern European case studies, Katherine Verdery analyses the symbolic mechanisms that underlay the practices around the erection, destruction and rededication of monuments and the burial/reburial of political leaders and those who have perished in war – both the collective gestures and the administrative procedures that ‘animate post-socialist politics’ (Verdery 1999: 22). Her approach can be extended to broader cultural processes and to the practices of their state administration, connected not only with the manipulation of material objects but also with work on the cultural legacy as a whole. The latter, too, can be transformed into a ‘dead body’ that gains a political life if carefully balanced between conservative-essentialist and constructivist-instrumental conceptions of tradition. In this regard, the obvious instrumental frame of such work on the historical cultural legacy is masked by an organicist rhetoric 31

The ‘Russian World’ 31 of national soil and of the spiritual roots that are anchored in it. This conceals the politically constructed reality of contemporary national-patriotic traditions behind an impenetrable discursive curtain. Let us repeat Shklovskii’s aphorism that ‘the dead do not war among themselves’. This is precisely because the ‘dead body’ of tradition, constructed before our very eyes, turns out to be a perfect vehicle for all forms of symbolic manipulation. The more lifeless this ‘body’ of tradition, the easier become the procedures for the synthesis and recombination of its ‘members’ and ‘organs’ and the more effectively they ‘animate’ the politics of a post-imperial era. Yet here we encounter cardinal differences from the situation described by Verdery. Whereas in the cases analysed by Verdery the living work out their relations with the dead, in the case of production of the Russian discourse of patriotic hegemony we are dealing with that which never existed in the first place, with that which is dead by definition and by origin. Or, even worse, more dangerous and unjust, we are dealing with the transformation of the dead into the stillborn – into empty symbols for the expression of loyalty before the state – as occurs in the case of the instrumentalization of memory of war, when our duty to those who have perished is transformed into moral duty to the state that lays claim to the right to speak in their voice. In contrast to the ghosts of victims described by Alexander Etkind in his recent monograph Warped Mourning, the ghosts deployed in the official politics of identity have no subjectivity of their own (Etkind 2013). They are not the fruit of the imagination of the living, to whom the dead make their appearance. Rather, they are an effect of political and computer technologies that give shape to these artificial ghosts who seek to populate the imagination, in competition with real ghosts, rooted in past histories and repressed in the subconscious. The Russian war films of recent years provide ideal examples of the artificial creation of such artificial ghosts. For this reason, besides the many well-known figures that embody the return of the past (ghosts, vam- pires, were-creatures and zombies), we must turn attention to one more figure: that of the body-snatcher or changeling, a creature shifted from one medium to another, from media technology into the social and individual imagination, capable of bending its new host to its will, expelling its former residents – those real ghosts that represent, for instance, a component of actual family memory and biographical histories. We may find many examples of the production of such artificial ghosts in the symbiosis of commercial culture and state cultural politics directed at the patriotic education of the young. In recent years, two remarkable films followed by two sequels appeared on the screens first of movie theatres and then televisions: We Are from the Future (2008, dir. A. Malykov) and We Are from the Future II (2010, dir. A. Samokhvalov), and Fog (2010, dir. I. Shurkhovezkii and A. Aksyonenko) and Fog II (2012, dir. I. Shurkhovezkii). The plots of these four films are remarkably congruent. A group of contemporary young people, infected with all of the ‘moral failings of the modern world’ – materialism, individualism, indifference to the past of their country, and so on – find 32

32 Ilya Kalinin themselves flung into the past and into the battles of the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War). Quickly, the crucible of Soviet history counteracts the effects of the post-Soviet disintegration of a unified collective identity – that negative post-Soviet ‘upgrade’ of personality. And in these films Russians, Ukrainians and Georgians, important antagonists of Russia in the post-Soviet space, once again turn out to be brothers in arms, having derived from the past the important experience of unity that is lacking in the present. ‘The Motherland is One – For All Time!’ is the pathos-filled tagline ofFog . The contemporary state politics of cultural identity are based on an argument that appeals to the historical past but articulates the cartography of the political space of the present, building on the idea of the eternal repro- ducibility of national ‘spiritual wellsprings’. The wellspring, in fact, becomes more important than anything that subsequently issues forth from it. Later developments, such as legal agreements, may always be revised. One does not, however, revise a wellspring. Hence, for example, when Putin declared in his address to the Federal Assembly Crimea to be the sacral centre of Russia, the cradle of Russian Christianity and of the united Russian state and nation, he remarked ‘this is how we will regard this matter today and forever’ (Putin 2014a). Similarly, a spiritual attachment to the soil becomes more important than any lawful possession of territory: the former is sanctified by tradition while the latter is merely affirmed by international law. The grammar of cultural identity renders the meaning of the law merely supplementary, in distinction from spirituality: ‘It is precisely on this spiritual soil10 that our ancestors first and forever recognized themselves as a single people. And this gives us every basis to say that for Russia, Crimea, ancient Korsuni, Chersonese and Sevastopol have enormous civilizational and sacral significance’ (Putin 2014a; see Figure 2.1). The sacral is predicated on eternity, the ‘civilizational matrix’ (another of Putin’s terms) is not subject to historical or political changes, time is a product of space, history a function of land, and politics an instrument for the realization of the internal potential of cultural identity. Karl Mannheim observed this same spatial-temporal metamorphosis, characteristic of conservative thought:

The conservative experiences the past as something equivalent to the present, and for this reason his conception of history is spatial, rather than temporal, for it foregrounds not sequence but simultaneity … History is rooted in the soil, and individuals are simply ephemeral Spinozan modes in this eternal ‘substance’ (Mannheim 1986: 176)

In this regard, it is important to note not only that the transhistorical substance of ‘the spiritual soil’ takes the place of historical change but also that the politics of identity founded on these conceptions views the subjects it operates on simply as products of a formula whereby the soil encounters a 33

The ‘Russian World’ 33

Figure 2.1 Monument to Vladimir the Great (who converted to Christianity at Chersones in Crimea). Statue raised at Borovitskaya Square (Moscow) in November 2016. Photo: Lena Jonson.

tradition that is rooted in it. History, which appears as the temporal continuation of soil, the form of its existence, is in fact the history of the continuous reproduction of tradition, while the subject of this form of history is doomed to the continuous return of the same, to the continuous repetition of that which was. This form of repetition, in which the subject is forced to re-experience over and over again situations already familiar to the point of tears, over and over again to react to the trials and tribulations of these situations, may be described as a form of neurotic compulsion. And here the politics of cultural identity are rooted in the social imaginary to which they appeal – often evoking a response – simultaneously taking the form of its symptom and of an attempt at its symbolic management. Nonetheless, the unity of the new Russian super-national identity is based not on the elimination of cultural differences but on an emphatic affirmation of the historical experience of the multinational state of the Russian empire. 34

34 Ilya Kalinin And this experience, in turn, has been described by Putin as ‘a process of mutual habituation, mutual interpenetration, mixing of peoples at the level of family, friends and working environment’ (2012). Such a construction of history creates an effective route for channelling the energy of post-colonial identification. Collective memory of the past, taken as a return to the origins of local national traditions, turns out to be a return to the ‘common home’ of the multinational Russian empire. In this way, the colonial legacy may be inscribed in a positive manner into the collective project of the multinational empire of memory, the subjects of which include all those peoples who, in Putin’s formulation, enter into the Russian ‘poly-ethnic civilization, bound together by a Russian cultural core’ (Putin 2012). In the case of Russia, the emphasis on sovereign subjectivity, understood not simply as administrative integration but as the political unity of the nation, immediately raises the question of the poly-cultural, poly-ethnic, multi-confessional imperial structure. In this connection, it becomes necessary to reconcile sovereign political unity with cultural diversity. (The word ‘culture’ in this context corresponds to a substantialistic and organic notion of ethnicity endowed with a clear civilizational identity.) The discursive mechanism for this reconciliation, as it turns out, is the appeal to a certain construction of ‘historical Russia’, that is to say, to Russia within the bounds of its long-standing, ancient borders, in which an equally long-standing history of ‘shared residence’ and ‘mutual interpenetration’ necessarily masks the imperial specificity of this cohabitation: ‘We will strengthen the ‘historical state’ that we inherited from our forefathers’ (Putin 2012). In this manner, the common past and the actualization of memory of this common past become precisely that synthetic argument that can eliminate the tension between proclamations of unity and the recognition of cultural ethnic and confessional multiplicity. Even more strikingly, this multiplicity is presented in patriotic discourse precisely as the basis of the stability of the unity so proposed. Hence, official discourse is, startlingly, not interested in countering the post-colonial tendency towards the rise in local traditions of memory, of ethnocentric discourse, or of the rewriting of local historical narratives. Rather, it co-opts this rise in the culture of memory in the service of its own interests: creating the paradoxical structure of a post-colonial narrative of empire in which new post-colonial symbols or lieux de mémoire are suffused with expressions of a common imperial unity. In this way, for instance, in contemporary Kalmykiya, the official rearticulation of the traumatic memory of repressions directed against Buddhism and of deportations has been inscribed in a politics of memory in which the traditional values of the Kalmyks – Buddhism and martial duty – have become elements of a monumental historical narrative that completely reconciles these values with the ‘voluntary incorporation’ of the Kalmyks into the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Consider the image of a monument to Lenin ornamented with lotus flowers and a Buddhist pagoda at the rear. This reflects the conclusion of a long and contentious story that took place over the course of the 35

The ‘Russian World’ 35 1990s, the period of post-colonial memory wars in post-Soviet Russia. Some national activists proposed destroying the monument to Lenin and building a Buddhist pagoda in this location. Their post-imperial opponents struggled to preserve the Soviet legacy. Yet while these discussions continued, a new era began. Now society has no need to choose between a universalist and imperial Soviet past and a post-Soviet national present because they may be taken as parts of a single whole, as parts of a common history. We arrive at a palimp- sest-like situation, in which Lenin is not replaced with a lotus flower but rather reconciled with it in the quite comic spectacle of their simultaneous presence. Hence, the emphasis on the return to the resources of local collective memory, which, in a typical post-colonial situation figures as an alternative to the official historical narrative of the metropolis, in the case of contemporary Russia acts as an organic part of the official discourse legitimizing the unity of the empire (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 The capital city of the Republic of Kalmykiya, Elista. Lenin Square. In this way, for instance, in contemporary Kalmykiya, the official rearticulation of the traumatic memory of repressions directed against Buddhism and of deportations has been inscribed in a politics of memory in which the traditional values of the Kalmyks – Buddhism and martial duty – have become elements of a monumental historical narrative that completely reconciles these values with the ‘voluntary incorporation’ of the Kalmyks into the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union (On this story see: Chetyrova 2011: 53–72). Photo: Lyubov Chetyrova. 36

36 Ilya Kalinin This is just one example, selected almost at random, of the inclusion of post-colonial discourses in the common historical narrative of the empire, which, naturally, no longer articulates itself by means of this political nomen- clature, preferring instead other, more complex terms such as ‘nation of nations’ (Tishkov 2013: 76) or ‘poly-ethnic civilization, bound together by a Russian cultural core’ (Putin 2012). Reinscribed by means of this new language, with its continuous appeal to ‘historical Russia’, and having passed though the era of collapse and loss of significant portions of territory, the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union have been transformed into an empire of memory that has returned to Russia not only its political subjectivity and sovereign unity but also its national idea, consisting of the repeated reacqui- sition of a forgotten ‘Eurasian mission’, which has gradually become the core of official geopolitical discourse. The mechanism for the assembly of this empire of memory consists of the organized channelling of a multitude of post-colonial ethno-cultural commemorations, the articulation of which gains a new burst of energy thanks to the ideological construction of ‘unity in diversity’, which is so central in the contemporary official discourse of Russian identity. The concept of unity in diversity, which regularly figures in both the speeches of Russia’s state leaders and the works of state establishment scholars, is called on to reconcile the unity of the fictitious federation with its imperial past and multinational present. On 9 January 2012, the then president, Dmitrii Medvedev, signed a decree ‘Concerning Commemoration in the Russian Federation of the Year of Russian History’. According to the laconic explanation of the decree’s basis, it was issued ‘in the interest of attracting the attention of society to Russian history and to the role of Russia in the world historical process’ (Medvedev 2012). In addition, the decree adduces a characteristic series of historical anniversaries, motivating the choice of 2012 in particular as the Year of Russian History. ‘Several important historical anniversaries fall in 2012: the bicentennial of victory in the Fatherland War of 1812, 1150 years from the founding of the Russian state and 150 years from the birth of P. A. Stolypin’ (Medvedev 2012). This collection of events is rather, shall we say, diverse, but its overall mnemonic referent is absolutely transparent: the sovereign unity of Russian statehood. The absence of a state ideology, it turns out, is an additional advantage, permitting an endless variation of the content of Russia’s ‘civilizational identity’, ‘cultural dominant’ and ‘unique experience of state development’ – all concepts taken from Putin’s essay on the nationalities question (Putin 2012). The vertical of power, which perpetually demonstrates its administrative inef- fectiveness, turns out to be an apt model for the construction of a national idea. On to the skewer of ‘love for the fatherland’, one can easily stick any event of the past or present, the single significance of which is proclaimed to be a correctly interpreted feeling of patriotism. The logic or syntax of this construction is subordinated to the grammar of the current political agenda and relies on the dictionary of historical legacy, comprehended in the manner 37

The ‘Russian World’ 37 of a tear-off calendar, proposing dates and anniversaries quite apart from their original historical context. Anything that can serve as the basis for a holiday is appropriate for inclusion in such a ‘civilizational identity’: the anniversaries of Pushkin and Dostoevskii, the first manned spaceflight, the emancipation of the serfs, the 850th anniversary of Moscow, the 300th of St Petersburg, the 1,000th anniversary of Kazan and Iaroslavl, the 1,000th anniversary of ‘the union of the Mordovan people with the peoples of the Russian state’, which was also celebrated that same year, or the 1,150th anniversary of Russian statehood. A telling example of this simultaneously fragmented and integral patriotic discourse is to be found in the main official monument to victory in the Great Patriotic War at Poklonnaya gora in Moscow. It can serve as a visual allegory for the structures of this mnemonic technology, in which a multitude of signifiers refers to one and the same signified. Here, we also encounter the ‘universal signifier’ –the bayonet of a Russian rifle, on which are stuck a collection of symbols, eclectic in form but identical in mnemonic content. These include the Greek goddess Nike, two cupids with trumpets (the so-called triumphal cupids of the Baroque era) and a statue of St George. Despite their comical dissonance, all three symbols relate to the imperial idea: Byzantium, the Baroque conception of empire and Muscovy. The spatial-symbolic context of the monument doubles its imperial, universalist pathos – the monument is surrounded by an Orthodox chapel, a mosque and a synagogue. All these signs are, ultimately, no longer linked to Antiquity or the Baroque, to Orthodoxy or to Islam. They are connected only with the idea of cultural, historical and confessional diversity that lies at the base of the historical unity of the empire. Returning to Putin’s 2012 programmatic essay, it was here that he presented at length his vision of the historical dialectic of unity and multiplicity:

In our country, in which a civil war continues to rage in the heads of many, in which the past is extremely politicized and ‘dissected’ into ideological quotations (frequently comprehended by different people in a diametri- cally opposite manner), we are in need of very subtle cultural therapy. We need a cultural politics that, on all levels, from school textbooks to historical documentary films, can form a comprehension of the unity of the historical process, in which the representatives of every ethnicity, the descendant of the ‘red commissar’ and the ‘white officer’ alike, can all see their own place. So that they will all feel themselves to be heir to that ‘one for all’, contradictory, tragic, but great history of Russia. (Putin 2012)

The ‘cultural therapy’ proposed by Putin consists not of the critical contextualization of quotations, derived from the past, in order to establish their authorship and structural meaning, but rather the elimination of the quotation marks, transforming multiplicity into the unity of a ‘one for all’ history of the Russian state. In this way, the fragmented collection of random historical 38

38 Ilya Kalinin metonyms represented in previous examples is now transformed into the basis of an integral metaphor for the unity of the history of the Russian state. This is no longer the ‘patriotism of despair’, as Serguei Oushakine described the post-Soviet cultural aphasia of the 1990s in his book of the same name (Oushakine 2009) but, rather, a patriotism of historical eclecticism, lying at the foundation of the Russian empire of memory. This internally eclectic empire of memory – or, to be precise, empire of constructed national memory, artificially uniting contradictory historical and cultural traditions – finds unmediated rhetorical and ideological form in the conception of the ‘Russian World’. Freud defines the neurotic symptom as a symbol that may be correlated with the repressed past. The repressed seeks to ‘return’ to the present and does so in the form of dreams, painful symptoms, verbal slips and world division behavioural compulsions (Freud 1971: 230–78, 348–67). By these analytical optics the ideological construction of the ‘Russian World’ is the dream of the post-imperial subject, longing for that which was lost. As Minister of Culture Medinskii noted in this regard, in his address at the Fifth Global Congress of Compatriots, ‘we all speak, think and dream in Russian’ (Kolesnikov 2015). Or, in other words, the Russian World is a pun that relates to the unconscious, a spontaneous, or in fact intentional, slip of the tongue that makes it possible to ignore the normative grammar of state borders. In precisely the same manner, the common concepts of patriotic discourse, such as ‘Russian culture’, ‘spirituality’, ‘the historical past’ and ‘traditional values’, are all deformed: their past lexical meanings are effaced as these concepts begin to operate precisely as that form of mnemonic symbol that Freud described as equivalent to the neurotic symptom. This form of ideological construction may be described as composed of phenomena that belong at one and the same time to two regimes of unconscious work: the unintentional verbal slip, which expresses suppressed ideas and desires (Freud 1960) and the technique of wordplay, the goal of which is the achievement of pleasure arising as a result of ‘short circuits’ between distant semantic levels that economize the expenditure of psychic energy (Freud 1964). Thanks to a ‘witty’ rhetorical substitution, ‘Russian culture’ in the context of the official discourse of patriotic hegemony is transformed into a conceptual palliative or a subconscious euphemism for ‘Russian empire’. Consider, for instance, an example of the subtle manner in which the language of national spirituality is recoded into the language of the imperial past:

The historic reunification of Crimea and Sevastopol with Russia is now accomplished. For our country, for our people, this event carries enormous significance. This is because in Crimea live our people; this territory is strategically important; because the spiritual springhead of our many-faced but monolithic Russian nation and centralized Russian (‘rossiisskoe’) state is located precisely here. Indeed, it was exactly here, in Crimea, in ancient Chersonese, or as it was called by the Russian 39

The ‘Russian World’ 39 chroniclers, Korsuni, that Prince Vladimir was himself baptized, after which he baptized all of Rus’. (Putin 2014a)

On the one hand, in the frame of this argument, national history gains real, substantial content, in opposition to the ‘juridical formalities’ of state borders. On the other hand, the spiritual wellspring and the spiritual soil turn out to be factors in ‘the strategic importance of the territory’. The reunification of lands is described as a reestablishment of the unity of history (a ‘historic reunification’), while the unity of cultural identity (‘our people’) appears as a factor of territorial expansion, baptism grants its blessings to the monolithic solidity of the nation and the centralization of the state, and the spiritual borders of the Russian World turn out to be more durable than international political borders.11 Cultural legacy and political ambitions become elements of a shared topology, like a Mobius strip, in which one side melds imperceptibly with another in a single surface

‘Russian World’ and two conceptions of border If 2014 was a year of sharply aggressive foreign policy and of economic crisis, at the level of social discourse, as initiated by the powers that be, it was also a year of discussion of the foundations of state cultural policy and, in general, an official Year of Culture. Clearly, it was precisely cultural politics, as well as the politics of cultural identity that undergird it, that were responsible for the development of crises in both economic and foreign policy. This is connected with the fact that the space of ‘Russian culture’, not in the sense of a multiplicity of actually existing practices and institutions but rather as a construction of state patriotic discourse, began to function as a screen, of sorts, on which were projected various complexes and desires, including imperial desire. For the political elites and their political technology personnel, this may well have been a result of conscious intent. For some part of society as a whole, it was probably the result of unconscious reaction. ‘Russkii mir’ or ‘Russian World’, ‘historical Russia’, ‘Russia as a civilizational unit, around which neighbouring nations consolidate’, ‘Russia as a special form of spirituality’ – all of this is the conceptual, rhetorical topoi of the contemporary discourse of national identity, which one way or another relates to a complex of lost empire – a repressed complex that has not been properly worked through and that therefore returns again and again. In the wake of the annexation of Crimea, and at the moment of the escalation of conflict in Donbass, there arose new collective reactions to events, provoked by the powers but not entirely under their control: a sense of collective unity, sensations of collective bodily experience, shot through with the mass effect of a reestablishment of historical justice, the return of a lost situation and political subjectivity. All of this might be described as the symptoms of the birth of a nation. Beyond the events just mentioned, this all came 40

40 Ilya Kalinin to be as a result of a peculiar ricochet phenomenon – as a reaction to the Ukrainian national uplift. The frame of events created by the seventieth anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War granted additional weight and a grand historical dimension to this collective sense of national unity. However, the specificity of the official language that has shaped what was in many ways a spontaneous movement of nation formation has a special character of its own, one that is in reality in opposition to this movement. The current Russian elites are interested not in the birth of a nation but in the reproduction of state patriotism. National uplift, with all of its negative and at times ugly features, must be understood as an aspect of modernization that sets in motion social forces under the control of neither the elites nor the state bureaucracy – all the more so when both the latter are rooted in the imperial past. It was for this reason that this wave of mass effect, with its potential dangers for the political status quo, was quickly channelled into discursive dispositions that at one and the same time relate to the imperial idea and mask this idea beneath the patriotic rhetoric of national cultural identity. ‘Russian culture’ in the frame of the official discourse of patriotic hegemony is for this reason, as noted above, transformed into a conceptual politically correct palliative or the unconscious euphemism of ‘Russian empire’. Let us return to one of the concepts with which this chapter began, a concept that has been applied to describe the evolution of political and socio- cultural regimes in Russia in recent years – that of the conservative turn. To my mind, this concept is quite appropriate, but requires certain correctives. As I demonstrate above, contemporary Russian conservatism should be discussed not in terms of a classical ideological formation but rather in relation to the effects of the unconscious acting out (in the psychoanalytic sense) as well as the conscious enactment (in the political-technological sense) of past historical experience. What is more, the crucial mechanism that sets in motion the return of the repressed and the repetition of experience consists of the intentional activity of political elites working to channel social tensions (political, economic, etc.) by means of a cultural politics of identity that activates the resources of the historical past of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. This mechanism of return works thanks to the actualization of precisely the same discourse on external enemies and internal traitors that has already been canonized as the dominant language for description of perestroika and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. (Furthermore, in order to intensify even more the traumatic mobilizing resonance with the historical past, the even more authoritative discourse of ‘fascism standing at Russia’s borders’ is activated.) An additional aspect of this political mechanics is found in the mobilizing resource of fear for one’s cultural identity, which is presented as under threat of loss or destruction if it is not reproduced by means of an extreme and active policy. The dialectics of the conservative appeal to tradition are always second hand, since they are in fact a reaction to modernization. The interesting thing, however, is that conservative identity politics, in appealing to traditions, 41

The ‘Russian World’ 41 historical memory and cultural legacies of an exclusively positive character, turns out to be answering a real or frequently imaginary negative horizon of loss. The generation of these fears of loss is used as an instrument to mobilize society, which must rise in defence of that which is threatened. In other words, the value of tradition is so enormous precisely because others are trying to steal it from us. At the bottom of this fear lies the repeated and insistent reproduction of the conceptual frame by which the collapse of the Soviet Union is described as a collective historical trauma. Certainly, the collapse of the Soviet Union constituted a major historical transformation that was accompanied by a sharp decline in living standards and a loss of social status and of material savings for a quite significant part of society. A considerable sub-segment of the population symbolized these events as a historical defeat, as the loss of the historical past and of the geopolitical authority tied to it, or – in the more conspiracy-theoretical version – as a theft of that past which had been engineered by alien forces and their internal allies. In the 1990s, this language of description for these events had a popular, if also marginal, character – at least from the point of view of the political and even socio- cultural mainstream. However, from the beginning of the 2000s, this frame of interpretation began more and more to acquire the status of an official position of the state and of the political elites at its helm: ‘The collapse of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’ (Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, 25 April 2005). One might say that with this pronouncement, a new political era in the history of Russia began. The neurotic frame that exploits the evaluative topoi of catastrophe and the traumatic effects of modernization leads to a whole chain of unconscious conceptualizations, which are endlessly repeated in contemporary patriotic discourse in the full panoply of its political and ideological variations. These may be formulated as the following propositions, founded on the fear, anxiety, phobias and sense of inadequacy that are typical of the neurotic subject: ‘the cultural legacy is that which is threatened by some other’, ‘historical memory is that which one must protect from others’, ‘history is that which enemies seek to rewrite’, ‘the past is that which they want to steal from us’. The reproduction of this unconscious optic, founded on the constant presence of danger from abroad that threatens the national identity, becomes one of the most effective means of mobilization and de-modernization. Fear and recognition of the external threat forge out of cultural communities, professional iden- tities and the multitude of various social groups – a unity of the nation, or at least a majority, that speaks in the name of the nation. First comes the all- pervading suspicion of one group of another, then social anomie and finally a new assembly of this internally atomized majority. The exploitation of trauma, continuously raising the fear of losing the historical past, is effective on the basis of a real loss of territory. Any revision or reinterpretation of the national-historical narrative, any problematization of 42

42 Ilya Kalinin the official historical doctrine, is taken as a threat to territorial integrity and a spectre of further territorial losses. The historical past or the cultural legacy, conceptually and rhetorically bound to the land, gain the status of ‘national strategic interests of the state’. In this way, at some fundamental and in part unconscious level, beneath the declaration of defence of the historical past from foreign aggression lies a desire to return lost territories. It is precisely this desire, which at times gains the character of a conscious intention, that under- girds such pronouncements as: ‘we will not allow you to rewrite the results of the Second World War’ or ‘we will not allow you to steal our victory’. And so, in a condition of shortage of real economic and military-political resources, in a moment of shortage of the desire to modernize, the conservative resource of Russian culture was activated and began to operate as a mnemonic symptom linked to the historical past of the empire, with political greatness and with past territorial boundaries. I quote, once again, the text of The Foundations of State Cultural Policy:

It was culture, precisely culture, that ensured the unity of Russia’s multinational people, and in many ways defined Russia’s influence in the world. Today, in the context of the intensification of the global competition of ideas and information and in the context of the as yet to be overcome consequences of the national catastrophes of the 20eth century, this characteristic of Russian (rossiiskaia) culture becomes decisive for the future of the country. (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki 2014)

Mention of the unity of the multinational people of Russia, founded on the special qualities of Russian culture, raises the question of the boundaries of the polity; and here arises an interesting paradox. The consolidation of society is one of the main goals of Russian politics today, but such a consolidation is possible only as a result of the inscription of definite borders. As Emile Durkheim wrote, the creation of social boundaries is not a consequence of social integration. Rather, it is one of its necessary conditions. These boundaries are being drawn, but they describe not the external borders of the polity, but rather its internal borders, which divide society into a majority that is not ready to recognize the presence of external borders, and a minority that in an act of ‘national treason’ calls for their observance. In this connection, it is interesting to examine how the official doctrine of cultural politics changed while it was under legislative consideration. Originally, it presented a solid, broadly developed position according to which culture was defined as a mechanism for distinguishing betweenours and theirs. The Ministry of Culture’s original proposals for the foundations of state cultural policy articulated – granted, in characteristically odious manner – a clear distinction, defining the figure of the Russianother in the following manner: ‘Russia is not Europe’ (Ministerstvo kultury izlozhilo 2014). The political stand-off with the West, which was unfolding in a dynamic manner at that time, 43

The ‘Russian World’ 43 provided the rational motivation for a politics of identity founded on such a pronouncement. At the time they were under consideration, the Ministry of Culture’s anti-Western, anti-European and anti-modern proposals reflected entirely adequately the then current political context, which consisted of an ever more intense conflict. However, the final text of the foundations, signed by Vladimir Putin at the end of 2014, gave preference not to the logic of distinction and the inscription of external borders but to a different mechanism for the articulation of national cultural identity. This mechanism emphasizes the historical tradition and its openness abroad, beyond the boundaries of the Russian Federation – and Russia’s foreign policy has stuck to this same logic. The final text of the foundations softened the pronouncement concerning cultural opposition, raising once again the question of the national identity of Russia and its boundaries and activating the older syntax of the language of empire, endowed, to be sure, with a vocabulary of cultural specificity, geography and historical experience:

As a result of Russia’s geographical position, as well as its multinational and multi-confessional nature, it has developed and continues to develop as a country that unites two worlds – the East and the West. The historical path of Russia was defined by its cultural particularity, by the specificities of the national mentality, by the foundational values of Russian society. A unique historical record of mutual influences, mutual enrichment and mutual respect has taken shape – and for centuries it has been on this foundation, naturally, that Russian statehood has been built. (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki 2014)

Whereas the language of structural distinctions continues to be activated in relation to the Western other, the language of organic unity, located in the depths of the cultural-historical tradition, is applied in relation to those countries that at one time or another formed part of the Russian empire or Soviet Union, or of its sphere of interest. Note, too, that distinct cultural logics for the generation of identity are woven together: First, the symbolic distinction, ‘I’/’Other’, in which the imagined conception of the Other takes the form of a negative, mirror-image double that may be used in the formation of one’s own ‘I’. Second, the symbolic invention of one’s own past, in which the basis for the formation of the ‘I’ is the constructed ‘organic tradition’, which elimi- nates all internal distinctions between elements that are drawn into the space of ‘mine/ours’.12 In our case, the context of opposition, which, it would seem, should have led to the activation of a more rational logic for articulation of one’s own identity in the frame of comparisons and oppositions with the relevant Other, in reality leads to the strengthening of a more archaic and more manipulative logic of political archaeology, which discovers the cultural identity of the ‘I’ in the depths of historical tradition – depths which are not subject to rational 44

44 Ilya Kalinin oversight. To apply the language of psychoanalysis: in the end the political unconscious of the self-actualizing subject no longer depends on the restrain- ing factor of the reality principle, which stands behind the image of the Other. Truth to tell, the figure of the other does describe certain boundaries – boundaries against which unfolds the process of production of one’s own collective identity. This Other, of course, is of an imaginary, constructed nature, but precisely for this reason it figures as no less than the border that the ‘I’ comes to know as real and significant. By contrast, the invention of tradition –by which the collective subject strives to find a cultural wellspring for its own identity and to affirm its position in political space –is based on the pleasure principle, which removes the tension between ours and theirs that results from the situation of conflict and the necessity of self-definition. Finally, the Other falls away here thanks to the genealogical imagination, which negates distinctions and reduces the heterogeneity of historical change in the service of the reconstruction of a unified, singular entity. And so the return to the spiritual wellspring makes it possible to be suffused with a feeling of unity and to legitimize the ‘return home of Crimea’, which is to say a return to the spiritual wellspring or to unity with Russia. Hence, the appeal to the spiritual wellspring turns out to be an evasive manoeuvre, the internal psychological defence of the post-imperial subject, that allows it through a characteristically narcissistic non-differentiation between ‘I’ and the ‘Other’ to defer into the future the need to define one’s own boundaries. In so far as the boundaries of the ‘Russian World’ remain undefined, which is unavoidable, given that the idea of expansion is implicitly inscribed in this construction, the relevant Other is not available in post-Soviet space. And in a situation of the absence of this proximate, post-Soviet Other, the instrument for the creation of a national identity and of the borders of the polity is found in political archaeology, the narcissistic projection of the ideal image of the ‘I’ into the historical past of cultural tradition. Encountering difficulties with expansion in space, the imperial narcissist realizes his desire for recognition in the depths of the historical time that he himself invented. Imagining a triumphal past, he corrects his deficit of geopolitical power in the present. In this sense, the conception of the ‘Russian World’ turns out to be a reaction to the fear of losing one’s own imaginary past, on the one hand, and a symptom of the absence of precise conceptions concerning one’s own identity and boundaries, on the other. Posing the frame of national cultural identity, this conception blocks the very possibility of achieving understanding of where the borders of Russia actually lie – of where it ends. Whereas the content of the concept ‘Russia’ becomes exclusively spiritual, its extent becomes well nigh boundless, while the question of boundaries, including state boundaries, is translated into the arena of cultural politics.

In his book, Uses of the Other, Iver Neumann describes collective identity as a variant of the productive forces: it ‘offers the possibility of activity and 45

The ‘Russian World’ 45 structures the social field, presenting the opportunity to realize one or another action’ (Neumann 1999: 237). It would seem that the cultural politics of today that aim for the creation of a national identity are a means to make the transition to this contemporary form of productive forces. Yet here we must note the following: the industrial era was based on an exploitation of natural resources, whereas the post-industrial focuses on the activation of culture as a resource. While in the first case technologies were based on energy, in the second they are based on information. Now information is described in the same terms as were applied in the past to energy. To cite Foundations of State Cultural Politics once more: ‘The Culture of Russia is the same sort of legacy as are natural resources. In the contemporary world, culture becomes a significant resource for socio- economic development, which makes it possible to ensure the leading position of our country in the world’ (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kul’turnoi politiki 2014). The problem is that, confronting the challenges of the post-industrial epoch, Russia – its political regime and the socio-cultural order tied to it – while it may make the transition to this new resource, is working with it without recognizing it as a commonly available, open resource that multiplies in direct proportion to its use. That is a consequence of working with information according to the same laws that were articulated for working with energy. In other words, this is working with culture on the basis of political-economic habits and behaviours formed while working with natural resources. In Marxist terms, the arrival of a new productive force – cultural identity – has not yet brought about a shift in the relations of production. The modernization that was initiated has stalled in its early industrial stage, corresponding to the construction of national states.

Notes

1 I am extremely grateful to the Aleksanteri Institute (Helsinki University) Fellowship (2017) that gave me an opportunity to accomplish this paper. 2 Recognition of the need to develop a national idea arose in the immediate post- Soviet era following the presidential elections of 1996, when it became clear to those close to the president (who had won the elections only with great difficulty and not without recourse to ‘administrative resources’) that a new social consensus could not be founded on anti-communist propaganda alone. It was at this moment that a decision was made at the core of the presidential administration to form a working group to gather and analyse the ideas of Russians concerning the national idea. In July of that year, Boris Eltsin, in a characteristically grand gesture, publicly gave this team of political scientists and sociologists one year in which to determine ‘which national idea, which national ideology, is the most important for Russia’ (Eltsin 1996). 3 On this vision see: Oakeshott 1991. 4 For this reason, it is no accident that activists in various societies for the reenactment of military historical events have played such an important role in the genuine political and military events of recent years. Their personal involvement in and manner of working with the past coincided with the dominant 46

46 Ilya Kalinin discursive formations of the moment and the political practices of their realization. As early as 2010, the transparent passage from the reconstruction of war to war itself was the core subject of the filmWe Are from the Future II, directed by A. Samokhvalov. On the conceptual implications of the temporal shifts in a number of recent films, see Kalinin (2013: 103–11). 5 Commemorative celebrations and the mnemonic principles that structure them constitute perhaps the most spectacular, performative and affectively loaded means of such symbolic utilization and administration, working simultaneously at the collective and individual levels of signification. On this form of affective management in relation to the chief commemorative holiday in post-Soviet Russia, see Oushakine (2013: 269–302). 6 See, for example, the recently published collection of materials ‘Voina s pamyat- nikami proiskhodit tam, gde vse uzhe gotovy voevat s lyudmi’. Available at http:// snob.ru/selected/entry/98333?v=1443621972. 7 From the website of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. Available at http://mkrf.ru/press-center/news/ministerstvo/ministr-kultury-rf-vladimir-medinskiy-otkroet-pamyatnik-knyazyam-ryuriku-i-olegu. 8 ‘Vladimir Medinskii otkryl pamyatnik osnovatelyam Rusi’, website of the Russian Military Historical Society, 9 September 2015. Available at http://histrf.ru/ru/rvio/ activities/news/item-2001. 9 See the general work on this debate by Lev Klein, who himself was an active participant in this multi-century disputation (Klein 2009). 10 The reference is to the adoption of Christianity. 11 For a psychoanalytical analysis of the public discourse and official rhetoric surrounding the annexation of Crimea, see Platt (2017: 134–49). 12 See Prozorov (2011: 1273–93).

References Chetyrova, Lyubov (2011) ‘Mo(nu)menty proshlogo: nelineinaya istoriya vzaimosvi- azei v Kalmykii’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas: Debaty o politike i culture, 6: 53–72. Eltsin, Boris (1996) ‘Eltsin o natsionalnoi idee’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 13 July. Etkind, Aleksander (2013) Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of Unburied, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Freud, Sigmund (1960) ‘The Psychopathology of Everyday Life’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. from the German under the general ed. of James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey, Alan Tyson, and Angela Richards, 24 vols., London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, vol. VI. —— (1964) ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VIII. —— (1971) ‘Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III) (1916–1917)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVI. Kalinin, Ilya (2013) ‘Past-in-the-Future/Future-in-the-Past: sovetskoe budushchee postsovetskogo proshlogo’, Seans, 55/56: 103–11. Available at http://seance.ru/blog/ esse/future_in_the_past/. Klein, Lev (2009) Spor o varyagakh: Istoria protivostoyania i argumenty storon, St Petersburg: Evrazia. Kolesnikov, Andrei (2015) ‘Voistinu kongress’, Kommersant, 5 November. Available at www.kommersant.ru/doc/2847377. 47

The ‘Russian World’ 47 Mannheim, Karl (1986) Conservatism: A Contribution to the Sociology of Knowledge, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. First published 1925. Medvedev, Dmitrii (2012) Ukaz o provedenii goda Rossiiskoi istorii. Available at http:// kremlin.ru/events/president/news/14238. Military Historical Society (2015) ‘Vladimir Medinskii otkryl pamyatnik osnovatelyam Rusi’, 12 September. Available at http://histrf.ru/ru/rvio/activities/news/item-2001. Ministry of Culture, “Ministr kultury RF Vladimir Medinskiy otkroet pamyatnik knyazyam Ryuriku i Olegu.” Available at http://mkrf.ru/press-center/news/ministerstvo/ministr-kultury-rf-vladimir-medinskiy-otkroet-pamyatnik-knyazyam-ryuriku- i-olegu. Ministerstvo kultury izlozhilo ‘Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki’ (2014), Izvestiya, 10 April. Available at http://izvestia.ru/news/569016. Neumann, Iver (1999) Uses of the Other: The ‘East’ in European Identity Formation, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Oakeshott, Michael Joseph (1991) Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. London: Meuthen. Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki (2014) Available at www.pravo.gov.ru/proxy/ ips/?docbody=&link_id=1&nd=102364581. Oushakine, Serguei Alex (2009) The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War and Loss in Russia, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. —— (2013) ‘Remembering in Public: On the Affective Management of History’, Ab Imperio, 1: 269–302. Platt, Kevin M. F. (2016) ‘Tselostnost i fragmenty naroda: k psikhoistorii russkogo patriotizma’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas: Debaty o politike i kulture, 6 (110): 134–49. Prozorov, Sergei (2011) ‘The Other as Past and Present: Beyond the Logic of “Temporal Othering” in IR Theory’, Review of International Studies, 37 (3): 1273–93. Putin, Vladimir (2012) ‘Rossiya: Natsionalnyi vopros’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 23 January. Available at http://www.ng.ru/politics/2012-01-23/1_national.html. —— (2014a) Poslanie Prezidenta Federalnomu Sobraniyu, 4 December. Available at www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/47173. —— (2014b) Pryamaya liniya s Vladimirom Putinym. Available at www.kremlin.ru/ events/president/news/page/151. Shklovskii, Viktor (1990) ‘Vyshla kniga Mayakovskogo ‘Oblako v shtanakh’ (1915)’, in Gamburgskii schyot: Stati – Vospominaniya – Esse (1914–1933 ), Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel. Tishkov, Valerii (2013) Rossiiskii narod: istoriya i smysl nazionalnogo samosoznania, Moscow: Nauka. Verdery, Katherine (1999) The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change, New York: Columbia University Press. 48

3 The new conservative cultural policy and visual art

Lena Jonson

The effects of Putin’s new political-ideological agenda of 2012 were immediately felt in the country. Many perceived a possible threat to cultural life and to the freedoms of creativity and the free exchange of ideas. The Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinskii, appointed in May 2012, was well known as a conservative and regarded by critics as an exponent of a Russian ‘Weimar resentment’, that is of feelings of national indignation over the lost position of a once great power (Morozov 2012). Against this background, it seemed likely that the contemporary arts would be targeted by the government. Russian visual art, in particular, had distinguished itself by its independent, innovative and critical approach, and many now feared for the future. This chapter discusses the new state cultural policy and how visual art was targeted by the authorities in order to redirect it on to a conservative trajectory. The first section outlines the major state documents on cultural policy, and the second and third sections analyse the art-policy scene: how the art scene was restructured and the policy behind the art exhibitions in large state museums in 2015–16.

The new conservative cultural policy Before 2012, the Ministry of Culture had accepted that cultural diversity and pluralism were necessary for society’s development (cf. Moroz 2016: 80). The active policy pursued by Medinskii after May 2012 was therefore a complete change. Medinskii immediately embarked on a reorganization of cultural institutions. Citing economic efficiency and strict management, he merged, reorganized or closed institutions, replaced respected directors with young, loyal managers, and used the allocation of resources as a carrot or stick to persuade institutions to follow state policy.1 He demonstrated an interest in hands-on decision-making early on.2 His combination of appointing loyal people, steering the flow of resources and setting up councils of selected experts was seen as an effort to gain control over cultural life and redesign it according to the new conservative paradigm. In the years that followed, policy documents formulated a policy that asked culture to contribute to the consolidation of the state and the unity 49

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 49 of the nation and to help educate the population in accordance with patriotic and conservative values. Guidelines for a new state cultural policy were signed by Putin in December 2014. The language of the presidential decree, Foundations for a New State Cultural Policy (Osnovy 2014), had been modified in comparison with draft documents, in particular one by the Ministry of Culture from the previous April (Izvestiya 2014), which had been heavily criticized, but also a draft by the Presidential Administration from May (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2014).3 The presidential decree avoided formulations such as ‘Russia is not Europe’, did not explicitly reject the ‘liberal Western postulate’ of universal values and no longer openly argued against ‘tolerance’ and ‘multiculturalism’, which had been part of the draft by the ministry of culture. Nonetheless, the major theses remained the same: the idea of a unique Russian civilization and a matrix of Russia’s specific traditional and conservative values. The final document strongly emphasized the role of the Orthodox religion in forming the national value system, while recognizing other religions.4 Medinskii later portrayed Putin as the true defender of traditional European values, quoting the latter’s accusation that many Western countries had abandoned their roots in Christian values (Medinskii 2014). The view of culture in the documents was highly instrumental. The purpose of state-supported culture was to help to consolidate the nation by strengthening national values and fostering the moral orientation of the individual.5 Culture was defined as the spiritual experience of the country and the ‘collection of moral and ethical values’ that was to be handed on to future generations. The major task was to fortify patriotism and national pride through the education system (school curricula, history textbooks), the media and cultural outputs (film, theatre, the visual arts, etc.).6 It seemed no coincidence that the April 2014 policy draft by the Ministry of Culture had referred to Sergei Kara-Murza. Kara-Murza had formulated his ideas for a counteroffensive against the liberal paradigm of the Eltsin regime in the early 1990s. These were published in 2000 in his widely read book Manipulation of the Mind (Manipulatsiya soznaniem) (Kara- Murza 2008: 56–7), in which he alleged that people with liberal ideas had dominated the cultural sphere, giving them access to channels for manipu- lating people’s minds. He blamed such people for the break-up of the Soviet Union and traced the ideas of perestroika back to the 1960s and a revolt by the elite of the intelligentsia in the humanities against the Soviet state. He compared their activities to a small but well-organized army of aliens against a large, peaceful population that was entirely unprepared for such a confrontation. Favouring the ‘Soviet project’, Kara-Murza saw liberalism and ‘Westism’ as alien to Russian thought. He was against everything that he identified as the heritage of the Enlightenment. His book provided a common platform for various conservative ideas, and his call for a counteroffensive seemed to be answered in 2014 in the pages of the Russian policy documents. 50

50 Lena Jonson In December 2015, a presidential decree on the national security strategy spelled out the strategic tasks for culture as part of national security:

To maintain and strengthen traditional Russian spiritual-moral values as the foundations of Russian society, to educate children and young people in the spirit of citizenship; to maintain and develop the all-Russian identity of the peoples of the Russian Federation as of a united cultural territory of the country; and to increase the role of Russia in the international humanitarian and cultural space (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2015)

The educational task of culture in countering threats from external and internal forces attempting to undermine Russian society and values was repeated in the government paper, ‘Strategy on State Cultural Policy to 2030’, adopted in February 2016 (Strategiya 2016). In it, the most dangerous threat to the domestic situation was described in terms of an upcoming humanitarian crisis (involving an ongoing ‘severance of previously stable social relations (friends, family, neighbours) and increasing individualism’) that the enemy was exploiting (Strategiya 2016: 6). The broader threat image was painted as an:

… erosion of traditional Russian spiritual-normative values and a weakening of the unity of the multinational peoples of the Russian Federation through the provision of an external cultural and infor- mational expansion (including the spread of low quality mass culture products), permissive propaganda and violence, racial, national and religious intolerance … efforts to falsify Russian and world history, infringements of cultural objects. (Strategiya 2016: 6–7)

The role of culture was thus formulated in dramatic terms as defending national sovereignty against efforts to undermine Russian society and values, by playing the role of healer in society and transferrer of traditional Russian values and norms from one generation to the next.

Cultural policy and visual art It seemed obvious that Medinskii would target the critical strand of contemporary culture. When it came to visual art, he did not understand it, and he did not like it. The ministry financed the lion’s share of the 2013 Moscow Art Biennale, and Medinskii spoke at its opening. His comments about the major exhibit of the biennale received huge media attention,

I kept thinking: Why doesn’t anyone shout “the king is naked!”? Why do we, under the label of contemporary art, have to see something abstract – cubic, clumsy, in the form of a pile of bricks? And, moreover, it is paid for 51

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 51 with public money! Not to mention that it is incomprehensible to the vast majority of the inhabitants of Russia. (Yablokov 2013)

In 2014, Medinskii’s deputy, Vladimir Aristarkhov, told how the ministry planned to sponsor art that was beautiful and has a ‘positive impact on people’ (Lapina 2014). His words were seen as an indication of where the ministry was heading – towards favouring a more traditional, figurative, decorative and optimistic art.7 The state had paid no attention to the arts in the 1990s. The break-up of the Soviet Union drastically cut financial support for culture, and the state more or less withdrew from this sphere. Still the art scene flourished in the 1990s. A slogan by the Moscow art Actionists from the time noted that: ‘There is no money, and money isn’t necessary.’ Throughout the first decade or more of Putin’s rule, the Ministry of Culture maintained this low profile. It did not meddle in what it considered a field of the freedom of art. The limited financial resources of the state also contributed to the passivity of the ministry in relation to the cultural sector. The Moscow art scene found its feet by relying to a large extent on private money. It was private capital that made possible the expansion of the early 2000s. Galleries such as the Gelman, Aidan, Ridzhina and XL expanded; new galleries opened; centres for art or art and design were created, such as for example the Winzavod, Garazh, Art Play, Fabrika and later Art Strelka, and the museums of private collectors opened, such as the Ekaterina Foundation and Art4Russia. The expansion of private money into the cultural sector took place in cooperation with the state in the sense that the city authorities put out on lease old factory complexes were converted into art and design centres. Although the government funded the vast majority of the costs of the Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art, which began in 2005, private-sector businesses also provided sponsorship. This was a highly dynamic period in the development of the art scene. The only state institution for contemporary art was the State Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA), a federal structure created in 1992 that had seven branches around the country in 2015. The NCCA was at a disadvan- tage, however, as it was provided with only a small budget for activities and none at all for building a collection. Nonetheless, the NCCA developed as an independent and serious art institution with ambitions to become the Russian equivalent of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. When in the early 2010s the state began planning for the building of a state museum for contemporary art, the NCCA seemed the natural host institution. Thus, before 2012, an infrastructure of contemporary art had developed in which the state played a supportive, albeit aloof and non-interventionist role. The ministry accepted that cultural diversity and pluralism were necessary for society’s development (cf. Moroz 2016: 80). 52

52 Lena Jonson Against this background, the Medinskii policy turn raised concerns in the art community that the ministry would adopt measures according to its new conservative agenda. These misgivings were confirmed in November 2015 when the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, which is financed by the presidential administration, published a quasi-official report,Contemporary Art as an Instrument for Influencing Russian Policy. The report directly accused contemporary art – visual art, first and foremost, but also contemporary film, theatre and literature – of being provocative and against Russian values (Vlaskin 2015). Art managers, gallery owners and theatre and film producers were directly accused of using art as a political instrument to promote pro-Western values. These ‘provocateurs in art’ were named as the gallery owner Marat Gelman and artists from Voina and Pussy Riot, as well as Petr Pavlenskii, the film director Andrei Zvyagintsev and the theatre director Konstantin Bogomolov. How were they provocative? The answer was clear. They were ‘Depressive, denied authority and detested the classical canons of art’, and, moreover, such kind of art was becoming the norm (Vlaskin 2015). The author viewed this art as part of a ‘global competition of worldviews, a collision in the struggle for influence over the minds of the masses between Western postmodernism and the traditional conservative values of Russia’. The report repeated views expressed in official conservative statements. The ministry now redefined the concept ‘contemporary art’ to denote all living artists.8 From such a wide category, the ministry could choose any art of its liking. There was also a redefinition of the conditions under which the state would support art projects. Medinskii argued that state cultural policy must be in line with the opinions of the broad mass of the population and not be controversial. Art paid for by the taxpayer was not supposed to create tension or conflict in society because people do not like art that causes scandal. Instead, art must be appreciated by a broad section of the population (Izvestiya 2015a). In its efforts to redirect the art sphere into more loyal trajectories, the Ministry of Culture used two instruments: a restructuring of the art scene and active encouragement of an exhibition policy in state museums that favoured the new conservative paradigm.

Restructuring the art scene After 2012, the private galleries lost the initiative in setting the agenda for the art scene (Palazhchenko 2016). The most important galleries, Gelman, Aidan and XL, stopped working as commercial galleries in April 2012 (The Village 2012). The situation for most of the remaining private galleries deteriorated in the more complicated political environment. The initiative was instead taken by state museums. Although the budgets of such museums were also cut against the background of the deteriorating economic situation, they were still better off than private galleries with regard to resources, exhibition venues and access to specialists (Palazhchenko 2016). Nonetheless, the situation for the state museums was also changing as they were forced to find external 53

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 53 sources of financing in the form of sponsorship and partnerships with business corporations.9 The NCCA, as the only state institution for contemporary art, came under pressure from the Ministry but continued to pursue an independent policy. Financing became an important instrument for the Ministry in its efforts to redirect the art scene. State directives and priorities were determining factors for grants such as presidential grants or government awards. A major cri- terion in the selection process was the degree to which a project could attract a large audience. Thus, contemporary art projects had little chance of receiving money in competition with projects by the traditionally conservative artists’ unions and associations. Private funds were set up in close cooperation with the government to provide a budgetary supplement for art projects to the liking of the state. The Fund for the Development of Contemporary Art was created for this purpose in June 2015. Initiated by the Kremlin, and under the supervision of Vyacheslav Volodin in the Presidential Administration, it was registered as a public organization to be financed by private means (Kommersant 2015a). Its purpose, according to Ivan Demidov, the appointed head of the fund, was to initiate and support projects in the visual arts, film and theatre in ‘the search for a new language’ that is appropriate for present-day society (Izvestiya 2015b). It is no coincidence that Demidov, a well-known conservative who had previously been close to Vladislav Surkov and had been a deputy minister under Medinskii for a time, was appointed to lead the fund. Demidov emphasized that ‘Today the main task is to create a constructive dialogue between art and society. We do not want unnecessary confrontation wih public opinion’ (Izvestiya 2015b). Thus, a democracy argument was used against art that the authorities considered too controversial, too innovative or to contain ‘alien’ values. Major steps were now taken to restructure the institutional set-up of the art scene. In October 2015, the State Museum and Exhibition Centre (ROSIZO) was given a large pavilion at the VDNKha (pavilion 66, formerly pavilion ‘Kultura’) to be used as a gallery of contemporary art and a centre for contemporary theatre, film and music (Palatkina 2015). ROSIZO was created in 1959 mainly as an organization to handle the logistics of large art exhibitions. It had previously had nothing to do with contemporary art. Over the years it had built a collection of more than 40,000 artworks of mainly official Soviet art, and it was granted the status of a museum in 2010. The ROSIZO gallery at Pavilion 66 was supported by the ministry of culture, and Eduard Boyakov was appointed curator. Boyakov had created Praktika, a small theatre, at the beginning of the century, and was famous for staging plays in the new-drama genre. In 2015 he publicly declared himself to be a neo-conservative, an active Orthodox believer and a supporter of the new state cultural policy, as well as of Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He therefore seemed a good fit with the plans of the new official conservative paradigm Colta( 2015). Declaring that ‘[t]‌he quintessence of our culture lies in religious art’, he emphasized that the arts needed a new language in the wider communicative sense of the word. An 54

54 Lena Jonson infrastructure for contemporary art now exist as do methods and techniques, he said. Focus should therefore turn to its ideational content. Although he admitted that today’s aesthetic code was universal, he rejected what he called ‘the liberal civilizational paradigm’ and the values of Western curators, arguing instead in favour of a matrix of Russian values (Colta 2015). Boyakov illustrated how the political winds were blowing. The first exhibition at Gallery ROSIZO, ‘Ever Contemporary: Art of the 20th and 21st Centuries’, which opened in April 2016, gave an indication of what to expect.10 It demonstrated what the redefinition of ‘contemporary’ meant with regard to both time and ideational content. Paintings of Socialist Realism were presented side by side with the art of today, official Soviet art with underground art, and no distinctions were made or explanations provided of the art and the context in which it was produced. Instead, everything seemed to harmoniously fit into a grand narrative of the development of art in Russia. The twists and turns of Russian art throughout the twentieth century were described as ‘artists’ efforts to respond to the demands of their times as well as the expectations of society during each period and to personal tastes’ (Vsegda sovremennoe 2016). The exhibition also demonstrated a new model of cooperation for organizing state exhibitions, that is, between ROSIZO, various Russian state museums; private galleries, in this case Gallery Triumph, and the newly created Fund for the Development of Contemporary Art (Kommersant Weekend 2016). The takeover of the NCCA by ROSIZO was announced in May 2016. The NCCA was an important institution but, due to its independence, also a thorn in the flesh of the authorities. The NCCA had become an obvious nuisance to the authorities in April 2011 when Voina was awarded the Innovatsiya prize (hosted by the NCCA) for an action that painted a giant phallus on a St Petersburg bridge opposite the main offices of the state security organization, the FSB. When in February 2016 the Innovatsiya prize council of art experts seemed likely to shortlist Petr Pavlenskii for his action, Threat, which consisted of setting fire to a door of the FSB Lyublyanka building (see Figure 8.13), the NCCA director intervened to prevent Pavlenskii’s name from being included, and the situation became acute (The Art Newspaper Russia 2016). Nonetheless, the announcement that the NCCA was to be swal- lowed up by the much larger ROSIZO came as a surprise. The new director of the enlarged ROSIZO became Sergei Perov with a background in the military and government as well as the presidential administration and the United Russia Party. The former director of the NCCA was fired and offered a position at the Andrei Rublyov Museum of icons, the old- est form of Russian art. The Ministry justified the merger of the institutions on economic and efficiency grounds. The new director emphasized that now ROSIZO’s collections of Soviet art would be used in exhibitions of contemporary art (Mamaeva 2016: 12).11 Although the new director declared that the NCCA and its branches would be able to work as before, everybody expected that this would be the end of 55

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 55 the NCCA as it had been known. The merger was heavily criticized by many in the art community, who feared for the future.12 To them it seemed very strange that an organization like ROSIZO, with no previous focus on or knowledge of contemporary art, would take on responsibility for an institution that specialized in such art. It seemed obvious that the Ministry’s intention was to give ROSIZO overall control over the field of contemporary art in the new broader sense. The merger brought all the NCCA branches around the country, the Innovatsiya Art Prize, the Biennale of Young Art and all the other NCCA biennales and festivals under the aegis of ROSIZO (Mamaeva 2016: 12). In November 2016, the NCCA building was closed as a venue for art exhibitions (Bazhanov 2016). ROSIZO is also expected to take over the NCCA’s responsibility for host- ing the new state museum of contemporary art whenever it is built. It cannot be excluded that it will also put its imprint on the Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art. In May 2016, Yosif Bakshtein left his position as commissar of the Moscow Biennale, which he had held since it began in 2005, in expectation of the impending reorganization. In the summer of 2016 it was announced that the biennale organization would close, and an initiative group was appointed to find a new form of the biennale and of its financing (Dyakonov 2016a, 2016b). This initiative group was led by a former adviser to Medinskii, a member of the presidential council on culture and a private gallery owner (Gallery Triumph).

Exhibition policy and the introduction of new parameters for understanding art Thus, the authorities tried to take control of the contemporary art scene and emphatically redefined contemporary art as everything made by currently living artists. Whether the government knew what sort of art it preferred, remained however an open question. A number of large art exhibitions at state museums since the autumn of 2015 seemed to give an indication of the kind of art that was officially preferred, and thus where artists were encouraged to seek for inspiration in the future and art critics to look for guidelines and criteria for their work. These exhibitions attracted large audiences, something which the state used as an important argument for the kind of art that was to be supported in the future. Medinskii explicitly stated that art must be appreciated by broad sectors of the population. The state now actively intervened in the art field to demonstrate its determination to take contemporary visual art in a new, politically more loyal direction. It commissioned exhibitions of Soviet art, which had been disregarded for several decades. The large state museums responded to the new political signals. The exhibition ‘Romantic Realism: Soviet Painting, 1925–1945’ was perceived as a turning point in this regard (Koshelev 2015).13 It was initiated by Medinskii; and the Ministry of Culture and ROSIZO were given responsibility for the exhibition. Symbolically enough, it opened at the Manezh exhibition 56

56 Lena Jonson hall in central Moscow on 4 November 2015, the Day of National Unity. Works by most of the famous painters in the Stalinist grand style of Socialist Realism were shown, such as Aleksander Gerasimov, Isaak Brodskii and Aleksander Lakhtionov. Together with them, painters who had been forced into the margins during the peak of Stalinism were also exhibited, such as Aleksander Labas, Aleksander Deineka and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin. The exhibition was shown in tandem with a huge exhibition ‘Orthodox Rus: Russia Is My History, 1914–1945, From Great Shocks to the Great Victory’,14 organized by the Patriarchate’s committee on culture together with the private fund of Vasilii the Great. The latter exhibition presented religious Russia and provided an overview of the life of the church against the background of Russia’s successes and victories during these years, at a price in terms of human suffering. Icons blended with images of Stalin in the parallel exhibitions in the same building. The exhibition on Socialist Realist art was heavily criticized by some of the most respected art critics. First, the name of the exhibition raised questions. Although the period 1925–45 was linked to a dream of a utopia, it seemed odd to many to call its art ‘romantic’ and ‘realistic’ without discussing the complexities of the time. Art critics claimed that exhibiting art from this period without explanations of the function of such art and the context in which it was produced prepared the way for a murky mental soup of nostalgia. The curators of the exhibition, among them Zelfira Tregulova, director of the Tretyakov Gallery, and Eduard Boyakov of Gallery ROSIZO, were accused of ‘presenting the art of the Stalin period as a beautiful myth and making it the object of romantic fantasies’ (Kommersant 2015b).The art critic Valentin Dyakonov wrote, ‘The content, concept and general purpose of ‘Romantic Realism’ are impossible to explain in terms other than ethical and aesthetic blindness – or by bureaucratic slyness and cynicism’ (Dyakonov 2015). Art critic Igor Gulin wrote, ‘One can hardly think of a worse way to serve Soviet art. Instead of the possibility of examining it in detail, you find here an affectionate sealing of the Socialist Realist myth that has been made a completely harmless ‘guilty pleasure’. This is nothing but a disser- vice’ (Kommersant 2015b). The general public, however, seemed delighted and came in large numbers. It helped that the two exhibitions were widely advertised and that admission was free. The art community understood the exhibition as a political call for an art that is in line with the educational and consolidating tasks given to culture by the official cultural policy documents. In his analysis of the exhibition, the artist, Egor Koshelev, wrote, ‘The effect of the influence of “Romantic Realism” on contemporary Russian art was such that it was impossible not to notice it.’ What had changed? First of all, he said, the voice of the authorities was heard again for the first time in contemporary Russian culture, here used ‘in the capacity of loudspeakers’. Second, he said, a reactual- ization was taking place of Soviet Socialist Realism, which not long ago had been seen as ‘dreary and harmless’ but now turned out to be ‘an aesthetic weapon of a mass destruction’ that echoed in the exhibition hall: ‘Boom! 57

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 57 We had (and have!) a great country!’ … ‘Boom! We are a people of victors’ (Artguide 2015). Other state museums followed the new wave of interest in Socialist Realism and paid reverence to what they called the realist approach. In October 2015, the exhibition ‘Russian Realism: XXI Century’ opened at the Central Museum of Contemporary Russian History in Moscow (Vystavka 2015).15 The press release referred to ‘realism’ as a common denominator between the Soviet Socialist Realist and contemporary Russian artworks exhibited. Works were exhibited by forty artists from two periods: the years 2010–15 and the 1930s. The press release noted that both were periods when the radical avant- garde – of the 1910s and the 1990s – had ‘lost its topicality’. The realism that replaced the avant-garde was named ‘real realism’ and defined in the press release as that which describes ‘not what exists but what ought to exist, what is approaching but does not yet exist’ (Vystavka 2015). The press release also declared that the exhibition

demonstrates an important tendency in contemporary Russian art: the return of figurative art, which combines a reliance on tradition, attention to real life and the ethical position, into an avant-garde of the artistic process. Having received and processed the cultural baggage of modernism, in the twenty-first century, realism again takes the lead position in fine art.

The curator, Arsenii Shteiner, stated that the exhibition was ‘beyond ideology’. Yet, he declared, ‘Here I see the obvious link to painting of the 1930s.’ He claimed that the link between the artistic tendencies during these two post- avant-garde periods consisted of a ‘return to a clear worldview, a solid ethical position and contact with reality’. The facts that the ‘realisms’ of the 1930s and the 2010s are completely different phenomena and that the approaches to realism in today’s art are extremely diverse were ignored. In St Petersburg, the exhibition ‘Russia: Realism. XXI Century’, which opened at the Russian Museum in November 2015, focused on realist artworks from the 2000s.16 The press release declared that the purpose of the exhibition was to show various aspects of the realist tradition. Although it stated that the artists belonged to no common association or group of like- minded individuals, the exhibition was said to have an ‘integrated concept’ that made it possible to ‘discover the specifics of the realism of the 21st century and the context of problems of topical art [aktualnoe iskusstvo]’. Among the artists was Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, who also exhibited at the Central Museum of Contemporary Russian History in Moscow. Several well-known art critics strongly reacted to the exhibition at the Russian Museum. The art critic Anna Matveeva, who called the autumn of 2015 ‘the season for figurative and, above all, realist painting on the art scene’, wrote, ‘I do not remember the largest halls in the two major cities at any previous moment at the same time and, as it seems, almost without agreeing between themselves, 58

58 Lena Jonson arranging for such massive art artillery fire using similar shells’ (Matveeva 2015). Matveeva perceived this to be part of an official art offensive. Matveeva was critical of the fact that no distinction had been made between the various kinds of ‘realism’ in the exhibition, no attention paid to the conflicts between official and nonconformist art, and the specific political load of the artworks had been ignored. ‘Realism’ was never defined. Instead, the paintings seemed to be selected because of their figurativeness, and, as a result, all that could be found on the paintings, such as faces, figures, objects, interiors, urban landscapes and animals, could be clearly identified. In contrast to most contemporary art, this realist art could be easily understood by broad groups of people. Thus, figurativeness became a political statement, and so was the fact that this art was presented as ‘contemporary’ Russian art. The art critic Anna Tolstova was no less sharp in her criticism. She saw the labelling of the exhibition as a diagnosis of current Russian artistic life and found that the label ‘realistically signified’ its nearest perspectives.17 She argued that the exhibition clearly identified the social and political problems of today’s realism as ‘realism’ is on the offensive on all sides and reaches into all possible corners – museums, exhibition halls, the collections of private funds and the repertoires of galleries. She saw this as the result of ideological commissioning by the authorities for ‘the epoch of the new symphony between church and state’ (Kommersant 2015c).18 This Russian art of the late 2010s well reflects an epoch that is characterized by its style of consensus and conformism. It is an epoch that is generally

open to any content that is recommended from the top and supported from below, and responds to ideological commissioning and demands from the market, pleases the tastes of the oligarchic elite and the broad public … This is the style of a time and an attitude of ‘we sit it out, scrape by, and then we’ll see’. (Tolstova in Kommersant 2015c)

A large exhibition of the work of the Stalinist court painter Aleksander Gerasimov opened at the State Historical Museum in Moscow in February 2016.19 Gerasimov, who was famous for his painting of Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin, among other things, had been out in the cold for many years (Kurdyukova 2016). This was the first exhibition of his works for sixty years and timed to celebrate the 135th anniversary of his birth. The way the exhibition was widely advertised by the museum and the ministry of culture led critics to conclude that the exhibition ‘once more accentuated the type of art that the state nowadays considers worth searching for landmarks’ (Kurdyukova 2016). The attempt by the museum to approach Gerasimov in a neutral way, neglecting the political function of his most important works, provoked a wave of criticism. Exhibitions followed at the New Tretyakov Gallery of painters in the modified Socialist Realist style of the 1960s, such as Gelii Kozhev and Tair 59

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 59 Salakhov, of whom at least the former had been out of the limelight for several decades. Kozhev’s paintings of revolutionary enthusiasm and struggle and Salakhov’s melancholic paintings in the characteristic ‘severe style’ (surovyi stil) of the late Soviet period now found a new audience. Newly opened museums set up by private collectors contributed to the new focus on Soviet art. These included the Museum of Russian Impressionism (2016, collector Boris Mints) and the Institute of Russian Realist Art (2011, collector Aleksei Ananev). It was in this new context that independent private galleries and art centres, such as Garazh, with an interest in Russian and international contemporary art now had to work. The comments by those art critics who were negative about the exhibitions of Soviet art reflected fear and uncertainty about where state cultural policy was heading. While nobody expected Socialist Realism to be the new aesthetic, figurative art clearly was, but so was a kind of positive and optimistic art – an art that would strengthen a sense of common purpose in society and inject a belief in the future and in the wisdom of the regime. The presence of a clear, common and bright vision for society clearly appealed to Medinskii when he selected his favourite painting from the Romantic Realism exhibition – Isaak Brodskii’s Second Congress of the Comintern (1924). He said that what appealed to him was the revolutionary enthusiasm: ‘we are building our new world [my nash, my novyi mir postroim]’. Interestingly, he also touched on the issue of what realism is, when commenting on the painting Stalin and Members of the Politburo Meeting Children in Gorkii Park (1939) by Vasilii Svarog. This meeting never took place, but in principle it could have done, Medinskii argued. What Medinskii appreciated was that the meeting in the painting ‘takes on the characteristic of a myth – positive and bright’ (Izvestiya 2015c).20 But this was no propagandistic imagination, he said, ‘such was the mood in society at that time’. This positive optimism was emphasized in the above-mentioned exhibition at the Gallery ROSIZO. The artworks seemed to have been selected according to this principle. The narrative spread of the glory of those Soviet years, of the spirit of vision, optimism and heroism in spite of all the difficulties and problems of the time, and contemporary artists became hostages to this overall cura- torial concept that predetermined the interpretation of their artworks. The dilemma seemed general and was visible in for example the 2015 exhibition ‘Personal File’ (Lichnoe delo) at the Museum of the Worker and the Kolkhoz Girl at the VDNKha in Moscow. Here the works by contemporary artists intervened, commenting on the great sculpture, The Worker and the Kolkhoz Girl, by Vera Mukhina that in 1937 had represented the Soviet Union at the World Exhibition in Paris, and on the signs and symbols of Mukhina’s time. Although several artists were critical of that period, their artworks still corresponded well with the quasi-official narrative on those years that dominated the exhibition. Socialist Realism does of course have a place in Russian art history, and it is important to study national art history. The state exhibition policy 60

60 Lena Jonson since 2015, however, seemed to reflect nostalgia for the past and a wish to have that past not only inspire the future but form it.21

Conclusions The cultural policy of the conservative-authoritarian Russian regime after 2012 stemmed from a wider vision of an ongoing struggle to defend ‘Russian values and norms’. The call to use culture for the purposes of educating and socializing people into the new ideological paradigm created new conditions for the art scene. By restructuring art institutions and redefining contemporary art, and with the help of a state-sponsored exhibition policy, the government was able to redirect the art scene to promote art that fitted its own liking and to marginalize art that did not conform to the conservative paradigm. Together, these measures fulfilled the function of restructuring the sensory filter of the type of art that is to be considered the most promising for the foreseeable future. Without spelling out clear and detailed directives, the conservative-authoritarian government managed to introduce its specific gaze, perspective and angle and to make it dominant on the art scene. The art that was selected and promoted did not directly propagate patriotic symbols or values but fulfilled the function of emphasizing a feeling of belief in the present and in the unknown future, and thereby contributing to the patriotism that was so eagerly sought by the authorities. For the individual artist this situation opened up both new opportunities and new problems. For those who did not want to be part of the government’s agenda, doors were closed. As the number of alternative actors in independent galleries had been reduced, these artists found their opportunities for exhibiting shrinking and their art no longer in demand. But they still searched for new ways forward: art is a headstrong child, and creativity continues to flourish.

Notes

1 On this conflict, see Nicodemus (2014). 2 The film sector was the first field in which he directly intervened, and critics perceived this to be a model for gaining control over other cultural sectors (see Borisova 2012). 3 See the guidelines, ‘Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki: Utverzhdeny ukazom prezidenta RF’ of 24 December 2014 (Osnovy 2014). Compare with the ministry of culture document of April 2014 (Izvestiya 2014); and the one from the Presidential Administration of May 2014 (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2014). Twenty-three members of the Russian Academy of Sciences immediately reacted, above all to the formulation that ‘Russia is not Europe’. They argued that the document was based on the idea of a compulsory ideology in direct violation of Article 13 of the Russian Constitution, which prohibits any state ideology (Colta 2014). See also the heavy criticism of the draft policy of the ministry of culture in the special issue of the journal Iskusstvo, especially Razlogov (2014) and Rubinshtein (2014); as well as Kalinin (2014). 61

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 61

4 Although the final version emphasized the key role of Russian Orthodoxy, it acknowledged the contributory roles of other religions and non-Russian ethnic groups on Russian territory. 5 Foremost among the major goals of cultural policy were: ‘to shape the harmonious development of the individual and to strengthen the unity of Russian society’ and ‘to strengthen a civil identity’, create the conditions for the upbringing of citizens; to transfer from generation to generation traditional Russian values and norms, traditions, customs and ways of behaviour (Osnovy 2014). 6 See also the follow-up discussion in the presidential council on issues of culture and the arts, ‘Zasedanie Soveta pri Prezidente po kulture i isskusstvu’, December 2015. 7 See the criticism in ‘Minkult otorvalsya ot zhizni’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 18 September 2014, www.ng.ru/editorial/2014-09-18/2_red.html. For the report on the ministry’s priorities see Gosudarstvennyi doklad o sostoyanii kultury v Rossiiskoi Federatsii v 2013 godu, pp. 120–33. 8 In 2017 this understanding of ‘contemporary art’ was confirmed in a circular from the ministry of culture to all state cultural institutions (Artguide 2017). 9 See the interview with Zelfira Tregulova, the director of the Tretyakov Gallery, concerning the budget of her museum (Napreenko 2016). 10 See the website of the exhibition ‘Vsegda sovremennoe. Iskusstvo XX i XI vv’, available at www.rosizo.ru/events/event/183/. 11 For an interview with Sergei Perov see Perov (2016: 34–5). 12 See, for example, Turkina (2016). 13 The exhibition ‘Romanticheskii realism: Sovetskaya zhivopis, 1925–45’, 4 November–4 December 2015, http://moscowmanege.ru/ru/romanticheskij-realizm- sovetskaya-zhivopis-1925–1945-gg. 14 Pravoslavnaya Rus. Rossiya–moya istoriya, 1914–45. Ot velikykh potryasenii k Velikoi Pobede, 4–22 November 2015, available at http://moscowmanege.ru/ru/ pravoslavnaya-rus-rossiya-moya-istoriya-1914-1945-gg-ot-velikix-potryasenij-k- velikoj-pobede. 15 Vystavka (2015). Curators Arsenii Shteiner and Anastasiya Zaborovskaya, 10 October–1 November 2015, Participating contemporary artists: S. Agroskin, A. Belyaev-Gintovt, M. Blinov, A. Velichko, I. Gaponov, A. Dashevskii, A Dyakov, A. Zaborovskaya, E. Kovylina, V. Kolesnikov, S. Lipgart, A. Morozov, K. Novikov, I. Pestov, T. Podmarkova, A. Pomulev, D. Pushkarev, M. Rozanov, L. Rotar, and V. Saikov, E. Samodurova and S. Sonin, Sinii sup, A. Chizhov, A. Chumak, D. Shevchuk, E. Yashin, and Doping-Pong. 16 ‘Rossiya. Realizm. XXI veka’ at the Russian Museum, St Petersburg, 11 November 2015 to 24 February 2016, see www.rusmuseum.ru/benois-wing/exhibitions/ russia-realism-twenty-first-century. 17 See www.kommersant.ru/doc/2851468. 18 ‘Symphony’ is an ecclesiastical term for close cooperation between the church and the state. 19 Aleksander Gerasimov, K 135-letiyu khudozhnika. Exhibition at the State Historical Museum, Moscow, 10 February–16 May 2016, see www.shm.ru/shows/ 6161. 20 Compare Medinskii’s view on the myth about the 28 Panfilovtsy (Lenta 2016). 21 Svetlana Boym makes a distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. The former best characterizes this exhibition policy. 62

62 Lena Jonson

References Artguide (2015) ‘Romanticheskii realizm: Khudozhnik i kurator Egor Koshelev podvodit vystavochnye itogi 2015 goda v Moskve b Peterburge’, 15 December. Available at http://artguide.com/posts/936?page=2. Artguide (2017) ‘Sovremennoe iskusstvo po Minkulturu’, 19 July, http://artguide.com/ posts/1298. Bazhanov, Leonid (2016) ‘Leonid Bazhanov: ‘Ya ne vizhu dlya sebya vozmozhnosti rabotat v takom klimate’ (interview by Darya Palatkina), The Art Newspaper, 25 October. Available at www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/3612/. Borisova, Darya (2012) ‘My vam zakazhem: “Minkult nameren opredelyat tematiku finansiruemykh filmov” ’, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 18 September. Available at www. ng.ru/cinematograph/2012-09-18/100_medinskiy.html. Colta (2014) ‘Akademiki RAN raskritikovali ‘Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki’, 16 April. Available at www.colta.ru/news/2912. Colta (2015) ‘Poezdki na Afon i v Pskovo-Pecherskii monastyr, dumaesh, bessledno prokhodyat? Eduard Boyakov propoveduet Elene Kovalskoi osnovy novogo kon- servatizma’, 7 October. Available at www.colta.ru/articles/theatre/8787. Dyakonov, Valentin (2015) ‘Stil repressionizm: Vystavka sovetskogo iskusstva v Manezhe’, Kommersant, 11 November. Available at www.kommersant.ru/doc/ 2850691. —— (2016a) ‘Moskovskaya biennale otdelilas ot gosudarstva: A Iosif Bakshtein osta- netsya na dolzhnosti pochetnogo komissara’, Kommersant, 8 July. Available at www. kommersant.ru/doc/3035080hke. —— (2016b) ‘Nam poka nikto ne otkazal ni v dengakh, ni v gospodderzhke: Yuliya Muzykantskaya: o budushchem Moskovskoi biennale sovremennogo izkusstva’, Kommersant, 12 July. Available at www.kommersant.ru/doc/3036586?utm_ source=kommersant&utm_medium=culture&utm_campaign=four. Gleb Napreenko (2016), ’Privilegii i metafizika v Tretyakovskoi galeree’, Raznoglasie, 30 March 2016. Available at www.colta.ru/articles/raznoglasiya/10494. Gosudarstvennyi doklad o sostoyanii kultury v Rossiiskoi Federatsii v 2013 godu. Ministerstvo kultury Rossiiskoi Federatsii, http://mkrf.ru/upload/mkrf/mkdocs2014/ doklad_block.pdf, p. 132. Izvestiya (2014) ‘Minkultury izlozhilo “Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki” ’ (2014), Izvestiya, 10 April. Available at http://izvestia.ru/news/569016. Izvestiya (2015a) ‘Kto ne kormit svoyu kulturu, budet kormit chuzhuyu armiyu: Ministr kultury Vladimir Medinskii: o tom, po kakim pravilam stroitsya vzaimodeistvie gosudarstva, obshchestva i tvorcheskikh deyatelei v sfere kultury’, Izvestiya, 17 June. Available at http://izvestia.ru/news/587771. —— (2015b) ‘V poiske novogo yazyka iskusstvo silno operezhaet razvitie obshchestva’, Izvestiya, 12 October. Available at http://izvestia.ru/news/593009. —— (2015c) ‘Ministr kultury: o kartinakh vystavki “Romanticheskii realizm” ’, 4 November 2015. Available at https://iz.ru/news/594762. Kalinin, Ilya (2014) ’Kulturnaya politika kak instrument demodernizatsiya’, Neprikasnavennyi zapas, 98 (6). Kara-Murza, Sergei (2005) Manipulatsiya soznaniem, Moscow: MediaKniga. Available at http://bookz.ru/authors/sergei-kara-murza/karamurza/1-karamurza.html. Kommersant (2015a) ‘Sovremennomu iskusstvu pozhertvovali deyaetlya: Novyi fond vozglavit Ivan Demidov’, Kommersant, 12 October. Available at www.kommersant. ru/doc/2830489. 63

Conservative cultural policy/visual art 63 —— (2015b) ‘Igor Gulin o vystavke “Romanticheski realism” v Moskve’, Kommersant, 6 November. Available at www.kommersant.ru/doc/2846849. ——. (2015c) ‘Realizm kak konsensus: Anna Tolstova o vystavke, “Rossiya. Realizm. XXI vek”, Kommersant, 20 November. Available at www.kommersant.ru/doc/ 2851468. Kommersant Weekend (2016) ‘Smeshat i vzbaltyvat. Anna Tolstova o tom, chego zhdat ot sliyaniya ROSIZO i GTsSI’, 17 June. Available at www.kommersant.ru/ doc/3008044. Koshelev, Egor (2015) ‘Romanticheskii realizm’, Artguide, 15 December. Available at http://artguide.com/posts/936?page=2. Kurdyukova, Darya (2016) ‘Dva vozhdya i doyarka’, Nezavisimaya gazeta, 11 February. Available at www.ng.ru/culture/2016-02-11/8_socreal.html. Lapina, Alena (2014) ‘Khudozhnikam budut vydavat dengi za talant i krasivye raboty’, The Art News Paper Russia, 5 December. Available at www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/1055/. Lenta (2016) ‘Medinskii sravnil 28 panfilovtsev s 300 spartantsami’,Lenta , 4 October. Available at https://lenta.ru/news/2016/10/04/medin. Mamaeva, Olga (2016) ‘Sovremennoe iskusstvo ukrupnili’, The Art Newspaper Russia, No 6 (July–August). Matveeva, Anna (2015) ‘Kogda kartina stanovitsya politikoi: Anna Matveeva razmy- shlyaet o tom, chto znachit figurativnaya kartina segodnya’,Artguide , 3 December. Available at http://artguide.com/posts/926. Medinskii, Vladimir (2014) ‘Zadacha kulturnoi politiki: vyrastit “pokolenie pebedite- lei” ’, Kommersant, 18 September, www.kommersant.ru/doc/2569559. Moroz, Oksana (2016) ‘Strategii rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki: opyt rassledovaniya’, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, 3(107). Available at http://www.nlobooks. ru/node/7434. Napreenko, Gleb (2016), ‘Privilegii i metafi zika v Tretyakovskoi galeree’, Raznoglasie, 30 March 2016. Available at www.colta.ru/articles/raznoglasiya/10494. Nicodemus, Katja (2014) ‘Skandal in Moskau: Das russische Filmmuseum wird sys- tematisch zerstört!’, Zeit Online, 13 November Available at www.zeit.de/2014/45/ filmmuseum-moskau-larissa-solonicina. ‘Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki. Utverzhdeny ukazom prezidenta RF’ (2014), 24 December. Available at http://kremlin.ru/acts/47325. ‘Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki’ (2014), Rossiiskaya gazeta, 16 May. Available at www.rg.ru/2014/05/15/osnovi-dok.html. Palatkina, Darya (2015) ‘ROSIZO poluchit sobstvennyi pavilion na VDNKha’, The Art Newspaper Russia, 22 October. Available at www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/ 2235/. Palazhchenko, Nikolai (2016) ‘Trendspotting 2016’, Artguide, 27 January. Available at http://artguide.com/posts/962. Perov, Sergei (2016) ‘Kak sdelat tak, chtoby vse-taki doezzhat tuda kuda nichego nikogda ne doezzhalo’, The Art Newspaper Russia, 5 (44): 34–5. Razlogov, Kirill (2014) ‘To, chto khorosho dlya iskusstva, daleko ne vsegda khorosho dlya obshchestva’, Iskusstvo, 3 (590): 56. Rossiiskaya gazeta (2014) ‘Proekt “Osnov gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki” ’, 16 May. Available at www.rg.ru/2014/05/15/osnovi-dok.html. Rossiiskaya gazeta (2015) ‘Ukaz Prezidenta RF ot 31 dekabrya 2015 goda N 683 “O strategii natsionalnoi bezopasnosti RF” ’, Rossiiskaya gazeta, 31 December. Available at http://rg.ru/2015/12/31/nac-bezopasnost-site-dok.html. 64

64 Lena Jonson Rubinstein, Aleksander (2014) ‘Sozdavaya zakon o kulture’, Iskusstvo, 3 (590): 44–53. Strategiya gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki na period do 2030 goda (2016) Rasporyazhenie ot 29 fevralya 2016. No 326-r. http://mkrf.ru/upload/mkrf/ mkdocs2016/09_03_2016_01.pdf. Tolstova, Anna and Valentin Dyakonov (2015) ‘ “Up & Down: Luchshie i khudshie vystavki 2015 goda”, Khudozhnik i curator Egor Koshelev podvodit vystavochnye itogi 2015 goda v Moskve i Peterburge’. Art Guide, 15 December. Available at http:// artguide.com/posts/936?page=2. Turkina, Olga (2016) ‘GTsSI byl …’, Artguide, 25 May. Available at http://artguide. com/posts/1041. Village (2012) ‘Na Winzavode’ zakryvayutsya srazu tri gallerei’, Village, 12 April. Available at www.the-village.ru/village/weekend/weekend/112905-vinzavod. Vlaskin, Aleksander Aleksandrovich (2015) ‘Sovremennoe iskusstvo kak instrument vliyaniya na politiku Rossiiskoi Federatsii’, Rossiiskii institut strategicheskikh issle- dovanii, 10 November. Available at http://riss.ru/analitycs/22761. Vsegda sovremennoe: Iskusstvo XX i XXI vv.(2016) Gosudarstvennyi muzeino- vystavochnyi tsentr ROSIZO 2016. Available at http://www.rosizo.ru/events/event/ 183. Vystavka (2015) ‘Russkii realizm XXI veka’. Muzei sovremennoi istorii Rossii. Available at www.sovrhistory.ru/events/exhibition/561bdbc3d382d83a37365d82. Yablokov, Aleksei (2013) ‘V 2014 godu gosudarstvo vserez vozmetsya za kulturu’, Vedomosti, 11 October. Available at www.vedomosti.ru/lifestyle/news/17373481/ v-2014-godu-gosudarstvo-vserez-vozmetsya-za-kulturu?full#cut. 65

4 Neo-traditionalist fits with neo-liberal shifts in Russian cultural policy

Alexander Bikbov

Russia’s post-2012 cultural policy is often justly seen as having been based on reactionary foundations. International awareness of this arose from the case of Pussy Riot, which publicly illustrated how a criminal trial can rely on anti-feminism and accusations of disrespect for Russian Orthodox culture. At the same time, however, other elements of the policy turn had already shown themselves in earlier cultural incidents, which were less explosive from the point of view of the attention they brought from the international media but no less important to the administrative model that was being established. Since the 2003 exhibition ‘Beware! Religion’, the intrusion of far-right and fundamentalist movements into gallery and museum life has been boosted by the criminal-justice system prosecuting the art curators rather than the violators (Jonson 2015: 50–3, 106–10). In 2012, the model was inverted, and there was evidence of an expansion of fundamentalist values into the government itself. One of the key figures of the movement, Vladimir Medinskii, was appointed Minister of Culture in May 2012. He quickly became a herald of the moralist turn, providing public espousals of official intolerance towards contemporary art, academic research on political history and verbatim theatre, which he called unacceptable or immoral phenomena nourished by public financial aid. All this highlights the neo-traditionalist nature of recent state management of Russian culture. Nonetheless, I argue below that behind the moral design based on values of cultural unity and social cohesion it is easy to find a contrasting trend that consists of the commodification of culture and austerity with regard to the public finances. This trend robs the Russian case of its uniqueness, placing it in line with the majority of national cultures. This chapter pays particular attention to the speeches and strategies of Medinskii, focusing on the political and social variables that constitute the context for his activities and for the whole new style of cultural management in Russia.

The moralist turn in its political context The moralist turn, or the harsh governmental criticism of Westernized contemporary culture and decadent public values, cannot be explained if it is 66

66 Alexander Bikbov isolated from the recent political context, that is, from the wave of protest that began in December 2011 (Bikbov 2012). The criticism of Vladimir Putin and ‘his’ regime – which was loud and unexpected, at least in its extent – led to explicit governmental responses to reduce public dissent, not least a hardening of ‘counter-extremism’ legislation and anti-NGO measures. Other responses consisted of suppression of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) movement in the form of the promotion of the normative family model; administrative and penal measures against ‘revisionism’ in Russian history, a glorious vision of the past; the adoption of laws that penal- ized ‘offending religious feelings’; and several other conservative campaigns that provided clear evidence of a repressive use of culture. The concept of the ‘Russian World’ should also be noted in this context. It was established by the Russian government in the early 2000s as a framework for soft-power activities in the Commonwealth of Independent States and as a tool for further- ing cultural influence in Western Europe (seeChapter 2).1 During the war in Ukraine, the concept served as the basis for a campaign to ‘save’ all Russian- speaking populations from discrimination and repression. Another strong but less explicit aspect of the moralist turn seems to flow from the Soviet-style populist impetus for proletarian virtues, which consists of a rare but firmly stated appeal to the common people in official discourses. The form of such an appeal can vary but might include a prize established to recognize the ‘ordinary people of culture’, inspired by the example of the first Soviet commissar of education and culture, Anatolii Lunacharskii, ‘who was the first to grant systematic attention to ordinary people, without whom nothing can exist’ (RIA Novosti 2015). In the broader context of popular education, the same preoccupation with the loyal majority is translated into patriotic and religious training in school curricula and campaigns of propaganda condemning decadent Western values and lifestyles, targeted at the poorly educated among the population. The various governmental acts and discourses that oppose themselves to harmful modernity contain a common feature: they operate in a normative and moralist culture using the tools of political prohibitionism and legal restrictions. Proclaiming nominally universal access to culture based on simplified iden- tities, such as mastery of the Russian language and respect for Orthodox traditions, the official definition of culture seems to use a clearly asymmetrical opposition between cultural populism and cultivated elitism, which is quite common in classic cases of political reaction such as the Soviet Union in the 1930s or Vichy France (Muel-Dreyfus 1996).2 When neo-traditionalist movements become official, they generate their own institutions, such as prizes, councils of trustees, supervisory bodies and social foundations. The stress of its current version on the glory of ‘classic Russian culture’ and ‘our traditions’, however, makes it difficult to observe autonomous cultural effects or content generated from within the policy turn. Nonetheless, its political aim remains perfectly clear. It is practically recognized in the trends and manifestations 67

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 67 of the censorship that is applied, which contradict the patrimonial unity in which the imaginary ‘core’ and ‘simple’ majority serve as sufficient provision of a national order. This order is considered to be better than that of the ‘idle middle class’, a concept that belongs to the same imaginary scale.3 This position showed itself to be perfectly suited to the opportunistic instrumentalization that was quite fresh during the 2011–12 political crisis, when Putin’s ‘working majority’ was commonly opposed to the ‘leisured public of protest rallies’ (Kalk 2012). The momentary meaning of that class division, which was mainly defined by cultural capacities rather than economic power, consisted of a comfortable essentialist explanation of political pre- dilections.4 Although its medium-term political meaning goes further, in a situation of compulsory national unity, raised against external dangers and their ‘minority’ representatives on the national scene, the path is kept open for a state of exception through the abnegation of more complex consensual negotiations and a legal harmonization of interests. In this way, a normative ‘popular’ culture can justify modifications to the political regime by means of a ‘manual override’, in which a personalized authority is applied to ‘poorly working’ institutions in the name of global justice, the people’s will or the nation’s needs.5

New public management of culture This short overview shows that the symbolic dimension of national policy and the way cultural policy in particular presents itself, is clearly populist and moralist. However, can the administrative dimension of this policy also be understood in class terms, as favouring ‘ordinary people’? Some of its facets, such as the state-supported production of blockbuster patriotic Second World War movies, do indeed maintain a clear ‘pro-ordinary’ orientation.6 But does this orientation express something other than what are presumed to be popular tastes and sensibilities? Does it imply an awareness of growing cultural and economic inequalities, so that the ‘ordinary’ classes could comfortably survive or, in a more optimistic vision, be able to gain from the cultural colli- sions arranged by the post-Soviet cultural institutions? Many interpreters of Russian policy tend to automatically transfer the normative model from the realm of traditionalist declarations to the realm of practical management. In reality, however, these two realms hardly ever align, and the resulting formulation of cultural policy is left in a double bind between the regulatory zeal of national unity and an administrative propulsion to mercenary competition. In fact, it is easy to find rhetoric that drives ideas of social justice in culture, at least in its visible opposition to 1990s declarations praising ‘income’ and ‘consumption’. Medinskii states that ‘Cultural policy cannot be described exclusively in economic terms, nor in terms of “freedom from censorship”. And it is in any case unacceptable to think about it in terms of “the provision and consumption of services” ’ (Medinskii 2015b). His admiration for 68

68 Alexander Bikbov Soviet cultural policy, even where tinged with non-orthodox nuances, seems to strengthen this idea:

A guarantee of equal and compulsory access to art works was equally the aim of the state. Hence all kinds of aggressive and effective [Soviet] ‘marketing’ in the sphere of culture, including the ‘imposed fashion’ for a culturally rich leisure, the large-scale promotion of cultural institutions and art works, affordable ticket prices, and mandatory cultural outings in the framework of schooling and education. (Medinskii 2015b)

Such statements could seduce us into believing that a solution to cultural inequalities might consist of either a return to Soviet redistributive policy based on class-based positive discrimination or another step towards hard nationalist protectionism. Medinskii’s close collaborator based in the legal department of the Ministry of Culture, Natalya Romashova, apparently confirms such hints:

We are convinced that under market conditions and with the objective incapacity on the part of most cultural institutions to reach self-suffi - ciency, the state must guarantee budget expenditure in this sector. This is what cultural institutions and consumers of cultural goods expect from us. (Romashova 2014)

Strangely, but in concordance with her boss’s idea of Soviet ‘marketing’, she goes on to give quite a radical commercial redefinition of such a ‘social guarantee’:

Therefore, the dominant line of economic regulation [in the cultural sector] should be a transition from the ‘sponsor state’ to the ‘investor state’, by making provision for efficient cultural activities through adequate budgetary expenditure, and introducing effective tax mechanisms and extra-budgetary funds. (Romashova 2014)

It is easy to find more confrontational proposals emanating from the same ministry and even from the same representatives who generate contradictory messages on cultural justice or the means of social-justice- inspired culture. If one insists on the primitive hypothesis of the purely moral and traditionalist origin of the current turn in cultural management, such incongruence might easily be interpreted as a typically Russian, uneven and incomplete implementation of the reform. Alternatively, if we look for a logic that legitimately permits both anti- and pro-consumption, and pro- and anti-profit official discourse, this gives us a chance to discover that the basis of their confluence 69

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 69 lays deeper. To reveal the guiding principle that concurs with the oppressive moralization, we need to search for it in the practical expressions that seek to resolve the ambiguous orientation of the Ministry of Culture in the field of social guarantees and consumerism. In fact, traces of a concurrent logic, as well as its derivatives realized in the form of direct prescriptions, are numerous and quite explicit. In the catechism of Russian cultural policy willingly disseminated by Medinskii, we discover, among other things, the following scheme: ‘While reducing, for example, subsidies to some theatres by 2.5 per cent, we immediately promised a bonus of up to 7.5 per cent to those that had the best sales’ (Medinskii 2015a). A similar solution was applied to cinema and to the understanding of what is socially significant in the current model of culture:

We support not only commercial but also socially valuable projects. Money is directed to where it can be effectively spent. When deciding on whether to support one or another film studio, we focus on all their previous achievements, awards and public success, and not only on the box office. (Medinskii 2015a)

As for cultural management itself, ‘much really depends on the director, who must cut drastically the flows which go ‘past the cash desk’, must attract sponsors, create a board of trustees and establish endowment funds. That is why [today] contracts with directors of public cultural institutions include a clause about the imperative of growth in extra-budgetary revenues and attendance’ (Medinskii 2014b). These practical and pragmatic solutions have little to do with traditionalist rationality. On the contrary, they refer to the generic neo-liberal scheme that dominates the European scene in cultural institutions. Funds for public culture redistributed on the basis of better attendances and earnings, institutional constraints on competition between ‘service providers’ with the same profile and public-private partnerships are commonplace in the new public management (Boston 2013). All these recipes break Russia away from its presumed uniqueness and place it in the common and well-codified deregulated condition applied to the public sector. Even the minister’s crusade against contemporary art is resolved in a purely pragmatic concern: ‘As for buying it [contemporary art], I have nothing against this idea. Although I think that we need to buy something that, speaking bluntly, you can always resell: something that will only grow in value. You cannot buy something of an uncertain value’ (Medinskii 2014b). The same neo-liberal tolerance fits films that are regarded as defiant:

Some may like, for example, the director Ivan Tverdovskii and some may not. Although his debut filmCorrectional Class has already won some thirty international prizes, I personally could not watch this film to 70

70 Alexander Bikbov the end. Not because it is bad in itself, I just cannot watch such things. I become nervous. Some went mad with delight. Neither matters. What matters is the objective success story. With such a story both the director and the producer gain priority rights to state subsidies for their next project. (Medinskii 2015a)

In contrast to the neo-traditionalist agenda, which focuses on the restoration of family-style cohesion and implies a specific moral economy as opposed to a monetary one, neo-liberal trends in culture management transform the historical process by reshaping both the technologies of human administration and the employees’ subjectivities in favour of accountability, striving for profit and the translation of exterior control into interior motivations (Boltanski and Chiapello 2006; Laval 2007).7 If the neo-traditionalist model presupposes a recoding of economic relations in moral and cultural terms, the neo-liberal model does the contrary, presenting culture as a set of quantifiable and accountable services. From this point of view, a contradictory but explicit ministerial redefinition of the vocabulary related to the social value of culture into financial scales makes sense within the commercial remaking of officially supported culture. This is precisely the way in which Romashova combines a social and commercial vocabulary to give new meaning to old terms:

Expenditure on culture should not be regarded as a burden on the state and as its irrecoverable expenses. Meeting the needs of society related to intellectual achievements and the growth of human capital – that is precisely the return that makes government expenditure an investment in people. (Romashova 2014)

A commercial turn in the public sector and two parallel histories In addition to the instructions and declarations of the Ministry of Culture since 2012, these trends are part of the global conjuncture of neo-liberal reform and a wider shift towards the commercial management of the public sector. These have been established in various administrative forms in a pattern and tune shaped by the specific political moment. In Russia, this tune was shaped in the context of a reactionary governmental response to the mass protest movement of 2011. In the old democracies, this tune was forged in particular by accelerating competition in the international economy. Even in what was becoming ‘traditionalist’ Russia, it has been possible to trace a shift in this direction since the early 2000s. Guided by a neo-liberal rationale, the policies of several consecutive governments that were not always in concordance with one with another found new institutional solutions to issues linked to social justice and public culture. It is possible to identify these steps 71

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 71 as originating in 2001, when a progressive tax on personal income was abolished in favour of a universal ‘flat tax’ set at 13 per cent, a measure justified by the pragmatic reason that it would collect more tax from the highest income earners who might otherwise choose to totally evade the tax system. Once again, as happens globally, the logic of public duty and public expenditure is especially revealing in the model of cultural management. Further change followed in 2002, when the tax advantages for publishers of academic books and school textbooks were removed, raising the effective rate of tax from zero to 10 per cent, with virtually no assistance or grants for the publishers concerned. Just over half of all new students have been paying tuition fees since 2004. The law now allows a reduced number of publicly financed student places.8 Another revolutionary act in the field of taxation and remuneration was perpetrated by the government in 2008. The universal scale of wages (edinaya tarifnaya setka), which was introduced in 1936 to regulate labour relations, was abandoned for the public sector. A system of supplements was introduced instead. These ranged from 15 per cent to 70 per cent of salary, depending on the activity – the highest being for those working in medical care – to be awarded by administrators. A new page was turned in 2010 when Federal Law 83 changed the financial model of public institutions, pushing them to provide fee-based services. This was followed by major forms of guided commercialization in public schools and hospitals, which forced them to make profits from the provision of ‘additional services’. These changes in legal and commercial rules in the educational sector were accompanied by regional experiments involving the outsourcing of personnel in public social services, and the closure of some small schools in rural areas. In 2011–12 the number of civil servants was cut by 10 per cent. Some of these changes, such as raising taxes on academic and school textbooks, affected the cultural sector directly and brought about new forms of economic stratification based on the level of household resources available to spend on cultural pursuits. Others had an indirect but powerful impact. The abolition of the universal scale of wages, which affected the public sector as a whole, altered career structures in universities, museums and secondary schools. Some of the changes not specific to cultural management may have had a positive effect on the public sector. For instance, fines of the equivalent of €100–300 were imposed on state officials and their line managers who failed to respect the thirty-day deadline for replying to citizens’ enquiries. But in general such measures redefined the meaning of public service, where culture was no longer associated with specific competences but with procedural and financial performance. These mutations observed in the 2010s were not sufficiently clear to identify the future direction. They appeared side by side with bureaucratically shaped practices and policies destined to maintain the social and cultural institutions inherited from the late Soviet period or, paradoxically, reinvented in the 1990s. One major dilemma much discussed concerning Russia’s public 72

Table 4.1 Two parallel histories on Russia, 2000–15, based on neo-traditionalist and neo-liberal trends.

Neo-traditionalist trends in the Neoliberal trends in the institutional public sphere sphere

2000–1 Boris Eltsin appoints Vladimir Progressive tax on personal income Putin as his ‘successor’ is abolished in favour of a universal 13% flat tax 2002 Tax exemptions for NGOs are Tax benefits are reduced for abolished; major international publishers of academic titles and foundations supporting civil- school textbooks rights programmes quit Russia 2003–5 A campaign of economic and Half of all first-year students pay political recentralization is full tuition fees; attempts made undertaken by the Kremlin; to monetize and reduce social Mikhail Khodorkovskii benefits for vulnerable social among others is arrested and groups imprisoned 2007–8 Police centres ‘E’ (for counter- The universal scale of wages is extremism) are created to fight abandoned in the public sector against human-rights defenders in favour of supplements and social activists; penalties distributed by administrators for ‘extremist activities’ are increased; regular arrests are made during legal street rallies 2010 Increased pressure on social, civil Federal law no. 83 is adopted, rights and LGBT activists; the pushing public educational case of the ‘Khimki hostages’; and health institutions towards anti-fascist activists Aleksei partial financial self-provision; Gaskarov and Maksim Solopov experiments with outsourcing in are unlawfully imprisoned regional social services 2011–12 Massive falsification of the Small schools in underpopulated parliamentary elections; areas are closed; the number penalties for civil protest are of civil servants is reduced by increased; freedom of speech 10 percent; financial penalties for in digital media is reduced; a negligent officials are introduced law on ‘foreign agents’ damages (equiv. of €100–300) NGOs’ activities; the case of Pussy Riot 2013 A law against ‘homosexual Pension reform increases minimum propaganda among minors’ is qualifying age by between five adopted, criminalizing LGBT and fifteen years; the number activism of tenured positions is reduced in universities; the Academy of Sciences is reformed, institutional control passes to a federal agency 2014 Annexation of Crimea; Russia Public secondary schools are participates in the war in merged and closed; hospital staff Ukraine massively reduced; total number of hospital beds also reduced 73

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 73 sector is whether its future orientation will be towards the needs of the population or as a throwback to Soviet-style bureaucratic over-regulation. The cumulative effect of the above-mentioned changes revealed itself in unexpected ways, such as an obviously ultra-liberal paradigm of financial management and a growing regulatory role for the state as the central inducement to competition, as well as in the certification of competences and qualities. The most recent initiatives by the ministry of social affairs, such as attempts to introduce a medical tax on the unemployed and official rhetoric using the Soviet moral concept of ‘parasitism’ (tuneyadstvo) to redefine unemployment as a practice of hiding income (Petrov 2016), clearly put the Russian government on the side of mercantilism, as opposed to the welfare-state model.9 This brief and of necessity incomplete overview of these changes reveals two histories on Russia’s public sector in the twenty-first century (seeTable 4.1). The first talks about the public sphere, human rights and political freedom, and is marked by a shift towards neo-traditionalist government using a series of moral attacks and restrictions. The second focuses on administrative rules and regulations and tells an alternative story guided by instrumental turning points in which the pressure of financial enforcement has grown into a revision of the institutionally administered dilemmas of social justice. Observing these parallel histories as empirical phenomena, we should not be struck by the incongruent vectors of the Russian present. Such complexity fully conforms with many other cases, especially those of peripheral national capitalisms such as China, South Korea or nations in the Arab world, where neo-liberal tools of governance are closely articulated with a traditionalist agenda with regard to human rights, gender relations and political succession (see, e.g., West and Parvathi 2010; Kerlin 2002; Wu 2010; Kyung-Sup 2010; and Shechter 2011). Western societies are no less complex from this point of view, even though there such complexity is translated in a double bind of a different nature that articulates economic ultra-liberalism with support for cultural and political diversity, alongside previously constituted forms of grassroots self-governance. Such alternatives and potential directions for national development are chosen taking account of weighty historical back- grounds but no doubt also with pragmatism at each particular moment, as was the case in Russia during the post-protest political reaction of 2012–13. Taking these facts into consideration, we should not be asking how such ambiguity it possible but rather ‘in what way does it work?’

Pragmatic neo-traditionalism Two strong links can be identified between the neo-liberal and neo-traditionalist agendas for the new cultural management. The first is a business-oriented one that links the promotion of success and the profit motive with a strengthening of the Orthodox Church and of the re-patrimonialized state. The second is administrative or governmental, and pragmatically restricts production and consumption to within the country. 74

74 Alexander Bikbov The first has been articulated on many occasions by Medinskii in his praise for Russia’s winning strategy:

What is the main change we see in Russia in the Putin era? The fact that Russia has started to win. For several decades, we did not win anywhere. We became accustomed to defeat and often to humiliation. A whole type of post-Soviet man was produced: an outsider. Add here the pseudo- intelligentsia’s rubbish about Christianity being the religion of losers. Nothing of the sort! Christianity calls on man to win victories at every turn, during the whole of his life. Christianity requires individuals to gain a decisive victory over their own weaknesses: over selfishness, laziness, discouragement. (Medinskii 2014a)

Christian virtues that it is possible to read in many ways are given an emphatically militant and expansive edge. This can also be observed in the morals of the younger generation in the fundamentalist movements that articulate Orthodoxy with a patriotic agenda. Humility is no longer appreciated, and an ‘active’ and ‘winning’ attitude is promoted together with justified force.10 The leaders of such militant Orthodox groups might own their own businesses and also serve the material goals of the Orthodox Church. As a result, fundamentalist groups are currently contractors for gardening services, local trade fairs and amateur sports festivals but equally in less peaceful services such as private security or mercenaries in local conflicts with citizens who protest against commercial or parish capture of common spaces.11 The confluence of the minister’s vision and the agenda promoted by business-oriented fundamentalist groups is more than pure coincidence. Combining moral and economic investments in the Orthodox and patriotic wave is considered, at least in part, to be a winning business strategy and equally proper by Vladimir Medinskii. His roles include the presidency of the Russian Military-Historical Society, established in 2012 and destined to

consolidate state and society forces in the study of Russia’s military and historical past, to promote the study of Russian military history, to coun- teract attempts to distort it, to ensure diffusion of the achievements of military-historical science, to educate on patriotism, to raise the prestige of military service and to preserve the military-historical heritage.12

This clearly neo-traditionalist mission is achieved by the society’s commercial activities as a contractor with the state to meet its demand for diverse large-scale cultural and patriotic projects, such as monument restoration and cinematic production (Reiter and Golunov 2015). Medinskii himself justifies such moral and business activity in the recognizable terms of commercial performance: 75

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 75 The Russian Military-Historical Society is probably one of the most cost-efficient organizations of its kind in the country. Every penny hits its target. And for every budgeted penny there is a rouble of private co-financing … The Company also earns from publishing books and making computer games. The books The History of Crimea and The History of Novorossia or the video Aircraft Ilya Muromets are potentially profitable projects. (Medinskii 2015a)

That a variety of public-private partnerships have been given the form of highly moral enterprises with commercial outputs clearly demonstrates one of the mechanisms used by the ministry of culture in its promotion of national unity. The construction outbids both traditional cultural nationalism and private business interests. This is nationalism made business, and its potential expansion through the involvement of both the new faithful and new clients is connected with a utopian motif of the lucky historical moment that has long escaped from the mouths of senior Russian officials:

Looking from the outside, one might say that 21st century Russia has entered a phase of incredible luck. Increased fertility and a reduction in mortality, the growth of citizens’ personal incomes; never in Russian history could its citizens live so well and so free. And consider the peace in the Caucasus and the constant growth in the salaries of military men, teachers, doctors, and now finally of cultural workers. And the triumph in Sochi! [the Olympic Games] Do you remember the truly incredible triple victory of our skiers in the last race on the last day of the Olympics? And Crimea? No one could even dream of it. (Medinskii 2014a)

A new element in this thrilling ode brings us to the second conjunction of neo-liberalism with neo-traditionalism. The fertility and mortality mentioned by the minister do not just refer to population issues; they are equally charged with a wider care for the territory managed by the state. In general, the demography topic was one of the most explicit and regularly revisited in the 2000s, representing the idea of a low and even shrinking population in such a vast territory. It was picked up in various versions, including on advertising posters promoting higher fertility using hyper-realist slogans such as: ‘The country needs your records: every minute three people are born in Russia.’13 Treated in its purely biological expression, the topic received equally obvious ministerial incarnations in which demography and territorial issues were targeted by means of culture. The above-mentioned project ‘Russian World’ was intended to symbolically recreate the territory of the former Soviet Union, based on the argument of a unique language and culture. Another administrative form of cultural and territorial concern was a project to establish ten federal universities in the late 2000s and the 2010s as 76

76 Alexander Bikbov important territorial outposts. They were created as a result of an aggregation of existing universities in strategic regions, in an attempt to resolve two types of territory-related issues: ‘geopolitical problems and the need in human resource terms for large inter-regional investment projects’ (Remorenko 2008).14 As in the above-mentioned cases, the insertion of the project into the economic realm was clear: ‘Their [federal universities’] scientific schools should determine the sustainability and competitiveness of the domestic economy’ (Remorenko 2008). The newly appointed minister of science and education, Olga Vassileva, expressed similar concerns in the long-standing debate about uniform manuals for every school discipline. Criticizing the existing wide variety of manuals and promoting the idea of uniform school manuals, she targeted the scale of cultural unification across the territory: ‘I believe, and it is my profound conviction, that every pupil in the country, especially in elementary school, from the Far East to Kaliningrad, must have the same basis’ (Regnum 2016). A clear step in the redefinition of the global mission of state cultural policy was realized by the Ministry of Culture under the direction of Medinskii. A much-discussed and widely ridiculed document, the Project on the Foundations of State Cultural Policy, was published in 2014, followed by a modified and then an approved final version – which was even more explicit in its political agenda and pragmatism (Rossiiskaya gazeta 2014). The first document was cheered by the traditionalist far right in culture (Burlyaev 2014) and strongly criticized by left and liberal experts as an essentially neo-traditionalist programme involving forced ideological indoctrination, nationalist mobilization, and an anti- European and Russian pro-ethnic tune.15 In these debates, the second crucial dimension went unobserved – the neo-mercantilism explicitly set out in especially clear detail in the final, widely altered version of the text. First and foremost, culture had been defined as an aim in itself in the late 1950s and had officially maintained this status until the late 2000s, when it was redefined as a tool of two major heteronomous tasks: economic growth and national security.

State cultural policy is to ensure privileged cultural and human development as the foundation of the economic prosperity, national sovereignty and civilizational identity of the country. State cultural policy is considered an integral part of the strategy for the national security of the Russian Federation. (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki 2014, emphasis added)

Second, the document clearly defines the desired results of state cultural policy, and here the pragmatic logic of the new culture management is once again outlined in correspondence with the issues of demography and territory in an exhaustive list of the desired results:

Growth of the intellectual potential of Russian society; growth of social value and the status of the family, awareness of family values as a basis 77

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 77 of personal and social well-being; growth of the number of citizens, especially young people, who want to live and work in their native land, who consider Russia the most favourable place to stay and develop their creativity, creative abilities; mastery of the Russian literary language, knowledge of Russian history, an ability to understand and appreciate the arts and culture, as a necessary condition of personal fulfilment and social demand; harmonization of the socio-economic development of the regions of Russia, especially of small towns and rural communities, and a reactivation of the cultural potential of territories; qualitative growth in the cultural and recreational needs of citizens, including those for media production. (Osnovy gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki 2014 Section VIII)

It is possible to see here the future spread over the next fifteen to twenty years, realized with the help of culture as a tool, completely absorbed by the imagery of a growing national economy and economic might, where all social inequalities are negligible or non-existent. Thanks to culture, the population, and especially its youngest sections, should remain in Russia, build creative, proactive, productive and healthy families, contribute to regional development and consume nationally produced media products. The point about ‘mastery of the Russian literary language’ might concern both locally born younger generations and immigrant populations settled in the country. Hyperbolically, culture as a magic mercantilist tool is even destined to develop small towns and rural communities. All these expected outputs depict culture as an essentially economic instrument applied to the national territory, and even national security is tacitly redefined as part of a mercantilist rationale, as declared in the goal-setting. After all, it would be wrong to decode these formulas as a simple travesty of moral principles, covering purely instrumental financial accounts, or as a naive demand for moral order. On the contrary, on both eventual readings, this document as well as the complete set of cases given above constitute a tangible core of genuine neo-mercantilism where a belief in national cohesion as a desired state does not contradict but only boosts the drive for economic prosperity and makes commerce integral to national integrity. One crucial point that should be remembered here is that attributing such a mission to culture really has little to do with Russia’s historical past but makes a sub-type of the global neo-liberal disposition fit a locally and newly invented traditionalist form.

The making of moral capitalism The aim of creating a moral capitalism is not an original idea of Russia’s state mercantilists but has been haunting right-wing reformists since at least the mid-2000s. One of the best known attempts was made by the then president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who in 2008 declared the need to moral- ize capitalism and encouraged the population to embrace initiative and 78

78 Alexander Bikbov entrepreneurship, giving them a clear idea of moral capitalist institutions and articulating their liberties and responsibilities (Le Monde 2008). In opposition to classic liberal conservatism, Sarkozy insisted on giving the state a central regulatory role in the management of competition and remuneration policy. Classic praise for the ethos of the free market and self-regulation are probably better known in the English-speaking world, such as that provided by various conservative institutions like the Prager University Foundation which was established in 2013 to distribute video and internet content that presents ‘the values that have made America and the West the source of so much liberty and wealth’. It justifies the free market as serving morality as part of a set of ‘Judeo-Christian [values that] at their core include the concepts of freedom of speech, a free press, free markets and a strong military to protect and project those values’.16 Compared to these variations of a socially adjusted mercantilism in Continental Europe and libertarian conservatism in the United States, Russian and other peripheral versions contain an important inversion. As seen in Russian cultural policy and the transformation of its entire public sector, the mission is less about capitalism made moral and more about a moral turn made profitable. The high tide of isolationist official discourse was designed to persuade the population to maintain the pursuit of a highly non-egalitar - ian arrangement of illiberal forms of governmentality, to use an important Foucauldian concept.17 In so far as capitalism has never been widely accepted as a social or cultural goal in Russian society, state-arranged attempts to make the capitalist model acceptable consisted of masking it with moral or even religious convictions and non-profit collective gains. A question arises about the relatively successful conduct of such a large-scale operation over more than a decade. This interest is especially relevant if we take account of the widespread expert scepticism about the ability of the early post-Soviet state to successfully carry out liberal reforms. How did the new strategy become the core of Russian public management? A structural explanation can be found in the content of the international agreements concluded by successive Russian governments since the early 1990s. A whole set of assistance programmes in the 1990s and further intergovernmental treaties in the 2000s targeted a uniformity in the institutional framework and a synchronization of Russian administrative reforms with European ones (Delcour 2001). The integration of Russian public- sector decision-making into European and international dynamics, achieved through medium-term institutional cohesion, had complex effects on the cultural and public sectors. It was assumed that the symbolic expressions of neo-traditionalism that followed the neo-liberal public management reform, which had been agreed and progressively implemented by Russian officials, were a local strategy for coping with or adapting to irrevocable institutional game rules. In this context, it is worth noting that, regardless of the recent harsh anti-Western and anti-European campaign, the Russian government has not broken any international agreement signed since 1991. 79

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 79 A closer look at the biographical trajectories of the Russian state mercantilists provides a more complex explanation for such constraints. The officials who entered the Russian federal administration after 2012 adapted their activity to institutional conditions that had been heavily structured by previous Europe-related agreements and reforms. This is also the case for the Minister of Science and Education, Olga Vassilieva, who was appointed in 2016. She was a historian of the Orthodox Church until early 2012 and a pro- moter of the conservative cultural agenda in public debates. However, those who entered earlier or who are now the most active promoters of a neo-lib - eral management of culture have another source for their neo-liberal views on cultural issues: their own experience in the private sector or in privatized public enterprises founded on the ethos of competition. Key actors in the neo-liberal reform of culture and education share this background. Medinskii co-founded an advertising agency in 1992–8 and then led the public-relations departments of several public institutions. His experience and his age (he was born in 1970) separate him quite obviously from his predecessors: Aleksander Sokolov, born in 1949, minister in 2004–8 and formerly a professor and a director at the Moscow Conservatory; and Aleksander Avdeev, born in 1948, minister in 2008–12 and formerly a senior diplomat. A glance at the biographies of the protagonists in the neo-liberal reform of the public sector provides more of the same. Senior officials promote neo- liberal reform with an energy that is proportionate to their previous careers in the private sector or the most commercially oriented government offices. Their experience of the private sector, shared by some state mercantilists, dates back to the 1990s, when business rules had little to do with international regulations and were much more closely related to management by violence. Others have public-sector experience from the 1990s linked to adapting highly bureaucratic institutions to emerging market conditions.18 Their biographies help us understand the absence of a uniform rationality from the international assistance programmes internalized by the members of successive Russian governments implementing a neo-liberal agenda. The key mechanism of the commercial turn over two decades has been a transfer of private-sector experience and a neo-liberal agenda formed by public institutions such as the Ministry of Finance to the sectors of culture and education. The partially conflicting sets of rules generated in these two poles of social and political change produce tensions not only between the state administration and its employees in the administered sectors but also between the regulatory principles themselves. On the one hand, economic deregulation managed by the state administration is clearly discernible, such as aligning the budgets of cultural institutions to attendance rates, making schools and universities compete for students or reducing tenured research and teaching positions in favour of precarious contracts. On the other hand, state over-regulation is introduced to the economically deregulated field of culture, such as integrating educational programmes or introducing private-public audit for public institutions. Where these visible 80

80 Alexander Bikbov contradictions converge we find a nominal democratization with regard to access to education and culture based on flat-rate admissions, a ‘flexibiliza- tion’ and disempowerment of employees and a growing segregation between ‘excellent’ and ‘backward’ cultural institutions in terms of performance and fundraising. This can currently be observed in museums, universities, secondary schools and theatres, as well as in other centres of cultural production and reproduction. Such tensions bring Russia in line with many other nations, including the established liberal democracies.19 The Russian case adds another dimension, derived from attempts to compete against technologically and economically more advanced societies in a situation in which the adoption of capitalist competition has been only partially accepted (or is partially rejected). The above-mentioned neo-mercantilist tools for administering the population and the territory, among which culture is destined to serve the basic goals of boosting productivity and security by promoting a moral order and national cohesion, provide a response to the global challenge. The senior ranks of the Russian administrative apparatus today represent a strategic assembly of the newly formed state bureaucracy and converted business leaders who accept, internalize and trustingly apply an amalgamation of neo-liberal regulation and neo-traditionalist beliefs. As for the population of the administered cultural and public institutions, the basic tension is resolved once again through a transfer effect – being politically conformist becomes economically profitable. This effect reveals itself in silent public loyalty under the double bind of growing commercial competition and a moralization of state-supported cultural activities. The collective illusion of ensuring loyalty operates by removing the security of careers and on shaky institutional integrity. Positive economic and negative administrative motivations tend to maintain the status quo, even if important segments of the employees of key cultural institutions show obvious dissatisfaction with the established mode of management. Under such conditions, the translation of economic inducements into political and moral loyalty serves as the core regulatory principle of the new state mercantilism.

Notes

1 The model for this cultural influence was founded on the promotion of the best traditions of the Russian language and Russian literature as well as Russian folk heritage. 2 This was something that led a faction of liberal-oriented commentators to stress that Vladimir Putin and his administration now favour Uralvagonzavod, under- educated and politically obscurantist workers, as opposed to the civilized and illu- minated intellectuals favoured previously. See, for example, Rubinshtein (2012); Nemtsov (2013). 3 This image spread on both sides of the political frontline. In the Russian media it could not escape profound contradictions. According to Putin’s 2012 policy manifesto, the ‘working people’, such as schoolteachers, workers and military men, should transform themselves into the ‘middle class’, following the standards 81

Neo-traditional fits/neo-liberal shifts 81 for prosperity and rational culture. But that is a matter for the coming decades. Today’s nation-building requires them to be ‘common people’. See Putin (2012). 4 Even in Putin’s view, ‘The middle class are people who … have, as a rule, such a level of education that it allows them to consciously choose between [party] candidates, rather than to “vote with the heart” ’ (2012). 5 The term ‘manual override’ [ruchnoe upravlenie] was already in active use in the 2000s, with reference to non-functioning institutions that were relaunched through the personal intervention of the president or another senior official. Hiding behind the reasoning on ‘inefficient institutions’ is the routine application of extra-legal supreme authority, the state of exception similar to the one justified with solem- nity by Carl Schmitt (1985). 6 In addition to remakes of Soviet-era Second World War films, such asThe Dawns Here Are Quiet (1972 original, 2015 remake) and newly produced patriotic blockbusters glorifying the First World War, such as Battalion (2015), the ministry of culture has supported the production of many film and television projects of this kind through the Russian military historical society (see below). A list may be found on the society’s website: http://rvio.histrf.ru/activities/projects/item-1600. 7 Pierre Bourdieu reveals quite clearly the paradoxes of a moral economy that cannot express itself in proper economic terms (Bourdieu 1990: Book 1, Chapter 8). 8 The previous version of the federal law on education set a norm of 1700 publicly financed student places (so-called budget places) for every 10,000 of the population; the version adopted in 2013 introduced a norm of 800 places for every 10,000 persons aged between seventeen and thirty. 9 The project intends to impose a tax on unemployed citizens’ medical and social services, thereby demonstrating a clear break with the social solidarity and security that offered the unemployed social and financial assistance. 10 This is precisely the case for the group God’s Will (Bozhya volya) led by Dmitry Enteo, which became famous for its aggressive acts against contemporary artists and exhibitions, or the militant fundamentalist movement 40x40 (Sоrok sorokov), which regularly extols ‘an active approach’ to issues of faith. See their public group in social networks: https://vk.com/sorok_sorokov. 11 Corresponding journalistic investigations are regularly published in the Russian media. See, for example, Tumanov (2015). 12 Ustav Rossijskogo Voenno-Istoricheskogo Obshestva (official page). Available at http://rvio.histrf.ru/officially/ustav-rvio. 13 The example is from a laconic 2010 public-service advertisement poster depicting a young woman with three babies, a blue sky background and this motto. 14 Among the regions concerned, Siberia, the Baltic, the Far East, the southern territories, the Arctic, the Urals and Crimea represent the frontier zones or zones with low population densities. 15 See, for example, ‘Zayavlenie Komiteta grazhdanskikh initsiativ’ o proekte ‘Osnov gosudarstvennoi kulturnoi politiki’, 16 April 2014. Available at https://komitetgi. ru/news/news/1461. 16 See the website of Prager University, ‘What We Do’. Available at https://www. prageru.com/what-we-do. 17 In addition to the well-known lectures on security, territory and population by Michel Foucault, see Dean (2010), especially Chapter 7. 18 The former Ministers of Education Andrei Fursenko (2004–12), and Dmitrii Livanov (2012–16) had in the 1990s a R&D business career and a business-oriented 82

82 Alexander Bikbov university position. A Minister of Healthcare in 2007–12 Tatyana Golikova brought to life a commercial pension reform preceeded by her long lasting professional career in the ministry of finance since the 1990s. 19 On France, see, for example, Charle and Soulié (2007); and Schultheis et al. (2008).

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5 Daughterland Contemporary Russian messianism and neo-conservative visuality

Maria Engström

This chapter analyses the neo-conservative visual metaphor of Daughterland [Rodina-Doch] in order to demonstrate how the idea of Russia’s eschatological mission – and the concept of Russia as katechon/restrainer, in particular – is visualized in contemporary art, and popular culture, music and film. The representation of Russia as a katechon, or a ‘shield’ against the apocalyptic forces of chaos, was formulated in neo-conservative circles in the early 2000s by Aleksander Dugin and Egor Kholmogorov (Engström 2014). According to this doctrine, the mission of Russia to protect the world from evil must be carried out by any means – military, spiritual and cultural, including artistic. The first part describes the emergence of the post-Soviet conservative avant- garde, which took shape in the 1990s but is only today announcing itself as a powerful cultural and political project that can be used in the Kremlin’s rhetoric on Russia’s ‘conservative turn’ or ‘counter-reformation’. The second part focuses on the concept of Daughterland to demonstrate how the meanings, images and symbols created by a closed circle of conservative avant-garde artists almost twenty years ago are currently spreading throughout Russian society. A significant proportion of this conservative ‘aesthetic mobilization’ is Socialist Realist art, the romanticism of perestroika and the sexual revolution of the 1990s. It is possible that this combination of the grand-style aesthetics of the 1930s–1950s with the radicalism of the 1990s – the two periods that provoke the strongest nostalgic reaction today and have undergone a rapid museification1 – has contributed to the growing popularity of neo-conservative visuality, which until now existed only in hermetic communities, closed to the general public.

Perestroika and the contemporary Russian conservative avant-garde Neo-conservatism in post-Soviet Russia initially appeared not at the formal level of authority or as a bureaucratic resource but as a certain type of subculture. Its main agents are not politicians but artists, writers and musicians. I follow the Russian sociologist Alexander Bikbov, who has demonstrated that the Kremlin’s cultural policy is neo-liberal and that a traditionalist façade is hiding a quite determined reform of the social and cultural sectors in a 85

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 85

neo-liberal style that is recognizable worldwide (see Chapter 4 in this volume; Bikbov 2016). The difference between official ‘pseudo-conservative’ culture and contemporary Russian neo-conservative art can be compared with the difference between the Kremlin’s idea of Eurasian union and Dugin’s countercultural Eurasianism (Laruelle 2015). By neo-conservative art I mean a particular type of figurative art that, like Russian neo-conservatism itself, originated in the late Soviet underground of Leningrad/St Petersburg and Moscow. This ‘conservative avant-garde’ is a closed circle of friends that remains hermetic and non-systemic today. The leading artists in this camp are Timur Novikov (1958–2002) and his New Academy of Fine Arts: Georgii Guryanov (1961–2013), Denis Egelskii (b. 1963), Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt (b. 1965), Mikhail Rozanov (b. 1973) and Stanislav Makarov (b. 1972), as well as the St Petersburg art group Doping- Pong. An important source of inspiration for the neo-conservative art that emerged in the late 1980s was the ‘forbidden fruits’ of the Russian avant-garde in the early Soviet erotic photography of 1920s and 1930s and Abram Room’s 1935 film Strogii yunosha (Strict Young Man), but also Robert Mapplethorpe and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. This ‘remix’ of the Soviet Socialist Realist art, which abided by the ideas of the Russian avant-garde, namely, Viktor Shklovskii, in terms of defamiliarization/deautomatizing of perception, was initiated by the circle of artists at Timur Novikov’s New Academy. The main aims of this group were to reintroduce figuration in contemporary art and to advance classical beauty as a radical alternative to Moscow Conceptualism. Neo-academicians remediated and fused iconic images from antiquity and Soviet culture by presenting them in new contexts or in new media such as computer graphics, pixilated films, screen printing or cardboard cut-outs. To a great extent it was the artists in this group – and primarily Georgii Guryanov, who was also a member of cult rock band Kino – who championed the ‘resurrection’ of Soviet aesthetics in the post-Soviet period. It is important to emphasize, however, that the main figures of the New Academy were gay and were not promoting ‘conservative values’ but creating a neo-conservative narrative of beauty. Neo-conservative art in contemporary Russia has the same status as neo- conservative ideology. The neo-conservative ideologists Aleksander Dugin, Aleksander Prokhanov, Eduard Limonov and Egor Kholmogorov are famous, but they remain on the margins of political life. The same can be said of today’s neo-conservative art: it is well known but not institutionalized. To a certain extent it exists outside the mainstream of contemporary art, which is still highly suspicious of any figurative and realist tradition.2 At present, the artists belonging to the neo-conservative camp are attempting to establish a more or less official relationship with the state, which has started to acknowledge them and to some extent allow them into the official media sphere. It is possible to list a number of exhibitions that took place in 2015 and 2016, such as Mikhail Rozanov’s solo exhibition ‘The Clarity of Goal’ at the Moscow Museum (23 January–1 March 2015), which presented photographs 86

86 Maria Engström of the Soviet architectural myth; as well as his solo exhibition ‘Manhood’ at Winzavod (22 June–26 July 2015); an exhibition project ‘Victory as a New Epic: Dedicated to the 70th Anniversary of Victory’ at the Russian Academy of Arts (27 May–5 July 2015); the ‘Reinforcing Reality’ exhibition at the A3 Gallery (11–21 June 2015); and ‘Space: Reconstruction of the myth’ at the A. S. Popov Central Museum of Communications in St Petersburg (19 May– 16 June 2016), where most of the conservative avant-gardists were present. It is worth mentioning that this closeness is not yet influencing the ideological or aesthetic position of the artists. As Eduard Boyakov, a prominent theatre figure of the perestroika period, one of the major champions of the ‘new drama’ and founder of the Golden Mask Festival, noted in a recent interview in Colta: ‘Those who are one step ahead understand the relevance of conservatism. Moreover, they realize the need for conservatism, for traditionalism as a state ideology. We do not follow the authorities. The authorities follow us. And millions of those who are like us’ (Boyakov 2015). When describing late Soviet countercultural groups and their post-Soviet versions, I find it productive to adopt the approach of the US anthropologist, Alexey Yurchak, who devoted a number of scholarly works to analysing the nonconformist fringe milieu in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. One of the main reasons behind the critique of liberalism by radical conservatives was the transformation of the anti-Soviet discourse into a dominant one. Liberalism, according to its critics, monopolized truth and laid claim to being the ultimate right. Late Soviet subcultures initially set themselves in opposition to the binary model of Soviet–dissident, and were busy searching for outsidedness (vne) (Yurchak’s term), the point of maximum freedom from any ideological discourse. Perestroika, in their opinion, never reached its goals as the binary model was simply turned on its head, with one dominant ideological discourse making way for its opposite. As Yurchak notes:

Under late perestroika the discourse of Soviet ideology, which had dominated the public space, yielded to the anti-Sovietism, which criticized that ideology. At some point, any association with the new discourse became the same banality and out-of- datedness as the earlier association with ‘official’ Soviet ideology had been. (Yurchak 2005)

Once the criticism of ‘all things Soviet’ becomes mainstream, nonconformists choose the strategy of aestheticizing such things. Another reason for the rise of neo-conservatism among nonconformists was the travels of perestroika’s main heroes, Sergei Kurekhin (1954–1996), Viktor Tsoi (1962–1990) and Timur Novikov, to Europe and the United States. The death of the imaginary West (Yurchak’s term) as a consequence of personal encounters with real life in Europe and the United States in the late 1980s, was the reason why major counterculture figures turned sharply towards radical neo-conservatism and began their quest for a new imaginary 87

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 87 anti-West. The latter was taking shape as new socialism, Eurasianism, Stalin’s Soviet Union, conservative revolution, new Russian classicism and empire. Sergei Kurekhin, who joined the National-Bolshevik Party after one of his trips to the West, wrote:

I have been travelling a lot recently and I often have to meet the world of capitalism face to face. It’s terrible. You get this sinking feeling as you realize that socialism is something that can resist capitalism. Basically, anything can make a stand against capitalism. But since historically it has been socialism that resisted capitalism in our country why should we abandon this model? All we have to do is give the concept of ‘socialism’ new substance. (cited by Raikov 2010)

The new situation called for a certain ideological stance that would oppose both systems. A viewpoint was needed that would offer an alternative while at the same time indicating the borders and dangers of putting any ideological model into action. The rhetoric of the radical right employed by Dugin, Limonov, Kurekhin and to a certain extend Novikov in the 1990s should be considered part of a libertarian emancipation project aimed at liberation from both Soviet officialdom and post-Soviet neo-liberal capitalism. The quest for the prized territory of outsidedness/vne and freedom from all forms of ideological violence manifested itself in hybridization, provocation and a free mixture of elements that belonged to different ideologies (cf. Dugin’s neo- Eurasianism as a version of Kurekhin’s melange of styles and genres). The prevailing mood during the liminal period of perestroika was that of waiting for the triumph of the ‘aesthetic state’ and for the transgression mediators – underground musicians and artists – to enter the corridors of power. However, the real-life embodiment of that utopia resulted in the figure of Vladislav Surkov, the ‘ideology minister’, a personal friend of many legendary rock musicians, the lyricist for the Agatha Christie band, an art critic who published articles in Artchronika and Russian Pioneer magazines, and the presumed author of the novel Okolonolya (Around Zero), which was published in 2009 under the pen-name Nathan Dubovitsky in a supplement of Russian Pioneer.3 As Aleksander Sekatskii, a neo-conservative philosopher from St. Petersburg, recently stated, the main losers of perestroika were its mediators, the Soviet underground. They could retrieve their symbolic capital only by proposing a new alternative; for instance, the installation of a ‘national idea as something more tempting, rich and aesthetically appealing than the discreet charm of shopping’ (Sekatskii 2011). As a new ‘temptation project’, Sekatskii proposes a version of an organic empire of ‘flowering complexity tsvetush[ - chaya slozhnost]’, which he borrows from the philosopher Konstantin Leontev:

An organic state, which Russia must remain, breeds differences and preserves them in their authentic condition. The ability to sustain a 88

88 Maria Engström harmonious coexistence of people of different nationalities, religions and world views in a common societal choir – that is the true call of an Empire. Anyone will have a place here – workers, highland divisions and postmodernists, the likes of Sorokin and Pelevin. (Sekatskii 2011)

Thus, the conservative avant-garde sees the idea of an empire that brings together the incongruous as the only domain of true freedom, because nowhere else is there the possibility of an elegant and cunning game of the senses and symbols, which is the genuine art.4 The main tool of the conservative avant-garde is serious styob, or post- irony, which is both ironic and sincere at the same time. This method, which stipulates that criticism and positive assessment must coexist and interconnect, was widespread in the Soviet counterculture of the early 1980s. A detailed account of the serious styob method is given by Yurchak (2005), who stressed the ambiguity of statements made within this aesthetic:

When an ideological sign was subjected to serious styob it was not always evident whether the author approved of the ideology or was mocking it. In the best instances of serious styob these two positions came together as one and the author was unable to draw a distinct boundary between them. (Yurchak 2005)

When studying contemporary conservatism in politics and culture in Russia and from a global perspective, the theory of metamodernism is apposite. This notion was proposed by the Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker in their 2010 essay ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, in which they analyse the emergence of a new dominant culture:

Meanwhile, architects and artists increasingly abandon the aesthetic pre- cepts of deconstruction, parataxis, and pastiche in favor of aesth-ethical notions of reconstruction, myth, and metaxis. These artistic expressions move beyond the worn out sensibilities and empty practices of the postmodernists not by radically parting with their attitudes and techniques but by incorporating and redirecting them. In politics as in culture as elsewhere, a sensibility is emerging from and surpassing postmodernism; as a non-dialectical Aufhebung that negates the postmodern while retain- ing some of its traits. […] The metamodern structure of feeling evokes an oscillation between a modern desire for sense and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all, between a modern sincerity and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy and empathy and apathy and unity and plurality and pur- ity and corruption and naïveté and knowingness; between control and 89

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 89 commons and craftsmanship and conceptualism and pragmatism and utopianism. Indeed, metamodernism is an oscillation. (Rudrum and Stavris 2015)

The post-Soviet Russian radical conservatism in art and politics not only fits but also in many aspects forms this new global cultural and political vector that is defined by the term ‘metamodernism’. Postmodern irony and estrange- ment, the ‘flicker of meanings’ are combined with a clearly defined ideological position and vision of the future. Metamodernism does not exclude the utopian impulse. In politics, metamodernism is expressed as a partial revenge by ‘the political man’ over ‘the economic man’ and the creation of a hybrid ‘cosmo-nationalism’ (Hadar 2016), which combines the struggle for national, cultural or sexual sovereignty with faithfulness to the principles of the global economy, free trade and freedom of movement.

Daughterland and neo-conservative symbolic politics In my earlier works I describe the neo-conservative metaphors of Apollo, North and Cold (Engström 2012, 2016a, 2016b). It should be noted that the neo-conservative discourse is clearly dandyish, misogynistic, sexist and patriarchal. It is characterized by the aesthetics of male military communities, close to the camp style. While there are many female images too, the majority are representations of ideas associated with the topics of war and mobilization. Personifications of Russia have a long history in Russian visual culture, philosophy and literature (Hubbs 1993; Ryabov 2007; Rutten 2010; Aksenov 2015; Ryabov 2015). During the Silver Age, Russia was likened to a bride, while in the Soviet period the image of the motherland became dominant. The Russian tradition is marked by the great significance attached to the cult of the Theotokos, which unites images of a young virgin, of motherhood, and of the protectress. The Theotokos, who assists in warfare, is a persistent element of Russian cultural memory. The statuary images of goddesses/holy warriors, the likes of Pallas, Athena and Joan of Arc, as well as allegorical images of countries as maiden warriors were popular in the nationalist and patriotic European art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the mass propaganda art of the First World War. In 2007, the most prominent neo-conservative Russian artist, Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, reintroduced this tradition, presenting a new image of Russia as a daughter in his project Patria Filia: Daughterland (see Figure 5.1). He won the Kandinsky prize, the most prestigious prize for contemporary art in Russia, for this project in 2008. The mid-2000s were characterized by a normalization and secondary aestheticizing of the Stalinist epoch and its inclusion in the historical narrative. I believe that it is due to these processes that Belyaev-Gintovt’s project was singled out by the jury as an important artistic representation of processes in culture and society. The image of Daughterland is symbolized in this project by a fragment of the famous sculpture Worker 90

90 Maria Engström

Figure 5.1 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, Patria Filia, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

and Kolkhoz Woman by Vera Mukhina (1937). On the other hand, an inner circle of confidants knew of another, earlier work, representing Daughterland as a young Valkyrie – a young female with a sword and a black flag, and her traditional Russian sarafan dress fluttering in the wind. This image from 2004 became a symbol of the Eurasian Union of Youth, which had been created in response to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine (see Figure 5.2). In the Patria Philia project, Beliaev-Gintovt developed Nikolai Fedorov’s (1829–1903) esoteric idea of ‘father-loving’ daughters, presented in his Philosophy of Common Cause (1906–13). Fedorov divided all women into two types: ‘ordinary’ women who love their offspring; and a superior and much smaller group whose virtue is ‘love for fathers’.5 This second – and according to Fedorov superior – group of ‘daughters’ had a special task in the future project of the resurrection of the ancestors. Fedorov emphasized the gendered aspects of the various stages of resurrection, leaving ‘daughters’ the task of ‘embodying’ fathers and mothers, lending a somewhat occult and futuristic take to the female tradition of weaving:

Death, one might say, is a form of anaesthesia, during which the most complete corrosion, decomposition, and dispersion of substances takes place. Recombining these scattered particles is a question for cosmo-telluric 91

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 91

Figure 5.2 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, Patria Philia, 2004. Courtesy of the artist.

science and art, and consequently the male task of assembling the col- lected parts is a physiological and histological problem, while the problem of weaving together, as they say, the fabrics of the human body, the body of our fathers and mothers, is a female task. (Fedorov 1982: 419)

In Soviet times, Fedorov’s ideas were developed by Aleksander Bogdanov (1873–1928), a philosopher and science-fiction writer, who tried to transfer blood from young to old revolutionaries in order to preserve the life of the fathers of the revolution (Krementsov 2011). A curious interpretation of the Daughterland plot during the Soviet period can be found in Partisan Ballad (1961) by the Belorussian painter, May Danzig (b. 1930). In 2015, Partisan Ballad was displayed at the Saatchi Gallery in London in an exhibition devoted to the seventieth anniversary of victory in the Second World War. It depicts a young woman with a rifle, her head inclined in a manner reminiscent 92

92 Maria Engström of the Blessed Virgin/Theotokos as featured in icons. She is breastfeeding a wounded soldier who, in turn, is reminiscent of the Saviour who has just been taken removed from cross. The place of the infant is taken by a guerrilla fighter who can be seen as both a brother and a father. The merging of patriotism as filial love with forbidden eroticism, which is present in Dantsig’s work and in contemporary images of Daughterland, can be traced to the painting Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero) by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). The St Petersburg Hermitage owns the first version of Rubens’ painting from 1612. The image was very popular in Soviet times and even printed on a postage stamp. This masterpiece is based on a legend, an account of which was written by Valerius Maximus, a Roman historian from the first century AD. The legend tells of Cimon, who was sentenced to death by starvation by the Roman senate. His daughter, Pero, had recently given birth to a child. Wanting to prolong her father’s life, she came daily to his prison cell to breastfeed him. Her love for her father was stronger than her love for her child or her fear of death, as breastfeeding adults was treated as incest and punishable by death. This unprecedented loyalty led the judges to grant Cimon a pardon. Pero was also pardoned in recognition of her self- sacrifice and fulfillment of her filial duties. In 2008, during the Georgia–Russia conflict, Belyaev-Gintovt created a new genre of mobilization posters, which he called ‘eschatological posters’ (eschat-plakat). He visualized the future Russia in the image of a beautiful young Valkyrie, shield maiden or dominatrix, wearing a traditional Russian shawl, ready for battle, armed with a hybrid golden axe and a Kalashnikov automatic rifle. In this artistic project, Daughterland was personified by a muse of the neo-conservative camp: the model, actress and political journalist Anastasia Mikhailovskaya. The image of future Russia as a daughterland that will resurrect the past and its fathers, and ‘will bring it all back’, is executed in an iconographic manner, with black, red and gold predominant. The image of a young woman standing with a weapon tilted forwards refers to known Eurasian personifications of motherland, such as the monuments Mother Georgia (1958/1963) and Mother Armenia (1967). Belyaev-Gintovt’s mobilization images (One Soul: One People and Sevastopol Is a Russian City; see Figure 5.3), with their cross-like composition and deliberate monumentality, refer to these iconic monuments from the era of friendship between Eurasian peoples and their collective struggle against the common enemy. During the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the war in Donbass, Belyaev- Gintovt in collaboration with Andrei Iryschkov created a series of video posters Read My Lips (2014–15). In place of Mikhailovskaya, the part of Daughterland is played by Maria Katasonova, who is also a journalist and model but also coordinator of Evgeny Fyodorov’s patriotic National Liberation Movement (Natsionalno-Osvoboditelnoe Dvizhenie, NOD). In the meantime, Anastasia Mikhailovskaya went from being on Belyaev-Gintovt’s 93

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 93

Figure 5.3 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt, Sevastopol Is a Russian City, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

prophetic posters of 2008 to be Igor Strelkov’s public-relations agent and take charge of the Novorossiya information agency, where she records propaganda clips in which she recites, among other things, Nikolai Gumilev’s poem War (1914) and Dugin’s manifestos. This type of reciprocal interweaving of art and reality and to some extent radical carnivalistic behaviour is characteristic of both the avant-garde of the early twentieth century and the contemporary conservative avant-garde. Each Read My Lips video clip is a thirty- to forty-second- long oath delivered by a braided girl either wearing national costume with the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) red, blue and black banner in the background, or in uniform in the middle of a desolate landscape. The viewer can only see the movement of the lips and must decode the meaning of the utterances. The artists use archaeo-futuristic imagery of the warrior maiden and combine traditionalism with contemporary minimalism and electronic music. It seems that the strict, slow movements that are close to immobility, as well as the intentional chastity of the girl’s fairytale image are deliberately set against other famous artistic projects – the savage protest dances of Pussy Riot and the Ukrainian Femen, with their aggressive nudity and chthonic female origin. At the same time, there is a clear sadomasochist subtext in the Read My Lips project that is set in the Orthodox context (see Figure 5.4). It was transferred to neo-Eurasianism by the ideology of national Bolshevism, which is based on the extreme sexualization of political protest. 94

94 Maria Engström

Figure 5.4 Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt and Andrei Iryschkov, Read My Lips, 2014. Courtesy of the artists.

The romantic subjects of youth, beauty, heroism and sacrifice continue in the creative works of the St Petersburg-based art group, Doping-Pong, pioneers of Russian digital art. Doping-Pong’s The Birth of a Legend (2013) (see Figure 5.5) depicts seventeen-year- old Vera Voloshina, who sat for Ivan Shadr (1887–1941), the artist and sculptor of the iconic Soviet sculpture Girl with an Oar. Vera Voloshina, the epitome of a Soviet girl, was immortalized in the statue. She was a student of the Physical Education Institute, who wrote poetry, was a skydiver, rode a motorbike and was a Voroshilov sharpshooter. She volunteered as soon as the war with Nazi Germany began, became a member of a partisan group and died a martyr’s death in November 1941 at the age of twenty-two. A special role in developing the neo-conservative metaphor of Daughterland and the neo-grand style of its representation was played by the Soviet magazine Ogonyok. In the 1930s–1950s, Ogonyok focused on the image of the Soviet woman, represented in ‘ceremonial’, full-length portraits or set against the background of their workplaces. In the mid-1980s, pastiches of Ogonyok magazine from the Stalin period became popular in the Leningrad and Moscow musical and artistic underground. It all began as a styob, but interest in the aesthetics of romantic Socialist Realism gradually became more serious and eventually came to define the aesthetic programme of the conservative avant- garde. For instance, Georgii Guryanov’s famous painting Traktoristka (Female Tractor Driver, 1998) is a ‘cover’ of a photograph from Ogonyok. 95

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 95

Figure 5.5 Doping-Pong, The Birth of a Legend, 2013. Courtesy of the artists.

Interesting images of Daughterland can be found in the art of the famous Moscow artist, Aleksei Morozov (b. 1974), who also identifies with the neo-conservative agenda. In his sculptures and paintings we can note similar statuaire to the works of Doping-Pong and Belyaev-Gintovt, the same determination and aloofness and the same combination of ‘eternal womanhood’ with militarism, antiquity and our times. If Belyaev-Gintovt and Doping- Pong connect the future to the resurrection of the romantic Soviet past, Morozov’s neo-Hellenism echoes the idea of ‘Moscow as the Third Rome’; the artist sees the future Russia as a girl in a toga and with a Roman hairstyle but riding a Segway and brandishing the latest generation of weaponry. The image of Daughterland in neo-conservative discourse is also embodied in Russian ‘sports beauties’. Sports and military/political victories have been closely connected since Soviet times but only in 2014 did this connection re-emerge fully blown when Russia’s victories in the Sochi Winter Olympics coincided with the annexation of Crimea and then again in 2016 due to the banning of some Russian athletes, including Elena Isinbaeva, from the Summer Olympics in Rio. One can also highlight the symbolic images of figure skater Yulia Lipnitskaya and fencer Sofiya Velikaya, to whom Belyaev- Gintovt and Doping-Pong had attributed their work. For example, the artists of Doping-Pong used word play in their work Velikaya (which translates as Great), combining the last name of the fencer with the abbreviation Rus that all the Russian team wore on their uniform during the games. The result is a fresh, modern and unexpected interpretation of ‘Velikaya Rus’, which translates as ‘Ruthenia magna’ (see Figure 5.6). 96

96 Maria Engström

Figure 5.6 Doping-Pong, Velikaya (Great Russia), 2015. Courtesy of the artists.

The neo-conservative metaphor of Russia as daughter has yet to take root in official rhetoric, but it is already sufficiently represented in popular culture. The short period of perestroika was the time of the youth. Young women as objects of desire dominated the visual culture and cinema of that period, such as the first Soviet beauty pageants and the cult filmsAssa (1987), Malenkaya Vera (1988) and Interdevochka (1989). The image of a beautiful young girl symbolized the sexual revolution and liberation from Soviet puritanism, patriotism and bureaucracy. However, a new interpretation, bringing us closer to the Daughterland concept, which refers not just to the future but also to the past, was born as early as the beginning of the 2000s. The metaphor of Russia as a teenage girl is present in the filmSisters (2001), directed by Sergei Bodrov, Jr. The film demonstrates for the first time in the post-Soviet period 97

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 97 a reconstruction of romantic heroism typical of both official Soviet culture and the wild 1990s. The main heroine of Sisters, the elder sister Sveta played by Oksana Akinshina, is a thirteen-year-old girl from a provincial Russian town, a brave ‘girl with a gun’ who wants to be a sniper in the Russian army and to fight in Chechnya. Sveta not only protects her younger half-sister Dina but in her name also stands up to defend the future of Russia-Eurasia from evil, personified in the movie by the local mafia. Thus, she becomes one of the first embodiments of Daughterland and marks the return of both the Soviet interpretation of an archaic ‘young victim’ plot and Soviet ‘child heroism’.6 Another interesting example of the Daughterland discourse in contemporary Russian popular culture is the most recent version of Viktor Tsoi’ famous song Cuckoo/Kukushka from 1990, performed by the twelve-year- old Dasha Volosevich (2015). Earlier covers of this song were performed by young female singers: Zemfira made her version in 2000 and Polina Gagarina in 2015. Gagarina’s version of Cuckoo was the soundtrack for the blockbuster Battle of Sevastopol (2015), which tells the story of a Soviet maiden who turns out to be a natural-born sniper.7 Here we see a reference to Bodrov’s Sisters not only because both girls are snipers but also because Viktor Tsoi’s Cuckoo was the soundtrack to Sisters. Polina Gagarina’s cover gathered almost 36 million views on YouTube and demonstrated the commercial potential of the idea of Russia as katechon, represented by the young female warrior sniper.8 The special twist to Dasha Volosevich’s performance in this video is the fusion of childish innocence, aggressive militarization and a willingness/readiness for future sacrifice. To date, the video has been viewed more than 7 million times, which demonstrates the demand for and commercial value of the Daughterland concept. The context of war and/or army is even more explicitly presented in the internet posters. The commercialization and populariza- tion of the image of a young girl and war in the patriotic segment of pop culture culminated in February 2016 in the most recent cover of Viktor Tsoi’s Cuckoo performed by the seven-year- old Yaroslava Degtyareva on the show Golos-Deti, which has been viewed more than 17 million times on YouTube (see Figure 5.7). The press release for the song tells us that the girl chose the song herself after seeing the filmThe Battle of Sevastopol. A recent case that demonstrates the topicality of the Daughterland discourse in official propaganda and mass culture was Natalya Poklonskaya, the prosecutor general of Crimea, who became a symbol not only of the Russian Spring, but of Russia as katechon. In the famous video clip Nyash-Myash by Enjoykin from March 2014 (26 million views on YouTube), she became a ‘cute’ superhero in a military uniform. The segments of the video shot in the anime style presented the thirty-four-year-old as a girl with a sword fighting against metaphysical evil. Then followed a stream of anonymous anime drawings of Poklonskaya on the internet (Moskovskii komsomolets 2014) (see Figure 5.8). Poklonskaya’s archetypical characteristics and her media and pop-culture potential are determined by her position as an enforcement officer and also 98

Figure 5.7 Dasha Volosevich, still from Cuckoo, 2015. http://ecoleart.ru/dasha- volosevich.html.

Figure 5.8 Anonymous, Natalya Poklonskaya as Nyash-Katechon, a shield against Anomia [bezzakonie], 2014. www.mk.ru/social/ article/ 2014/ 03/ 20/ 1001432- yapontsyi-hotyat- chtobyi- ih- doprosila- prokuror- poklonskaya.html . 99

Daughterland: messianism and visuality 99 by her similarity to FBI agent Clarice Starling, the character from the film The Silence of the Lambs played by Jodie Foster, who also single-handedly emerged victorious against absolute evil. The images of Daughterland have an explicit mythological subtext in both popular culture and neo-conservative discourse: a beautiful young damsel endures the wrongs and tortures of evil, often personified by an old witch or her stepmother, or both. For example, Poklonskaya as a symbol of Crimea and ‘real people’s democracy’ is contrasted with Timoshenko as a symbol of the new Ukrainian oligarchic regime (‘the Junta’). There are many anti-Ukrainian memes on the internet with allu- sions to Snow White. In the neo-conservative discourse, just like in folklore, beauty becomes a symbol of ‘civilizational’ truth. Poklonskaya’s youth and beauty are contrasted with the ugly old body of bureaucratic Europe. This image was embodied in a popular meme in which Poklonskaya, representing Russia, was drawn as an anime character and Europe – and the West in a broader context – is represented by an unflattering photograph of the former high representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton. In these memes, the face of Poklonskaya is unmoved in its chastity, whereas the faces of the ‘enemies’ are distorted by grimaces. The political potential of Daughterland was fully tested for the first time during the campaign for elections to the Duma in the summer of 2016. A distinctive feature of this state Duma election was the great number of young women candidates. Among them were the beauties and media celebrities Natalya Poklonskaya (Rodina), Maria Katasonova (United Russia) and Maria Baronova (Open Russia). The sexualization and anaesthetization of political protest were traits of the marginal nonconformist movements of the 1990s (e.g., Limonov’s National-Bolshevik Party), but today this subtext has moved into official culture and politics. Feeling the vibes of the time, Eduard Limonov (2016) published an article in August 2016, ‘Only Broads Are Going into Battle’, in which he noted an unexpected influx of qualified and attractive women into Russian politics. Poklonskaya, for instance, is increasingly mentioned in the media not only as an Asian sex symbol but also as the ‘princess of Crimea’ and an ‘heiress to Putin’ (Connor 2016).

Conclusions The images of homeland as a female virgin warrior or a merciful young female who is ready to sacrifice herself for the cause are typical during war or in pre- war periods, as they possess great mobilization potential. Today, the future of Russia is seen in neo-conservative circles primarily in the utopian ideas of resur- recting and preserving the life and art of the past. The images of Daughterland find themselves in an ambiguous zone, somewhere between patriotism and incest, feminism and male fantasy, and nostalgia and futurism. This mercurial condition is one of the typical traits of the global post-postmodernist culture of which the contemporary Russian conservative avant-garde is part. 100

100 Maria Engström The images and meanings of romantic and sexual patriotism formulated by Russian neo-conservative subculture at the beginning of the 2000s are being filled with political meaning today. This new phenomenon of erotic patriotism clearly goes beyond Putin’s alpha-male cult, which characterized his second presidential term and reflects deep-rooted archaic symbolism of youth sacrifice for the ‘common cause’. As for Putin, he is definitively solidifying as the ‘father’ of a young and sexy nation.

Notes

1 One could mention here the revival and transformation of VDNKh complex, the Russian pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale which focused on VDNKh, or the Colta’s project ‘The 90s Island [Ostrov 90-kh]’ (Filippova 2015; Taylor-Foster 2016). 2 See, for example, the exhibition ‘Hurray! Sculpture!’ at Winzavod with Anatolii Osmolovskii as the curator (Winzavod, 5 December 2015–24 January 2016). 3 Surkov himself never confirmed his authorship. 4 Most influential in the neo-conservative artistic sphere is Konstantin Leontiev’s aestheticism, which draws on vitalism and the cult of life and anti-mortality. Imperial aesthetics appeal not only to artists and writers, architects and filmmak- ers but also to neo-conservative politicians, who rarely discuss the economic or juridical aspects of their imperial projects. The writings of contemporary radical conservatives are not so much a political programme as manifestoes and pam- phlets on imperial aesthetics. 5 According to Osipovich (1998): ‘In his Philosophy of Common Cause he [Fedorov] divided all women into two types. The first one, the most numerous, included all mothers. Fedorov described this type as the one in which “the prevailing, exclusively dominant principle is Philoprogenitiveness, love of children. It is capable of rearing and raising not humans but tyrants. This type is, obviously, inferior. It is sensuous and intolerant, with its whole world limited to a nursery […] As a second, much smaller but more highly regarded, type the philosopher designates Antigones and Cordelias; i.e. women whose virtue is ‘love for fathers’ ”. 6 We can observe the growing popularity of images of warrior maidens in the West as well. This archetype is present in such blockbusters as The Hunger Games, Games of Thrones and Divergent. 7 The Ukrainian title of this Russian-Ukrainian film isIndestructible (Nezlamna, Nesokrushimaya). 8 The image of chaste Gagarina in a white dress in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2015 is also included in the ideologeme of Daughterland because the contest, with its politicized agenda, was the first after sanctions were imposed for the annexation of Crimea, and Gagarina was the personal target of all the criticism of Russia.

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Daughterland: messianism and visuality 101 Bikbov, Aleksander (2016) ‘Iz entsiklopedii muzei prevrashchaetsya v prezentat- sionnuyu ploshchadku’, Colta, 23 March. Available at www.colta.ru/articles/ raznoglasiya/10484. Boyakov, Eduard (2015) ‘Poezdki na Afon i v Pskovo-Pecherskii monastyr, dumaesh, bessledno prokhodit?’ Colta, 7 October. Available at www.colta.ru/articles/theatre/ 8787. Connor, Laura (2016) ‘Next Putin? “Iron Princess of Crimea” Who Became Manga Sex Symbol in Japan Takes Next Step to Kremlin’, Daily Mirror, 26 August. Available at www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/next-putin-iron-princess-crimea-8713307. Engström, Maria (2012) ‘Forbidden Dandyism: Imperial Aesthetics in Contemporary Russia’, in Peter MacNeil and Louise Wallenberg (eds.), Nordic Fashion Studies, Stockholm: Axl Books, pp. 179–99. —— (2014) ‘Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy’, Contemporary Security Policy, 35 (3): 356–79. —— (2016a) ‘Apollo against Black Square: Conservative Futurism in Contemporary Russia’, in Günter Berghaus (ed.) International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 328–53. —— (2016b) ‘Neo-Cosmism, Empire, and Contemporary Russian Art: Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt’, in Vlad Strukov and Helena Goscilo (eds.), Russian Aviation, Space Flight and Visual Culture, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 135–65. Fedorov, Nikolai (1982) Sochineniia, Moscow: Mysl’. Filippova, Anya (2015) ‘Grand Designs: Can a Stalinist Propaganda Park Become an Appealing Public Space?’ Calvert Journal. Available at http://calvertjournal.com/ articles/show/3568/vdnkh-moscow-stalinist-renovation-urbanism-public-space. Hadar, Leon (2016) ‘Nationalism Isn’t Replacing Globalism’, The National Interest, 30 June. Available at http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/nationalism-isnt- replacing-globalism-16792?page=2. Hubbs, Joanna (1993) Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Krementsov, Nikolai (2011) A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press. Laruelle, Marlene (2015) ‘The Iuzhinskii Circle: Far-Right Metaphysics in the Soviet Underground and Its Legacy Today’, Russian Review, 74 (5): 563–80. Limonov, Eduard (2016) ‘V boi idut odni devki’, UM+. Available at https://um.plus/ 2016/08/29/v-boj-idut-odni-devki/. Osipovich, T. (1998) ‘Victory Over Birth and Death, or Womenphobia of Russian Utopian Thought at the Turn of the XXth Century’, Obshestvennye nauki i sovre- mennost’, 4: 174–81. Raikov, A. (2010) ‘Kulturnaya sostavlyayushchaya natsional-bolshevizma’, NBP-info, 4. Available at http://theory.nazbol.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=art icle&id=196: 2010-01-09-11-15-33&catid=30: the-community&Itemid=49. Rudrum, David and Nicholas Stavris (eds.) (2015) Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century, London: Bloomsbury. Rutten, Ellen (2010) Unattainable Bride Russia: Gendering Nation, State, and Intelligentsia in Russian Intellectual Culture, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press. Ryabov, Oleg (2007) ‘Rossiia-Matuska’: Natsionalizm, gender i voina v Rossii XX veka, Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag. 102

102 Maria Engström —— (2015) ‘The “Motherland” in the Symbolic Politics in the Time of the “Snow Revolution”: Legitimation and Delegitimation of Power’, Labirint, 4: 64–81. Available at www.intelros.ru/pdf/Labirint/2015_4/Riabov_2.pdf. Sekatskii, Aleksander (2011) ‘Missiya Rossii: stat Noevym kovchegom’, Nevskoe vremya, 11 January. Available at www.nvspb.ru/tops/missiya-rossii-stat-noevym- kovchegom-44138. Taylor-Foster, James (2016) ‘Russian Pavilion at 2016 Venice Biennale to Examine the VDNH: Moscow’s Soviet “Amusement Park” ’, ArchDaily, 12 April. Available at www.archdaily.com/784716/russian-pavilion-at-2016-venice-biennale-to-examine- the-vdnh-nil-moscows-soviet-amusement-park. Yurchak, Alexei (2005) Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: the Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 103

6 Cultural policy and conservatism in Hungary A parallel development

Eszter Babarczy

In this chapter, I attempt an analysis of the cultural policy of what I prefer to call ‘Orbánism’, the political regime and set of political principles that has dominated Hungarian cultural life – and most other aspects of life – since the 2010 election victory of the Viktor Orbán-led ‘Alliance of Young Democrats’ (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége, Fidesz). I propose that the nature of the present regime and its cultural policy cannot be fully understood without some familiarity with the final decade of state socialism in Hungary, which is usually referred to as the late Kádár era, after János Kádár, the leader of the state socialist party of Hungary.

Prehistory: the compromise between party and culture Having consolidated party power during a brief but bloody period following the 1956 revolution, Kádár started the country on a course that came to be known as ‘goulash communism’ or ‘the merriest barrack on the block’. Kádár’s cultural policy, delegated to the infamous György Aczél, reflected his preference for a truce with an intelligentsia alienated by the retribution after the revolution. His motto, as he announced in 1961, was ‘whoever is not against us, is with us’, radically redefining the Stalinist concept of internal enemies. His aim was to domesticate large segments of the intellectual elite, who were described as ‘fellow travellers’. Most of these intellectuals, writers, musicians and film-makers learned to exercise some self-censorship while negotiating their options with party-appointed editors and other high- ranking cultural bureaucrats. Most had personal access to György Aczél, the ‘tsar of Hungarian culture’, who cultivated their friendship. The three categories in socialist art policy were: ‘forbidden’, ‘tolerated’ and ‘supported’. Forbidden artists and writers were silenced; tolerated artists could work and even exhibit at smaller venues, mostly in the country; supported artists, by no means all of whom were communists or socialists, lived a comfortable middle- class lifestyle, exhibited at major national venues, received awards and were allowed to travel. Since 1989, critics and historians have paid most attention to the systems of oppression under state socialism while curators have re-canonized 104

104 Eszter Babarczy the cultural figures who did not cut a deal with the regime. However, only a handful of artists and writers belonged in this category. By the final phase of Kádár-era socialism, the extensive system of cultural institutions had become fairly inclusive. Even artists (or individual works) who had been forbidden and often harassed in the 1970s were tolerated in the final years of the regime. By this time, however, many of the intransigents had been forced to leave the country. A few went on to establish international careers, but others remained on the margins of the international art world and regarded themselves as exiles. While oppressing or forcing abroad a few implacable critics, the socialist state maintained that ‘culture is not a commodity’. Accordingly, state- controlled organizations distributed studio space and stipends, maintained retreats for artists and ran a nationwide commercial distribution channel. It was mostly through these channels of state patronage that favoured artists enjoyed the rewards of reconciliation. Commissions for public monuments went to the favoured sculptors of the regime, but from the late 1960s the aesthetics of these public sculptures moved away from Stalinist requirements and incorporated stylistic features of modern expressionist, geometric and abstract art. Thus, even the face of officialdom converged to some extent with currents of Western international art. Socialist Hungary wanted to be modern in its own way and proudly emphasized the progressiveness of its cultural policies.

The renewal of the culture wars in Hungary Post-socialist Hungary inherited an extensive system of cultural institutions that soon proved to be difficult to finance. While the first freely elected Hungarian government defined itself as centre-right and ‘national’ or ‘patriotic’, it did not have the means to introduce and establish a new canon in the art world, partly because there were very few artists with the appropriate ‘pedigree’ and partly because it struggled with the immense economic consequences of political change. The government itself, however, was closely linked with ‘populist’ (agrarian or ‘Narodnik’) writers. In the mid-1980s, this group had formed one of the first opposition groups that could be turned into the seed of a political party when the process of political change – a surprise even to opponents of the socialist system – was launched by Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to let the Eastern Bloc go. The aesthetics of these writers could perhaps be best described as ‘Narodnik expressionism’. They saw themselves as the heirs to the populist or Narodnik movement of interwar Hungary. This latter group was leftist, romantic-agrarian and nation-centred and defined itself in opposition to both the official Horthy regime (and its aesthetics) and what it regarded as ‘urbanist’, ‘cosmopolitan’ Jewish culture. After 1990, and the first free elections in Hungary since 1945, it was these two strands of cultural heritage – those of the Horthy regime, which the new political elite regarded as the last 105

Cultural policy in Hungary 105 sovereign Hungarian state, and the populist writers – that were resurrected in the language of symbolic, including cultural, politics. However, the official ‘neo-baroque’ culture of the interwar era and the Narodnik heritage were only united in a soft cultural anti-Semitism (or anti-cosmopolitanism) and an irredentist nationalism. These currents, especially open anti-Semitism, were seen as hardly acceptable in a new democracy that regarded itself as European to the core and provided political opportunities for the liberal opposition party. This party, the Free Democrats, had been formed by the other significant opposition group to socialist officialdom, the so-called Democratic Opposition, and became the target of vicious anti-Semitic attacks from the ‘Narodnik group’ in the ruling party, the Hungarian Democrats. The official cultural policy of the early 1990s therefore lived in an uneasy coexistence with the ever more radical anti- Semitism of some of the founders of the party in government. Eventually, Prime Minister József Antall, a centre-right Christian Democrat, forced out the most radical and vociferous proponent of anti-Semitism while also getting rid of the ‘national liberal’ group within the ruling party. In the 1990s, the ‘culture wars’ flared up in and around all cultural institutions and branches, eventually creating parallel structures in some areas, mostly in journalism (two associations divided along the lines of the culture wars) and literature (a new association for writers who left the original group because of the anti-Semitic pronouncements of some of its members). In the visual arts, music and theatre, however, the most important institutions were still closer to the urbanist definition of contemporary culture: pro-European, proudly cosmopolitan and post-national. To understand the emergence of the parallel structures that increasingly dominated Hungarian culture for much of the twenty years that followed 1990 and the first eruption of the ‘culture wars’, we must step back again to the late 1980s. The socialist institutional structure of the 1980s was disrupted by the arrival in 1984 of the foundation of the Hungarian-born philanthropist, George Soros. The Soros Foundation functioned as a parallel cultural sphere with its own cultural policy that mostly, but not exclusively, supported liberal-leaning intellectuals, writers and artists. It is hard to overemphasize the long-term consequences of this development. Nowadays, both leftist and right-wing critics of liberalism emphasize that ‘the Soros network’ vied for and achieved ‘cultural hegemony’ as early as the late 1980s. This cultural hegemony in the arts mostly favoured neo-avant-garde artists and their critics who resisted the Kádár-era politics of appeasement and seduction. Moreover, because the foundation cooperated with the cultural institutions of the Kádár era – such as the Kunsthalle, the main venue for contemporary art – many of the institutions and their leaders survived the political changes. With the additional support of the liberal mayor of Budapest, a flourishing art scene was created and the first commercial galleries appeared in Hungary. The Soros Foundation’s involvement in Hungarian culture eased the transition to a market economy 106

106 Eszter Babarczy for actors in the cultural sphere and ensured that liberals removed by a rightist leadership made a soft landing and survived on scholarships. In part because it was helping artists and writers regarded as urbanist, the Soros network came under attack early on. Despite the fact that it had supported the very people who later attacked it, it was to become a major target in the slow formation of a right-wing cultural elite. Even though the foundation supported many ‘beyond-border’ Hungarians and cultural projects, it was seen and labelled as an anti-national force – a term that could be interpreted as ‘Jewish’ in the Hungarian language. The nationalism of the new right relied – and still relies – on emotional concern for minority Hungarians living beyond its borders and an open nostalgia for ‘Greater Hungary’ (the territory of the kingdom of Hungary before the Treaty of Trianon was signed in 1920). The truly cosmopolitan network of Soros foundations was and is a convenient embodiment of ‘the foreigner’, ‘the internal enemy’ and, on occa- sion, ‘the international Jew’.

Orbán’s first government: the first acts of self-assertion Viktor Orbán came to prominence as the leader of a third party formed in the late 1980s. In 1990, Fidesz was made up of under-thirties who regarded themselves as ‘children of divorced parents’, referring to the implacable enmity between urbanists and Narodniks. Liberal in outlook but sharing a concern for Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries, the party was seen by many young liberals as an opportunity to leave behind the venom of the symbolic and cultural wars. Fidesz was a party far less steeped in the cultural sphere; most of its founders were law students or young lawyers. They founded their own ‘thick journal’ (the 1990s was the decade of dozens of cultural and political magazines edited for highly educated audiences), which started to explore different pasts in the Hungarian political heritage, looking for a tradition to identify with. Fidesz was highly anti-communist, but the first tradition it explored was that of the so-called bourgeois radicals, a progressive group from around the turn of the century who fought to extend the franchise and for social reform, and who were mostly modernist in their aesthetics. Fidesz started its move right after 1993, when it realized it could not compete as liberals with the Free Democrats, whose often patronizing behaviour they resented. In hindsight, it was precisely its lack of a cultural heritage that made it much easier for Fidesz to change its political colours. It was far less sensitive to anti-Semitic language because very few of its founders came from Hungarian Jewish families. It therefore easily embraced the nationalist rhetoric of the late József Antall, the first Hungarian prime minister, that, for Fidesz, did not evoke the spectre of Nazism. The same cultural rootless- ness, on the other hand, left the founders without a foothold in the parallel institutions developing under the political struggles between Narodniks and ‘Westernizers’. During its first term, Fidesz’s main objective was to establish a strong institutional and financial background for the party, and its cultural 107

Cultural policy in Hungary 107 moves and references were mostly designed to woo right-leaning older voters who had been deeply immersed in the tragic culture wars. The first Orbán government (1998–2002) made attempts to establish its own cultural institutions, cancelling, among other things, the construction of a new National Theatre, which was already in progress but regarded as the ‘territory’ of the Free Democrats, and building another one at a different location based on a much criticized postmodernist design by a less than prominent architect. Because the new government was working in coalition with the Hungarian Democrats (the by-then-insignificant first governing party), the Smallholders, Agrarian Workers and Civic Party and the Christian Democratic Party, it adopted a conservative-nationalistic tone and turned the year 2000 into a celebration of St Stephen, the first king of Hungary. The coalition’s cultural preferences were strictly thematic: local governments received funds and commissioned artists independently. The result, not surprisingly, was a mixture of small-scale monumentalism and genre sculpture. The first Orbán government also embraced an architectural version of the populist/Narodnik movement that stood in stark contrast to the second-hand postmodernism of the new National Theatre (see Figure 6.1) or the modernist concert hall, also built under the auspices of the first Fidesz government. While the government put much effort and considerable public funding into propaganda efforts celebrating Hungary’s national traditions, its artistic

Figure 6.1 The National Theatre with a detail of a free-standing gate by Miklós Melocco, 2002. Photo: Eszter Babarczy. 108

108 Eszter Babarczy choices were rather eclectic. Cultural policy-makers relied on their own private networks. Thus, the friends (and friends of friends) of Miklós Melocco, a sculptor who received a large number of public commissions, and Imre Makovecz, the leader of the organic architecture movement, became the centres of an unofficial official culture. They dominated the public scene without invoking explicit aesthetic ideologies, although most would describe them as patriotic and Christian. Melocco’s history is fairly typical of the new right- wing culture: victimized by the Stalinist regime, he was nonetheless able to find his place in the Hungary of Kádár and had a Kunsthalle exhibition as early as 1967 and another in 1985. He combined the neo-baroque leanings of the interwar regime with elements of postmodernism and remained untouched by modernism or the conceptual tendencies of the artist-opposition. The architect Makovecz had also been given opportunities under socialism and had developed his unique style of highly ornamental organic architecture before the political changes. The literary and art worlds, however, were barely touched. As the main guest of the 1999 Frankfurt Book Fair, Hungary delegated authors who were already established and popular, especially in Germany, as well as younger writers in the ‘Westernizer’ tradition. This continuing support for Westernizers was met with much indignation on the part of the populists who remained allied with Fidesz. The main thrust of Fidesz ideology was increasingly fervent anti-communism, more specifically the eradication of all (ex-)communist networks and influences. Fidesz described itself as a party for a new Hungarian Bürgertum – the closest equivalent of the Hungarian word polgár, which means both citizen and bourgeois, and under socialism had been applied as a disapproving adjective to non-communist regimes, authors and philosophers. Anti-liberalism featured only as frequent references to the previous government, a Socialist-Free Democrat coalition, which was described as ‘a return of the sons to the fathers’, referring to the fact that some leading figures in the Free Democrats had started their careers as reformist Marxists while others were children of prominent Communist Party members. By 2002, however, especially after its surprise defeat in the parliamentary elections, Fidesz fused its anti-communism with an attack on the Free Democrats and their cultural allies, who were now described as beneficiaries of the party-state, notwithstanding the fact that most had openly and coura- geously opposed the regime and signalled their opposition by joining Charter ’77, the Czech opposition movement lead by Václav Havel. The first cultural manifestation of the new, more aggressive tone was the House of Terror Museum, established by Viktor Orbán, whose name and words were inscribed on a plaque above the stairs leading to the exhibition – an unheard-of gesture in Hungary where personality cults had previously been avoided by politicians. House of Terror is a museum built for an immersive experience and edutainment, and was stylistically very modern for its time. Again, it was not the aesthetics but the message that concerned the 109

Cultural policy in Hungary 109 political sponsor: the museum is supposed to commemorate the victims of the Arrow Cross (the Hungarian Nazi collaborator movement) and those of the communist political police – each consecutively headquartered in the same building. The museum is not so much about the victims, however, as about the perpetrators – it reminds the audience not to forget the sins of the members of the political police, who are represented by names and faces throughout the external wall. One such leader happens to be the father of a prominent Free Democrat. The museum programme also suggests that Arrow Cross members, representing foreign (German) interests, morphed into the newly constituted political police; and that both were creations of external powers. In fact, the Arrow Cross movement was a Hungarian breed of Nazism, and the organization’s roots reached back to the mid-1930s. This distortion – pointing out perpetrators and labelling them agents of foreign forces – was to play a far more prominent role in the cultural script of the second and third Orbán administrations.1

The 1956 memorial: an open clash between modernists and conservatives Orbán lost power to a Socialist–Free Democrat coalition in 2002. The new government continued to support neo-avant-garde artists and Westernizer- progressive writers as well as cultural projects. However, the focus of this government was initially a 50-per-cent pay rise for all public-service employees with a degree and increased benefits to other social groups such as pensioners; and later its efforts to climb out of this self-dug budgetary pit. This was a policy of buying support and peace for a government under constant fire from Fidesz, which had claimed that the socialist victory was illegitimate because ‘the nation cannot be in opposition’. The government also suffered from disarray within its ranks, especially with the Free Democrats, after it was revealed that its non-party prime minister had been a spy during the socialist regime. Public expenditure had got out of hand, and money was scarce by the time another prime minister took over to take the Socialist–Free Democrat coalition to a second victory in 2006. The Soros Foundation had scaled down its activities in Hungary in previous years and in 2006 announced a complete shutdown. The deficit and the disappearance of this secondary funding source meant that cultural institutions and projects had to tighten their belts. The focus of the new government was reform of large-scale social systems such as health care, and culture played only a minor role. The new Prime Minister, Ferenc Gyurcsány, became increasingly unpopular after a speech was leaked in which he had told Socialist Party members of parliament that the previous government had lied about the public finances and the country could not now avoid serious austerity programmes. The ‘speech about the lie’, as it was called, provoked public unrest. Dozens of young people, mostly football hooligans, attacked the building of Hungarian Public Television and set police cars on fire. 110

110 Eszter Babarczy The year was also the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 revolution, probably the only national event that is seen as foundational on both left and right of the political spectrum. On 23 October, the anniversary of a mass protest against Stalinism in Hungary, the opponents of the government mobilized their resources. In addition to a mostly peaceful Fidesz mass rally, students and football hooligans protested in the streets, and the protests turned violent. The riot police used rubber bullets and sticks indiscriminately, causing many injuries. Nonetheless, the government went ahead with the official celebration. In a surreal doubling of reality, the live commemorations during which tanks could be sat in by children dressed as ‘the boys of Pest’ mirrored the violence of the protests, and the props of the official remembrance programmes were also used by radical protesters – one even started a tank on display and turned it against the riot police. These developments completely overshadowed the aesthetic war that broke out over the monument dedicated to the revolution. The monument, unveiled a few days before the riots, was the work of the young art collective i-ypszilon, selected by a jury consisting of curators, art experts and NGOs. The monumental abstract work was supposed to symbolize the process in which the people in 1956 cooperated, were fused into a single force and achieved victory (see Figure 6.2). The fighters’ organizations of 1956 were outraged by the non-figurative scheme and had to be appeased by a monument more to their

Figure 6.2 Monument to the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 revolution by the artist group i-ypszilon, commissioned by the socialist government, 2006. Photo: Eszter Babarczy. 111

Cultural policy in Hungary 111 taste. Many older contemporary artists of the neo-avant- garde also found the work wanting, and one of them prepared a parallel site-specific exhibition, setting up ‘steles’ (stone monuments) in front of the Budapest blocks where fighting had taken place with photo-realist paintings of a set of images taken in secret during the revolution (see Figure 6.2).2 Although the original monument won the prestigious World Architecture Award, it was not well received by the citizens of Budapest who took to calling it ‘the iron hairbrush’.3 On the other hand, the alternative monument created by Róbert Csíkszentmihályi was mostly greeted with ridicule in the art world for its conservatism, lack of originality and sentimentalism (see Figure 6.3). The row over the monument prefigured much of what came to be called cultural policy under the second Orbán administration (2010–14). With his sweeping two-thirds majority in parliament, Orbán started his second term very differently – and the administration was defined by its symbolic politics and complete appropriation of the public space. Yet in terms of aesthetics Orbán remained just as agnostic as he had been during his first term: he looked for political legitimization and embraced the aesthetics of whatever group offered further morsels of ‘patriotic’ legitimacy.

Figure 6.3 Memorial of the 1956 revolution by Róbert Csíkszentmihályi, 2006. Photo: Eszter Babarczy. 112

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Orbánism in power: the outsourcing of cultural policy The first major act of the new government was a new constitution, drafted and enacted without any input from opposition parties or indeed the public. The new constitution also started a new chapter in cultural policy by incorporating an informal group of artists around Imre Makovecz into its text, and assigning that group the task of safeguarding Hungarian national culture. Makovecz, whose organic architecture was well liked by the remnants of the Narodniks but also found young supporters, died early in the new term. His place in the newly established institution was taken by an interior designer whose main distinction was that his wife had served as Orbán’s spokesperson. György Fekete declared after his appointment that good art should not be critical of the government and should respect religion and patriotism. This conservative manifesto, however, did not describe too well the oeuvre of the hotchpotch of elderly artists, writers and architects who were elected to the new Hungarian Art Academy (Magyar Művészeti Akadémia, MMA).4 Fekete, like Makovecz and Melocco, had been a successful and decorated artist during the Kádár era, although he mostly worked as an interior designer, later adding some small sculptures with religious motifs to his oeuvre. Makovecz, Melocco and Fekete share a vague Christian spirituality. Starting during the first term with the cult of the Holy Hungarian Crown – and its putative owner, St Stephen – the cultural and education policies of Fidesz have always seen the established churches in Hungary as important partners. Orbán often emphasizes the Christian roots of European civilization, but the larger part of cultural production under Fidesz is no more religious than the Hungarian population – one of the most secular societies in Europe. The MMA soon amassed enormous power as Orbán outsourced more and more cultural policy and funding decisions to it. However, apart from wrapping themselves in the mantel of patriotism, it is impossible to find a unifying aesthetic vision among these figures. What is common to them is a feeling of being sidelined by the previous ‘cosmopolitan’ cultural elites: few of them enjoyed high prestige in the eyes of Westernizer curators and art historians. However, the roots and traditions of individual members of the group are very different. Some came from the grand generations of rebellious neo- avant-garde artists;5 others were minor masters acknowledged by the party- state;6 still others were only tolerated but nonetheless fairly well integrated under socialism. One or two even had some reputation in the international art world. The most conspicuous feature of the MMA is the list of those who did not join, were not invited or first joined but later reconsidered, despite the alluring lifelong monthly stipend even for corresponding members. As several independent art publications pointed out, the ‘grand list’ of the fifty most important Hungarian visual artists compiled by collectors, art historians and gallery owners features only two members of the academy.7 The ‘academy model’, a prima-facie self-governing body for the arts, is not without precedent in Hungary. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences was 113

Cultural policy in Hungary 113 established in the early nineteenth century, but under socialism it became a state-dependent buffer institution between research scientists and the party. Artists and writers were deprived of their academic membership in 1949. Therefore, in 1992, the then president of the Academy of Sciences established a new Academy for Literature and Arts, which still exists but which has never had any policy-making function in the art world or the literary scene. The very fact, however, that this institution was founded and its membership consisted mostly of prominent cultural figures who were labelled Westernizers or urbanists by the right prompted Makovecz, according to the logic of parallel institutions, to form his informal circle that was later to become the MMA. This gesture of legally establishing and inscribing in the constitution a parallel institution mirrors the deeply divided Hungarian cultural elite. However, it should also be interpreted as an arbitrary act of power, an act that defies the more organic and autonomous institutions of civil society in the name of the absolute sovereignty of the ruler. This is a message that Orbán consistently sends to institutions in any way dependent on the state – including cultural institutions that could not survive without state sponsorship. It also reflects his belief – and that of his entourage – that post-1989 institutions should all be subject to scrutiny and regarded as under the influence of a ‘liberal post-socialist network’, the elimination of which is a primary objective of the Orbán government.

The anti-liberal turn In 2014, in a speech at an event in Transylvania that is traditionally organized by Fidesz and its allies among beyond-border Hungarians, Orbán declared that Hungary should become an illiberal democracy. The speech was received with surprise and outrage in both Hungary and established democracies such Germany and the United States. The announcement was a calculated way of asserting the sovereignty of Hungary, which in the eyes of Orbán’s intellectual supporters – who prefer Carl Schmitt to any liberal theorist – is equivalent to the sovereignty of its leader. The leader principle has never been explicitly endorsed by government politicians but was publicized backed by the political philosopher, András Lánczi, an important figure in the Orbánist intellectual landscape who, at the time of writing, is being imposed as president on Hungary’s only university dedicated to economics and social science, having served a few years as the head of a government-sponsored think tank that also employs his son as its leading analyst. In his scholarly writing, Lánczi declares himself to be a follower of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt and emphasizes the primacy of ‘the political’ over institutions, the law or civil society. Lánczi is one of several scholars who have tried to establish a credible conservative canon and a political philosophy adapted to the realities of present-day Hungary. Most of these authors, however, rely on a Burkean view of conservatism, emphasizing tradition and organic evolution as well as a good deal of scepticism about liberal ‘utopias’ 114

114 Eszter Babarczy and enforced Westernization. These same authors have found themselves on a collision course with the realities of Orbán’s radical and aggressive style of governance and, although rarely publicly, have withdrawn their support. Lánczi, on the other hand, is fascinated by the realities of power, strong leadership and power politics; and with some support claims that there are several variants of democracy of which liberal democracy is only one. The two main ideologues of the government – Lánczi and the disenchanted former Free Democrat, Gyula Tellér – emphasize the public good and the national interest, contrasting these with liberal concepts of freedom.8 While Orbán has development states such as Singapore in mind, which fuse policies encouraging economic growth with an authoritarian streak and control over the media, Lánczi’s hints on strong leadership and the primacy of politics over everything else capture the everyday workings of the regime. I would argue, however, that despite the criticism levelled at Orbán, his regime is not totalitarian. He is a centralizer and a supporter of a strong state who can rely on socialist-era traditions of conformism without the need for direct political enforcement. The concept of a strong state enjoys widespread support in Hungary, so his encroachments on individual freedoms or the autonomy of cultural institutions and civil society are not perceived as pernicious or, indeed, wrong. To maintain the image of a strong leader of a strong state, he relies, in a very Schmittian way, on ‘international enemies’ such as the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, multinational companies and foreign-funded NGOs, as well as more specifically George Soros and the internal enemies of national unity – liberals and ‘cosmopolitans’. In culture, the significance of the illiberal turn of 2014 was simply an acknowledgement of the facts on the ground. While Orbán, when preparing for his second term, envisaged a state that was above the culture wars, the culture-wars state of mind was something even he could not extinguish in his followers and entourage. Initially, for instance, the MMA declared itself open to all artists with ‘a significant oeuvre’, but the establishment of the academy provoked such outrage, and its leader made so many statements concerning ‘natural loyalty’ to the government, that many artists who would have been gladly accepted refused to join on principle. While this was evidence of admir- able courage and character, the secession of these artists only contributed to the unfortunate system of parallel institutions – albeit with one significant difference. Since the establishment of the MMA and its authority over the distribution of grants and the appointment of institutional leaders, most parallel institutions with a more liberal or Westernizing mindset, including in the sciences, are being starved to death. The illiberal turn in art therefore means not so much a new canon or aesthetics but simply, according to the Hungarian logic of the culture wars, an institutional death to anything and anyone liberal. It would be going too far, however, to state that Westernizer-type culture is on the brink of extinction: the MMA simply does not have enough cadres to replace Westernizer or ‘neutral’ curators. In addition, its vision of the kind of culture it wants to promote is so vague that people who, in fear for their 115

Cultural policy in Hungary 115 jobs or for other reasons, are willing to cooperate remain free to mount exhibitions of their own liking without interference. It is important to understand that Orbán is only interested in art or any other cultural expression per se if it can draw more people to Fidesz. He even talks about ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’ culture as being necessary to gain the attention of young voters. What the illiberal turn means is the complete defeat of the Westernizing elite as a group of influencers.

Memory wars While cultural policy has been outsourced to the MMA – something that provoked a series of protests in the Hungarian art world followed by attempts to create a new art scene that is not dependent on state sponsorship – culture is not a priority for Orbán. His priority is representation and a dream of world-class Hungarian football that would enhance the image of Hungary worldwide. State representation, on the other hand, entails a revisionist interpretation of Hungarian history. The gist of this reinterpretation is similar to that staged in the House of Terror in 2002: a declaration that Hungarians or the Hungarian nation have been victims of various oppressive foreign forces but proudly and bravely defiant for ‘a thousand years’ since the time of St Stephen. This is the usable past that is commemorated in various memorial projects. One such project was the restoration of the square in front of the parliament building, a major venue for demonstrations, to its ‘original state’, that is, restoring the statues that had been there before 1945 and removing those erected since. The new space prevents large-scale demonstrations in front of the building, but it also sends an aesthetic message – or rather the lack of an aesthetic message. The reproduction of late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century statues also reproduces their stylistic prominence in state representation. These artworks mirror the monumental style of Hungary before the First World War, that is, before two-thirds of Hungarian territory was lost under the Treaty of Trianon. Although some of the original artworks were commissioned in the interwar period, their neo-baroque grandios- ity (see Figure 6.4) was meant at the time to recall an era when Hungary was ‘whole’ and assert the demand for the restoration of Greater Hungary (see Figure 6.4). The fight to control the public space was also extended to rural Hungary, in a similar way to the St Stephen statues, by establishing a day of ‘national unity’ to assert solidarity with beyond-border Hungarians. The government again provided funds to all municipalities to erect their own national-unity monuments, so-called national flagpoles which were also an invention of the interwar revisionist regime. This was a shrewd way to avoid directly erecting irredentist monuments, as many local municipalities, mostly also controlled by Fidesz, might have chosen to go much further than the constraints of international diplomacy would have made possible. Hungary has thus become 116

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Figure 6.4 The reconstructed monument (2014) to István Tisza, Hungarian Prime Minister between 1913 and 1917 (detail). The original was built in 1934, sculptures by György Zala. Photo: Eszter Babarczy.

populated by overt or not so overt references to Greater Hungary in most of its main squares. The aesthetics of these flagpoles or monuments reflects the popular imagination of what constitutes worthy and adequate representation, and the results are often a combination of financial constraints, memories from the interwar period and postmodernist urban revival projects. In a way, these monuments were bound to respect popular tastes; in small localities resistance to an aesthetic concept (e.g., modernism) can become part of everyday politics. Orbán thus created a truly populist form of strong, central symbolic message. A very different immersive-modernist aesthetic is promoted by Mária Schmidt, the director and founder of the House of Terror (see Figure 6.5). Schmidt, a historian by training, promotes artistic visions much closer to the memorial architecture of Europe. She is no traditionalist and never reaches back to interwar or pre-First World War models. Her projects offer a powerful combination of immersive experience and almost aggressively modernist solutions that always intrude into the public space around the building. However, her most recent project, a Holocaust memorial for the child victims, has been stalled by the resistance of Jewish cultural leaders 117

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Figure 6.5 The building of the House of Terror. Photo: Eszter Babarczy.

who say they do not want to see Mária Schmidt ‘monopolizing’ the memory of the Holocaust. The government has sided with the Jewish leaders for now (see Figure 6.5). If we compare the histories of the first official 1956 memorial and the children’s memorial, it is obvious that in the case of the Socialist-era 1956 memorial, left-liberal elites could promote their modernist visions through elected politicians, who were then forced to back down in face of a more traditionalist aesthetic. The Orbán regime, on the other hand, is wholly indifferent to questions of style. Often steering dangerously close to anti-Semitic slogans, or at any rate slogans that may be open to an anti-Semitic interpretation, they are careful to show empathy for the wishes of Jewish leaders, some of whom have been co-opted by the regime. (These Jewish cultural leaders are by no means representative of Hungarians of Jewish origin but mainly a self-selected group of individuals who claim exclusivity in matters of Jewish memory and culture.) 118

118 Eszter Babarczy This indifference to style and keen interest in a usable past was embodied in a memorial dedicated to the victims of the German occupation in 1944. This is the monument that whipped up unprecedented resistance from civil groups and individuals, often but not exclusively from families that survived the Holocaust. The monument is seen as the embodiment of denial, an effort to obfuscate the role of the Hungarian state in the deportation and murder of some 500,000 Jews. The responsibility of the Hungarian state, and Hungarians in general, has been a contentious issue for most of the post- 1989 period. Jewish Hungarians and many historians have demanded that the state acknowledge its responsibility, while mostly right-wing governments and their supporters have rejected the notion of ‘collective responsibility’. This sensitive issue exploded when the government decided to erect the monument directly opposite the Monument to the Soviet Soldier – a piece of land that is still owned by the Russian state – in a central square in Budapest. The sculpture is by one of the artists who contributed to the sculptural decoration of the new national theatre (see Figure 6.6). Following the installation of the German occupation memorial, during which riot police were used to push back angry protesters, a wholly new form of resistance was started by the art historian, András Rényi, and the

Figure 6.6 The monument for the victims of the German occupation (2014) with protest signs against the monument in the foreground, Szabadság tér, Budapest. Photo: Eszter Babarczy. 119

Cultural policy in Hungary 119 Facebook group he initiated. The project, called ‘Living Memorial’, encourages individuals to take personal items to the monument to commemorate their loved ones. (This solution was partly inspired by the debates over the Vietnam veterans’ memorial in Washington, DC.) This civil movement also organizes talks, and at the time of writing has been drawing supporters to the occupation memorial for many months. While vandalism directed at monuments has become almost a tradition in Hungary since 1989, this new form of engagement can be seen as an inclusive and personal process that does not aim to defile the memorial (although opponents complain of ‘littering’ by participants), but instead enhances and transforms it through collective dialogue.

Efforts at resistance The outsourcing of cultural policy and funding decisions to the MMA was greeted with widespread anger and calls for resistance within the contemporary Hungarian art scene. However, these protest flashmobs and unauthorized installations remain the insular actions of a few individuals that, while reported in the news, have not led to a more robust solidarity movement. One reason for this is the deeply divided nature of the Hungarian art world, as manifested in the struggle around the Kunsthalle – the main venue for contemporary art. When the Kunsthalle was taken over by the MMA, the then director, originally appointed by Fidesz, refused to cooperate and resigned. However, he still fell into the category of those who once collaborated with the regime and therefore remained persona non grata for the Westernizer elite, leaving him no choice but to rejoin the Fidesz patronage network in another position. The next director, an architect and stage designer from the world of political theatre, was not a member of the Fidesz network or the MMA. His inclusive vision of an art that is interesting or moving but not necessarily disruptive was again greeted with ridicule, even though the exhibitions he organized were very far from a Christian-conservative vision of art. A prominent liberal critic described the ‘National Salon’ exhibition, which was ‘representative of all Hungarian art’ in accordance with the explicit wishes of the MMA, as a mildly disappointing experience where the professional visitor’s main interest was in checking who among the ‘significant’ artists opted in and who refused the invitation (Mélyi 2015). The other reason for this divide is economic: artists and organizations have competed for fewer and fewer resources while the art market is far too small to support the number of artists who are trying to make a living creating art. Any system of cultural policy was perceived as favouring a particular group and created resentment. In addition, Hungarian fine arts are the least rebellious branch of culture apart, perhaps, from classical music, and very few internationally recognized artists can rely on sales and international commissions or support themselves without domestic patronage. Not joining the 120

120 Eszter Babarczy MMA was, therefore, a significant sacrifice in itself, although not one that could mobilize public opinion. A further reason for the failure to mount an effective counterattack is the fact that modernist art or Westernizer art – the kind of art that speaks an international language – has always been the preserve of a small intellectual elite and a handful of collectors. Contemporary art exhibitions are not crowded, very few Hungarians could name a single artist from among those who are highly regarded in the cultural elite, and even other cultural branches have little affinity with contemporary art. At the opposite end of the scale, there is theatre. Despite the hefty ticket prices, theatre in Hungary still attracts large audiences. Many actors are well known even if they rarely appear in films, and some theatres have passionate and dedicated audiences. This is therefore a cultural area in which the government has not tried to meddle, knowing full well that, especially in the case of the Budapest theatres, this would lead to protest and repercussions in the international media. Critics of the new cultural productions are trying to show that the plays or exhibitions are aesthetically meaningless or inferior to the previous canon. This tactic is preaching to the converted; it does not broaden the alliance against heavy-handed Orbánism. On the contrary, it shows that it is indeed a liberal hegemony that is being replaced with something more diffuse and inclusive but not so very different. New institutional leaders who accept the framework offered by Orbán and his stooges often struggle for recognition among the old elites. Meanwhile, a new and as yet tiny neo-leftist scene is attacking Westernizing elites or cosmopolitan art not for being anti-patriotic but for being weapons of colonization and providing a distorted view of the role of centre and periphery in culture as well as history.9 These scuffles consume most of the energy of leading critics and curators but are waged in such restricted circles that even art students do not seem to know or care about them. One fairly unusual but important incident shows how Orbánism can handle most forms of artistic protest. A well-known woman artist, singer and show-woman, Kriszta Nagy, who had been firmly part of the Westernizer- liberal canon in the 1990s and 2000s had an exhibition in Gallery Godot, one of the most established commercial galleries in Budapest. The title, ‘You Can Hire Me to Paint Your Portrait’, was an iteration of the theme that Kriszta Nagy often explored – the problematic status of both contemporary art and artist in Hungary. She exhibited twelve portraits of Viktor Orbán, based on the same official photograph, with pop art style overlays of colours and small decorative objects (see Figure 6.7). As Orbán looks somewhat effeminate in these portraits, many right-wing critics reacted with suspicion. However, the Orbán family visited the exhibition and bought a number of pictures. Kriszta Nagy was later invited to several smaller venues across the country to exhibit the portraits. When accused by the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ of selling out, she retorted that they were speaking out of envy, that Orbán was the best thing 121

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Figure 6.7 Kriszta Nagy, Viktor Orbán, 2014. From her exhibition ‘You Can Hire Me to Paint Your Portrait’ (2014), Godot Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.

that had happened to her in a long time, and that most artists would like to sell out themselves if only they could (see Figure 6.7).

Orbánism, art and the big money Orbán has decided that the former castle in Buda that had been home to the national gallery, the national library and the Budapest historical museum should return to its original political function. It will be the building housing the prime minister’s offices in around 2018. The move involves and perhaps motivated the largest scale art project in Hungary heretofore: the construction of a museum quarter around the present Kunsthalle and the Museum of Fine Arts, razing to the ground many buildings and incorporating much of the park that surrounds them. Various groups oppose the project for various reasons. The responsible ministry launched an open international tender process for the project, once again testifying to the entirely instrumental role of style. The project is still in its planning phase, but its website already makes it clear how important the decision-makers regard acknowledgement from international audiences.10 The project, called the Liget Project, after the park, represents a face of Orbánist cultural policy aimed at international audiences and is therefore free from any ‘Narodnik’ nostalgia and, significantly, not a territory where the eclectic MMA has any influence. Regardless of whether one sees the project as viable, and the usual arrogance behind it acceptable, it offers an attractive vision of a rich cultural centre in one of the old-style tourist attractions in Budapest. The truly monumental Millenial Monument 122

122 Eszter Babarczy at Heroes’ Square, erected at the turn of the nineteenth century to commemorate the millennium of the Hungarian tribes’ arrival in the Carpathian Basin, could be domesticated and rendered less conspicuously out of place, time and proportion by a richer cultural environment. The Liget Project demonstrates an important aspect of Orbán’s cultural policy. When constructing a face for the outside world, grand cultural projects are important tools and do not follow the logic of the culture wars. The film industry is another branch of cultural production that serves a similar function in Hungary. Classical music is also an important cultural export, and here Orbán has also restrained himself and his entourage from interfering too much with world-class musicians such as Ivan Fischer, a vocal critic of the government who currently leads one of the world’s most renowned orchestras, the Budapest Festival Orchestra.

Conclusion: the 1960s all over again? I have tried to argue above that there are no substantive conservative aesthetics behind cultural policy-making in Hungary. Different facets of culture serve different political goals: some branches, such as film or the Liget Project, are to enhance the image of Hungary in the eyes of foreigners; others serve the local network of clients and supporters. To put it another way, culture in general is mostly uninteresting to the government and only farmed out to the clientele if the government does not expect international attention. This shrewd decision prevents individual artists from becoming martyrs and symbols for the cause of liberalism and European values. Orbán does not suppress any form of art. While in the Kádár era a dedicated core of artist opponents resisted the party-state and were duly banned from exhibiting in public, Orbán simply withdraws funds and access to institutional decisions, leaving Westernizer art to its own devices and the market. Although the slogans of the government and their appointees often emphasize Christianity and patriotism, there is little evidence that artists are expected to conform to stylistic norms or subject matter. Leaders are mostly replaced through legal means, at the end of their terms, so anyone looking for signs of cultural oppression or Gleichschaltigung can be shown how diverse Hungarian art (and culture in general) remains. The frequent references to a ‘System of National Cooperation’ (capitalized despite Hungarian rules of spelling), a menacing slogan, are a constant reminder of the government’s presence. Notwithstanding its occasional blood-and-soil rhetoric, however, it has no ideology beyond grabbing power and channelling public funds and European financial support to loyal supporters of Orbán. Liberals and Westernizers who are deprived of funding and other opportunities feel as if time has been set back fifty years like it is the 1960s all over again. Nonetheless, while many media outlets, including all public media, are under political control, artists are free to work, to exhibit and to form associations. The system of parallel institutions that predates Orbán – and was as much the making of some liberal Westernizer groups as of their Narodnik 123

Cultural policy in Hungary 123 opponents – guarantees that some institutions can be simply ignored without explicit political cleansing. This does not apply to the media, where political cleansing is a constant threat. I also argue that the essence of Orbánism is the aggressive assertion of centralized power. The aesthetic equivalent is not so much an imposition of some form or content on artists, or oppression of political or Westernizer art, but the colonization of the public space through monuments. These serve as reminders that the government has power and backing even in the smallest towns or villages. It is a form of aesthetic domination that does not threaten cultural diplomacy or the advantages derived from internationally successful projects. In a few cases, harassment can become serious – but only when it involves funding. The Norwegian Civil Fund, for instance, was investigated by the police and the tax authorities for sponsoring publications and groups critical of the government. The intention of the government in this case was, however, to extend control over the distribution of these funds, not to ban artworks or artists. Eventually, it had to back down when Norway expressed dissatisfaction over the interference. I have also tried to pinpoint that the ‘cosmopolitan or Westernizer elites’ are partly to blame for the dire situation in the art scene. They actively contributed to the development of a system of parallel institutions and mirrored the rhetoric of their opponents by questioning the legitimacy of their aesthetics or institutions. In some cases, such as with the MMA, the Hungarian art academy that was canonized in the text of the constitution, this concern is entirely justifiable. Yet the rift in culture originates in much earlier conflicts, reaching back as far as the Hungary of the 1930s. A culture war that was bitter but not meaningless in those days became a fight over resources. This fight recreates the dependence of culture on the state and political patronage and overwrites meaningful differences in the aesthetics or philosophies of art. The author would like to emphasize that she is not an impartial observer but part of the scene and a member of the cosmopolitan or urban elite. If criticism is directed at this elite, it should also be taken as self-criticism.

Notes

1 This was also noted by Judt (2005). 2 The steles later toured Europe in an exhibition. See www.pauergyula.hu/aktualis/ parizsen.html. 3 See www.worldarchitecture.org/architecture-projects/evhe/central-monument-of- the-1956-hungarian-revolution-and-war-of-independence-building-page.html. 4 See www.mma.hu/akademikusok. 5 Attila Csáji and Imre Bukta belong in this category of visual artists and, even more importantly, Géza Bereményi among the writers. 6 Such as Pál Kő or Miklós Melocco himself. 7 For the grand list of artists, see http://artkartell.hu/vizit/81-a-nagy-lista. 124

124 Eszter Babarczy

8 See their interviews in O’Sullivan and Kálmán (2015). 9 Kristóf Nagy describes the Soros Network’s funding decisions in the 1980s as a form of condescension by a hegemonic culture (Nagy 2015). 10 See www.ligetbudapest.org/eng/.

References Judt, Tony (2005) Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London: Penguin. Mélyi, József (2015) ‘Kollektív disszonancia: Itt és most. Képzõmûvészeti Nemzeti Szalon a Mûcsarnokban, 2015. július 19-ig’, Mozgó Világ, June. Available at www. mozgovilag.hu/. Nagy, Kristóf (2015) ‘Nagy A Soros Alapítvány képzőművészeti támogatásai Magyarországon: A nyolcvanas évek második felének tendenciái’, Fordulat, 3. Available at http://fordulat.net/pdf/21/F21_Nagy_Kristof_Soros.pdf. O’Sullivan, John and Pócza Kálmán (eds.) (2015) The Second Term of Viktor Orbán: Beyond Prejudice and Enthusiasm, London: Social Affairs Unit. 125

Part II The state of affairs Voices from the Russian art scene 126 127

7 Culture as the enemy Contemporary Russian art under the authoritarian regime

Andrei Erofeev

The relationship between contemporary art and the Russian government – its legislative, executive and judicial branches – can be defined as a permanent conflict that has frozen at a critical point but not transformed into a fully fledged war. The nature of this conflict is close to a ‘cold war’ based on ideological confrontation. The aim is not to destroy the enemy but to neutralize and discredit it and thereby to obtain the maximum amount of deter- rence. It also allows for material and physical damage to the enemy caused by third parties, acting with the hidden support or on the direct orders of the state. Confrontation between the state and culture has a protracted history and is constantly being stirred up in modern Russian society. It first appeared in 1999, the year of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power and the appointment of Vladislav Surkov as deputy head of the presidential administration. Conflicts had erupted between state and culture in post-Soviet Russia before 1999, but these had been successfully defused. In 1995, for example, criminal proceedings were begun against the creators of the parody television show Kukly (Dolls), which was accused of ‘dishonouring’ leading politicians in the country. Even though the attorney general had filed the case, the authorities put an end to it. It would have been possible to act in a similar way in 1999, when a criminal case was begun against the artist Avdei Ter-Oganyan for his performance in Moscow’s major exhibition hall, the ‘Manezh’, when photographic reproduc- tions of icons were chopped up using an axe (Kovalev 2007). The artist wanted to remind the hypocrites who only yesterday had donned the cross that twenty or thirty years before the entire Soviet people had participated in the mass destruction of church property. Several visitors were appalled and threw him out of the exhibition. This minor conflict could easily have been resolved, but instead a scandal developed that stirred up the whole of Russia. The Cossacks were unleashed on Ter-Oganyan. These descendants of the paramilitary peasants from southern Russia who in tsarist times had been used for anti-Semitic activities and to disperse political demonstrations had been repressed by the Bolsheviks but were now revived in their former character as leaders of pogroms (pogromshiki). Ter-Oganyan disappeared, thereby escaping the physical demise the Cossacks had promised him. Their 128

128 Andrei Erofeev later victims in the art world, such as Pussy Riot, were beaten with whips, stamped on with boots, sprinkled with urine or Brilliant Green (a permanent green medical dye) and sprayed with tear gas. Ultra-nationalist and crypto-fascist parties, unions and associations moved against Ter-Oganyan. Their newspapers, websites and leaflets spread deliberately false interpretations of the artist’s actions. A standard lawsuit was drawn up and sent to the prosecutor’s office. A number of priests agitated from the pulpit, calling on their parishioners to participate in mass street protests. The patriarch delivered an anathema against the ‘atheist’. There was a campaign of disinformation and slander involving the national and regional press, as well as television, which showed a repugnant film about the artist. When the investigation began, it garnered tens of thousands of similar petitions from towns and cities across the country from people who had not seen the action and did not understand precisely what had happened, where or why. The investigator himself dictated the required accusatory phrases to the parishioners. He then sought out some shabby art critics from the margins of the art community, defined them as experts and squeezed the necessary charges out of them. No objections, letters or explanations from leading artists, art deal- ers or critics were taken into account. The performance by Ter-Oganyan was categorized as ‘deliberate incitement of hatred between confessional groups’ under Article 282 of the Russian criminal code. The prosecutor demanded a sentence of four years in prison for the artist. Today, there is little doubt that people with close ties to the presidential administration were behind this orchestrated campaign. In the sixteen years since these events, the same scenario has been repeated in Russia dozens of times, affecting exhibitions, performances, film screenings and books. An artwork that displeases in some way is chastised in unison by the Orthodox Church and ‘patriotic communities’. This choir is often joined by the civic chamber of the Russian Federation, the committee on culture of the State Duma led by Stanislav Govorukhin, as well as a number of influential semi-official culture figures such as the film director, Nikita Mikhalkov. People are hounded, in a way that is seemingly orchestrated by the Kremlin ‘puppet master’. In the first stages of a conflict, the state acts as the secret instigator, a back- stage director of the bullying as well as its indirect sponsor. It is very difficult to find evidence of this coordination because nothing is documented or written down, and activities are sponsored by what appear to be voluntary donations from individuals. It is clear that these fighters against culture are not generally driven by greed or conformism but merely implementing their own cultural policy, the gist of which is the suppression of and a total ban on any secular creative work that is viewed as alien to ‘Orthodox civilization’. The programme of this particular civilization has been written and enunci- ated many times at ecumenical councils and other meetings of the Orthodox Church and Russian nationalists. It can be found, for instance, on the internet 129

Culture as the enemy 129 in a summary of the statements of Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who for many years was the right-hand man of Patriarch Kirill. It seems likely that the government is playing a double game with its fellow travellers, in the knowledge that the ultra-right-wing extremists and religious fanatics could one day become dangerous rivals in the political arena. The fight against culture gives these communities publicity while at the same time distracting their attention from the struggle for power. Usually, the state only openly intervenes when debate is already raging, at the stage of wide-ranging discussions, as well as investigative and judicial activities. It then plays the role of a third-party arbitrator. Although formally independent, except in one or two cases of vandalism against state property, the court has almost always supported the prosecutor. As a result, art works are prohibited, their authors or distributors punished, and censorship implemented without the executive authorities becoming involved. This implementation of censorship by proxy, which is reminiscent of the principles of the ‘hybrid war’ being used in eastern Ukraine, allows the authorities to formally deny any active role in the conflict. Sometimes the condemned artworks are directly related to religion, such as, for example, the exhibition ‘Caution! Religion’ or the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, but sometimes they are devoted entirely to other topics, as in the case of the exhibition ‘Forbidden Art 2006’ at the Sakharov Centre in Moscow in 2007, the Vadim Sidur exhibition in the Manezh Exhibition Hall in 2015 and the Jan Fabre exhibition at the Hermitage in 2016. Nonetheless, the artists, curators or directors are taken to court under the same articles – Article 282 (on ‘inciting hatred’ between various groups) or Article 148 of the Russian criminal code (on ‘offending the religious feelings of believers’), which was introduced into the criminal code in June 2013. Offended feelings have become an excellent formula for unsubstantiated accusations and unconditional condemnation. It is sufficient for a citizen to claim that his feelings have been hurt by the fact of the staging of a performance or the opening of an exhibition somewhere in another city for the state’s lawyers to believe him unconditionally. No forensic medical examinations are required. The courts take these allegations at face value, just as they did in the 1930s regarding accusations of sabotage and espionage. Self-censorship by authors and a kind of ‘proxy censorship’ mechanism by the institutions that distribute their work are widespread today. Today, a fear of being trampled to death by steel-capped boots, condemned by a judge, not surviving the mayhem in the museum or being fired guides the actions of many museums and theatre directors rather than their conscience and knowledge. Intimidatory tactics work flawlessly. Fear outweighs shame and people undertake degrading acts. The history of the conflict between the Putin regime and culture can be divided into two periods. In 1999–2013, the confrontation had a spontaneous character. There were no elements of a programme behind it. The process of decreasing tolerance towards and increasing aggression against those working in the culture sphere happened gradually. The expanding list of prohibitions 130

130 Andrei Erofeev was spurred by the administration’s obscurantism and bigotry on the one hand and the increasing politicization of culture on the other. The drift towards Soviet stereotypes about contemporary culture began with a growing rejection of the figure of the free and ungovernable artist who allows himself a distanced critique of reality. The ponderous ‘national idea’ rhetoric, different variations of which were being intensively developed and implemented by the Kremlin’s spin doctors, made this type of artist its favourite target. Therefore, once perestroika, which contained a subtle hint of flirtation between the authorities and the art community, had come to an end, the critical discourse of the ‘avant-garde’ was once again declared extremist and its proponents were called bullies who provoked conflicts and incited hatred. The artist once again became the epitome of evil, a detractor of national values and a fan of all things profane. In 2007, a placard at a nationalist protest rally near the exhibition ‘Forbidden Art 2006’ read ‘Our God is Christ: your god is manure.’ In this way the function of the exhibition hall, museum or publishing ministry is clarified: to serve as a filter to prevent critical art bacilli – or ‘poison’ in the words of Nikita Mikhalkov – infecting society. The heads of cultural institutions have replaced their previous tolerant smiles by the tough style of a warden. Can a warden possibly make friends with the prisoner, attend their studio or delve into his creative kitchen? Russia’s managers of culture flaunt their ignorance of Russian contemporary art as a badge of merit. They confuse artists’ names and interpret artistic images in bad faith and with vulgarity. Ostentatious obscurantism was a hallmark of the Soviet bureaucracy. Now everything is back to square one. In response to a request for his assessment of the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, Deputy Minister of Culture Vladimir Aristarkhov said that he had never seen anything ‘more detestable’ in his life. The minister of culture himself, Vladimir Medinskii, did not yield to his assistant, calling creative people who challenge the myths of socialist realism ‘utter brutes’. Officials at the ministry of culture believe that contemporary art has a bad influence on the human psyche. Therefore, according to Aristarkhov, it must be taken control of. At the same time, the ministry began to plan a new type of art, one that ‘would have a positive effect on Russians’. This statement, made in 2014, marked the beginning of the second phase of the state’s battle with culture: the programmatic phase. This time it would be a battle with contemporary culture. The concept of a modern art ‘based on traditional values’ was developed within the confines of the ministry of culture and the culture department of the Russian government. This was about creating a ‘patriotic’, that is, loyal to the regime, duplicate or simulacrum of vital artistic culture. The new concept of government-supported official art differs markedly from the official art of the Soviet era. The main difference is in its rejection of one, single state art style and recognition of many different forms of ‘patriotic creativity’. Its aesthetic component can seem almost avant-garde, in the form of performance, installations, graffiti, rap, punk rock and so on. Today’s travesties and clowns stand in sharp contrast to previous Soviet 131

Culture as the enemy 131 agitation-performances. Many techniques and much imagery have been borrowed from the practice of contemporary protest art: artists like Avdei Ter- Oganyan and Artem Loskutov and groups such as Blue Noses and Pussy Riot. It seems likely that the patriotic eclectic pseudo-avant-garde know-how belongs to Vladislav Surkov, who used to take a regular interest in contemporary art forms through the gallery owner Marat Gelman. It is obvious that this appropriation of the language of contemporary culture has a dual objective: to win the hearts of the youth, who are more familiar with this kind of language than with academic rhetoric, while at the same time discrediting statements by genuine artists regarding the mediocrity and meanness of plagiarism. If in Soviet times underground culture was the site of genuine ideas in a language that remained independent of ideological demagoguery, this area today has been seized and used on behalf of the authorities. It is important to note that the artists who play the role of ‘patriotic stand- ins’ are mainly unknown to the wider public. In the case of patriotic street art, for example, they are anonymous designers or designers from provincial schools. It is unlikely that any of them are ideologically motivated conformists. For them, the new semi-official art is a means of making easy money. Nor are their outputs severely judged, since even the government-customer understands that it is all just a simulacrum of art. Things are no better with the traditional genres of the new government-supported art. Writing about the works on show at an exhibition widely promoted by the ministry of culture – ‘Current Russia’ (Aktualnaya Rossiya) – which opened in November 2016 at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Russian History, the leading art critic Valentin Dyakonov called it ‘the ideology of shlock’. The exhibition was not saved even by the works of the well-known and respected artists, Pavel Peppershtein and Nikita Alekseev, which were included to make it appear more solid. Their works were taken from museum collections as they had not agreed to participate. Only a tiny group of well-known artists agreed to cooperate with the authorities (Gor Chakhal, Aleksei Belyaev-Gintovt and Elena Kovylina). In a situation in which many artists chose not to cooperate, the authorities launched a campaign to recruit and seduce masters of nonconformism. Erik Bulatov, for example, was embroiled in such an intrigue. He was appointed an academician and received the Order of Friendship in addition to the opportunity to mount a huge personal exhibition. A similar operation was carried out with regard to Ilya Kabakov, but this was rebuffed by the artist. Another source of the new official art are graduates of public art schools, where the teaching style has hardly changed since Soviet times. Finally, Soviet artistic heritage is being actively used to enhance the weakness of the new official art. The worst period of Russian culture, the 1940s, has been rehabilitated. Huge canvases depicting Stalin’s meetings with the people, or parades and rallies for the builders of communism, as well as models and drawings of totalitarian architecture and horrendous sculptures have been taken out of storage, restored and presented as Russia’s heritage from the twentieth century. 132

132 Andrei Erofeev ‘Any talk about censorship is ridiculous. Censorship is basically impossible, it is forbidden by the Constitution’, declared Sergei Perov, the director of ROSIZO and thus one of the leading officials in Russian culture, when he imposed a ban on an exhibition about Polish performance art 1967–89 (because there were too many naked people) at the State Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) in 2016 (TASS 2016). The next act by Perov was the virtual elimination of the centre itself as its venue was closed as an exhibition hall. The name remained, but its staff and exhibition programme were completely altered. Along with the centre, which was created in the era of perestroika, a previously approved project for the building of a contemporary art museum was cast into oblivion. Perov, a graduate of a military academy, served as head of the department of culture in the Russian government for three years. In the summer of 2016 he became the head of ROSIZO, the technical organization given the task of promoting ‘patriotic contemporary art’ in Russia and abroad by the ministry of culture.

Concluding remarks The war between culture and the Russian government is still in full swing so it is too early to draw any conclusions. Most of the government’s strategy, however, is already clear. This makes it possible to make a few predic- tions. First, the authorities will try to clear the public field of what they call ‘Russophobic art’, that is, creative political protest on current topics in a spirit of irony, mockery and caricature. The most persecuted art at the present time is that which combines social criticism with laughter. It is no coincidence that it is not the members of Voina (War) or Petr Pavlenskii who have suffered the greatest punishment and whose actions have provoked the unconcealed hatred of the regime, but the members of Pussy Riot, who cheerfully ridiculed Putin’s pre-election agreement with Patriarch Kirill. The fight against so-called Russophobic art has inherited much from Soviet practice. For example, it is now routine for arrested artists to be given psychiatric assessments during their interrogation, often in a way that is biased for the purpose of enrolling them in forced psychiatric treatment programmes. Homes have been searched during the night, artworks have been seized by the secret service, and there have been countless detentions by the police. This has already achieved results: a number of politically engaged artists and critics have emigrated. Others have gone temporarily silent. Second, the government has worked to minimize the presence in state institutions of analytical and documentary art dealing with social issues such as homophobia, racism, the violation of women’s rights and the state of prisons and hospitals. Following the example of China, this could lead to such art being excluded from state institutions and instead moved to the ‘reservations’ of private museums and galleries, the number of which is fortunately growing. Third, the authorities seem likely to try to reorganize their cultural institutions by packing them with officials ready to promote the old Soviet and 133

Culture as the enemy 133 the new semi-official art as the mainstream direction for the development of Russian national culture in the twenty-first century. Whether the authorities manage to carry out these tasks and paralyse Russian culture will depend on the future direction of the regime. If Russia plunges into some form of repressive totalitarianism, then something similar to the situation in the early 1930s could arise and the culture of the country would be completely transformed. If, however, power remains in the hands of corrupt cynics who are ready to try any political manoeuvre to preserve their position and personal capital, it is possible that Russian culture will see a new version of the ‘thaw’ (ottepel) in the current domestic ‘cold war’ in relations between the state and cultural life.

References Kovalev, Andrei, Rossiiskii aktsionizm 1990-2000, Moscow: World Art Мuseum, 28/ 29. TASS (2016) ‘Sergei Perov: v “ROSIZO” deneg stanovitsya menshe, tvorcheskikh ambitsii – bolshe’, 14 November. Available at http://tass.ru/opinions/interviews/ 3777661. 134

8 Voices from the art scene Interviews with Russian artists

Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina1

Andrei Kuzkin

I try not to focus on politics (see Figure 8.1). There is a friend of mine who cannot talk about anything else except that Putin is a fascist and why he is bombing Syria. I do not even know who he is bombing there – the good guys or the bad. This is probably due to some internal weakness, a feature of my psyche. But I have distanced myself from these problems. However, when the annexation of Crimea was taking place I dressed up in a Russian army uniform – the same one that was worn by Russian soldiers in Crimea, unmarked and in black masks. Wearing this uniform, I went to the opening of the Innovation exhibition in April 2014, which was dedicated to the best works of modern art in 2013. I strolled through the halls there with an assault rifle by my side, frightening the visitors (seeFigure 8.2). The meaning of the gesture was in the fact that against the backdrop of the war that the state had unleashed, it was ridiculous to speak seriously about any other innovations. I also participated in the main project of the 2015 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art. The work was called Balls and Nails. For five days I inflated white balloons at the entrance of the exhibition. Each visitor was offered a balloon and a nail and then had to decide what to do with them. The pops, which came from everywhere like gunshots, served as a reminder that we are living against a backdrop of military action. The feeling that a person gets when he pricks the balloon is probably com- parable with the emotions of someone who pulls the trigger of an assault rifle. This performance can be seen as an allusion to the existential themes of life and death, but you can also read it as a metaphor for contemporary art – the ephemeral nature of its works, which are inflated and burst like soap bubbles. In addition, fighting broke out in Syria during the Moscow Biennale. There were terrorist acts of various kinds, and many viewers saw their reflection in this work. I am not doing proper political art. I am not, because for political art you must be prepared to pay. You might be beaten on the streets, have to go to jail or even lose your life. But nobody wants to go to jail. And no one today is ready put their life at stake to fight for something. Besides, everyone understands 135

Figure 8.1 Andrei Kuzkin, Circle-wise, 2008. Performance during the 1st Moscow International Festival for Young Art ‘Stoy! Kto idet?’. Veretevo Village, Moscow Region. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: N. Shamfarova.

Figure 8.2 Andrei Kuzkin, Innovation 2014, 2014. Performance, Moscow. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andrei Erofeev. 136

136 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina that such sacrifices will not change anything. Take Pussy Riot: they did not change the situation, right? There was a latent conflict between the artists, the authorities and the church. Pussy Riot pressed down hard on the sore spot, and this led to an escalation of conflict. Every possible screw has been tightened. Now art will once again go underground. The number of exhibition spaces, and of exhibitions themselves, is rapidly decreasing, and funding is coming to an end. There is no energy. Lethargy is coming. To be honest, I myself am not ready to complain that I have no place to exhibit my works. The problem I have is that I do not know why I would do so. And, of course, I don’t want to leave. I have a purely local mind. I know that anything can happen here in Russia, but I am ready for it. You could say that it is a slave or quasi-religious consciousness when a person accepts everything that happens around him.

Irina Korina For me, the situation in relation to the current war in eastern Ukraine is, of course, tragic. It is as if we were back in the Middle Ages; and I, for one, do not see myself as a person of the Middle Ages. I do not want to live in a feudal society, and I do not believe that we need to conquer certain territories. On the contrary, I believe that now it is necessary to abolish all borders, because everything is for everyone and belongs to everyone. It does not matter where exactly you were born. In general, the borders between states are nominal. This is some kind of system that is imposed on us, an erroneous specula- tive structure that needs to be rethought. And it turns out that everybody is thrown back into the past and continues to defend their territory, where they were supposedly born, and what was supposedly their land. These are some very brutal, tangible things that I am not interested in but because I ended up in these arrangements, it turns out that I am a participant in this process. I do not like having to share other people’s plans and ideas. Why make weapons? Why hold parades and demonstrate these weapons? It is like getting out clubs and waving them in the air. Or shaking one’s fist, and saying, ‘I have here a fist. Look what I can do to you!’ Why in our society is it considered decent behaviour for the authorities to display tanks on the streets? It is monstrous behaviour: the Stone Age! I understand, of course, that there are government systems and that societal relations are based on power pressure. We ought to give it up and find other ways, but nothing changes. However, it is possible not to give in to the manipulation but instead pretend that nothing is happening. To tell yourself that you do not agree with what the state is doing and move on with your life as you find necessary. It is like you abolish that situation in society for yourself: you no longer notice it. Artists always have a number of themes with which they can work, not paying attention to current political events – almost like cancelling them. It is really a way out, because you cannot live your life shivering and creeping in horror all the time. You draw the conclusion for yourself that you are an individual, 137

Voices from the art scene 137 you are not a property of the state, and do not come under the influence of its manipulative statements. So I do not watch television. I have ousted myself from all levers of influence. I have stepped aside, which is a classic example of escapism. On the other hand, of course, I really cannot avoid thinking about what is going on. I therefore recently made several big projects related to military events, in particular to military parades. For example, last summer I made the installation, Winter Crops, which is reminiscent of a piece meant for propaganda or for decoration, to be shown during a parade or a carnival. I ended up with a huge toothy monster, whose mouth is made of a funeral wreath. It revealed a connection with some primitive, sacred rituals of the demonization of war – or its glorification as a kind of liberation. I recently did a piece called Patternalism (see Figure 8.3). It is a huge metal structure that looks like half a fir cone or shell. Metal plates on the outside resemble the lids of the zinc coffins that usually bring fallen soldiers home. Each plate is framed with a flower bed of red carnations. It is an obvious reference to the aesthetics of semi-official military funerals. These funerals

Figure 8.3 Irina Korina, Patternalism, 2015. Private collection. Courtesy of the artist. 138

138 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina are now being carried out in secret, and my piece glorifies them. It appears to legitimize the war, declaring it a holy war, a noble cause. As if all that happens abides by the norm: to kill, to die, to become a hero. On the inside this monument is not quite presentable. Behind the black fabric curtains flanking the entrance you can see a pond overgrown with rotten leaves. The bottom of the pond is strewn with small coins like the ones tourists throw into fountains. Instead of a meaningful centre, the monument reveals a rotten emptiness and meaningless ritual. Although this thing is pretty big – 4.5 metres high – I do not think it has made an impact on society because no art does today. The group of art consumers is quite narrow. So instead this work is important to me as an attempt to explain something to myself. My work can also be understood as a diagnosis of what is happening in society today. So we will be able to understand post factum what the mood was and what the level of society was at the time. This means that art is a real indicator but cannot change anything. That is my pessimistic overview.

Roman Mokrov It seems to me that Russia’s current politics are not at all a turn towards Asia, as they are declared to be. It is as if the Western world bullied us and we needed to leave its playground in order to return there under more beneficial conditions. Before we can return we need to go to Asia, punch the biggest bully on the nose and then call for our mom and tell on him. We won’t be friends with the Chinese, we won’t. Russia is still a European country. We won’t become Asians. I can’t believe that war is really starting. There is a certain element of a play in it all. I am not saying that it is a nice kind type of play. No, it is more like bad theatre of some kind. The play will keep going until the puppeteers come to an agreement. Then everything ends, but the situation will never go back to exactly the way it was. Our relationships with Europe and Ukraine will never be the same. These changes are very dangerous. They bring danger for me too. These events have got me in a state of frustration, which I have been experiencing now for over a year. Although my works are not very political, I want to barricade myself from it all even more. I want to barricade myself using cheap romantics. I don’t know how one can produce artworks in a situation like this. I feel a kind of worthlessness. What is art capable of after all? It can either praise and glorify war, like for example Malevich did in 1914, or it can oppose the war. It can also serve as therapy for both the artist and the observer. I vouch for this option. Political art is possible, of course, but only a tiny fraction of artists work in it. Only a couple of names come to mind when I think about it. It is because no one is particularly interested in the field or because they lost the belief that art can change anything (see Figure 8.4). It seems that the 1930s, with its repressions, cannot repeat itself, that this would be impossible given the current state of technical development and of 139

Voices from the art scene 139

Figure 8.4 Roman Mokrov, To Set Off (from the video Pustitsya v put), 2013. Courtesy of Gallery Triumph.

the internet. To do so, the authorities would have had to invest much more effort in cutting down, closing everything and arresting everybody. For this, a most serious external threat would be needed, and right now everyone understands that all these statements that someone is going to attack us are bullshit. It seems to me that right now the authorities do not have the guts to put across something like the 1930s. Back then the ideas of communism paved the way for the building of a new world and that we were a besieged fortress. Now there is nothing like that. That is why now only isolated cases of repression are possible, and only isolated cases of people being sent to jail. That is why it is unlikely that the authorities will start to control the artists. To be able to ask something from a man who is daubing, you need a deeply rooted ideological basis, a complete world view like the communists used to have. What does a bright future mean for us? High oil prices, to have something to eat and to be able to sleep well. On the other hand, you never know. If in the twentieth century we did not manage to see through the revolution in time and were unable to imagine how everything would drown in blood, how dramatically everything would change, and how many human lives would be turned upside down, then we may be equally unable to do so now.

Pavel Peppershtein Policy has tightened in the past year, and political performances have finally begun to cause the reaction that artists originally intended. It began with Aleksander Brener in the 1990s, who in every way needed a public scandal 140

140 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina and the involvement of the authorities. He wanted to be punished because he who is punished can claim to be a martyr. In his view, the punishment was unfair even though he himself had provoked it. He deliberately provided the scandal in order to capture for himself a place in public opinion. The strategy of radical performance art can be criticized from different sides. The big political question appears to be: did the activities of these artists help to provoke the tightening of the regime? I think that they did. Their activities provoked the regime into repression. After all, it is clear that the new stage of the struggle against the artists began after performances that highlighted the territory of contemporary art in the eyes of the politicians. Moreover, much dedicated effort was needed before the politicians took any notice of anybody and began to perceive something. Personally, I, as well as our entire art group, Inspection Medical Hermeneutics [created in 1987], always looked on such performances with antipathy, because the very idea of waking society up from its sleep seemed wrong and evil. It seemed clear that a society that had been woken up by kicking and screaming about the need to improve, that there needed to be progress, that liberalization must happen – such a society would be even more terrible than a society immersed in sleep. And the current political authorities, in contrast to the Soviet regime, do not want society to fall asleep. They have armed themselves with an art of provocation and performance. They have also produced various kinds of shock impact on the population that means constantly invigorating it and waking it up from sleep. In this sense, I do not see any difference between the artists who confront the authorities and the authorities themselves. They reflect each other. This situation reminds me somewhat of the competition between two art groups working with the same director. At the same time, however, a degradation can be identified that affects both artists and the government. In the 1970s, no matter what it was doing, Soviet power wanted peace in society. The ideal at that time was a man who qui- etly went to work, calmly ate his potatoes and dozed on the sofa in front of the television. That is the exact opposite of the revolutionary ideals of the 1920s: the cheerful Soviet citizen who got up every morning for a run, fulfilled the norms of physical and defence training and could handle a rifle. In other words, somebody who is highly energetic and always ready for labour and military service. Today the authorities are once again pumping up a state of artificial energy. The authorities are also initiating confrontation with United States, although oddly enough this conflict does not prevent the rapid Americanization of our society. On the contrary, this Americanization receives an additional incentive. After all, in order to oppose the United States, we must become like it. So the official culture is constructed today. We must have the same heroic movies as Hollywood, the same strategies for contemporary art, the same media, the same Western ideologies and even the same wars. Everything should be the same as in the United States 141

Voices from the art scene 141 because we also want to be ‘cool’. Not like we were in Soviet times but cool in accordance with the Western models that we are offered to copy blindly and enthusiastically. All the time the authorities keep repeating that we do not agree and that we represent some kind of alternative. The idea that we must be different at the deeper level, however, is missing: it has been lost. At the same time as contemporary art has lost its critical and reflective qualities, it is occupying an increasingly significant niche in our social life. Official events are now held under the cover of contemporary art. If in the 1990s the club culture of music and entertainment was much stronger than any contemporary art events, it is now the other way around. All club shows – dancing, entertainment – are held under the auspices of openings of exhibitions. This active social function completely dilutes contemporary art. Its value is being debased by public recognition. Even as Pussy Riot artists were jailed, their art paradoxically became the official art of modern Russia. All the repressions and prohibitions against art have become part of its recognition. Some artists want to suffer and they suffer; they want to go to jail and they are imprisoned. Others want, for example, to be awarded a cash prize; and they get it. Still others want to arrange a holiday for all, with galloping and jumping; and this is also possible. The system gives everybody a hand. Because of this, our art world has lost its specificity, its alternativeness. But you can talk about emasculated, inauthentic art only when you understand what true art is. Such art is not available today. It exists only as a memory. That is why everything only seems to be genuine. The same can be said of today’s crisis. The crisis is present even in countries where this super-extravagant, inordinate behaviour by governments and artists does not exist. Everyone feels this moment to be a kind of crisis. This is either the end of all time or a very painful transition to something else. The situation no longer succumbs to understanding so it is impossible to judge the nature of the crisis. Even the diagnosis that is contained in the word ‘crisis’ is impossible to identify with certainty. Imagine that a man falls ill and goes to the doctor. The doctor tells him, ‘No, you are not ill. You are going to live like this. You will not die, but your life will be different.’ No recovery is implied. Everything has qualitatively changed. A different era has arrived. It is worse and rougher than the previous one. Nobody thus far has got used to it, and therefore it is considered a crisis. It may become a new concept of what constitutes the norm. This is one hypothesis about what is going on. It is a very unpleasant hypothesis. A more optimistic idea would be that there is a crisis but one day it will end.

Anatolii Osmolovskii Today’s generation is in a state of some kind of formation. It seems to me that a clear line has not yet been drawn. We can say, for example, that it is fashionable now to be a leftist, but what exactly this means to a young person is unclear. We can also say that minimalism is very popular. 142

142 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina Reacting to the authorities does not necessarily have to mean head-on opposition. It is not necessary to run into the street and shout and scream about what is going on. The reaction can be expressed by visual means and through various formal methods. After all, it was the lack of a clear formal programme that determined the failure of the art project of the 1990s, including its political goals. I always caught myself thinking that art expresses and reflects reality on the one hand and anticipates it on the other. For example, if you look at Malevich’s suprematism, it is obvious where the Russian political development would lead. If we interpret the Black Square (1915) from a political- social point of view, a clear political division appears between black and white, sheep and goats. In such a way political reality was conceptualized in the following fifty years of Soviet rule: a rigid division between those who were right and those who were wrong, between the enemies of the people and the servants of the people. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the art of Moscow Conceptualism, where the use of props (butaforiya) became the leitmotif. It was Yurii Leiderman who first said, ‘props, props’. The inauthenticity of life was the main topic of Ilya Kabakov. The insights of the art group Medical Hermeneutics were expressed in the images of hallucination and fantasy. A few years later, we got the democracy-prop and non-genuine life. But for us, artists of the 1990s, authenticity was the most important category. If we take the image of Kulik, the man-dog, that is not about savagery. It is, in fact, Man according to Rousseau – a person close to nature. What awaits us in the future? It is most likely that there will be a solution to the crisis similar to the one in 1991. Hopefully, it will not be too bloody, but I believe it is likely that blood will be shed. Today, in contrast to the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is a lot to cut up. In addition, the enlightened kind of man – honest, with high morals and who aspires to freedom and respects others – this kind of man disappeared in the late 1990s. He was replaced by people with a neutral, selective attitude to the surrounding reality. These new people establish contact with those they consider interesting and potentially useful for friendship while simply ignoring the rest. It is important to me that my works are ambiguous and have two or even three meanings. For example, in my recent sculptural composition, You Did This? No, You Did!, I included the severed heads of famous revolutionaries: Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh (see Figure 8.5). Our intellectuals were enraptured by this work. They were all looking at these severed heads and clapped their hands with such pleasure. In fact, however, this art work is melancholic and also provocative because the second part of its title, ‘No, You Did!’, indicates that the laughing crowds are the ones who cut off those heads. It is important for me to put the viewer in an unstable position between the victim and the executioner. It is important to show that everyone wants to mock these severed heads. Everyone wants to bury Lenin. Oleg Kulik has been toying with this idea for five or ten years. Everybody wants the same 143

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Figure 8.5 Anatolii Osmolovskii, Have You Done This? No, You Did! (Eto vy sdelali? Net, eto vy sdelali!), 2014. Installation, metal, welding, bronze. Courtesy of the artist.

as is now happening in Ukraine [the demonstrations in Maidan Square of winter 2013–14]. It has already come to such a situation that people have begun to break away the Soviet stucco of the hammer and the sickle from their houses. They want to clean everything up, forget about what happened in our history. This hysterical behaviour is a symptom of a disease. It is hysteria when all the monuments to Lenin are brought down regardless of their artistic value. I wanted to show these hysterics in my work. And I would say that the civil war is still going on. If you read Marx, he considered this a natural state of society. Another statement by Engels is very important for this work. He said something like, there will come a time when all governments will crumble into dust, and we, the communists, will take power into our own hands. We will commit ridiculous experiments, understanding ourselves how untimely they are. And in the end we will lose our heads. And the fact that we will lose them physically is not the worst thing. The worst thing is that we will enter history as complete fools. For me this passage describes the whole of Soviet history. As for Putin, he is a classic nationalistic capitalist ruler. There is nothing super-scary about him. He is an authoritarian leader like Charles de Gaulle was. At least he is so far. Do you think that de Gaulle did not put people in 144

144 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina jail when there were demonstrations? Putin really does not fully correspond to his time. And we have a really unenlightened government. I have not stopped my political struggle, but for now I think it shows itself in my teaching. Now it is pointless and physically dangerous to engage in real-life acts. If earlier Pussy Riot members were sent to jail, now they could just as easily be killed. The risk is extremely high but, of course, it is not all about the danger. What is important is the fact that we need to prepare a community of people who would be united by a common discourse and a common system of values. As a matter of fact, this is the task of forming a new underground. This process, to establish such a discourse, will take time. Meanwhile, the country will see very big changes in the coming years. The question then arises: will these young people be able to form themselves in time and put together a programme in these two or three years? I think time is short. The artist Dmitry Gutov, however, believes that we have entered into a new thirty-year cycle. The first cycle, which began in 1985, can be called ‘Love for the West’. Now we are in a new cycle: Russia’s effort to find its own identity and unique way of life. There will be no third cycle because then the country itself will not exist. Even the name ‘Russia’ will disappear, and everything will fall apart.

Oleg Kulik Twenty years after Fedor Dostoevskii wrote the novel Demons, Russia saw real demons come to life: the terrorists. These demons were born from Dostoevskii’s imagination. Today, the Russian authorities copy the methods of radical artists. What are these methods? Shock, provocation, scandal and aggression. Theatrically framed actions that always allow you to say, ‘It’s not me, it’s a picture, an image.’ This clowning provides a rescue for policy-makers. They don’t know who they are. They are, of course, not capitalists and not democrats but nor are they tyrants of the East. Like many artists, these people are eagerly looking for an identity. Moscow Actionism of the 1990s was all about this: about the lost person. This person nailed himself to a crucifix, screamed, ran around naked, masturbated (see Figure 8.6). He was a deranged, biologically liberated being who had lost all cultural frameworks and norms. In the past our artists were mainly focused on the West: ‘They will see us, we will be recognized. We will enter the international language.’ Now this land- mark has been discarded, and the influence of capitalism is over. An entirely new situation has emerged: one of pseudo-tyranny, a dehumanized society. The new generation sees no disaster in this. It is a tragedy only for us – for those who still believe in the humanistic project of Man, capable of building an ideal society. For me it is very difficult to reject the model of the intelligent human being. It is difficult to reject the notorious idea that is summed up in the quote by Maxim Gorkii in the play At the Bottom: ‘Man! That has a proud sound!’, the idea that man is the ‘crown of creation’. That he is a creature who is capable of transforming himself, controlling and being in charge of himself 145

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Figure 8.6 Oleg Kulik (together with Mila Bredikhina), I Bite America and America Bites Me, 1997. Deitch Projects, New York, 12–26 April 1997. Courtesy of the artist.

and building viable human systems. But the longer I live, the more I see that this stereotype shrinks to my family and to my own commitment to what is human. And that the people around me can no longer understand who they are and what is human. We, the artists of the 1990s, completely jumped out of the frames. This is human: to want not to live according to some standards of behaviour but instead to create a scandal or a whim. You may not be the most important thing around, but you live for yourself and you do not represent any national, political or economic characteristic. You are not an addendum to some great idea, be it religious, philosophical or anything else. Our aesthetics of direct action corresponded to real existence. The meaning of an action, not always properly explained by critics, was to transgress and get beyond the limits of any conceptual programme. You act this way because you feel this way. Not because your actions are imposed by some kind of programme. Who today represents such individuality in our art? Definitely, it is Petr Pavlenskii. And it is hard even for him: he finds himself constantly in the thrall of collective myths, just like Pussy Riot did. They showed their wilful 146

146 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina character, their human self: ‘Fuck the authorities! Kill me! I am human. I am like this. I shit on your ideology. I’m hungry. I want to love. I am a fool. Hear me out.’ And in response they got, ‘Hear you out? Who are you? Go to jail for two years.’ Now I am not making any proud art, no works that explain the world or even aim to understand it. I make art that simply continues and sustains life in general. I no longer get into conflict with the encirclement. If there is a rapist, I give in to him. I would like to get out of the system not by fighting it but by simply standing still in the middle of it, like: ‘do with me what you want’. You exist today and you understand that hell surrounds you, but you don’t fight this hell – you accept it in your heart. It is an almost religious humility. It’s like this: you are lying in shit, you get up and clean yourself up with dignity. But again you get knocked down and shit poured over you. Again, you get up, but still you do not scream, ‘Do not spray me with shit, you sons of bitches! I am a proud man!’

Viktoriya Lomasko In 2012, it seemed as if a socially oriented art would actively develop. I am myself engaged in social graphics, mostly graphic reports, and in 2011–13 I noticed that more and more artists were getting involved in documentary drawing at rallies and in court. To turn to graphics makes sense: this kind of art has almost no material costs, it is on the spot, and at the same time the image can be replicated without loss of quality in a book, [clandes- tinely] in samizdat, in the streets in the form of a poster or graffiti and on the internet. Of course, social graphics are not such an outstanding media as political actions by Pussy Riot, the Voina art group or Petr Pavlenskii. But while art activists can quickly go off track – they either cease to raise the bar of radicalism or are persecuted – graphic artists can engage in long dialogues with the audience and touch on a wide range of problems. As a curator, I tried to include the most interesting works in the project Feminist Pencil [Feministiskii karandash, in co-curatorship with Nadya Plungyan] and in the project Drawing the Court [Risuem sud, in co-curatorship with Zlata Ponirovskaya]. The works that in my opinion deserve special attention are the graphic series by Ilmira Bolotyan about life in a convent; the story about women’s mental hospitals by Jana Smetanina; and Tatyana Faskhutdinova’s works about people with disabilities and about endangered villages. Today, many authors who were engaged in social art no longer have the resources to continue their work. In most cases, the activism was not funded by any human-rights organization or art institution. Artists earned their money by undertaking commercial commissions or by working part-time somewhere and in their spare time documenting court sessions, decorating rallies, painting posters, making videos and so on. In the current situation, with the economic crisis, most artists are forced either to take a full-time job 147

Voices from the art scene 147 or to take on so much work that any voluntary work becomes impossible. Quite a few artists have emigrated. If we talk specifically about the development of social graphics, it requires at least some Russian media outlets to be ready to publish such works from time to time. For example, I used to run political cartoons in the Russian Reporter magazine. I had pictorials on the Grani website and on PublicPost. I illustrated articles on OpenSpace. Some fairly harsh works of mine were published in the journals Bolshoi Gorod, GQ and so on. Now much of the media has changed its policy and so has the composition of its editorial boards, and any statements critical of the authorities are censored. Many journals have closed. Many sites have been blocked by Roskomnadzor.2 The situation with censorship and repression became tougher after the dispersal of the rally on Bolotnaya Square on 6 May 2012, the day of Putin’s inauguration. After the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of hostilities in Ukraine, events began to occur rapidly everywhere, including in the cultural sphere. Now every week we read news about people wrecking exhibitions, about attacks on activists and about new laws on the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community. Marat Gelman’s gallery was closed in 2015 after he decided to host an auction in support of political prisoners (see Figure 8.7). Of course, there are artists who attempt to resist. For example, the feminist group Gandhi from St Petersburg made a series of anti-war stencils. The actionist Kado Kornet performed in the centre of St Petersburg portraying a blind and mad Russia with blood on her hands. Artists decide from time to time to carry out something risky, knowing that they might be threatened with criminal prosecution. In fact, however, the maximum attention such statements receive are likes and reposts on social networks. The lack of any kind of reaction from Russian art critics to such rare and important projects and the way such projects are ignored reflect an inexcusable incom- petence among the critics. Maintaining a carefree lifestyle has now become impossible. People abroad often ask me, ‘Have you been searched already? Aren’t you afraid?’ It is clear that European journalists want to hear, ‘Yes, I have been searched. Yes, I am terrified.’ I try to make distinct but not overtly provocative drawings. Currently, I am studying the graphics made by Russian artists after the suppression of the revolution of 1905–6. These artists found original ways to bypass tsarist censorship, and they created works that were difficult to take to court, even though the critical content was understood by everyone. Perhaps we have to look for similar ways. To mock the audience and depict the Russian man as a vatnik [uneducated hurray patriot] or a gopnik [in English: chav] seems totally inappropriate to me. I want to establish a long, peaceful and respectful dialogue with the audience. And I want to consider the audience’s level of preparedness, which is often due to the lack of a good education and the lack of experience gained from travelling abroad. I want to find an appropriate language. The ordinary viewer will not search for oppositional websites. He would rather watch 148

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Figure 8.7 Viktoriya Lomasko, Life Everywhere (Vsyudu zhizn), 2015 (ink, watercolour, acrylic). Courtesy of the artist.

television. So I myself have to organize the meeting with him. I recently went to Makhachkala [in Dagestan] to give lectures, for instance, and these were attended by different kinds of people. Many artists avoid socially oriented topics. It is understandable if an artist is only interested in plastic problems. Why not? In the current political situation, there are artists who continue to paint, or make objects and installations, exhibit them in commercial galleries, and sell. Maybe, in parallel, they as citizens will post something on the internet or come to a rally, or maybe they will not. That is the responsibility of each individual. One feels repelled by an artist who wants to position himself as a socio- political author but at the same time produces fictitious, self-censored works. 149

Voices from the art scene 149 He receives grants for them. Moreover, some authors do not have to be forced into self-censorship of their art. From the very beginning, they come up with ideas for artworks where there won’t be anything to censor, since this art is harmless. It is unlikely that it all will develop so far as to reprisals against ‘contemporary art’. It is more probable that contemporary art will just become so harmless and so much about nothing that there will be nothing to censor. Only the empty form will remain. And such decorative abstractions will then be called ‘contemporary art’.

Vikentii Nilin Russia is not a failed state. I would say it is more of a fake state. The term ‘governance’ describes the social contract in the modern world, but one cannot find this word in the Russian constitution. Instead, the term ‘power’ (vlast) is used. I am sure that this was done on purpose in order to mislead us. No ‘power’ (cognate to the verb ‘to possess’ in Russian) is possible or needed in the twenty-first century. These guys own nothing, simply because whatever they touch crumbles to dust. It is unnecessary to say that they are not elected – they just appoint each other. They constitute no power, and they know this better than anyone. That is the root of their craving to destroy everything and not just to destroy but to have what was destroyed immediately replaced by an imitation. To demolish small sale outlets and replace them with those of their own, which nobody needs and which are too expensive to be profitable. There was once the Baikonur Cosmodrome, which bothered nobody, but now, ‘Here is your new Vostochnii Cosmodrome, enjoy!’ Hotel ‘Moskva’ was demolished and re-erected exactly the same, but an imitation. You used to read the writer Pelevin – they planted the writer Prilepin. The names sound similar, but the essence is completely different. This confuses the ordinary man. He doesn’t think of this in terms of prostitution or propaganda. I encounter difficulties explaining this to him. He reads and believes, ‘Well, here is a writer, and this is literature.’ At first he doesn’t believe me when I tell him that the book he is reading is prostitution or advertising but not literature. Then, if I succeed, he loses his belief in any form of creativity. Art becomes for him an unworthy matter, phoney and dependent, serving the interests of some external discourses. Narcissism has today supplanted all remaining kinds of relations between the individual and the surrounding reality. My artwork Riding the Police from the Photo Lab series caters to the narcissism of the audience (see Figure 8.8). It satisfies both the neurotic selfie itch and a sense of civic dignity. It connects two types of narcissism: one that substitutes for politics – what kind of politics can there be in a country where the president appoints the head of the central electoral commission? – and one that substitutes for art – what kind of art can there be if modern man goes to a museum to take a picture of himself with the artworks in the background? 150

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Figure 8.8 Vikentii Nilin, Riding the Police (from the Selfie Machine series), 2014. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andrei Erofeev.

The artwork Photo Stand (or, rather, tantamareska) is an object consisting of four natural-looking paper figures of police officers on which you can climb and be photographed as if they were carrying you around. It refers to a previous historical epoch when they (the above-mentioned power) understood that the humiliated Russian needed a vent. So the ‘agents of power’ organized such a vent in order to make it easier to keep people’s wrath under control and to get personally acquainted with everybody who disliked the authorities. This is all about the 2011–12 euphoria, a blessed time when anyone could feel himself to be a brave fighter against the bloody regime without repercussions. This euphoria gave way to despondency when the government took our little toys away from us and took back its monopoly on everything.

Pussy Riot/Nadya Tolokonnikova and Petr Verzilov In 2014, we gave up the version of actionism that we had invented in 2007. Although we had in July 2015 even been preparing our last action, we had not shown it to anyone. We wanted to hold our kind of heroic march (marsh- brosok). The heroine, who I played, would crawl in a bright green balaclava and a genuine military uniform from the Moscow forests to Red Square. 151

Voices from the art scene 151 When approached by the police, she turns over, and the onlooker would see a grenade on her chest. She then pulls out the pin, but we do not see the explo- sion. What happens next is left to each person’s imagination. A clear, simple and banal message: every war, even if you start it for your own benefit, leads to your defeat. When something strange and unclear is happening in society and in politics, something that knocks you off track, you cannot formulate and implement your project. As soon as you start thinking it through, another nightmare happens. You realize that what you have come up with has become irrelevant. It is generally very difficult to keep constantly adjusting one’s artistic strategy – especially when the production of works is connected with resources and the investment of time. Therefore, our group had been silent for the whole of 2014. It was very difficult for us. We were tormented. We reflected and we realized that our old language – a bright, carnival-like, childish event – no longer corresponded with the times in which we were living. I think that something similar probably happened to other artists. In 2014, I came to the following important conclusion: when the state behaves like a punk, the artist must behave in the opposite way as much as possible. We put our aesthetic, non-punk position in opposition to the state, which at some point had decided to behave arrogantly, to shit down on everyone’s head, to use foul language and to make lewd jokes. It was all so shocking to me that I realized that we have to change our strategies and to start building up institutions. We have created an independent organization, Mediazona, which helps prisoners, including artists. For example, at the moment we are helping the band Krovostok to get rid of the censorship that has been imposed on it by the courts. We are also making a map of the prison colonies. After all, we have more than 1,000 of them in Russia. During the year we were able to gather information about each one. A whole team is constantly working on the map. It is important to make it as interesting as possible and to make it accessible to a wide audience – to make it visually attractive even for hipsters. It will be built on the principle of a multilevel computer game. Hipsters will come to our site and learn about prisons and camps, of which they had never thought before. The work of our human-rights organization is a continuation of our art and our creative strategy. This is our new role. It is extremely important for the artist to be able to radically change in order to preserve their communicative capacities (see Figure 8.9).

Petr Pavlenskii Today’s society is facing defeat in its dialogue with the authorities. The authorities have won. This became especially obvious after the revolution in Ukraine. Our government made a bogeyman out of the victory of the people’s will there. All of Russian society is being kept at bay with this bogeyman. It says, ‘Look what happens to those who go against the authorities. 152

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Figure 8.9 Pussy Riot, Chaika, 2016. The performance Chaika (2016) was inspired by Aleksei Navalnyi’s investigations and accusations against the general prosecutor and his son of corruption and illegal takeover of propriety – and of covering this up. Courtesy of Pussy Riot. Photo: Aleksander Sofeev, www.youtube.com/watch?v= VakUHHUSdf8.

These poor people lose their territory and face war. All the horrors that one can imagine – murder, crime, fire, bombings – they all bear down on those who dare to rebel.’ That is frightening. And it strongly affects even people who understand why and how all this has been created. As a result, having strongly destabilized the situation in Ukraine, the Russian authorities were able to massively cement the situation here in Russia on terms favourable to themselves. The protests came to a halt. And I am not, by the way, involved in protest as such. I am engaged in political art. Allow me to explain. I understand political art as working with the mechanisms of power and its system for control and management: psychiatry, the media, the system of law enforcement, the legal system. My action thus becomes only a fragment of the whole field. Now, for example, I am going through a criminal trial, which I am incorporating into my work. Before that there was a criminal investigation, which I also incorporated into my work. For example, the investigator called me in for a formal examination procedure, and I started to talk to him about art. He did not mind talking about art, and I had a tape recorder in my pocket and recorded these conversations, one after the other. Then I made 153

Voices from the art scene 153 a transcript, and it turned out to be an interesting text with a clearly identifiable ideological conflict (seeChapter 15 ). From that point, things carry on without my involvement. For example, Theatre.doc made a play out of these transcripts, and this is already real art. As a rule, I do almost nothing during my actions. I try to remain in the most static position – I don’t move, I say nothing. This is done in order to maintain the shape of silence. Everything that happens around me is done by the authorities. They define the dynamics. I set myself the task of doing as little as possible. And I do so in order to have the action, which will be called the result of my behaviour, carried out by the authorities’ hands. The government’s actions appear to be aimed at neutralization and suppression, but it is clear that the policemen who come to neutralize an action in fact make it into a significant event. What I do in the streets, in places that have symbolic meaning for the authorities, I call ‘actions’ rather than performance. They may share the same form, but the preparation process is very different. For example, you invite people to a performance, announce it in advance and explain it, and people come specifically to see it. But you cannot invite people to an action because if somebody apart from my aides learned about it in advance, it could not take place. Relations with law-enforcement bodies are so intense that you cannot even call anybody to talk about it on the telephone. You cannot say a word about it out loud in your own apartment.

Figure 8.10 Petr Pavlenskii, Carcass (Tusha), 2013. Photo: Sergei Ermokhin. Archive of Petr Pavlenskii. Courtesy of the artist. 154

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Figure 8.11 Petr Pavlenskii, Fixation (Fiksatsiya), 2013. Аrchive of Petr Pavlenskii. Courtesy of the artist.

If we talk about our art world, it mainly consists of decorative art – not in the narrow sense of decorating a restaurant or something similar, but in a wider sense – of constructing props. I mean the props in which the government is interested and which hide the mechanics of power. Most artists simply work on the construction of such decorations. I find it interesting either to destroy these props or at least to move them around in order to expose the mechanisms of how the authorities work. I would not want to go anywhere – to emigrate or to work anywhere else – because the conditional front line is right here. It would be strange to escape now. It would be like neutralizing yourself (see Figures 8.10–13). 155

Figure 8.12 Petr Pavlenskii, Freedom (Svoboda), 2014. Аrchive of Petr Pavlenskii. Courtesy of the artist.

Figure 8.13 Petr Pavlenskii, Threat (Ugroza), 2016. Photo: Nigin Beroev. Archive of Petr Pavlenskii. Courtesy of the artist. 156

156 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina

Darya Serenko I am a poet. I work in a public library where I supervise exhibitions, social projects and interactive visual poetic performances. On 28 March 2016, I started a new project, Tikhii Piket (Silent Picket) (see Figure 8.14). I would like to use it to develop the principles of the anti-war travelling exhibition, ‘Non-Peace’, which was held in Moscow and St Petersburg in December 2015 to March 2016, to share information while drifting in the cityscape. While participating in meetings and demonstrations, I began to think that some new formula of political – and perhaps not only political – communication was needed, as I always felt that the people who were behind the barrier were regarding us almost as fools. We didn’t have any communication with them. Our message and our posters more generally could not be digested by them. When I, an employee of an ‘educational institution’, imagined what an individual picket could be, it became apparent that picketing had to be educational, in the form of a children’s encyclopedia: ‘Did you know that …’ and a list of facts. To date, ninety-three people have taken part in the action in different cities in Russia and in other countries: Cambodia, Ukraine, Belarus and France. It is an open, horizontal action, so everyone claims it in different ways. Usually, Tikhii Piket looks quite simple. It is just an A3 sheet of paper with the hashtag ‘tikhii piket’ (silent picket). Some people make stickers and glue them on their backpacks. Each participant makes their own changes to the format. The general rules are available from the Tikhii Piket communities on Facebook and VKontakte. At the end of each day, each participant uploads a report: a photograph of the poster and a description of people’s reactions to it. We often ask people for permission to publish the stories told to us during the discussion of the poster, as some of them are very traumatic or scary, and it can be easy to recognize the identity of the narrator. Tikhii Piket has a comic motto – ‘Silent picket is when you let your hands down’ – as the poster is always in a lowered hand, never raised, and it doesn’t look flashy in any way. In any case, it does not carry a demonstrative protest message, so I am problematizing the genre of political posters. Some people who adhere to traditional poster practice accuse our posters of being unclear, of having too much text and of not being posters per se. But they do not take account of the fact that our posters are not static. Our posters change during the course of performative communication, and my tiny handwriting on the poster is no less important than the large slogan next to it. Our poster is not a battlefield: it is a space for discussion. It is the person who decides whether to look at a poster or leave it unseen – to talk to you or not. This is extremely important. We do not talk to people until they talk to us. If a person decides to communicate, that is their choice. This situation is disarming. Why then would they yell at you? Generally speaking, blatant aggression on the part of passengers is almost totally absent. Now I have a poster with me everywhere I go: on public transport, in the street, at work. To move around with a poster greatly affects you. I am three 157

Voices from the art scene 157 months under the supervision of a poster. It is not easy. I am constantly communicating with people, fifteen or twenty times a day. If I feel bad, I can ask my friends to set me free from the action for a few hours. If I were to free myself, I would be failing to comply with the ‘silent picket protocol’: the decision to carry a poster every day throughout the year. But this permanent communication with the poster only applies to me. Other participants are free to carry a poster with whatever frequency they choose. There are ‘poster facts’. There are posters that are very much on the representative-visual side. There are ‘poetic posters’, which contain poems by, for example, Leonid Shvab. Tikhii Piket has already established itself as a genre, but I have never tried to hide from people that this action is something that probably already existed before me. I am hardly a demiurge here, I just claimed this practice, concentrated it and developed its form. Despite the diverse set of problems with this genre, the artistic component is the most important to me. I see Tikhii Piket as a continuation of my poetic practice. But here I am only speaking for myself, not for the other participants. Some of the participants in Tikhii Piket say that for them it is only a political or a social action. But I feel that all these areas interact with one another. Protesters usually ride alone. Otherwise they might be arrested for participating in an unauthorized gathering. But sometimes we do joint rides with two or three posters. One of the most recent actions was in this format. I was with a mirror poster: an A3 mirror with barbed wire painted on it and the hashtag ‘tikhii piket’. The person reflected in the mirror [sitting opposite in the metro] saw his face behind barbed wire. Sometimes people were shocked by it: they came up to me and said: ‘Yes, we feel that we are in danger.’ I suggested to another participant, Anya, that she write the names of political prisoners in mirror writing on her poster, such as Eldar Dadin and the prisoners of 6 May, and take the seat in front of me so the names are reflected properly in my mirror. As a result, some people went first to Anya and then to me, and each of us had our own communication. It was important not to make people only read the reflection in the mirror. The main thing was for them to see the performative channel between us, to get interested and to become engaged in a dialogue. One passenger began to talk to Anya in a very friendly way. He suddenly took her poster and looked into my mirror. You should have seen how his face changed because in a sense he was in the place of the political prisoners whose names were reflected behind barbed wire. We put a description of the action on the internet, and one of the comments was from that man: ‘It was me, thank you.’ People can always find us using the ‘tikhii piket’ hashtag. The action is often recognized on the metro. While I am walking someone suddenly approaches me and starts hugging me, saying thank you. Our state apparatus is working to destroy any healthy causal relationship between humans. People cannot associate the first with the third through the second, but they are not to blame for this as we think they have been 158

158 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina under long-term exposure to this parasitic beam … To demonize the ordinary person is one of the most vicious practices. In my opinion, Pavlenskii is engaged in this. He aggravates the myths surrounding the ordinary person. As a result, the latter loses his ‘pre-performative’ unique basis, in which I, for one, believe. Inside Pavlenskii’s actions there is no chance for any person. You cannot feel solidarity with him. I cannot call the way he behaves with people communication. Some equality needs be observed within communication, but for Pavlenskii it is just another colour in his palette. He is very monologue-ish and totalitarian. His monologue stands higher. He and Pussy Riot take the macho superhero position of strength. They have erected a wall between contemporary art and the ordinary, small town man; between a political statement and the man who became entangled due to so many years of living in a vacuum. In general, they [Pavlenskii and Pussy Riot] occupy a highly traditional, romantic position: the poet and the crowd … They are not radical: quite the contrary. Within Tikhii Piket everyone is equal in communication. We try to create a safe space (see Figure 8.14).

Figure 8.14 Darya Serenko, Silent Picket (Tikhii piket), 2016. Photo: Anna Sinyatkina and Darya Serenko. Courtesy of the artist. 159

Voices from the art scene 159

About the artists Irina Korina, artist, sculptor, theatrical artist. Born in Moscow in 1977. Graduated from the Russian Academy of Theatre Art (GITIS), studied at the Valand Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden, the Academy of Arts, Vienna, and the Moscow Institute of Contemporary Art (New Artistic Strategies). Winner of Russia’s Soratnik Award (2006, 2009 and 2012). Took part in the Venice Biennale (2009). Finalist for the Kandinsky Prize, Moscow (2011, 2014). Awarded the Innovatsiya Prize for Contemporary Art in 2007 and 2014 (Moscow). Currently living in Moscow. Oleg Kulik, performance artist, sculptor, curator, photographer. Born in Kiev in 1961. Graduated from Kiev Art School and Kiev Geological Survey College. A leading name of Moscow’s radical performance art and internationally well known for his performance Man-Dog, first performed in 1994. Curator at the Regina Gallery, Moscow, 1990–3. Curated the Kandinsky Prize (2009) in London. Participated in Manifesta 1, the Venice Biennale (2001, 2005) and the Valencia Biennale. Awarded the Medal of the Russian Academy of Arts in 2005. Awarded the 2007 Innovatsiya Prize for Contemporary Art, Moscow. Currently living in Moscow. Andrei Kuzkin, performance artist, sculptor, painter, installation artist. Born in Moscow in 1979. Graduated from Moscow State University of Printing Arts. Awarded the 2008 Innovatsiya Prize for Contemporary Art, Moscow. Prize winner at Russia’s Soratnik Awards (2009, 2010, 2011). Long-listed for the Kandinsky Prize, Moscow (2010, 2011). Participated in the VIth Berlin Biennale. Currently living in Moscow. Viktoriya Lomasko, graphic artist, curator of feminist art exhibitions. Born in Serpukhov, Russia, in 1978. Graduated from Moscow State University of Printing Arts. Continues the tradition of graphic reporting. Co-curator of the Feminist Pencil exhibition movement and the Drawing the Court project. Long-listed for the Kandinsky Prize, Moscow (2010). Cooperates with human-rights organizations. Currently living in Moscow. Roman Mokrov, artist, photographer. Born in Elektrougli near Moscow in 1986. Graduated from the Moscow State Regional University, studied at the Free Workshops School for Contemporary Art at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art and the Moscow Institute for Contemporary Art. Nominated for the 2012 Innovation Prize for Contemporary Art and received a special prize. Received a special mention by the jury of the Now&After’12 international video-art festival. Long-listed for the Kandinsky Prize, Moscow (2012). Nominated for the Kuryokhin Prize in 2013 in the category Best Media Object. Currently living in the Moscow district. Vikentii Nilin, performance artist, sculptor, photographer, civil activist, actor. Born in Moscow in 1971. Graduated from the All-Russian State University of Cinematography (VGIK) but without a diploma. Member of the band 160

160 Andrei Erofeev and Irina Kochergina Plattitude International since 1992 and Peculiarity (Osobennost) since 1998. Long-listed for the Kandinsky Prize for Contemporary Art, Moscow (2008). His works are housed in the Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow; the National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Russia; and the Moscow Multimedia Art Museum. Currently living in Moscow. Anatolii Osmolovskii, performance artist, sculptor, art theorist, teacher. Born in Moscow in 1969. One of the leaders of Moscow Actionism in the 1990s. Leader of the art group Expropriation of Art Territories Movement (1990–2). Founder of Radek magazine in 1994. Editor-in- chief of the art magazine Baza (Base) since 2010. Head of the Institute of Contemporary Art ‘Baza’ (2011). Awarded the Kandinsky Prize for Contemporary Art in the category ‘Artist of the Year’ in 2007. Participated in the Venice Biennale (1993, 2003) and Documenta XII (Kassel). His works are housed in the Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow; MuHKA, Antwerp; and the Museum der Moderne: Mönchsberg, Salzburg. Currently living in Moscow. Pavel Pepperstein, artist, Moscow Conceptual art theorist, writer, rap musician. Born in Moscow in 1966. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Prague. Continues the traditions of the Moscow Conceptualist school. Co-founded the experimental art group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics in 1987. Participated in the Venice Biennale in 2009, and Manifesta 10 in 2014. Awarded the Kandinsky Prize for Contemporary Art in the category ‘Artist of the Year’ in 2014. His works are shown at the Tretyakov State Gallery, Moscow; the Russian State Museum, St Petersburg; and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. Currently living in Moscow. Petr Pavlenskii, performance artist (political art). Born in Leningrad in 1984. Studied monumental art at the St Petersburg Art and Industry Academy. Trained at the St. Petersburg Pro Arte Foundation for Culture and Arts. Co-founded the independent online newspaper Political Propaganda in 2012. Famous for his radical actions in Red Square, Moscow; the Tripartite Bridge, St Petersburg and Lubyanka, near the FSB Headquarters in Moscow. Imprisoned for his actions. Awarded the Vaclav Havel Prize for Creative Dissent in 2016. Daria Serenko, poet, curator. Born in Khabarovsk, Russia in 1993. Graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, Moscow. Works in the exhibitions/cultural projects department of the Municipal Library in Moscow. Practises blackout poetry. Took part in the anti-militarist travelling art exhibition ‘Ne Mir’ (No Peace) in 2016. Curated the exhibition of Stuckist art in Moscow in 2016. Ran the social projects: Silent Picket and Library 1+1 for women in crisis situations. Currently living in Moscow. Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, artist and political activist. Born in Norilsk, Russia, in 1989. Studied philosophy at Moscow State University and joined the performance-art group Voina in 2007. A member of the feminist punk-rock 161

Voices from the art scene 161 group, Pussy Riot, she was sentenced to two years in a prison colony for her participation in Pussy Riot’s ‘Punk Prayer’ in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow (2012). Co-winner of the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2014. Founder of Mediazona (2014 with Maria Alyukhina), a Russian independent human-rights media outlet that focuses on the judicial, law enforcement and penal systems in Russia. Lives in Moscow. Petr Verzilov, artist and political activist. Born in Moscow in 1987. Studied philosophy at the Moscow State University. One of the initiators of the art performance group Voina. Unofficial spokesperson for Pussy Riot. The pub- lisher of Mediazona.

Notes

1 Andrei Erofeev conducted the interviews, and Irina Kochergina edited the material. All texts were translated from Russian by Artemis Davleev except the text by Vikentii Nilin, which was translated by James Donoher. 2 Roskomnadzor is the federal supervisor of telecommunications, information technology and mass communications. 162 163

Part III Artistic counterstrategies 164 165

9 Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ Tergiversation as politics

Daniil Leiderman

This article examines several phenomena in contemporary Russian art that seem to intentionally undermine or betray the very discourses that they claim to voice. Building on Jacques Rancière’s notion of politics articulated in his book Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, I argue that these betrayals are a strategic effort towards a redistribution of the sensible, motivated by a deep scepticism about the prospects of overturning oppressive social institutions without replacing them with something equally odious. I trace this effort to the counter-ideological strategy known as ‘shimmering’ (mertsatelnost or mertsanie) in the discourse of the Moscow Conceptualists, among whom the poet and artist Dmitrii Prigov, who coined the term ‘shimmering’ in the late 1970s, was a key figure. The Moscow Conceptualists are the circle of artists and writers that consolidated within Moscow’s artistic underground during the 1970s and remain influential today. In Prigov’s understanding, shimmering consists of a disciplined strategy of oscillation between mutually exclusive ideological and/or metaphysical discourses from profound investment in the artwork to utter detachment, critical distance and merciless analysis, and then back again – a trajectory intended to prevent or pre-empt the consolidation of an authoritative artistic voice or artwork (Prigov 1999).1 I expand this definition to a broader disciplined tergiversation of alternating investment and detachment, designed to undermine the binary conflicts around art between the official discourse of Socialist Realism and the alternatives of early Nonconformism. Using this definition, I discuss the vitality of shimmering as a strategy in critical artworks of the Putin era.

Nonconformist politics, dissensus and shimmering Rancière’s book revolves around the entanglement and opposition between ‘police’ and ‘politics’. ‘Police’ is understood as the ‘distribution of the sensible whose principle is the absence of void and of supplement’, the regimentation of society to a set of instrumental functions that pretend to represent the totality of society and, therefore, establish the limits of the ‘visible and the sayable’ (Rancière 2010: 36–7). ‘Politics’ consists of the contestation of such limits, insisting on the visibility of that which is normally invisible within the 166

166 Daniil Leiderman reigning distribution of the sensible and attempting to utter the unspeakable within the space of public discourse. Politics manifests ‘dissensus’ – the break within the whole – challenging the unity of the social totality that the ‘police’ seek to embody. Politics is thus not only the critical appearance of ‘dissensus’ but a potential expansion of the ‘police’ to a new domain, encompassing that which was previously excluded, to co-opt the potentially dangerous energies of ‘dissensus’, transforming them from troublesome gaps and supplements to integrated and exploited components of the police and the sensible. The opposition between Russian Nonconformist art of the 1960s and Socialist Realism aptly represents Rancière’s terms in action. Socialist Realism directly aspired to moderate the ‘visible and the sayable’. Heroic paintings of Lenin and Stalin, history paintings depicting the suffering of Western subaltern and Russian pre-revolutionary rebels, and romantic images of daily life shaped historical narratives, defined normative relations and effaced ugly social conflicts, openly delimiting the visible and the thinkable. Ekaterina Degot’s description of the relationship between the ideological premise of Soviet official art and life overtly represents it as a means of policing the distribution of the sensible: ‘Socialist Realist paintings both authenticated the reality they depicted and constituted the mythic narratives through which that reality was perceived’ (Degot 2000: 139). It is precisely because Socialist Realism sought to police the ‘visible and sayable’ that the Soviet authorities acted as though threatened by the visibility of nonconformist art. If socialist realism is understood as a form of police, Nonconformist art is necessarily a form of politics, and an embodiment of dissensus, even if the Nonconformist work or artist is declaredly apolitical. Early Nonconformists rarely made overtly anti-Soviet works, and they did not have to. Their wilful deviation from the efforts of Socialist Realism enacted what Rancière describes as the central drive of politics: the effort to achieve the visibility of those excluded from the sensible. However, some Nonconformists were concerned that their stake in the ‘visible and the sayable’, and their politics, could open the door to the unwelcome possibility of coming to mirror the authoritarian language of policing. For them, ‘shimmering’ provided an outlet, turning the focus of the artwork away from the project of producing the ‘right’ mythic narratives and towards the problem of investigating the machinery of myth production. Rancière vocalizes the essential message of the police as, ‘ “Move along! There’s nothing to see here!” The police is that which says that here, on this street, there’s nothing to see and so nothing to do but move along.’ Conversely, ‘politics […] consists of transforming this space of “moving-along”, of circulation, into a space for the appearance of a subject’, thus directly resonating with the history of nonconformist interventions into the space of the street (Rancière 2010: 37). One of the first and most significant conflicts between the early Nonconformists and the establishment in the 1960s was precipitated by a publicized but unauthorized exhibition of Nonconformist painting in the streets. On 26 November 1962, the prominent Nonconformist painter Ely Belyutin 167

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 167 (1925–2012) held an exhibition of ‘Russian Abstraction’ with artists from his circle in the street outside the Taganskaya subway station in Moscow. The show attracted enough attention for Belyutin and his circle to be invited to participate in the thirtieth anniversary exhibition of the Moscow Artists’ Union at the Manezh exhibition hall. Belyutin recalled thinking, ‘It is either a provocation or inclusion’ (Belyutin 2008: 123). The Manezh exhibition turned out to be a provocation. On 1 December 1962, Nikita Khrushchev attended the exhibition, an event only made possible by the loosening of censorship associated with his ‘destalinization’ of Soviet society – hence the hope of ‘inclusion’. Khrushchev’s response to the alternative work was virulently negative, even during the introductory discussion with Belyutin. The result was that ‘reactionary party activists on all levels used Khrushchev’s pogrom at the Manezh to resurrect and strengthen the mechanisms of control and especially censorship, which had visibly weakened in the initial euphoria of the Thaw’ (Rosenfeld 2011: 11). None of the paintings featured in either the public exhibition or Manezh could be called overtly anti-Soviet. All of them were a form of dissensus, however, making visible that which was invisible through the conscious design of the authorities. Belyutin’s recollection of hope for inclusion and the vitriol of Khrushchev’s reaction demonstrate the political stakes. Requiem, painted by Ely Belyutin in 1962, nearly a decade after Stalin’s death, seemingly as an immediate reaction to his removal from the mausoleum and internment, demonstrates the peculiar form of the early Nonconformist articulation of dissent. Requiem depicts Lenin’s burial procession through a frenzied mood and expressive brushstrokes that suggest anything but grief. The flatness and dynamism of the work mark Belyutin’s investment in avant- garde aesthetics and his distaste for both Socialist Realism and the Soviet cult of personality around Lenin. Alone in the throng, Lenin’s body appears drained of colour. Lenin is not depicted as immortal, or even as he appeared in the mausoleum, painted in flesh tones by his taxidermists.Requiem ’s Lenin is dead with a finality that is inappropriate within the formal norms of Socialist Realism. Conversely, the dynamic and indistinct strokes that represent the crowd around Lenin signify life and dynamism, collapsing the living body of the people with the living, expressive texture of the painting. Requiem makes the living body of the public visible when it should be emphasizing the body of Lenin. It embodies dissensus through a formal shift in the ossified conventions around painting Lenin’s corpse. Requiem was not exhibited at the Manezh show. If it had been, it would have been taken as a direct provocation. The precise nature of this provocation, however, reveals much about the early form of the Nonconformist ‘dissensus’. Works like Belyutin’s were not simply derided: as a 1962 Pravda editorial on Belyutin’s circle stated, ‘as to the ‘canvasses’ of young abstrac- tionists [they] are beyond discussion – they are simply outside art’ (cited in Stroke and German 1994). Nonconformist artists often positioned their confrontation with Soviet official art in similar terms, describing Socialist 168

168 Daniil Leiderman Realism as a fundamentally degenerate deviation from true art and culture and the Soviet experiment itself as a derailing of Russia’s proper historical and cultural destiny and an unwelcome effort to change humanity for the worse. Thus, when Belyutin describes the motivations of his studio during the 1960s, he asserts ‘that art is not an aesthetic category, but a category of the ethical-moral subconscious … most capable of disorienting society and corrupting the people’ (Belyutin 2008: 121). If, according to Belyutin, Socialist Realism exploited the power of art for the sake of a sinister social- engineering project, Nonconformists like him had to use art for the sake of social rejuvenation and enlightened humanism. Given the political and institutional limitations on Nonconformist artists, these Manichean struggles could only be fought within the space of art. Paradoxically, Soviet official sources used virtually the same language. A Moskovskii khudozhnik (Moscow Artist) editorial of 26 May 1967, ‘Do not pervert Soviet reality’, for instance, states that Rabin’s works ‘distort our Soviet reality and bring political and ideological harm to our society’ (Moskovskii khudozhnik 1967: 2). Even though Requiem’s subject matter was shared by hundreds of heroic, lamenting or otherwise ‘proper’ Socialist Realist paintings of Lenin’s entombment, for Belyutin, as for those official painters, their formal and stylistic opposition was fundamental. However, just a decade later, this opposition was complicated by the appearance of works such as Vitaly Komar (b. 1943) and Alexander Melamid’s (b. 1945) Onward to the Victory of Communism! (1974). Komar and Melamid’s work is almost identical to a Soviet slogan banner, but the signature at the bottom, which should by right be Lenin’s or Stalin’s, is displaced by the names of the artists. Komar and Melamid usurp the authoritative voice of the Soviet state while discarding the personal artistic gesture that empowered Belyutin’s artistic resistance. The work is designed so that both a Soviet censor and a Nonconformist colleague might find it equally offensive and ideologically harmful, and yet it is contemporaneous with the so-called Bulldozer exhibition of 1974 where the authorities responded to an illicit show of paintings by numerous Nonconformists by running the entire exhibition over with bulldozers, giving the exhibition its conventional name, and dispersing the crowd with water cannon. Onward oscillates between the discourses of Socialist Realism and Nonconformism without investing in either, paradoxically by appearing to invest in both. Komar and Melamid shimmer between genuine investment in the impersonal form and content of socialist realism and the privileged authorial voice of the Nonconformist artist. In the process, they both reveal and appropriate a pejorative affinity between these voices around their shared desire to police the sensible through art. Shimmering seeks to suspend the seemingly inevitable transition of the Nonconformist artistic intervention from the dissensus of politics into an ossified instrument of the police. It accomplishes this paradoxically: through a temporary and willing embrace of the most odious forms of the police discourse (in this case a Stalinist slogan), only to betray the stakes and goals of this discourse. Far from simply satirical 169

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 169 or ironic, shimmering is equally merciless on the Nonconformist artistic discourse, which it confronts directly with the obvious symbols of Soviet ideology that it had hoped to completely exclude from the domain of art. Komar and Melamid and other Moscow Conceptualists radically broke from the artistic discourses of both Socialist Realism and Nonconformism by approaching them as mutually contingent ideologies rather than absolute truths in conflict. However, this rupture is not immediately apparent, precisely because it masquerades as detached, ironic elision, pastiche and appropriation rather than direct negation or overt denunciation. Developing in a dialogue with Nonconformist strategies, shimmering took shape as a heightened awareness of the implicit burden of the Soviet artist’s symbolic power coupled with their actual powerlessness. Shimmering manifested the Conceptualists’ unwill- ingness to engage earnestly in the heroism of the artist-prophet or to adopt an authoritative artistic language. As Octavian Eşanu writes in his Transition in Post-Soviet Art: The Collective Actions Group Before and After 1989:

Unlike the previous generations of Moscow unofficial artists, who tended to take the language of the Politburo seriously, reaching for religious or existential themes to criticize its main premises, the Conceptualists abandoned this sort of criticism and resorted instead to the examination and investigation of its ethos and mechanisms of distribution. (Eşanu 2013: 64–5)

While the major motive – the critique of Soviet cultural hegemony – was still intact within Moscow Conceptualism in the 1970s, the means for carrying out this critique were quite different from those central to 1960s’ Nonconformism. Shimmering represented a strategy of principled, strategic tergiversation. Tergiversation has a double meaning: it can mean both an evasive refusal to give a straight answer and a wilful betrayal of a cause or faith. Shimmering involves both meanings, betraying the heroism of Nonconformism and the project of Socialist Realism in turn, by appearing to embrace both, falteringly and earnestly, in a traitorous sequence of evasive answers. The point of shimmering is not to triangulate and reconcile but to maintain the tension between opposite discourses, to pursue ideological mobility rather than stable truths and to expose the principle of dissensus as self-purposeful, thereby allowing an investigation of the means by which the sensible is policed and politics ossifies into policing. If every Nonconformist artwork articulated dissensus by the sheer fact of being visible as a gap in the representative framework of Socialist Realism, shimmering embodied dissensus within Nonconformism. Through shimmering, the Moscow Conceptualist circle criticized Nonconformism for its will to power (in the sense of the imagining of the artist as the bearer of eternal truths that will change the world in their image) and its reliance on the understanding of the artist as a prophet charged with redistributing the sensible. Shimmering was a counter-ideology, a principled choice of perpetual 170

170 Daniil Leiderman indecision as a political alternative to the binary limits on the sayable and the thinkable within Socialist Realism and Nonconformism. Shimmering was the politics within Nonconformism, making visible that which Nonconformism necessarily effaced: the ideologically contaminated everyday language and form of Soviet daily life (byt). Shimmering emerged from the binary opposition to Socialist Realism and Soviet material culture of 1960s Nonconformism. In an anthology about the 1970s, the Moscow Conceptualist painter Erik Bulatov sardonically recollects the conviction of his Nonconformist peers that ‘a real artist must speak a different language, and not at all about our reality, which should go unnoticed, and through which something eternal should be seen’ (Bulatov 2010: 49). Conversely, for Bulatov the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s was associated with a need to ‘tell about the time in which we lived; to say something, without being ashamed of yourself and your “poor, incor- rect” language’ (Bulatov 2010: 49). Bulatov writes that his re-evaluation of his relationship with his language and its accompanying ‘[Soviet intelligentsia’s] “complex”, that everything that we have is unreal: the culture is unreal, life is unreal, and everything around is false, Soviet’ showed the possibility of challenging the ideological contamination of everyday life with a flexible metaposition of perpetual flight and betrayal, rather than the nonconformist quest for the true and redeeming oppositional artwork.

The politics of shimmering in oppositional Russian art of the 2000s–2010s Perhaps that is why, despite their seeming dissolution as an art movement, the Moscow Conceptualists still have a powerful influence on contemporary protest art in Russia. For instance, Aleksei Plutser-Sarno, the spokesperson for the Russian anarchist art collective Voina (War), known for its outlaw actionism, which included flipping police cars and spray-painting a giant penis on the raised bridge opposite the St Petersburg headquarters of the FSB, wrote of his admiration for the Moscow Conceptualist and member of the performance group Collective Actions, Andrei Monastyrskii: ‘He neither sold himself nor went into shit-commerce’ (Plutser-Sarno 2012). Similarly, Dmitrii Prigov even planned a collaborative action with Voina in 2007, but this was cancelled following his death.2 Instead of the planned action, Voina staged a wake in his honour, illegally occupying a subway car on Moscow’s Central line with an elaborately set table and a feast.3 The philosophical and critical legacy of the declaredly apolitical Moscow Conceptualists is visibly continued by some of the most radical political contemporary Russian artists. Despite its dissolution as a cohesive art movement, Moscow Conceptualism remains resonant with the most radical wing of Russian art. Shimmering is central to this resonance, representing a key critical strategy: critique that does not rely on the delivery of its own ideology but rather a juggling performance with bracketed truths readily available in popular discourse and 171

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 171 contaminated by various patriarchal and parochial authorities. For several contemporary Russian artists, shimmering provides a critical alternative to the rallying nationalistic discourses alleging the failure and foreignness of Western postmodern relativism in Russia and offering violence in the service of ‘truth’ as a vital sign of essential Russian spirituality. I examine below the afterlife of Moscow Conceptualism through several indirect examples from post-Soviet and contemporary Russian art using shimmering as a productive critical device or dynamic metaposition characterized by principled tergiversation. Whether these artists are under the direct influence of Moscow Conceptualism is not central to my argument, but rather that their work creates dissensus through an intentionally faltering and paradoxical effort to achieve unity with the police. Shimmering is treasonous rather than confrontational. If politics consists of the articulation of dissensus within the totality of the police, shimmering seeks to temporarily collapse this difference, with the ultimate aim of aggravating it further and with a genuine investment in ideological mobility as a desired and achievable goal. The crux of this ambition revolved around the figure of the artist. Both the nonconformist and the socialist-realist discourses relied on a privileged image of the artist as either an engineer or a saboteur of human souls. The central thrust of the Moscow Conceptualist break with Nonconformism emerged in their willingness to betray the privileged position of the artist, mocking it by embracing it as a neurotic and authoritarian presence, a petty tyrant bracketed by the artwork rather than a herald of its essential truths. For instance, Ilya Kabakov’s work represented numerous experiments with such authorial alter-egos, embraced by Kabakov as his own selves, only for the sake of making their inadequacy and problematic will to power apparent. Kabakov’s use of shimmering to construct unreliable alter-egos both vocalized his own artistic insecurities and ambitions and fundamentally disarmed them, displacing the heroic nonconformist image of the prophet artist with one of the artist as a lowly eccentric.4 The series Woman Museum (1996–2009) by the artist and photographer Tatyana Antoshina works through a shimmering approach quite similar to Kabakov’s bifurcations of artistic identity. In this series, Antoshina’s vantage point oscillates between stuckedness in unreliable personal surrogates and an evident critical distance. However, in Woman Museum, Antoshina harnesses shimmering for a project critiquing and destabilizing patriarchal gender roles. While probably influenced by Western feminist artists such as Barbara Kruger and Cindy Sherman, Antoshina’s project is distinguished by the shimmering character of her critical vantage point. Much like Sherman, Antoshina works through elaborately staged photographic compositions that highlight the constructed and arbitrary nature of patriarchal gender roles and reproduce objectifying and gendered images from art and popular culture. Like both Sherman and Kruger, Antoshina aims to provoke her spectators into questioning the construction of gender. However, where Sherman uses her own 172

172 Daniil Leiderman

Figure 9.1 Tatyana Antoshina, Olympus. Courtesy of the artist.

body, Antoshina primarily uses her husband’s body, as well other male nude models, resituating them as the embodiments of perfect femininity by having them assume the role of various women from canonical paintings: from Manet’s Olympia (1865) to Picasso’s Girl on a Ball (1905). Antoshina’s husband becomes her problematic muse, an erotic, playful, passive subject dis- playing itself for her – and her audience’s – objectifying titillation. In Olympus Antoshina even erodes the defiant gaze of Manet’s original, replacing it with a giggling, placid odalisque (see Figure 9.1). In these works, Antoshina not only reproduces the patriarchal male gaze but exceeds and exacerbates it, while seemingly insisting that it is organically her own. Antoshina’s position is shimmering because it works through unreliable expressions of earnest investment in the very discourse she is undermining. Antoshina tergiversates from the critical feminist discourse by indulging objectifying representative traditions and betrays the intended privileged male spectator of such traditions by taking his place for herself. By seemingly endorsing the natural immediacy of erotic academic odalisques while usurping the spot reserved for the patriarchal male spectator, Antoshina destabilizes the objectifying gaze’s claim to nature, without negating it. 173

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 173 Antoshina earnestly reproduces this oppressive gaze as her own, putting it under unsustainable pressure in the process. The fact that her husband is her model only complicates the whole situation. Indeed, some critics misread her work as a kind of tribute to her love for her husband badly masquerading as feminist critique.5 Through the emasculated poses and provocative effeminacy of her husband’s body, the work ridicules the patriarchal gaze by showing its fragile and arbitrary underpinnings. Antoshina embodies this gaze, revealing it to be perversely intricate, codified and utterly socially mediated, but only through a shimmering insistence on its natural immediacy. She transforms the desiring onlooker and objectified body into malleable artefacts for simultaneously provoking the hetero-normative Russian male spectator and insisting in earnest that she is merely indulging desires identical to his. Antoshina creates dissensus by making her own desires visible and therefore exposing the patriarchal conventions that demand their invisibility within the artwork. Her authentic desire for her husband objectifies and emasculates him only if the spectator endorses the feminist view that an objectifying gaze is intrinsically oppressive. She seemingly jumps head first into the grand old tradition of objectifying effeminate bodies: her husband is just one such body, and a perfectly serviceable support for the performance of femininity. Antoshina puts gender roles and objectification into question by provoking her audience with a lurid wink. Her feminist intervention is shimmering between the embodiment of an objectifying patriarchal discourse and its self-evident mockery. Much like Kabakov, Antoshina creates disposable artist alter-egos embodying her own vantage point, and invests them with verisimili- tude and creative authority, only to destabilize their voices (and thus her own) into oscillating between a sincere participation in the desires that she evokes – it is her husband, after all – and a wry critique of all that they represent. Shimmering is bound up with the form of Antoshina’s intervention. Like Kabakov, she offers critique through a display of stuckedness. It is a double bind, and it is achieved through shimmering, as Antoshina sabotages her own critical intervention in order to make it all the more effective. Feminist critique works here through its own absence and effacement. This approach is clearly informed by the mixture of critical intervention and self-effacing sabotage of the authoritative voice characteristic of shimmering, even if it is not directly indebted to either Kabakov or the rest of Moscow conceptualism. Pussy Riot’s 2012 performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour also uses shimmering for the cause of interventionist political art by claiming to invest earnestly in the very discourses that it attacks. This was apparent in Mother of God, Chase Putin Away (Punk Prayer), which led to the conviction and imprisonment of three of the participants – Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and Ekaterina Samutsevich (the latter released in court) – for ‘inciting religious hatred and offending religious feelings’. During their performance, the women’s collective occupied the area reserved for the priests in the Orthodox Cathedral. Faces masked in colourful balaclavas, the women performed something between a prayer 174

174 Daniil Leiderman and a punk rock song extolling the Virgin Mary to save Russia from Putin (Pussy Riot 2012). In this performance, Pussy Riot does not directly attack the legitimacy of the problematic collusion between the Russian Orthodox Church and the repressive organs of the Russian government. Instead, Pussy Riot acts as though church and state were inherently a single entity, chiding it for not living up to a proper religious moral standard. The band members invade the church with a provocative punk rock performance, while insisting on their genuine investment in the church’s values and meaning. Their rhetorical position shimmers between punk protest and religious fervour, calling the patriarch a ‘bitch’ in the same breath as they call for greater faith. The text of their prayer directly alleges that the Orthodox Church has lost its moral compass by choosing power over faith: ‘The head of the KGB, their chief saint … The Church’s praise of rotten dictators … Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin. Bitch, better believe in God instead! … Mary, Mother of God, is with us in Protest!’ (Finley 2013). Instead of critiquing the collusion between state and church from a secular vantage point, Pussy Riot critiques from a religious vantage point – seemingly trying to harness religion to effect political change, the exact type of manipulation that they are denouncing in the first place. Even their costume, akin to monastic garb, is allegedly a sign of their desire to depersonalize. Mikhail Yampolskii has compellingly linked these costumes to Malevich’s works, indicating that here the nonconformist and avant-garde myths of the artist as a prophet are activated as a means of political critique, The critique, however, intentionally becomes stuck in the religious discourse that it violates (Yampolskii 2012). For Yampolskii, Malevich is a necessary reference for Pussy Riot because the avant-garde artist directly represents art as an heir to the functions previously reserved for religion. Pussy Riot takes up Malevich’s assertion, embodying it through practice. In the Pussy Riot trial documents, the three accused members insist repeatedly that they identify sincerely as Christians and believe their intervention to be couched in authentic Christian faith. The group members’ letter from jail to the Patriarch Kirill (the same one referenced in the punk prayer) asserts that ‘fervent and sincere prayer can never be a mockery, no matter what its form. Therefore it cannot be said that we jeered at or mocked the shrine.’ It goes on to claim that ‘[t]‌he power and truth of our prayer did not shame the faithful. … Our prayer shamed only Putin and his henchmen’ (Finley 2013: 27–8). They conclude with an even more provocative claim: ‘Our prayer could not be “a mockery of the most holy”, because we prayed to the Virgin in defence of our sacred land’ (Finley 2013: 27–8). This effectively invests Pussy Riot’s performance with biblical associations specifically reminiscent of Christ casting out the merchants from the temple. These claims should not be viewed as cynical subterfuge. The investment of the women of Pussy Riot in the religious discourse they both assault and claim to represent is vital to their critical approach. Their shimmering tergiversation is crucial here because without it Pussy Riot’s criticism is readily dismissed as Western, atheistic and feminist 175

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 175 propaganda. Shimmering allows Pussy Riot to outmanoeuvre and pre-empt these dismissals. The court transcripts from Pussy Riot’s trial read as if they were written for a performance. What should be an open-and- shut case of misdemeanour trespassing and perhaps vandalism turns into a hyperbolically elaborate conversation about blasphemy, religious meaning and feminism. Some exchanges appear almost fantastic:

[NADEZHDA TOLOKONNIKOVA]: ‘Is feminist a swear word?’ WITNESS: ‘It is if it’s said in church’ … ‘You find the word feminist insulting?’ WITNESS: ‘I do. For an Orthodox believer it is an insult, an obscenity!’ (Finley 2013: 50–1)

It is not entirely clear what the witness means by ‘feminism’ here, but the use of the term draws a chalk outline around the incoherence of the religious reaction at the heart of the trial better than any atheist provocation ever could. By insisting on their faithfulness, and seemingly identifying with the project of unifying church and state, Pussy Riot reveals the viciousness and hollowness of the contemporary marriage of church parochialism and state repression in Russia. At great personal cost, the women of Pussy Riot exposed a convoluted entanglement of reactionary politics, misogyny, religion and political authority by appearing to fully invest themselves in each aspect of the entanglement as authentic believers. Instead of describing their unorthodox prayer as a critical provocation informed by Western art, Pussy Riot claimed it as a more adequate and appropriate reading of the Bible than that practised by the religious authorities. Their appropriation of the Virgin Mary as a fellow punk feminist resists claims made by the prosecution by confusing the terms of their opposition. The Virgin Mary may or may not be a feminist, but the prosecution’s claim that even the word ‘feminism’ is an insult to a believer is also not founded in dogma. By fully investing themselves in the discourse of Orthodox Christianity without suspending their anarchist and feminist critical distance, Pussy Riot effectively turned the Orthodox Church’s own discourse against its own authority. Pussy Riot’s tergiversation between religi- osity and irreverence proved far more impactful than a merely atheistic or secular critique ever could. Rather than asserting feminism as vital alternative to the parochial and oppressive Russian church, Pussy Riot represented the Russian Orthodox Church as the vital, feminist alternative to itself. In the case of Pussy Riot, shimmering proves to be a powerful form of resistance precisely because it wilfully escapes the dichotomies of Russia and the West, as well as parochial truth and moral relativism, that the Russian political and religious establishments desperately need to justify their power and violence. Although the link between Pussy Riot and Moscow conceptualism is indirect (Tolkonnikova and Samutsevich knew Prigov through 176

176 Daniil Leiderman their association with Voina), its manifestation of a shimmering strategy at the heart of Russia’s contemporary political and religious strife is a dramatic politicization of the critical device that preserves the apolitical, evasive form of shimmering intrinsic to Moscow Conceptualism while generating dissensus. Pussy Riot’s use of shimmering allows its dissensus to expand beyond the bounds of underground, artistic or feminist critique. By finding dissensus within the religious discourse itself Pussy Riot reveals the unseen subversive dimensions that already exist within one of the most stolid institutions of the police in contemporary Russia. Petr Pavlenskii, one of the most radical contemporary Russian artists, also uses shimmering to exacerbate the violence of the police. Pavlenskii’s practice resonates with Moscow Conceptualist approaches, exacerbating their logic to an extreme degree. I discuss above the appropriations of the authoritative voice in works such as Komar and Melamid’s Slogan, but the Collective Actions group truly laid the groundwork for performance art that directly appropriates the violence of authority (only to betray it) within the Russian underground. Collective Actions did not want to reproduce the privileged authority of the artist that both Socialist Realism and Nonconformism often relied on. The central effort was to avoid any semblance of a will to power, in the form of either a claim to absolute truth or a hierarchical relationship between an artist-prophet and his disciples. Characteristically, Collective Actions pursued this ambition by exaggerating its authority in individual actions: imposing complex instructions, uncomfortable waits or other onerous demands on their audience. At the same time, the organizers of the actions sought to restrict their own ability to control or interpret the work, seeking an audience that would question their authority while still playing along with their instructions. They accomplished this by making their audience responsible for the bulk of the documentation and interpretation of the actions they staged. In a deliberate reversal of the avant-garde model of the inspired artist guiding his audience to a revelation of ultimate truth, Collective Actions wanted a mis- guided audience to pull the artists along in shimmering confusion, to redis- tribute the sensible anarchically by encouraging their audience to wrestle it back from the organizers. Pavlenskii takes this logic a step further. In Seam (2012), he sewed his mouth shut, appearing in public with a poster that asserted that Pussy Riot’s performance directly referred to Christ’s casting out of the merchants from the temple. In Carcass (2013), he bound himself in a cocoon of barbed wire near the entrance to the St Petersburg legislative assembly. In Fixation (2013), Pavlenskii nailed his scrotum to the pavement in Red Square. The obvious symbolism of these actions – the sealed mouth and bound and tortured body – is secondary. The power in these works comes from Pavlenskii’s willingness and readiness to anticipate, appropriate and exceed the violence of the police. He does not need to be silenced: his lips are literally sewn shut; he does not need to be tortured: he has already pierced his own genitals with nails; and if the police want to imprison and beat him, they will have to cut through 177

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 177 his barbed wire first. Pavlenskii’s dissensus works through shimmering, enacting the violence of the police and exhibiting it; embodying it and suffering it far more intensely and visibly than the distribution of the sensible allows. Instead of making a political statement and then suffering torture or imprisonment somewhere far from sight like a normal Russian dissident, Pavlenskii skips the statement and makes the violence visible and immediate instead. Pavlenskii puts the visibility of violence into the gap, the dissensus within the normativity of violence in the contemporary Russian social order. He turns violence against violence, in a move that directly resonates with Pussy Riot’s, as both turn the discourses of state violence and parochial religion against themselves by embodying them more earnestly and fervently than their opposition. Pavlenskii does not just ‘turn the other cheek’, or evoke Christian martyrdom. In a fashion directly reminiscent of those anecdotal protesters who held signs with non-specific profanity and were arrested for offending Putin (‘we know who you meant … ’), he exhibits the raw violence against his body with the expectation that his audience will readily imagine what he did to deserve it (in the eyes of the state), while leaving the state unable to exceed or even match his intensity. Characteristically, Pavlenskii’s most significant and detailed articulations of his views on politics and art to date takes the form of a nearly verbatim account of his dialogue with his interrogator after his arrest (see Chapter 15). Pavlenskii’s shimmering tergiversates between the meta-positions of the state executioner or torturer and the voiceless victim, in the process usurping the sovereign place and private pleasure of the execu- tioners by making the torture public and visible. Finally, a diffuse but still recognizable form of shimmering has recently emerged on a broad social scale in the annual phenomenon known as the ‘monstration’. This combination of ‘demonstration’ and ‘monster’ is a peculiar form of public protest that has become increasingly popular in Russia since the collapse of the protest movement against Putin’s inauguration in May 2012. The first monstration took place in Novosibirsk in 2004, organized by the artist Artem Loskutov in collaboration with the art group Contemporary Art Terrorism, preceding the recent protest movement by almost a decade. Loskutov justified the decision to represent the protests as monstrations instead of ‘demonstrations’ by describing the prefix ‘de’ as intrinsically negative and therefore undesirable (Mamin 2012). The monstrations therefore represent a positive protest, as contradictory as that might seem. This should not be confused with a public expression of affirmation: monstrations are viru- lent critiques of the current situation and the absence of real access to political agency within Russia. However, they do not criticize or attack anything. Each monstration is a public protest without an apparent cause. Participants bring various picket signs with slogans proclaiming nothing directly political. For instance, in images from the 2010 and 2015 Novosibirsk monstrations, the crowd carries large, declarative slogans done in a style reminiscent of the colour arrangements of official Soviet banners –white text on a red background. These slogans preserve the form of the political statement but 178

178 Daniil Leiderman

Figure 9.2 Artem Loskutov, Monstratsiya (Monstration for Mocracy), 2015. Photo: Yaggreg.ru. Available at https://charter97.org/ru/news/2016/5/1/202274/

omit the expected content. For example, a 2010 slogan, ‘If everyone started walking out like this, it’d be some kind of anarchy!’, seemingly appropriates the comic vantage point of someone principally opposed to the monstrations. The slogan shimmers between a fictive yet probable critical voice and palpable sympathy for the anarchic impulse it is denouncing. As a result, the central message of the slogan is an equally exuberant and faltering enthusiasm for the public voicing of protest. Similarly, a 2015 slogan ‘Monstration for Mocracy’ seemingly appeals to democratic aspirations but undermines them through the jettisoned prefix, which suggests that the desired Russian ‘mocracy’ is as distant from democracy as monstrations are from conventional political expressions of discontent (see Figure 9.2).6 Monstrators are motivated by a desire for political agency and a certainty that this agency is unachievable in contemporary Russia. Monstrations articulate dissensus directly, as a self-purposeful statement of evasive, tergiversating opposition, rather than a specific critique or a demand for recognized rights. A typical monstration slogan reads, ‘I am not afraid anymore’, another reads, ‘I think that!!’ (Shaburov 2013: 309–10). Rather than protesting against corrupt officials, brutal police tactics or an oppressive government, monstrations express pure protest, pure dissensus, an irreconcilable and irreparable gap in the social fabric, and yet always through a shimmering ambivalence. The slogans of the monstrations are uncertain not because the people carrying them 179

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 179 are unaware of the problems in society but because they refuse to take up the discursive position of power. They avoid their own will to power as despicable but do not forsake the insurrectionary outbreak that prompts the protest in the first place. Despite the seemingly apolitical and often comic slogans that characterize monstrations, the authorities have not ignored their underlying political sentiment. For instance, in 2009, Loskutov was arrested by a branch of law enforcement charged with hunting down terrorists and extremists and, surprisingly, given the mission of the unit, charged with possession of marijuana. In a 2012 interview, Loskutov explained the political side of the monstrations in terms directly kindred to the experiments with anarchic communality by the Collective Actions group:

Monstrations were conceived as an artistic action and at the same time as the possibility of an ‘initial push’ for the expression of a personal position. It had to become (and became) a kind of non-scary experience of an action not tied to some political faction. A sort of civic gymnastics. (Morsin and Shkarubo 2012)

Loskutov represents monstrations as precisely the kind of training (‘gymnastics’) for a liberated and critical civic consciousness that the Collective Actions sought. Monstrations represent the broad social resonance of shimmering: the need to express a critique of the existing political order and a desperate anxiety about reproducing it, about embodying the hateful, authoritative, commanding voice of power. Jacques Rancière’s notion of dissensus describes the relation between politics as a perpetual struggle over the distribution of the sensible: the hegemony of the police interrupted by the supplement of politics, which ossifies in turn, becoming hegemonic. Shimmering sought to forestall this process, suspending the nonconformist effort towards politics as implicitly doomed to success, to ossification into the police, and opting instead for perpetual tergiversation and ideological mobility over final truths. Shimmering is still resonant in contemporary Russian art, precisely because of the vociferous intensity with which the reactionary forces in Russia insist that they own truth and meaning. What was once manifest in the 1960s by Socialist Realism is now proclaimed by the church and Putin’s media. However, against the numerous parochial, nationalistic and xenophobic narratives dominant in contemporary Russia, shimmering proves to be even more openly political than it was in the artistic underground of the 1970s–1980s. Instead of criticizing the patriarchal and oppressive sexual roles championed and naturalized by the Orthodox Church and the criminalization of alternative sexual and gender roles in Russian society, Antoshina internalizes and embraces these same roles until they crumble under the strain. Instead of attacking the collusion of church and state from the vantage point of a secular, feminist critique, Pussy Riot internalizes and embraces the contradictory entanglement between faith and the police, 180

180 Daniil Leiderman until this contradiction undermines the whole structure. Instead of speaking freely about politics, Pavlenskii anticipates, exceeds and makes visible the violence that the authorities would rather inflict on him privately and invisibly. Finally, instead of protesting the corruption and oppression of the contemporary Russian state, the monstrators voice pure dissensus as a self-sufficient and non-negotiable betrayal of the terms in which the state would frame its authority and the legitimacy of its effort to police the sensible.

Notes

1 Unless indicated, all translations are by the author. 2 In this action, members of Voina were to carry an oak wardrobe encasing Prigov up twenty-two flights of stairs of a dormitory at the Moscow State University while he recited his own poems to the accompaniment of a recording reciting the same poems (see Epshtein 2012: 113–15; Gessen 2014: 36–40). 3 A photographic account of the wake is available at http://accidentalrussophile. blogspot.com/2007/09/wake-of-dmitri-prigov.html. 4 C.f. ‘[L]‌ike a Byzantine theologian, Kabakov had worked his way around the subject of Akaky Akakievich, the archetypal “little man” of the Russian psyche, whom Soviet ideology had appropriated as a central cliché. Now the artist became the little man’ (Wallach 1996: 65). 5 ‘Now no one can doubt the depths of Antoshina’s feelings for her spouse. It seems that they are the only reason for the exhibit. On the other hand, all the feminist bric-a-brac and meditations about world harmony are but slightly graceless decorative vignettes covering this fact’ (Romer 1997). 6 The English association between ‘mocracy’ and ‘mockery’ is unfortunately not replicated in the Russian. Instead, the word bears a strong resemblance to ‘mokro’ – ‘wet’ or ‘damp’.

References Belyutin, Ely (2008) Pravda pamyati: Kartiny i lyudi – Iz zapisnykh knizhek khudozhnika, 1937–2007, Moscow: AST. Bulatov, Erik (2010) ‘Za gorizont’, in Georgii Kizevalter (ed.), Eti strannye semide- siatye, ili poterya nevinnosti: esse, intervyu, vospominaniya, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie NLO. Degot, Ekaterina (2000) Russkoe iskusstvo XX veka, Moscow: Trilistnik. Epshtein, Alek D. (2012) Totalnaya ‘Voina’ Art-aktivizm epokhi tandemokratii, Moscow: Umlaut Network. Eşanu, Octavian (2013) Transition in Post-Soviet Art: The Collective Actions Group Before and After 1989, Budapest: Central European University Press. Finley, Karen (ed.) (2013) Pussy Riot! A Punk Prayer for Freedom: Letters from Prison, Songs, Poems, and Courtroom Statements Plus Tributes to the Punk Band that Shook the World, New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Gessen, Masha (2014) Words Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, New York: Riverhead Books. Mamin, Artur (2012) ‘Artem Loskutov: “A Real Monstration in Novosibirsk” ’, Gaudeamus, 10 April 2012. Available at http://gaude.ru/node/18620. 181

Dissensus and ‘shimmering’ 181 Monastyrskii, Andrei (ed.) (1999) Slovar terminov moskovskoi kontseptualnoi shkoly, Moscow: Ad Marginem. Morsin, Alexander and Elena Shkarubo (2012) ‘Artem Loskutov and Maria Kiseleva: “If you haven’t done time, you aren’t Russian” ’, Sib.fm., 28 April. Available at http:// sib.fm/interviews/2012/04/28/kto-ne-sidel-tot-ne-russki. Moskovskii khudozhnik (1967) Editorial, Moskovskii khudozhnik, 26 May. Plutser-Sarno, Aleksei (2012) Personal communication with the author [email], 16 April. Pravda (1962) Editorial, Pravda, 2 December. Prigov, Dmitrii (1999) ‘Shimmering’, ed. Andrei Monastyrskii, Slovar terminov moskovskoi kontseptualnoi shkoly, Moscow: Ad Marginem, pp. 58–9. Pussy Riot (2012) Mother of God, Chase Putin Away (Punk Prayer), February. Available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCasuaAczKY. Rancière, Jacques (2010) Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, London and New York: Continuum. Romer, Fyodor (1997) ‘Tania Anotshina, “Muzei Zhenshchiny” ’, in Elena Trofimova, (2002), Gendernyi yazyk Tatyany Anotshinoi. Russian Journal, 14 February 2002. Available at http://old.russ.ru/culture/20020214-pr.html#3. Rosenfeld, Alla (2011) ‘Moscow Nonconformist Art and Its Sociopolitical Context’, in Moskovskii nonkonformizm, Exhibition catalogue of the exhibition ‘K vyvozu iz SSSR razresheno … ’, 4th Moscow Biennial for Contemporary Art, 21 June–2 October, Moscow: Fond Kultury ‘Ekaterina’. Shaburov, Aleksander (2013) Soedinyonnye Shtaty Sibiri: Sibirskii ironicheskii kontsep- tualizm, Tomsk: Sibirskii tsentr sovremennogo iskusstva. Stroke, A. and M. German (ed.) (1994) No! and the Conformists: Faces of Soviet Art of the 50s to the 80s, Exhibition catalogue, Warsaw: Fundacja Polskiej Sztuki Nowoczesnej. Wallach, Amei (1996) Ilya Kabakov: The Man Who Never Threw Anything Away, New York: Harry N. Abrams. Yampolskii, Mikhail (2012) ‘Tri sloya teksta na odnu izvilinu vlasti’, Novoe vremya, 20 August. Available at http://artprotest.org/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=6693. 182

10 Humour as a bulletproof vest Artists embracing an ironic zeitgeist

Helena Goscilo

Laughter liberates not only from external censorship but first of all from the great interior censor. […] It unveils the material bodily principle in its true meaning. (Bakhtin 1984: 94)

As a plethora of thinkers encompassing such diverse figures as Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stanisław Lem have argued, laughter possesses extraordinary subversive power.1 Mark Twain believed that ‘the human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter’. In his dystopian novel MY (WE, 1927), Evgenii Zamyatin similarly asserts: ‘Laughter [… is] the most potent weapon: laughter can kill everything – even murder’ (Zamyatin 1972: 210).2 And, according to Charles Dickens, ‘There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humour’ (A Christmas Carol). Whereas tragedy elevates humans, comedy typically debases them but encounters receptiveness rather than resistance owing to audiences’ jouissance in laughing. No wonder that Oscar Wilde pointedly advised, ‘If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you’. These concepts of humour as power, positive contagion and disarming strategy counter Freud’s perspective, which locates humour at the crossroads of the conscious and the unconscious and associates it with the humourist’s ‘venting’ or release of repression and, in the case of what he views as tenden- tious jokes, with hostility (see Freud 1928; 1960). Nonetheless, Freud’s theory is singularly useful for an examination of humour in a society straitjacketed by a strict censorship – the broader, socio-political version of individual psychological repression – whereby the comic tackles the unsaid in permissible mode. Indeed, I contend that laughter constitutes a parallel alternative to today’s dominant, censorship-submissive zeitgeist in Russia, as manifested in a certain strand of contemporary Russian art. While Zurab Tsereteli, Nikas Safronov, Aleksander Shilov and countless similarly genuflecting painters churn out anodyne canvasses in tune with Kremlin ideology and are rewarded accordingly, a tiny minority openly confront official policy and its consequences through critical, often extreme 183

Humour as a bulletproof vest 183 actions, usually resulting in arrest or detention. Bypassing this binary, a third and, in my view, more interesting category of artist proceeds not by direct opposition, but by adopting a range of humorous devices.3 Given limitations of space, I shall leave aside such original talents as Sergei Kalenik and Vasilii Slonov, to focus on Blue Noses and Sergei Elkin as the artists whose humour defies the conservative and constrictive ethos that blights Russian art today.4 The two differ in their brand of humour and in the genres they favour, but both produce visuals calculated to elicit observers’ laughter and in so doing contribute to what may be called a counter-zeitgeist. Neither servilely approbatory nor challengingly hostile, they occupy a position that implies cool-headed judgment, a rueful, objective recognition of human weaknesses and vices that deserve castigation or ridicule, but in a risible, even entertain- ing mode. These artists’ approach to phenomena recalls Henri Bergson’s conviction that laughter requires dispassion, an intelligent detachment at the opposite end of the resistance-spectrum from the sort of heated gestures for which Voina, for instance, has become famous. Moreover, the fact that both Blue Noses and Elkin disseminate their works for a presupposed audience confirms Bergson’s idea that collective laughter is easier than laughter in isolation, for laughter at its meaningful (or influential) best is a social activity (Bergson 1969). A strategy of courting laughter contrasts with the humourless, overt and sometimes violent means by which such groups as Voina and Pussy Riot generally operate. Their anti-establishment actions, often involving sexual organs or gestures, have led to their arrest and detention, particularly Oleg Vorotnikov but also Leonid Nikolaev, not to mention the members of Pussy Riot.5 The recent actions of the young, uncompromising performance artist Petr Pavlenskii (b. 1984) – shrouding himself in barbed wire, sewing his mouth closed, nailing his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square and setting fire to the FSB headquarters at Lubyanka – belong to a related type of unequivo- cal defiance.6 Such activities qualify as explicit, even radical dissent, and the punitive measures adopted against their perpetrators testify to the state’s tolerance of generically more mediated debunking of officialdom as practised by Blue Noses and Elkin. Eschewing straightforward attack, they opt for more discursive strategies – in terms of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s useful taxonomy, dissensus.7

Blue Noses and sublime idiocy Today, Blue Noses is two males – the Urals native Aleksander Shaburov (b. 1965 in Berezovskii) and the Siberian Vyacheslav Mizin (b. 1962 in Novosibirsk) – who readily expose their far-from- ideal bodies and their outré imagination in absurd acts of what they call ‘hooligan improvisation’.8 Hallmarks of their art, which derives from Moscow Actionism (pioneered in the early 1990s by Aleksander Brener, Oleg Kulik, and Anatolii Osmolovskii), include exuberant antic humour, completely ludicrous scenarios, blatantly incongruous 184

184 Helena Goscilo elements, a deliberately unconvincing assumption of historical personalities, and hybrid images that above all debunk holy cows, the sententious and the pretentious, as well as the overly popular mass-produced (what they call the ‘fetishistic’), mainly through the major comic devices of discrepancy and travesty.9 Subverting hallowed traditions and hyperbolic claims, they cut them down to size in photographed or videotaped performances, often reprising the visual equivalent of zaum.10 They argue that the goal of their art is: ‘vozde- istvovat’ na pionerov i pensionerov!’11 Their risqué performances and artistic productions range widely and normally engage conventions of artistic or everyday life – in other words, the readymade, to which they give an unexpected, usually outrageous, twist. For instance, the early performance The New Holy Fools (Novye iurodivye, 1999) in the year the group formed (see Figure 10.1; left to right are Skotnikov, Mizin and Shaburov) lampoons tourists’ apparently insuperable addiction to being photographed against the backdrop of the Kremlin. To do so it employs the simple device of the trio appearing in their underwear, as the medieval iurodivye might have done in their enigmatic, often startling religious zeal. Hot Heads (Goryachie golovy, 2003) patently ridicules the medical practice of preserving bodily organs in specimen jars, but Shaburov’s wry expression – not to mention the duo’s continued existence – makes it clear that he is alive. This work could be interpreted as the duo’s biological/medi - cal ‘Exegi monumentum’. Elsewhere, Blue Noses desacralize revered icons of Russian art, as in the absurdly titled Inno, Nano, Techno, which drastically alters the three stalwart, armed defenders of Orthodoxy and national borders in Viktor Vasnetsov’s canonical, endlessly reproduced Bogatyrs (Bogatyri, 1898). In Blue Noses’ version, three hefty, naked women on horseback, neu- tered by their maths-technologically inspired names, which reference Dmitrii Medvedev’s passion for technology, presumably safeguard the virtual flow of information in today’s world.12 Here the familiar, defamiliarized (ostranenie) through a switch in gender and bared flesh, hooliganishly topples ‘high art’ off its pedestal – and possibly advertising too, such as the use of Vasnetsov’s painting on billboards, co-opted by the People’s Party (Narodnaya Partiya) during the official electoral campaign of 2003.13 It also exposes the affec- tation and banality of overly reproduced copies that demote the status of the original (Walter Benjamin’s notion of the loss of aura), as in the case of Vasnetsov’s Bogatyri, Van Gogh’s Starry Night (1889) and Claude Monet’s Water Lilies (1920–6). Although Blue Noses bristle at the elitism of contemporary art, they equally abhor its blatant commercialism. The same principle of travesty operates in the entire series of photographed performances debunking arguably the most venerated -ism of the avant-garde: suprematism, and its supreme practitioner, Kazimir Malevich. An example from the series Kitchen Suprematism (Kukhonnyi Suprematizm, 2005) ‘domesticates’ El Lissitzky’s renowned and endlessly cited Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (Klinon krasnym bei belykh, 1920) through the substitution of cheese and kolbasa (see Figure 10.2), while Suprematist subbotnik 185

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Figure 10.1 Blue Noses, The New Holy Fools (Novye yurodivye), 1999. The New Holy Fools enacting a tourist cliché – the obligatory snapshot in front of the most recognizable and widely disseminated marker of Russia. Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov.

and Sex-suprematism (see Figure 10.3) dethrone Malevich’s sacrosanct paintings through bodily everyday contexts, to put it mildly, given the flagrant and cheerful vulgarity of the visual adduced here. These works follow the duo’s major principle of lowering the elevated to the base and physical, thereby demystifying it, bringing it ‘down to earth’ and the lower bodily stratum, not unlike Rabelais’s verbal scenarios. For Blue Noses, as for Rabelais, the body restores a sober perspective on phenomena inflated by cultural or political 186

Figure 10.2 Blue Noses, Kitchen Suprematism (Kukhonnyi Suprematizm), 2005. A ‘domestic demotion’ of El Lissitzky’s Constructivist propaganda poster, Klinom krasnym bei belykh! (Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge! 1919). Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov.

Figure 10.3 Blue Noses, Sex-suprematism, 2005. Defining shapes from iconic paintings by Kazimir Malevich reinterpreted and recontextualized. Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov. 187

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Figure 10.4 Blue Noses, Kissing Cops: The Era of Mercy (Tseluyushchiesya militsionery: era miloserdiya), 2005. Russia’s answer to graffiti artist Banksy’s amorous policemen. Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov.

pretension, as do some genres of folklore (e.g., chastushki, uncensored folk tales), which the duo references as inspiration for its artistic mode.14 In works such as these, Blue Noses resort to wacky, sometimes silly humour, and in doing so disarm viewers into perceiving the duo as so frivolous and extreme that they cannot pose any threat to Russia’s political officialdom. Indeed, these allusive acts and images do not expressly engage socio-politics and thus appear as merely juvenile pranks or hooliganism, about which Joan Neuberger has written so eloquently (Neuberger 1993, passim). Such a perception of Blue Noses may influence one’s reading of the duo’s other works, which are similarly referential but situated on a diapason of increasing politicization. For instance, Kissing Cops: The Era of Mercy (Tseluyushchiesya militsionery: era miloserdiya, 2005), which evokes the street artist Banksy’s Kissing Bobbies (2004), shows two policemen in uniform osculating, their hands on each other’s buttocks, against a lyrical winter landscape (see Figure 10.4).15 It manifestly counters the Kremlin’s and conservative society’s anti- gay attitudes by attributing same-sex desire to society’s purported upholders of law and state ideology. Chechen Marilyn (Chechenskaya Merilin, 2005) combines the famous photograph of the West’s best-known sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, in Billy Wilder’s Seven-Year Itch (1955) with the kamikaze 188

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Figure 10.5 Blue Noses, Chechen Marilyn (Chechenskaya Merilin), 2005. East revises West: the Chechen shakhidka, with eloquent tights, evoking Marilyn Monroe’s legendary image from Billy Wilder’s Seven Year Itch (1955). Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov.

terrorist Zarema Muzhahoyeva, who, according to the concomitant absurd explanation, ‘came to Moscow to commit terrorist suicide, but was charmed by a shop window and decided not to blow up anything’ (Blue Noses 2006: 180) (see Figures 10.5). Nothing could possibly link Monroe’s image and her role in Wilder’s film with the Ingush shahidka, labelled a black widow in the West, who in 2003 surrendered to the police, became an informant and was sentenced to twenty years in prison. The striking discrepancy between the two women, antipodal in appearance and role, might elicit laughter, but the risky allusion to the Chechen war politicizes the image, potentially interro- gating the war’s legitimacy. Like all ironic images, after all, this one presupposes and pivots on familiarity with the cultural and/or political context. And Chechnya, Putin and Orthodoxy continue to be taboo topics unless tackled in a spirit of blind loyalty to Kremlin ideology. The 2005 series Il’ich, Wake Up! (Il’ich, prosnis!) is more explicitly political in its spoof of the man who masterminded the October Revolution. Reduced here to a sleepy, hard-drinking couch potato, the historically abstinent Lenin is stretched out beneath the kind of kitschy Soviet wall rug especially popular during Stalinism, and accompanied by the accoutrements of the Soviet 189

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Figure 10.6 Blue Noses, Kids from Our Block (Rebyata s nashego Dvora), 2004. Like Apollon Grigoriev’s Pushkin, here Putin is ‘our all’, but through ubiquity, here depicted as multiplication. Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov.

Union – the hammer and sickle on the red cushion, a copy of Pravda, bottles of Soviet liquor, champagne, and, incongruously, Coca-Cola. This banaliza- tion of the Soviet icon alludes not only to his supine, chemically preserved body in the Kremlin but also to the cliché of Lenin’s immortality (Lenin zhil, zhiv, i budet zhit), which hardly eludes political resonance. The jarring blend of the readymade from two conflicting discursive traditions (Soviet emblems and a capitalist product that enjoys vast popularity in the newly consumerist Russia) renders the image anomalous. Most audacious in the current political context are the duo’s send-ups of Russia’s current president, in such series as Kids from Our Block (Rebiata s nashego dvora, 2004). Putin’s face superimposed on a collection of young male bodies derides his ubiquity (‘that is, Putin is our all, an all that’s everywhere’, as Aleksei Merinov visually quipped in a caricature for the publication Putinki) and addiction to the limelight and at the same time the media’s repeated insistence on his humble roots (see Figure 10.6).16 What Blue Noses called the Video Gag of 2007 pushed further by coupling the subversive duo with three famous personalities standing behind them: George W. Bush, Putin … and Daniel Radcliffe, the young star of the Harry Potter films (seeFigure 10.7). While Putin stands out by virtue of his colourlessness – an eloquent comment in itself – his and Bush’s status is also demoted by their implied analogy with an 190

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Figure 10.7 Blue Noses,Video Gag, 2007. By juxtaposing the three media-attracting personae in the back row, the visual suggests an equation of the two presidents, Putin and George W. Bush with the boy star of the Harry Potter films. Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov.

eleven-year- old actor; one, moreover, who was appearing in an internationally record-breaking cinematic fantasy geared to an audience of children – presumably those who also should be watching the two political leaders, for Radcliffe’s implicitly analogical presence infantilizes the two presidents and, by implica- tion, their ‘audiences’.17 All three peddle fantasies. Moreover, all three depicted personae are heavily advertised ‘media products’ – a perennial target of the duo’s satire. Most extreme and consequence-laden, however, is the highly provocative 2000 series, Mask Show, featuring Putin, Bush and Bin Laden, which has a well-publicized history behind it. The three politicos (the Blue Noses members in masks) not only loll around on a couch in their underwear, but in a collection of shots keep changing roles as to who is lying on the couch, who wears a plaster cast and who needs the metaphorical crutches. In short (and shockingly), the three are cast as interchangeable. It is no surprise that this work, along with ten others, was confiscated at Sheremetievo Airport in 2006, when the British gallerist Matthew Cullerne Bown tried to export them for an 191

Humour as a bulletproof vest 191 exhibition in London. Under the Russian criminal code, publishing material insulting to a public official is an offence, and there is little doubt that this series is insulting to Putin. Yet, whereas Bown was detained for hours, and Marat Gelman, whose gallery had exhibited the works, was interrogated and beaten, the artists suffered no repercussions and continued to devise equally irreverent multimedia works.18 Perhaps better than any commentators, Blue Noses has articulated its creative position in the following terms:

Humoristic cynicism, expressed in extravagant and ‘idiotic’ pranks, has more than once served as a platform for good sense and a free spirit in times when neither of the competing ideologies – in culture and in politics – seemed convincingly and morally justified. […] The Blue Noses’ […] pranks, as a special kind of artistic form, may be reproduced and felt apart from the original by means of retelling or reminiscing. One needn’t even know the Russian language or about Russian everyday life. (Blue Noses 2006: 21)

They go on to note, somewhat superfluously, that their work is ‘aimed at the deconstruction of cultural, sacral, and moral standards which facilitate control over society and the suppression of individuality’ (Blue Noses 2006: 21). My one corrective would be that, as with Sergei Elkin’s caricatures, a knowledge of Soviet history and everyday life helps one to appreciate precisely what the duo is targeting with their visually seditious humour. In fact, without that knowledge one would find many of the Blue Noses’ images cryptic and simply vulgar instead of subversive. Thus far, Blue Noses has not been harassed by state forces, nor paid the penalty for what are indisputably gestures calculated to challenge conservative tastes and that simply ignore the conservative zeitgeist, although they patently derive power from prohibition. For instance, Aleksander Sokolov, the Minister of Culture in 2004–8, called Tseluyushchiesya militsionery ‘por- nografiya’ and ‘pozor Rossii’ [Russia’s shame]’, confirming for anyone who doubted it that he did not belong to ‘era miloserdiya’ (era of mercy). In fact, just as the Soviet Union denied its citizens permission to travel abroad, so he prevented the work’s shipment to Paris for an exhibition. Yet, even if efforts to transport the Blue Noses’ works abroad have met with resistance more than once, they have appeared in the Tretyakov Gallery. A series such as the one uniting, via drink on a couch, Russia’s three seemingly unimpeachable icons, Putin, Pushkin and Jesus Christ (see Figure 10.8) could offend disciples of any or all three personae, as the irrepressible duo recognize in the unapolo- getically brazen title The Motherland Knows: An ‘Artist’ Can Offend Anyone (Rodina znaet). Indeed so, and often has, which was one of the incentives for this collection and the conference from which it sprang. With respect to Blue Noses’ denial of a political dimension to their oeuvre, the purview of which certainly extends beyond politics, it is impossible to 192

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Figure 10.8 Blue Noses, The Motherland Knows: An ‘Artist’ Can Offend Anyone (Rodina znaet), 2000s. The three sacrosanct figures of today’s Russian culture. Courtesy of Aleksander Shaburov.

ignore the political status of figures such as Lenin, Stalin, Bin Laden, Bush and Putin in the duo’s photographic collages – even when the context exceeds politics. Certainly, the Kremlin, ever vigilant and sensitive to possible insults directed at Russia’s head of state, could not be amused by the image of Putin as a frivolous couch potato alongside Bin Laden. Yet, unlike other artists, Blue Noses has emerged basically unscathed. Although the duo’s works have been suppressed, they have not, for laughter is the duo’s law and categorical imperative. While there has been a slight decrease in productivity in recent years, as manifested in performances made accessible on the internet or published in collections, this development cannot be ascribed to censorship or punitive measures. The activities of Blue Noses continue unabated, and, even as I was writing this chapter in July 2016, the duo were participating in The New Malachite Casket, an exhibition in Ekaterinburg devoted to Pavel Bazhov (1879–1950), the area’s famous folklorist and author of the literary fairytale collection Malachite Casket (Malokhitovaya shkatulka, 1939), with its intriguing, logic-defying Mistress of Copper Mountain.19 As long as fetishism and cliché abound, the Blue Noses will have ample material for subversive, unaccommodating art, which has been exhibited in Beijing, Berlin, Budapest, Milan, Moscow, New York, Paris, Seoul, Tel Aviv and Vienna, at the first three Moscow Biennales of Contemporary Art and at the Fiftieth 193

Humour as a bulletproof vest 193 and Fifty-First Venice Biennales. Only those indifferent to the art of today are unfamiliar with their antic yet purposeful hooliganism in visual form.

Sergei Elkin and the art of caricature According to Joseph Conrad, a caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth. Their differences notwithstanding, works by Blue Noses and Sergei Elkin (b. 1962) fall into the capacious categories of humour and irony, which manifestly function as mediating techniques to achieve distance. Whereas Blue Noses engage in slapstick and what they call ‘brutal’ performances that they videotape or photograph, the fifty-four-year-old former architect from Vorkuta and journalist in Voronzh, who has lived in Moscow since 1999, is a cartoonist for whom satire is by definition both key device and world view.20 Having debuted as a cartoonist at approximately the same time as Blue Noses launched, in recent years Elkin has acquired dramatically increased visibility and popularity, although thus far only one scholarly article on his work has appeared in print (Mikhailova 2015: 65–81). A regular contributor to the websites polit.ru and gazeta.ru, and to Izvestiia, RIA Novosti and Vedomosti, among other publications, Elkin now enjoys a wide reputation for his series of daily cartoons on ‘Putin’s Russia’ in the Moscow Times (Golubock 2014). Although he targets a broad range of subjects, from Russian politics to international events and, more generally, universal human foibles, it is above all his caricatures of Putin, familiar from hundreds of postings and issues, that seem most popular and indisputably defy the conservative zeitgeist.21 While the country appears intent on imprint- ing Putin’s inscrutable image on everything from vodka glasses and towels to T-shirts, clocks and fridge magnets, not to mention toilet paper, Elkin system- atically travesties Putin’s persona, public statements, initiatives and pretensions.22 Indeed, anyone interested in Putin’s presidential career could track its trajectory through Elkin’s cartoons over the past twelve years or so. It is no accident that the volume of his cartoons, Two-Headed Russia (Dvuglavaia Rossiia, 2014), bears the subtitle History in Pictures (Istoriia v kartinkakh). The relationship between cartoon (from the Italian cartone, meaning thick paper) and caricature rests on their shared interest in satire, with the term ‘caricature’ derived from the Italian caricare, to load. The Russian karikatura does not distinguish between cartoon and caricature, but in the West practi- tioners of and commentators on the two related genres differentiate between them. The distinction is far from definitive, however, especially since the American Peter Arno (1904–68) pioneered the single-panel cartoon for the New Yorker.23 Among that magazine’s roster of talented cartoonists/carica - turists, perhaps the most memorable is the award-winning Gary Larson (b. 1950), creator of The Far Side, a single-panel cartoon series that anthropo- morphized animals and was syndicated internationally to newspapers for fifteen years. David Remnick, the current editor of the New Yorker and former Russia-based journalist, has somewhat floridly noted that ‘the best cartoons 194

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are exquisite explosive devices’ (Remnick 2004). While hyperbolic, that designation acknowledges the incendiary potential of the genre. A caricature is essentially a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the appearance or perceived essence of a person or object, even as it creates an easily identifiable visual likeness. According to the Indian cartoonist S. Jithesh, a caricature satirically illustrates a person or a thing, whereas a cartoon is the satirical illustration of an idea.24 Yet the two often overlap. David Levine (1926–2009), the prolific artist identified with theNew York Review of Books and the New York Times, specialized in caricatures, some of which are car- toonish, such as the famous image of Lyndon Johnson demonstrating his scar. My sense is that a cartoon normally engages narrative, which is not obligatory for a caricature, although the context referenced by a caricature inevitably is narrational, and that certainly obtains for Elkin’s caricatures, which respond sardonically to contemporary actions and situations, knowledge of which he presupposes in his viewers/readers. According to Charles Press, ‘The political cartoon has always been an aesthetic achievement only by accident. […] Its purpose is propaganda, not art’ (cited in Hess and Northrop 1996: 15). I maintain, however, that a cartoon’s effectiveness as propaganda is insepar- able from its artistic merits. Three salient requisites for the art of both cartoon and caricature, merged as noted above in the Russian genre of karikatura, are the ability to: (1) identify the key defining features of the subject; (2) hyperbolize them from an ironic stance that implies criticism (irony, as we know, creates distance); and (3) depict the ironized subject in a minimalist mode through expressive lines.25 Elkin possesses these skills to an impressive degree; indeed, they are his signature. The expressiveness of Elkin’s cartoons and their compression often render a verbal text superfluous. For instance, while emphasizing the Russian president’s self-satisfaction through facial expression and body language, and especially through the empirically inaccurate, exaggerated dimensions of Putin’s nose, Elkin literalizes metaphor to convey the idea that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin aggressively shoves his nose into everything – an idiom Russian shares with English (sovat [svoi] nos v …). In so far as Elkin’s satires reference current events, a prerequisite for understanding, let alone appreciating, his work is knowledge of daily political developments in Russia. Of course, as much may be said of any political cartoons, such as Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury comic strip, inaugurated in 1970. As Dean Turnbloom correctly observes, ‘Editorial [meaning political] cartooning is a marriage between satire and allusion’, the purpose of which ‘is to illuminate complex issues in an easily understandable format and to elevate the public consciousness’ (Turnbloom 2008).26 While not many cartoons illuminate complex issues – cartoonists prefer to expose their oversim- plification by individuals or groups for pragmatic ends – no one would dispute the consciousness-raising potential of the genre. Elkin consistently and eloquently exploits that potential. 195

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Figure 10.9 Sergei Elkin, ‘I Feel Like a Beast of Burden’. Literalization of Putin’s claim about his arduous presidential labor. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

In targeting Putin’s various types of self-fashioning, Elkin draws most frequently on specific strategies for his self-promotion. For instance, not unlike Stalin, Putin presents himself as the conscientious, committed leader who toils indefatigably for the nation’s benefit. Indeed, one could invoke Stalin’s notorious assertion, ‘Life’s become better, life’s become cheerier’ [Zhit stalo luchshe, zhit stalo veselee], as a summation of the popular conviction that life has improved immeasurably under Putin’s rule. Accordingly, Elkin visually literalizes the metaphor of a workhorse and a slave on a galley ship as Putin’s self-conception (see Figure 10.9). Similarly, he exposes Putin’s heavily orchestrated, media-hyped annual exchange with Russian citizens (Pryamaya liniya s prezidentom/Putinym ) as an artistic creation and dramatizes his collusion with the church in their efforts to stamp out Pussy Riot (see Figure 10.10). Putin’s obsession with performing in front of cameras informs the Ben-Hur image of him as both huckster and spectacle at the Roman Colosseum, while the many photographs of his bare-chested vacationing in Siberia (which went viral) inspired a cartoon of him delivering a formal public speech shirtless – an image repeatedly derided over the years and recently ironized on the cover of the sober British publication, the Economist (17–23 October 2015). To anyone 196

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Figure 10.10 Sergei Elkin, Two powers in collusion, Putin and the Orthodox Church, literally stamping out Pussy Riot. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

conversant with the media hype around Putin, here, as in many of Elkin’s cartoons, any text would be superfluous. Elsewhere, Elkin conjoins two concepts in a single visual with an abbreviated, allusive text. For instance, late in 2011 the internet buzzed with speculation and revelations about Putin’s cosmetic preparation for the 2012 election. He underwent a facelift and Botox treatment – evident in photographs posted on the internet, which recall Gogol’s characteristically grotesque comparison of women’s beautiful faces to a smooth egg. One of Elkin’s cartoons shows Putin seated on a bar stool as he orders another Botox, only to be informed by the bartender that he has had enough. Elkin alludes not only to the procedure of epidermic rejuvenation undergone by Putin, but also to Russian men’s propensity for heavy drinking, something alien to the abstemious, sober Putin, for whom a youthful public image, not alcohol, has always been primary – and especially before the 4 March primary in the 2012 election. In more recent cartoons Elkin resorts again to realized metaphor when referencing negative reactions to Putin by the media and segments of the Russian population. For instance, an entire series of cartoons targets his spurious discovery of ancient Greek amphorae on the seabed of the Black Sea in August 197

Humour as a bulletproof vest 197 2011, when he and the media colluded to enhance his public persona as a scuba-diving macho man and preserver of culture. The event, like so many involving Putin’s physical prowess, was staged, the urns planted there specifically for his retrieval. Since Putin (abetted by the population) has regularly equated himself with Russia’s national identity, Elkin’s wordless cartoon of the country’s double-headed eagle holding the urn fragments mimics Putin’s pose for photographs by the Black Sea. Reprising the notion of toiling for the sake of Russia featured in the workhorse cartoon, Elkin also shows Putin suffering the physical consequences of his heroic exertions and seeking aid from his doctor, exaggeratedly claiming to have rowed like an ancient galley slave (na galerakh). A later cartoon reveals the touted find as fraudulent, the metaphor of manufacturing the event again literalized in Putin actually producing the amphorae. Since the orchestrated drama of the historic achievement completely misfired, eliciting only ridicule from the press, the final cartoon in the series literalizes the metaphor of Putin having ‘put his foot in it’ – trapped and unable to extricate himself from an unexpectedly embarrassing situation. A separate series addresses Putin’s self-presentation as a modern day St Francis, the patron saint of animals (Mikhailova 2013: 65–81). During his first two terms, the media circulated numerous images of Putin fondling, feeding or kissing animals. Quite apart from his fabled love of dogs, especially his Labrador Koni – a gift in 2000 from Sergei Shoigu, now minister of defence – and, more recently, Buffy and Yume, Putin has appeared in front of cameras feeding goats and elks, caressing jungle cats, romping with dolphins and kissing a staggering range of animals from horses to fish.27 Elkin satirizes these photo-op events in such caricatures as those of a cow reproachfully remind- ing Putin that he failed to kiss her or his contrasting of himself to President Obama, who, a newspaper reports, killed a fly(!). Putin smugly observes that he would have kissed it (see Figure 10.11). Given his unassailable popularity during Russians’ post-Crimean honeymoon with their president, he has been kissing less and revealing his bellicose side more, but the images of the 2000s have made an indelible impact worldwide, and Elkin has contributed gener- ously to the ridicule of the kissing campaign. Some of Elkin’s strongest images appeared from mid-2008 to mid-2012. Despite the catchword ‘tandem’ adopted by the Kremlin and popularized throughout the four years of Dmitrii Medvedev’s official presidency to characterize his co-administration with Putin as prime minister, only the excep- tionally naive failed to grasp that the latter exercised supreme power in the government. Widely viewed as merely Putin’s ‘front man’, Medvedev lacked Putin’s experience, authoritarian bent and reliance on the media to enhance his public image. Medvedev’s recessive manner, conventional mode of speech and remoteness from macho physical activities combined to project the passive, conciliatory persona of a subordinate. Elkin’s series of cartoons on the tandem picked up on Medvedev’s submissive deference to Putin in the performance of their respective public duties, and his role as political child vis- à-vis his seasoned, arrogant older colleague (see Figure 10.12) whose popular 198

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Figure 10.11 Sergei Elkin, Putin, Obama, and the Fly. Putin’s response to the ludicrous newspaper headline reporting that Obama has killed a fly (!), ‘A-ahh! Now, I’d have kissed it’ ironically references his passion – during his two earlier tenures as president – for osculating animals in front of media photographers. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

support unfailingly exceeded Medvedev’s throughout the latter’s stint as the country’s nominal head of state. As early as 2008, there was no doubt that Putin would run for president in 2012, would win and would again appoint Medvedev as his prime minister. Medvedev’s term as president, like Cinderella’s success at the ball, was a temporary move (see Figure 10.13), with Putin’s resumption of his official ‘place on top’ a foregone conclusion, and Elkin casts Medvedev as both girly Cinderella and occupant of a ‘place below’ – the power vertical. As Elkin’s clever cartoon implies, Putin moved more quickly and self-confidently than his wide-eyed puppet. Moreover, Medvedev lacked the drive and pugnacious energy to forge an independent path, as ironized in Elkin’s visuals referencing the publicized friendly badminton game played by the pair. To the puzzlement of anyone who accessed it, Medvedev’s video of their match posted on his Kremlin blog was preceded by an introduction extolling the virtues of badminton: ‘Badminton is known to everyone because badminton is played at home, on the street, and in school and university sports halls’, he announced, 199

Humour as a bulletproof vest 199

Figure 10.12 Sergei Elkin, Putin and Baby-Medvedev . The dependent, infantilized Medvedev on the paternal Putin’s shoulders captures the true nature of the much-touted tandem. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

but added, ‘Those who can really play badminton are few in number’ (Greene 2011). Putin’s choices of sport, by contrast, are judo, shooting, downhill ski- ing and scuba-diving. Medvedev’s affection for badminton suggests a placid temperament, captured in Elkin’s revision of the motto by the militarily distinguished Roman statesman, Cato the Elder, ‘Carthage must be destroyed’, com- ically transplanted by Elkin to Tadzhikistan, with a pacifist’s choice of military weapon (see Figure 10.14). The sly substitution of a shuttlecock and racquet for helmet plumes and sword, combined with the Cinderella image noted above, emasculates Medvedev, especially when juxtaposed with Putin as the exemplar of machismo – an identity that he cultivated assiduously throughout the 2000s but no longer needs to publicize. To appreciate this image, like many others, a knowledge of both contemporary Russian politics and world culture is essential. Elkin’s artwork presupposes his readers’/viewers’ advanced education – a fact that makes his sizable following all the more impressive. Elkin’s cartoons take aim not only at famous personalities but also at political strategies and groupings, perhaps most richly Narodnyi Front, a party 200

200 Helena Goscilo

Figure 10.13 Sergei Elkin, Medvedev – the Cinderella. ‘Remember, Cinderella, if you don’t leave the ball in time, your limousine will turn into a pumpkin, and the blue flashing light on it will become an eggplant.’ A reminder that Medvedev’s stint as president from 2008 to 2012 was merely a mode of biding time before Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, for the revised period of six years. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

formed with all possible speed when in 2011 Edinaya Rossiia, which for years had been associated with Putin and the Kremlin, experienced a drastic diminishment in its ranks and reputation. Leaving Medvedev as the default leader linked to Edinaya Rossiia, which he remains to this day, the über-pragmatic Putin became the inspiration and centrepiece of Narodnyi Front, which launched a comprehensive enlistment campaign that included enrolling huge blocks of employees at numerous workplaces without the courtesy of consult- ing them. Hence, Elkin’s ironic diagnosis in a medical laboratory that mul- titudes were clamouring to join Narodnyi Front, and his notion of Putin’s manoeuvre as a temptation to the unevolved citizens of the Eden that is Russia today, with the ineffectual, duped Medvedev sidelined (see Figure 10.15). Elkin recast the lapsarian myth as Putin’s seductive power of eloquence over his listeners, thereby analogizing his specious self-presentation with that of the biblical snake. In addition, the cartoon engages Putin’s public denigration 201

Humour as a bulletproof vest 201

Figure 10.14 Sergei Elkin, Tajikistan Must Be Destroyed. ‘Tadzhikistan must be destroyed’ echoes the phrase repeated during Rome’s Punic Wars against Carthage (Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam), with Medvedev wielding not a sword but a badminton racquet as a weapon and a shuttlecock as his helmet’s plumage. The then-president not only played badminton, but posted a eulogy to the game on his site. Whereas Carthage was perceived as a genuine threat to the Roman Republic, the republic of Tadzhikistan hardly represents a challenge to Russia, though Russia has sent troops there since Tadzhikistan declared its independence in 1991. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

of the mass protesters as ‘Bandar-logs’, the monkeys hypnotized by a python in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book – here, however, with Putin as the hypnotic python of Narodnyi Front. In another visual, Putin as the proactive Donald Duck needs to explain to Medvedev as uncomprehending sponge the necessity of creating a new party, which, however, has no platform other than the promotion of Putin, who during his presidency has reinstated sundry Soviet practices (centralization, nationalization of resources, an expanded secret service [FSB], censorship, militarism, etc.). In short, Elkin’s cartoons exposed the vacuity of Narodnyi Front and the cynical, self-serving motives behind its formation. More recent works similarly target Putin’s thuggish power moves in Ukraine, above all the annexation of Crimea in 2014 (see Figure 10.16) and 202

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Figure 10.15 Sergei Elkin, The Bandar-logs in Russian Eden. In Russia as Eden, the sign on the Tree of Knowledge reads, ‘Join the People’s Front’, with Putin-as-snake urging the ‘Bandar-logs’ ‘Closer, come closer.’ Corrupted by Western technology, Medvedev as the Apple-logo- bearing onlooker wears the clothing signaling his Fall. The caricature appeared soon after the Kremlin created the coalition party Narodnyi Front in 2011, with Putin as its star attraction. It arose in reaction to the sudden defection by many previous supporters of the United Party, for years associated with Putin. This diminishment of its ranks was viewed as imperiling Putin’s anticipated triumph in the 2012 elections. The monkeys reference the Bandar-logs (in Hindi ‘monkey people’) in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894), a term used to describe the senseless, voluble simians in the Indian jungle. During one of his televised Q&A sessions, Putin applied the term to protesters in 2011 and his critics. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

his denial that Russian forces were in the area, which credulous Western countries either believed or found it convenient to believe. If the stylistic desiderata of cartoons as a genre are expressiveness and conciseness (recalling Pushkin’s requirements of prose, ‘kratkost i tochnost’ or conciseness and precision), the achievement of these goals fulfils two functions simultaneously – one psychological, the other socio-political The cartoons tickle viewers’ humour, even as they ignite their awareness of what is wrong in the world. David Levine, the stylish caricaturist who produced more than 2,500 meticulously rendered, astringent drawings, declared in an interview in 2008, ‘I would say that 203

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Figure 10.16 Sergei Elkin. Putin and Ukraine. Only after the annexation of Crimea did Putin reverse his persistent earlier denial that the armed troops taking over the Ukrainian territory were, indeed, Russian. Courtesy of Sergei Elkin.

political satire saved the nation [the US] from going to hell’ (Weber 2008). The popular perception of cartoons and caricatures as funny and frivolous reduces their power, according to Levine, who believed that ‘by making the powerful funny-looking … [one] might encourage some humility or self-awareness’ (cited in Weber 2009). Cartoons in today’s Russia have little likelihood of exerting the same influence on political figures and the populace alike, but if any cartoonist possessed the credentials to turn the political tide it would surely be Elkin. Yet, despite his consistently ironic and often acerbic commentary on the Russian government and its vain, egotistical leader, Elkin denies having suffered any censorship or repercussions: ‘Personally, I have never had any problems with the government. […] As for the media, sometimes when I draw something particularly critical, editors have refused to print it. They feared the consequences’ (Golubock 2014). Self-censorship, of course, is an old Russian tradition that is currently thriving in theatre and especially film.28 According to Elkin, as one may deduce, his cartoons generally reflect his own personal opinions on politics, which ‘are as cynical in person as they appear on paper’ (Golubock 2014). Like the Blue Noses, he continues to use humour 204

204 Helena Goscilo (but humour with vinegar) for anti-establishment statements, which unques- tionably belong to an alternate zeitgeist – one of satirical scepticism that thrives within the larger context of conservative political aesthetics. Both Blue Noses and Elkin, their dissimilar visual genres notwithstanding, embrace an aesthetic that decidedly counters the dominant politicized principles regulating artistic production. Humour in the form of satire flourished during the far from permissive reign of Catherine the Great and the early Soviet period, when it was promoted by no less a figure than Commissar Anatolii Lunacharskii. Although the current head of state and the hapless minister of culture, Vladimir Medinskii, have issued no public statement about the status of satire in Putin’s administration, Blue Noses and especially Elkin have managed to circumvent the Kremlin’s wrath through the powerful force of laughter – also embraced by Voina in the group’s atypically humorous 2010 version of vertikal vlasti – their nugatory depiction of a 65×27-metre phallus on St Petersburg’s Liteinyi drawbridge, which faces the FSB headquarters.29 While Voina’s leaders were jailed temporarily, the so-called artwork, contrary to all logic and expectations, won the official Innovation Award in 2011.30 Not as aggressively disruptive as Voina, Blue Noses and Elkin nonetheless exemplify dissensus – the French philosopher Rancière’s term for equality-assumed aesthetic challenge to the established values and structures of a society. A question worth asking, and answered positively in my commentary, is whether the humour in dissensus, as opposed to the inflammatory protests of Pussy Riot and other groups (dissent), constitutes not only an alternative zeitgeist but also a bulletproof vest, analogous to images of Stalin in prison tattoos during the Soviet era.31 Just as Stalin’s face imprinted on prisoners’ bodies protected them from guards who would not risk shooting at them for fear of hitting the depicted leader, so today humour may deflect the punitive wrath of the new leader and his cohort.32

Acknowledgements I extend profound gratitude to the artists whom I discuss in this chapter for their thought-provoking art and for their ready generosity in allowing me to reproduce their works.

Notes

1 Rabelais believed that ‘laughter makes men human, and courageous’, in Introduction to Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64). 2 ‘[S]‌mekh – samoe strashnoe oruzhie: smekhom mozhno ubit vse – dazhe ubiistvo’ (Zamyatin 1973: 180). 3 Here there is an intersection between the ‘shimmering’ of Moscow Conceptualists (see Chapter 9) and the artists I discuss. Satire, of course, has turned its merciless eye on socio-political ills since the beginning of literary history and flourished throughout centuries, as the acerbic talents of Aristophanes, Juvenal, Voltaire, Swift, Pope, Twain, Heller and hundreds of others testify. Art, film and television have followed suit, as is evident in the works of Jan Brueghel the Younger, William 205

Humour as a bulletproof vest 205 Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940), Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), Michael Nichols’ Catch 22 (1970), Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class (1972), Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74), Saturday Night Live (1975–), Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show (1999–2015) and countless others. 4 Kalenik is responsible for comic strips about Putin as a macho action hero. See Goscilo (2013: 188–91). Similarly, the Siberian artist Vasilii Slonov opted for irony when he put on sale (at 100 roubles each) special envelopes he had created for placing money to pay bribes. These sold extremely well and were reportedly also bought by corrupt bureaucrats. After the first 100 sold out, he printed more, some intended for the Winzavod Contemporary Art Centre in Moscow. See O’Flynn (2015). 5 Both men spent three and a half months in prison for one of their actions, and the group’s ‘ideologue’, Aleksei Plutser-Sarno, fled abroad on 15 November 2010, originally to the Czech Republic, to avoid expected arrest and incarceration. He continues the group’s work from Europe. For examples of their initiatives, see plucer.livejournal.com/2668. The case of Pussy Riot has been amply covered by scandal-hungry media, which transformed its members into heroic celebrities. 6 As Pavlenskii has pointed out, his actions hurt no one but himself (Kramer 2015). 7 Throughout, I engage Lena Jonson’s adoption in her study (Jonson 2015) of the distinctions explicated in Rancière (2006) and Rancière (2010). 8 Although Shaburov and Mizin are the leaders of the art collective, they have been joined off and on by Konstantin Skotnikov, Evgenii Ivanov, Maksim Zonov (died 2001) and Konstantin Gurianov. For many years, the duo has collaborated with the Marat Gelman Gallery and has sustained relations with ‘In Citu’ Fabienne Leclerc (Paris), Galerie Volker Diehl (Berlin), the Hans Knoll Gallery (Vienna, Budapest), Loushy Art & Projects (Tel Aviv), Art Issue (Beijing, Seoul), B&D Studio (Milan) and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts (New York). The body has become one of the focal elements in post-Soviet protest or non-conservative art, as demonstrated by Brener, Kulik, Sinie Nosy, Pavlenskii and countless others. On the various groups, see Jonson (2015). On the contemporary Russian body see Goscilo (2006: 248–96). 9 Brener is a Russian-Jewish performance artist born in Alma-Ata in 1957; he belongs to Moscow Actionism. He often appeared naked and is known for such performances as defecating in front of a painting by Vincent van Gogh at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, having sex on city streets and vandalizing art work. He was jailed in 1997 for painting a green dollar sign on Kazimir Malevich’s painting Suprematism. A performance artist and curator of the Regina Gallery, Kulik (b. 1961 in Kiev), known most widely for his media-attentive assumption of a canine personality (naked, chained, ready to bite) in protest against the crisis in contemporary culture resulting from an overly refined cultural language that creates barriers between individuals. 10 Zaum refers to the linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation made by Russian futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh in the 1910s. 11 To have an impact on pioneers and pensioners. The words appear in a citation from an interview, reported in https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinie_nosy. See also Blue Noses (2006: 4), which contains many works by the duo. 12 ‘Inno’ is a free script-driven installation system pioneered in Delphi (1997), while ‘nano’ is a unit prefix meaning one-billionth. ‘Techno’, of course, highlights the etiology of the other two names. 206

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13 On the repeated (mis)use of Vasnetsov’s renowned painting, see Goscilo (2008: 248–53, plus visuals). 14 The body was heavily censored in Soviet times and became a prime device for post- Soviet anti-establishment discourse. On this topic, see Goscilo (2006). They also cite the Russian avant-garde and Sots-Art of the 1980s as the traditions on which they lean. Personal communication with Aleksander Shaburov; and the interview in Beijing in Art Issue (2009). 15 A lesser-known, analogous photograph has two ballerinas kissing against a similar backdrop. 16 The visual recalls Aleksei Merinov’s sardonic illustrations in the publication Putinki (2004). 17 Radcliffe was eleven years old when he starred in the first Harry Potter film,Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which premiered in 2001. 18 Among the many media sources covering the event, see ‘Works by Russian Artists: The Blue Noses Seized at Airport’ (2006) Saatchi Art, 12 December. Available at http://magazine.saatchiart.com/articles/culture/reports-from/london- reports-from/works_by_russian_artists_the_b. See also Parfitt (2006). 19 For an original interpretation of that work, see Lipovetsky (2014). 20 Major sources for Elkin’s visuals are the websites www.toonpool.com/artists/ Elkin_ 379 and www.elkin.ru/, his Facebook page, and his recent publication (Elkin 2014). 21 As Elkin observed in an interview, many of his clients are websites, and the majority of requests now come from the Internet, with significantly fewer commissions from newspapers and the occasional job for television (Golubock 2014). 22 For the full range of such images, see Cassiday and Johnson (2013: 37–64) and Goscilo (2013: 6–36, 180–207). For a continuation of the trend in 2015, see Reuters (2015). 23 Benjamin Franklin’s cartoons in the mid-eighteenth century anticipated the satirical drawings of the British magazine Punch in the following century, which normalized the meaning of cartoon as a humorous illustration, typically published in newspapers and magazines. In the early twentieth century, the term denoted a comic strip or animated film but now encompasses a broader range of visuals. 24 Famous caricaturists include Leonardo, Cruickshank, Beerbohm, Al Hirschfield (1903–2003), Vitalii Peskov (1944–2002), Sebastian Krüger and David Levine (1926–2009), as well as Edward Gorey (1925–2000), whose macabre caricatures and cartoons accompany the opening of the British Masterpiece Mysteries and often feature children in a refreshingly dark vein. 25 These characteristics similarly define animated cartoons, as demonstrated by the popular Tom and Jerry series, as well as the Soviet Nu, pogodi! 26 Turnbloom points out that a skilful political cartoonist can sway public opinion and cites as examples Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Nash. Among the prizewinning political cartoonists featured in his volume there is not a single woman; nor are there any famous female caricaturists. Indeed, both genres – cartoon and caricature – seem to be gender-specific, that is, male. 27 Buffy, a Karakachan (a Bulgarian shepherd dog), was a gift from the Bulgarian prime minister, Boyko Borisov. Yume is a female Akita Inu given to Putin by Japan. 28 Bolder Kulturarbeiter have commented on this phenomenon, such as Serebrennikov (2013), John Freeman’s regularly reports in the Moscow Times on the luckless fate of Teatr.doc and Ruble (2015). 207

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29 See Oushakine (2013: 174–94, especially 190–2) and the 2012 documentary by Andrei Gryazev, Zavtra. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= WkL9dN8MOWQ. 30 In typically Russian paradoxical developments, both the Innovation and the Kandinsky Prize have been awarded to many officially anathematized artistic collectives and individuals. On this topic, see Jonson (2015). 31 Like the existentialists, Rancière defines politics as action, above all action that challenges the hierarchy of institutionalized social arrangements. Challenging such hierarchical orders, he believes, presupposes one’s own equality, and that challenge is most meaningful when it is collective, not individual – a notion possibly inherited from Bergson. What Rancière calls dissensus is action’s disruption of inequitable power arrangements within the social order and, significantly, the latter’s naturalized perceptual underpinnings. Art, according to Rancière, has the capacity to cause such disruptions through its aesthetics, its original perspective on and critique of phenomena. In other words, an artist’s action in dissensus is the production of perception-changing, revelatory art. 32 For an analysis of such tattoos and criminal tattoos in general, see Goscilo (2012: 203–30).

References Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. Bergson, H. (1969) Le Rire: essai sur la signification du comique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. First published 1899. Cassiday, J. A. and E. D. Johnson (2013) ‘A Personality Cult for the Postmodern Age: Reading Vladimir Putin’s Public Persona’, in H. Goscilo (ed.), Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 37–64. Elkin, S. (2014) Dvuglavaya Rossiya: Istoriya v kartinkakh, Moscow: Alpina. Freud, Sigmund (1928) ‘Humor’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 9 (1): 1–6. —— (1960) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton & Co. First published 1905. Golubock, D. G. (2014) ‘Cartoonist Sergei Elkin Finds Humor in Putin’s Russia’ (video), Moscow Times, 31 March. Available at www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_ n_ideas/article/cartoonist-sergei-elkin-finds-humor-in-putin-s-russia-video/497091. html. Goscilo, H. (2006) ‘Post-ing the Soviet Body as Tabula Phrasa and Spectacle’, in A. Schönle (ed.), Lotman and Cultural Studies: Encounters and Extensions, Madison, Wisc.: Wisconsin University Press, pp. 248–96. —— (2008) ‘Viktor Vasnetsov’s Bogatyrs: Mythic Heroes and Sacrosanct Borders Go to Market’, in V. A. Kivelson and J. Neuberger (eds.), Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, pp. 248–53, plus visuals. —— (2012) ‘Texting the Body: Soviet Criminal Tattoos’, in D. Goldfrank and P. Lyssakov (eds.), Cultural Cabaret: Russian and American Essays in Memory of Richard Stites, Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, pp. 203–30. —— (ed.) (2013) Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, London and New York: Routledge. Greene, N. (2011) ‘Putin and Medvedev Play Badminton for Control of Russia’, Village Voice, 24 October. Available at http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/ 2011/10/putin_and_medve.php. 208

208 Helena Goscilo Hess, S. and S. Northrop (1996) Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons, Montgomery, Ala.: Elliott and Clark. Jonson, L. (2015) Art and Protest in Putin’s Russia, London and New York: Routledge. Kramer, A. E. (2015) ‘Russian Artist Sets Security Service’s Door on Fire’, New York Times, 9 November. Available at www.nytimes.com/2015/11/10/world/europe/ russian-artist-sets-security-services-door-on-fire.html?_r=0. Lipovetsky, Mark (2014) ‘The Uncanny in Bazhov’s Tales’, Quaesto Rossica, 2: 212–30. Mikhailova, T. (2013) ‘Putin as the Father of the Nation: His Family and Other Animals’, in H. Goscilo (ed.), Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 65–81. —— (2015) ‘A Caricature of the President: Vladimir Putin in Sergei Elkin’s Drawings’, Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, 71 (1): 65–81. Neuberger, J. (1993) Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St Petersburg, 1900– 1914, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. O’Flynn, K. (2015) ‘Russian Artist Creates Special Bribe Envelopes for Corrupt Officials’, Moscow Times, 23 April. Available at www.themoscowtimes.com/arts_ n_ideas/article/russian-artist-creates-special-bribe-envelopes-for-corrupt-officials/ 519604.htm. Oushakine, S. (2013) ‘Address Your Question to Dostoevsky’, in Birgit Beumers (ed.), Russia’s New Fin de Siècle, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 175–94. Parfitt, T. (2006) ‘In Briefs: Covering Up Blue Noses’, The Guardian, 7 November. Available at www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/artblog/2006/nov/07/hooligan improvisation. Putinki: Kratkii sbornik izrechenii prezidenta (pervyi srok) (2004), Moscow: OOO ‘Ekho Buk’. Rancière, J. (2006) The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London and New York: Continuum. —— (2010) Dissensus: The Politics of Aesthetics, London: Bloomsbury. Remnick, D. (2004) ‘Foreword’, in R. Mankoff (ed.), The Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal. Reuters (2015) ‘Putin the Polite, Chilling Hero of Russian Souvenirs’, Moscow Times, 23 August. Available at www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/putin-the-polite- chilling-hero-of-russian-souvenirs/528437.html. Ruble, B. (2015) ‘Theater and the Heart of a City: Moscow’s Teatr.doc’s Confrontation with Authority’, Wilson Center, January. Available at www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/theaterand-the-heart-city-moscow%E2%80%99s-teatrdoc%E2%80%99s- confrontation-authority. Serebrennikov, K. (2013) ‘Tsenzura v teatre est’, Radio Ekho Moskvy, 28 December. Available at http://echo.msk.ru/blog/echomsk/1227596-echo/?fb_action_ids=1015 2112789979038&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_source=other_multi line&action_object_map=[504149139699178]&action_type_map=[%22og. recommends%22]&action_ref_map=. Turnbloom, D. P. (ed.) (2008) ‘Foreword’, Prizewinning Political Cartoons, Gretna, La.: Pelican. Weber, B. (2009) ‘David Levine, Biting Caricaturist, Dies at 83’, New York Times, 29 December. Available at www.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/arts/design/30levine.html. Zamyatin, Yevgeny (1972) WE, trans. Mirra Ginsburg, New York: Viking/Bantam. —— (1973) MY, New York: Inter-Language Literary Associates. 209

11 Demontage of attractions

Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova

This article surveys the observations on the socio-cultural situation in Russia made by the Agency of Singular Investigations (ASI), founded by Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova, on the basis of the research conducted between June 2014, when the Agency was founded, and September 2016. Nodal points in this research are represented by the following projects: Observatorium (2014) at Manifesta 10 in St Petersburg; Apocalyptological Congress (2015) (see Figure 11.1) at Fabrika Center for Creative Industries in Moscow (CCI Fabrika); Park Dystopia (2015), at the Sixth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; Dark Matter: Political Philosophy of a Brush Stroke, Social History of Fear (2016) at the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art; and ASI in Construction (2016) at the CCI Fabrika. Although the ASI was initiated by artists, its activities do not normally result in the production of works of art. Instead, it sees itself as a platform for research on the border between communication and artistic practice. The ASI modus operandi combines various types of discourse and practices of appropriation with the reinterpretation of images and ideas, both mass-produced and one-off. All the work by the ASI, whether practical or theoretical, is thought of as an answer to the specific challenges of the current historical moment. All of it comes from an understanding of the need to study the invisible dimensions of images and visuality. These answers are part of the general idea of dismantling the hierarchical and patriarchal forms that still dominate the cultural sphere and prevent its transformation into a democratic and liberating environment.

Locating discontents Visual culture is animated by the energy of spectacle. All images presuppose or even include components of spectacle: in the form of audience, the staging, behind-the-scenes, or performing. In his text Montage of Attractions from the early 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein describes the devices of spectacular suggestion in mass society (Eisenstein 1923). Theatre for Eisenstein was an instrument of propaganda that must adopt both the technical achievements of the time and the mass-cultural methods of manipulation of the viewer’s attention. What 210

210 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova

Figure 11.1 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova, from the project Apocalyptological Congress (Entrance Hall – Spectral Labyrinth), Collage, 2015. Courtesy of the artists.

Eisenstein meant by ‘attractions’ is exemplified by the role of special effects in today’s visual culture. Attractions, or special effects, are instruments for conquering and controlling the attention of viewers. These devices direct the audience’s perception towards and through selected meanings, helping to naturalize ideological constructions. The development of communication networks has made these techniques of spectacular suggestion ubiquitous. Special effects have to be produced, timed, assembled and installed in specific places within a narrative. All this is done with help of montage or editing. Special effects help the viewer to forget herself and identify with an image. They are key units in the production of subjectivity. Montage creates connections between images: it fuses the frames, erasing gaps and breaches, suturing the subject and producing identification. The work of the ASI, conversely, aims to devise a counterstrategy of the subversive dissolution of ideological messages. It should be thought of as a ‘demontage’ of attractions. In an opposite effect to that of the montage, the ASI deploys elements of deconstruction in order to investigate the role of such things as emptiness, disruption and misrecognition in the image-based reality of communications. The industry of attractions imbues today’s public sphere with specific dynamics. The flow of images becomes more intense. Mediascapes are 211

Demontage of attractions 211 permeated with presumptions and suspicions, prejudices and aspirations, and emotions and fantasies that today act more quickly and strongly than ever before. This creates force fields that often go unnoticed, even at the levels where they are amplified and dispatched by global semiotic machinery. Their outputs are growing and accelerating, widening the gap between technological reality and human perceptive and cognitive capacities. This makes the mediascapes increasingly inhuman, and, to compensate, the communication networks replace platforms for critical thinking with emotionally laden reactions. Attractions and special effects aim to create certain impressions, while at the same time hiding certain things. The hidden and the masked, the expelled and the disappeared are the focal points in the ASI research practice. The attention to the invisible is a response to the process of the mainstream discourse becoming hermetically sealed by the conjunction of mass-produced conservative feelings and populist rhetoric that has abounded in the shrinking public sphere in Russia in recent years. Through various phenomena in various segments of cultural life, conservative sensibility, in turn, is presented as a natural attitude to a reality where people have little influence over their economic or social prospects. However, even preliminary molecular analysis shows that today’s conservatism is a product of the synthesis of such elements as fear and greed. Fear comes from the experience of uprooting and helplessness in the face of historic change. Since the beginning of this century, throughout the period of so-called stabilization, a threatening refrain has been heard: ‘Do you want to go back to the chaos of the 1990s?’ In the popular imagination, that period of democratic openness has been gradually turned into the embodiment of a Hobbesian natural state marked by the ceaseless war of everybody against everybody else. Greed manifests itself in mass consumerism, in the expansion of the oligarchic capitalism of the 2000s and eventually in the vener- ation of the idea of ‘sovereignty’ in the recent period when conservatism grew into neo-imperialism. Fear presents frightening images of chaos, and greed answers with images of ‘sovereignty’, ‘traditional values’ and even ‘the sacredness of power’. They seem to be directed against ‘chaos’, but really they mask the void that reveals itself in the widening distance between the people and power. Mainstream culture produces its phantasmagorias in order to convince the audience that beneath the pavement is not the beach but an abyss. It has learned to appropriate forms from other discourses, including subcultural and even countercultural ones. All available media are used to create the desired picture of history. This artificial memory allows the world view to be kept somewhat liquid; panoramas might rise and fall around the enchanted subject. Mediatized memory sets the tonality of historical experience: the yesterday with its democratic aspirations is backward and corrupt, whereas the day before yesterday is an ideal that has to be saved from the grasp of oblivion. This idyllic image of the day before yesterday stretches as in a dream, fusing Soviet and imperial history into a single chimerical entity. 212

212 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova The past becomes an object of ceaseless reconstruction. Partially, this corresponds with the global tendency enforced by the development of communications media: today, it is much easier to reconstruct an image of the past than to project a convincing image of the future. According to the official conservatism, not all the past is worthy of reconstruction – only the key moments that can be turned into the material for monumental images of the Un-past, that is, the continuity between today’s political regime, the Soviet state and the Russian empire. The idea of an Un-past is addressed in the project Dark Matter: Political Philosophy of a Brush Stroke, Social History of Fear which was conducted by the ASI in collaboration with the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art. This work involved exhibiting pieces selected by the ASI from the museum’s collection. The intention was to demonstrate that the art objects retain coded signatures of atmospheres and emotional tonalities from the past, including anxieties and fears, regardless of the artist’s awareness or intention. Assuming that fear has played an especially important role in the twentieth- and twenty- first-century history of Russia, the ASI built optic machines that allow the observation of the effects of politically induced fear. Through the use of these optic machines and a specially designed ‘orientational carpet’ with a transformed semiotic square printed on it, it was possible to observe how social fear reveals itself. This invisible element from the past that is nonetheless still present and influential could be thought of as the socio-cultural equivalent of what contemporary physics calls dark matter. The project Dark Matter is an attempt to open up access to a past that informs the present as a hub of interpretations of history. This trajectory opposes mainstream cultural efforts to populate the present with happy images from the autocratic and totalitarian past. Collaged fantasies are positioned as historic documents, images slide into each other, creating the past as an object of consumption and turning it into a colony of today, into a logotype of our imagined limitations and into a theme park. Such images of the past are both ahistorical and dated by the present, as they mark the state- sanctioned exit from history. In Dark Matter, the material for research has been provided by the museum collection. In contrast to most of the other case studies, this work by the ASI includes the originals of the works of art. In all other cases, the objects presented to the audience are copies, and a lot of material comes from open sources. The ASI is predominantly interested in the images as circulating subjects, as parts of communicative gestures and as links that animate communication networks. Such medialised images are sets of signs that can produce various meanings depending on the contexts and the optics. These images belong to the fields of meaning generated by our confidence in them: they erase borders between the imaginary and the documentary, fiction and fact. The field of art remains interesting for the ASI inasmuch as it provides shortcuts to changing reality. The capacity of art to produce borderline spaces where the real, the conventional and the imagined meet is determined by the 213

Demontage of attractions 213 use of re-signification, renaming and imaginary reconstruction, all methods that stem from what the situationists called detournement. The efforts of the ASI are focused on the production of special situations through the displacement of appropriated images, words and meanings, and disruption of the habitual relations between them. The events that take place in the Agency’s space at CCI Fabrika in Moscow often include such actions as the presentation and demonstration of documents, the staging of narratives and the discussion of schemes and models of interpretation. It could be a presentation of a found archive, a public discussion or a schematic scale model of a theme park that has never been built. Or it could be a guided tour through a conference hall intended to host a congress of pseudo-scientists will never take place. Usually, such events are not called exhibitions, since the gesture of the ASI is not just to display or hold out anything before the audience. Rather the opposite, the effort is to create the conditions that allow the audience to sense what remains eclipsed by the visible.

The constructivist spirit and the dwarf of political theology Every image bears traces of the historical forces that form it. At the same time, images are often the symptoms of specific circumstances or tendencies that are not otherwise visible. The projects by the ASI are attempts to develop instruments for the observation of such symptomatics. These symptoms seem to migrate from one cultural form to another, each time marking distinct, historically determined atmospheres. In other words, time shows itself through certain aspects of images. The stuff they are made of, a series of signs, evokes the spirit of the time. Fear and greed refract on multiple surfaces of social relations: through the moods and emotional tonalities, aspirations and apprehen- sions that circulate through communication networks. This spirit is imbued with anxieties and fears about the future. It is turned towards the newly built images of the past, and yet it believes that it can transform reality through technological manipulations. Accelerating movement of images, narratives and interpretive patterns, growing intensities of communication flows, the widening gap between technological and socio-cultural development – these are the forces that amount to the specific atmosphere of the current historical moment. In his 1940 fragment, On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin describes a chess machine where one must play the automaton of historical materialism, which always wins because it is secretly driven by an unsur- passed mastery of chess, and the dwarf of political theology who is hiding under the table. This metaphor was meant to be a critique of the Stalinist regime, which at the time had allied itself with Nazi Germany. Yet today this text seems even more relevant. This allegorical image unfolds a paradoxical juxtaposition of representations of materialism and theology, machines and bodies, and rules and deceit that is exactly what influences the media sphere now more than ever. 214

214 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova We live at a time of the mass production of images. The new era of mypho- figuration is not unlike an amplified version of the 1930s avant-garde visions, although it now takes in all the spheres of communication, using multimedia and serving ideological functions. Allegorical figures are produced unceas- ingly by digital networks. They populate the collective imagination in the guise of real subjects and actors, or sometimes, conversely, camouflaged to blend in with information patterns. The precise ontological status of the allegories does not mean much anymore; what is important is that they can be private or public interfaces for the understanding and use of social reality. In the project Observatorioum, the ASI experimented with the poetic production of a figure that could embody the current condition of the political atmosphere. The figure of an unknown conspirologist is devoid of embodiment and exists only in its traces: in constellations of the objects from a personal archive, pictures of the schemes drawn on a slate, a plaster cast of a coat taken off in a hurry and a collection of photographs of the city streets. These are fragments of a cognitive map of a disappeared world that is almost a copy of the world that we know. His name and biography are lost. Only some of his documents and belongings are preserved. The two-storey house, styled as one of the many museum-apartments of St Petersburg, becomes the space that retains materialized traces of the conspirological unconscious. The set of ideas behind Observatorioum was devised to provide an image of the slippage from communication to conspirological reality, accompanied by the ever-increasing significance of images. If the waves of representation and form can be compared to the breath of the ‘world’s soul’, then somewhere in its pores, the movement of the zeitgeist might be discerned. This movement has a number of observable traits. First, it inhabits digital environments: numeric entities such as numbers, series and sets form its nature. Missives of numbers are easy to transform into other missives of numbers. It is in constant movement, and each element can present itself as any other one. It is elusive: it fits easily between pixels. Fragmentation and integration help it to express itself through forms and constructions appropriated from popular discourses and the general intellect. Second, binary oppositions endlessly reflect each other, thereby blurring the borders between opposing elements, most notably between reality and fiction. Ambiguity of communication turns it into an intermediary zone where all truth values are situation dependent. Third, enforced by communication networks, imagination becomes more important in social life. The production of knowledge and the production of images intertwine. A new synergy between technologies and the imagination makes the domain of the visual ever more politicized. Fourth it recognizes itself in reconstructions of the past. It is turned away from the future: its constructivist power eclipsed by the re-constructivist that drives most of the possibilities of the historic vision. Thus, the only future that it acknowledges is projection of the past. Reconstructions of the past replace aspirations for the future, echoing conservative, traditionalist, ‘passéist’ and other historicist types of the ‘passion for the Real’. 215

Demontage of attractions 215 Today’s conservative drive manifests itself in various forms. Mainstream culture is dominated by a conservative sensibility. Communication networks are permeated by a conservative spirit that ensures that these networks remain torn between consumption and resentment and consequently remain at least partly patriarchal and nationalist. As a result of state politics, the sphere of official culture is widening and gradually pushing other perspectives out of public life. Intolerance is declared a virtue and the production of consent on other levels is reminiscent of the notion of cultural hegemony, or acceptance of the ruling class ideology as the natural point of view by the dominated classes. Due to the system’s mirroring capacities, all elements of the atmosphere – moods and aspirations, ideas and narratives, anxieties and hopes – down to the molecular level retain the freezing touch of the regime’s psyche. Like hegemony, this state of things cannot be complete and stable. As soon as the hegemonic grasp weakens, the repressed multiplicity of perspectives will break out seeking acknowledgement. The current version of conservatism is a constructivist one. Instead of restrained scepticism and adherence to the ‘small deeds’ typical of classic conservatism, it aims for the active production of reality. Its key element is a belief in technologies, including public relations and political marketing, propaganda and mass media manipulation. These machines operate in the sphere of communication, where everything might be ambivalent. They act on the basis of the assumption that any fragment of the reality of communication networks can be changed, enhanced, presented at the right angle and linked with the required entities. This system of angles, exposed and hidden signs, emphases and omissions, stresses and distractions can be used to produce the required kind of reality. This production is organized in post-Fordist terms: it is dissipative and sensitive to the oscillations of consumer expectations, and it uses the same media as the agents of globalization do – digital communication networks. Constructivist conservatism presents past events and situations in relation to today’s consumerist desires. It is absorbed by visions of the past, but it is not the ‘organic’ past of classical conservatism. This version of the past is synthetic, a glossy collage of the echoes of today’s superstitions and habits, collective fantasies and fears. Constructivist historicism re-enacts the past, turning its remastered and remixed images into mass products. Both traditional life forms and traditionalisms are constructed before our eyes, in accordance with today’s ideological templates. Nonetheless, the past is pos- ited as the source of social energy, the foundation of the power structure and the background of the state. This new image of the past is a simulacrum that is meant to outshine any thinkable referent. This stream of inversions, re-enactments and simulations nourishes the image of the past as an attractor for the present. This reversion of the time flow opposes the Soviet passionate aspiration for the future conceived of as a progressist escape from the ‘fetters of the damned past’. In the Soviet Weltanschauung, the past was dark and run by irrational forces, while the 216

216 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova

Figure 11.2 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova, from the project Apocalyptological Congress (Congress Hall Chairs Signalling), Collage, 2015. Courtesy of the artists.

future was typically referred to as ‘bright’. Today’s conservative ideology sees the future as a source of instability and reverses expectations towards a collaged representation of the past that should be restored. Now the future is associated with injustice and inequality. The future looks disquieting, prone to accidents that may arise from harmful tendencies in nature, technology or society. Hence, the way to avoid getting lost in the complexities of the coming world is to adhere to ‘traditional values’ and, first and foremost, predictably, to worship power.

Documentality in the expanded field The focal point of the dominant discourse is the idea of authority as the ultimate value. State-supported culture venerates authority, the power to decide and sovereignty as sacred sources of all the distinctions that organize social spaces. The most important of these distinctions is the opposition of the true and the false. The conservative spirit insists that truth is what power selects and declares to be true. Selection and declaration are two distinct levels. The former corresponds to the ‘molecular’ power-knowledge networks; the latter is the perquisite of the authoritarian incarnation of the regime. This 217

Demontage of attractions 217 dimension of power, let’s call it authority-image, manifests itself in a variety of tropes of social imagination. Thus, power finds itself split into the authority-image and the elitist selection systems that operate symbolically throughout social, cultural and psychic spaces. The authority-image might be seen in various aspects: it interpolates, demands, patronizes, controls, punishes, encourages and so on. In the world of images, any truth assessment is arbitrary as long as at least the possibility of other points of view remains. The authority-image promotes itself aggressively partially because it feels threatened by the opportunities to be found in undesirable aspects. Power knows that it cannot control all aspects of its image, despite its authoritarian fantasy about a fixed point of view of itself. This partially explains why images are not the main point of interest for the ASI. Its research addresses not so much visuality itself as its invisible parts – assumptions, implications and free associations, all that is located between and behind pictures, frames, strokes and pixels. That is what can provide the access to power’s molecular structure – and, in order to change it, one must deconstruct these invisible scaffolds. The struggle for the authority-image would be dissolved through the changing micro-logic of the perception of images. The strategy of the ASI is to intervene and shift the links in the triangle of fact-image-meaning. If history is presented as a space for possible reconstructions, then the stakes of the cultural struggle are the systems of distinction that condition the links between meaning, facts, images and, consequently, the horizons of the reconstructionist vision. Facts mix with fiction to form communication flows. The technical possibilities of image production and those of socio-political control are growing side by side. As a response to growing complexity, simplifying schemes and populist strategies that appeal to the imaginary are spreading throughout the mediasphere. Populism is a mass version of conservative constructivism. It suppresses the ‘meaning’ unit in the above-mentioned triangle of fact-image- meaning in favour of image. Populism is politics after pop culture and yet its ambitions to fix all problems with simple solutions, to quench mass anxiety and change life immediately, are based on a belief in constructible reality. This is especially clear in the Russian situation, where the moment of synergy of communication technologies and propaganda is supported by the habit of erasing the history that evolved during the totalitarian era. Constructivist conservatism would not be possible without the socio- cultural undercurrent that can be called the bureaucratic unconscious. The constructivist, or in this case re-constructivist, approach presumes that reality consists of sets of signs that can be changed by means of a series of operations. Thus, the key issue is to find the right materials and technologies for the reconstruction of selected environments or situations. The resources have largely an imaginary or a symbolic nature, even if they are embodied in material things, devices or institutions. The construction kits are stored and transmitted within a system that resembles an archive, where all elements are registered, classified, systematized and ranked according to the qualities 218

218 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova and indicatives prescribed to them. Distribution is mostly done automatically, according to the systemic predispositions fuelled by collective desires and anxieties. However, the habitual relations between facts, pictures and meanings are becoming more dissipative. Constructivist conservatism of mainstream culture fights for control over the methods of signification, that is, for privileged access to the archives of the bureaucratic unconsciousness and the exclusive right to prescribe meanings to archival units. The ASI researches the possibilities of undermining the linking and associating systems used by constructivist conservatism. This implies varying the distances between referents, meanings and signs. Variation, the diffusion of associations and the condensation of stereotypes amount to a process of the conceptualization of the idea of documentality. On attaining the conceptual dimension, documentality becomes the most contested territory. The sphere of the spectacular is permeated by forces of dissemination that define ceaselessly increasing capacities for manipulation. In the digital era everything tends to become both a document and documented, and this relationship can exist between any objects, images or propositions. Documents are constantly produced and automatically stored and exchanged. Everything can be done at any moment or place. Documentality becomes liquid, elastic and contaminated by the aesthetical. The borders between the aesthetical and the documental are dissolving; subjective visions and the objective states of things intermingle. The documental becomes part of the system of communication – a certain kind of imagery or product of the imagination. Eventually, the range of possible meanings becomes immeasurable: anything can mean anything. These transformations of the documentary became the main subject of the programme ‘Documentality in the Expanded Field’ developed by the ASI in research carried out in 2015–16. One of its parts is Park Dystopia. This project addresses the problematic of the production of imaginary reality using documentary images. The project is structured around a presentation of the part of the archive dedicated to a historic world-scale disaster that was kept secret until the ASI presented documentary evidence of it. According to the archive ‘discovered’ by the ASI researchers, the city of Moscow was destroyed by a meteorite in 1955. Due to the achievements of Soviet astronomers, the collision had been predicted, and a new city, an exact copy of Moscow, had been built few hundred kilometres to the north-east. Most of the population was transported to the new Moscow in an unconscious state. All this was kept out of the official history. The documents presented reveal the real course of events; for example, they show the disassembly of the iconic buildings of that era for transportation to the new site – even if they might look like photographs of construction sites. During the next iteration of Park Dystopia, the Agency developed a plan for a theme park dedicated to the disappeared original Russian capital. Its attractions will represent key images of modern power, such as Hobbesian sovereignty, Benjamin’s 219

Demontage of attractions 219 dwarf of political theology, the dialectical spirals of history and the abysses of representation.

Supplementary notes on temporal inversions This document was published within the framework of the programme ‘Documentality in the Expanded Field’. It relates to the above-mentioned presentations of archival material found by the ASI almost as theory relates to practice.1 The main objective of the ASI is to observe communicative environments, especially those where the tension between the factual and the fictive can influence exchanges between past and present. Research into the possibilities of reality change and of manifestations of the so-called power of art ascertained the decisive role of the category of the documental almost immediately. It was thought not too long ago that the intersecting area between the singular and the documental was negligible. The singular is something unique, hidden in foams of the factual, something that is possible to identify but not to repeat. It appears in traces of the insufficiency of language, or of the missed encounter between facts and meanings. Documents, in turn, are a product of systemic operations. They lend themselves to being copied. And yet the evolution of global networks made these customary distinctions dither. Between fact and fiction spans the ‘grey zone’ of communications that absorb cultural subsystems. In this zone, everything is reversible and interchangeable; the inimitable emerges out of the typical and standard, and the universal out of the meaningless. The tension between the original and the copy dies away but does not disappear; hence, obsolescent cultural institutions – author, artwork, public – do not dissolve into the data streams for good. Ambiguity and the curiosity of the ‘idle talk’ that frightened observers in the past century become the main source of communicative energies today. Running in circles from ‘post-’ to ‘neo-’, from ‘proto-’ to ‘trans-’, interpretations are born, mutate and decom- pose in strata of images, only to become a nutrient medium for new generations of images. Emotion streams pulsate within global networks as bursts of singularities against the growing power of repetition (i.e. the obvious and the doxa) in the background, illuminating the space that maintains its patriarchal, hierarchical layout. Last reminders of distance, borders, subjects and objects are still here, but in between the disappearing poles of truth and lies the ‘middle world’ gapes, of reconstruction and reinvention. It is not because of some magic qualities of aesthetic experience that artistic action is capable of changing the pattern of reality, but thanks to the acts of speech, which denote one thing as something else. Naming is a leap of re- signification, a metaphor, and myriads of such meaning transfers constitute reality. Every such proposition is a moment in a movement of re-signification, within transitions between the material and the immaterial that form reality, from social connections and to the depths of inner worlds. Re-signification 220

220 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova pierces communication streams, creating thousands of levels of climate for the growth of ecosystems of difference, where the non-self-identical, the non- manifest and the non-recognizable find their place. Practices of re-signification oppose hierarchies and closed circuits through displacement and concentra- tion, disruption and tangling the traces. Unlimited semiosis accompanies the evolution of surveillance and control systems, the growing speed of data crunching, of reading and finishing circuits. With the proliferation of images grows the role of documentality, with its testimonies of time gaps, that is, facts. Documents still count as the most reliable guides to the endless labyrinths of images. Facts can take place ‘by chance’ or ‘in theory’, as accidents or consequences of certain regularities, as nodes of symbolic systems. Narrations of the accidental, documents are similar to subjects; when they witness systemic facts, they are more like objects, symptoms or evidence. Image industries give documentality a special meaning; today, the memory of any micro-event is automatically saved, catalogued involuntarily and inconspicuously, annihilating the opposition of chance and system. Factuality separates from the ‘thusness’ of things, and acquires the nature of a temporary constellation of elements, the nature of an atmosphere or situation. Documentality is a situation where images, disregarding their designation, start narrating their secret intentions. A document is a record, plus a proof of its authenticity, a structure that merges trace and meaning between the space dust of events: scratches, mark- ings, disturbances, noises, the accidental and the fleeting. These gleams of facts over the dark mirror of the documental unconscious betray the deep structure of documentation processes, like a tic running through one’s face verifies the invisible presence of the system. The interpretation of records, even of the accidental ones, is shaped by the perspective of the gaze, habits of perception and the horizon of expectations of the reader, the latter being the profile of her presence within the situation of a document. Past penetrates present with strings of documentality; facts unfold the collages of circumstances, grow into beliefs, mix with fictions, compacting the climate of the epoch so much that it becomes a screen where streams of ideological imagery flicker. Documents carry within themselves traces of the invisible, relaying not only system power, but also the subtexts, phantasms, unvoiced anxieties and suppressed dreams. These ephemeral forces act imperceptibly to create ruptures of history tissue that bind phenomena. A significant part of the documentality process occupies the invisible – something that remains outside the frame, off the paper, hidden behind the broken link, forgotten, decomposed, erased and disconnected. The most certain evidence of any document is of the emptiness that separates the singular here and now of the situation of its assertion and the power that authorized its capacity for signification. The inexpressible of documentality, (absent) power structure, can appear both as Kafkaesque castle and as a cultural institution of photography, which includes not only cameras, printers and fingers pushing buttons, but also the non-conscious 221

Demontage of attractions 221 belief that an imprint of an electro-magnetic ray, reflected from the object surface would not deceive the viewer. From facts to photography – in all directions, belief cuts its objects out of multi-layered metaphors. Belief defines atmosphere, mood and other imperceptible conditions of phenomena observability. These forces are of a weak kind: documents, meanings and facts, the visible and the invisible is linked by the oscillating movement – from trust to suspicion and back again. From here emerges the key feature of documents – their cogency, this quiet voice of the imaginary, governing an observer’s attention. Usually, a document’s authenticity is verified by a sufficient amount of easily readable details. Every document is a part of a system, an element of a line or of a matrix; born into its reality, it is often doomed to disappear with it. Only a few of them outlast their world, and yet the dotted line of the documental is not swamped with the overproduction of evidence in media. On the contrary, it asserts relent- lessly the active presence of unidentified and non-localized historic forces. As soon as a document loses its functional sphere, it becomes apparent that right outside of its margins, emptiness unfolds. Behind the usual transparency of the present are pulses, spins and splashes, a diversity of rhythms and currents, and of turbulence. The transformation of time into space is not just a side-effect of the triumph of machines, as was held in the past century. The spring of spatiality unbends in the encounter of durations, together with the beginning of communication. A story, a conversation, speech acts – discursive networks absorb time with all their fibres. It dies in their strata, leaving its figures that remind one of crystal lattices and wave packets, ripples and fractals. A diversity of forms of past and future with their unlived histories, lost plots and un-quiet zeitgeister is neutralized in the present by an apparent obviousness of intersubjective consensus. It smooth- ens out the tension between the intensity of subjective time and the systems’ indifference, their programmes and schedules, and plans and diagrams. The polished wave of the technological present barely hides a space, generated by the freezing time. The time of individuals, of those who can support a spring- like timeline with their persistence, disintegrates into micro-convolutes and a plexus of episodes. The latter make up the close-circled time of systems, defined by scripts, protocols and programmes. The organized collection of documents is an archive, a special layout of symbolic space and a structure of places and their relations. If a document is an image of reality, then an archive is lines, columns, diagonal and knight moves, systems of notions and scenes where stories unfold. Documentality is a constant recording of the state of things, a production of images and propositions where conditions of reality and of subjectivity are fused. During the past century, archives were thought of as static spaces, that tended towards centralization. Subjects, institutions, topics and functional spheres became centres of hierarchical unities, referents of ‘authentic’ images of the past. In the era of digital networks, archives became fragmented spaces for exchange and circulation. 222

222 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova Interpretations, perspectives and meanings are changed. Documents are being produced by themselves. An archive is a process, not just a place to keep the articles that remain from the past. It includes the layers of reality that lie between the rules and repertoires of the ‘big language’ that specifies the boundaries of the possible, and the speech that fills systems of communication. Morphing into elements of archive, documents are being registered as exemplary propositions, useful for further the production of meaning. Every archive has an inherent selection system with its basic functions – the production of maps for orientation within the unstable symbolic landscapes, and the construction of such landscapes. Awaiting their new incarnations, plots subside in the archive space of transition between the possible and the actual. The accounted elements of an archive undergo standard procedures: conservation, classification and storage. This is how a separation of regions, sections and places is constructed; archives become factories of stories. According to Michel Foucault, every document in an archive is a proposition the essence of which is concerned not with being grammatically correct, but with the sensible relation of signs. The ‘Archaeology of Knowledge’ gives an example of such a proposition in azert – a set of typed letters, taken not just by itself, but specifically printed on a sheet of paper. This combination of letters documents certain qualities of the ‘big language’ with its grammar and vocabulary that determine the probability of the vicinity of signs in communication, and hence on a keyboard. Propositions attest to the historical circumstances just like an imagery of dreams documents unconscious processes: they could always have been different, and yet they turned out precisely the way they are. The meaning of the document includes the conditions that allow it to remain in the archive, and also the possibility of their recon- sideration. A traditional archive pretends that its methods of classification are an objective state of things, hiding the incompleteness of its own system of coordinates. It is more difficult to hide the relativity of classification: as the number of archives grows, they become more localized and situationally dependent. Evolution, as database read and processing speeds grow, as well as the bias of evidence and the artificiality of traces, the ‘subjectivity’ of archives becomes more and more apparent. Documents refract reality, deforming it in compliance with the field lines of power, turning it into ideological rebus. At the level of elementary meanings, they form something similar to a consciousness of the archive, where in place of the structure of intentionality there are systems of data selection and value allocation defined by the interests of the archive’s compilers. Beyond this area, lit by torches of historical conjec- ture and perception habits, lies a space of fuzzy and elastic meanings – the archive’s unconscious. Contradictions drift and conglomerate here, decom- posing and tightening up their knots again; in passages between the levels, roles change in fragments and whole, in intensity and volume, with expectation and experience. 223

Demontage of attractions 223 The documental unconscious fills the space between archive elements like invisible mycelium. Behind the visibility of order and corporate loyalty hide conflicts and mismatches, discrepancies and political struggle. The digital- ized spaces of archives are similar to labyrinths, with moving walls in video games or science-fiction films. Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘archive fever’ describes them via analysis of the fluctuations between the diverging functions of source and power (Derrida and Prenowitz 1995). The next step in the diagnosis was taken by Hal Foster, for whom ‘archival impulse’ feeds on the energy of reason’s primordial paranoia, the dream of archiving all that exists, which is closer than ever in the era of ‘Big Data’ (Foster 2004). If the origin of the power of documents is psychosis, then its agent is identification. The elementary action in archiving machines is counting a document as a unit of storage. Acknowledged as a unit, it is subject to calculation as ‘one more’ element. The crucial condition for the acknowledgement is self- equality, or identity. Hence, stability of meaning is usually seen as the crite- rion of authenticity. Reality is always poorer than the sum of its descriptions. There are always fewer documents in the archive than possible relations between them. The greater the archive, the less measurable is the quantitative dominance of interpretations over facts, the more difficult it is to predict where archiving machines might lose count. This is how the wandering presence of a subtle excess manifests itself; displaced by the classifying pressure of the archive consciousness, the excess reveals itself in fluctuations of background radiation that penetrate through the gaps between pixels, frames, words and digits. The phantom archivist glides as a draft of unaccounted possibilities through data arrays, turning ideological settings upside down. This pale shadow looms in random bundles of secondary and unrecorded meanings, in glitches of optics, in gleams of incoherence that settle secretly in the nooks of crystal castles of archive paranoia. If there is a system of classification with its rules of inclusion and exclu- sion, of reading and contextualization behind the consciousness of archive, then excess of interpretation creates an imperceptible source of resistance. As a result, an archive acquires the advantages and disadvantages of a living witness: its own inimitable outlook and unique intonations. Its inner world spans narrative and testimony, and between subject and system. The archive unconscious is woven from signal exchange between the roaming excess of meanings and the psychosis of total archiving. Once a quiet haven of eternity, it has turned into the portal, the hub on which to dock more and more narratives and beliefs. The ultraslow, tectonic temporality, which is seemingly inherent in archive spaces, accelerates. The surface layers of the present are set in motion, pushing the fixed meanings, the established images of the past, opening the cracks, voids and deep currents within them. Communications are capable of suddenly changing the pace of collective time, and the meaning of documents changes with it. The situation of exposi- tion reveals the nature of documentality as a missed encounter of sights: the 224

224 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova relict intentions of the archive’s initiators, turning to a present unknown to them, slipping past the interpreter’s gaze directed into the past. The internet reads thoughts, divines desires and answers the questions yet to be asked. Documentality has become more complex. It can never return to the fixed shores of the archives of yesterday. Their monumental tranquillity was shielded by transparent walls of trust in the document – a reminder of another mighty illusion, the pictorial plane of traditional painting. Behind it lay the world of images, a frozen past that had a mystic authority over the present. Trust in documents held for a century longer than the pictorial plane. Both were destroyed by communications but if in the latter case it was photography, cinema and the press, then for the former it was Photoshop, Instagram and YouTube. Every low-quality image or illegible note can reveal unexpected secrets. In a fuss of signs abandoned by meaning, the memory of noises awakens, through the visual froth gleams a deep dream of the world outlook. The open archive injects the present with the past’s notions, and documentality becomes a resource and a means of reconstruction and reinvention. Like a planet, the past returns in a series of angles, influencing waves of imaginary media, defining socio-cultural topology, linking the near and the far, the apparent and the hidden, dynamics and tectonics. The evidence always points to the border between emptiness and presence, and between system and subject. Archive spaces bind past and present, and referent and meaning into temporal knots, whereas in the installation space different registers of reality intersect – things, images, narratives. Propositions are constellations of heterogeneous elements that belong to various levels and temporalities. Included in the space of the archive, they cut their links with their own contexts and are accommodated in the table of examples so that they can represent themselves. Meanwhile, their meaning will depend more on conditions of visibility in a given historic moment with its own hopes and fears, obsessions and apathy, and struggles between the forces of control and liberation expressed by the connection between the imaginary and the documental. The elusive time of emotions: storms of mass identifications, geological time of mentalities, linear timelines and bubbles of eternal present, continuity of traditions and dotted lines of hopes. Archive propositions are synthetic; they contain an indication of a subject, of the lost worlds of those who peered through the viewfinder, pasted a photograph into the album page, signed postcards or received the stamped certificates. What is important here is not the primary, not originality, but ‘only the regu- larity of the proposition: not the arithmetic mean, but the curve’ (Foucault 1972). The archive matrix turns time into space, rebuilding temporal series; and traces of alternative histories reveal themselves – time flow becomes traffic. Time does not freeze but moves in different directions, changing rhythm, speed and density, and creating chains, grids and kaleidoscopic patterns of moment. The reversibility and discontinuity of time intensify inside a proposition: contraction and expansion, jumps, oscillations and pauses. Doubling, unfolding, rotation, a decomposition of narratives generates areas 225

Demontage of attractions 225 of incomplete signification, misty fields of unrealized possibilities – the inexpressible archival guide to the seamy side of memory. Document is a means of presence in several realities; it retains traces of hidden misunderstanding, incoherence, desire, weakness, cunning, nostalgia and impatience. Signals directed towards times past, towards the notion of a past, the document shares with the observer, limited by the document’s own present. The secret life of archives is defined by technologies. The more intense communication is, the faster identification occurs, and circuits are read and closed. Hints at the latent links between things shimmer in folds of data overproduction. Secret knowledge does not emerge from a lack of data, but from its excess, as an effect of openness, versatility and mutual reciprocity – the digital extensions of the same old curiosity and ambiguity. Notions, beliefs, illusions, phantasms of worlds emerging and dying fill the scene of the present. Behind them are seen the theatrical machinery of epistemai and para- digms, easily forgotten assumptions and premises. From the machine’s point of view, time is reversible and guided, as it is actually a kind of space. It is similar to the intersection of the spiral movement of contemporaneity and the grid of eternal present. In such a space, progress and tradition, passéism and futurism, the avant-garde and conservatism switch places with ease. Mutual reflections of rows and matrices unwind the ornaments of difference between the copy and the original, between the political and the aesthetic, and between truth and lies. The primary splitting of time is specified by the nature of the archive, while every element of the latter includes the association of its own time, reflected in the document as a subject, with the time of the observer, where the document is included as an object. This duality is activated when archive space becomes public, part of the present, making contact not with the past itself, but with its possibilities unrealized and models untested – the memory of those who employ the register of documentality. Tensions and contradictions between the various modes of oblivion, of distortions, manipulations and delusions, come to the surface, extending their potential for coupling with other elements and for the construction of meaning. The fragmented nature of memory does not fade with the development of archival practices. It is the vicinity with emptiness that surrounds every document withdrawn from its context that allows for fluctuations between a diversity of pasts and futures. An archive collects those rare objects that succeed in avoiding being absorbed by the past, and sends them on a lonely trip into the history of the future, to contexts that do not exist yet. Every moment generates new documents: photographs, video and audio. Archives grow like an avalanche; being transported from past to present, their elements are imbued with the imaginary – a force that brings images into the world. The imaginary does not fit into the good old schemes anymore, its formations move around the planet faster and faster, breathing cogency into documental evidence, charging various types of world view batteries. Documentality is a special regime of the imaginary that needs to be verified 226

226 Stanislav Shuripa and Anna Titova by an observer or by the public, meaning that it needs trust in an archive, needs the incoherence of historic time to be masked, needs an absence that installs the surviving evidence in an assemblage to be used as instruments to explore the limits of the present.

Note

1 The following excerpt was published in Khudozestvenniy Zhurnal no. 95 (2016) (translated into English by Sergei Ogurtsov).

References Benjamin, Walter (2009) On the Concept of History, New York: Classic Books America. Derrida, Jacques and Eric Prenowitz (1995) ‘Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression’, Diacritics, 25 (2): 9–63. Eisenshtein, Sergei (1923) Montage of Attractions, Moscow: LEF. Foster, Hal (2004) ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, 110 (autumn): 3–22. Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, New York: Pantheon Books. Khudozestvenniiy Zhurnal (2016), ‘Dokument1’, Khudozestvenniiy Zhurnal, 95 (March). 227

12 Wartime intimacy Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and the Chto Delat school for engaged art

Jonathan Brooks Platt

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and, indeed, during the years of perestroika that preceded it, Russian radical art practices have been profoundly public and performative in orientation. Whether taking the form of street actions, gallery-based performances or longer-term social interventions, most recent additions to the canon of Russian art have involved public display or the display of the public. Such practices were bound to take centre stage in a society experiencing a deeply contested, epochal transformation, and they have shown remarkable longevity. Over the past fifteen years, even as social relations in Russia have become increasingly reified and corporatized, politically engaged artists have nonetheless continued to confront the public, demanding to be seen and heard and insisting on the fundamental malleabil- ity of what can be seen and heard. Nonetheless, this public orientation has recently become increasingly untenable, and the reasons are not hard to discern. Since the Russian protests of 2011–12 and Vladimir Putin’s controversial election for a third term as president, the Russian state has followed its own path of conservative rad- icalization. Russian actionism has lost much of its potency (Petr Pavlenskii being the exception that proves the rule); exhibition spaces invariably practise self-censorship, or find themselves overrun by neo-fascist Cossack bands; and artists are more likely to shun the newly mobilized ‘people’ than engage them in social projects (Platt 2018).1 As one might expect, this situation has led many in the leftist art community to turn inward, working beneath the radar of state interests and developing practices of intimacy. In this chapter, I discuss one particular long-term pedagogical project – the Chto Delat group’s School for Engaged Art, founded in 2013. With this project Chto Delat has developed its own form of intimate practice that does not simply reject the compromised public sphere. On the contrary, they have worked tirelessly to build a viable, alternative institution that can potentially serve as a public platform. And while this goal is decidedly utopian, since the inchoate counter-public they would address remains completely marginalized by mainstream officialdom, their project has nonetheless been an undeniable success. The Chto Delat school and Rosa’s House of Culture (named after Rosa Luxemburg), which the 228

228 Jonathan Brooks Platt group opened in 2015, continue to grow and develop despite serious resistance from both private and state actors.2 Hundreds of Petersburg artists, activists and intellectuals have participated in their activities, not to mention visitors from other Russian and foreign cities. Most importantly, the institution has contributed to the formation of a close-knit network of young artists and intellectuals who show remarkable group solidarity while pursuing a broad range of activities and focusing on diverse aspects of the leftist agenda. In the school’s inaugural year in 2013–14, I was an active participant in many of its activities. Most notably, I involved the students in a collaboration I had initiated in the summer of 2013 with Chto Delat member Natalya Pershina- Yakimanskaya (Gluklya) and Sofia Akimova, who entered the Chto Delat school that autumn. The project revolved around Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, an eighteen-year- old diversionist who was captured, tortured and executed by German forces during the battle for Moscow in 1941. After the story of Kosmodemyanskaya’s gruesome death and the bravery with which she faced it appeared in Pravda (Lidov 1942), she received a central place in the Soviet pantheon of heroes, celebrated as a model for communist youth. The core question of our Zoya project was how the Soviet militant tradition has survived and been transformed in contemporary Russian memory. After a series of presentations and discussions in the Chto Delat school, Gluklya directed a group performance, Becoming Zoya, at the monument to Kosmodemyanskaya in St Petersburg’s Victory Park on 18 April 2014.3 In many ways, the Zoya performance served as an early challenge to the Chto Delat school and its practices of intimacy. The spring of 2014 was a moment of great uncertainty for the New Russian Left. The Maidan Uprising in Kiev led to deep tensions and divisions, especially after the Donbass War broke out in March. The issue of militancy at the heart of our Zoya project was inevitably coloured by this context. At the same time, the question of heroism has always been at the centre of Chto Delat’s own practice, and our project served as an interesting and, I think, important intervention. If Chto Delat tends to look for a core of weakness in the hero, guarding against the dangers of ideological myth production, our project instead sought to unearth a longing for heroism in contemporary society, describing the hero through the echo of her negation. In what follows I first examine the Chto Delat school and its practices of intimacy; I then turn to the theme of heroism in Chto Delat’s own work; and, finally, I consider the Zoya performance and the questions it raised about both these aspects of Chto Delat’s practice.

The Chto Delat school: alternative institution and intimate counter-public As an alternative institution, the Chto Delat school aspires to a form of emancipatory practice that does not require the confrontational ethos of actionism 229

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 229 to sustain a publicly oriented position. Instead of hurling itself against the wall dividing it from the hegemonic culture, an institutional project asserts a public presence while accepting its unavoidably marginal status. Participants are not obsessed with ‘peak experiences’ that guarantee a place in art-historical memory. Instead, their work and the cultivation of intimacy it promotes are sub- tler and more concrete – such as the occupation and inhabitation of collective spaces, the pursuit of long-term, small-scale projects and the supplementing of direct activism with the production of group solidarity. When involved in such practices, the temporality of political engagement is doubled. It simultaneously anticipates a future of active resistance (instead of merely staging provocations in the streets), while also constructing a genuinely emancipatory present founded on patient, self-organized, collective labour, in contrast to more radical communities, which typically collapse under the pressure of their own aspirations. The builders of alternative institutions are thus involved in a form of utopian projection – imagining and longing for a viable counter-public – while concretely working to sustain one another here and now, maintaining enthusiasm, fidelity and solidarity through mutual support and collaboration. In terms of its philosophy, the Chto Delat school adheres to the traditional leftist paradigm outlined in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. While more recent radical pedagogy tends to focus on the dissolution of authority and hierarchy, Chto Delat sides with Freire in the basic assumption that ‘without leadership, discipline, determination, and objectives […] an organization cannot survive, and revolutionary action is thereby diluted’. The key is to forge a balance – or, more precisely, to sustain a dialectic – between authority and freedom, such that ‘no one teaches another, nor is anyone self- taught’ (Freire 1968: 178, 67).4 The methods Chto Delat uses in pursuit of these ends have been developed over nearly a decade of conducting short- term pedagogical projects (Chto Delat 2015, 2016). The most prototypical of these are their intensive seminars that culminate in the staging of a ‘learning play’, which the participants write and perform under the direction of Olga Egorova (Tsaplya), who possesses an uncanny ability to unite an unruly collective around a common cause. These plays also make extensive use of the contemporary dance techniques of Nina Gasteva, who describes her area of responsibility as cultivating the group’s ‘collective body’. While these projects are of course far from Freire’s work with the illiterate poor, they can be seen as fostering community and empowerment among the creative workers who participate in them. It hardly needs to be stated that young people interested in forms of labour that do not produce marketable commodities (whether material or immaterial) often live precarious lives and run the risk of slipping into conditions of deep alienation. The blitzkrieg of intimacy Chto Delat brings to these projects, with its heavy orientation on public performance and politicized speech, provides a tangible form of resistance to such problems. Chto Delat’s pedagogical method is not uncontroversial, and it raises a number of questions familiar to readers of Claire Bishop’s influential survey of participatory art in Artificial Hells (Bishop 2012). What are the spectatorial 230

230 Jonathan Brooks Platt implications of such projects? To what extent does a pedagogical art project need to communicate itself to a public beyond the participants themselves? What aesthetic criteria apply to its final outcomes? If the public identifies these outcomes with the artist-organizers, does this objectify the participants as delegated performers? Is the project ‘mere’ art? Or is it a real social process? With their St Petersburg school, Chto Delat is working to extend its pedagogical practice beyond the feverish tempos of the learning plays and, perhaps most importantly, to bring it back to its home city after years of plying its trade in foreign art contexts. The result has been even greater risk. Since the school emphasizes collective work over individual initiatives, and the organizers choose the central theme for each semester based on their own interests (violence and monumentality were the themes of the school’s inaugural year), the students find themselves deeply embedded in Chto Delat’s own practice while not directly involved at its uppermost levels. The group makes a constant effort to distinguish between its own work and that of the school, but to an outside observer this can seem somewhat arbitrary. Meanwhile, the student-artists are constantly faced with the task of negotiating their position as individuals with specific ideas, affinities and goals, as members of a collective working on collaborative projects, and as participants in the Chto Delat platform itself, where they can never be quite sure if they are the beneficiaries of the group’s significant symbolic capital, or if they are contributing their energies to help that capital grow. These conditions have produced some interesting tensions. For example, the cast of Chto Delat’s 2014 filmThe Excluded: In a Moment of Danger consists primarily of graduates of the school’s inaugural year (see Figure 12.1). Although filming began only weeks after the final work of the school, Chto Delat insisted that the film was its work alone. (The recent students were paid for their participation.) The film focuses on the marginalization of independent-thinking young people in Russia, and the young artists are positioned as typical examples of this class of Russian youth. Considering the sudden shift of agency in this project, it is not surprising that a few of the participants rebelled, criticizing the film in an open letter for using their ‘beautiful, young bodies’ to create the image of a ‘single organism’, cleansed of all internal contradictions. In other words, the authenticity that the young artists gave to Chto Delat (as young Russians) pushed them into a position of inauthenticity when it came to their individual performances (Open Left 2014).5 Such tensions may be grounds for criticizing the school, but they can also be seen as an articulation of its fundamental question – a question that strad- dles the aesthetic and the social. Within the school’s bounds the student- artists join the tutors and lecturers in a deeply intimate space of collective labour. Productive antagonisms abound in their discussions and creative work – always the hallmark of Chto Delat’s particular model of collectivity. But since the school is also an institution, it must invariably turn out- ward and face the public as well. At this incredibly fraught moment, all the 231

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 231 questions of performativity, delegation and spectatorship emerge. To the outside, the school appears as a single organism, presented as incredibly vulnerable, always under the threat of external violence or internal despair. But the collective never fails to re-emerge after this moment of alienation to repopulate the intimate space of the school or the house of culture. The moment of public exposure is merely staged, almost ritualized, and so the collective body is always able to return to what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as a community of shared finitude:

Sharing comes down to this: what community reveals to me […] is my existence outside myself. Which does not mean my existence is reinvested in or by community, as if community were another subject that would sublimate me, in a dialectical or communal mode. […] Being-in- common does not mean a higher form of substance or subject taking charge of the limits of separate individualities. (Nancy 1991: 15, 26–7)

The collective body survives precisely because it is not a single organism or a homogeneous collective subject. Each staged encounter with the hostile public is followed by a reaffirmation of the internal boundaries that define the collective’s true structure as shared finitude, a structure in which the students, tutors and their guests are mutually exposed to one another in an ongoing collaborative practice. It is useful to compare this dialectic of public and intimate exposure with recent Russian actionism. Here everything also turns on an encounter with the hostile public – whether as the police, who guard the public’s borders and norms; the state-sanctioned media, which defines its ideological scripts; or the ‘people’ themselves, who often engage the works directly – most proto- typically in the form of commentary to internet publications. On one level, this encounter is manifestly ‘real’, but it is also part of the artwork, as the public (the police, the media) are drawn into the action’s aesthetic space as a central structural element. At the same time, the collective body of resistance that confronts the public is always a mask – the anonymous anarcho-queer collective in Pussy Riot’s actions or the band of unruly outlaws in the work of the Voina (War) group. Meanwhile, the actual daily practices of these artists and the real communities in which they participate remain hidden in the underground.6 Thus, in so far as the action also addresses a counter-public, it does so only through a vague imperative to imitate the artists’ methods. Become an outlaw, put on a balaclava! But this imperative never went much further than the protests during the Pussy Riot trial. Indeed, Pavlenskii – who rose to prominence during these protests – no longer even gestures towards an underground collective, preferring instead to use his body as an allegory for the counter-public – silenced, mutilated and ultimately submissive to the oppressive regime or, in his more transgressive, utopian moments, rising up in flames of revolt.7 232

232 Jonathan Brooks Platt The Chto Delat school operates at a safer distance from the state machinery, and its tutors are much less optimistic about symbolic forms of heroic intervention. In The Excluded, the ninth scene (‘In which a Sublime Union of the Excluded is formed, but one of its members disrupts the harmony’) depicts the collective body of marginalized youth humming different tones to produce an ominous chord. One of their members then rises in discontent:

I feel good with you. But I can’t be happy when people out there suffer from injustice and perish in the war. To talk with society, it’s necessary to go to the people. That’s why I go out to protest alone – the only way it is allowed.

The final scenes of the film revolve around the beating the young protester receives after appearing on the streets with a sign that reads, ‘Russia Kills’.8 The group imagines all the different social types who might have attacked her, and the film closes with a long shot of the ‘public’ walking down St Petersburg’s Nevskii Prospect. In this scenario, society’s indifference to the school’s inchoate counter- public of resistance serves as the outer limit for the collective body. Any extension of this body or its individual parts across this limit means facing violence, since society’s indifference is always ready to explode into open hostility if its norms are transgressed more directly. And so the transgression is ritually staged, allowing the body to renew the intensity that gathers along its intimate, internal borders. This does not mean fragmentation into individualities. Much as the external view on the collective can never swallow up the intersubjective exposure it frames, the members of this intimate collective are not individuals but what Nancy calls singularities:

A singular being does not emerge or rise up against the background of a chaotic, undifferentiated identity of beings, or against the background of their unitary assumption, or that of a becoming, or that of a will. A singular being appears, as finitude itself: at the end (or at the beginning), with the contact of the skin (or the heart) of another singular being, at the confines of the same singularity that is, as such, always other, always shared, always exposed. (Nancy 1991: 27–8)

Indeed, shared exposure is not only a fitting description of Chto Delat’s pedagogical practice. It is also a key device in its films and learning plays. For example, one of Gasteva’s fundamental techniques involves placing one hand on your own body and one hand on the other’s – a perfect image of Nancy’s collective of singular beings. In this way, the public and the intimate are suspended in tense, dialectical interplay. Each approach to the threshold of violence re-founds the alternative institution and, most importantly, invites others to join its intimate practices. 233

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 233

Figure 12.1 Chto Delat, still from The Excluded. Courtesy of Chto Delat.

This is where ‘reality’ lies for them – in the community of shared finitude and its potential for creating a more sustainable counter-public.

Chto Delat and the dialectic of weakness and heroism The introduction of the Zoya project into this environment was bound to trigger conflicting reactions. On the one hand, there is the story of Zoya’s heroic act – podvig in Russian – in which she refuses to divulge information under torture but then finds the strength to address the villagers gathered to watch her execution with words of fiery resistance. This heroic image – mixing stoic silence with impassioned speech – resonates powerfully with the actionist tradition of risk-fraught public display. In other words, precisely the tradition the Chto Delat school is trying to move beyond. Yet, at the same time, the deep tenderness of Soviet depictions of Zoya – epitomized by Sergei Strunnikov’s photograph of her mutilated but beautiful corpse in Pravda – elicits a sense of intimacy at the threshold of death that recalls the school’s own collective projects. Before examining the results of our collaboration, it is important to note the central place of heroism in the work of Chto Delat itself. Founded in 2003, the group’s artistic core originally consisted of Dmitrii Vilenskii, the group’s producer and main ideological strategist; Nikolai Oleinikov, known for his militant, erotically charged graphic and textile works; and Gluklya and Tsaplya, who began their own intimate partnership as the Factory of Found Clothes (FFC) in 1995.9 In 2002, FFC announced a turn in their work 234

234 Jonathan Brooks Platt towards more social projects with a manifesto (subsequently printed in the first issue of the Chto Delat Newspaper) that declared that artists must take ‘the side of the weak’, engaging people in collaborations that ‘give birth to heroes’ (Chto Delat 2003). The dialectic of heroism and weakness (not unlike that of public and intimate exposure) has persisted as a guiding principle in Chto Delat’s work. Most importantly, it has inherited from FFC the concept of participatory art as a form of podvig, in which the group constructs conditions that allow student or non-artists to draw strength from their own precarious position within the social fabric and produce a political utterance that is at once collective and internally heterogeneous.10 Gasteva refers to this process as oriented on the ‘weak beat’ (slabaya dolya, the unaccented ‘back’ or ‘off’ beat) inside the participants’ personal rhythms. Related concerns occupy the group at the thematic level as well. For example, in their 2009 filmPartisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story, a monument to the communist militants of the Second World War comes to life in the form of a ghostly choir, or tragic chorus, urging a return to their noble ideals amid neo-liberal (racist, ageist, homophobic) efforts to ‘clean up’ Belgrade and make it an attractive site for investment (see Figure 12.2). The choir thus emerges from the monument – a traditional figure of national greatness and strength – as an impotent voice from the past, ever calling towards a utopian future, while lamenting that their great sacrifice is fast becoming meaningless. Chto Delat further developed its approach to heroism during the mass protests that ignited around the world in 2011. In a programmatic article in the Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal (Moscow Art Magazine), Vilenskii criticizes the

Figure 12.2 Chto Delat, still from Partisan Songspiel, A Belgrade Story, 2009. Courtesy of Chto Delat. 235

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 235 actionist practice of Voina for drawing on the tradition of the Russian holy fool. While Voina’s actions are undoubtedly successful, they are also dangerous, Vilenskii argues, since they eschew the reflective consciousness and deli- cate social work necessary for concrete political change. In the work of Voina, ‘it is clear that the only figure who can break the chains that bind us is an inhuman hero, someone who has turned his back on ‘the world’ of money, home, and language, someone garbed in sackcloth and mortifying his flesh’ (Vilenskii 2011: 72). In early 2013, Vilenskii and Tsaplya reasserted their own, more ambivalent position with regard to heroism in the lecture-performance, The Flaming Heart of Danko, or Looking for the Hero of Our Time. Here, the artists describe the tragic structure of their songspiels with a familiar twist. The tragic hero’s hubris is replaced by weakness:

In general, the heroes of our songspiels aren’t heroes at all. They’re just people, often weak people, whom we rouse to take up the position of heroes. We create situations for them in which they have to act and show their strength, which then gives material for the commentary of the chorus.

The artists go on to discuss various incarnations of modern heroes, from dictators to the anonymous protester, always flirting with the possibility that heroism has become an obsolete or, again, dangerous category. Tsaplya is the more reluctant to abandon the idea, referring to a powerful image from her Soviet childhood – the writer Maksim Gorkii’s character Danko from one of the tales in his 1894 ‘Old Woman Izergil’ series. Tsaplya paraphrases the Danko tale:

A long time ago there lived a people. But one day evil men came and drove the people from their historical lands deep into the dark forest. In this dark forest the people were frightened, lost, and they didn’t know what to do. Some of them even suggested selling themselves into slavery. But then Danko appeared (when I was a child I imagined him very young and beautiful). And he said: ‘I will lead you out of the dark forest. Follow me and don’t be afraid.’ And the people followed him. And the journey was long and arduous, and it soon became too much to bear. And then the people said: ‘We don’t want you anymore. We don’t believe in you anymore. We’re going to kill you.’ And then Danko tore his heart from his breast and raised it above his head. And this heart burned like a torch and lit the way. And Danko led his people to a wonderful meadow where the sun was shining and the birds were singing and the flowers bloomed. The people ran out onto the meadow, and Danko fell down and died.

Tsaplya recognizes the problems such images create in contemporary conditions, but she is still enthralled by their romantic power. This now takes on a 236

236 Jonathan Brooks Platt negative or, perhaps, ‘weak’ form of longing – toska in Russian – which carries a broad semantic range including boredom, melancholy, pining and anguish:

This is how we lived (or, more precisely, this is how ideology assumed we should live), always ready for a podvig. And, taught by Gorkii, we thought that a podvig is a great form of overcoming oneself, one’s weakness and finitude. By overcoming the fear of death, you cast a challenge to fate, to your small place in life. In the moment of the podvig a human being is equal to his or her true self. And despite the fact that progressive humanity has decided to reject the idea of the podvig, there remains a longing [toska] for that lofty realization of the self. (Chto Delat 2013)

During our discussions about the Zoya project in the spring of 2014, Tsaplya and Vilenskii presented the lecture-performance to their students. The tutors were clearly uneasy about it, describing the performance as possibly already out of date – a sentiment that reflected the darkening mood in both Russia and around the world.11 At the same time, Chto Delat was planning a new film about the nineteenth-century revolutionary Ippolit Myshkin. Myshkin interested the group as a model of what they call the ‘unlucky’ or ‘failed’ hero (geroi-neudachnik), a militant subject who displays incredible passion and will but who receives too little support from the people they are trying to liberate. Ultimately, this is a more tragic version of the Danko tale, emphasizing the last moments of Gorkii’s story, left out of Tsaplya’s retelling in the Flaming Heart lecture. After Danko dies,

the people, joyous and full of hope, did not notice his death and did not see the brave heart still smouldering beside Danko’s corpse. Only one careful man noticed it and, afraid of something, stamped on the proud heart with his foot … And so, it broke apart into sparks and went out. (Gorkii 1968: 96)

Such unhappy ends mark the ‘weak beat’ of the hero’s rhythm, which preserves the humanity of the podvig and prevents it from growing cold in the bronze of a monument. The Myshkin film was never realized, however. Tsaplya says they did not simply abandon the project; rather, the more urgent questions of the present forced a transformation of the historical subject. For example, one element of the Myshkin film involved building a monument to the unlucky hero in the form of a giant ear. Such a monument then became the centrepiece of The Excluded. But the historical past only appears in The Excluded in a few select moments: when the young actors ‘register’ their position in time and space, one of Gasteva’s techniques in which the performer marks their spatial and/or temporal distance from a past or future event; when they inscribe ‘points of no return’ on the wall of the set (the violent dispersal of Russian 237

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 237 protesters on 6 May 2012, the terrorist act in the Nord-Ost Theatre in October 2002, etc.); and in short narratives about the performers’ personal unlucky heroes – Antonio Gramsci, Guy Fawkes, Ulrike Meinhoff, Andrei Sakharov and others, including Myshkin. While these moments in the film ensure that its abstract mise en scène remains charged with historicity, the idea of a fuller treatment of a specific episode or figure from the historical past remained on the shelf. The performance at the monument to Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya took place precisely at the moment Chto Delat was moving away from the Myshkin project towards The Excluded. Our own insistence on a historical subject proved to be highly controversial, perhaps indicating a certain blockage in the school’s relationship to the Russian revolutionary tradition and its distorted post-revolutionary development.

A place for militancy? Enter Zoya My collaboration with Gluklya and Sofia Akimova on the Zoya project began in July 2013, when we made a series of trips to Moscow and Tambov to visit various centres for the preservation of Zoya’s memory: Osino-Gai, the village where she was born; her school in the Voikovskii region in Moscow; and the site of her execution in the village of Petrishchevo. By April 2014, the original context in which we began the project had drastically changed. Russia was now effectively at war with Ukraine, and its propaganda machine was in overdrive, deploying a stream of symbols from the Second World War to frame the hostilities as a renewal of the struggle with fascism. As a result, our appeal to the Chto Delat students to join our engagement with Zoya’s image came with great ambivalence and risk. If rebel ‘volunteer’ units in the Donbass were only distinguishing their uniforms with the St George Ribbon, which has become the main symbol of the 1945 victory, and if the Russian media were repeatedly referring to the new Ukrainian government as ‘Banderovites’ (Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis), there seemed to be little hope that an artistic statement could salvage any of the authentic historical power of the first Soviet generation’s defeat of the Third Reich. In the discussions that preceded the performance, we addressed the historical issues that inform my scholarly interest in Kosmodemyanskaya: the militant socialist tradition and its exhaustion in the exterminatory violence of the Nazi–Soviet war (Platt 2013). However, the central focus clearly fell on the urgencies of the present day. Several students were close to rejecting the assignment, calling the theme of heroism reactionary and all patriotic symbols repulsive. Many rejected the notion that Zoya’s podvig displays any fidelity to the revolutionary event of 1917, arguing that she was nothing but a brainwashed fanatic, closer to today’s suicide bombers than nineteenth- century militants like Vera Zasulich, who fought for a universal emancipatory truth. A good part of the latter discussion revolved around the dubiousness 238

238 Jonathan Brooks Platt of Zoya’s actions, particularly her role in Stalin’s scorched-earth policy, burning villages in the occupied territories west of Moscow. Despite these tense debates, we went forward with the performance. Gluklya asked the students to make dolls of Zoya, which they would then bring – as a kind of offering – to Matvei Manizer’s monument to the diversionist in Victory Park. Although many of the students rejected this idea, the significance of the gesture was clear. Gluklya hoped to shift the public monument towards the more ‘archaic’ spheres of fetishism, voodoo, child’s play, ritual and theatre. In this way, we would soften the statue’s hard phallic authority, introducing flexibility and the potential for directed motion. In typical FFC fashion, the power asymmetry between the statue’s sublimity and our own weakness would be inverted – invoking the very different, more matriarchal, horizontal and quotidian authority of sympathetic magic and its interventions into the uncanny. The assignment also actualized existing tensions in the site. Manizer’s statue depicts Zoya in a heroic pose – clenched fist, striding boot, rifle slung over her shoulder, eyes steely and determined – eschewing her alternative image as the feminine victim of Nazi atrocities (as in the barefoot Petrishchevo statue). This militant figure is somewhat out of place in the park, however. Standing beside a pond, hidden from the bustling Moscow Avenue by tree-lined alleys and playgrounds, the statue is not a meeting place for fiery demonstrations and speeches. Instead, the site is contemplative, suited mostly for individual encounters, even if the size of the statue and the height of its pedestal require one to look up, while Zoya gazes into the sublime distance of her podvig. It is also significant that Victory Park was built on the site of a brick factory that was converted into as a mass crematorium during the Leningrad blockade. The monument’s link to funerary sculpture and its traditional function of domesticating death is thus taken to the extreme. In contrast to the soul-wrenching memorial that marks the mass graves at the Piskarevskoe Cemetery, in Victory Park the horrors of the blockade are thoroughly veiled by representations of military glory. The performance thus revolved around the tension between Manizer’s monument and what it veils and domesticates in the context of Victory Park: the conceptually unwieldy and, for many of the students, emotionally irredeemable realities of exterminatory war. The statue marked a place of fixity, order and consummation in death and memory – but also silence and the shadow cast by power over the living, forcing them into a subaltern position of chaos and precarity. If public monuments transform dead flesh into bronze permanence and then gather the living, ever-renewable attention of the collective around it, alienation from this process endows the monument with a vampiric quality. One of the Chto Delat students, Anna Isidis, offered a ‘doll’ that brutally illustrated this effect – a paper cut-out of a zombie Zoya, disem- bowelled to reveal the Young Pioneer children she has devoured. Overall, the students presented individuated performative gestures that could not be subsumed into a single utterance. Nonetheless, taken together, 239

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 239 these gestures traversed a continuum of possible reactions to Zoya’s statue in the specificity of its spatial and temporal context, elaborating the question at the core of the performance: what does the Soviet militant mean to us today? At one extreme, there were gestures like that of Isidis, which addressed the statue from a position of total alienation. Ilya Yakovenko took the most aggressive posture, facing the statue and shouting at it, associating Manizer’s image with the current patriotic fervour propagated in Russia. By ironically thanking Zoya for Russia’s current ‘anti-fascist’ campaign of imperial expansion, he made it clear that appeals to great-power nostalgia typically run slip- shod over history. Leaving a small bundle of notes about Zoya’s ‘union with the absolute’, Maria Maraeva described how the bronze militant’s life in the ‘kingdom of order’ is incompatible with the false starts, rough drafts, sketches and revisions of the artistic process. Viktoria Kalinina was among those who took up the suggestion to make a doll, crafting a faceless, footless image of a female corpse adorned with a mock crucifix – a screw tied to a noose made by Anna Tereshkina, symbolizing the image of Zoya as a mere ‘screw’ in the totalitarian machine. Kalinina accompanied her doll with a poem, which again questioned the black-and-white simplicity of historical myths – specifically, the version of Zoya’s story in which she withstands torture, but one of her comrades gives her up to the Nazis to save his own life. This narrative was particularly compelling in the spring of 2014, when Putin was warning of a ‘fifth column’ of ‘national traitors’. Kalinina ironically sides with such rhetoric in her poem:

Don’t give anyone up, and you are a hero. Climbing up on the scaffold, The anti-fascist battle … Time will have its reckoning! Time will have its reckoning! Time will show who is one of us. The traitor will be damned. Don’t give anyone up, and you are a hero.

Each of these three performances thus strove to problematize the interpretive matrix that reduces the complexities of war to simple oppositions – conviction and doubt, hero and traitor, friend and foe. Significantly, however, none disturbed the power differential between monument and man. Instead they confirmed it from a position of alienated pessimism. Another group of gestures formulated an alienated address less as a challenge to the statue and more as a way to reveal problems in the present. As a result, they allowed for the possibility of a rapprochement with the sculptural image – albeit on their own terms. Natalya Tseluba made a rough bed in the grass in front of the monument, resting her head on a stack of books about Zoya and the war. Responding to the statue’s indifference with her own sleepiness, she thus transformed the asymmetrical relation into a comment on 240

240 Jonathan Brooks Platt

Figure 12.3 Chto Delat School of Engaged Art (directed by Natalya Pershina- Yakimanskaya/Gluklya), Prop from Becoming Zoya (text: ‘I regret nothing’ and ‘Maybe I carried out this savage order of Stalin in vain’). Courtesy of Chto Delat.

human resilience and spaces of comfort at the edges of power. Olga Kuracheva positioned two ‘Zoya-believers’ – myself and Nikolai Oleinikov – across from one another in front of the statue, each holding a card that undermined our fidelity with ambivalence. On one side, Zoya appears – through the image of her ecstatic corpse – as a relentless militant hero. On the other side – now a fragmentary collage of Zoya as a schoolgirl before the war – she appears as a tool of Stalinist cruelty, who might have thought twice about obeying the order to burn villages, driving Soviet citizens into the cold along with the occupying forces. Kuracheva’s oscillation between the two positions – identifying with each in turn as we rotated the cards – culminated in a silent, tearful gaze up at the statue (see Figure 12.3). While these two performances appropriated the stasis of the monument, or allowed it to suppress their own potential movement, Liya Gusein-Zade expressed her own ambivalence by bringing movement into dialectical tension with monumental fixity. As she vainly lit match after match in the wind, hop- ing to feel the hot cinders on her fingers (referring again to Zoya’s mission), a crowd began to gather not around the statue but in a disorderly mass in front of it. Abandoning the matches, Gusein-Zade began pushing the inert collective toward the pond behind the monument, as if impelling us to embrace militant self-abnegation. In this way the gesture dramatically realized the metaphorical 241

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 241

Figure 12.4 Chto Delat School of Engaged Art (directed by Natalya Pershina- Yakimanskaya/Gluklya), still from Looking for Zoya, I. Courtesy of Chto Delat.

semantics of the word podvig (etymologically related to the verb ‘to move’), and the desperate shuffling and strain of this awkward movement provided a stark contrast to the stillness and poise of Manizer’s image (see Figure 12.4). A final group of performances abandoned the position of alienation for identification, reducing the tension between motion and fixity until each complemented the other. Natalya Nikulenkova interpolated Zoya’s podvig into a narrative of personal history, telling the story of her great-grandmother’s sacrifice of a beloved shirt – the only possession saved from a burning house – to bind the wounded leg of a soldier during the war. As Natasha laboriously made a rag-doll at the base of the statue from her own shirt, embroidered with the word ‘Antifa’, she forged a link between Zoya’s militant violence and the life-preserving acts of self-sacrifice performed by so many other participants in the war. Karina Shcherbakova scattered sugar around the pedestal and offered a bag of the commodity – always coveted in wartime – as her doll of Zoya. The white sugar transformed the snow of Zoya’s torments during her barefoot march into an image of ‘the sweet life’ promised to the victors. Finally, Sofia Akimova marked out the eighty tortured steps Zoya took to the gallows from the peasant’s hut in which she was interrogated. Dropping a piece of black bread – the antipode of Karina’s refined sugar – for each step, Akimova produced an ephemeral (disappearing as pigeons erased the steps), emotional supplement to the statue’s steely fixity (seeFigure 12.5). Along this continuum from irony and frustration to sympathy and identification, a specific tension recurred again and again. Each performative gesture in its own way sought to oppose or at least soften the authoritative stillness of the statue with figures of motion and temporality, uncertainty and disor- derliness. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms the performances punctured the statue’s ‘encirclement’ (okruzhenie) with the energies of a living ‘horizon’ (krugozor). As living beings, we act within the limits of a specific horizon – weighing risks, 242

242 Jonathan Brooks Platt

Figure 12.5 Chto Delat School of Engaged Art (directed by Natalya Pershina- Yakimanskaya/Gluklya), still from Looking for Zoya, II. Courtesy of Chto Delat.

making decisions, anticipating a future of meaning (what our life ‘will have meant’), all based on the internal directedness of our activity. But the future of meaning can only exist outside our horizon – in the past, as perceived from the perspective of an encircling, consuming gaze. This contradiction can be a source of both freedom and alienation, since the final meaning of my life and actions can and must always be deferred. You cannot tell me who I am and what my life means until all my inner force is exhausted. The meaning of ‘my’ life is never really mine, since it is ultimately only accessible from a position beyond my death (Bakhtin 1990). Zoya’s monument stands encircled, full of meaning, but it also stands in place of the living, now dead, eighteen-year- old girl, closing her horizon. The statue does not expect to be challenged by the living people who approach it in the park. Rather, their task is to honour Zoya’s memory, supplementing the statue’s fixity with their living motion, in turn borrowing its meaning as a rhythmic ideological supplement to their own risk-fraught life. The statue anchors a homogeneous, collective identity with the great moment it symbol- izes. Meanwhile the collective that gathers around the statue endows it with a surrogate horizon – a metaphorical afterlife in collective memory. The performance as a whole remained faithful to the Chto Delat school’s interpretation of public exposure – the moment of encirclement – not as the consummation of a collective but as the reaffirmation of its intimacy within an evolving, risk-fraught horizon. The students thus preserved Nancy’s sense of community as the sharing of finitude, rather than its reinvestment 243

The Chto Delat school for engaged art 243 by some higher subject – be it the nation, empire, or ‘socialism in one country’. At the same time, however, only Gusein-Zade addressed the logic of the podvig and its specific relation between horizon and encirclement, which in fact inverts the monumentalist logic of ideological myth. Working at a remove from the statue, Gusein-Zade depicted the collective as the static body and the militant as the one seeking to introduce motion and risk, insisting on the potential for change and emergent meaning. To actualize this inversion requires a decision, an existential leap of volition, seizing a moment of exceptional danger in which the subject is confronted with an irrevocable, world-defining threat, announcing a time of reckoning here and now. The subject’s living force persists through this moment as if she is paradoxically encircled with meaning and yet still moving through the limited horizon of her life. Gorkii’s story of Danko offers another powerful image of this moment of decision. The lost tribe is about to slip away from the moment of danger into slavery when Danko seizes the moment and makes his decision. By ripping out his burning heart and holding it aloft, Danko effectively splits in two. He embraces the tension between horizon and encirclement and takes control of it through inversion, making his living power – the burning heart – into a sign full of meaning. He dies on reaching the end of the forest, but this is no mere expiration of life. It is the closure of a space of death that has been traversed and transformed, claimed and authored as his own. However, the collective addressed by any podvig is only offered the fact and image of this decision – which ideally, as in the case of Danko, deliv- ers them from the moment of danger and removes the conditions in which such a decision can be made. The collective is left then with a weaker variant of the decision. They can immortalize Danko as a monument, domesticating the power of his podvig and its uncanny inversion of horizon and encirclement. Or they can remain faithful to it, facing the new conditions it produces from its own unsettling perspective, rejecting any collapse into the old stability. In Gorkii’s story, the collective chooses neither of these options and indifferently stamps out the fire of Danko’s heart. The result is that the reader’s sympathy for Danko allows a secondary, allegorical level of fidelity, in which the collective prepares itself for such decisive moments in the future. This is the model of weak or unlucky heroism that has been so important in the practice of Chto Delat, as it was in that of FFC before them. One can say that it represents a kind of compromise with the podvig, allowing the artists to resist ideological monuments and preserve the conditions of intimate exposure for a moment of decision to come. In this way it recalls the distinction between what Walter Benjamin calls a ‘weak Messianic’ moment and the authentic revolutionary event – the ‘strait gate’ of radical rupture through which the Messiah enters (Benjamin 1969: 254, 264). The unlucky hero model also reflects Chto Delat’s honest and pragmatic attitude to the political efficacy of art. Yes, we are already in a moment of danger, a state of emergency, but 244

244 Jonathan Brooks Platt until the counter-public of resistance finally gathers into a critical mass, there is no subjective decision to be made. So, instead of merely staging the podvig in the hopes of inspiring imitation, as actionism does, the Chto Delat school remains within the transversal zone of art, studying its communist desire. But our Zoya performance asked the students to consider the paradoxical moment of the podvig more closely. It could not invoke the logic of the unlucky hero, since Zoya was of course ‘lucky’ in the sense that her podvig became a triumphant, monumental myth. As a result, the performance consisted primarily of more or less iconoclastic efforts to resist the statue’s encirclement and its asymmetrical relation to the students’ living horizons. At the same time, despite Gluklya’s clear intention to evoke the dialectic of weakness and heroism, her doll assignment led the students into individuated engage- ments with the statue, breaking up the shared finitude they were developing in the school. The performance challenged the Chto Delat school’s intimacy in other ways as well. As discussed above, the school runs all the risks that haunt participatory, pedagogical art projects, particularly that of delegated performance. Although their exploration of the dialectic of intimate and public exposure largely exonerates them from such accusations, one can still argue that their methods block the volition that might produce an authentic podvig, positioning the students as victims of an indifferent or hostile public. When the students face the public – especially when they do so as representatives of frustrated, marginalized Russian youth – they have no access to the inversion of horizon and encirclement that defines thepodvig and its decision. All their energies are directed towards problematizing encirclement and protect- ing their shared horizons from premature closure. This blockage of volition came to the fore in our performance, which could also be seen as involving elements of delegation. Even though the Chto Delat students produced their own individual gestures, whether embracing the doll assignment or not, the awkwardness of this individuation brought into relief their status as ‘young, politically engaged Russians’ – something that was useful to both Gluklya’s film and my scholarly work. At the same time, it totally defused the dialectic of intimate and public exposure. And this is arguably what was most interesting about our intervention into the school’s practice. By confronting the students with the concept of the podvig, we revealed how the school’s emphasis on intimacy protects its students not only from the hostile public but also from the political alienation and frustration that besets them as a potential collective subject or the militant vanguard of that potential subject. In our performance this protection was removed, releasing a range of emotions, rather than carefully crafted conceptual statements. And all partook of the general negative effect – longing for the time of decision. There, beyond death’s encirclement, the uncanny horizon of the podvig opens up, and the exposed singularities of the collective body embrace volition to become a revolutionary subject. 245

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Notes

1 Two recent actionist projects, Silent Picket (2016) by Darya Serenko and Punishment (2016) by Ekaterina Nenasheva, both of whom trained as poets at the Literary Institute in Moscow, have been widely discussed on social media. Significantly, however, these projects more closely resemble street activism than the sophisticated aesthetic statements of the actionist tradition. 2 They have, by my count, been forced to move their operations five times over the course of only two and a half years. 3 Documentation of the performance was included in Gluklya’s film,Looking for Zoya, first screened at the conference, ‘ “No Radical Art Actions Are Going to Help Here…”: Political Violence and Militant Aesthetics after Socialism’, which I curated for Manifesta 10’s Public Programme in September 2014. 4 The orientation on Freire also represents the polemical resistance of the currently more popular model of radical equality in Rancière (1991). 5 Red Thug. 6 For example, the Voina group lived without money, by squatting, shoplifting and depending on the hospitality of friends to survive. Shoplifting frequently appears in their actions, but only in exaggerated form, as the daring crimes of a mythic band of outlaws. At the same time, this image hides the often destructive effects of the group’s unruly, underground lifestyle on the oppositional community, which frequently found itself attacked by Voina for failing to live up to its radical principles. 7 Pavlenskii’s peculiar experiments in family life with his partner and collaborator, Oksana Shalygina, have recently been the subject of several press reports, but these are presented as glimpses into the underground. 8 The sign plays on the warning printed on cigarette packets, ‘smoking kills’. Since June 2012, solitary pickets have been the only form of legal protest in Russia that does not require advance approval from the authorities. 9 Gluklya and Tsaplya produced their last work as FFC in 2013. Tsaplya began devoting her time more exclusively to Chto Delat in 2008, at which point Gluklya became FFC’s driving force and, after partially emigrating to Holland, became less involved in the day-to-day practice of Chto Delat. 10 Tsaplya interview. 11 Recall that the Donbass War was part of a general turn to state violence that included violent clashes in Egypt, Turkey and Brazil in 2013, as well as the escalat- ing Syrian Civil War.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail (1990) ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, trans. Vadim Liapunov, in Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (eds.), Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, pp. 4–256. Benjamin, Walter (1969) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, pp. 253–64. Bishop, Claire (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, New York: Verso. 246

246 Jonathan Brooks Platt Chto Delat (2003) ‘Manifest Fabriki Naidennykh Odezhdy’, Newspaper, 1. —— (2013) ‘Goryashchee serdtse Danko ili v poiskakh geroya nashego vremeni’, unpublished script for lecture/performance. —— (2015) Back to School: A Chto Delat Reader on Performative Education. Available at https://chtodelat.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/back-to-school-full.pdf. —— (2016) Zachem stanovitsya khudozhnikom: Opyt shkoly vovlechennogo iskusstva. Available at https://issuu.com/dmitryvilensky/docs/ Freire, Paulo (1968) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos, New York: Seabury Press. Gorkii, Maksim (1968) Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. I. Moscow: Nauka. Lidov, Petr (1942) ‘Tanya’, Pravda, 27 January. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991) The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press. Open Left (2014) ‘V teni bolshogo dereva’, 6 November. Available at http://openleft. ru/?p=4613. Platt, Jonathan Brooks (2013) ‘Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya mezhdu istrebleniem i zhertvoprinesheniem’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 124 (6): 54–78. —— (2018) ‘Hysteria or Enjoyment?: Recent Russian Actionism’, in Birgit Beumers, Alexander Etkind, Olga Gurova and Sanna Turoma (eds.), Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 141–59. Rancière, Jacques (1991) The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Vilenskii, Dmitrii (2011) ‘Kritika “zhivogo romanticheskogo obraza”: Kommentarii k vzaimootnosheniyu novogo aktsionizma i iskusstva v Rossii’, Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal, 81: 71–5. 247

13 A dilemma for the contemporary artist The ‘revolutionary pessimism’ of Roman Osminkin

Mark Lipovetsky

Roman Osminkin (b. 1979) is one of the most prominent poetic voices from within the cultural opposition to Putin’s political system. Osminkin has written four books of poetry and produced several dozen performances, typically based on his texts. He is a member of the Laboratory of Poetic Actionism and of the Russian socialist movement. He actively participated in the anti-Putin protests of 2011–12; for example, he was one of the activists in Occupy Abai, the Moscow equivalent of the Occupy Wall Street movement. A graduate student at the Russian Institute of Art History, he has published his poetry and manifestoes in such journals as Translit and Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, among many others. In 2016, his bilingual book Not a Word about Politics, with new texts and excellent translations into English, was published by the New York based Cicada Press. Osminkin’s political activism paired with his interest in poetry, performance and theory designate him as almost an exemplary indicator of the internal problems that characterize the current period’s nonconformism. As I try to demonstrate below, Osminkin’s poetry employs two aesthetic and discursive models at the same time, each of which is politically charged. One of these models directly continues the legacy of Moscow conceptualism, and especially its leading poet and theorist Dmitrii Prigov (1940–2007). His other major influence comes from the Left Front of the Arts in the 1920s (LEF), which aimed to establish a new hegemony through a system of cultural practices. I trace the interaction between these two discourses in Osminkin’s poetry and some of his performative works (video art). I discuss the internal conflict characteristic of Osminkin’s work, essential for a political discourse, which he defines as ‘pessimistic enthusiasm’ for the revolution, and which I believe reflects more than just his personal position.

Engagement with Prigov and Moscow conceptualism Osminkin’s engagement with Dmitrii Prigov’s legacy is diverse, open and self- conscious. This dialogue concerns both the formal elements (from genres to intonation) and the conceptual aspects of Prigov’s poetry. Many of Osminkin’s poems read as variations on Prigov’s famous themes or declaratively bear the 248

248 Mark Lipovetsky mark of Prigov’s style and playfully emphasize this connection. For example, the poem Vot slavyane i tatary (You Know the Slavs and the Tatars) has a subtitle Rechitativ – podrazhanie Prigovu (Chant in imitation of Prigov) (Osminkin 2016: 123–6) and dialogically variegates Prigov’s famous poem Kulikovo. An entire cycle ‘Teksty s pretenziei na formalnyi eksperiment’ (‘Texts That Claim to Be Formal Experiments’) (Osminkin 2016: 199–223) resembles similar word games by Prigov. Even Osminkin’s ironic self-designation as ‘Roman Sergeevich’ in third-person narratives about himself posted on Facebook is reminiscent of Prigov’s ‘formal’ self-nomination as ‘Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov’. Osminkin’s manifestoes also resonate with Prigov’s conceptualization of performatism as an integral language for the manifestation of contemporary cultural presence. Prigov famously claimed that:

for me, all forms of my [artistic] activity belong to a larger project entitled ‘DAP’ – Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov. Inside this integral project, all of my texts and performances assume slightly different roles than taken sep- arately. In fact, they function as pointers to the central zone from which they all originate. In this sense, they are just simple byproducts of the activity of this central phantom. (Dobrenko et al. 2010: 74)

Similarly, Osminkin likens verbal and behavioral gestures and argues that when transposed into a poetic discourse, every thought inevitably transforms into ‘a performance of thinking’. Performative thinking serves as the foundation for his understanding of poetic actionism: ‘Poetic actionism is a secular- ized ritual chanting whereas politics as ritual and chanting has transformed into a public artistic gesture’ (Osminkin 2012: 7). Within this logic and following Prigov’s lead, Osminkin envisages the poet’s self-erasure from a poetic utterance and interprets this strategy as a path towards:

direct democracy of the word, wherein all conventional language gestures are registered. The word ceases to function as just a representation tool of a defective (ущербный) act, whereas the action operates as the trigger or motive for the word. The word and the action obtain equally real status – equity – the comradeship of the word and deed, which cannot be reduced to each other and cannot exist without each other. (Osminkin 2012: 7)

Osminkin’s expression: ‘conventional language gestures’ references Prigov’s quotation, which he uses as an epigraph for the essay O metode (On Method): ‘I think that the most democratic literature is not the one eligible for all, but the one that takes into consideration all conventional language gestures’ (Noskov 2012). 249

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 249

Influence from the Left Front of the 1920s Another important system of references in Osminkin’s works is leftist theoretical concepts. In the same manifesto, On Method, Osminkin quotes Walter Benjamin’s characterization of Sergei Tretyakov as the ‘operating writer’ epitomizing ‘functional interdependency […] between the correct political tendency and progressive literary technique […] His mission is not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively’ (Osminkin 2012: 64). Benjamin’s concept of the ‘operating writer’ (Benjamin 1978: 223) directly resonated with the concept of life-construction (zhiznestroitelstvo), which Tretyakov and his protégé Nikolai Chuzhak, along with other critics of the 1920s Left Front, including Viktor Shklovskii, had been developing in the late 1920s, and which can now be defined as a politically engaged performatism. Notably, while promoting this concept Tretyakov worked as the kolkhoz organizer, and Chuzhak listed materials from the infamous Shakhtinskoe affair trial of 1928 in his programmatic article, ‘Literature of Life-Construction’, which is among the most prominent examples of such literature. The association between the LEF’s ‘life-construction’ and the activities, including terror, sponsored by the Soviet state is quite obvious. For the LEF theorists, the ‘operating writer’ can confront the public but never the communist authorities. Although Tretyakov declares the need ‘to involve all the masses in the “creative” process, which until recently remained a sanctimonious area for the select few’ (Chuzhak 2000: 216), he never suggests that this creative process should transcend or even question the ideology in power. For him, life-construction’s main purpose is to regurgitate, develop and adopt the ruling ideology by means of art in the everyday setting. In his article Novyi Lev Tolstoi (New Lev Tolstoy, 1927), he postulates the full and unquestionable priority of the party and its ideology over any individual visions and concepts: ‘It would be ridiculous for a writer-loner to think about his philosophic hegemony next to the collective brain of the revolution [i.e. the Party]’ (Chuzhak 2000: 30–1). This is why for Tretyakov and his followers, the concepts of the ‘literature of fact’ and ‘life-construction’ imply the utilization of art and the artistic personality as ‘the tools of direct business-like influence’ (pryamoe delovoe vozdeistvie). Of what and on to what? Certainly, of the state ideology and on to social reality. In other words, the LEF concept of political performatism sets as its goal the formation of the hegemonic culture, its ‘language’ (through art) and its ‘speech acts’ (through art-driven practices). Naturally, such a programme can be accomplished only with the full support of the authorities. When the LEF concept is applied to Osminkin’s poetic actionism, one cannot fail to notice significant discrepancies along with some, no less significant, similarities. He and his circle of like-minded writers and philosophers united by their interest in leftist theory, a circle that includes Aleksander Skidan, Pavel Arsenev, Kirill Medvedev and Artemii Magun, also seek to create poetry that intends to produce a direct, affective influence on political 250

250 Mark Lipovetsky reality. Osminkin strives to create his own version of the ‘literature of fact’. This is obvious even from the titles of some of his poems: ‘A Poem Recited by the Prison at Lebedeva Street During the Hunger Strike of the Petersburg Activist Filipp Kostenko’, ‘Poem-Manifesto for the Movement Occupy Abai’ or ‘Jesus Saves Pussy Riot: A Song Written in Support of the Feminist Group Pussy Riot on March 8, 2012, Which They Celebrated in Prison.’ It could be that the LEF ideas are significant for Osminkin as strategies to escape from the ‘intelligentsia ghetto’, or, in other words, to appeal to a more broad readership. The LEF offers a wide spectrum of technologies for performative art that transcends textuality, is inscribed into the particular situation and involves the author in unscripted interaction with the audience. Nonetheless, despite all his kinship to the LEF, Osminkin can hardly swear allegiance to the authorities. His position is consistently countercultural, which explains his reliance on Prigov’s and Moscow conceptualism’s legacy. Much like them, he is seeking weapons against authoritative discourses and authoritarian politics. Osminkin would have subscribed to Prigov’s definition of the intellectual (especially after the collapse of communism) as ‘a being specially bred for the testing and experimentation of the durability of all possible myths and discourses of power. Like, for example, a dog trained to sniff out narcotics’ (Prigov 2007: 212–13).

The dilemma Thus, Osminkin attempts to cross-breed two models of performativity: the model represented by the LEF, which aimed to establish a new hegemony through a system of practices, on the one hand; and a model that undermines and disperses existing cultural hegemony and discourses with an ambition for hegemony through the mockery of mundane cultural practices informed by a given hegemonic discourse, on the other. Osminkin’s mediation between these two modes of performativity appears as an illuminating representation of the paradox indicative of the contemporary political/cultural situation in Russia. Osminkin’s position therefore demonstrates the dilemma of the contemporary Russian intellectual. This dilemma consists of either continuing to struggle, this time against Putin’s conservative cultural hegemony, using the subversive methods that proved effective in the 1970s–1980s, or, in the knowledge that this strategy failed to prevent the return of authoritarianism, adopting Soviet methods for the establishment of one’s own cultural hegemony, formally and discursively modelled after the Soviet one. Yet the effects of Soviet cultural hegemony are also well known and not forgotten by the poet. How successful are his efforts to fuse early Soviet avant-garde wedded to Soviet ideology with late Soviet as well as post-Soviet conceptualism and its strong anti-authoritarian and countercultural clout? Osminkin discusses one of the principles behind such a fusion in his essay ‘On Method’. If the LEF reserved for literature and other forms of art a role as one of the mechanisms in the industrialized construction of socialism, 251

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 251 Osminkin assigns to poetry the role of an ‘idler’ or ‘loafer’ – an element uniquely able to create a gap in the industry-like production of new meanings and concepts characteristic of the post-industrial society: ‘ “Homeless” subjects, excluded (frequently against their will) from the unitarian mass body, may find a place, while recognizing themselves, in these new language forms’ (Osminkin 2012: 60). In practice, however, the outcome of this experiment looks more problematic. Consider, for example, Osminkin’s video performance Kommunizm ne ideal (Communism Is Not an Ideal), in which the poet, in a mundane if not meager setting, sings the following text:1

Communism isn’t an ideal. Communism is who you’ve slept with today. Communism is who you’ve eaten with today. Communism is the freedom of bodies […] Communism isn’t an ideal. Communism is the book you’ve just read. Communism is the friends you’ve made. Communism is the struggle of ideas […] Communism isn’t an ideal. Communism is where you’ve aimed your [Molotov] cocktail. Communism is who you’ve sung to today. Communism is the movement of deeds. (Osminkin 2016: 118–21, trans. Olga Bulatova and Anastasiya Osipova)

This series of poetic definitions conflates the orthodox idea of communism as a ‘struggle of ideas’ with the much more subversive ‘freedom of bodies’. Osminkin simultaneously presents communism as wide open for anyone, since it appears to be embedded in the mundane everyday and isolated from outsiders by the enigmatic interpretation of an elusive meaning of the central term. It is possible to read this vision of communism as a dialogue with Prigov, who used to find the significance of the complex network of performative manifestations in an elusive ‘central subject’ that is constantly rewritten and reinvented through the process of its significations. This central subject, in Prigov’s poetry, is born as a common denominator of various alienated discourses playfully deconstructed and appropriated by the author. Osminkin paradoxically replaces Prigov’s ‘central phantom’ with communism. As a result, communism is transformed into a performative category, the meaning of which changes with each mundane gesture by the author – from cooking to posing with a naked torso. Another example of Osminkin’s attempts to synthesize the LEF’s and conceptualists’ strategies can be seen in his video Lyubi svoyu rodinu, synok (Love Your Motherland, Dear Son).2 To the accompaniment of the energetic beat and the poet’s rap-like singing, the viewer is immersed in a montage of images 252

252 Mark Lipovetsky from Soviet documentaries. One layer of these images epitomizes endless optimism, enthusiasm and the world of plenty. On the other layer, the viewer may (or may not) recognize images of Stalin at Lenin’s funeral in sequence with Osip and Lilia Brik next to Mayakovskii’s coffin. In Osminkin’s text for this video, a narrative of the great Soviet past peppered with imperative demands to love the socialist motherland and productive labor in a Christian way, also incorporates the names of Shalamov, Blok, Belyi and Esenin, who can hardly stand as icons of communist ideology:

Love your motherland, dear son Here Bely duelled with Blok Yesenin managed to hang himself Shalamov sat out his sentence. (Osminkin 2016: 194–5, trans. Jason Cieply)

Apparently, this video performance seeks to mock the recent version of Soviet patriotism, which has absorbed both the Russian Orthodox Church’s rhetoric and Soviet marches – a combination typical of Putin’s version of conservatism. This concept of patriotism also includes the Soviet regime’s creators and perpetrators of terror (later digested by its machinery) in the pantheon of the regime’s iconic victims as equally important proofs of past greatness. The satirical mockery of hegemonic ideology does not, however, prevent the possibility of interpreting Osminkin’s video in a different way: as an enthusiastic and modernized ‘leftist rap’ promoting the official ideological discourse. Tellingly, the author defines the genre of his text as ‘ambivalent rock about the benefit and the poverty of national identity’ (Osminkin 2016: 191). The reason for this confusion lays not in the conceptualist-like ‘shimmering’ – Osminkin’s ideological position does not leave any doubt about his radical confrontation with Putin’s neo-conservatism. Nonetheless, neither in Osminkin’s text, nor in his video montage are deconstructive elements as pronounced as they are in Prigov’s classical works. This is probably because Osminkin cannot entirely separate himself from the Soviet hegemonic discourses, epitomized for him by the Briks rather than Stalin, and since the official ideology has already (re)appropriated ‘Sovietness’, Osminkin’s political critique appears muffled. Indeed, he takes into consideration ‘all conventional language gestures’, but his attempts to distance himself from them appear to be insufficient. In a certain way, this video text reminds me of Aleksei Balabanov’s Brat 2 (Brother 2, 2000), a cinematic manifesto of nationalism and xenophobia that has become an inexhaustible source of citations for many populist movements of the 2000–10s, providing a rhetorical programme for the current politics of neo-imperialism and Russia’s confrontation with the United States. Back in the early 2000s, many critics interpreted it as an obvious and, 253

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 253 to them, smart and ironic parody of nationalism as well as a mockery of wild post-Soviet ideas about universal justice. Indeed, both nationalism and its parodic representation coexist in Brother 2. However, as the subsequent perception of this movie demonstrates, postmodernist irony fades away, serving as a fashionable decoration for aggressive discourses. Certainly, Osminkin does not intend such a double game. He only unwittingly slips into ‘the Balabanov paradigm’. Where Balabanov and his followers tried to satisfy – quite cynically – a liberal professional elite and anti-liberal mass audience, Osminkin displays and comedically exaggerates the real problems of his subject. In the preface to Osminkin’s book Teksty s vnepolozhnymi zadachami (Texts with Outside Goals), published by the prestigious Moscow-based press Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie (New Literary Review) in 2015, the critic and poet Kirill Korchagin argues that such ambivalence is not accidental for Osminkin. Rather, he believes, it is indicative of a new subjectivity explored by the poet.

The performative space of Osminkin’s poetry does not ‘theatricize’ everyday routine. Instead, it functions as a space for a specific experiment targeting the development of a new subjectivity. […] This subject is born in the gap between word and action; it originates from instability and the inevitable ideological engagement of all speech practices. (Korchagin 2015: 7)

Noting the similarity of such subjectivity to the one created by Prigov, the critic underscores the novelty of Osminkin’s adaptation of conceptualism:

If the elder poet [Prigov] had been disintegrating the world by breaking it into fragments, the younger poet produces a reverse operation by trying to integrate the world anew, to stitch together discursive levels separated from each other by Conceptualism’s analytical lancet. […] In a new reading of Conceptualism, [Prigov’s] programme has acquired a new political meaning: the quest for ‘one’s own’ speech among ‘foreign’ speech streams echoes the quest for one’s own space for political action. (Korchagin 2015: 8)

At first sight, this is indeed so, since Osminkin has many poems in which he displays the construction of the self as a montage of borrowed discourses and identity fragments. However, despite Korchagin’s claim that Osminkin ‘stitches together’ a new subject, his poetry more frequently displays unresolved contradictions between the postmodernist construction of subjectivity and some of Osminkin’s other self-images and corresponding ‘definitions of poetry’. Osminkin has created a sufficient number of texts manifesting a desire to find firm ground for his subject, expressed through engagement with 254

254 Mark Lipovetsky ideological, typically Marxist, discourse, which is presented as a universal key to the real:

All the world’s woes In my friend-feed Engagement clogs Up my lyre Irreconcilable Antagonisms A Marxist enema They need it bad (Osminkin 2016: 144, 145, trans. Jon Platt)

We’ve been deceived By the clever and the rich They’ve divided and conquered Now you may as well try And catch the wind This ain’t no alms house (Osminkin 2016: 158, 159, trans. Jon Platt)

In these and similar poems, ‘we’ frequently replaces a fragmented postmodernist ‘I’ in the same way as communism replaces Prigov’s ‘central phantom’ in ‘Communism Is Not an Ideal’. Osminkin even introduces the all-too- famil - iar concept of the poet’s guilt concerning the working class. In some poems, he quite seriously displays a conflict between his lifestyle of a poet dining at a sophisticated restaurant in Princeton and miners dying in a Siberian mineshaft (‘chto ty dumaesh’ proletarskii poet [what are you thinking, proletarian poet]’; Osminkin 2016: 108, 109). In others, he splits his voice into two debating voices:

My fucking shame before the people of labour Sits in my guts like mineral ore […] Fine, sit there if you like it so much But please don’t shame me when the morning comes In the morning I can’t deal with my shame And thoughts about labour only come with pain (Osminkin 2016: 126, 127, trans. Jon Platt)

At the same time, in contrast to the constant ‘shame before the people of labour’, in some poems Osminkin goes as far as to recognize the abstract and anachronistic character of Marxist categories and mantras, including the disappearance of the proletariat itself: 255

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 255 You know how sometimes you want to write about the working class You go to the factory district But there is no working class Just a bunch of hipsters drinking coffee (2016: 44, 45, trans. Keith Gessen)

Probably, trying to remediate this discovery, Osminkin argues in one of his manifestoes that the proletariat is not a social class but an existential, ethical and even ‘ontological’ condition distinguished by the loss of identity, ideology, faith, clear political affiliation and so on:

The proletarian today is an ethical project, the very name of which points out at the direct figure of action; the proletarian is the one who has fallen out into the zone of loss by the will of destiny or by the fact of birth. This is not a social loss, but a certain ontological modus of the presence. (Osminkin 2012: 12)

Yet, in this case, it is his ‘postmodern’, desubjectivized, fragmented self that substitutes for ‘the proletarian’, in other words, the only proletarian that Osminkin really knows is himself. In his poetry, the single feature distinguishing the ‘proletarian’ from the poet is the former’s preparedness for violence that, in Osminkin’s eyes, corresponds to the proletariat’s nature as the revolutionary class:

I only need a bit from you You never were a coward Stomp just once down on your pity So it lets out a crunch You don’t need to break it Just make it hurt, submit And when you have it pinned The break will come on its own The Kremlin scum will scurry off Like the last thug at a heist And this land will be transformed And leap up from its slumber (Osminkin 2016: 140, 141; trans. Jon Platt).

Obviously, Osminkin’s two discourses of the self – the postmodernist and the openly political, ‘operative’ in the Benjaminian sense – suggest opposing attitudes to violence. From the standpoint of the post-conceptualist self, any justification of violence leads to the uncontrollable avalanche of totalitarian violence. In agreement with this discourse, the motif of violence appears 256

256 Mark Lipovetsky in Osminkin’s poems either in the context of the totalitarian past and its memory (Krovavye bani [Blood baths]) or in connection with today’s political regime (Omonovets v balaklave napishi svoei mame [Riot Cop in Balaclava Write a Letter to Your Mama]). At the same time, justification for revolutionary violence is the corner- stone of the leftist discourse (see Benjamin’s Critique of Violence). This explains why both a pejorative attitude to violence and the post-structuralist tendency to reveal violence hidden in any verbal or symbolic act are sati- rized in Osminkin’s poems such as Poeziya eto organizovannoe nasilie nad yazykom (Poetry Is Organized Violence against Language, Osminkin 2016: 90, 91) or Nasilie, nasilie (Violence, Violence, Osminkin 2015: 102). The intelligentsia’s fear of violence triggers Osminkin’s irritated reaction (Osminkin 2015: 83):

Define yourself already! Finally awaken the beast in yourself Or get out of here.

This irritation against the liberal intelligentsia flickers behind many of Osminkin’s texts and performances. Expressed suggestively rather than intellectually or ideologically, it is not only justified by the ‘awakened beast’ in oneself but also exemplifies its presence – as proof of the poet’s allegiance to the idea of revolution. Despite this, the ‘ideological’ self emerges in Osminkin’s poems as a no less performative phenomenon than a postmodernist one. The ‘red poet’s’ identity originates from quotations referencing the grand narrative of class struggle, his self-image incorporates borrowed intonations and appropriated yet recognizable rhetorical gestures. This is why Osminkin is half-jok - ingly ready to present his leftist self as a public persona rather than an internalized conviction. In an explicitly self-ironic text 7 noyabria 2015 goda: Sovremennye poety levykh vzglyadov chitayut teksty o revolyutsii i svoi teksty (7 November 2015: Contemporary Left Poets Read Poems about the Revolution and Their Own Texts), Osminkin satirically displays a yawning gap between leftist theoretical discourse and everyday behaviour. Having proclaimed that ‘instead of making political art we should make art political / equate the pen and the bayonet etc.’ (Osminkin 2015: 228), left poets, including himself, unanimously decide not to participate in any radical performances, although each has their own, very personal, excuse for this decision. Even more devastating irony targeting his own discourse and its performative aspects appears in Osminkin’s text, Revolution. Here the revolutionary action directly stems from the word ‘revolution’, its reading, articulation, screaming, singing, chanting, shouting, and so on: 257

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 257

Revolution Consider the aforementioned word Really think of it […] If no one’s around shriek the word as loud as you possibly can Draw it out With a transition into a squeal on the last syllable Oooooon becoming IIIIIII Let your body join the scream Set your emotions free At this stage you should be joined by others At least by one of your neighbours or co-workers […] Coordinate your actions and sing in unison Don’t stop In time your song has to become a sounding chant […] Kick everything else out of your path Now if you’re really following these instructions At some point you’re going to have to set the controls for the Kremlin Head towards the Kremlin Gather the last of your strength Take a deep breath And together shout the word as loud as you possibly can one last time If the decibel level gets high enough, the Kremlin will have no choice but to beautifully reveal itself as a house of cards and collapse into a thousand red bricks (Osminkin 2016: 96, 98, 100, 102; 97, 99, 101,103; trans. Ian Dreiblatt)

However, after this elaborate scheme of actions, which may also be read as instructions for a group performance, it turns out that revolution is nothing but a video game: ‘Congratulations! You have arrived at the end of the national level and will receive a bonus credit in the form of one extra life. While the next level’s loading, try to relax. Listen to the Internationale’ (Osminkin 2016: 102, 103, trans. Ian Dreiblatt). What is being mocked in this text? Faith in the revolutionary power of the word? The self-absorbed infantilism of leftist intellectuals secretly (playfully) believing in the magical power of their discourse? The instrumentalism and commercialization of revolutionary rhetoric in today’s world? Or all of the above? Obviously, Osminkin’s satire here is aimed at his own circle and does not exclude his own poetry. He argues that an ability to mock oneself distinguishes ‘leftist irony’ from other kinds of irony. But is there perhaps something more to this? The modality of the video game is dubious. On the one hand, it suggests isolation from the real world, escapism equipped by technology and fused with entertainment. On the other hand, video gaming stands for new forms of culture, which are steadily conquering new cultural and social 258

258 Mark Lipovetsky spheres with the promise of becoming a meta-language of societal communication and, perhaps, even politics in the near future. To summarize his criticism of revolutionary enthusiasm and rhetoric, Osminkin introduces the concept of ‘revolutionary pessimism’. In his view, this foundational attitude distinguishes his art from the legacy of the LEF. In other words, he employs elements of the former revolutionary hegemonic discourse with a clear awareness of its marginalization in the contemporary cultural and political situation:

Revolutionary pessimism In our time, enthusiasm of the left artist focuses on the concept of revolutionary pessimism, which means that you want to be an enthusiast, and simultaneously you are quite pessimistic about the subject of your enthusiasm. First, it all [revolutionary movement] is unachievable here and now. Second, it is pregnant with totalitarian trauma: more in the cultural sphere but the understanding that this trauma can be overcome by political means only. And third, you just can’t … you don’t have tools to articulate all this in broad societal circles, you lack any access to media and in general to the universal field of publicity. Nowadays new laws are encircling us from all sides. But one should act through the revolutionary pessimism. […] In short, we need enthusiasm, but critical and defamiliarized. (Cieply 2015)3

But how to act through the ‘revolutionary pessimism’? One of the methods is ‘dissensus’ as defined by Jacques Rancière: ‘The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one. […] Dissensus is not the confrontation between interests or opinions. It is the manifestation of a distance of the sensible from itself’ (Rancière 2001). Osminkin deliberately emphasizes conflicts and contradictions in his poetry, and by this means knowingly manifests ‘dissensus’. For example, he says about his performances:

the text must be in conflict with music, it should maximally contradict the music, this is what they call kairos (καιρός):4 the clash of two systems of signification, from which a flash appears … yes, and something happens in the mind of the viewer and listener … you understand that you are listening to some pop tune but the lyrics contradict it or, conversely, some stern and complex music combines with a simplistic childlike text … this gap, this kairos we are trying to employ. (Cieply 2015)

Similarly, through the exposure of inner contradictions within his own poetic voice, by incessant unearthing of the war-like cohabitation of different subjectivities and discourses in each of his texts and performances, Osminkin fulfils the political promise of his art: he presents ‘two worlds in one’. These two worlds 259

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 259 embody the conflict between two strategies for the intelligentsia’s resistance to the neo-conservative regime. However, both the strategy of direct political action, based on the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s; and the strategy of dissipation and mockery of any totalizing or authoritative discourse, derivative of underground nonconformism of the 1970–1980s, appear in Osminkin’s poetry as equally problematic. Hence, ‘pessimistic enthusiasm’. Jonathan Platt applies Prigov’s category of shimmering (Platt 2016: 17) to Osminkin’s poetry. For Prigov and his followers, shimmering served as a disciplining strategy aimed at distancing themselves from any authoritative discourse or symbolic language – what they called ‘non-sticking’ (onto the discourse). Daniil Leiderman explores this notion in his works, demonstrating its significance for different aspects of conceptualist art as well as its relevance to today’s political art.5 Osminkin’s poetry displays certain aspects of shimmering in his relation to the discourse of revolution. However, at a deeper level, his poetic style is based on different principles, which incorpo- rate shimmering but are not equal to it. Shimmering is present in Osminkin’s poetry as the manifestation of the author’s resistance to the authoritative neo- conservative ideology of today’s regime and, most importantly, as the expression of his individual intellectual freedom – the legacy of nonconformist late Soviet intelligentsia. Yet this is just one pole of his constant oscillations. On the other hand, the reader finds a desire for enthusiasm and ideological engagement justifying ideologically charged discourses as vehicles of ‘firm truth’ and a much needed sense of community. It is this cohabitation of incompatible modalities – shimmering vs. ideological engagement – that makes Osminkin’s poetry especially relevant to and reflective of the current political dilemmas characteristic of the entire ‘creative class’ in Putin’s Russia, rather than just the circle of left intellectuals. Taking a step back, one may detect a certain semiotic model that is reproduced and repeatedly reinvented in Osminkin’s poetry, a model that arguably can be applied to a broader spectrum of cultural phenomena in contemporary Russia. The poet himself lays these semiotics bare in his cycle ‘Byvaet’ (You Know How Sometimes). Тhe majority of texts in this cycle consist of three parts, wherein the first two parts introduce a binary opposition, while the third part supposedly deconstructs it, blurring the binary. For example:

You know how sometimes you turn on the TV And they’re all praising Putin […] You go online And they’re all talking shit about Putin […] Then sometimes you pick up a book one of the Russian or foreign classics But more often Russian […] And you think My God There are some fundamental human values left on this earth after all. 260

260 Mark Lipovetsky The simplicity of these poems is deceptive. Under closer consideration, one cannot fail to notice that the final lines of these poems onlyimitate the deconstruction of a given binary, while Osminkin’s ironic and frequently Prigovian intonation signals the failure of the reader’s expectations for a synthesis between thesis and antithesis. Instead of turning the binary upside down or destroying the borders between oppositions, Osminkin places conflicting elements next to each other without resolving their conflict. Naturally, his poetic self appears to be constantly oscillating between unreconciled polarities. This is exactly how he treats the tension between his two models of subjectivity as well as the two discourses of violence. He clearly recognizes their incompat- ibility, but, unable to resolve the conflict, he creates performances of oscillation between them. This rhetorical model resembles the one I describe in my book Paralogies: Transformations of the (Post)Modernist Discourse in Russian Culture of the 1920s–2000s (Lipovetsky 2008). While trying to define the core rhetoric of Russian postmodernism as it had been shaped in the 1960s–1970s, I arrived at the concept of the explosive aporia or paralogy, which means that in Russian postmodernism, binaries neither blur nor vanish but proliferate and continue their struggle for domination even when inverted or problema- tized. The binarist tension within the process of deconstruction produces a chain of semantic explosions, which typically leads to the stabilization of the conflict as within an aporia. These ongoing semantic explosions demonstrate that the contradiction remains unresolved and, in most cases, is unresolvable. Therefore, new semantic formations emerge, dynamic and elusive. This is not Derridean freeplay but a defamiliarized and deconstructed conflict presented –frequently with loads of irony – as a cultural norm (see Lipovetsky 2008: 45–69).

Mirroring official culture Osminkin’s poetry represents a faithful but highly creative variation on this rhetorical configuration typical of Russian postmodernism. Thus, his poetry may serve as an argument against popular claims of Russian postmodernism’s expiration and irrelevance in present-day culture. Apparently, its paradigm remains flexible enough for a new political art, even one driven by a desire to transcend postmodernism as the outdated aesthetics. Osminkin adds a new dimension to the postmodernist paralogy since, as we can see, his semantic explosions translate the conflict between discourses on to a performative level. This transition of the postmodernist explosive aporia to the performative level, which almost inevitably also appears political, can trigger various interpretations. In a certain way, this process resonates with the instrumentalization of postmodernism that many analysts detect in current Russian public, and especially television-based, politics. In one of his last interviews back in 2007, which has recently been published, Dmitrii Prigov said, 261

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 261 [our] society is stuck in transition. This state is not very comfortable and therefore some attempts are made to convert it into the pseudomorphosis of empire […]. This is reminiscent of bonds and braces on a disintegrating house: the house practically does not exist, but the bonds and braces remain intact. Really a postmodernist state. (Shapoval 2014: 24)

In the same year, Lev Rubinshtein, another veteran of the underground nonconformism, wrote about the meaninglessness of postmodernism hijacked by spin-masters and other political manipulators: ‘Anyway, postmodernism has become a part of the everyday. What is most important and interesting – it has become part of political practice, and a vigorous gang of spin-masters of a new cast actively exploits its stylistic peculiarities’ (Rubinshtein 2007). Most recently, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, the leader of Pussy Riot, suggested that

political actionism loses its strength every day, because the state has confidently hijacked the initiative: now it operates as an artist and performs whatever it wants with us. Boris Goys would have said that Putin continues the tradition of the Stalinist total work of art (read his Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin), when a whole country is one person’s work of art. (Tolokonnikova 2015)

The most spectacular account of the fusion between postmodernism and neo-conservatism in Putin’s public politics appeared in Peter Pomerantsev’s best-selling book Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, in which he describes in detail how the ‘postmodern dictatorship’ is enacted on Russian television channels. (He worked for one of them for more than a decade in the 2000s.) Among other things, he describes a stunning lack of conflict between seemingly incompatible discourses of official neo-conservatism and private neo-liberalism shared by Russian television producers:

Before I used to think the two worlds were in conflict, but the truth is a symbiosis. It is almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you’re always split into little bits, and can never quite commit to changing things. […] But there is great comfort in these splits too: you can leave all your guilt with your ‘public’ self. […] It’s not much about denial. It’s not even about suppressing dark secrets. You can see everything you do, all your sins. You just reorganize your emotional life so as not to care. (Pomerantsev 2015: 234)

When one places Osminkin’s work in this context, it becomes clear that his poetics mirrors – in the dimension of the nonconformist cultural lexicon – the 262

262 Mark Lipovetsky strategies of the official culture. In this respect, he operates as a jester or trickster imitating and mocking power. As a poet-trickster Osminkin joins a lin- eage of nonconformist tricksters epitomized by Aleksei Kruchenykh, Daniil Kharms, Andrei Sinyavskii and (yes, again!) Dmitrii Prigov. Yet Osminkin not only mirrors power’s cynicism but exposes its deepest secrets. It follows from Pomerantsev’s book that the present-day political utilization of postmodernist devices is pursuing one major goal: to hide or make aesthetically pleas- ing the conflicts between the mutually contradictory discourses and positions incorporated into today’s political agenda: imperial nationalism and defence of minorities; support to terrorist regimes inside and outside the Russian Federation and anti-terrorist rhetoric; selective persecution of the political opposition and use of the rhetoric of human rights, especially in international affairs, and so on. From this perspective, the conflict between discourses that Osminkin reveals in his mirror image of mainstream ideology and culture is the most significant part of his poetry. Theperformance of the discursive conflict is indeed his most relevant critical response to the instrumentalization of postmodernism by state propaganda. Evidently, Osminkin does not seem to know how to overcome the conflicts between the nonconformist discourses he is working with. His artistic practice offers a general direction rather than a concrete response to the question of resistance and a method for the neutralization of ‘postmodern’ state propaganda. However, in times of moral panic, like the current moment, Chekhov’s dictum comes to mind: for a writer, the correct formulation of a question is more significant than any attempts to answer it.

Notes

1 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygb_skkVPPg 2 See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n74IJ3sLNzs 3 I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Jason Cieply for sharing his interview with me. 4 Osminkin appears to have misused this ancient Greek term, which means either a liminal time of significant acts or (in rhetoric) an appropriate moment for the utterance. 5 See Daniil Leiderman’s chapter on shimmering in this volume (Chapter 9) as well as Leiderman (2016).

References Benjamin, Walter (1978) ‘The Author as Producer’, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Chuzhak, Nikolai (ed.) (2000) Literatura fakta: Pervyi sbornik materialov rabotnikov LEFa, Moscow: Zakharov. Cieply, Jason (2015) Interview with Osminkin. Unpublished. 263

A dilemma for the contemporary artist 263 Dobrenko, Evgenii, Ilya Kukulin, Mark Lipovetsky and Maria Maiofis (eds.) (2010) Nekanonicheskii klassik: Dmitrii Aleksandrovich Prigov, 1940–2007, Moscow: Novoe Literaturnie Obozrenie. Korchagin, Kirill (2015) ‘Podozritelnyi subekt’ in Osminkin, Teksty s vnepolozhnymi zadachami. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, p. 5–10. Leiderman, Daniil (2016) ‘Moscow Conceptualism and “Shimmering”: Authority, Anarchism and Space’, Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Art and Archeology, Princeton University. Lipovetsky, Mark (2008) Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kulture 1920-kh-2000-kh godov, Moscow: NLO. Noskov, Grigorii (2012) ‘Interview of Dmitrii Prigov’, Valerii Anashvili’s Facebook page, 22 February. Available at www.facebook.com/anashvili/posts/ 248551471897058. Osminkin, Roman (2015) Teksty s vnepolozhnymi zadachami, Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. —— (2012) Tovarishch-slovo, Moscow: Translit zhurnal. —— (2016) Ni slova o politike! [Not a Word about Politics!], trans. Olga Bulatova, Clement Collective, Jason Cieply, Ian Dreiblatt, Brian Droitcour, Keith Gessen, Ainsley Morse, Bella Shaevich, Anastasiya Osipova, Jon Platt, David Riff, eds. Jon Platt, Matthew Whitley, Anastasiya Osipova. New York: Cicada Press. Platt, Jon (2016) ‘Communism Isn’t an Ideal’, in Roman Osminkin, NI slovo o politike! [Not a Word about Politics!]. Pomerantsev, Peter (2015) Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia, London: Faber & Faber. Prigov, Dmitrii (2007) Raznoobrazie vsego, Moscow: OGI. Ranciére, Jacques (2001) Ten Theses on Politics, Baltimore, Md.: John Hopkins University Press. Available at www.after1968.org/app/webroot/uploads/ RanciereTHESESONPOLITICS.pdf Rubinshtein, Lev (2007) ‘Uzhe nichego’. Available at http://grani.ru/Politics/Russia/ m.131397.html. Shapoval, Sergei (2014) D. A. Prigov: 21 razgovor i odno druzheskoe poslanie. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda (2015) Facebook post. Available at www.facebook.com/ tolokno/posts/792897714074449:0. 264

14 Radical art actionism

Andrei Erofeev

The Russian authorities do not recognize the cultural status of Pussy Riot’s action in the Christ the Saviour Cathedral. For them, it is a ‘hooligan prank’. As an important corollary, public screenings, discussions and collections of such works by public cultural institutions are no longer allowed. This is why the topic of Pussy Riot has not been raised in the Tretyakov Gallery, or in the Russian Museum, the House of Photography or even the National Centre for Contemporary Arts (NCCA). For six months, thousands of people were talking about this action in every corner of Russia, but the experts at the specialist cultural institutions, where it just had to be discussed, remained silent. Even the advocates of Pussy Riot largely confined themselves to the political, ethical and humanistic aspects while considering the aesthetic side of the performance weak. The music, they said, was primitive and the lyrics bad. In fact, Pussy Riot’s performance was faithful to traditional Russian- Soviet art culture. It was a disguised performance, that is, an art ‘situation’ integrated into reality to the maximum extent possible. We are accustomed to the theatrical performances of Oleg Kulik or Marina Abramović, where the viewer is immediately imbued with fiction and relishes the brilliant game of the actor-artist while remaining in the role of a passive observer, but a framed performance with comfortable seating and a VIP area is not typical of Russian art. Here the dominant task is to accurately simulate the political statements of the ‘first person of the state’ to the detriment of the play-acting and directing techniques of the performance. The artist is eager to eliminate the barrier that separates them from the audience. Whether it be a spectator, a passer-by on the street or an internet user, the idea is that they take such a performance at face value and reacts to it as a fact of life – and the fact is so striking because it does not fit into their view of reality. Thus, after the shock of this meeting the beliefs of the spectator and ideally even their life should be changed. Herein lies the huge difference between a ‘performance’ and an ‘artistic situation’. The Pussy Riot action simulated a performance by a teenage schoolgirls’ musical garage band. It staged a rebellion of children against their parents, fed up with their lies. In addition, the whole act happened very much like teenage mischief. However, an informed audience who understood that it was a performance was intended to assess the perfection 265

Radical art actionism 265 of the ‘situationist’ setting and the accuracy of the site selection, the artistic stylization of the ‘character’ image, as well as the successful concealment of the maturity of the participants, and in contrast the emphasis on the elements of a backyard amateur revue. Hence the deliberate neglect of the quality of the lyrics and sound. But that is not the point. The aim of the ‘art situation’ is to change the environmental context of life through entertainment, revealing ‘hot’ topics for a wide and stormy public debate. Thus, the quality of the performance is directly related to the social effect – and here Pussy Riot managed to achieve maximum results. Discussions around the Voina (War) art group, which flared up with particular force at the time of the arrest of some of its members, revealed that the vast majority of those who participated in the debate believed that the artists should be punished for repeatedly and knowingly committing acts of vandalism and theft, as well as deprecating public and government property, or in other words consciously violating the law. The dispute was about the rigour of the judicial punishment of the art group for such acts. Some recognized their acts as art while others did not. The fact that the people in front of them were criminals, almost nobody questioned. At the same time, wide circles of Russian society – and not only liberal circles – highly valued the pranks of Voina. They were actively discussed at social events and in factories: people admired the brightness of the group and relished the details of its courageous street interventions. The website on which the records of Voina’s performances are lined up breaks records. The giant graffiti image of the phallus that is slowly and solemnly raised together with the drawbridge directly opposite the building of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in St Petersburg, the huge light projection of a skull and crossbones on the wall of the government building in Moscow and the subsequent re-enactment of a storming of the building all delight a majority of Russian citizens, since these performances demonstrate the weakness, slowness, stupidity and cowardice of the police and the arrogance of the bureaucracy. Moreover, Voina’s performances give the passive and sluggish Russian man in the street the chance to witness the joy of retaliation, acts that are bright and charged with the dream that society can respond to the arbitrariness of the authorities. It seems to me that both society and the authorities, and even many artists, do not see any great difference between Voina, political activists or even extremists in various political movements. Each can act on a good idea to amuse their audience, but all of them should be neutralized and isolated. Such things look good in the movies, but they should not exist in real life. These are the attitudes that the poet Lev Rubinstein had in mind when he said that it would be good to learn to distinguish between a real prankster and an actor playing the role of a prankster. Many do not believe that Voina’s performances constitute avant-garde theatrical staging. When Oleg Kulik jumped around in the street like a dog and tore someone’s coat off with his teeth, the performance was much more obvious. Nobody else could think of such an extravaganza. It was a unique 266

266 Andrei Erofeev author’s statement and was followed by an entire ‘philosophy’, which Kulik himself told us all about. In the case of Voina we are dealing with the most banal statement (‘Fuck culture – let’s go to the prosecutor’s office!’), rough and sometimes childishly silly, often indecent and obscene and virtually indis- tinguishable from the chants of football fans. Radical performance artists usually have institutions, galleries, biennales and festivals behind them as well as a sophisticated audience armed with cameras. The policeman who arrives on alert is satisfied with soothing arguments: ‘We have a movie actor working here.’ The police are warned in advance, and tend to agree with what is happening. But Voina’s performances were not protected by krysha (protection), the logo of an institution, the supportive words of critics, the support of a crowd of onlookers or the lyricism and humanism of an author’s text. Their actions had not been approved by the government because they were done without its knowledge or against the authorities in order to cause them moral damage and undermine the myth of their omnipotence. If the performance is called Humiliation of a Cop in His Home and takes place not in a theatre or a museum but directly outside a police station, then the police will never be reconciled with it. But who decided that everything done in the public sphere must be approved by the police and government officials? A city is not an area protected by the authorities – it is the common property of its citizens. If the overwhelming majority of St Petersburg’s citizens are outraged, for example, by the city administration’s inflexible intention to build Gazprom’s phallic- shaped headquarters building directly in front of the Smolnii Palace, why would a legitimate response in the form of a ‘dick’ drawn on Foundry Bridge be considered a hooligan prank? It is a literal embodiment of the ‘voice of the street’, and of its characteristic gesture. The population has a right to an asymmetric response, in the form of graffiti, if all legitimate means of struggle have been exhausted. The rage of round-table discussions, publicists’ wit and cartoonists’ bile were all powerless to prevent the authorities from turning away and not listening. Voina responded to the rejection of verbal dialogue. They met an indecent gesture by the authorities with an insolent gesture of their own. Art used to be unable to voice the impersonal, the collective or the national, even though this was the original and cherished dream of the avant-garde. Only in the 1980s were we finally able to bridge a wide inter- change between the verbal, painted and musical images of the ‘unprepared’ audience and the artists. The price was a move away from the museum and out on to the street, and then to the internet. Both these spaces – the real and the virtual – play a complementary role in the works of the Voina group. In the first case, it is a real incident, skilfully crafted by artists, anonymous and unexpected, like most events in life. In the virtual space this event is categorized artistically as a performance based on certain traditions and quotations. Thus, in the real space, the actions of Voina mask their artificial and project- based origin. This least of all is art. The artistry in a gesture that would be recognizable on the street, such as an exhibition of paintings on a bridge, 267

Radical art actionism 267 is not allowed due to the authorities’ efforts to create an image of a ‘united people’ (obshchenarodnogo). This seriously weakens the power of a statement, making it narrowly specific and related to the figure of the artist. Who is an artist in the consciousness of the masses? A nobody, a buffoon. Therefore, Voina built its action-performances on the patterns of general knowledge and skills, along the lines of the general mood and attitude. Anyone could have done it! The brilliant accuracy of finding the key image is veiled in its extreme simplicity and vulgarity. The performance Cop in the Priest’s Cassock, which depicted the newly declared master of life more clearly than all of Russian cinema, literature and theatre, not to mention the fine arts, seemed to be a teenager’s joke. Do the Sochi Olympics, Pussy Riot dancing in the cathedral, Petr Pavlenskii setting a door of the FSB building on fire, the war in Ukraine and the bombing of Syria have anything in common? Actually they do: they are all mature, spectacular, aesthetically designed extraordinary performances. They are designed for the widest possible audience. Few people have been able to see them live, but millions have seen pictures and video streams. Nothing is lost because they look even more interesting as pictures than in real life. A picture focuses and synthesizes a spectacular event in the best possible way so that it has an almost bewitching effect on everyone. You are in awe or indignant. It is impossible to remain indifferent, to shrug, to spit, to turn away or to forget. Spectacular events have a story. Their own script is split into multiple scenes with a large number of passive and active participants. These may be athletes, musicians, pilots, investigators, prison guards, and so on. Their actions are professionally correct, but also risky, sometimes dangerous and sometimes terrible. They generate many emotions – fear, pain, feelings of insult or admiration, or tears of delight – in the passive participants in the event, spectators in stadiums, people in Syrian cities or worshippers in the temple. The Olympics, the war in Ukraine and the military operation in Syria resemble great television series that are multidimensional and have been stretched in time. The performances of Pussy Riot, Voina and Petr Pavlenskii also consist of many steps and actors – the spectacle in itself and then the arrest, investigation, medical examination, court case and wider discussion in society. This entire trail is included in the art performance, which is indicated by the artists themselves. The action is not limited to just a performance, that is, literally a singular event. It includes the responses of the authorities and their various ‘organs’, and those of the audience. It is no coincidence, for example, that Pavlenskii made transcripts of his conversations with the investigator and that they staged as a play by Theater.doc. A spectacular compound event such as several actors in a play is managed by the major figure in the spectacle – the director; in the case of a political or military spectacle by a politician, and in the case of a performance by an artist. While politicians are usually confined to the leading role of a director, performance artists usually take on the role of actor and director at the same time, both of which are in the meta-position in respect to the spectacular event. 268

268 Andrei Erofeev They organize it, they brew the stew of human conflict, and, at the same time, they represent it to external audiences. The spectacular event that incorporates numerous human fates is their own personal statement, produced for the purpose of shocking and overwhelming the audience. The incredibly successful military operation that was the annexation of Crimea (there was not a single casualty) and Russia’s Olympic success, which nobody believed possible, are interpreted by many as feats by our president. Wonderful successes are explained by the personality of this politician. Putin is treated by state media as an exceptional person whose extraordinary actions, flying with cranes, deep sea diving, and so on, only serve as proof of this fact. The Russian performance artist sculpts himself in a similar image. He does outstanding things no mere mortal is capable of. His courage is immense, his bearing unparalleled and his ingenuity unmatched. Imagine a wizard tournament. One wizard comes out, waves his wand: Lubyanka (FSB headquarters) is on fire. Another one steps out to face him, and with a wave of his wand Syrian cities are burning. Wave and in the middle of the imperial capital a bridge is raised depicting a giant phallus. Wave and entire Olympic cities appear with unimaginable speed in the heart of the Caucasus Mountains, and a miracle bridge several kilometres long, leading to nowhere, is built in Vladivostok. The authors of these performances feel omnipotent, like Titans acting on the world stage. Humanity is watching them. This competition between politician and actionist as the two titan showmen is a unique Russian formulation of the virtual conflict between the authorities and art. The situation is certainly not fair – a repressive state apparatus has once again been fashioned to suppress the artist. However, the more repression there is, the more the regime and its leader are discredited. Therefore, methods of physical violence are complemented by a symbolic competition of performances and images. In this contest, all means are good as long as the spectacle becomes exceptional. Vandalism, lawlessness and the violation of all kinds of boundaries, rules, norms and taboos are not evaluated from humanitarian and moral positions. None of the objects, conquests and artefacts that appeared in the process of the preparation and conduct of the performance have any value of their own. Thus, the Olympic Village near Sochi, which is now in a state of decay, was never the purpose of the performance, and the same is true of the newly built Donetsk airport. These were just acces- sories, decor or the footprints of spectacular events. Never in the West has a performance been turned into a display, a public event to be discussed by everybody, as it has in Russia. Thanks to the scandals that turn into local civil wars between supporters and opponents, it is easy to see that the Russian artist-performer has been transformed into a unique personality from whom everyone is seriously waiting for revelations and miracles. The creator of the ‘Animal Party’, Oleg Kulik, was the first to undergo such a metamorphosis from a little-known performance artist in a private gallery to the man-beast, bird-human, human-amphibian, holy fool and actor admired by crowds. Against a background of the complex and skulking Russian 269

Radical art actionism 269 high society, which possesses neither the language nor the play-acting skills of gloomy and boring politicians, or the lean faces of the clergy, the artist- performer seems to be the epitome of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, controlling all the most extreme manifestations of life. We cannot discount the notion that Kulik’s performances (diving, flying, playing with predators, etc.) gave the Kremlin technologists the idea of supplementing Putin’s image as ‘leader of the nation’ with such achievements. A generation of art actionists from Aleksander Brener and Anatolii Osmolovskii to Petr Pavlenskii has followed in Kulik’s footsteps. Although each has his own favourite set of topics, it is possible to outline the general attitude of Russian radical performance. It is a programme, an alternative to common sense. It is hostility towards the normal person and mundane, everyday life, as well as a rejection of Western democracy and its law and order. It is to mistrust the text and the verbal reflection of reality and a turn to the perception of living on an emotional intuitive note. It appears that this trend, which partially overlapped with the inner aspirations of some representatives of the Russian government, strengthened the interest of politicians of different ranks in the figure and plastic language of the radical performer. For many of them, the performance artist became a standard of behaviour. One of the fundamental features of life and culture in Russia today is that political power has appropriated and adapted the radical poetry and aesthetics of contemporary art for its own purposes. Government officials began to imitate artistic behaviour. For example, in mimicking the president and his entourage, all the pro-government establishment have begun to learn performative forms of radical ‘crazy’ behaviour and thinking. They have mas- tered the techniques of travesty, character acting and the strategies of artistic idiocy. They took on the development of carnivals, and slapstick scenarios for military geopolitical issues that dwarf anything we could imagine from radical performers in terms of special effects, destruction and bloody scenes. ‘The government wanted to pose as a punk’ is how Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot summed up this policy pivot, explaining the reason why Pussy Riot moved away from actionism. Radical performance has been compromised by its proximity to Vladimir Zhirinovskii, Aleksander Borodai, Motorola (Arsen Pavlov), Igor Strelkov and other extreme adepts of the ‘Russian World’. Our artists-actionists would not have sought such kinship even in their worst nightmares. Meanwhile, the appropriation of their style goes hand in hand with the growing persecution of the artists who created it. To the terror of far-right and Orthodox Christian organizations is increasingly being added that of officials, the police and intelligence agencies. Artem Loskutov, the organizer in Novosibirsk of the clownish ‘monstrations’, or performances with absurdist slogans in which year after year hundreds of young Siberians have joined, was put under house arrest. A new criminal case was begun against him. This time it was not about drugs, which had previously been planted and then ‘found’ in his pocket. Now the case was about ‘an insult to law enforcement’. Loskutov’s fault was his 270

270 Andrei Erofeev truthful description, which he posted on his Live Journal, of Novosibirsk prison employees and their methods for treating detainees. Somewhere in the vicinity, in the villages of the Novosibirsk region, Anton Nikolaev, the leader of the Moscow group Bombily, was hiding, having decided to suspend his performance activities in the capital after a series of threats against him. In Perm, a criminal case was begun against the local museum of contemporary art. The museum had dared to exhibit popular mock prints by Grigorii Yushchenko depicting drunken police officers. The museum was accused of ‘insulting the authorities’. It is clear now why we do not often see artworks by the Blue Noses in Moscow. Sasha Shaburov now rarely returns from his exhibition tours abroad, and Slava Mizin keeps a low profile in his hometown of Novosibirsk. Oleg Kulik left for – in this context, the urge is to say ‘ran away’ to – Tibet; and Dmitrii Vrubel for Berlin. The best way to characterize what is happening to protest artists today is a purge. The authorities leave untouched those who agree to follow their demands. These are not to reflect on what is happening, not to portray abstract things and to pretend that nothing special is going on in the country, that there is a normal social and artistic life. Related demands are to respect the authorities and not to discuss their actions. The police who ravaged the workshops of the PG and those of their friends, who discredited Loskutov and tortured Vorotnikov, are trying to achieve ‘normalization’ of the art world using a similar model to the one they used in the economic sphere. In business, they quickly and successfully managed to suppress any political alliance-building, as well as the spirit of independence and criticism. At the same time, experts argue that the competitiveness of new Russian businesses has suffered badly. The situation in the arts may develop in a similar way. If the joint efforts of the law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and ministry of culture officials manage to sabotage the avant-garde part of our culture, we will again be doomed to years of aesthetic stagnation and swamp. Obedient repetition of minimalism and arte povera in today’s hot social context will not be fruitful and may even be impossible, especially for the artists themselves. Just look at the smothered light or silent explosions in Petr Belii’s installations, or the rattling box of Andrei Kuzkin, which looks as if it is pinned down inside the author, or the rushing energy of the elements held by viscous pent-up bars in the works of Irina Korina, or the limply drooping iron bars of Anna Zhelud and it becomes clear that the artist’s message in fact completely contradicts the language chosen by him or her. The minimalist aesthetic of clarity, peace, simplicity and harmony is turned inside out by cries of despair, depression, sobbing, whining and weeping. We are witnessing mockery, a sign of funny, careless and reckless free thinking behaviour, being replaced by a turbid wave of depressive expressionism that is somehow concealing itself in the mantle of state-ordered minimalism. 271

15 Petr Pavlenskii and his actions

Per-Arne Bodin

The art action that has attracted by far the most attention in Russia in recent years is Petr Pavlenskii’s Threat, which was performed in November 2015 (see Figure 8.13). Pavlenskii stands out as the next step after Pussy Riot in the evolution of Russian art. The political content of his works has an even clearer function than the actions of Pussy Riot, PG or Voina. In Seam (2012), an earlier performance in St Petersburg, he stood on the square in front of the city’s main church, the Kazan Cathedral, after having sewn his lips together to protest against limitations on freedom of speech. Casting Christ as a prede- cessor of the performance artists, he held a banner which read: ‘Pussy Riot’s action was a re-enactment of Jesus Christ’s famous act.’ There was also a reference to Matthew 21:12–13 in which Jesus drives the money changers out of the Temple. In his next action chronologically, Carcass (2013), he wrapped himself naked in barbed wire and lay down on the pavement in front of the St Petersburg Legislative Assembly (see Figure 8.10). As Pavlenskii himself described the work, it was intended to demonstrate the persecution of political activists. Later the same year, in Fixation (see Figure 8.11), he nailed his scrotum to the pavement on Red Square as a metaphor for the apathy prevalent in modern Russian society. In all three of these actions the police arrested him and in some respects also came to his rescue by freeing and clothing him. In Freedom (see Figure 8.12), in February 2014 he reconstructed the events of Maidan Square, together with a group of activists waving Ukrainian and anarchist flags, and a barricade of burning tyres.1 Chapter 16 in this volume is a transcript recorded by Pavlenskii of the preliminary investigation into this event. It is a unique document that illuminates the relationship between Pavlenskii and the regime. The interrogator focuses on the nature of art and the cultural legacy, two thorny issues relevant not only to Pavlenskii but also to modern Russian culture more generally. The investigator maintains that unlike Rublev’s Trinity icon or Malevich’s Black Square, Pavlenskii’s actions are not art and that they dese- crate Russian heritage. Pavlenskii was charged with vandalism, and the interrogation focused on the central questions posed by performance art as to the essence of art and the difference between symbolic and real acts. Pavlenskii 272

272 Per-Arne Bodin himself describes his behaviour as ‘metaphoric’, while the interrogator links it to vandalism and to the concept of cultural legacy. In his next action, Segregation, Pavlenskii placed himself naked on the wall of the well-known Serbskii Psychiatric Clinic in Moscow and cut off his right ear lobe. The explanation he published on the internet was that he was protesting against the renewed Soviet practice of using psychiatry to punish political dissidents.

A knife separates the ear lobe from the body. The concrete wall of psychiatry separates the society of the sane from the mentally ill. Returning to the use of psychiatry for political goals the police apparatus is once again exercising the power to determine the threshold between sanity and insanity. (Interfax 2014)

As early as the preliminary investigation into Freedom, Pavlenskii had pointed out that the minister of culture, Vladimir Medinskii, was behind the resumption of such measures and had stated that Pavlenskii’s kind of art belonged in a special ‘psychiatric museum’.

Sources of inspiration The actions themselves and the interference of the police are documented in photographs and YouTube clips on the internet. Highly provocative and corporeal in nature, they echo the Austrian actionists of the 1960s or the somewhat later works of the Serbian-American artist Marina Abramović. Like them, Pavlenskii focuses on his own body and self-mutilation as the perhaps most significant components of the action. He has declared in one interview that he has not been influenced by this tradition and that what is important to him is the fact that he works with the instruments of power – by which he means the criminal justice system including forensic psychiatry – and devotes himself to political art (Pomerantsev 2015). Pavlenskii himself mentions Chris Burden, who died in 2015, as a source of inspiration. One of the US artist’s actions was a 1971 performance entitled Shoot in protest against the Vietnam War, in which he had an assistant shoot him in the arm. The action and the injury were recorded, and it was this documentation, including a photograph of the injury, that constituted the work of art. In another action, Trans-fixed (1974), the title of which is reminiscent of one of Pavlenskii’s performances, he was tied crucifixion-like to a car radiator. Burden’s works are usually described as body art. It and that of the Austrian actionists had a political agenda, although they should not be identified primarily with the major leftist movement of the period. They did, however, aim their criticism at the bourgeois establishment and the continuous growth of commercialism and commodification. In Burden’s case, US foreign policy was also a target. Thus, Pavlenskii’s actions are very much in keeping with this 273

Petr Pavlenskii and his actions 273 tradition. He attacks the Russian establishment with actions similar but not identical to an older form of performance art that had its heyday during the left-wing wave in the West. Despite its obvious political protest, the actionists and body art were for the most part an artistic phenomenon, whereas Pavlenskii defines his own trend as ‘political art’. He explains and justifies the obvious violations of the law in certain of his works as actions of self-defence vis-à-vis the authorities. Although Pavlenskii uses a provocative artistic form dating from the 1960s, it is the political message in his actions that arouses the most contro- versy. Whereas the Vienna actionists staged their subsequently photographed performances in museums or semi-private locations, he chooses public places of great significance in Russian and Soviet history. Pavlenskii has himself pointed out this difference when he is compared to Marina Abramović (spb Sobaka 2013). His topical message is much stronger than in the works of his predecessors, and the enormous attention he attracts in the mass media is indicative of a very different cultural situation. The reactions of the justice system are much more integral to his works than in the case of the Austrians or Burden. The Vienna artists insisted that their works could and should not be sold, and this is important to Pavlenskii as well, who mentions in his interroga- tions that although Malevich protested against art as a commercial product, in the end that is precisely what his works became. The central component of Pavlenskii’s actions, however, is their political content, which he supplies with guides for interpretation. What he wants to unmask is the ‘logic’ and ‘control mechanisms’ of power. In a recent book of interviews he talks about totalitarianism as an all-embracing phenomenon that affects not only Russia but, in varying degrees, the United States, England and North Korea as well (Pavlenskii 2016). His own art however is firmly situated in a Russian context. He often uses his body or his ordeals in a Russian prison as a tool or a part of the artistic experience. There is an ethical dilemma for the spectator here that is not unlike the quandary of the circus-goer who pays to see performers subject themselves to pain or danger in order to intensify the audience’s experience. The viewers of the Vienna group’s works faced this same dilemma, which in my opinion means that the observer and for that matter the critics are partly responsible for another human being’s suffering, whereas the artist accepts the ordeal voluntarily. This is quite obvious in the performances discussed here, where bodily damage is so prominent and nakedness so defenceless. In these performances the myth of the suffering artist is made bare. With the exception of Seam, Pavlenskii seldom appeals to religious notions. There are, however, several structural similarities between his actions and ascetic practices in the Orthodox or Catholic traditions. Art critics have pointed especially to the resemblance of his performances to the public behaviour of Russian fools in Christ, which included provocations directed at the powers that be, nakedness and extreme asceticism. Pavlenskii himself denies 274

274 Per-Arne Bodin any such connection, but then the holy fools themselves always denied that they were such. This non-self-identification is crucial for the phenomenon. Structurally, in any event, Pavlenskii belongs to this tradition.

The door to Hell Pavlenskii’s most recent performance took place on 9 November 2015, when he took himself to the Lubyanka, headquarters of the Russian Federal Security Service and former KGB, lit petrol he had poured on one of its wooden doors and posed for a photograph holding the empty petrol can. A video clip was also made of the action and of Pavlenskii’s arrest. The photographs show him standing in front of the massive burning door, and the fire and darkness produce a frightening yet aesthetically very appealing impression. The first title Pavlenskii chose for this performance was The Burning Door of the Lubyanka, but he later changed it to Threat. The entrance to the headquarters of the secret police was and still is the most feared door in Russia. So many people who went through it either never came out alive or disappeared into one of Stalin’s dreaded prison camps. Monstrous crimes have been committed on the other side of this door, and post-Soviet Russia continues to use the same locales as the Stalinist Terror and repression of the late Soviet period. It is almost as though the German secret police were to have moved into the former headquarters of the Gestapo after 1945. Pavlenskii accompanies the action with a commentary in which he declares that his work of art is attempting to show how to conquer the fear the regime wants to inspire in the population by means of the federal secret police:

The burning door of Lubyanka: a gauntlet thrown down by society in the face of the terrorist threat. The Federal Security Service is using the method of continuous terror and holding power over 146,000,000 people. Fear turns free people into a matted mass of isolated bodies. The threat of inevitable reprisal hangs over every person within the reach of surveillance, the tapping of conversations and the borders of passport control. An unconditional defensive reflex forces a person to go against this instinct. This is the reflex of fighting for your own life. And life is worth fighting for. (RadioFreeEurope Radio Liberty 2015)

The prominent contemporary Russian gallery owner and curator Marat Gelman called the work The Door to Hell, alluding to both Dante’s Divine Comedy and the important symbolism of doors in the Russian Orthodox Church. The resurrection icon shows Christ after he has conquered death standing at the door to the kingdom of the dead, or the door to Hell as it is called in Church Slavic and Russian. 275

Petr Pavlenskii and his actions 275

Monumentality The Lubyanka door is monumental, an impression that is enhanced by the marble frame in which it is set. The building itself is massive, and its grandness was reinforced during the Soviet period by lengthening the façade and joining together two original buildings overlooking Lubyanka Square (Makhov 2015). The Soviet coat of arms, the hammer and sickle, bolsters the continuity of the edifice with its Soviet past. In the indictment, in fact, the court referred to the door as ‘vkhodnaya dver NKVD-KGB-FSB (Entrance to the NKVD- KGB Russian Security Service)’ (RAPSI 2016). There is no sign on the door indicating what is located behind it, but the Lubyanka is familiar to everyone. The door that was ignited is in fact a blind door that is not used. All of this makes it a highly symbolic, a completely anonymous dead end. The monumental pose Pavlenskii struck in front of the FSB headquarters both recalls and attacks the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskii, founder of the Soviet secret police, that used to stand in front of the building until it was removed at the fall of the Soviet Union in a spontaneous dismantling. In 2015 the Communist Party in Moscow called for a referendum on returning it to Lubyanka Square. The referendum never took place. In its place is a monument, Solovki Stone, erected by the organization Memorial to the memory of the victims of GULAG. The square is saturated with meaning. Pavlenskii’s action was widely reported in the Russian mass and social media, where the artist has often been portrayed as mentally ill. That, of course, is also what the holy fools were often considered as well as the Soviet dissidents. He underwent a psychiatric examination in connection with his arrest for Seam. That concluded that he was entirely healthy. Pavlenskii himself denies any connection between his performances and illness or foolishness for Christ. He views his art as intimately related not only to Burden but also to Pussy Riot. There is a seriousness and severity in Pavlenskii’s appearance. He looks like an ascetic and is represented as such in interviews and in self-presentations. He candidly acts like a martyr in his actions, never trying to flee from the police or disguise himself to prevent identification. He never pretends to be anyone but himself, and he is not playing any roles in his performances. In this respect he displays the traditional Russian willingness to suffer, a feature in Russian culture that some thinkers define as masochistic, often quoting passages from Dostoevskii. The corporeal nature of Pavlenskii’s performances and the self-mutilation they sometimes involve intensify the actions and make them even more shocking. As was the case with the Vienna actionists, his behaviour sometimes disgusts his viewers. As the head of the Tretyakov Gallery has remarked: ‘Pavlenskii’s works evoke in me something between horror and light-headedness. Unlike the Voina group’ (Meduza 2016). Pavlenskii’s actions differ from those of Pussy Riot and other contemporary actionists in that with the exception of Freedom, he performs them alone. In this respect he is reminiscent of Aleksander Brener, an artist from an older 276

276 Per-Arne Bodin generation who also presented one-man performances on Red Square, especially in the 1990s. He is best known for an action in which he stood dressed as a boxer on Red Square, shouting, ‘Come out of there, Yeltsin, you dirty coward!’ The atmosphere of Pavlenskii’s works, however, is, as noted above, much more serious, and their content is significantly more radical and overtly political. Today’s harsher political climate has created a more extreme political art. Pavlenskii’s performances seem to be spontaneous, but they are thoroughly planned and strongly charged historically, politically and culturally. They are, we might say, the perfect artistic expressions of the current situation in Russia. They have been criticized for not being art, and a lively discussion has arisen about his resume. It has been noted that he has in fact had training as an artist and was especially interested in monumentalism. All of his actions have involved encounters between the politically and socially monumental and the vulnerable individual: the Kazan Cathedral, Red Square, one of Petersburg’s main thoroughfares, the wall of the Serbskii Institute, the massive headquarters of the security services. What his performances completely lack is the cheerful carnivalesque element (often in the spirit of Bakhtin) that has been so important for other contemporary Russian artists, including Pussy Riot. Pussy Riot’s or Voina’s displays may sometimes evoke laughter, but never Pavlenskii’s. In court he is accused of vandalism, but he himself insists that the charge should be terrorism, which of course makes the work of art even more political. In an interview with Novaya gazeta while in detention awaiting trial, Pavlenskii declared that his actions are meant to combat the fear experienced by the Russian people and liberate them from the daily prison in which they find themselves. The struggle with fear of the regime is also a pervasive theme of Pussy Riot and Voina. He maintains in the interview that he sees no difference between political and artistic action. His performances involve the police and the court system. He often chooses to remain silent, but various written statements reveal a singular logic that forces the authorities to play along.

The mass mediatization of Threat The action Threat and Pavlenskii’s trial have attracted enormous attention in the media. Access to him appears to have been almost unlimited. A newspaper was allowed to interview and question him in writing while he was in detention. The media were well represented during the legal proceedings, and it seems that journalists were able to interview him freely in the courtroom before the court was in session, and the audience applauded Pavlenskii on several occasions. No filming was permitted when the verdict was read out, and it is reported that the judge rushed through the judgment in a manner that made it difficult to follow. The verdict on his earlier action Freedom was read in the same headlong recitation style familiar from Zvyagintsev’s film Leviathan. This seems to be a special form of demonstrating power inherent in Russian court practice. 277

Petr Pavlenskii and his actions 277 The mass mediatization of his works has been reinforced by the delibera- tions for two awards: the Innovation Prize and the Havel Prize for Creative Dissent. Pavlenskii was the leading contender for the former until he was removed from the list of nominations for reasons that remain unclear. He was stripped of the Havel Prize when he declared that he intended to give the prize money to the Primorskii Partisans, which the awards committee regarded as a terrorist organization. Pavlenskii is silent in court but talks about his art in various types of interview. While on trial, he uses the court’s own methods as a resistance strategy.

The cultural legacy Pavlenskii is often accused of desecration (oskvernenie), as in a newspaper headline illustrating the corrugated iron door that replaced the damaged entrance to the Lubyanka: ‘Posle oskverneniya dveri v zdanii FSB ono potery- alo chast svoego sharma’ (‘After the desecration of the door of the FSB building, the edifice has lost some of its charm’ Sovershenno( sekretno 2016). The verdict came in June 2016. Pavlenskii was ultimately convicted of a crime that had not been central to the initial charge, that of damaging a cultural artefact. Arguing that the door belonged to Russia’s cultural legacy, the prosecutor highlighted the fact that so many twentieth-century Russian cultural figures had been imprisoned on the other side of it, giving the whole procedure a comic tinge not at all intended by the court (Mediazona 2016). This repressive symbolism and reality was precisely what Pavlenskii’s action was protesting against. The classification of the offence is itself prepos- terous, and Pavlenskii showed its absurdity. The accusation also resulted in a discussion that digressed from the main question of repression and fear of the authorities. The defence counsel maintained that the door was not a cultural artefact, since the original door had been replaced as recently as 2008. The court ordered Pavlenskii to pay damages and a hefty fine. On his release, he told the press that he did not intend to pay the fine or accept a collection on his behalf, since doing so would mean that he had in a sense bought the door from the FSB. The cultural legacy is an important issue for the current Russian establishment, which when it considers future culture focuses more on this heritage than on artistic innovation. The popularity of the exhibitions at the Tretyakov Gallery of the work of two older artists – Valentin Serov and Ivan Aivazovskii – seem to indicate that this attitude has met with broad approval among the long queues of visitors. There was a lot of discussion about the charges that should have been levelled against Pavlenskii: hooliganism, as in the case of Pussy Riot, minor hooliganism or vandalism. Pavlenskii himself wanted to be accused of terrorism in solidarity with two Ukrainian activists sentenced as terrorists for similar actions protesting the Russian annexation of Crimea. He is the Russian artist who has most strongly and consistently condemned Russia’s 278

278 Per-Arne Bodin policy towards Ukraine. The use of the word ‘terror’ is highly provocative politically, considering how charged the current situation is. What distinguishes Pavlenskii from activists such as Voina, PG or Pussy Riot is the bodily and solitary nature of his performances. Pavlenskii’s actions and the reactions to them are indicative of a conservative turn in Russian cultural policy in several respects, but they also reveal a search in Russian art for a new form of political commitment that harks back to an older period in European and US art.

Note

1 For a detailed and knowledgeable presentation on Pavlenskii, see Sneider (2016).

References Interfax (2014) ‘Psikhiatr priznal otrezavshego sebe mochku ukha Pavlenskogo vmen- yaemym’, Interfax, 20 October. Available at www.interfax.ru/russia/402840. Makhov, Aleksander (2015) ‘Lubyanka Square: Monument of an Unresolved Conflict’. Widok: Teorie i praktyki kultury wisualnej. Available at http://pismow- idok.org/index.php/one/article/view/276/556. Mediazona (2016) ‘Pavlenskii v sude’, Mediazona, 8 June. Available at https://zona. media/online/2016/08/06/pavlensky-prigovor. Meduza (2016) ‘Ya ne vizhu khudozhestvennoi sostavlyayushei v aktsiyakh Pavlenskogo: Intervyu direktora Tretyakovskoi galerei Zelfiry Tregulovoi’, Mediazona, 15 March. Available at https://meduza.io/feature/2016/03/15/ya-ne-vizhu-hudozhestvennoy- sostavlyayuschey-v-aktsiyah-pavlenskogo. Pavlenskii, Petr (2016) O russkom aktsionizme, Moscow: Izdatelstvo AST. Pomerantsev, Igor (2015) ‘Khudozhnik Petr Pavlenskii ob iskusstve i politike’, Svoboda, 13 November. Available at www.svoboda.org/a/27360365.html. RadioFreeEurope Radio Liberty (2015) ‘Tom Balmforth: “Russian Protest Artist Sets Fire to Door of Security Services HQ’, RadioFreeEurope Radio Liberty, 9 November. Available at www.rferl.org/a/russia-fsb-moscow-shock-artist-pyotr- pavlensky/27353693.html. RAPSI (Rossiiskoe agenstvo pravovoi I sudebnoi informatsii) (2016) ‘Prigovor khu- dozhniku Pavlenskomu – za podzhog dveri FSB vstupil v silu’, RAPSI (Rossiiskoe agenstvo pravovoi I sudebnoi informatsii), 25 October. Available at http://rapsinews. ru/moscourts_news/20161025/277015706.html. Sneider, Noah (2016) ‘Body Politics’, The Economist, June–July. Available at www.1843magazine.com/features/body-politics. Sovershenno sekretno (2016) ‘Sotrudniki FSB tyazhelo perezhivayut nadrugatelstvo aktsionista Pavlenskogo nad istoricheskim zdaniem na Lyublyanke’, Sovershenno sekretno, 28 May. Available at www.sovsekretno.ru/news/id/9328/. spb Sobaka (2013) ‘Petr Pavlenskii: “Marinoi Abramovich ya sebya tochno ne chuvst- vuyu” ’, 11 November. Available at www.sobaka.ru/city/city/19186. 279

16 A dialogue about art

Petr Pavlenskii and Pavel Yasman

Introduction On 8 February 2014, Petr Pavlenskii performed Svoboda (Freedom) in the heart of St Petersburg. He set fire to two or three dozen tyres on the pedes- trian bridge over the Griboedov canal, only a few steps from the entrance to the Russian Museum. The event was dedicated to the Ukrainian revolution, particularly the events in Maidan Square. The artist was arrested and charged with vandalism. The following dialogues are abbreviated transcripts of Pavlenskii’s inter- rogations by the investigator Pavel Yasman of the investigation committee. According to Pavlenskii, the content of Freedom is based on the complemen- tarity of the street action and the reaction to it by various representatives of the state: the police, investigators, judges, prosecutors and prison guards. Pavlenskii was still in prison awaiting trial when the investigator who conducted the interrogation had a sudden change of heart and resigned from the investigative committee for political reasons to begin a career as a human- rights lawyer.

Interrogation 1

INTERROGATOR: I understand that this is art. I have nothing against art. And our state has nothing against art. This is not the 1980s and this is not the Soviet Union. But you have to distinguish between art and engaging in unlawful acts. PAVLENSKII: Actually, there is no distinction. INTERROGATOR: Suddenly, then, God forbid, you might kill someone. PAVLENSKII: I am very sensitive to other lives. I don’t even eat meat. INTERROGATOR: Fine. But you might just go and murder someone for the sake of art. You remember the guy with the moustache and the bang that could also be called art. God forbid that someone falls victim to such art. PAVLENSKII: No performance I have carried out ever had a single victim. Only myself, if the term is applicable at all. 280

280 Petr Pavlenskii and Pavel Yasman

INTERROGATOR: What about burning tyres on a site of architectural importance? Let’s agree that Malyi Konyushennyi Bridge is such a site. PAVLENSKII: Pavements are granite and granite is a fireproof material, not wood, not a wooden bridge. If it had happened in a park, the trees might have caught fire: but this is granite, a stone. INTERROGATOR: The case here is not about damage. It is about desecration. The situation is the same as if you had sat on the mausoleum and taken a shit. PAVLENSKII: What do we mean by desecration? Desecration means violating something. The relationship between two societies – Russian and Ukrainian – has been violated. INTERROGATOR: You are thinking more globally, about societies. You introduce some countries. And the public authorities, to which I belong, regard it as an act of vandalism. I am not saying that it was you who set the bridge on fire. No one suspects you so far. In this criminal case you are a witness at this time. And the actions of unidentified persons who set fire to the tyres on the bridge are classified as vandalism. PAVLENSKII: Now the talk is about squeezing a symbolic gesture into some wording. INTERROGATOR: This is just one plane, which is being investigated and considered in terms of criminal procedure and legal proceedings. PAVLENSKII: Okay, we accept this plane, but it is this plane that is the subject of political art. At least one of the instruments of this larger system in which political art is carried out. INTERROGATOR: Okay, let’s say that some people go to the grave of an African-American … PAVLENSKII: Aaaaand … INTERROGATOR: They break the tombstone, smash it, but play it in a theatrical way. Would it be considered a crime? PAVLENSKII: It is a question of ethics and the meaning of the action. It could be the friends of the African-American, because their country’s ritual provides for some kind of special treatment. As in Tibet, for example. INTERROGATOR: Who set the tyres on fire? PAVLENSKII: We are going to talk about it some more. Today, the 51st [Article 51 of the Russian criminal code]. INTERROGATOR: Oh, stop talking about art, as if to say political acts. Let’s not mix good art with shit. PAVLENSKII: What do you mean by art? INTERROGATOR: Art as part of life. PAVLENSKII: Art is visual codes. This is what we work with, to say so. INTERROGATOR: I would like you to testify. PAVLENSKII: Article 51 for now. INTERROGATOR: Only you could treat this act as art. Everybody else treats it not as art, but as an act of vandalism. 281

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PAVLENSKII: We still have to ask everybody else about this. There are a lot of people, a lot of opinions. INTERROGATOR: I’m talking about layers. The person who committed this crime will be identified sooner or later, and the case will be sent to court. PAVLENSKII: That is clear. Or it will be dismissed due to lack of criminal intent and it will be determined that it is not an act of vandalism. INTERROGATOR: Then criminal proceedings will be dropped. But if it were not considered an act of vandalism, the criminal case would not be launched. PAVLENSKII: The bridge, which I visited today, has not been destroyed, or damaged. That is why this work is in the field of symbolism. INTERROGATOR: So you are saying that in the future there will be such a movement. People will go to the Hermitage, to the Winter Palace. There will be paintings, let’s say by [the painter] Arkhip Kuindzhi, and people will take them and stab them with knives. PAVLENSKII: But there is already such a precedent. There was an activist named Aleksander Brener. In one of his works he painted a green dollar sign on Malevich’s white square. Brener did it out of great respect for Malevich. This was one of the pinnacles of Russian art. INTERROGATOR: So, for example, I go to the Tretyakov Gallery, where we have Rublev’s Trinity. I pick up a knife, I cut it and say it is art. PAVLENSKII: Let me explain. You always give a specific example of physical destruction. Chopped, sliced, this is an act of destruction. It would be quite difficult to restore. And I am talking about work in the symbolic field. INTERROGATOR: So, for example, I drink a lot of water. I go to the Tretyakov Gallery, pull out my ‘device’ and sprinkle like a hose. Is this an act of art? PAVLENSKII: The very same Brener took a crap in front of a painting by Van Gogh. It was real. This sharing. He showed his respect. He took the concept of ‘giving a crap’ literally. But that is history. There is always a question of intent – what he did it for. INTERROGATOR: I’m saying that I’m awed by Rublev’s Trinity. I want a part of me to stay on the painting. I take it out and pee on the painting. PAVLENSKII: Here one has to understand the context in which this is happening. Because to be an act of political art, it has to come out of a political context. INTERROGATOR: We have laws and a legislature that describes specific actions for which a person is legally responsible. Would I bear the responsibility for such acts? There are consequences. The painting is pissed on: it is spoiled. PAVLENSKII: But what about the green dollar sign on the painting by Malevich? He was in the avant-garde, and all his life Malevich struggled with all kinds of commercialization of art and with those who painted taverns at that time? Brenner showed that Malevich had turned into the opposite of what he was fighting against. He was simply devoured by the system and transformed into a commodity. We do not live in the plane of 282

282 Petr Pavlenskii and Pavel Yasman the Criminal Code. It is just a part of this world just as it is part of that context. INTERROGATOR: But you have to understand that some things are prohibited by law. It does not matter whether it is art or not art. You cannot go and piss on Rublev’s painting. You just can’t, do you understand? You cannot unload tyres on Malyi Konyushennyi Bridge, where people come in their thousands to take pictures and hang locks. You cannot throw tyres around and set them on fire. Whether pursuing or not pursuing some personal goal, this cannot be done. PAVLENSKII: Here we can say: beating a child is not permitted. But what if the child wants to jump from a window or put his finger in an electric socket? This is a trivial example: hit the child at the moment when he goes to shove his fingers in the socket, where electricity would just kill him. You hit him on his arm, which you are not allowed to do, but the context means that it must be done or he will be killed by the current, all charred. INTERROGATOR: The Criminal Code has a chapter, ‘circumstances preclud- ing criminality’: self-defence, causing harm in the detention of a person who has committed a crime, or physical or mental coercion, reasonable force, execution of an order. I hit a child, I break his leg, but he does not get run over by a train. I see that he is going to be hit by a train, so I shoot him in the leg. Painful, of course, but I have prevented his death. But what do tyres on a bridge prevent? PAVLENSKII: The intention is to make a gesture that can contribute to pre- venting a cold war between two societies: in this case, Russia and Ukraine. Societies do not need a cold war. Societies should not fight or hate each other; and if there is nothing in the Criminal Code about it, this means that it is not perfect. INTERROGATOR: So after all which consequences are you worried about? You personally. PAVLENSKII: Not to be prosecuted and for everybody to understand that it is art, not vandalism. The bridge is intact: there is not even any soot. INTERROGATOR: If the bridge were not intact, it would be, for example, article 167, terrorism, because a transport artery would have been destroyed. You must understand that vandalism is linked to the specific circumstances. Malyi Konyushennyi Bridge is a site of architectural importance, it is protected by UNESCO. This was deliberately desecrated. This was done with direct intent – to burn. If someone were to say that it happened by accident … Let’s say a truck was driving, tyres fell from it and formed a row, and then someone threw a cigarette butt and they accidentally caught fire. Motive is one of the elements of the crime. PAVLENSKII: It is necessary to consider the context of the situation in order to speak about the incident. This is a historic bridge. This is the place where terrorists from the ‘People’s Will’ attempted to assassinate Emperor Alexander II. Who at the time was suppressing … INTERROGATOR: What the hell are you talking about? 283

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PAVLENSKII: There is a historical context here. Why did the person do it? That is the question – why? That sets the precedent for art. INTERROGATOR: I see you favour the word ‘context’. You have repeated it something like 600 times.

Interrogation 2

PAVLENSKII: In general, I am interested in establishing the truth of a matter. Here we were talking about Malevich. As he once said, ‘In art, truth is important, but not sincerity’. INTERROGATOR: Petr Andreevich, my friend, I am very happy to talk to you. But do we have a long time today or not? I’m here every day; I come at seven in the morning … PAVLENSKII: I want us to find some common ground. I want to understand how one side thinks and how the other side thinks. To fit something from the field of symbolism into the Code of Criminal Procedure is a difficult task. INTERROGATOR: What did you say? I did not understand a thing. Let us only speak in Russian. PAVLENSKII: In Russian. There is the field of symbols and signs. And it is in this symbolic field where art works: signifier and signified. The act of art occurs in the symbolic field for the most part; and to a certain extent, of course, in reality. That is, we must begin to look at the action from different angles. Then we will come to some kind of truth. Whether it was an act of desecration and humiliation of public morality or, on the contrary, an action aimed at strengthening social relations. I will even explain why I touch on the symbolic field. You had it in mind when you mentioned uncleanness and bowel movements during our last conversation. From the point of view of cultural concepts, these acts would be aimed at humiliation. But fire is not derogatory. It is its element. For example, take the recent Olympic Games. Would it make a big difference if instead of the torch with the Olympic flame, a device with sewage was carried? Is there is a difference or not? Do you at least agree with me that we are interested in establishing the truth of events? INTERROGATOR: Of course! PAVLENSKII: Good! But if we consider the truth of events, we must consider the context. Desecration: the humiliation of anything. Fire is the song of release. It is not a desecration. INTERROGATOR: What are you telling me? You are a witness, and you sit back and acknowledge in the presence of the investigator, that … PAVLENSKII: We are discussing the action Freedom. INTERROGATOR: We are not discussing the action. We are not investigating the action. We are investigating arson involving tyres. PAVLENSKII: But we are not talking about the burning; we are talking about ignition. We are talking about the action Freedom and about the field in which this action was made: in the criminal field or the symbolic. 284

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INTERROGATOR: Look, the whole action, this circle – it is all action. And tyres are only a small part. So only this small part is being investigated. No one is persecuting anybody for their actions here. The prosecution is being carried out against an unidentified group of persons for burning tyres. PAVLENSKII: For the fire? INTERROGATOR: For setting the tyres on fire! PAVLENSKII: Fire is the consequence of burning a tyre. Fire is a certain symbol, in this case, the symbol of liberation. And fire cannot be compared with sewage. If a car were passing this bridge … a vacuum truck. INTERROGATOR: A shit truck … PAVLENSKII: A shit truck. If it were passing over the bridge and shit spilled from it, a tonne of it, that would fill the entire bridge and at the same time block the road to pedestrians. Then perhaps you could consider it a desecration. INTERROGATOR: I will interrupt you there. I get your idea. It is simple genius but you think very broadly. I think a little more narrowly, you know, as a common man in the street. PAVLENSKII: Nothing of the sort! Then we just delete the entire history of art and its entire cultural baggage, as if it does not exist at all INTERROGATOR: And what does art have to do with it? The crime must be investigated. The crime! Do you understand? PAVLENSKII: The fact of the matter is that you cannot put any art action within the scope of the word ‘crime’. If we speak about the historical context, we understand that the very fact of bad relations between societies … INTERROGATOR: Petr Andreevich, I beg you, do not think so globally in such matters. PAVLENSKII: I look at the general. INTERROGATOR: Narrow it down. PAVLENSKII: I can narrow down. Then we have a situation in which the Code of Criminal Procedure itself becomes part of the action Freedom. Because there is a certain paradox: for the action Freedom my freedom is threatened. And now both of us have to establish the truth. INTERROGATOR: We have already established the truth: that an unknown person set fire to tyres with a group of persons. This is a truth that we have already established. We now have to identify the culprits and send the case to court. PAVLENSKII: But your ‘truth’ might be false. INTERROGATOR: Maybe. Therefore, we are investigating all the circumstances. PAVLENSKII: If we go back to Malevich, for example, Malevich went to jail twice. INTERROGATOR: Malevich, yes, unfortunately we cannot interrogate him as a witness. PAVLENSKII: We cannot, no. But he was questioned in 1927 and in 1930. And if we cannot understand now that perhaps the NKVD, or those who questioned Malevich, and kept him in prison were mistaken? 285

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INTERROGATOR: Do you want to go there? Do you want to be locked up? PAVLENSKII: I want other things. I want it not to reach the point of incarceration, I want for the new generation not to go back to the same things. INTERROGATOR: Petr Andreevich, do you compare yourself with Malevich? PAVLENSKII: No way. This only time will tell, and the volume of work done. Malevich, by the way, did a lot of work. INTERROGATOR: Are you, incidentally, going to show some pictures? PAVLENSKII: Wait. I am as an artist working in a fairly narrow specialism. INTERROGATOR: Which one? PAVLENSKII: Actionism. INTERROGATOR: Then I am also an artist. PAVLENSKII: You only have to carry out an action. INTERROGATOR: I have already carried out a couple today. PAVLENSKII: Then you still have to reflect on them. INTERROGATOR: I have. PAVLENSKII: Then you can call yourself an artist. INTERROGATOR: I am an artist! PAVLENSKII: Wonderful! INTERROGATOR: Artist-interrogator of the central district investigative department: Artist of Justice. PAVLENSKII: Very well. In that case you also have to think seriously about yourself as an ‘artist’. INTERROGATOR: I don’t know; I’ll think about it. I just haven’t ever considered myself an artist. Now I will assume myself to be an artist. Maybe I will sign somewhere. First, my activities as an artist have helped me to achieve social justice! Second, I have made an invaluable contribution to the formation of statistical reporting. PAVLENSKII: Maybe then you were more like a statistician? INTERROGATOR: I’ve already told you; I’m an artist of justice. PAVLENSKII: Good. Then you need to establish it as an art form. INTERROGATOR: I have marked it, sewn and numbered it. PAVLENSKII: To establish is to convince the whole world. INTERROGATOR: I convince the whole world in the form of a single person on the third floor: the prosecutor. PAVLENSKII: One opinion is not enough. INTERROGATOR: Then I’ll convince the judge. PAVLENSKII: You must make a contribution to culture. It must be as a form of interaction. INTERROGATOR: When a court makes certain decisions, comes up with the sentence – it will be the result of my art. PAVLENSKII: A question for you, then. In what way did you overcome yourself in this? Art is overcoming conventional boundaries. What are the conventional boundaries here? INTERROGATOR: I overcame myself in the fact that I did not sleep enough, got up early, finished the criminal case in three days. Overcame? Overcame! 286

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PAVLENSKII: In this you have shown that you are a hard-working person. On some things we can even agree. The fact that we want to establish the truth. INTERROGATOR: Let’s agree. And stay friends! We will meet, drink tea. PAVLENSKII: What things do you want us to agree on? Do you want sincerity before truth? It will not be. Then I will immediately find myself in the category of stupid, impotent artists. INTERROGATOR: And who told you that you are stupid and pointless? We are not taking any proceedings against you. We just meditate, talk. PAVLENSKII: The conviction leads us to the truth. I cannot go against it and start playing. I cannot replace truth with that. INTERROGATOR: I understand, Petr Andreevich. I largely agree with you. I am just explaining to you the mere fact that arson involving tyres is being investigated. You see? I think that if this event of burning the tyres had taken place somewhere other than on the bridge, even on Nevskii Prospect, on the road, in a field, no one would have said a word. But so long as Malyi Konyushennyi Bridge has historic, social and cultural value, if someone sets fire to tyres on it, it is necessary to investigate the event. PAVLENSKII: I will try to talk about vandalism from a legal point of view. Like talking about desecration. What is desecration? A humiliation of something: piss, crap, smash, this can be seen as desecration, because some actions are well-established symbols of humiliation from the point of view of the amassed experience But fire is not a symbol of humiliation. INTERROGATOR: I get it. Do not hesitate to provide testimony. PAVLENSKII: Testifying implies sincerity. Is that correct? INTERROGATOR: Yes. Well, put it this way … PAVLENSKII: I am not interested in working for the plant that produces criminals, and in particular in making myself a criminal. My goal is to establish the truth. To define the categories in which this action can be considered. I have a very simple task. But at the same time I am fully aware of how the system will act with regard to me. INTERROGATOR: Here you come and talk and talk, but we have not recorded anything. We must sooner or later begin to testify. PAVLENSKII: And is there any meaning in our conversations for you? INTERROGATOR: Of course there is, within the framework of the criminal file. PAVLENSKII: By and large, the way I am talking to you now I will not change later. INTERROGATOR: That is your right. But there is no such procedural status as ‘an artist’. We do not investigate actions here. We investigate arson. PAVLENSKII: Arson that has no connection to the action? INTERROGATOR: None. PAVLENSKII: So that means this is a separate act? INTERROGATOR: It is an act within another performed act. PAVLENSKII: It turns out to be a sort of ‘hyperaction’. I cannot afford to cas- trate my action in this way. It would be a betrayal of myself both as an 287

Dialogue about art 287 artist and as a person. And of what I have been doing for a number of years. That would be a crime, by the way. INTERROGATOR: You know what it can be compared with … performing an artistic action, tying a person to a stake during the action and saying, ‘yes this is a common event and it is all part of the action’. PAVLENSKII: I sewed up my mouth, nailed my balls to the pavement, rolled myself up in barbed wire. But I didn’t do it just because. INTERROGATOR: But what is the most effective way of self-assertion, self- realization? What action provided you with the most satisfaction? PAVLENSKII: I will tell you when I got satisfaction … When I saw the signature of the investigator who opened a criminal case on the action Fixation, which was the exact copy of the plastic of my action Carcass. Carcass is the human body in a cocoon of barbed wire. It is an action about how a person feels in a repressive legal system. When a criminal case is opened, the legal system bites into the body. My actions are not unfounded. It is not just my imagination but an observation of the context in which we find ourselves. In general, I hold my ground. INTERROGATOR: Here we have the interrogation protocol. We still have, unfortunately, the Criminal Procedure Code that requires compliance with the protocol forms. All the things that you are talking about, all of them must be recorded on paper. PAVLENSKII: Fixation … INTERROGATOR: Fixation.

Interrogation 3

INTERROGATOR: Hello (offers hand). PAVLENSKII: Hello. You are my accuser, why should we shake hands? INTERROGATOR: Are you going to testify? PAVLENSKII: No. INTERROGATOR: In any event? In any procedural status? PAVLENSKII: In any procedural status. Last time I talked with you about truth and sincerity. I have to be faithful to the event and the words. What is your position? INTERROGATOR: My position as what? PAVLENSKII: You can only have one position. You haven’t had a crack on the head and don’t have a dual personality? INTERROGATOR: You know, sometimes my head can crack. You don’t want to be examined? PAVLENSKII: : An examination of what? INTERROGATOR: A mental health examination. PAVLENSKII: No, I don’t want that. I already did three surveys and was examined by a forensic psychiatrist. And these already provide sufficient reason to believe that my condition is normal. This is the first 288

288 Petr Pavlenskii and Pavel Yasman and second: all these examinations are actually the construction of segregating walls. INTERROGATOR: What segregating walls? What are you talking about? PAVLENSKII: Segregation, barriers, division … INTERROGATOR: Wait, wait … PAVLENSKII: Segregation is separation: racial, religious. Norm and pathology is also a separation – one that aims to support the homogeneous mono- lith of public opinion. I think you know what it is formed with: media propaganda. INTERROGATOR: No, I do not know anything. I, Petr Andreevich, got my ass handed to me because the case is still in court. On a charge of vandalism. PAVLENSKII: The authorities, official obligation … INTERROGATOR: Not even by the district authorities, but by the deputy head of the main investigation department. Do you see? PAVLENSKII: I see. We are talking. You also cannot be split. Where are you? Are you a man or a functional element? INTERROGATOR: You want to hear my thoughts? But I was instructed. I have to execute them as an official. PAVLENSKII: So you admit that you are a tool. This instrumentalization, the power just instrumentalizes people. INTERROGATOR: I agree. I expressed my opinion. Now I am waiting for the order for my punishment. So definitely, I want to tell you, you will be accused and the case will be sent to court. PAVLENSKII: Clear. Do you remember that the action was called Freedom? It was the first action in which I was not talking about prison, but about freedom. Now the paradox is that as soon as I started talking about freedom … INTERROGATOR: Call it metaphysics. PAVLENSKII: There are different angles from which to look at it. When I was talking about prison, the authorities accepted it. A conversation about freeing people automatically begins to affect my freedom. That is all twisted. INTERROGATOR: I have received my instructions and I am obliged to follow them silently, carry them out calmly. Just don’t comment on anything, for God’s sake. PAVLENSKII: This is all the rage of those entities. They make you do what you do not want to do. They take people who are initially able to recognize art, to make art. And then some people are forced to attack others. They are being made the prosecutorial side. INTERROGATOR: No, wait. Let us agree that there is a fact of vandalism in your actions. The burning of tyres. Fire is not vandalism, okay. But the burning of tyres that leaves marks, smelly smoke – this is vandalism. PAVLENSKII: I do not agree. Vandalism involves humiliation, desecration. The bridge was not humiliated. There was talk of a political context. Historical context was included there too. INTERROGATOR: Why on the bridge? 289

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PAVLENSKII: The bridge is a metaphor. Bridges are burning and there is no way back. I talked about what happened in Ukraine. Maidan is a coup d’état. There is no way back. INTERROGATOR: Well, I understand, a question of qualification. PAVLENSKII: You told me that I’m thinking big. And I can say that the system to which you belong strives to capture everything in its wide scope. All the actions or inactions of people can qualify as a crime. INTERROGATOR: I’ll be honest, I have to give you the procedural status of a suspect and to implement the preventive measure of house arrest. PAVLENSKII: You have everything prepared? INTERROGATOR: Of course. PAVLENSKII: I think in that case, if the system will take such actions towards me, I will respond with silence. INTERROGATOR: Will you fill it in? PAVLENSKII: No. I tried to convince you that it is not necessary to differentiate between ‘good’ art and ‘bad’ art. Norm and pathology and disease. Is this art right? INTERROGATOR: Which art? You have to act according to the law. PAVLENSKII: That means that the Criminal Procedure Code serves as the ideological apparatus. At the head of all of this is statistics. There are no features to this or that situation. There are statistics and all. Everything is done for the sake of reporting. Here you have given me a status. INTERROGATOR: You are now officially a suspect. You will be charged within ten days and the case will go to court. As I understand it, you will not testify with the status of a suspect and the accused? PAVLENSKII: No. INTERROGATOR: Let’s just write it then: refused to testify. PAVLENSKII: Can you tell me who chose this article in relation to this action? INTERROGATOR: Who chose? PAVLENSKII: It could be a ‘coup’ attempt, terrorism, something else … Tell me, if you were nearby, would you join in? INTERROGATOR: No, I would not join in. Do you want to testify? PAVLENSKII: No. You understand that any moment has a historical importance? It is a question of responsibility. INTERROGATOR: I know that sooner or later there will come a time that for me will have historical importance. PAVLENSKII: I mean responsibility before yourself, first and foremost. Not before the authorities. Bosses are an infinite hierarchy. Each boss is someone’s slave and every slave is someone’s boss. And as a result there is a statement from Minister of Culture Medinskii that says such art belongs in a psychiatric ward. INTERROGATOR: It seems to me that out there, there is no strong political will, or your case has been forgotten about. If someone sends you to jail you will be locked up and no European Court will help you. PAVLENSKII: Everything is determined by the will of a person who just doesn’t like what is happening? 290

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INTERROGATOR: Truth be told, I really don’t know what is going on. PAVLENSKII: So someone’s will is pressuring you here, pressuring me? INTERROGATOR: It might be will. It might be vision. It might be the objective truth: who knows? There is the court, right? The court will decide. PAVLENSKII: The court, as you know, understands nothing. The court looks at the papers. It all starts with a report and ends with a sentence. Endless migration of paper. Do you think I’m interested in engaging with the production of paper? INTERROGATOR: Here abouts they say: ‘We live under totalitarianism’. But in America, where there is democracy, things are much harsher and more brutal. There you offend a cop and get forty years for it. In our country, can you imagine? They beat up cops and are given a suspended sentence. PAVLENSKII: They don’t get suspended sentences here. You are, in my opinion, somehow sympathizing with the system. You justify the system but you don’t justify the person. On the contrary, everything is reversed. Why? INTERROGATOR: What is reversed? PAVLENSKII: A system where paper reigns supreme is justified, but man is not justified. INTERROGATOR: I still need to write down testimony. Why are you not providing testimony? PAVLENSKII: I’m not testifying because I don’t want to encourage this paper flow. INTERROGATOR: You’ll still testify. The Attorney General will address you and you will be given the last word. PAVLENSKII: And maybe I won’t. I shall see. Maybe I will put my position in my last words, or maybe silence will be my last word. I have been on trial. I am not interested in the procedure. I wonder at how the system works. I look at the judge: it is not a judge but an appendage to this flow of paper. INTERROGATOR: So it is everywhere. If you had burned somewhere on Stachek Prospect or on the Ring Road. Why carry out the action on an object of cultural heritage? PAVLENSKII: It is a question of historical context. INTERROGATOR: You have to consider the legislation. To find out. PAVLENSKII: Can you imagine me planning the action and then starting to check the legislation? That is what I should do? INTERROGATOR: That’s for when you do an action the next time; but don’t do it in the central district. You go outside Gorokhovaya, that’s all. You can do anything you want there! PAVLENSKII: Don’t you understand? I don’t work in the centre or not in the centre. I work in an information field. INTERROGATOR: Define information field and its territory outside the city centre for yourself. PAVLENSKII: Following this logic, next you will be advising me perhaps to exclude any action on the Day of the Interior Ministry Employees. 291

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INTERROGATOR: No no no: only geographically. By the way, now look … Okay, I will not say anything, because then you will say that I have advised you to do so. PAVLENSKII: You can say nothing, but go and execute it yourself! Put on plain clothes so that no one recognizes you. INTERROGATOR: No, I’m too un-free for that. PAVLENSKII: Why do you not aspire to this? INTERROGATOR: I really want to, I do want to, but I’m a reserved person. PAVLENSKII: You could even get out of the system and build something taking advantage of their knowledge. INTERROGATOR: I’m going to leave the system sooner or later. I just don’t know how. 292 293

Part IV Theatre A parallel development 294 295

17 Theatre in a period of archaization

Pavel Rudnev

In Russia, theatre has turned out to be one of the main testing grounds for a cultural war between culture and the state. To people in the theatre world or active in the work of the theatre this is both logical and revealing. The most recent attacks on the new directors’ theatre by conservatives and defenders of the status quo have signalled how far the theatre has come to seriously influence public consciousness. A weak and dull phenomenon would hardly have provoked such an aggressive reaction, often interspersed with threats of censorship and repression against the artists. The development of Russian theatre over the past twenty to twenty-five years has been very complicated. It has passed through three periods since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 1990s turned out to be extremely destructive, although there were many interesting theatre productions during that time. The economic absurdity, during which state financing was drastically cut, led theatres into the abyss of capitalist economics. Step by step and in different ways the theatres had to learn how to earn money on their own and how to attract an audience. At this time, therefore, there was a dramatic change towards the boulevard theatre and the bourgeois theatre. The spiritual, social and communicative missions of the theatre were lost. Theatre became just a form of entertainment – one among many. The spirit of experiment disappeared. Most important, however, was the dramatic loss of its former audience. It is possible to say that there was one audience in the 1980s, another in the 1990s and a third in the 2000s. These three groups did not overlap. A crisis in the theatre is always a crisis in society. During the 1990s the intellectually curious audience abruptly left the theatre, which was partly linked to the total impoverishment of the intelligentsia. The tradition of going to the theatre was thereby almost broken. The theatre lost its value and importance and was no longer in demand. The 1990s passed in increasingly empty and grey theatre auditoriums. The end of the 1990s and especially the beginning of the 2000s saw the first tentative attempts to understand and overcome the crisis. It is especially important that the 2000s were the years when private initiatives ruled. The recovery of the theatre therefore took place through self-treatment and self- repair. It was initially a movement ‘from below’ that did not follow on from 296

296 Pavel Rudnev any diktat of the ministry of culture or from any commissioning policy of the authorities. Individuals in the theatre world began to develop the theatre in different directions, and through their private initiative there arose a movement of contemporary plays, an interest in modern dance, a new festival culture, the movement of theatre laboratories in the provinces (which remarkably strengthened Russian theatre outside its two largest cities), open theatre venues and the various forms of social outreach in the theatre. Theatre centres were created all over the country. These became the heart of the work of spreading enlightenment about theatre, and attracted more and more volunteers and amateurs who gradually became professionalized. As important as the tasks of liberating the theatre system and searching for new theatre technologies were, there was also the idea of the theatre as a form for consolidating society and the country, that is, of the theatre as a kind of ‘social glue’. By the 2010s the picture was much more positive. The theatre had developed its muscle and regained its social and artistic value. The new theatre had given birth to the phenomenon of a new audience that was starting to demand its own theatre. The festival culture, which is well developed in Russia, was now not only connecting the regions and linking them to Russia’s two largest cities, but also educating both artists and the audience. Thanks to the large Russian theatre festivals, the Russian audience has for the past twenty years been able to see almost all that was happening in theatre around the world – the various theatre systems and the multiple ways of making theatre. The influence on the de-canonization of Russian theatre was incredible as it quickly patched up the lacunas left by Soviet censorship, which had narrowed its horizons. At the same time the Russian theatre world was renewed by the new post-Soviet generation of artists who came to work there. The new drama and the genre that became of the utmost importance to the Russian stage – documentary theatre – led the theatre to the study of real life and an interest in reality, on the one hand, and brought back a tradition of compassionate social criticism, on the other. One of the main features of the new theatre culture became its opening up to the audience in a call for dialogue and an effort to overcome the ‘fourth wall’. Over the past twenty years the new theatre has often provoked lively discussions with its audience and used the blogosphere as a democratic instrument with no hierarchy but just horizontal connections. This direct contact with people made it possible to develop an audience and gave artists an opportunity to offer their ‘keys’ to an understanding of the new aesthetics and the new senses. All these novelties made the theatre highly influential and allowed it to regain its social significance. Theatre was talked about: it became the target of heated debate; it was hated and adored; and a new active audience came with demands of its own. The theatre began to react to life beyond the stage – to learn the changing language of society, value landmarks and talk about serious topics. Migratory processes in contemporary Russia, how to adapt society to the needs of disabled people, xenophobia, social inequality and social upheaval were all discussed. The most outstanding example of this influence 297

Theatre in a period of archaization 297 was the production by Teatr.doc, 1 Hour 18 Minutes, which publicized the story of the lawyer, Sergei Magnitskii, who fell victim to the political system and died in jail. The attacks by the state on the theatre after 2012, conservative accusations of ‘European tendencies’ in theatre and the arts, and the demand for repressive and censorial restrictions all aimed to limit the sudden increase in the influence of the theatre. They sought to weaken the socially active leaders who had started to influence the minds of the intelligentsia. There should be no place for illusion here. All the theatres and directors that were subject to repression – Teatr.doc, Kirill Serebrennikov, Konstantin Bogomolov, Timofei Kulyabin and the ‘Golden Mask’ theatre festival – were first and foremost connected with the theatre’s social critical wing, which depicted on stage the genuine problems of society, the state and the country. Accusations of immorality, or that the new theatre violated ‘traditional values’, were nothing but political cover. In fact censorship was aimed at the most outstanding and the most outspoken social critics among the artists. It is interesting to compare this with the huge Russian subculture of the ‘prison chanson’, which has an audience of millions. You never read or hear of prison chanson being ostracized by the state, in spite of the fact that it romanticizes the criminal and promotes antisocial values such as the cult of physical power, the existence of a parallel ‘law of thieves’ being more important than state law and the idea that the prisons are full of good and innocent souls.

Repressive methods used against the theatre Many types of repressive methods have been used against theatres. A series of tactics has been deployed. First, the state has taken over from private initiative in cultural life. The state used ‘raider attacks’ in both a literal and a figurative sense to displace private initiative. Culture became a state activity and the state became extremely active where it had been inactive before. This often resulted in the collapse of cultural institutions. The authorities appointed loyal but incompetent and sometimes even highly dubious people as directors of cultural institutions. In one notorious example, when in the spring of 2015 a controversial production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Novosibirsk Theatre for Opera and Ballet was closed and the head of the theatre fired, the person appointed to replace him had a criminal record and substantial debts. In another example, the ministry of culture in the summer of 2015 replaced the experts on the jury of the Russian Golden Mask international theatre festival with ‘fake experts’ who were unknown and lacked any professional authority but were politically loyal to the state. This resulted in protests from the theatre world (Kommersant 2015; Izvestiya 2015). The festival had been constantly under attack from conservatives for being too oriented towards experimental theatre (poiskovyi teatr) rather than the traditional theatre. In fact, classical and avant-garde theatre were usually equally represented among the nominations, but it is important to remember that what is regarded as important 298

298 Pavel Rudnev by professionals in the theatre is the search for theatrical forms and not for any canon. Second, the concept of ‘usefulness’ was introduced into discussions of the arts. The state would support financially only such art that it considered useful, or as Russia’s Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinskii, put it: ‘We water only flowers which are useful’. In his mind this meant art that praised and not criticized Russia. Such a concept is dangerous. It paves the way for an immediate and unambiguous evaluation of art by officials who use their authority as an instrument of power in order to ‘execute or to show mercy’. According to Medinskii’s deputy, Vladimir Aristarkhov, ‘the objective of the Culture Ministry is not art; the objective is the physical and mental health of the nation’ (Lapina 2014). From there it is just one step to ‘pulling out the weeds’. Directors’ interpretative theatre is now officially regarded as an unhealthy phenomenon and state financing for experimental theatre has been questioned. In the name of defending so-called traditional values there have been calls for an end to reinterpretations of classical works of Russian literature and to any interpretations made in the context of contemporary Russia. At the same time, the radical contemporary play is also out of favour. Conservatives cite new forms of the theatre art as the root cause of social troubles and a direct source of drug addiction and social apathy, corruption and depravity. Official policy has now introduced the principle of norm creation in the sense that moral conservative values should be promoted, and the dark side of life and social problems be cut from depictions of society. The result of such a policy is that theatre productions lose contact with real life. The criticism of interpretative directing reaches the level of absurdity. For example, during the December 2015 ‘International Cultural Forum’ in St Petersburg the authorities initiated a public debate on ‘The Author’s Theatre: Borders of Interpretation of the Classics’. Most of the participants argued that there was nothing to discuss, and that it is comical to talk at the beginning of the twenty-first century about denying interpretation in directing when hermeneutics, semiotics and psychoanalysis have already ruled out any idea of an ‘objective reading’ of a text. Also absurd are the investigations by the institute named after Dmitrii Likhachev of various theatre productions with regard to whether they correspond to the nature of the original texts by Pushkin or Gogol (Colta 2015). The attempt to move theatre away from an interpretative function denies directing as such and will take us back to the illustrative theatre of the nineteenth century. We therefore face archaization, a phenomenon that has become very common in Russia in recent years. It is the equivalent of trying to take contemporary music back to the symphonic style of Beethoven or the culture of galleries back to the easel and figurative painting. Moreover, all the talk about denying the tradition of interpretative theatre resembles the recent law against so-called falsification of history, when in fact it is the state that is ‘capturing interpretation’. 299

Theatre in a period of archaization 299 It is characteristic that classic Russian literature has been declared the official norm but also a territory free of risk-taking and danger – a territory of comfort. As if classic Russian literature (‘the old, good and eternal’) would be incapable of offending or insulting as long as it were not interpreted from the context of contemporary society. We know that it is enough to have read the classics to be able to refute such an idea. Antonin Artaud, the French theatre director and one of the most influential figures in the evolution of modern drama theory, said that admiration of the classics is part of bourgeois conformism. Dictatorships usually adore the classic heritage but transform culture into a monument and a museum. The deployment of culture around a normative tradition leads to another paradox, especially since the most diverse experience can be found in the Russian theatre tradition. Russian culture includes everything and is multi- faceted. There is not only the psychological theatre of the early Moscow Art Theatre but also the modernism of Stanislavskii, the aestheticism of Tairov, the tough interpretative theatre of Meyerhold and Lyubimov; Christian art as well as anti-religious and anti-clerical art; theatre loyal to the state but also theatre defending the little man against the state machinery; and not only feelings of comfort and the joy of existence, but also a deep and severe tradition of social criticism. Third, depriving the theatre of financing has become a major instrument of the state. In addition to the argument about the usefulness of art mentioned above, there have been a number of discussions about ending the state’s financing of experimental art and of art with a critical perspective. To completely cut off such art from state financing is a break even with Soviet tradition, as even in Soviet times the film director Andrei Tarkovskii, the Sovremennik Theatre and the Taganka Theatre were financed by the state. Vladimir Medinskii’s favoured idea is that the state is not a sponsor but a contractor. Moreover, it is more common to encounter the peculiar characteristic of negatively defining what is useful: not what art would be ‘useful’ for the state but what art ought not to be. Art, for example, should not express tolerance, multiculturalism or criticism of Russia. This is actually a way of defining through negation – apophatic theology. Attempts to define special Russian values end up with the all-human values of home, family, harmony and justice. The specifics of Russian values are difficult to understand. In line with the new ideas, the ministry of culture cut its financial support to the influential ‘New European Theatre’ (NET) festival, which was created as a private initiative by theatre critics and became one of the most influential Russian festivals. For more than twenty years it gave the Russian audience a chance to see all the major, newsworthy European theatre and to get to know new drama. Instead of supporting NET the ministry gave money to the ‘Smotriny’ festival of contemporary plays, which almost exclusively mounts productions based on the works of Yurii Polyakov. Polyakov is the chief editor of Literaturnaya gazeta, a newspaper loyal to the authorities and aggressively anti the new culture. He has turned Literaturnaya gazeta into a place 300

300 Pavel Rudnev for settling old scores with his opponents. He deliberately writes folk plays full of ideological slogans, unequivocally biting remarks and crackling music hall humour. His plays are usually staged by theatres with no interest in new plays and no artistic individuality. None of the best-known and respected theatre directors have so far staged a play by Polyakov. The problem of depriving the experimental of state financing is more serious than it may appear at first. The state leaves experimental and critical theatre to private investors, but at the same time continues to harass those few theatres that manage to survive without state support. Thus, Teatr.doc, the most famous theatre for documentary plays, was twice forced to move from one building to another because the authorities used all possible means, including partly illegal ones, to deprive it of its base. Each move was capital- intensive but also created huge enthusiasm among volunteers who grew in number. As a result Teatr.doc gained a larger venue and more publicity. There is a problem with the state monopoly on theatre in Russia. The dependency of the theatre on state financing has not changed its character since Soviet times. There are large, prestigious and branded federal theatres; regional theatres; departmental theatres such as the theatre of the army and navy; and municipal theatres linked to a city or district. The private theatre initiative just manages to survive. No more than twelve private, non-commercial theatres exist in the country. The deteriorating economic situation in Russia and the pauperization of the audience make the situation for private theatres even more difficult. Even during the relatively liberal years of the 1990s, the state did not manage to create a system that allowed the private theatre to exist or make it profitable for businesses to invest in private initiatives in the field of culture or social outreach. The conditions no longer exist for private theatres to survive in Russia, especially in the provinces. Theatre is a costly art form, and the denial of state support means losing the right to stay in the profession. Moreover, there is a paradox that state institutions do not perceive social criticism to be useful for the state. According to the conservative paradigm, satire is seen as something evil. Only praise, odic intonations and glorification can be beneficial. The traditions of Socialist Realism are being revived. However, to any person of the twenty-first century it is abundantly clear that criticism of society, the regulation of life in society, is an important function of culture. Through satirical and carnival-style portraits of reality, artists ful- fil very important tasks. They reflect on the mentality of society, its spiritual state of mind, hidden fears and complexes, while also anticipating the future and speculating at the consequences of the mistakes of the authorities. Fourth, the issue of the church has become a specific problem. The Russian Orthodox Church has blended with state institutions and now acts as the most severe censor and delimiter. As a rich investor, the church could have acted more wisely, in a more precise and tactful way. Instead of burning out all that it dislikes or considers ‘wrong’, which leads to the exasperation of the intelligentsia and an outflow from the church, the church could have invested 301

Theatre in a period of archaization 301 in an art that is ‘useful’ in the sense that artists become interested in a dialogue on issues of faith without critical intonations. Unfortunately, it is more profitable for the church to use the methods not of free competition but of forcible takeover and capture. The conflict in the spring of 2015 around a production of Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser could be seen as symptomatic. In the production by Timofei Kulyabin, one of the most interesting young theatre directors, the plot was transferred to contemporary times and the singer, Tannhäuser, became a film director. The poster of the play was a parody of the well-known poster of the US film The People Against Larry Flint, using an image of the crucifixion. The church, relying on the loyalty of the local authorities, organized a noisy media campaign and street demonstrations. As a result, the leadership of the theatre was replaced by the ministry of culture and the new leadership closed the production. The church referred in its statements to public indignation, but in fact the indignation was manufactured. The discontent consisted only of people who had an interest in the leadership of the Novosibirsk Opera being replaced. Judging from the photographs of the demonstration, the people who gathered were not opera lovers but people who hardly visit theatres. In order to set a precedent that would become known all over the country, a vulnerable project was selected – an opera, the most complicated of all genres and a field in which very few specialists exist. Moreover, opera is in itself a highly conservative art form that is difficult to modernize. TheTannhäuser opera in Novosibirsk was seen by very few people, since opera productions are shown in cycles and not regularly every month as is usually the case in Russian dramatic theatres. There were only four performances altogether, which means that only about 4,000 people saw the production. All the discussion and the public hearings were deliberately closed to people who had actually seen the production, even when they asked to be allowed to participate. Finally, Timofei Kulyabin is a modest and quiet man who did not even campaign or try to make a noise. Here is the main paradox. I saw Tannhäuser live, which today sounds like ‘I saw Lenin’. Kulyabin’s production was a highly religious work, full of sympathy for the Christian faith and not at all a parody of the canons of the church. The conception of the play is to show the closeness between the Christian martyrs and martyrs in the arts. In the Novosibirsk production Tannhäuser himself is a film director, an ascetic and passion-bearer who chooses martyrdom in the name of an idea, exactly as the Christian martyr does, by choosing his form of asceticism, praying and fasting. What caused the indignation above all was a scene from the film by Tannhäuser that showed Christ among the courtesans, and the poster with the crucifixion parodying the poster of the Larry Flint film visible. This belonged to the hero’s past and was the first phase of his purgatory when demons tried to drag his soul into hell (mytarstvo). All this is rejected in the finale of the opera by Tannhäuser and the hero of his movie, Jesus Christ, who chooses 302

302 Pavel Rudnev the road of martyrdom and suffering and not the one to joy, happiness, bliss and lust. In the last scene Tannhäuser, after choosing asceticism, carries a cross to the film shoot. The theatre stage, which is the instrument of the artist, becomes his personal Golgotha, the place of purgatory and martyrdom for an idea. In Tannhäuser, art is presented as an ally of faith and not at all as its opposite. However, there was nobody to whom to prove this. The last performance, which I saw, bathed in the love of the audience. Wagner’s music could not be heard on the Novosibirsk stage above the cheers and screams of delight. Observing the repertoire of Russian theatres as a whole it is possible to conclude that the topic of faith has disappeared completely from theatre performances. The church has frightened people of the theatre to such an extent, through endless scandals in different regions of the country, that not only have anti-church and anti-clerical ideas vanished, but faith-based art has vanished too. Artists try to avoid the topic of faith because, as an image, it has been monopolized by the church. The question is whether this situation is advantageous to the church. Fifth, the mania for prohibiting and snitching by officials has now also entered the world of art. Aesthetic conflicts in the creative environment are often used as a lever for repressive politics. An alternative counterculture is slowly growing up in basements and gateways, ripening on the seeds of rejection. The forbidden fruit is always the sweetest. Obscenities in the public art space are currently forbidden by federal law. These forbidden, tabooed words relate to sexual relations and the genitals. The interest in this kind of language in the 1990s and 2000s was conditioned by its long suppression. The obscene rebellion in modern culture was just a reaction to the dominance of the ritual, ‘socialist’ language (derevyannyi yazyk), an abstract language without specifics, corporality or life. It was a riot of the body against all that had held it back and limited its rights for so long. At the beginning of the 2010s obscene language slowly began to retreat from new plays and new productions. The method had become boring. It had ceased to excite and to have an impact, and therefore evaporated. Without the new prohibition the extreme profanity would have left the scene on its own as a redun- dant method. Instead the prohibition in law provoked a new wave of interest. Today, many theatres parade how easily they can evade the ban by only changing one sound in a word or by enjoying the expectation of the word in a rhyme without pronouncing the word itself. A good actor has thousands of ways to say the prohibited word without saying it, by only hinting at it. However, the law banning all obscene language in theatre plays means that such plays risk losing their expressiveness. As a consequence of all these forms of prohibition, provincial theatres are dying out. Prohibitory practice since 2012 has led to a dehydration of the provincial theatre, which had successfully built up serious artistic potential, and become autonomous and really interesting throughout the 2000s. While Moscow and St Petersburg can always use the freedom of the big city, 303

Theatre in a period of archaization 303 provincial culture over which control can more easily be exercised is at risk of slowly dying. Prohibitory practices result in a gradual draining away of the audience. The narrower the horizons of the theatre, the narrower the audience becomes since it seldom sees the theatre as an object worthy of its interest. If the Russian theatre system as a whole continues to resist attempts by the authorities to control it, the media has already given in to state control. As a consequence, the media has become more oriented towards the authorities in recent years and is preaching their message. An earnest intellectual discussion about the theatre is therefore no longer possible in the traditional media. Today, such a discussion is possible only on the internet.

References Colta (2015) ‘Rezhisserov obvinyayut v iskazhenii Pushkina’, Colta, 1 April. Available at www.colta.ru/news/6836. Izvestiya (2015) ‘Chinovniki navyazyvayut nam svoi predstavleniya o prekrasnom.’, Izvestiya, 23 October. Available at http://izvestia.ru/news/593820. Kommersant (2015) ‘Bespretsedentnyi krizis mozhno poborot tolko bespretsedentnymi merami’, Kommersant, 19 October. Available at www.kommersant.ru/doc/2835622. Lapina, Alena (2014) ‘Khudozhnikam budut vydavat dengi za talant i krasivye raboty’, The Art News Paper Russia, 29 (December/January). Available at www.theartnewspaper.ru/posts/1055/. 304

18 Nonconformist theatre in Russia Past and present

Kristina Matvienko

Nonconformist theatre continues to exist in Russia despite the difficult conditions imposed by the conservative state cultural policy that has been in place since 2012. The tradition of nonconformism in Russian theatre is a heritage of Soviet times, when it took the form of an unofficial undercurrent. At that time all theatres were state-financed. When the nonconformist theatre tradition was revived in the late 1990s, small independent theatres also appeared. These independent nonconformist theatres are now struggling to survive.

The nonconformist theatre tradition in Soviet times The Russian theatre of the 1920s was full of political messages, as demonstrated by Vsevolod Meyerhold’s so-called political reviews. Meyerhold developed his language of a new theatre in Soviet Russia in 1918–24. He broke with the traditional structure of theatre performance by using cinema and constructivism in his stage designs and biomechanics to produce a special acting style that created strong emotional and intellectual effects. Erwin Piscator was doing something similar in Germany at that time. This approach to theatre and film-making is described in the theoretical texts of Sergei Eisenstein, who was one of Meyerhold’s pupils, and later in Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical theory and practice. However, while Piscator and Brecht used theatre as a weapon in a genuine ideological struggle against capitalism and Nazism, Meyerhold used political material more as an artificial component. Like Mayakovskii and most artists in early Soviet Russia, Meyerhold was fascinated by the victory of the socialist revolution. These were the people, however, who would later become victims of the Soviet terror. A drastic turn followed from 1930 to 1953 with the so-called grand style realism introduced by the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) [Moskovskii khudozhestvennyi teatr MXT]). The MAT style brought a common denominator to Russian theatre: Socialist Realism. As a result, any formalist revolutions in the theatre were cancelled for decades to come. Articles in the party newspaper Pravda and official resolutions now called for an end to experiments with form and to an art that ‘people do not understand’. 305

Nonconformist theatre in Russia 305 Nonetheless, even during this period attempts were made by theatre directors to introduce politically critical messages into bright theatrical shapes. In 1951, for example, Nikolai Akimov staged The Shades based on a novel by Mikhail Saltykov-Shedrin, the nineteenth-century Russian writer of classical novels and dramaturgy. Akimov was one of the most popular and important theatre directors of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He expressed ideas about a confrontation between the citizen and state power, and the fear that Soviet citizens felt of the authorities; and he was removed from his position as a result. After the death of Stalin in 1953, the nonconformist theatre tradition re-emerged. In 1956, a group of young actors under the leadership of Oleg Efremov established the Sovremennik theatre in Moscow. For over a decade the performances and the heroes of this theatre symbolized images of freedom, a new sincerity, neo-realism and the thaw (Ottepel) in post-Stalinist society. Theatre Sovremennik wanted to return to the forgotten ideals of Stanislavskii’s ethical and psychological theatre. Its focus on a new type of hero – honest, sincere, idealistic and young – who approached the audience directly and in a simple and neo-realistic way, suddenly made it the most important theatre in Moscow. Together with the Bolshoi Drama Theatre in Leningrad, led by Georgii Tovstonogov, and the performances staged by Anatolii Efros, a wave of renewal was created in Soviet theatre. This was no clear or open protest against the existing political order, but the theatre instead expressing the inner freedom of a personal understanding of the world. The Taganka Theatre opened in 1964 with Yurii Lyubimov’s production of Brecht’s The Good Person of Schechuan. The Taganka immediately became the main symbol of nonconformism in Soviet theatre. Lyubimov was the theatre’s resident director, and he put on performances of clandestine protest against the totalitarian regime. Open protest would have crossed the line, ending state support for the theatre, and meaning no more work for the artists at the theatre. Boris Zingerman, a famous Russian critic, wrote about The Taganka Theatre:

Opening in 1964, after the thaw (Ottepel) had come to an end, the theatre was built in the sad landscape of timelessness … And if there was a topic of a free and ‘thawed’ personality in Tovstonogov’s performances – a topic that demanded from the heroes a lot of high-tension and immeasurable effort, in Lyubimov’s theatre this topic of a free individuality sounded loudly and bravely in spite of all the gloomy caddish bans … Politics was for him not separated from psychological realism, audacious theatrical games, and sharp moral problems that required an immediate response from the individual. He understood the drama of the period of stagnation like nobody else but he did not give way to its scepticism and melancholy. A worldview based on Russian history helped him to cope with the time of his life. He realized the strength of the pessimistic mood of Yurii Trifonov’s novels in a time of compulsory contentment. (Zingerman 2002) 306

306 Kristina Matvienko Nonetheless, the new theatre met with resistance. In 1974, Wooden Horses, based on the novel about a Soviet village by Fyodor Abramov, was staged at Taganka. The play came to the attention of the authorities, which accused it of ‘anti-Soviet intentions’. The theatre was asked by representatives of the Moscow department of culture to cut out a scene about de-kulakization during the collectivization of the countryside in 1928–9. The Moscow authorities claimed that it was impossible to illustrate this huge political project in only a couple of lines, especially as these lines showed only its negative side – the excesses that took place (Abelyuk and Leenson 2007). In 1976 the play Alive, directed by Lyubimov and based on a novel by Boris Mozhaev about a Soviet village during the difficult time of collectivization, was banned. Speaking at the time, its writer, Fyodor Abramov, asked:

Why should we describe the life of the hero [a country woman who suffered at the hands of Soviet power] in a glamorous way? Who demands it? The Communist Party? For whom is this good? No! Me and Lyubimov do not want to make Western journalists ask us at every press conference: why do you hide facts from your history? We are not hiding, and we don’t want to hide. Yes, there were failures and excesses, at the time when great history was also made. (Abelyuk and Leenson 2007)

The 1960s was the time when the first attempts were made to defend personal freedom in spite of the authorities’ efforts to deprive people of it. It was difficult for theatres to take this step since they were so dependent on state financing. Nonetheless, this was a time about which the famous Russian conceptual artist Ilya Kabakov wrote:

There is no doubt that the 1960s were the years of the underground blossoming of all spheres of art: above all in visual art, in poetry and in literature. Most interesting during the 1960s was the special climate of underground artistic life – it was everywhere, in all these workshops and small apartments where artistic, bohemian people lived. This existence consisted of mad, strong tensions and a feeling that there were two separate worlds: ‘them’ (the Communist leaders, representatives of the Soviet establishment), whom we regarded as enemies and as dangerous people living ‘at the top’, in the official world; and ‘us’, an absolutely separate, independently existing underground community of people who liked and respected each other. Such an atmosphere of cooperation characterized the life of those artists, poets, jazz musicians and writers who by a lucky coincidence met each other … in Moscow artistic life at that time. (Kabakov 2008: 26–7)

To be a nonconformist meant to use uncommon tools and to use the new language of one of these two worlds in an attempt to introduce it into the 307

Nonconformist theatre in Russia 307 other – and thereby become what was officially called a ‘non-loyal influence on society’ bringing up issues and promoting heroes or texts that were not accepted officially. When in the 1980s nonconformist experiments with the language returned to the theatre, this took place at first in hidden spaces. Nonetheless, the 1980s became a time of small, experimental studios and individual artists and theoreticians on the margins, such as Evgenii Shiffers and Anatolii Vasiliev. Vasiliev tried to reform theatrical and acting methods. He created the School of Dramatic Art in 1987. Some of the earliest experimental theatre groups were created in St Petersburg. One, Pushkinskaya 10, was a space at the end of 1980s where artists met rock musicians and cinema directors (the group Nekro-Realists led by Evgenii Yufit) as well as theatre groups such as the Engineering Theatre AKHE, Derevo, created by Anton Adassinskii; and the Formalnii Teatr, created by Andrei Moguchii. With no support from the state these theatre groups produced radical, open air and site-specific performances, created text-based or non-verbal shows, mixed pop music with the theatre of objects, used Japanese buto and physical theatre, and so on. All of them were engaged in aesthetic experiments to extend existing forms of the theatre tradition, but they did not act against the existing forms of political power. In fact, in contrast to their colleagues in Eastern Europe, for example in Poland and the then Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Russian theatre groups of the early post-Soviet years did not engage directly in political protest. Russian experimental theatre was focused more on avoidance strategies because most of those engaged in it did not trust the authorities. Nonetheless, as the theatre researcher Nikolai Pesochinskii has emphasized, all these underground groups were at the same time incorporated into official state structures – institutes, houses of culture, and so on:

All these so-called underground companies – from Boris Ponizovskii’s group to Vyacheslav Polunin and theatre Litsedei [Licedei, after 1981 located in Leningrad’s House for Young People] – were more or less involved in state structures. That is why it is difficult for me to consider them as underground. They were all socialized in and constituted parts of the city’s general theatrical context. As for censorship, I don’t think that anyone from the authorities restricted Licedei in any way. Anton Adassinskii, who worked with Polunin, was from the very beginning of his career very radical in his experiments. But nobody disturbed him. I guess it was a mutually profitable situation for organizations. (Pesochinskii and Renanskii 2011: 7–14)

The most famous group associated with the revival of the performing arts in the 1980s and 1990s was Pop-Mekhanika under the musician and artist Sergei 308

308 Kristina Matvienko Kurekhin. The main aesthetic idea at that time was expressed in a beautiful combination of the chaos of the universe and the chaos of culture. As a result, there was a stream of different voices instead of a dialogue. This kind of theatrical experience was based on close cooperation between the theatre and contemporary artists, rock musicians and dancers. For example, theatre director Boris Yukhananov staged his performances in cooperation with contemporary artists and suspended the traditional hierarchy between art and society. Anton Adassinskii and his company Derevo created physical theatre outside of theatrical venues, right on the streets of St Petersburg, and this became a new way of communicating between the artist and the audience – every witness could transform into a spectator. Nonetheless, none of them pretended to be a nonconformist in the political sense. Instead of Joseph Beuys’s idea about social engagement and the responsibility of art, Russian artists preferred to escape from this reality and to create their own, inner reality of freedom. In spite of the great importance of all these new trends, critics and the professional community in general paid little attention and did not support them. Underground theatre was regarded as a specific kind of lifestyle rather than theatre. The new theatre forms were not officially recognized in the zeitgeist of those years.

Post-Soviet times and the need for a new socially oriented theatre After the collapse of the Soviet Union contemporary plays that had previously been accused of black-painting Soviet reality (chernukha), such as for example the plays by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, were now acceptable and legalized. The Russian theatre landscape was radically altered. Society needed a new and different kind of theatre and the term ‘underground theatre’ therefore lost its meaning. By this time, however, many of the key figures of the post-Soviet underground were living abroad. Others had just disappeared. Few were officially recognized. Everyone experienced the tragic turns of the time. An important sign of change in Russian theatre appeared in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. A politically and socially engaged way of thinking began to spread. Political involvement was in demand, and the theatre responded immediately. The new-drama movement and the theatre Teatr. doc reflected this important turn in Russian theatre in the 2000s. A tradition of a covert nonconformism had existed in theatre art for a long time, but the appearance of open nonconformism in the late 1990s was in response to the theatre’s previous tradition of escapism or avoidance of reality. A young generation of playwrights and directors now gathered around the non-profit Teatr.doc and the new drama. After years of escapism there was for the first time a conscious attempt in theatre to reflect reality in all its social, anthropological and political aspects. It was a time of renewed responsibility for the artist. Only later did restrictions and censorship appear. 309

Nonconformist theatre in Russia 309 Teatr.doc was created as a non-profit organization by young playwrights first and foremost, together with actors, directors, critics and managers, who all wanted an open-minded kind of theatre and a frank conversation about current reality. Teatr.doc became a place where every important political or public event was a topic for discussion. ‘We cannot keep silent and we will not do so anymore’ became a slogan for the young generation that came to the theatre in the 2000s. Witnesses instead of professional actors, personal evidence instead of fictional plays, questions instead of answers – all these components were deeply ingrained in the new theatre. In spite of minimal state or municipal financial support – or the lack of any support at all – Teatr. doc and several other small, independent companies in the 2000s made a great contribution to the creation of civil society in Russia. These theatres based their activities on an aesthetics of arte povera, social engagement, the involvement of non-theatrical artists and work among groups of non-commercially oriented participants. They established a tradition of open dialogue with the audience as an important part of the theatre process. Teatr.doc filled a niche that had been empty for a long time, a niche of a socio-existential theatre that explored the inner world of people who find themselves in difficult situations or beyond the line of normal existence. Before Teatr.doc it was considered improper and unworthy for art to deal with the real problems of Russian life. Artists preferred the ivory tower of dealing with ‘the eternal questions’ rather than reacting to topics of the day. Teatr. doc had a mission to expose the implicit and explicit dramas of the time. It attracted the most active and socially concerned young artists, most of whom were novices. It is often said that Teatr.doc dealt exclusively with politics, but this is far from the truth. The basement theatre on Trekhprudnyi Lane produced plays on many different topics: the problematic relationship between mother and daughter, forced migration and the adaptation of the post-Soviet peoples, the lifestyle of underground bohemian artists in the 1980–1990s and an attempt to put oneself in the position of the rock stars of the past. Teatr. doc did not restrain its artists, and that was the reason why an enormous number of projects blossomed there – projects which became a ‘library’ of Russian life of the 2000s, above all. Key playwrights made their debut there in the early 2000s: from Ivan Vyrypaev, whose famous play Oxygen was first staged at Teatr.doc, to the Belorussian Pavel Pryazhko, whose texts became part of the contemporary Russian theatre landscape due to the support of Teatr.doc and the young playwrights of the Lyubimovka festival. The theatre became an independent and truly nonconformist institution in a way unparalleled in Russian artistic practice. Teatr.doc staged documentary productions about current events, such as the demonstrations of 2012 (The Bolotnaya Case), the imprisoned lawyer Sergei Magnitskii who was left to die (One Hour Eighteen Minutes) and the treatment of the Belorussian Vladimir Neklyaev who tried to stand as a candidate in the Belorussian presidential elections but was arrested (Two in Your House). Apart from One Hour Eighteen Minutes, where the auditorium 310

310 Kristina Matvienko was transformed into a courtroom for a legal process against those guilty of Magnitskii’s death, the plays were open to different versions of events, different voices and different sides of reality being presented to the audience. The documents on which the plays were based were not used as evidence against any character. This was a major achievement of the nonconformist theatre in Russia. Speaking in 2012, Michail Ugarov, the playwright and director, and one of the creators of Teatr.doc, noted that: ‘Our aim is not to punish or blame anybody. Our task is to force people into some action. If all of us (in the theatre, at least) were to do something definite, it would be much more useful.’ The task of Teatr.doc, however, consisted of trying its best to force the audience into a position of uncertainty but without providing any answers. For the first time in many years, messages from the theatre stage had become a challenge to society, and not just to the core of a traditional theatre audience. The question of whether theatre in Russia could be important to public discussion seemed to have been answered positively. The authorities responded very sharply to this situation. One important turning point in this regard was the attempt by the state to invade artistic territory, when the organizers of the 2006 art exhibition Forbidden Art were taken to court, accused of violating the feelings of Orthodox believers, and convicted in 2010. After the trial, a documentary was made by a group of artists from Teatr.doc and the writer Ilya Falkovskii. The play was shown only a couple of times. It did not present one side as ‘right’ or ‘guilty’ but instead was a documentary investigation based on interviews with witnesses and participants, including the curators Andrei Erofeev and Yurii Samodurov. It showed the complexity of the situation and the characters of everybody involved. Only later was it understood to be one of the most important projects of its time. It was shown in the programme ‘The New Play’ at the Golden Mask Theatre Festival, and was a major reason why this programme was closed a couple of years later (Zolotaya maska n.d.a). Another conflict took place over a production of the operaTannhauser at the Novosibirsk Theatre for Opera and Ballet in the spring of 2015 (see Chapter 17). The production was closed and the manager of the theatre fired by the ministry of culture. The Golden Mask Theatre Festival was attacked in 2015 by a deputy of the United Russia Party, who criticized ‘anti-Russian’ theatre directors such as Konstantin Bogomolov of the MAT and the young Dmitrii Volkostrelov of the experimental Teatr POST (see below), but also the fact that a theatre like Teatr.doc was allowed to represent Russian theatre abroad in a tour of Poland. The Russian ministry of culture declared that henceforth it would distribute state financial support to theatres according to such criteria as promoting patriotic and traditional values in art and reduce state support to artists and institutions that criticize Russia or – what was considered even worse – display the dark sides of Russian life and society. Theatres that did not follow these edicts were recommended to look for private-sector funding. 311

Nonconformist theatre in Russia 311 The Orthodox Church, the poorly functioning legal system, the absence of freedom of speech and manipulation of the mass media were all topics reflected on by the theatre. The independent theatres felt the tension with the authorities at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, but the situation became more difficult after 2012 when state and media began to actively propagate conservative values. Plays containing a direct political message or open protest disappeared as a result. Instead, Theatr.doc and other independent theatres directed their attention to the lives of ordinary people. At the Lyubimovka theatre festival, Mikhail Ugarov explained why this focus was so important: ‘Our modern Russian citizen feels himself very confident in the field of mythology but not safe in reality. The less courage we have in our real life, the more perplexed we are – the more legends, illusions and myths we invent every day for our safety’ (Ugarov 2011). This preference for myths was nourished by state policy. As an ideologist of the new drama, Ugarov often expressed negative attitudes about theatre being based on ‘eternal’ and ‘vertical’ values and principles. Teatr.doc and the new drama focused instead on ‘life-making’. Even if theatre cannot influence the decisions of a court, it can change the usual passivity of people through discussion and by asking difficult questions. This became the mission of Teatr.doc.

Nonconformist theatre in the regions Several theatre workshops and small festivals created within the institutional theatres attempted to record the life of ordinary people. Like a drop of water reflects the whole, they wanted to reflect the life of the whole country. Together with some other theatres, Kult-proekt, a non-commercial organization that was still being financed by the ministry of culture in 2015, long after similar projects had been closed, produced several impressive ‘documentary laboratories’ from St Petersburg to Khabarovsk. The St Petersburg project, Rzhevka VS Nevskii Prospect, the documentary stage of the Baltic Home theatre festival, which featured playwrights and directors from Teatr.doc, presented a collective but at the same time deeply individual portrait of contemporary residents of St Petersburg, many of whom live in the suburbs and rarely visit the historical city centre. Some live the life of a Dostoevskii character without knowing it. Others, having moved from another city, might work in the retail sector and admire the city as tourists. The production was listed in the programme as ‘the New Play of the Golden Mask Festival’. It provoked a wave of discussion about the St Petersburg myth of today, and the transformations that are going on in the city without anyone noticing. Boris Pavlovich, the artistic director of the Theatre on Spasskaya in the city Vyatka (formerly Kirov) is deeply involved in social projects. For example, he is currently producing educational programmes at the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, including a project for people with Down’s Syndrome. He made a documentary about the city and its suburbs entitled Well Yeah (Tak-to da), an 312

312 Kristina Matvienko expression often used by locals that became the point of departure. Theatre and film-makers, and theatre students of Maria Razbezhkina, delved deeply into local life through its language and linguistic deformations, errors, accents and swear words. The performance evoked a response from the locals and was shown at the Golden Mask Festival in the ‘New Play’ programme, together with another one of Pavlovich’s productions, I Am (Not) Leaving Kirov. The latter was made with local school students in their final year, who wrote essays about their dreams. Some were fed up with the city, saw no prospects of a future and desperately wanted to leave. Others wanted to stay no matter what. The students played themselves, and this experience became an important part of the development of witness theatre in Russia. In the Vasilii Shukshin Drama Theatre, a cult project in the city of Barnaul, the director Roman Feodori, famous for his vibrant theatricality, made a documentary production Derevni.net (There Is No Village). The play was based on fieldwork carried out by the director, the actors and a group of playwrights and documentary film-makers in Kurya in the district of Altai Krai. The village is located on the beautiful steppes, near a gold mine where a new factory is planned. The conversations with local people, from dairy workers to tractor drivers to pensioners, formed a multicoloured and contradictory picture of how modern Altai villages are developing or dying. The gold mine lured many with its high salaries but also frightened many because of the looming ecological catastrophe. This was the likely fate for the locals who practised subsistence farming and engaged in a little trade. The play was funny and tragic at the same time: it was a clash of colourful characters and dramatic fates. It was possible to feel the breath of time in it, which was especially clear in this most remote corner of Russia. In the city of Perm, during its two-year ‘cultural revolution’ which began in 2008, a group of playwrights wrote a documentary for the New Drama Festival about the local Motovilikhinsk metalworking plant, an enormous factory that played – and continues to play albeit to a lesser degree – a crucial role in the life of the city. The project was partly inspired by Maria Razbezhkina’s idea for a project entitled I the Worker. It began with interviews conducted in several stages: the playwrights visited Perm several times in order to capture the history of the transformations taking place at the plant. The play was shown at the festival in the presence of the governor of the region, cultural representatives, ministry officials and representatives of the plant. It received a huge response precisely because of its many-sided approach. The zero position repeatedly emphasized by Mikhail Ugarov – he insists that the author of a documentary should not be prejudiced towards his or her favoured angle – was expressed here in an incredible way. The workers at the plant did not evoke sympathy or present themselves as ‘humiliated and insulted’, despite the obvious harsh- ness of the work which was harmful to their health and not that well paid – although not badly paid either. The plant itself was presented as a mystical space that devours a person once and for all, never letting them go until death. The Motovilikhinsk Worker also used innovative techniques: the second version 313

Nonconformist theatre in Russia 313 of the play included music by the young composer, Dmitrii Vlasik, who used metal constructions and pipes in his score. These local, urban and country projects of the 2000s showed the strength and importance of documentary theatre as a method of exposing the implicit forces at work at the time, their essence and characteristics. In fact, doc-theatre became the major trend of the decade, which cured many artists, and more importantly some in the audience, of the artificiality and falseness so common in the theatre. Moreover, documentary theatre demonstrated the complexity and illegibility of what is happening in people’s heads as our attention was directed towards the smallest turns in their fates. It demonstrated the success of the method of detailed and attentive observation of something that at first glance seems to be totally insignificant. The private domain became the stage for the major narratives of the time. In spite of all the changes that have taken place in Russian state cultural institutions since 2012, and of the formulations in the state’s strategy document on the new cultural policy, new theatre venues and companies are still being started up by young directors and producers. The activities of small, regional, independent groups have become an important part of Russian theatre life. The KNAM theatre community in Komsomolsk-na- Amure, a city in the Far East of Russia, is one example. Established in 1985, the theatre is located in a city built by young workers and Communist Party members participating in the creation of a new world. The artistic director of this independent theatre company, Tatyana Frolova, staged contemporary plays the type of which had not been staged in Russia before, basing performances on personal documentary stories and on the experiences she and her actors got from their street actions about those places in the city where victims of Soviet repression had been buried. KNAM received only sporadic financial support from the local authorities (towards renting the venue). The theatre participated in European theatre festivals and in the Golden Mask Festival’s special programmes. Once the political situation in the country became more complicated, in spite of the strong and enthusiastic efforts of Frolova, the KNAM theatre was put on life support. One of the most powerful independent regional theatre companies in the 2000s was Golosova 20, a centre for new plays in the city of Togliatti organized by the playwright, Vadim Levanov. Togliatti was once the centre of the Soviet car industry, producing the famous Soviet era Zhiguli. Paradoxically, it later became the centre for young playwrights born in the 1970s and 1980s, all of whom – like the well-known brothers Durnenkov and Yurii Klavdiev – were involved in cooperative projects with theatres and workshops, and had a great influence on Russian theatre.

The changing theatre landscape To understand the changing landscape and modus vivendi of the nonconformist theatre in Russia in the 2000s, it is enough to recall that the first Moscow shows of productions of the ‘Togliatti wave’ took place on one of 314

314 Kristina Matvienko the main stages, the Moscow Art Theatre. It was there that the Moscow premier of the Durnenkov brothers’ performance The Cultural Layer took place, with the playwrights as actors and props consisting of only an easel and a couple of chairs. It was here during the New Drama Festival that the only performance of the draft of the play My Blue Friend by Ekaterina Kovaleva, a prisoner at the female high-security prison, took place. The show was initiated by Teatr.doc and was a result of intensive social and theatre work in the prison by a group of playwrights. The show included actors from the MAT, one of whom, the famous Moscow actress Evgeniya Dobrovolskaya, directed the play. After the first run the author, who arrived at the premier with a police escort, gave several interviews that were published in the largest Russian newspapers. It is hard to imagine this now, although in 2016 a British theatre director working with the Russian director, Kirill Serebrennikov, put on a Shakespeare production in a local prison with prisoners as actors. In 2003, the Lozha Theatre from the city of Kemerovo put on a production of Coal Pool at the New Drama Festival. The play, written by the playwright, director and writer Evgenii Grishkovets in 1991, was an experiment in theatrical appropriation of improvised half-documentary speech. It was created after the Lozha Theatre participated in a seminar with London’s Royal Court Theatre. After Grishkovets left Kemerovo to become ‘a bard of the new Russian sincerity’ in his solo career, the Lozha Theatre devised two remarkable plays in which the verbatim technique was united with the artists’ natural artistry and humour. In their performance, the unfamiliar speech was intertwined with stories about the mines, as well as jokes and the bitter truth of life. The most important element was the openness and seemingly naive sincerity of how they told their stories, while attempting to stay within the boundaries of fine theatricality. The Lozha Theatre, which had been created within a theatre institution, became one of the most important phenomena in the independent alternative theatre of the 2000s. Thanks to the talent and enthusiasm of the director Damir Salimsyanov, the small Paraphraz Theatre in the Udmurt city of Glazov became one of the most interesting theatres in Russia. The company members built their small venue practically by themselves, accomplishing almost everything without any help from the state. The theatre uses a mixed technique: documentary stories are interwoven with conventional genres, such as a New Year’s Eve comedy or a melodrama. The Paraphraz Theatre features remarkably sincere and lively – in a non-theatrical way – actors; and it turns out that their performances, such as Somewhere and About (Gde-to i okolo), based on the monologues of locals, capture the state of modern Russian language and the fate of the residents of ‘single-storey’ Russia. Les Partisannes Theatre in Izhevsk has recent experience of truly partisan work. It was created by a French language teacher, the theatre director, and a group of amateur actors from the local faculty of philology. This independent theatre has found a small venue for itself by the local philharmonic hall, where it stages modern plays and poetry, and carries out its pedagogical teaching. 315

Nonconformist theatre in Russia 315 Les Partisannes is an interesting example of a theatre that is not only focused on social aspects, but also fascinated by experimentation. For example, it takes screenplays of popular US films and incorporates Izhevsk reality into them, or stages performances about the contemporary Udmurt village after plays by Valerii Shergin, a student of Nikolai Kolyada. The actors are actively making their way in a multi-ethnic city where the authorities choose to ignore them. Since the 2000s, one of the most important players in the field of contemporary theatre has been the Kolyada Theatre in Ekaterinburg. It was created as an independent theatre by the playwright, director and teacher Nikolai Kolyada, who gathered around him the young theatre people of Ekaterinburg. Based around the local theatre school, he created a course for playwrights in the late 1990s that later became the powerful ‘Ural school’, represented, for example, by the Presnyakov brothers and Vasilii Sigarev. In addition, Kolyada organized a competition for modern plays under the banner Kolyada-plays, and a reading festival with the same name that includes plays in different categories, from plays for children to chamber theatre. All this activity creates a very positive atmosphere around the theatre and its satellite, the recently created Centre for Contemporary Art, which experiments with form, various playwrights and directors. The Kolyada Theatre often stages Kolyada’s own plays, as well as modernized versions of Chekhov and Shakespeare. The centre stages documentary performances, for example, about Urals rock music culture; Ekaterinburg is famous in Russia as the cradle of rock culture, modern dance and documentary film. The performanceSashBash , about a legend of rock music of the 1980–1990s, Aleksander Bashlachev, who committed suicide in 1988, is based on documentary testimonies and interviews with him, and on memoirs of his friends and colleagues. Kolyada’s work is some of the most remarkable in Russia. He can be called a genuine enthusiast and Kulturträger who, against all odds and with little help from the state – and more recently no help at all – has made so much effort to build his theatre based on the principles of topicality and timeliness. The St Petersburg theatre POST, created in 2010 and led by the director Dmitrii Volkostrelov, a student of Lev Dodin, has introduced a new quality of theatre directing. The theatre works in a highly experimental and minimalistic way with texts by Pavel Pryazhko, one of the most important authors of the 2000s, who is now living in Minsk, Belarus. Pryazhko fixates on the smallest change in the Russian language and – as a consequence – in the lives of people. Volkostrelov, who is famous for his high quality psychological theatre, has opened a new page in the history of Russian theatre. His productions demonstrate a seeming absence of any authoritative, aggressive direction; and instead of offering an interpretation they emphasize attention to the text itself, its letters and commas.1 This deliberate anonymity by the director and his at the same time essentially individual approach has deeply impressed Russian critics, who acknowledge Volkostrelov’s contribution to the development of the language of theatre. In all of Volkostrelov’s performance – of texts by both Pryazhko and Vyrypaev – the actors behaved on 316

316 Kristina Matvienko stage in a highly naturalistic manner. They appropriated the alien text, while at the same time being a penetrable wall through which this alien text could go without hindrance. The POST theatre has no venue in St Petersburg, no state funding and no troupe of its own. (It is Volkostrelov’s friends and class- mates from the theatre school that perform there.) It has staged probably the most important, albeit ‘quiet’ and deliberately abridged, theatrical transformations of different texts, from Pryazhko to Mark Ravenhill and Samuel Beckett. The POST theatre does not openly demonstrate any political sym- pathies and does not fight for social justice. Nonetheless, it has become one of the few truly nonconformist zones in contemporary Russian theatre that has remained unaffected by corruption or censorship. In the autumn of 2015, Volkostrelov opened with Semen Aleksandrovskii the Pop-Up Theatre, an open space with free access for visitors and a café, all fully financed by a private investor and thus without any meddling from the state. A couple of plays were performed that autumn, but nothing since. The theatre hopes to establish a continuing cooperation with sponsors, but in relative freedom. Paradoxically, in today’s Russia theatre people, who are as divided as society itself and who also fight with each other, still find the strength and energy to open new spaces and stand their ground. After a crowd-funding campaign, for example, the director Yurii Muravitskii from Teatr.doc opened his own student theatre in the former Party School in Moscow, where the owner of the building has let him stay for free. Thus, the energy that was accumulated during the 2000s – when many things were possible, a lot happened and people’s minds were opened up – has not disappeared after all; it has only been redistributed and is finding new spaces for its realization.

Conclusions Russian civil society was awakening in the 2000s, and theatre played a serious role in this process. There is a close connection between the ability of a culture to be truthful and the possibility that the audience will hear and accept the truth. The most important question becomes whether – and, if so, how – theatre will be able to develop new tools and bring new content to the attention of society. In any discussion on nonconformist theatre in modern Russia, it is important to emphasize that such theatre is not political in any direct sense. Rather, it becomes political in the way it transforms into new shapes of humanistic art. This theatre is not about one big idea. Instead, it is about a personal approach to the everyday lives of people. The closer you are to the life of individuals, the more open and specific you can be in telling about their life situation and living conditions, the more dangerous you become to the state – because the state is not interested in the daily lives of the people. It is in this sense that the new laconicism of the playwrights Dmitrii Volkostrelov and Pavel Pryazhko, and the new generation of documentary theatre became so relevant in the nonconformist trend in contemporary Russian theatre. 317

Nonconformist theatre in Russia 317 In spite of all the obstacles that are closely connected with current state cultural policy and its focus on supporting so-called traditional art, individual theatres searching for new forms of experimental theatre still exist. The young generation of artists, which lacks its own experience of pressure from censorship, is now fighting to defend the right to self-expression. Russian independent theatres and venues are in a difficult situation at present, since financial support has been cut. Nonetheless, the professional community has now recognized the status and importance of such theatres. The fact that theatre critics no longer evaluate performances through the traditional optics of professional standards has become very important to these theatres and also for the general mood of the audience. The old standards of theatre cannot be applied to the new theatre projects carried out by non-theatrical artists who seek to escape from the traditional institutional theatre, which they regard as a closed professional cluster. New theatre practices have now permeated to the core of Russian theatre and there are many examples of exchanges between the mainstream and the marginal experimental work of new playwrights, performers, visual artists and composers. Their mindset has dramatically changed Russian theatre, a fact that cannot be ignored even in the era of conservatism in which we now live. It is difficult to imagine today, when the theatre has already become a genuine cultural place to which people look for a mirror on the times in which they are living, how all these processes could be wiped out by the ministry of culture or by anybody else.

Note

1 For example, Closed Door, ON Teatr 2010; ‘Mean Girl’, Bryantsev Youth Theatre 2011; and The Coffeehouse Owner: I Am Free and Soldier, Teatr.doc 2012.

References Abeliuk, Evgenia and Elena Leenson (2007) Taganka: lichnoe delo odnogo teatra, Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. Kabakov, Ilya (2008) 60–70-e … Zapiski o neofitsialnoi zhizni v Moskve, Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. Pesochinskii, Nikolai and Dmitrii Renanskii (2011) ‘Avantgard, kotorogo ne bylo’, Teatr, 4. Ugarov, Mikhail (2011) ‘Dramaturg Mikhail Ugarov: “Nastoyashchaya dramatur- giya proizkhodit v realnosti” ’, Svoboda, 29 April. Available at www.svoboda.org/ a/16796934.html Zingerman, Boris (2002) Zametki o Lyubimove, Moscow: Izdatelstvo OGI. Zolotaya maska (2010a) ‘Rzhevka VS Nevskii prospekt’. Available at www.golden- mask.ru/spect.php?id=680. —— (2010b) ‘Teatralnaya aktsiya “Oskorblennye chuvstva” ’. Available at www.gold- enmask.ru/spect.php?id=759. 318

Index

Abeliuk, Evgenia and Leenson, Artem Loskutov, Monstratsiya Elena 306 (Monstration for Mocracy) 178 Abramov, Fyodor 306 Article 147, Russian Criminal Code 129 Abramović, Marina 272, 273 Article 282, Russian Criminal Code Academy for Literature and Arts 113 128, 129 Aczél, György 103 artist, image of 171 Adassiniski, Anton 307, 308 ASI (Agency of Singular Investigations) aesthetic rupture 10 15, 209–26 aesthetics, Rancière definition of 9, 10 Assa (film) 96 Agatha Christie (band) 87 athletes, banning of Russian 95 Agency of Singular Investigations Austrian actionists 272, 273 see ASI authoritarian regime, art under 127–33 Aidan gallery 52 authority-image 217 Akimov, Nikolai 305 Avdeev, Aleksander 79 Akimova, Sofia228 , 241 Akinshina, Oksana 97 Bakhtin, Mikhail 182, 241 Aleksandrovskii, Semen 316 Bakshtein, Yosif 55 Alekseev, Nikita 131 Balabanov, Aleksei, Brat 2 (Brother 2) Alive (play) 306 (film)252 , 253 ‘Alliance of Young Democrats’ (Fiatal balagan (farce) 16 Demokraták Szövetsége), Hungary Balls and Nails project 134 see Fidesz ‘Bases of State Cultural Politics’ 28, 43, Alyokhina, Maria 173 see also 45, 76–7 Pussy Riot Bashlachev, Alexander 315 ambiguity 15, 18, 19, 20 Battle of Sevastopol (film) 97 Americanization 140 Bauman, Zygmunt 5 Ancient Greece 16 Bazhov, Pavel, Malachite Casket Antall, József 105, 106 (Malokhitovaya shkatulka) 192 anti-Semitism 105, 106, 117 beauty pageants 96 Antoshina, Tatyana 171–3; Olympus Becoming Zoya (performance) 228, 233, 172; Woman Museum series 171 236, 237–44 Apocalyptological Congress project Belii, Petr 270 210, 216 Belyaev-Gintovt, Aleksei 11, 18, 57, 85, Aristarkhov, Vladimir 23n7, 51, 130, 298 89, 92, 95; One Soul: One People 92; Arno, Peter 193 Patria Filia: Daughterland 89, 90, 91; Arrow Cross 109 Sevastopol Is a Russian City 92, 93 art curators, prosecution of 65 Belyutin, Ely 166, 167–8; Requiem 167–8 Artaud, Antonin 299 Benjamin, Walter 184, 243, 249; On the Artchronika (magazine) 87 Concept of History 213 arte povera 270, 309 Bergson, Henri 183 319

Index 319

Berlin, exhibition of contemporary caricature 193–204 Russian art 16 carnival culture 16, 93, 269, 276 Beuys, Joseph 308 Cathedral of Christ the Saviour 173 ‘Beware! Religion’ exhibition 65 censorship: and Constitution 132; and Biennale of Youth Art 55 destalinization 167; and humour Bikbov, Alexander 84 182; of media 147; and neo- Bishop, Claire 10; Artificial Hells traditionalism 67; by proxy 129; (book) 229 in theatre 295–7, 300, 307 see also Blue Noses (Sinie nosy) 183–92, 193; self-censorship Chechen Marilyn (Chechenskaia Central Museum of Contemporary Merilin) 187–8; humour 203, 204; Russian History, Moscow 57 I l’ich, Wake Up! (Il’ich, pro snis’!) Chaplin, Vsevolod 129 188, 189; Inno, Nano, Techno 184; Charter ’77 (Czech opposition Kids from Our Block (Rebiata s movement) 108 nashego dvora) 189; Kissing Cops: Chto Delat art collective 18, 228, 229–37 The Era of Mercy (Tseluyushchiesya Chuzhak, Nikolai, ‘Literature of Life- militsionery: era miloserdiya) 187; Construction’ (article) 249 Hot Heads (Goriachie golovy) 184; Cieply, Jason 258 Kitchen Suprematism (Kukhonnyi ‘The Clarity of Goal’ Moscow Suprematizm) 184, 186; Mask Show Museum 85 190–1; The Motherland Knows: An classic Russian literature as official ‘Artist’ Can Offend Anyone (Rodina norm 299 znaet) 191, 192; The New Holy Fools classical beauty 85 (Novye yurodivye) 184, 185; The Coal Pool (play) 314 New Malachite Casket 192; Sex- Collective Actions performance group suprematism 185, 186; Suprematist 170, 176–7, 179 subbotnik 184, 185; Video Gag 190 collective identity 32, 44, 45, 242 Bodin, Per-Arne 20 collectivism 18 Bodrov, Jr., Sergei, Sisters (film) 96, 97 Commonwealth of Independent Bogdanov, Aleksander 91 States 66 Bogomolov, Konstantin 52 Connor, Laura 99 Bolotnaya Square rally 147 Conrad, Joseph 193 Bolotyan, Ilmira 146 conscious enactment 40 Bolshoi Drama Theatre, Leningrad consensus (Rancière) 9, 10 305, 311 constructivism 8, 12, 30, 213–15, Bombily 270 217–18, 304 Bourdieu, Pierre 81n7 ‘contemporary art,’ state Bown, Matthew Cullerne 190, 191 redefinition of 52 Boyakov, Eduard 53, 54, 56, 86 Contemporary Art Terrorism 177 Boym, Svetlana 61n21 Cop in the Priest’s Cassock Brecht, Bertolt 304; The Good Person of (performance) 267 Schechuan (play) 305 corruption 5, 152, 180, 316 Bredikhina, Mila 145 ‘counter-extremism’ legislation 66 Brener, Aleksander 139, 140, 275, 276 creativity as political 19 Brodskii, Isaak, Second Congress of the Crimean peninsula, Russian annexation Comintern (painting) 59 of 1, 3, 19, 38–9, 95 Buddhism 34 Csíkszentmihályi, Róbert 111 Bulatov, Erik 131, 170 Cuckoo/Kukushka (song) 97, 98 Bulldozer exhibition 168 culture, definition of 49, 66 Burden Chris: Shoot (performance) 272; ‘Current Russia’ (Aktualnaya Rossiya) Trans-fixed (performance) 272 exhibition 131 cynicism 4–6, 7, 12 capitalism 5, 7, 12, 73, 87, 211, 295; Czechoslovakia, opposition moral capitalism 77, 78–80 movement 108 320

320 Index

Dahrendorf, Ralf 4 education 71, 76, 80 Danzig, May, Partisan Ballad Efremov, Oleg 305 (painting) 91–2 Efros, Anatolii 305 Dark Matter: Political Philosophy of a Egelskii, Denis 85 Brush Stroke, Social History of Fear Egorova, Olga see Tsaplya project 212 Eisenstein, Sergei 15, 304; Montage of Daughterland 84, 89–99 Attractions (text) 209 defamiliarization 85, 184, 260 Elkin, Sergei 183, 193–204; The Bandar- Degot, Ekaterina 11, 166 logs in Russian Eden 202; ‘I Feel Like a Degtyareva, Iaroslava 97 Beast of Burden’ 195; Medvedev – Demidov, Ivan 53 the Cinderella 200; Narodnyi Front democracy argument 53 caricatures 199, 200, 201; Putin Democratic Opposition, Hungary 105 and Baby-Medvedev 199; Putin and democratization, agenda of 18 Ukraine 203; Tajikistan Must Be demography 75 Destroyed 201; Two-Headed Russia Derevni.net (There Is No Village) (Dvuglavaia Rossiia) (book) 193 (documentary) 312 Elliot, David 16 Derevo theatre company 308 Eltsin, Boris 45n1, 49 Derrida, Jacques 223 engaged art 17–18 destalinization 11, 168, 305 Engström, Maria 18 detournement 213 Enjoykin, Nyash-Myash (video clip) 97 Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol Enlightenment, rejection of 49 (book) 182 Enteo, Dmitrii 8, 81n10 Diogenes of Sinope 16 Erofeev, Andrei 17 disillusionment 4 ‘eschatological posters’ (eschat-plakat) 92 dissensus 1, 9–10, 15, 17, 19–20, 204, essentialism 27, 30, 67 258; and ‘shimmering’ 165–180 Etkind, Alexander, Warped Mourning dissent art 16 (monograph) 31 Dobrenko, Evgenii et al. (2010) 248 Eurasian Union of Youth 90 Dobrovolskaya, Yevgeniya 314 Evangeli, Aleksander 8 documentality 218–26 ‘Ever Contemporary: Art of the 20th ‘Documentality in the Expanded Field’ and 21st Centuries’ exhibition 54 programme 218–219 The Excluded: In a Moment of Danger Donbass War 39, 92, 228 (film)230 , 232, 233, 236–7 Doping-Pong art group 85, 94, 95; The exhibition policy 55–9, 60 Birth of a Legend 94, 95; Velikaya 95, 96 Dostoevskii, Fyodor: The Brothers Factory of Found Clothes see FFC Karamazov 5, 6; Demons 144 Falkovskii, Ilya 310 Dubovitsky, Nathan, Okolonolja ‘falsification’ of history 8 (Around Zero) (novel) 87 fascism 6, 40, 237 Dugin, Aleksander 85, 87, 93 Faskhutdinova, Tatyana 146 Dugin, Aleksander 84 see also Fassbinder, Rainer Werner 85 Kholmogorov, Egor Federal Law 83 71 Duma elections 2016 99 Fedorov, Nikolai, Philosophy of Common Durkheim, Émile 42 Cause (book) 90–1, 100n5 Durnenkov, Mikhail and Vyacheslav, Fekete, György 112 The Cultural Layer (play) 314 feminism 93, 146–7, 171–6 Dyakonov, Valentin 19, 56, 131 Feodori, Roman 312 Dzerzhinskii, Feliks, statue of 275 FFC (Factory of Found Clothes) 233, 234 Fidesz (‘Alliance of Young Democrats’) Eşanu, Octavian, Transition in Post- (Fiatal Demokraták Szövetsége) Soviet Art: The Collective Actions party, Hungary 103, 106–10, 112, 113, Group Before and After 1989 169 115, 119 economic deregulation 79–80 figurative art57 , 58, 59, 85 321

Index 321

Finley, Karen 174, 175 grand style realism 304 First World War, propaganda 89 Great Patriotic War (Second World War) Fischer, Ivan 122 28, 37, 40, 228 The Flaming Heart of Danko, or Grishkovets, Evgenii 314 Looking for the Hero of Our Time Gudkov, Lev 3m 5, 7, 8, 22n5 (performance) 235 guided commercialization 71 Fog (Shurkhovezky and Aksyonenko) Gulin, Igor 56 (film) 31–2 Gumilev, Nikolai, War (poem) 93 Fog II (Shurkhovezky) (film) 31–2 Guryanov, Georgii 85; Traktoristka ‘Forbidden Art 2006’ Sakharov Centre, (Female Tractor Driver) (painting) 94 Moscow 129, 130, 310 Gusein-Zade, Liya 240, 243 Foster, Hal 223 Gutov, Dmitry 144 Foucault, Michel 78, 222, 224 Gyurcsány, Ferenc 109 Frankfurt Book Fair 108 Franklin, Benjamin 206n23 Haedicke, Susan C. 22n6 Free Democrats, Hungary 105, 106, 107, Havel, Václav 108 108, 109 Hermitage, St Petersburg 92, 129 Freire, Paulo, Pedagogy of the Oppressed Hess, S. and Northrop, S. 194 (book) 229 historical anniversaries 36–7 Freud, Sigmund 38, 182 Holy Hungarian Crown, cult of 112 Frolova, Tatyana 313 House of Terror Museum 108–9, 115, The Fund for the Development of 116, 117 Contemporary Art 53, 54 humour and irony 13, 182–204 fundamentalism 65, 74 Hungarian Academy of Sciences funding of restructuring of arts 52–55 112, 113 Fyodorov, Evgeny 92 Hungarian Art Academy see MMA (Magyar Művészeti Akadémia) Gagarina, Polina 97 Hungarian Democrats 105 Gallery Godot, Budapest 120 Hungary 103–23 ; anti-Semitism 105; anti- Gallery Triumph 54 liberal turn 113–14 , 115; classical music Gandhi (feminist group) 147 122; coalition 107, 108, 109; concept Gasteva, Nina 229, 234 of a strong state 114; demand for gaze 7–13 restoration of Greater Hungary 115; Gelman gallery 52 demonstrations 109–10 ; deportation Gelman, Marat 52, 147, 191, 274 and murder of Jews 118; free elections Georgia–Russia conflict 92 104; Holocaust memorial 116, 117; Gerasimov, Aleksander 58 Horthy regime 104; importance ghosts, artificial 31 of Christianity 112; Jewish culture Gluklya (Natalia Pershina- 104; Kunsthalle 119; Liget Project Yakimanskaya) 228, 233, 238, 244 121–2 ; Marxism and Communism God’s Will (Bozhya volya) (group) 108; memorial to revolution 110–11 ; 8, 81n10 modernist art 120; Monument to the Golden Mask Theatre Festival 297, 310, Soviet Soldier 118; monumental style 311, 312 115–16 ; ‘Narodnik expressionism’ Golos-Deti (show on YouTube) 97 104–5 ; neo-avant-garde 105, 109; Golosova 20 theatre company 313 ‘neo-baroque’ culture 105, 108; neo- Golubock, D. G. 203 leftist scene 120; new National Theatre Gorbachev, Mikhail 104 107; organic architecture movement Gorkii, Maksim: At the Bottom 144; 108; personality cults 108; popularity ‘Old Woman Izergil’ series 235–6, 243 of theatre 120; populist movement Goscilo, Helen 17 104–5 ; as progressive 104; public sector Govorukhin, Stanislav 128 benefits109 ; resistance 119–21 ; state Gramsci, Antoni, Prison Notebooks sponsorship of arts 103, 113; ‘System (book) 8 of National Cooperation’ 122; urbanist 32

322 Index

culture 105; Westernizers 106, 108, 109, Kommunizm ne ideal (Communism Is Not 112, 113, 119, 120, 122–3 an Ideal) video performance 251 Hyne, William 16 Korchagin, Kirill 253 Korina, Irina 15, 136–8, 270; I Am (Not) Leaving Kirov (play) 312 Patternalism 137; Winter Crops 137 i-ypszilon (art collective) 110 Kornet, Kado 147 imaginary anti-West 87 Koshelev, Egor 56–7 imaginary West 86 Kosmodemyanskaya, Zoya 227–44 Innovatsiya art prize 17, 21, 54, 55 Kovaleva, Ekaterina, My Blue Friend Inspection Medical Hermeneutics (play) 314 (art group) 140, 142 Kozhev, Gelii 59, 60 Institute of Russian Realist Art 60 Kruger, Barbara 171 Interdevochka (film) 96 Kukly (Dolls) (TV show) 127 internal exile 14 Kulik, Oleg 142, 144–6, 265, 266, 268, ‘International Cultural Forum,’ 269, 270; I Bite America and America St Petersburg 298 Bites Me 145 Iryschkov, Andrei 92 Kult-proekt 311 Isidis, Anna 238 Kulyabin, Timofei 301 isolationism 78 Kunsthalle, Hungary 105 Kuracheva, Olga 240 Jan Fabre exhibition, Hermitage 129 Kurdyukova, 58 Jaspers, Karl, Man in the Modern Age Kurekhin, Sergei 86, 87, 308 (book) 3 Kuzkin, Andrei 15, 134–6, 270; Jithesh, S. 194 Circle-wise (performance) 135; Judeo-Christianity 78 Innovation 2014 (performance) 135 ‘kynical impulse’ 16 Kabakov, Ilya 19, 131, 142, 171, 306 kynicism 4, 17 Kádár, János 103–4 Kalinina, Viktoria 239 Lánczi, András 113–14 Kalk, Anastasiya 66 Lapina, Alena 51 Kalmykiya 34, 35 Larson, Gary 193 Kandinsky prize 89 LEF (Left Front of the Arts) 20, Kara-Murza, Sergei, Manipulation of 247, 249–50 the Mind (Manipulatsiya soznaniem) Leiderman, Daniil 19, 20, 21, 259 (book) 49 Leiderman, Yurii 142 karikatura 193, 194 Lenin, depictions of 34, 35, 167 Katasonova, Maria 92 Leningrad/St Petersburg 13, 85, 94, katechon 12, 13, 97 238, 305; experimental theatre Kholmogorov, Egor 84, 85 groups 307–8 Khrushchev, Nikita 167 Leontiev, Konstantin 87, 100n4 Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal (art Les Partisannes Theatre, Izhevsk 314, 315 magazine) 234 Levanov, Vadim 313 Kiev 3 Levine, David 194, 202, 203 Kino (rock band) 85 LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and Kissing Bobbies (Banksy) (graffito) 187 transgender) movement 66, 147 KNAM theatre community, life-construction (zhiznestroitelstvo) 249 Komsomolsk-na-Amure 313 Limonov, Eduard 85, 87; ‘Only Broads Kolesnikov, Andrei 38 Are Going into Battle’ (article) 99 Kolyada, Nikolay 315 Lipnitskaya, Yulia 95 Kolyada Theatre, Ekaterinburg 315 Lipovetsky, Mark 17, 19, 20; Charms of Komar, Vitaly 168, 169 Cynical Reason (book) 16 Komar, Vitaly and Melamid, Alexander, Lissitzky, El, Beat the Whites with Onward to the Victory of Communism! the Red Wedge (Klinon krasnym bei (painting) 168, 169 belykh) (poster) 184 32

Index 323

Literaturnaya gazeta (newspaper) Meyerhold, Vsevolod 304 299, 300 Mikhailovskaya, Anastasia 92, 93 ‘Living Memorial’ project 119 Millenial Monument, Heroes’ Square, Lomasko, Viktoriya 146–8, 149; Drawing Budapest 121, 122 the Court (Risuem sud) 146; Feminist minimalism 93, 141, 194, 270, 315 Pencil (Feministiskii karandash) 146; Mizin, Slava 270 Life Everywhere (Vsyudu zhizn) 148 Mizin, Vyacheslav 183 see also Loskutov, Artem 177–9, 269, 270 Blue Noses Lozha Theatre, Kemerovo 314 MMA (Hungarian Art Academy) Lubyanka 268, 274–6, 277 (Magyar Művészeti Akadémia) Lunacharskii, Anatolii 66 112–15, 119–21, 123 Lyubi svoyu rodinu, synok (Love Your mnemonic symbols 38 Motherland, Dear Son) (video) mobilization posters 92 251, 252 modernism 57, 106, 107, 116–17, 120 Lyubimov, Yurii 305, 306 modernization 40–42, 301 Mokrov, Roman 138–9 Magnitskii, Sergei 297 Monastyrskii, Andrei 170 Maidan Uprising 3, 143, 228, 271 Monroe, Marilyn 187 Makarov, Stanislav 85 ‘monstration’ 177–80 Makovecz, Imre 108, 112, 113 ‘montage of attractions’ (Eisenstein) 15 Malenkaya Vera (film) 96 moral capitalism 77, 78–80 Malevich, Kazimir 174, 184, 185, 273; moralist turn 65–7 Black Square (painting) 142 Morozov, Aleksei 95 Manezh exhibition hall, Moscow 8, Morsin, Alexander and Shkarubo, 55–6, 127 Elena 179 ‘Manhood’ exhibition 86 Moscow Academic Theatre 314 Manizer, Matvei 238, 239, 241 Moscow Art Biennale 50 Mannheim, Karl 32 Moscow Art Theatre (Moskovskii Mapplethorpe, Robert 85 khudozhestvennyi teatr) (MXT) Maraeva, Maria 239 see MAT Marxism 18, 45, 108, 254 Moscow Artists’ Union 167 mass production 214 Moscow Biennale for Contemporary Art MAT (Moscow Art Theatre (Moskovskii 51, 55, 130, 134 khudozhestvennyi teatr) (MXT) Moscow conceptualism 15, 142, 165, 304, 314 169–71, 175–6, 247–8, 253 Matveeva, Anna 57, 58 Moscow Levada Centre for opinion Mediazona (Pussy Riot website) 14 research 5 Medinskii, Vladimir: background 79; Moscow Museum of Contemporary concept of usefulness in art 298; on Russian History 131 cultural policy 48, 52, 55, 76, 67, Moscow Times, ‘Putin’s Russia’ 68–70; dedication of monument 29; cartoons 193 fundamentalism 65; on interpretation Moskovskii khudozhnik (Moscow Artist) 8; on neo-traditionalism 74–5; (journal) 168 on Putin 49; Romantic Realism Mother Armenia (monument) 92 exhibition 59; ‘Russian World’ Mother Georgia (monument) 92 38; on socialism realism 130; on Mozhaev, Boris 306 state funding of theatre 299; and Mukhina, Vera, The Worker and the visual art 50 Kolkhoz Girl (sculpture) 59, 89, 90 Medvedev, Dmitrii 36, 184, 197, 198 Muravitsky, Yurii 316 Melamid, Alexander 168, 169 Museum of Russian Impressionism 60 Melocco, Miklós 108 Museum of the Worker and the Kolkhoz mercantilism 78–9 Girl, Moscow 59 Merinov, Aleksei 206n16 Muzhahoyeva, Zarema 188 metamodernism 88–9 Myshkin, Ippolit 236 324

324 Index

Nagy, Kriszta, ‘You Can Hire Me to Paint Novikov, Timur 13, 85, 86, 87 Your Portrait’ (exhibition) 120, 121 Novorossiya information agency 93 Nancy, Jean-Luc 231, 233 Novosibirsk monstrations 177, 269, 270 Napreenko, Gleb 21 Novosibirsk Theatre for Opera and Narodnik movement, Hungary 104–7, Ballet 279, 301–2, 310 121, 122 Narodnyi Front caricatures 199, 200, 201 Observatorioum project 214 National-Bolshevik Party 87 Ogonyok (Soviet magazine) 94 ‘national idea’ rhetoric 130 Oleinikov, Nikolay 233, 240 national identity and culture 27–39 Orange Revolution, Ukraine 90 National Liberation Movement Orbán, Viktor anti-Semitism 117; (Natsionalno- Osvoboditelnoe cultural policy 111–15, 120, 121–2; Dvizhenie (NOD) 92 and development states 114; first ‘National Salon’ exhibition, government 106–9; and funding 122; Hungary 119 Hungary as illiberal democracy 113; national security 50 new constitution 112; priorities 115 Nazism 6, 109 Orthodox Church: censorship by 13, NCCA (State Centre for Contemporary 128, 300, 301–2; Pussy Riot 174–5; Art) 51, 53, 54–5, 132 role of 3, 6, 8, 49, 73, 74 Nekro-Realists 307 ‘Orthodox Rus: Russia Is My History, Nenasheva, Ekaterina, Punishment 1914–1945, From Great Shocks to the project 245n1 Great Victory,’ exhibition 56 neo-baroque art 115 Osipovich, T. 100n5 neo-conservatism 11, 84, 85, 86 Osminkin, Roman 20, 247–62; ‘Byvaet’ neo-Eurasianism 93 (You Know How Sometimes) 259; O neo-Hellenism 95 metode (On Method) 248, 249, 250; neo-mercantilism 76–7 influence of LEF249 –50; Kommunizm neo-liberalism 69–70, 72, 73, 74–5, 79 ne ideal (Communism Is Not an Ideal) neo-mercantilism 80 251; Lyubi svoyu rodinu, synok (Love neo-traditionalism 70, 72, 73, 74–7 Your Motherland, Dear Son) 251, 252; Neuberger, Joan 187 Moscow conceptualism and Prigov Neumann, Iver, Uses of the Other 247–8; Not a Word about Politics 247; (book) 44, 45 postmodernism 260–2; Revolution 256, New Academy of Fine Arts 85 257; ‘revolutionary pessimism’ 258–60; New Drama Festival, Perm 312 7 noyabria 2015 goda: Sovremennye ‘New European Theatre’ (NET) poety levykh vzglyadov chitayut teksty festival 299 o revolyutsii i svoi teksty (7 November new public management of 2015: Contemporary Left Poets Read culture 67–70 Poems about the Revolution and Other ‘new right’ movements in Europe 6 Texts) 256; Teksty s vnepolozhnymi New Russian Left 228 zadachami (Texts with Outside New Tretyakov Gallery 58, 59 Goals) 253 Nietzsche, Friedrich 269 Osmolovskii, Anatolii 15, 19, 141, Nikolaev, Anton 270 142–4; Have You Done This? No, Nikolaev, Leonid 183 You Did! (Eto vy sdelali? Net, eto vy Nikulenkova, Natalya 241 sdelali!) 142, 143 Nilin, Vikentii 149–50; Photo Stand 150; otherness 42–4 Riding the Police 150 Oushakine, Serguei, ‘patriotism of nonconformism 15, 16, 304–13 despair’ 38 Norman theory of provenance of outsidedness 86, 87 Russian statehood 30 Norwegian Civil Fund 123 Paraphraz Theatre, Glazov 314 nostalgia 10, 56, 60, 106 ‘parasitism’ (tuneyadstvo) 73 325

Index 325

Park Dystopia project 218, 219 Press, Charles 194 Partisan Songspiel: A Belgrade Story Prigov, Dmitrii 19, 20, 165, 170, 247–9, (film) 234 251, 253, 259–61; ‘Communism Is Not patriotism 28, 31, 39, 49, 66, 92, 130, 131 an Ideal’ 254 Pavlenskii, Petr 151, 152–5, 176–7, Primorskii Partisans 277 271–8, 279–91; Carcass 153, 176, 271; ‘prison chanson’ 297 cultural legacy 277–8; Fixation 154, Project on the Fundamentals of State 176, 271; Freedom 155, 271, 276, 279; Cultural Policy 2014 76 individuality 145; Innovation Prize Prokhanov, Aleksander 85 and Havel Prize for Creative Dissent propaganda 3, 7, 8, 66, 93, 107 277; on Medinskii 272; monumentality protectionism 68 275–6; on Pussy Riot 271; and religion ‘proxy censorship’ 129 273, 274; Seam 176, 275; Segregation Pryazhko, Pavel 315 272; sources of inspiration 272–3, 274; psychiatric examinations 132, 275 Threat 17, 20–1, 54, 155, 271, 274, public-private partnerships 75 276, 277; use of body 180, 183, 231 public services 71 Pavlovich, Boris 311, 312 Pushkinskaya 10 theatre group 307 People’s Party (Narodnaia Partiia) 184 Pussy Riot 173–6; actionism 17, Peppershtein, Pavel 18, 131, 139, 140–1 179, 264–5; arrest 183; Chaika 14, perestroika 11, 49, 84, 85–9, 96 152; feminism 93; humour 132; Perov, Sergei 54, 132 international audience 65; Kulik on Pershina-Yakimanskaya, Natalia see 145, 146; Kuzkin on 136; Mother of Gluklya God, Chase Putin Away (Punk Prayer) ‘Personal File’ (Lichnoe delo) 173; move away from actionism 150, exhibition 59 151, 269; Peppershtein on 141; personification 89–92 Putin, Vladimir: in Blue Noses send up Peskov, Dmitrii 23n7 183–90, 191–2; in caricatures 194–203; Pesochinskii, Nikolai and Renanskii, on collapse of Soviet Union 41; Dmitrii 307 confrontation between the state and photography, erotic 85s culture 127, 129–33; on Crimea 38–9; Piscator, Erwin 304 criticism and response 66; on cultural Platt, Jonathan 259 identity 34; cultural policy 29, 45, 49; pleasure principle 44 on ‘cultural therapy’ 37; to Federal Plungyan, Nadya 146 Assembly Crimea 32; media and Plutser-Sarno, Aleksei 170, 205n5 268, 269; on middle class 80n3, 81n4; Poklonskaya, Natalya 97, 98, 99 on nationalities 36; Osmolovskii on Polyakov, Yurii 299, 300 143, 144; political agenda 3; political Pomerantsev, Peter 5, 12; Nothing Is crisis, 2011–12 67; as president 1; on True and Everything Is Possible: Russian culture 27, 36; on traditional Adventures in Modern Russia European values 49 (book) 6, 261 Ponirovskaya, Zlata 146 Rabelais, François 204n1 Pop-Mekhanika 307, 308 radical art actionism 12, 17, 264–70 Pop-Up Theatre 316 Raikov, A. 87 post-colonialism 34–6 Rancière, Jacques 1, 9–10, 22n6, 179, post-imperialism 38 258; Dissensus: On Politics and POST theatre, St Petersburg 315–16 Aesthetics (book) 165 postmodernism 13, 18, 89, 107, 108, 260 Razbezhkina, Maria, I the Worker Prager University Foundation 78 project 312 Praktika theatre 53 Read My Lips video posters 92, 93, 94 Pravda (newspaper) 304 reality principle 44 presidential decree 2014 ‘Bases of State redistribution policy 68 Cultural Politics’ 28 reflective cynicism 4 326

326 Index

religious images and icons 56 SashBash (play) 315 Remnick, David 193, 194 satire 16, 17, 190, 193–4, 203–4, Remorenko, Igor 76 257, 300 Rényi, András 118, 119 Schmidt, Mária 116, 117 reunification of lands 38–9 Schmitt, Carl 81n5, 113 revisionism 66, 115 School of Dramatic Art 307 ‘revolutionary pessimism’ 258–260 Second World War see Great ‘Romantic Realism: Soviet Painting, Patriotic War 1925–1945’ 55, 56, 59 Sekatskii, Aleksander 87, 88 Romashova, Natalya 68, 70 self-censorship 14, 103, 129, 148, 149, Romer, Fyodor 180n5 203, 227 Room, Abram, Strogii yunosha (Strict Serebrennikov, Kirill 314 Young Man) (film) 85 Serenko, Darya, Tikhii Piket (Silent Rosa’s House of Culture 227 Picket) project 156–8 Rosenfeld, Alla 167 serious styob method 88 ROSIZO (State Museum and Exhibition Seven-Year Itch (Wilder) (film) 187 Centre) 53–5, 132 ‘severe style’ (surovyi stil) 60 Roskomnadzor 147 Shaburov, Aleksander 183 see also Rossiia, Edinaya 200 Blue Noses Rossiiskaya gazeta (newspaper) 50 Shaburov, Sasha 178, 270 Rozanov, Mikhail 85, 86 Shadr, Ivan, Girl with an Oar Rubens, Peter Paul, Roman Charity (sculpture) 94 (Cimon and Pero) (painting) 92 Shapoval, Sergei 261 Rubinstein, Lev 261, 265 Shcherbakova, Karina 241 Rudrum, David and Stavris, Nicholas 89 Shergin, Valerii 315 ‘Russia: Realism, XXI Century’ Sherman, Cindy 171 exhibition 57–8 ‘shimmering’ 19, 20, 165, 170–80, 259 ‘Russian Abstraction’ 166, 167 Shklovsky, Viktor 29, 31, 85 Russian culture 27–45; construction Shteiner, Arsenii 57 of state patriotic discourse 39; as Shuripa, Stanislav 209, 210, 216 national idea 27–39 Sidur, Vadim 8 Russian Federation 128 Slonov, Vasilii 205n4 Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, Sloterdijk, Peter 5–6, 7, 16, 17; Critique Contemporary Art as an Instrument of Cynical Reason (book) 4 for Influencing Russian Policy Smetanina, Jana 146 report 52 ‘Smotriny’ festival 299 Russian Military-Historical Society 74–5 Sochi Winter Olympics 75, 95, 268 Russian Museum, St Petersburg 57 social justice 67–9 Russian Pioneer (magazine) 87 Socialist Party Hungary 109 ‘Russian Realism: XXI Century’ socialist realism 11, 56–9, 166–8; exhibition 57 modified 58, 59 Russian Revolution 11 Sokolov, Aleksander 79, 191 ‘Russian World’ 38–45, 66, 75 Solovki Stone monument 275 Rzhevka: Nevskii Boulevard project 311 Soros, George 105, 114 Soros Foundation 105–6, 109 Saatchi Gallery, London 91 Sots Art 16, 19 sado-masochism 93 sovereignty, national 50, 76, 113, 211 Salakhov, Tair 60 ‘Soviet project’ 49 Salimsyanov, Damir 314 Soviet Union, collapse of 40–1 Saltykov-Shedrin, Mikhail 305 Sovremennik theatre, Moscow 305 Samutsevich, Ekaterina 173 see also ‘Space: Reconstruction of the myth’ 86 Pussy Riot spectator and art 22n6 Sarkozy, Nicolas 77, 78 spirituality 32–3 327

Index 327

‘sports beauties’ 95 ‘Togliatti wave’ in theatre 313, 314 St Petersburg/Leningrad 13, 85, 94, Tolkonnikova, Nadya 17 238, 305; experimental theatre Tolokonnikova, Nadezhda 173 see also groups 307–8 Pussy Riot St Stephen 107, 112 Tolokonnikova, Natalya 14, 269 Stalinism, presentation of 56, 89 Tolstova, Anna 20–1, 58 Stanislavskii, Konstantin 305 Tovstonogov, Georgii 305 Staraya Ladoga 29, 30 trauma, exploitation of 41–2 State Centre for Contemporary Art Treaty of Trianon 1920 106, 115 see NCCA Tregulova, Zelfira 56 State Historical Museum, Moscow 58 Tretyakov, Sergei, Novyi Lev Tolstoi state ideology, absence of 36 (New Lev Tolstoy) (article) 249 state regulation 79–80 Tretyakov Gallery 277 state sovereignty 6 tricksters 16, 20, 262 statism 28–9 Tsaplya (Olga Egorova) 229, 233, 235–6 ‘Strategy on State Cultural Policy to Tseluba, Natalya 239 2030’ 50 Tsoi, Viktor 86; Cuckoo/Kukushka Strauss, Leo 113 (song) 97 Strelkov, Igor 93 Tsvetkova, Roza 5 Strunnikov, Sergei 233 Turnbloom, Dean 194 student tuition fees 71 Tverdovskii, Ivan, Correctional Class styob 16, 94 (film) 69–70 super-national identity 34 Twain, Mark 182 Surkov, Vladislav 6, 12, 53, 87, 127, 131 Svarog, Vasilii, Stalin and Members Übermensch 269 of the Politburo Meeting Children in Ugarov, Michail 310, 311, 312 Gorkii Park (painting) 59 Ukraine 3, 40, 66, 92 symbols and signs 13, 19 Ukrainian Femen 93 unconscious conceptualizations 40, 41 Taganka Theatre 305–6 unemployment, Soviet moral concept of Tannhauser (Wagner) (opera) 14, ‘parasitism’ (tuneyadstvo) 73 301–2, 310 unintentional verbal slip 38 Teatr.doc 15, 300, 309–11, 314; 1 Hour ‘united people’ (obshchenarodnogo), 18 Minutes 297 image of 267 Tellér, Gyula 114 universal scale of wages (edinaya temporality 219–26 tarifnaya setka) 71 Ter-Oganyan, Avdei 127, 128 universities, project to establish Tereshkina, Anna 239 federal 75, 76 The Motovilikhinsk Worker (play) Unsicherheit 5 312, 313 Uralvagonzavod 80n2 The Shades (play) 305 The Silence of the Lambs (film) 99 Vadim Sidur exhibition 129 theatre 295–303; censorship 297; concept Valerius Maximus 92 of ‘usefulness’ 298; nonconformist Valkyrie 92 304–17; obscene language 302; vandalization 8 radical contemporary plays 298; Vasiliev, Anatolii 307 ‘raider attacks’ 297, 298; regional Vasilii Shukshin Drama Theatre 312 302, 303; Russian tradition 299; state Vasnetsov, Viktor, Bogatyrs (Bogatyri) funding 299 (painting) 184 Theotokos 89, 92 Vassileva, Olga 76; Regnum 76 Tishkov, Valeriy 36 VDNKha, Moscow 53, 59 Tisza, István, monument to 116 ‘Velikaya Rus’ 95 Titova, Anna 209, 210, 216 Velikaya, Sofiya 95 328

328 Index

Verdery, Katherine 30, 31 ‘Weimar resentment’ 48 Vermeulen, Timotheus and van Well Yeah (Tak-to da) (documentary) 311 den Akker, Robin, ‘Notes on Wilde, Oscar 182 Metamodernism’ (essay) 88, 89 Wooden Horses (play) 306 ‘Victory as a New Epic: Dedicated wordplay 38 to the 70th Anniversary of Victory’ 86 World Architecture Award 111 Vilenskii, Dmitrii 233, 234, 235, 236 World Exhibition, Paris 59 Vladimir the Great, monument to 33 Vlasik, Dmitrii 313 XL gallery 52 Vlaskin, Aleksander Aleksandrovich 52 Voina art group 52, 54, 170, 204, Yablokov, Aleksei 51 235, 265–7 Yakovenko, Ilya 239 Volkostrelov, Dmitrii 315–16 Yampolskii, Mikhail 174 Volodin, Vyacheslav 53 Year of Russian History, 2012 36 Volosevich, Dasha 97, 98 Yufit, Evgenii 307 Voloshina, Vera 94 Yukhananov, Boris 308 Vorotnikov, Oleg 183, 270 Yurchak, Alexey 86, 88 Vrubel, Dmitrii 270 Yushchenko, Grigorii 270

Wallach, Amei 180n4 Zala, György, monument to István war films, recent 31 Tisza 116 We Are from the Future (Malykov) Zamyatin, Evgenii 182 (film) 31–2 Zemfira 97 We Are from the Future II Zhelud, Anna 270 (Samokhvalov) (film)31 –2, 45n2 Zingerman, Boris 305 Weber, B. 203 Zvyagintsev, Andrei 52