QUESTIONS WITHOUT ANSWERS, ANSWERS WITHOUT QUESTIONS
1995. The action The First Glove. The war in Chechnya is going on. To express his protest, the artist Alexander Brener, dressed as a boxer, goes up onto the stone platform of the Lobnoye mesto in Red Square (in old times a site for the proclamation of the tsar’s ukazes), and shouts out challenges to that “pitiful coward” Boris Yeltsin to fight. His shouts are addressed to the mute Kremlin walls, which are incapable of answering him. For quite a long time no one reacts to his appeals and his provocative behavior. It takes several minutes for a militia car to show up (the police were still called ‘militia’ then): the guardians of law and order who have arrived in it try to understand what is happening and take Brener off to the station – but soon release him.
2013. The action Fixation. During the third presidential term of the politician Vladimir Putin, everything is coming to resemble authoritarian government more and more. The artist Pyotr Pavlensky, symbolically diagnosing the apathy that has gripped society since the mass civil protests of 2011–12, nails his scrotum to a cobblestone in Red Square. Members of the police are quick to approach the artist. Administrative proceedings are taken against Pavlensky for “petty hooliganism,” and five days later a criminal case is opened and he is made to give a written undertaking not to leave the city.
The moods of these two individual actions that occurred at the same place (Red Square), separated by a gap of eighteen years, are very different. At one pole we have Brener’s tragicomic shouts addressed to emptiness: a summons to action and struggle that is drowned in the absence of a reply from the person to whom it is addressed. At the other pole – Pavlensky’s masochistic and at the same time morally instructive act, unambiguously stating the impossibility of movement – is instantly met with a predictable response from the authorities.
How can we describe in structural terms the difference between these two actions, each of which was, in its own way, emblematic of its time? It is easier to make sense of the wide variety of ethical and political positions taken by Russian action artists in the period from the 1990s to the present if we regard them as acts and statements in the field of the Other, that is, as different versions of an appeal to a symbolic order, as different ways of relating to the law that regulates our existence, to its weaknesses and its strength. The symbolic law, naturally, has a material substrate, in which society and the state are the key instances for actionism.
The Other in Brener’s action is a weak Other, the fragmented post-Soviet state of the 1990s (its fragmentation has been described, among others, by the sociologist Vadim Volkov in his book Violent Entrepreneurs). This state was far less concerned with the affairs of its citizens and the affairs of society than with its own survival and dividing up Russian capital. With the end of the USSR this Other – that is, the state – to a significant degree abandoned its citizens to sink or swim. And Brener’s actions of the 1990s existed in a state of indeterminacy of the field of the Other. This indeterminacy can be read either as the long-awaited liberal freedom or as the loss of legitimate reference points and social guarantees. And therefore Brener’s actions, like many other actions of the 1990s (for instance, the collective action Barricade on Nikitskaya Street in Moscow, 1998), can be seen as a check on the reality of this Other, as an attempt to clarify by experimental means the new, still unarticulated laws of existence in the city and the state.
At the level of the content of his statement, Brener has a precise political agenda: a protest against the war in Chechnya. This content, and also the entire image of the boxer-warrior, are deliberately masculine and heroic. However, at the level of the act of the statement, The First Glove includes indeterminacy and intentional weakness: the question of exactly what reply Brener is expecting from the Other, and whether this reply is possible in principle, is left up in the air. This suspended state can be called the ‘aesthetics’ of Brener’s action in the sense in which this term is used by the philosopher Jacques Rancière: in speaking of aesthetics what happens here is the suspension of the knowledge of how to feel correctly, how to read and understand a work correctly. To put it another way, in The First Glove the gap between the act and the statement is of the essence – this gap is the aesthetics.
Brener projected a similar ‘state of suspension’ onto the whole of the new post-Soviet social order in his action What David Didn’t Finish (1995), by lining up a whole series of uncompleted utterances, beginning with the very title of the action. Standing near the former KGB building on Lyubanka Street, on the empty site of Dzerzhinsky’s statue, which was pulled down by protesters in 1991, Brener shouted out, as if he were addressing the cars swirling round him as they turned on the square: “Everything is all right! Carry on working! I am your new commercial director. Everything is all right.” In essence, Brener was giving voice to the unspoken imperatives of the new post-Soviet capitalist order. By insistently attempting to persuade the absent audience to his speech that “everything is all right,” he inevitably made people suspicious – was everything really all right? Was the site where Dzerzhinsky, that symbol of power, used to stand, really empty? The interminable swirling of the cars was expressive of the flow of time in which these questions had been suspended without an answer.
Pavlensky’s actions are also an emphatically male performance, like the actions of Brener – but they don’t contain any paradoxical and potentially bewildering dialectic of the phallic and castration, the heroic and the comic, strength and weakness, the content and the act of the statement – a dialectic that was intrinsic to Brener. Rather than that, Pavlensky bears tautological witness to his place in the space of the Other’s law, thereby challenging it – as in Fixation, where Pavlensky use his gesture like a signature, attesting to the fact of public apathy that he spoke about in his commentary on this action.
I will take the liberty of quoting a rather large fragment of my own article “What has Pavlensky overlooked?”1
In Pyotr Pavlensky’s action, which, according to the artist’s own statements, should make people think and provoke unpredictable consequences, an ethics can be detected, in which what is written down dominates what is not written down.
On 27 April 2016, at the request of Pavlensky, who was under criminal investigation concerning accusations of vandalism for the actions Freedom and Threat, his lawyer Dmitry Dinze brought the women whom the artist had presented as “prostitutes” to the court as witnesses for the defense. In Dinze’s retelling, Pavlensky regards prostitutes and the homeless as the only free people in Russia and therefore as being exactly the individuals who are entitled to state their opinion publicly in court.
The predictability of the authorities’ response and the media effect has been a component in all of Pavlensky’s works. But whereas in Pavlensky’s actions the artist participated face to face with the state, in the trial he imposed a predetermined role not only on himself and the representatives of authority, but also on the women who had been invited as witnesses. These women (and their predictably negative opinion of modern actionism) found themselves overshadowed by the signifier “prostitute,” which was taken up enthusiastically by the media. Pavlensky’s actions do not function as paradoxes, but as a triumphant ‘quod erat demonstrandum.’ One more time: according to Pavlensky, in modern Russian society it is only possible to have access to freedom if you are situated on the fringes of this society by virtue of being a sex worker or homeless person. In this model of Pavlensky’s the defining contours of society are neatly mapped out and everyone is assigned his/her own role (conformist/protester, sex worker/policeman, free/not free …). But this very notion of the social order as a system of written-down, predictable roles excludes freedom, and it was this very notion that Pavlensky himself reproduced in criticizing Russian justice.
The scene with the “prostitutes” in court revealed the presence in all of Pavlensky’s art of an ethics founded on the total recording of social roles. In his actions Pavlensky has always attested to the impasse of the political situation in Russia, effectively doubling it up by nailing down all of its participants in their places, as he nailed his own body to Red Square in the action Fixation. But in so doing he has only reproduced the impossibility of ambiguity and the impossibility of a halt to the universal accounting that underlies the power of the state. However in that case the unpredictable breakthrough, which he proclaims as an inspiration in his texts, cannot come about. Pavlensky’s actions do not function as paradoxes, but as a triumphant ‘quod erat demonstrandum’; in shying away from indeterminacy, they lead desire into a blind alley.
In Pavlensky’s action, the collapsing and reduction of what I referred to above as “aesthetics” is symptomatic not only of a change in art, but also of a change in the state’s position with regard to its citizens – a change in the Other with whom they have to deal. Essentially without granting its citizens any new social guarantees, the state is attempting ever more vigorously to interfere in their personal affairs – the legislative proposals on “prohibiting the propaganda of homosexuality to minors,” “insulting the feelings of believers,” and the abolition of free abortions, etc. can serve as examples of this.
Changes in the ruling regime have a direct effect on the poetics and prospects of political actionism. As my co-author Sasha Novozhenova and I wrote in an article on Russian actionism in the daily realities of the city in the 1990s,2 the beginning of the first period of post-Soviet actionism, when the state Other was weak and not yet fully delineated, can be taken as the cancellation, resulting from the collapse of the USSR, of the criminal proceedings that had already begun against the participants in the ETI-text action by the ETI movement (the acronym ETI stands for Expropriation of the Territory of Art, and also spells out the Russian word for ‘these’). The participants spelled out the word Hui (‘Prick’) with their bodies on Red Square. Three events can be noted as marking the end of this first period. Firstly, the criminal prosecution in 1998 of Avdei Ter-Oganyan for his action Young Atheist, in the course of which he chopped up reproductions of icons from the Art-Manège exhibition; in order to avoid prosecution the artist fled the country. Secondly, the FSB’s pursuit of the organizers of the occupation of Lenin’s mausoleum in the course of an action by the Against All movement (which advocates the reinclusion in election ballots of the option “against all”), as a result of which one of the pioneers of the movement stopped engaging in actionism. Thirdly, the criminal prosecution of Oleg Mavromatti for the action Don’t Believe Your Eyes in 2000, in the course of which the artist was nailed to a cross; like Avdei Ter-Oganyan, Mavromatti fled the country in order to avoid trial. And so, in the late 1990s the state asserted its authority and its control over the public space – and the word ‘actionism’ began to be associated with persecution by the authorities. In the new era political action artists required new working methods for dealing with the strengthened Other.
Of course, Pavlensky’s strategy is by no means the only way for Russian actionism to deal with this new persecuting state, which is not inclined to let artists’ escapades go without a substantial response. Pavlensky espouses direct confrontation with the state, certifying with his acts the seriousness of the Other’s law: it is one or the other – either face-to-face resistance or submission. In contrast, many of the actions of the group Voina (‘War’) and of Pussy Riot have instead been clownish or tricksterish in nature, mocking the authorities and their laws and showing how they can be evaded playfully. An indicative instance is the action by a member of Voina, Leonid Nikolaev (unfortunately recently deceased) in which he ran up onto and across a Federal Guards Service car beside the Kremlin with two buckets over his head – and then evaded capture and escaped (Fuckhead Lyonya Runs on the Feds’ Roof). Or the action in which another member of Voina, Elena Kostyleva, carried a frozen chicken out of a supermarket in her own body – inside her vagina (Why the Chicken Was Pinched, or The Tale of How the Cunt Fed the War, 2010). Or Pussy Riot’s actions from the series Free the Flagstone (2012), in which the members of the punk group clambered up and hid from police under the roofs of metro stations or on top of a trolleybus and sang songs from there, scattering around the down taken from pillows.
War and Pussy Riot seem to be competing with agents of the state to see who is wilier. They show how it is possible to evade taboos and prohibitions wittily and to demystify power by demonstrating that it is built on ruses which are in principle no different from their own anarchical gimmicks. Tricks or special contrivances that allow them to outwit the authorities are a major component of their actions. This is a fundamental difference between the actionism of the 2000s and 2010s and the action art of the 1990s.
The actionism of the 1990s was like a clump of naked life, tossed into the uncertainty of the post-Soviet city – like a stray dog, the alter ego of the artist Oleg Kulik, or Brener’s naked body. The reaction of the authorities (for instance, the militia), when it occurred, was not an integral part of the action itself – it was, rather, the end of the action, the point at which it broke off. In the same way as the crane driver and the crane which carried out Anatoly Osmolovsky’s request to hoist him up onto the shoulder of the statue of Mayakovsky were not part of the action in The Journey of Netseziudik to the Land of the Brobdingnagians: the content of the action was simply the image of Osmolovsky sitting on the shoulder of the proletarian poet. In the 2000s, when the gap between citizens’ bodies and the state was filled by media for implementing state power, action artists started expropriating these media, fighting against the Other for those symbols, facilities and inventions through which their relationship with it was mediated. For instance, the Liteiny leaf bridge in St Petersburg, which is raised in accordance with a strict timetable, was expropriated from the state as the medium for an action by the group Voina entitled Prick Captured by FSB (2010), and a metro-train carriage trundled round the metro, literally carrying the same group’s joint action with the Bombily (‘Blitzers’) under the title Feast (A Wake for Prigov) (2007).
But what is the role of agents of society in these actions? We have spoken above primarily about the Other of actionism as being the state, its institutions and agents – but not about society. And this is significant – the most clearly perceptible aspect of Russian political actionism is an appeal (as in the 1990s) or a challenge (beginning from the 2000s) to the authorities and the state. In the 1990s seemingly no place was envisaged for any kind of focused image or representative of society – the action artists went out into society as if it were a raw, indistinct reality, addressing every chance passer-by in the manner of Oleg Kulik, who flung himself at people like a dog. Society appeared to action artists as a clearly defined and structured target, not raw and arbitrary, from the moment when the behavior of the state was first clarified, when the state of social suspension of the 1990s came to an end. And the question of intermediaries, of media, became crucial for the action artists’ relationship with society, just as it had been for their relationship with the state. And whereas in the relationship with the state these intermediaries were special stunts, lures, captured ordnance and instruments of escape, in the relationship with society they were the news media.
Even in our day action artists (Pussy Riot, Pavlensky) are inclined to ignore members of society who happen by chance to be nearby during an action, whether they are candle-sellers in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior or simply passers-by. The only exceptions are the crucial ones of agents of the authorities (the police) and journalists: the immediate reality of the action is sacrificed to its media image. For the artists the news media are more or less the only fully legitimate representatives of society.
And precisely thanks to the efforts of the news media, an action is neatly divided into two components: an act of stating, which has been reduced to the level of scandal, and the content of the statement (frequently distorted, especially in the official media) – a kind of political message that can be written down in words. As filtered through the news media, the act and the content of the statement are devoid of the paradoxical relations that were inherent to the actionism of the 1990s: today the act merely serves as the instrument for propagating the content. And therefore, the more an action relies on making an impact via the news media, the less ‘aesthetics’ (in Rancière’s sense) it possesses. For instance, this is precisely the structure of Pavlensky’s actions, which lay claim to the status of a monumental example and a reproach that is disseminated via thousands of repostings on the internet. To a much lesser degree, this also applies to the group Voina.
The 1990s in Russia were a time of protracted capitalist (counter)revolution. Against the background of the collapse and reassembly of society, the artistic actions of the 1990s did not stand out very noticeably among the large number of disorienting events and shocking crimes. It is no accident that stories about artistic actions were quite often published in the newspapers’ city events pages. In this situation, artistic actions were attempts to determine the still unclear, unfamiliar borders of a new social order – attempts that were impossible in a time of changes on such a scale. This impossibility of achieving certainty was at the origin of the energy and poetics of the actionism of the 1990s. When Russian authoritarian state capitalism was firmly established, actionism acquired a new function. Its acts became acts of setting limits to the law – a rehearsal for revolutionary acts, made alone or in a narrow circle of close associates and fellow thinkers. And this is already a form of transgressive acts that is far more familiar to bourgeois society – these impatient attempts to play out a revolution – and also a far more familiar form of impossibility – the impossibility of carrying out this revolution in earnest.
Notes
1Gleb Napreenko, “What has Pavlensky overlooked?” Raznoglasiya no. 4. ‘A puffy eye. The ethics committee.’ www.colta.ru/articles/raznoglasiya/11139], in which I wrote in detail about these properties of the artist’s ethical position.
2Gleb Napreenko and Alexandra Novozhenova. “Moscow actionism under a fragmentary state.” Unpublished.