Read & Riot
Page 7
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HOW TO COMBINE ART AND POLITICS
A million protest actions are possible:
kiss-in: A form of protest in which people in same-sex or queer relationships kiss in a public place to demonstrate their sexual preferences.
die-in: A form of protest in which participants pretend that they’re dead. This method was used by animal rights activists, antiwar activists, human rights activists, gun control activists, environmental activists, and many more.
bed-in: A protest in bed. The most famous one was done by Yoko Ono and John Lennon in 1969 in Amsterdam, where they campaigned against the Vietnam War from their bed.
car/motorcycle caravans: A group of cars/bikes move through the city with lots of symbols, posters, and noise. Used, for example, by the Blue Buckets movement in Russia to protest the unnecessarily frequent use of flashing lights and roadblocks by motorcades and vehicles carrying top officials.
repainting: In 1991, Czech sculptor David Černý painted a Soviet IS-2 tank pink.
replacing: Swapping “normal” mannequins in shop windows with “abnormal” mannequins.
shopdropping: Covertly placing your own items in stores.
refusing to accept management’s absurd orders and laughing in response to them
laughing in response to abuse by police or guards
laughing to protest a trial
(Ridiculing power is one of the best means of democratization; we call it methods of laughter.)
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(add your own items to the list)
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To spark people’s lives with meaning, art should not exist only in the form of an art market, as it mostly does now. A market—by definition—creates exclusive, not inclusive, experiences. Art belongs to everybody. We should be able to create more art in the street, in public spaces. We should have free communal art centers, where anybody who’d like to can create an artwork. You say that it’s a utopia, I say look at Sweden in the 1980s and ’90s. They had communal cultural hubs, where every person who walked in could learn how to, let’s say, play the guitar.
destroy the (fourth) wall
How can I break the fourth wall that separates the artist from the audience?
Breaking the fourth wall is a good and healthy thing to do. It’s a sign of real hospitality, an invitation to think and create together. Trust your audience, treat them as equals, involve every guest in a journey, an investigation, and a conversation. They are part of the work of art too.
“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life,” writes Michel Foucault. “That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”
You share your artistic responsibility with the audience. It’s political theater—it’s a theater of cruelty where nobody is just an observer. You’re breaking the society of the spectacle by turning a spectacle into society. The audience will be thankful to you. They’re also tired of being force-fed junk by the entertainment industry. They want to share responsibility. Freedom grows through pressure, so give them pressure. They want to be in your mob.
We feel disconnected from reality. How can my little action possibly make any difference? If I could unite five or ten people through art, if I could make them believe in their power, that’s my prize and that’s my victory.
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Guy Debord, Jean-Luc Godard, and Bertolt Brecht were seeking a form of art that could break down the wall between the actor and the audience. According to them, the elimination of this wall would make it possible to involve an audience in action and critical analysis.
“Bourgeois dramatic art rests on a pure quantification of effects: a whole circuit of computable appearances establishes a quantitative equality between the cost of a ticket and the tears of an actor or the luxuriousness of a set,” writes Roland Barthes in Mythologies (1957). This kind of art is not going to ask the audience inconvenient questions. The audience has paid to feel comfortably numb.
“Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it.” That’s Bertolt Brecht.
I have no interest in art that does not disturb. Being radically honest, I would not even call it art. The goal of art is not to protect the status quo. Art is development and investigation. By definition, as an act of creation, art is change, change that affects artist and audience alike.
Making political art or music videos is not really that different from making any other type of art. The slight differences are:
You’re aware that intelligence services are closely following your every move.
You act according to the knowledge that intelligence services are following you.
As an honest (wo)man, you have to be sure that you warn every single person who’s involved in a production at the very first meeting: you have to be ready to (a) be fired from your job, (b) be beaten, and (c) be sentenced to several years in prison.
After you’ve released the piece of art, you casually check the news feed just to see if a criminal case has been opened or not.
You have to be ready to help those who are in danger because they participated in your political artistic enterprise.
That’s it, I think.
a prayer
If the theory of superstrings is right and we all consist of strings that vibrate, it explains why music can touch us so deeply. Because we do not consist of solid things, as we used to think. If we are just strings of energy—and quantum physics says that we are—we would resonate. If you could feel it, you could project ideas and feelings and perceptions of reality. Music is a prayer.
Music brings you closer to your animal state. The heartbeat of rhythm organizes your thoughts and visions, organizes effortlessly and elegantly, making them more impactful and mesmerizing. We cannot fake a spell, we must let a spell invade us, and then a spell is ready to be cast and may work very well. That’s what shamanism looks like. Music has always been—and will always remain—a prayer at its core.
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“As a little girl,” Einstein’s second wife, Elsa, once remarked, “I fell in love with Albert because he played Mozart so beautifully on the violin. He also plays the piano. Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories. He goes to his study, comes back, strikes a few chords on the piano, jots something down, returns to his study.”
Deeds
pussy riot church
You might think that on the day you committed a crime that resulted in two years of prison, you should feel something special. In fact, on my day, I felt ridiculous and stubborn. Honestly, I feel this way every day anyway, so nothing seemed special for me on the 21st of February 2012.
When we arrived at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, it didn’t feel as if we were doing anything wrong. Later, we were told by the court, the investigators, our president, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, and various outlets of Russian propaganda that what we did in the cathedral was blasphemy, a felony, an attempt to destroy Russia . . . that we in fact had declared war on Russian values, traditions, morality. We crucified Christ a second time; we sold our homeland to America and let NATO tear it apart. That’s what they told us.
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WHERE TO STAGE AN UNSANCTIONED CONCERT
Wall Street
Physical structures (construction scaffolding, lampposts, roofs)
In the air (balloon, tightrope, helicopter)
In flames (either by belching flames or dancing amid them)
Government buildings (police stations, city administrati
ons)
A blocked-off street; you can block it with trash bins
Military installations (e.g., the musical Hair)
The woods
Boat (e.g., Sex Pistols on the River Thames, 1977)
Prisons
Psychiatric institutions (Nina Hagen plays a lot of concerts there these days)
Interrupting a lecture in a college
The Pentagon
FSB HQ
Red Square
On public transport
On a tank, in front of a tank
On a military submarine
Interrupting an official event
During protests
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We didn’t foresee any of that when we came to the cathedral. It wasn’t as if we were planning to overturn the entire state. It was a windy winter day—there’s really nothing good I could say about the weather. But everything besides the weather felt just fine. I felt confident. I had heard from my government officials that I was living in a free country, so I could come to any public space and communicate to those in power whatever I’d like. Right?
That morning, we met at the Kropotkinskaya subway station (named after the Russian anarchist Kropotkin). Five women in colorful tights and colored hats.
For three weeks, we had been rehearsing quickly laying out the footlights and connecting them to a portable battery while simultaneously setting up the microphone stand and getting the guitar out of its case. However much we rehearsed, it took us fifteen seconds to set up the performance, which was way too long, of course.
“Careful planning of joint actions by the accomplices of the criminal group, attentive planning of each stage of the crime, and use of the necessary props made it possible to successfully complete all stages of the planned action and commence with its final stage,” read the verdict of Moscow’s Khamovniki District Court, August 17, 2012.
I had never thought that a concert could lead to a prison term, but you know, never say never—never stop wondering, life is truly full of unknowns. We entered the church and “began devilishly jerking [our] bodies, jumping, hopping, kicking [our] legs high, and wagging [our] heads,” as it says in our criminal case.
“After Nadya had crossed herself while kneeling, a guard came up to her and tried to grab her, and she very nimbly and girlishly slipped from his arms and ran off like a rabbit,” says my father, who was with us in the cathedral.
The performance lasted forty seconds. After the action, we picked up our belongings and left.
The next day, Putin and the patriarch get on the phone. The presidential administration called the right people. The main question in the Pussy Riot case was, Who was more offended by the Punk Prayer, Vladimir Putin or the patriarch? Putin knows that church and state are constitutionally separate in Russia, but he believes that they are one and the same. As quoted on inoSMI (November 7, 2017), he said: “How many European countries have deviated from their roots, including Christian values, that lie in the very core of the Western civilization? They deny moral principles and everything traditional on the national, cultural, and even sexual level. . . . The West quickly goes backward and down to the chaotic darkness, to the primitive state.”
“Through their actions they demonstratively and pointedly attempted to devalue ecclesiastical traditions and dogmas cherished and revered for centuries,” said the judge at my trial.
“I have vouchsafed God’s revelation and that the Lord condemns what Pussy Riot has done. I am convinced this sin will be punished both in this life and the hereafter,” said archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Russian Orthodox Church’s press service (RBK Group, June 25, 2012). God’s law, the most important law, had been violated by this action, by this sin. “For the wages of sin is death,” the Bible says, meaning eternal damnation in hell.
I feel that the action in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior was horrible on the whole. We didn’t accomplish most of what we intended—we didn’t even get to the refrain of the song. We did not have enough footage to make a good music video. We were extremely disappointed. Oddly enough, we were sent to prison for the worst Pussy Riot action we’d done. Apparently, Putin simply didn’t like it. He thought, Damn—what a load of shit! Put them in jail!
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A PUNK PRAYER: MOTHER OF GOD, DRIVE PUTIN AWAY
Virgin Mary, Mother of God
Drive Putin away
Drive Putin away
Drive Putin away
Black cassock, golden epaulettes
Parishioners all crawling to pay their respects
The phantom of liberty in heaven
Gay pride dispatched to Siberia in shackles
The KGB boss, their principal saint
Escorts protesters to jail
So as not to insult His Holiness
Women must have babies and sex
Shit, shit, shit, holy shit
Shit, shit, shit, holy shit
Virgin Mary, Mother of God
Become a feminist
Become a feminist
Become a feminist
The Church praises rotten leaders
A sacred procession of black limousines
A preacher is coming to school today
Go to class and bring him money!
Patriarch Gundyayev believes in Putin
The bitch had better believe in God
The Virgin’s Belt is no substitute for rallies
The Virgin Mary is with us at protests!
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It was just a prayer. A very special prayer. “The most important dictator, Putin, is really afraid of people,” as Pussy Riot member Squirrel says. “More specifically, he’s afraid of Pussy Riot. Afraid of a bunch of young, positive, optimistic women unafraid to speak their minds.”
We exposed the brutal and cruel side of the government, but we didn’t do anything illegal. It’s not illegal to sing and say what you think.
People don’t call it the Cathedral of Christ the Savior anymore, but rather the Pussy Riot church or, alternatively, the trade center of Christ the Savior. You can rent a holy conference hall and a press center and a concert hall with a VIP green room. Restaurants, a laundry, and a VIP car-washing service are located under the altar in the basement. It also houses a company that sells seafood. Tourists are sold Fabergé eggs at 150,000 rubles a pop, and the cathedral does a brisk trade in souvenirs. And since no one supervises or taxes them, the Russian Orthodox Church has decided to dabble in cheap Arabian gold. “If you want to be sure that your venture will go well, do it with us.” That’s what I read on the website of the “holy place.”
The Orthodox Church’s patriarch, Kirill, renowned for his tobacco business and his alleged fortune of $4 billion, spoke out often before the elections against political activism on the part of the rank and file. “Orthodox people are unable to go to demonstrations. These people do not go to demonstrations. Their voices are not heard. They pray in the quiet of their monasteries, their monastic cells, and their homes,” said His Holiness.
The patriarch had been unashamedly campaigning for Putin, referring to him as president of Russia before the presidential elections took place and saying that Putin had allegedly “fixed history’s crookedness.” If Putin has fixed anything, it would be the pockets of his minions—for example, the pockets of His Holiness Kirill.
So Pussy Riot’s only crime was that we did not rent a room at Christ the Savior Cathedral. The church’s website features a price list for room rentals. Any wealthy official or businessman could afford to hold a banquet at the church, because he is a man, has money, and is not opposed to Putin. These are the three secrets to success in Russia. Someone in a crowd once asked Saint Francis of Assisi if he ever thought about getting married. “Yes, a fairer bride than any of you have ever seen,” he answered.
Christ comes to church, throws out the merchants, and overturns moneylenders’ tables. Christ doesn’t sell jewelry in the church. Or operate a car wash. The church we have is fucked up, has sold o
ut, and is corrupted. If you have eyes, you’ll see it.
Heroes
the yes men
If there are superstars of the place where art and politics collide with irony and subversion, then the Yes Men are those stars. The Yes Men skewer their victims by making perfectly believable public pronouncements that only reveal their devastating satire when you sit down and think about it for a second.
I met the Yes Men at a gala event in Berlin. It was that kind of charitable dinner where they invite celebrities, etc., etc. Pussy Riot was expected to give a speech. We were sitting with our purses full of drugs next to the minister of interior affairs of Germany and overall felt a bit weird.
* * *
If Christ were resurrected now in Russia and went around preaching what he had preached before, he would be
registered as a “foreign agent”;
sent to jail for thirty days for violating the law on rallies;
sentenced to six months in jail for insulting the feelings of religious believers;
sentenced to a prison without parole under Article 282 of the Russian Criminal Code (“Incitement of hatred or enmity, as well as abasement of dignity of a person or a group of persons on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, language, origin, attitude to religion, as well as affiliation to any social group, if these acts have been committed in public or with the use of mass media”);
sentenced to four and half years in prison for involvement in rioting;
sentenced to fifteen years in prison for extremism;
whacked upside the head with a pipe.