The Russian state has tightened its grip on
contemporary arts and culture in recent years – most notably via the June 2013
law that criminalises acts which ‘offend’ Orthodox believers. The hooliganism
charges and subsequent court case brought against Pussy Riot in August 2013
exposed the extent of state intervention even further.
Last month, a state-run theatre in Novosibirsk
ran into trouble when Orthodox activists instigated a court case against the
theatre's director (who later lost his job).
What was the crime? Displaying a crucifix between a woman's legs on a
poster during the play. In this increasingly conservative cultural climate,
there is, however, one major arts institution that seems to resist – Moscow's
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
Times of war
The brochure for Garage’s recent exhibition Grammar of Freedom/Five Lessons reads
like a manual for insurrection. The exhibition highlights Eastern European
artists' 'common struggle for artistic and individual liberties', stressing
'art's potential in making individual voices heard and in confronting or
overcoming ideology, conflicts, and not least, wars'.
The brochure for Garage’s recent exhibition Grammar of Freedom/Five Lessons reads like a manual for insurrection.
Snejana Krasteva, the curator of the
exhibition, states that the concept emerged in the search for a common thread
to unite East European postwar avant-garde art. Artists from Yugoslavia, the
Soviet Union and today’s Central and Eastern
Europe all face(d) similar problems in their life and work, which variously
motivated them to engage with their environments artistically, impeded their
artistic production, or induced them to develop strategies to deal with these
problems. No matter how the curating process of the Grammar of Freedom
exhibition started – with the concept behind the exhibition or with the
artworks, which were supposed to be shown – given the increasingly conservative
political situation in Russia, the exhibition arguably comes at a very
sensitive point in time.
Indeed, it was only in March that Nikolai
Starikov, a patriotic 'AntiMaidan' activist, accused the National Centre for
Contemporary Arts Nizhny Novgorod (NCCANN) branch of organising an exhibition
in Krasnodar that allegedly promoted a 'Russian Maidan'. Moreover, Starikov
claimed that the NCCANN not only receives state funding for its 'Western-style'
exhibitions, but also impedes the 'patriotic education of citizens' – it
occupies part of the old kremlin [fortress] of the city. Whether Starikov's
subsequent call to relocate NCCANN, whose staff worked hard to renovate the recently
opened kremlin, will be answered, remains to be seen.
Marchers in a February 'AntiMaidan' march, led by activist Nikolai Starikov. (c) RIA Novosti/Aleksei Filippov
Ilya Budraitskis, a socialist activist and
curator, who gave a presentation on 'The Power
of the Powerless: Artistic Strategies in Times of War' at the conference that
was organised as part of the educational programme of the Garage exhibition,
states that specific initiatives against ‘liberal’ cultural productions are
often launched by ultra-Orthodox or self-proclaimed ‘patriotic’ individuals,
while the framework for action is provided by the government’s legislation and
discourse. As Rachel Donadio, arts correspondent for the New York Times,
reports, cultural figures say the government is sending a clear message: 'Fall in
line with the emphasis on family and religious values, or lose funding, or worse.'
And as Regina Smyth and Irina Soboleva argue, the
Kremlin increasingly uses symbolic politics, stressing 'a series of
masculine, historical, and religious touchstones that defined a core
constituency of true Russians pitted against a radical, Westernised, and very
limited opposition' in order to secure its power.
Freedom is for beginners
As stated on its website, Garage presents
itself as a 'place for people, art, and ideas to create history'. And the
museum’s extensive educational programme puts this participatory approach into
practice.
At the exhibition opening, curators, artists,
and experts reflected on the notion of ‘freedom’: it cannot exist in a vacuum,
only be experienced when one is aware of its boundaries; fighting for freedom
implies taking risks; and lastly, 'as a word, freedom is for beginners, as a
practice, it’s more advanced'.
But what is the grammar of freedom? The
exhibition is organised around five lessons: (1) the body as a tool for
liberation, (2) the transformation of systems (understood as revealing any
system’s inherent structures in order to change inequities in the distribution
of art and ideas), (3) the power of collaboration, (4) the practice of
self-organisation and resistance and (5) uniting through adversity against a
common enemy.
While some of these might not be lessons in the
narrow sense of the word, they all illustrate strategies of artists in the
struggle for professional and individual liberties. For example, in Blood Ties (1995), the artist Katarzyna
Kozyra uses her body as a tool to express (particularly female) vulnerability
in wartime Bosnia and Kosovo. In her photographs, the artist poses naked in
front of a red crescent and a red cross, symbols of the humanitarian organisations
that provided aid, but even more so of the religious groups that had come to
fight each other in the so-called ‘fratricidal wars’ on the Balkans.
'Blood Ties' (1995) by Katarzyna Kostyra at Garage. Image courtesy of the author.
In
Triangle, a provocative 1979 performance, Sanja Iveković exposes the
lunatic accuracy with which totalitarian regimes try to control even the most
private aspects of their citizens’ lives. On the day of a presidential visit to
the city, Iveković sits on her balcony and pretends to masturbate, expecting
the security guard on the roof of the building across from her balcony, who is
the only person who can see her, to notify the policeman on the street in front
of the house through his walkie-talkie. Things turn out as anticipated: soon
the policeman rings her doorbell and orders that 'persons and objects should be
removed from the balcony'.
In another powerful work in the exhibition, the
video I am Milica Tomić (1998), Milica Tomić
reflects on the relationship between personal and 'state-ordered'
collective identity, and the exclusionary impact the latter has on anyone who
does not want to or cannot relate to the propagated identity.
As a last example, in the video Barter (2007) by the Ukrainian SOSka
group, Mykola Ridniy takes off to the
Ukrainian countryside to trade copies of famous contemporary paintings for
produce or livestock.
'Barter' (2007) by the Ukrainian SOSka group. Image courtesy of the author.
Not all of the villagers are convinced by the
paintings. Giggling next to a work by Neo Rauch, one lady wonders out loud
which 'fool painted that thing' and 'which idiot would buy the original.'
All in all, the works clearly
show that humour and irony can be powerful tools in the struggle against unjust
regimes – be they political, economic, or ideational. During the last years, this has become an
established finding. In an article for Foreign Policy, Srdja Popovic and Mladen
Joksic argue that 'laughtivism', a humorous form of activism, helps to break
fear, builds confidence, and simply makes a protest movement seem 'cool'.
Most importantly, however,
laughtivism 'confront[s] autocrats with a dilemma: the government can either
crack down on those who ridicule it (making itself look even more ridiculous in
the process) or ignore the acts of satire aimed against it (and risk opening
the flood gates of dissent).' Only a few days ago, a Moscow court ruled that it is illegal to add celebrities’ images to
internet memes that 'have nothing to do with the celebrity’s
personality.' Could this be the end to shirtless Putins on birds and bears?
‘Special status’
Curator Snejana Krasteva says there were no
major negative reactions to the exhibition. But while other cultural
institutions struggle for their right to expression, how come no one seems to
mind Grammar of Freedom being shown
in the centre of Moscow?
Though the political relevance and radicalism
of some of the works is striking, most of the works shown at Grammar of Freedom comment more on dominating regimes and how they govern the visibility
art has than politics per se. The exhibition hardly makes any direct
references to current Russian politics and society – conclusions are to be
drawn by the visitors themselves, and these certainly vary a great deal.
Furthermore, while Grammar of Freedom
might appeal to the liberal and the well-educated, it might founder when it
comes to the majority of society, even though Garage makes a big effort to
reach out to all kinds of visitors.
Garage’s 'special status' may well have
something to do with its ownership structure. A private institution, Garage is
protected from direct state interference. Garage was founded by Dasha Zhukova
together with her husband Roman Abramovich. In a 2012 London court case, the judge ruled that 'Mr
Abramovich enjoyed very good relations with President Putin and others in power
at the Kremlin' and that he 'had privileged access to President Putin, in the
sense that he could arrange meetings and discuss matters with him.' For this
reason, in March 2014, opposition
politician Alexei Navalny called for Abramovich’s inclusion on the EU’s list of
sanctioned individuals.
Famously, Vladimir Lenin once proclaimed that the best way to control the opposition
is for the government to lead it itself. For all we know, Garage, one of the
last major places for seemingly truly free debate, might be part of a clever
governmental strategy to ‘allow’ an opposition arts and culture movement.
Aleksei Kosolapov's 'Lenin and Coca-cola'. Image courtesy of the author.
According to Holger Albrecht, who scrutinised
the Egyptian opposition before the Tahrir revolution of 2011, a 'controlled
opposition' can provide several functions to the state, for instance observing,
channeling, and moderating societal dissent; yielding certain democratic
legitimacy to the state and thereby appeasing critical individuals; and lastly,
playing out several factions of society against each other, in order to keep
them busy with each other, and creating an equilibrium in which the government
can act as a mediator.
As Budraitskis claims, the latter is exactly
what is happening in Russia: 'the regime's policy is not to build a total
cultural patriotic hegemony. Its policy is to strengthen the feelings of the
conservative majority, to feed these feelings, and to stress the line between “normal people” and
deviants.' Indeed, one could argue that the
existence of a liberal minority helps the regime to balance the two poles of
the Russian opposition.
Whether Garage is part of a government strategy
or not, Snejana Krasteva reminds us that 'any system reacts to its own
critique. Does that mean that there shouldn’t be an opposition?'
'The regime’s policy is to stress the line between “normal people” and deviants.'
'Without art, societies would be boring and uncritical'
In the context of Grammar of Freedom, the question remains how art and artists can
contribute to more just and liberal regimes. According to Krasteva, artists
have 'no obligation whatsoever to change society', but 'without art, societies
would be boring and uncritical.'
What artists can do is render objectionable political and societal developments
visible. They can imagine alternatives that may or may not be taken up by the
rest of society.
At the same time, Budraitskis argues that 'if
there are no ideas in society, there is no inspiration for artists.' Writing in
July 2014, Budraitskis asserted 'if the new
war (or prewar) footing into which Russian society is sinking deeper has a
point of consensus that unites different social and cultural strata, it is the
smothering, eerie awareness of society’s total powerlessness in the face of
interstate conflict.’
One hopes that irony and dark humour, two
aspects which unite so many works at Garage’s Grammar of Freedom, will continue to flourish, and not wither away
under difficult present conditions.