Interview with imprisoned Russian art group

Yusuf from Don't Panic UK says: "We've just published an interview with anarchistic Russian art renegades Voina on the website. Two members of the group, Oleg Vorotnikov and Lenja Nikolaev, answered their questions from St. Petersburg Prison, where they're awaiting trial on charges of hooliganism."

What do you think about a commentary on activism or radical art in Russia?

N.S.: Contemporary art is, first of all, an art activism for us, and not the piles of the art-rubbish kept in the galleries. Today activism is the only form of the radical left-wing art, which we are trying to revive in Russia. It's important to understand that there is no any other radical art in Russia, except for the one represented by a dozen of art-activists.

A.P-S: Anarch-art-activism is the only lively activity in Russia. Nowadays, when even hope for democracy in Russia is ruined, painting flowers and pussy cats or making any other "pure" art, lacking a socio-political content, is to support the right-wing authorities. The symbol of anarchy - a skull-and-bones - has to be painted right at the Russia's parliament building. That's what we did Our Jolly Roger laser projection was almost 50 meters high, covering almost the whole front of the White House in Moscow.

In a video on this page, the artists are shown closing traffic on a bridge to paint a giant penis on the asphalt, so that when the bridge was raised it faced the KGB offices. In the comments, we can discuss whether or not this was just as irresponsible as what the Orange County band the Imperial Stars did earlier this year when they shut down the 101 freeway in Los Angeles to play a set of songs.

[Link has a NSFW photo of a staged orgy at an art gallery] Russian art anarchists explain themselves: Banksy's new favourites Voina speak from prison

• Russian art group Voina "dicks" a St. Petersburg Bridge
• Art show fracas in Russia

• [fajar nugroho]

  woow, very brave at all ..!!! I give two thumbs up to them..!!!
  hhahahhaha

• [reckless love]

  Some contemporary art theorists suggest that true art can only exist on the margins; as soon as something becomes mainstream, it ceases to be art. I think it’s pretty clear that this group is on the margins, so by this test what they have created is art. That said, many of the same theorists (though not all) state that these margins must be made explicit to enact them as spaces of collaboration, experimentation, and of new creation. While this group has been successful in making explicit the margins from which they are creating art, I believe they are closing themselves off to collaboration by defining their practice within such narrow and rigid parameters. Furthermore, they are using a symbol (skull and cross bones) with externally-defined value to define their art, so I question what is being created here; it seems more the reproduction of a specific grammar that is not original. Gillian Rose outlines the idea that the notion of community “provides a structure for senses of identity which desire to be stable and harmonious, uniform within and hostile to what is positioned as without.” In this way, are they not replicating a system that they have simply chosen to place over the one they are protesting? In conclusion, this is not responsible as there is no invitation of dialogue, and an apparent arbitrary assignment of value to one position over another.

• [Yenisei]

  Imperial Stars analogy completely irrelevant. This is a drawbridge, one of the dozens in St.Pete. The traffic is stopped every single night around 2 am by a cop, a few minutes before the bridge opens to let the ships on the Neva pass through.

• [seachange]

  Since when was the skull-and-crossbones “the” symbol of anarchy? I have no problem with this group symbolizing their anarchism however they chose but I wish they would not speak for all anarchists.

• [mjsergey]

  From Alain Badiou’s 15 Theses On Contemporary Art:

  13. Today art can only be made from the starting point of that which, as far as Empire is concerned, doesn’t exist. Through its abstraction, art renders this inexistence visible. This is what governs the formal principle of every art: the effort to render visible to everyone that which for Empire (and so by extension for everyone, though from a different point of view), doesn’t exist.
  14. Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censures anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, to communicate and to enjoy. We should become the pitiless censors of ourselves.
  15. It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent.

  From Slavoj Žižek’s excellent essay “Neighbors and Other Monsters”

  Today, we seem effectively to be at the opposite point from the ideology of the 1960s: the mottos of spontaneity, creative self-expression, and so on, are taken over by the System; in other words, the old logic of the system reproducing itself through repressing and rigidly channeling the subject’s spontaneous impetuses is left behind. Nonalienated spontaneity, self-expression, self-realization, they all directly serve the system, which is why pitiless self-censorship is a sine qua non of emancipatory politics. Especially in the domain of poetic art, this means that one should totally reject any attitude of self-expression, of displaying one’s innermost emotional turmoil, desires, and dreams. True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism—insofar as the standard notion of “poetic spirit” is the ability to display one’s intimate turmoil, what Vladimir Mayakovski said about himself with regard to his turn from personal poetry to political propaganda in verses (“I had to step on the throat of my Muse”) is the constitutive gesture of a true poet. If there is a thing that provokes disgust in a true poet, it is the scene of a close friend opening up his heart, spilling out all the dirt of his inner life.

• [mfrankly]

  I am blown away and a bit envious of the balls these artists have, but I suppose that drastic times call for drastic measures—maybe the US hasn’t hit bottom yet?

  When the prominent curator Andrei Yerofeyev was accused of fomenting ethnic and religious hatred and “insulting human dignity” for organizing an exhibition and was brought to the court, the Voina art collective interrupted the case hearing by performing a new song All Cops are Bastards from the album Fuck the Police Those Motherfucking Bosses right into the courtroom. The idea was simple, the implementation – honest and uncompromising

  And there’s a video of it in the

  [joeposts]

  It’s certainly funnier than the Imperial Stars’ music. Penis = comedy gold, rap-rock = vomit in mouth.

• [Anonymous]

  To connect some dots, performers of the Belarus Free Theater were arrested and worse this week for protesting the Lukashenko “election” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/theater/22radar.html

• [Anonymous]

  What if ‘the authorities’ are simply a bigger group of art renegades whose art is so commonplace and accepted that it’s no longer revolutionary? Could it possibly come full circle, when the hip artistic democrats are besieged by groups of youths with nothing better to do than project a hammer and sickle on a popular democracist landmark?

  • [ultranaut]

    This is brilliantly insightful.

  • [enkiv2]

    ‘Kalifornia Uber Alles’ comes to mind here. That said, it’s true: that which seeks to fight the Empire is already part of the Empire; the Spectacle co-opts its opposition before it is even realized. You could make the argument that by having these guys around and allowing their stunts to become public, the Russian government is making the statement that Russia is a ‘free’ country by western standards (the opposition is co-opted before it’s realized).

    It’s worthwhile to note that Russia was never communist, nor was it ever a democracy, but it’s something resembling a republic now. Just so we don’t mince words; the hammer and sickle represents something that would be just as much of an improvement as the circle-A or the skull-and-crossbones, despite the long history of abuse of all of the above symbols both in Russia and elsewhere.

• [talzaken]

  What were the Imperial Stars protesting?

  • [Mark Frauenfelder]

    Their obscurity.

• [Anonymous]

  I can’t help but compare the effect on Russian government of lasers aimed at the White House in 2010 vs tank rounds in 1993.

• [maturin]

  I love it when people arguing on behalf of freedom and expression proceed to elaborate on how other people’s chosen form of expression isn’t valid.

  • [mdh]

    it’s not that, it’s that freedom comes hand in hand with responsibility. That’s what people are arguing, whether it was responsible.

• [Anonymous]

  that’s really danger russian… i have been got there last year.

• [Antinous / Moderator]

  Voina did their bridge cock thing at night, not rush hour. And they only stopped traffic for a couple of minutes. That’s a pretty big difference.

  • [Mark Frauenfelder]

    I’m glad there’s a difference, because I’m rooting for Voina and I can’t stand Imperial Stars.

• [Trent Hawkins]

  wow, so as it turns out drunken frat boys in america have been creating art all these years on their passed out friends’ faces for years.

• [roboton]

  I imagine projecting the Skull and Cross onto the US Capitol Building would be a risky and unpredictable move.

  These guys and girls have guts.