Art and Politics

Pussy Riot vs. The Pseudo Religious of Eastern Europe

The performance of Pussy Riot and its repression represent the deep political challenge of post communist authoritarianism and its progressive – transgressive alternatives. This is the first of two posts by Kitlinski that have great significance for Eastern Europe and beyond. -Jeff

Don’t let Putin fool you. Banishing Pussy Riot to a penal colony allowed the Russian leader to reassert his rule. Democracy be damned. Civil rights, religious freedom, and gender equality from herein would be subject to his purview. The ex-KGB officer’s message wasn’t just aimed at Russia. It was directed at all of Eastern Europe, too.

For anyone familiar with the history of regional politics, Putin’s positioning was thick with signifiers. Pussy Riot’s sentencing would please fellow reactionaries, obviously, as well as help serve as a salve for social distress. It also confirmed that the post-Communist period was formally over. Authoritarian capitalism is the rule of the day. There’s no alternative.

The political transition in post-Communist countries has turned majoritarian, as ex-Soviet bloc states start to formalize discrimination against pro-democracy forces.  Curiously, this reaction, of what can only be described as the ancien regime, both Stalinist, and its antecedents, focuses on sexual dissidence, to broadcast its worldview.  In the Ukraine, it’s Femen. In my own home, Poland, it’s Dorota Nieznalska, an artist who was convicted of blasphemy.

It’s a familiar story, one that Pussy Riot’s Nadia Tolokonnikova was quick to point out, when, in her closing statement, she compared her band’s fate to the trial of Socrates, and the kenosis of Christ. Jesus was “raving mad,” she reminded her religiously observant tormentors. “If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, the people and judges understood what ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ meant, they would not put the innocent on trial.” Tolokonnikov also cited the prophet Hosea, in the Hebrew Bible: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.” Surely, the authorities were not thrilled.

Pussy Riot’s choice of Jewish scripture is of course telling, as well as calculated. The prophets argue for forgiveness (Hosea forgave his unfaithful wife) and for social justice. Tolstoy, ultrademocratic, anarchist and religious, was also in conflict with the same Orthodox Church (and excommunicated by it) that now condemns Pussy Riot. Dostoevsky similarly emphasized the importance of forgiveness in Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov receives it from a prostitute. Pussy Riot are obviously traditionalists.

The forces that have condemned Pussy Riot are not religious. They are secular, despite their Orthodox pretense. Pussy Riot, ironically, respond as Christians. They protest the emptiness of consumer culture, and the lack of forgiveness on the part of their persecutors. Thus, they appropriate the figure of the Virgin Mother, to criticize authoritarianism. “Mary is with us in protest! Mary, become a feminist!” the band screamed during its infamous cathedral performance.

As a Pole, I find the entire affair reminiscent of an attack on the previously mentioned Dorota Nieznalska, at a Gdansk gallery, where her seminal Passion installation was being exhibited in 2002. The work, an exploration of masculinity and suffering, shows a cross on which the photograph of a fragment of a naked male body, including the genitalia, has been placed.

Staged by members of the reactionary League of Polish Families, the political party sued the artist over the exhibit.  In July 2003, a court found Nieznalska guilty “offending religious feelings” and sentenced to half a year of “restricted freedom” (she was banned from leaving the country.) When the judge read her sentence, members of the League packed the courtroom and applauded ecstatically. It took six years, but Nieznalska’s conviction was eventually overturned in July 2009, on the grounds that her freedom of speech had been violated.

Nonetheless, Nieznalska  suffered inestimable damage as  consequence of her successful prosecution. For years, Polish galleries refused to show her work. It took curator Pawel Leszkowicz to rehabilitate her reputation, by featuring her sadomasochist works in the exhibitions Love and Democracy and the GK Collection, claiming she was working in the S&M tradition of renown Polish writer Bruno Schulz.

I could go on. My point is that misogyny is the biggest threat to Eastern Europe’s incomplete democracies, and that it’s been a problem across the region for a good while now, not just in Russia. Abortion, for example, is banned, and a number of cultural and economic constraints on women and queers alike exist. Female artists who deal with sexuality have been especially hard hit by censorship. Pussy Riot is just the best-known example.

If Pussy Riot is what it takes to wake the West up to this situation, and help us complete our transition to democracy, so be it. Until then, as it has been said, we are all Pussy Riot. I’m sure the ‘band’, as it were, would agree with me.

The post was originally published in ‘Souciant’ (August 23rd, 2012) under the title “Pussy Riot in Polish.” Tomasz Kitlinski acknowledges the help of Joel Schalit, editorial director of Souciant, for his assistance in preparing the English text version.

3 comments to Pussy Riot vs. The Pseudo Religious of Eastern Europe

  • Daniyal Khan

    Would you say that from a different perspective, maybe the Pussy Riot case is one particular instance in a more general trend of a failure to pay closer attention to and understand dissenting, non-mainstream bands/musicians? I could cite two other recent cases. Case 1: American heavy metal band Lamb of God’s vocalist Randy Blythe was recently arrested in Czech Republic on accusations of manslaughter. Had this been a pop musician, the media coverage would have hit the roof. Moreover, the maturity of Blythe’s statement after his release goes a long way in challenging the stereotypes attached with dissenting punk, rock and metal musicians. It makes it all the more attention-worthy. Case 2: CNN wrongly including metal band Hatebreed in a list of “white power” bands, and then correcting the piece after protests by the band.

    References:
    Randy Blythe’s statement after release: http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/news/randy-blythe-releases-full-statement-on-arrest-and-release/
    CNN and Hatebreed: http://www.metalhammer.co.uk/news/cnn-label-hatebreed-a-white-power-band-hatebreed-quite-rightly-kick-off/

  • Tomasz Kitlinski

    Unfamiliar with Hatebreed (albeit I have read that CNN corrected its mistake of including them among white power bands), I’d rather compare the Pussy Riot trial with the repression against The Plastic People of the Universe in Communist Czechoslovakia — which is what some commentators in the Czech Republic and the U.S. have already done. I cannot be more grieved that Vaclav Havel is no longer with us; he’d surely have supported Pussy Riot. Their music — and great performance art! — is “the power of the powerless in dark times,” if I may intertextually use the Havelian-Arendtian subtitle from Jeffrey Goldfarb’s book: The Politics of Small Things. Poland’s legendary rebel Lech Walesa has just appealed to Putin to pardon the Moscow band; Walesa was talked into speaking out for Pussy Riot by a woman journalist, Monika Olejnik, which confirms the feminist connection in the work of and support for the Russian female artists on which I’ve elaborated in my first article in Deliberately Considered. Countless women in Russia have defended the band — among them, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, foremost dissident in charge of the human rights Moscow Helsinki Group, and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, winner of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for the Freedom of Women, established by Julia Kristeva. To use the theory of Elzbieta Matynia, Pussy Riot are part of “performative democracy”; accordingly, in my second piece on Pussy Riot in Deliberately Considered, I’ll discuss their Bakhtinian performativity: Nadia, Katya and Maria are punkers who perform human rights. Tomasz Kitlinski

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