Pussy Riot will set you free

Among all the media hype, surrounding the case of Pussy Riot, none of the numerous observers seems to have tried and dig into the band’s artistic pedigree. Interestingly, Pussy Riot’s protest actions perfectly fit in the practice of the last century’s Actual Art.

On November 17, 1918, Johannes Baader – writer, painter, active participant of the Dadaist movement, and a former architect and chaplain – sneaked into the gallery of the Berlin cathedral and disrupted the liturgy as he addressed the priest with his own sermon: “Stop! Who do you think Christ is? You don’t give a damn about Christ!” A tremendous scandal followed. The next day’s leading German papers carried articles on the incident, describing Baader as a “lunatic.” The performer of the action, labeled “You don’t give a damn about Christ,” was arrested. Baader’s companion and friend, the artist and poet Raoul Housmann, the founder of Dadaism, wrote a letter to Berlin’s minister of culture, advocating Baader’s right to free speech. The latter was released soon afterwards.

Dadaism revolutionized virtually all key genres of art, enriching them both with new techniques and new meanings, and producing a pleiad of brilliant poets, sculptors, and painters. The French Letterism movement, established in the late 1940s by the Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou, declared Dada as its primary predecessor. At 11:10 a.m. on April 9, 1950 four young Letterist artists, one of them disguised as a Dominican friar, entered Notre-Dame de Paris in the middle of the Easter High Mass. Inside ten thousand believers from all over the world gathered to attend the liturgy. The “bogus Dominican” (as he was labeled by the press), the 22-year-old Michel Mourre, took advantage of a pause in the liturgy, climbed to the rostrum and began to read a sermon written by one of his confederates:

“Today, Easter day of the Holy Year,

“Here, under the emblem of Notre-Dame of Paris,

“I accuse the universal Catholic Church of the lethal diversion of our living strength toward an empty heaven,

“I accuse the Catholic Church of swindling,

“I accuse the Catholic Churchof infecting the world with its funereal morality,

“Of being the running sore on the decomposed body of the West.

“Verily I say unto you: God is dead…”

The parishioners, forsaking all mercy and forgiveness, went for the conspirators; one of the young men had his face cut; the crowd chased the Letterists as far as the Seine. Mourre was in fact rescued by the police. He was released after an 11-days’ detention. Ironically, soon he became a zealous Catholic and a Church encyclopedist.

In 1957, the Letterists transformed into the Situationist International led by the philosopher and culture researcher Guy Debord. The Situationism ideology, which extremely efficiently combined radical art and leftist rhetoric, attracted and stirred lots of young minds. Debord denounced the total spectacle as the major evil of modernity: “The spectacle is the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence… The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” The spectacle is the cause of alienation: the alienation of the laborer from the products of labor, and the alienation of all people from their own emotions. The image becomes a consumer product, as alienated as everything else. Reality gives in to the show, which has long ceased to be entertaining, as it has merged with the society in which the mass media have replaced language, memory, and immediate communication: people “fumble for life.” The first meeting of the International, launched by Debord and the Danish painter Asger Jorn, gathered, besides Letterists proper, also intellectuals from America, North Africa, and Europe. They called for opposing the Spectacle’s tyranny by thinking with your head rather than your television. They labeled themselves Situationists, as they proceeded from the tactics of “situation constructing,” which implied the replacement of the Spectacle’s “public” and “actors” with “the people of life” for the sake of general involvement in the production of images: agitation, sabotage, spontaneous revolt, direct action, pejorative plays with advertising cliches in political propaganda, and defiance of copyright. To this end, in art they practiced a technique called detournement, which denies the existence of Situationist art, but admits the Situationist use of art.

In early May, 1968, a group of the Situationists’ followers, who called themselves Les Enrages (The Enraged Ones) provoked riots in Nanterre, a suburb of Paris. The riots immediately engulfed the capital, spreading to all of France. This youth revolution – the legendary French May of 1968, an event as political, as it was cultural, – forever changed the course of contemporary history.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the English Channel, a budding British fashion designer and gallery owner Malcolm McLaren was so astonished by what had been going on in France that he first masterminded a solidarity demonstration in London, and later sold T-shirts sporting Les Enrages’ motto: “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires.” In 1974, McLaren sponsored the printing of the first Enlish-speaking anthology of Situationist writings, Leaving the 20th Century. The next year he moved from words to actions, as he created a provocative punk rock band, which became famous as The Sex Pistols.

As a marginal music style, punk rock had existed for a solid 10 years by that moment. However, McLaren gave it a new lease on life, making it into something more than just a fact of rock music. The Sex Pistols effectively became his Situationist project, his own 1968 in the UK. McLaren applied Debord’s detournement in order to subject show business as such to his subversive goals: without it, The Pistols would have remained yet another punk band, albeit more successful than others. Among the scandals accompanying The Pistols’ short history, one has a special, even prominent, place.

In 1977, Great Britain celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Queen’s enthronement. Ten days prior to this event, 150,000 copies of the single with The Sex Pistols’ record of “God Save the Queen” had been sold. The lyrics ran as follows:

“God save the queen

The fascist regime…

God save the queen

She ain’t no human being

There is no future

In England’s dreaming

Don’t be told what you want

Don’t be told what you need

There’s no future, no future,

No future for you.”

On the Jubilee holiday itself, June 7, McLaren masterminded a concert on a river boat that cruised along the Thames near the House of Commons. When the boat was in full view of the House of Parliament, The Sex Pistols played “God Save the Queen.” Soon after that the police demanded of the boat crew to moor, and several people, including McLaren, were arrested. The attacks on band members started. Jamie Reid, the band’s art director, was the first victim. He was severely beaten by four unidentified assailants, who broke his leg and nose, and disappeared from the crime scene. Soon after that, leader of The Sex Pistols Johnny Rotten was attacked. The criminals cut his face, hand, and knee with a razor blade. Rotten has not been able to clench his left fist ever since. On that day Rotten was accompanied by band producer Chris Thomas and studio manager Bill Price, who were injured as well. On June 20, another Sex Pistols member, the 20-year-old drummer Paul Cook, was attacked outside an underground station. He was stabbed with a knife several times and received a strong blow with an iron mug in the back of his head. Cook managed to get home by himself and soon was taken to hospital, where surgeons had to put 15 stitches on his wounds. None of the attackers were identified.

Dadaism, letterism, and punk have been acknowledged as the non-disputable phenomena of the global civilization long ago. There is no doubt that punks and intellectuals from Pussy Riot carry on the radical art tradition that is almost a century old, as we can see.

It is hard to put up with this art. It is irritating, it will not agree to compromising, it mockingly laughs right in your face, and it is dangerous for its own authors and performers. And most importantly, it fully reveals the deep madness that underlies any official ideology, be it a statehood or religious one. Hard blows to the public taste, struck by young provocateurs, free this society from nightmares that have been suffocating it for centuries.