Read & Riot Page 4
Nobody refers to Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov just by his first and last names. He always wanted people to use his middle name, Aleksandrovich, with his first name. He treated his whole life as a work of art: his project was Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov.
D. A. Prigov came to my little hometown to give a lecture when I was fourteen.
I went to the festival where he would be lecturing and saw his artworks that were exhibited. There was a video where he talked to a cat, trying to make the animal say “RUS-SIA.” If you’d like to hear my interpretation, this is a brilliant commentary on all-consuming Russian exceptionalism and imperialism. Russia’s “domestic kitchen nationalism” as we call it here—Russian exceptionalism—is huuuge.
Another video of D. A. Prigov’s was exhibited, “A Cop and the People Are Molding the Face of New Russia.” In it, a cop and a half-naked man were kneading dough. This was during the first presidential term of Vladimir Putin, when he was trying to figure out how he should handle all the power he’d suddenly received. Putin and his circle tried different faces for his new Russia—and the easiest one surely was to return to neo-Soviet/Cold War/police state imperialism.
In his lecture, D. A. Prigov started to read a poem by Pushkin. Because Pushkin was unhappy to be used by an oppressive state ideological apparatus on a regular basis, he was praised as a shining light, the actual sun, of Russian poetry in Soviet times and in Putin’s Russia. Understandably, when you hear something like that about the sun and stuff, especially if you’re a kid who had to learn tons of this sun’s poetry in school—you want to throw up immediately. So D. A. Prigov started to read Pushkin’s poem, but it was hard to recognize the sweet poet: he read this piece of poetry in the manner of a Buddhist mantra, in Chinese, Muslim, Orthodox Christian styles; he would sing and scream like an odd magic creature. It was a whole new Pushkin.
I met D. A. Prigov a few years later, when he was sixty-four and I was seventeen. It was a big deal. I wanted to be his apprentice, wash his floors—just be around him. I asked him for advice. He told me, “Don’t live within the lie.” Later, when I was reading literature on dissent in prison, I found out that these were not D. A. Prigov’s own words—they were the words of Václav Havel. But I did not know all of that when I was seventeen. I was just so happy to hear “Don’t live within the lie” from Prigov that I got drunk right away and ended up reading the book of Revelation out loud till I fell down, sleeping in the snow.
Six months later, we agreed to do an action together. My colleagues—performance artists—and I had a plan to carry D. A. Prigov, who would be sitting inside a cabinet reading his poetry, up to the twentieth floor of a building. We had to do it with our own hands, climbing the stairs. DIY in action. Our point was that an artist should not lie around on a sofa—the artist should work harder than anyone, not excluding hard manual labor. D. A. Prigov wrote a fantastic prophetic text about a new generation of artists carrying him back to heaven. And then he died. He died on the way to our performance. It was a heart attack.
Rule № 3
TAKE BACK THE JOY
* * *
Smile as an act of resistance. Smile and say fuck you at the same time. Laugh in the face of your wardens. Seduce your hangman into your beliefs. Make prison wardens your friends. Win the hearts of those who support the villain. Convince the police that they should be on your side. When the army refuses to shoot into the crowd of protestors, the revolution wins.
* * *
We shall live with Love and Laughter
We, who now are little worth
And we’ll not regret the price we have to pay
RALPH CHAPLIN, “COMMONWEALTH OF TOIL,” 1918
(FOR THE WOBBLIES, INDUSTRIAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD)
Nothing is worth more than laughter. It is strength to laugh and to abandon oneself, to be light. Tragedy is the most ridiculous thing.
FRIDA KAHLO
Words
we shall live in love and laughter
Here is a chapter dedicated to all sorts of pleasure that you can find, both earthly and otherworldly pleasure. Joy is my ultimate capital, but it resides in me and not in a bank. I find joy in my art, which is barbaric and primitive political cabaret. It might not look joyful, but I get joy out of it. I even found joy in prison, briefly and secretly.
* * *
Your tormentors are easy to spot when you are in prison. Less so when you live a comfortable enough life in the free world. But there are tormenters out there all the same. They are the ones who preside over a system that dumps trillions in debt on students and gives tax breaks to billionaires. They sell off public land and drill nature reserves. They make sure the 1 percent gets rich and the 99 percent stays poor, relatively. They start wars and turn cities into no-go areas. You know, the politics.
Call out someone in power and rejoice when they are taken down. Resist and smile with meaning.
There is a popular misconception: people keep thinking that political struggle is boring. That it’s something you have to do with a sad face and for five minutes a week, and then you walk away from it, as far as possible. It’s like brushing your teeth in the early morning—you have to do it, but it’s not a super pleasurable thing.
They think you do a political action like you go to your boring office, and then you rest, then your real life starts. In fact, the truth is completely opposite. You just need to find a way to recognize it, this ultimate joy of uniting efforts. I actually start to worry about myself sometimes, because I may be addicted to this feeling of being involved. I’m an activist junkie.
dada
Dada is how absurd political melancholy manifests itself in a joyful manner. “The absurd has no terrors for me,” said Tristan Tzara, philosopher of Dada, in his 1922 “Lecture on Dada,” “for from a more exalted point of view everything in life seems absurd to me.”
Dadaists lived in an awkward period: the time between two world wars. Since the Industrial Revolution, the West had been seriously obsessed with the idea of progress. Progress had replaced God. But during and after World War I, it all started to look pretty confusing. People were working sixteen hours a day, kids were toiling in poisonous factories and losing their eyes and hands, often to produce more weapons for people to kill each other. This surely was not pleasing, and it left a number of people feeling fooled.
The artists who would go on to form the Dada movement were really upset about philistinism and the idolization of mechanics and progress. It was a turbulent, dangerous, nonlinear time, the time after World War I and before the rise of Hitler in Germany. They were on to something.
Real art is that obscure dream you’re too confused to talk about even to your psychoanalyst. In its collages, ready-mades, and performance pieces, Dada made a salad of public consciousness.
It’s all more than just politics. It’s always more than merely politics. Especially when it comes to art. Dada was also about new nonlinear physics. It was a reaction to the total failure of the Newtonian model of the world.
Newton came up with a couple of idealizations to describe the world, but it looked like they couldn’t solve a growing number of questions about the nature of reality. In particular, he wondered if light is a particle or a wave. People were confused. It turned out that light can be both a particle and a wave. What? The new revelation that the atom is not really the ultimate building block of the universe, not the simplest thing in the world, stepped onto the stage. Later all of this business in physics gave birth to quantum mechanics and string theory and so on.
Dadaists rejected the reality and logic of the uber-modernist society. Life was falling apart right in front of their eyes. They ran into the arms of nonsense, absurdism, making playful collages, sound art, sculptures, and the like.
It was said that Lenin visited the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. (Cabaret Voltaire was the artists’ nightclub where Dada began.) Lenin was making his revolutionary plans for Russia in a nearby apartment and allegedly would stop by the club to play c
hess.
What’s exciting about Dada? Artistic courage, freedom, introducing new techniques of not just making art but possibly thinking about the world itself. There was a lot of hype about postmodernist technique in literature, hypertext, and Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” idea some years ago, but I feel that dadaists had proclaimed this method for a long time, as early conceptual artists.
Dadaists used scissors and glue rather than brushes and paints to express their views of modern life through images presented by the media. Dada collage technique is beautiful to me, subversive, playful, flirty, coquettish. It’s based on collecting ready-made objects, and it can claim that it simply reflects reality. Though as usually happens with any process of making a collection or classification, metadata (a set of data that describes and gives information about other data) gives you much more information about intentions and moods than the data itself does.
Artistic classifications of reality are my all-time favorite, because through their absurdity and insanity they reveal the simple fact that any process of putting things in order is biased from the very beginning. Collage as an artistic attempt at a random classifying of information helps us not normalize and take for granted other types of classifications—stupid ones like “male behavior” and “female behavior,” “free world” and “non-free world,” “educated” and “uneducated.”
Cut-ups are like collages but with words rather than pictures. Pussy Riot uses this technique extensively. When we decided to start a band, we hated the idea of writing poetry (we were suspicious about poetry because we came from a conceptual art background), but we still had to create lyrics for our songs. We ended up composing our lyrics from quotes of our favorite philosophers and media headlines.
Tristan Tzara describes this cut-up technique in the Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love (1920):
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
When life was broken apart, these cutups were one response to that displacement and hopelessness. Hugo Ball wrote in a manifesto in 1916: “How can one get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanized, enervated? By saying Dada.”
Deeds
What’s up with Pussy Riot? Why are we constantly changing our methods and mediums? Illegal concerts, articles and books, speeches, drawings, posters, music videos . . . what else? It’s nothing but a diversification of art protest in action. The artist doesn’t constantly hit the same spot but is listening all the time. I’m ready to explore new mediums and will inevitably fail in that, be an amateur, be a fake artist, fake musician, fake actor.
“We share the same label of anti-state artists,” artist and activist Ai Weiwei told me.
“And another one: ‘fake artists,’” I added.
“Yes!” He got excited. “Anti-state and fake ones.”
Pussy Riot are conceptual artists, that’s why we may feel more free about music than most musicians. There is a popular idea among musicians that it is important to stick with some particular genre of music. I don’t feel like I have to. When I meet new people with whom I am about to record a song, they ask me, “What do you want to do?” I tell them that I want to do something I’ve never done before. Today we could do a Chordettes-influenced song, tomorrow we could do hard rock, and then the next day we could do a classical piano ballad. Every song should be so different that people won’t believe it’s the same artist. That’s the kind of freedom conceptual art gives you, when you don’t really care about craft. “Can I do it or not?” This question just doesn’t exist for you. If you want to do it, you can do it, and there is joy in this absolute freedom.
if the kids are united
But there’s no bigger joy than seeing how your voices and powers are amplifying and growing into something bigger. There’s this weird, fantastic, nonlinear mathematics of people’s movements: 1 voice + 1 voice + 1 voice may equal 3 voices, but 1 voice + 1 voice + 1 voice may also equal a whole new social and cultural paradigm. It happened in the 1960s; it happened with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I find myself in activist depression from time to time. What helps get me out of my hurricane of self-doubt is good solid action. You’re turning from a frog into a beautiful prince, from a jellyfish into a fighter. When you’re climbing onto a roof loaded down with musical equipment to perform the song “Putin Has Pissed Himself,” you don’t have time to fuck with your brain anymore. You think about the audience, your guitar, and trying to understand how many minutes you have until the cops will come. This feeling is joyful and priceless. It’s a pure divine orgasm and a moment of supernatural clarity, maybe even clairvoyance.
What I’ve learned from people who were going through genuinely difficult situations in their lives—prison, disease, poverty—is that they often learn better and faster about the currency of joy than those who lead “prosperous” lives. Life has an end point, so why don’t I take back from sorrow and sadness those minutes and hours that I have? For me, I remember that this works perfectly in prison.
Friends ask me now, “Hey you, you are a helpless, crying baby, you can’t make a phone call without bitching about your phone phobia. How did you survive prison?” It’s pretty easy. You simply don’t have the option to be helpless in prison. The danger is real: you fight for your life. You fight for your life with a smile. You grab your happiness back or you die. You may die physically or you may be buried in your own apathy. You formulate it to be crystal clear: my government wants me to lose all these years, okay, so what can I do? Human life is pretty short, and I understood early—at fourteen or so—that I have no desire to merely survive, I want to live. In Erich Fromm’s words, I want to be rather than have.
So I stayed committed to living a full life in prison. It was my full-time job, though not an easy one. I gained even more from my prison years than I would have gained from those years had I been free. Learn more, feel more, act more. Make the bigger difference. It’s your decision—if you want to intensify your life, flood it with passions and beautiful details, or not.
It wouldn’t be a lie if I said that I probably got the most important revelations about my consciousness, modern culture, human relationships, and power hierarchies while I was sitting in the cell during my pretrial detention. I learned more about my body too, doing lots and lots of push-ups and stretching. I didn’t know what would happen to me tomorrow. I was facing seven years in a prison camp. I lived every day as if it was the last one. I felt every minute of my life. Every meal, every bowl of porridge, every piece of bread. I was conscious of processes that were going on in my mind and in my body, I was working on balancing myself. I vowed to stay a happy warrior.
I learned what it means to care and be attentive. I was able to see green leaves for about thirty minutes the whole summer. I was able to catch sunlight through the prison bars for ten minutes several times a week. I did it religiously every time I had a chance to see the sun. I caught rare raindrops and cried happy tears because of the shining beauty of the rain.
The white-blue penitentiary light is always on in the cell. At night they have the light turned on: guards have to see the prisoners, and prisoners should always remember that they are being watched. Once a week a female guard who was friendly had her shift, and she’d secretly turn off the light in our cell. It was a glimpse of surprise solidarity, one you’re truly gr
ateful for. We looked out our window and saw the whole prison filled with light—we were the only ones who had the luxury of darkness. I’ve never been happier in my life than at those moments. It was a privilege higher than the highest of earthly privileges. And I was just sitting in a cell with no lights on, greeting the sunset without the stark white prison lamps, embracing the pale light of the Moscow evening summer sky. We’d sit still, afraid to even say a word. We did not want to interfere in this breathtaking magic—we would drink the evening, its subtle semitones.
Any given system of power is built on an assumption (which of course is trying to portray itself as an axiom) that to receive joy you need to pay or obey. The ultimate act of subversion is thus finding joy in a refusal to pay and obey, in an act of living by radically different values. It’s not an act of deprivation or austerity, it’s not a vow, it’s an act that reveals joy that transcends given boundaries. And that’s the way to go, the way to attract people to what we’re doing. Who can possibly be excited about the politics of austerity anyway?
Bring joy back into the act of resistance. For some weird reason political action and fun have been basically separated for decades. It comes from the professionalization of politics. I believe we’ve lost the connection between our existence, something that personally touches us, and politics. Look back at what was going on in the 1960s: we used to know how to combine the very core of our human existence and politics. Perhaps that’s why radical politics changed so many things in the political structure back then: those amazing, brave, and beautiful beings knew how to live passionately, how to treat political action as the most exciting and pleasurable love affair in their lives.