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  art in action

  The urban environment is highly underrated as a venue for exhibiting artworks. The subway, trolleybuses, store counters, Red Square. Who else has such colorful and spectacular stages?

  We debuted with a tour of public transport. We discovered that the best times for performing on public transport are during the morning and evening rush hours. We performed under the arches of the Soviet underground and atop trolleybuses. With all our equipment (guitars, microphone stands, amps) in tow, we clambered atop scaffolds that had been erected to change lightbulbs in the middle of subway stations.

  In the middle of a song, I would rip open a pillow, and feathers would rain down on the subway station, then be wafted upward again and again by the currents of air that accompany the trains in the underground tunnels. I would pull a large firecracker filled with multicolored confetti from my panties (Where else can you store it if you need to pull it out quickly during a performance without stopping the show to rummage through your backpack?) and set it off. A layer of colored foil and paper covered stunned passengers, who pressed the “record” button on their phones and pointed them at us.

  Nearly every performance ended with our being detained after we descended the scaffolding.

  We looked really strange at police stations, wearing torn bright pantyhose and white lace-up Doc Martens and lugging huge hiking backpacks with bundles of cables poking out of them. Bored cops would come out of their offices to gawk at us.

  Once, while we were rehearsing “Putin Has Pissed Himself,” the speakers started to burn and smoke. This apparently was a sign from above that he really had pissed himself.

  * * *

  PUTIN HAS PISSED HIMSELF

  A column of rebels heads to the Kremlin

  Windows explode in FSB offices

  Behind red walls the sons of bitches piss themselves

  Riot proclaims, All systems abort!

  Dissatisfaction with male hysteria culture

  Savage leaderism ravages people’s brains

  The Orthodox religion of the stiff penis

  The patients are asked to swallow conformity

  Hit the streets

  Live on Red Square

  Show the freedom of

  Civic rage

  * * *

  sexists are fucked

  In November and December 2011 we undertook an antiglamour concert tour: Sexists Are Fucked, Fucking Conformists Are Fucked. We performed at places where rich Putinists and conformists gather, e.g., on top of Jaguar automobiles, on tables in bars, in shops selling expensive clothing and furs, at fashion shows, cocktail receptions. We performed only one song, because you have time for only one song before you’re arrested. The song was called “Kropotkin Vodka,” and it featured calls to carry out a coup d’état in Russia. “Kropotkin Vodka sloshes in stomachs, / You’re fine, but the Kremlin bastards / Face an uprising of outhouses, the poisoning is deadly,” we sang.

  Whereas during the previous concert series we ripped up old feather pillows, this time around we decided to work with flour. Our plan was to riff on new bits of everyday life in our performances, things women encounter every day. We went to a fashion show armed with flour. It was not easy to get in. The show was invitation only, and members of the conservative pro-Putin artistic elite were among the audience.

  “We are from BBC Radio,” we muttered to the guard. We waltzed into the room, our faces tense. Skinny, long-legged young women, curtains wrapped round their beautiful bodies, were pounding up and down the catwalk.

  We climbed onstage and launched the performance.

  “Sexists are fucked, fucking Putinists are fucked!” we screamed.

  The models huddled in the corner. We grabbed a bag of flour and tossed its contents into the air. The white flour fanned out over the stage. Suddenly, something burst and there was machine-gun fire. A bunch of balloons noisily popped. We were enveloped in a pillar of fire. Our balaclavas smoldered and smoked. It was hot. We could not drop everything and run, because another chance to perform at a fashion show might not present itself.

  It was only later that we realized a fire had started because flour suspended in air is quite flammable. The catwalk at the fashion show had been ringed with candles, and when we threw the flour in the air, it caught fire. But we could have cared less why the flour caught fire, because we were already on our way to our next performance.

  “DEATH TO PRISON, FREEDOM TO PROTESTS!,” DECEMBER 14, 2011

  LOCATION: MOSCOW DETENTION CENTER No 1

  When the police arrested 1,300 of our fellow activists after mass anti-Putin protests, we were incredibly pissed. Our relatives, friends, comrades were locked up. Being angry is a good thing sometimes—it motivates you. We wrote a song in a day and hastily rehearsed it. The next day, we went to the detention center.

  We showed up on the rooftop of the prison to perform “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests!”—a concert for political prisoners.

  When we showed up at the venue, we saw that a riot police bus, a traffic police car, and a car containing plainclothes police officers had surrounded the detention center. Nevertheless, we decided to go through with the performance. The concert at the detention center marked the debut of Pussy Riot’s new soloist, Serafima, a militant feminist.

  “Cops or no cops, we’re going to perform,” she said right away.

  We took out our banner (“FREEDOM TO PROTESTS!”) and deployed it right on the barbed wire encircling the detention center. We climbed up to the roof of the facility. The heads of astonished staff poked out from the windows. There had never been a music concert there before, apparently. A policeman approached us from behind, from the yard, and demanded we get down. Several plainclothes officers came from the same direction and recorded the proceedings on camera.

  * * *

  The gay science of seizing squares

  Everyone’s will to power, without fucking leaders

  Direct action is humanity’s future

  LGBT, feminists, defend the fatherland!

  * * *

  As we chanted, “Death to prison, freedom to protests! Free the political prisoners,” the prisoners peeked out of the windows of their cells. They quickly picked up our slogans, and the detention center was shaken by their yells. The bars shook: the prisoners were trying to rattle them loose with their bare hands. When we got to the lines, “Force the cops to serve freedom. . . . Confiscate all the cops’ machine guns,” two policemen went back into the building, nervously shutting the door behind them.

  Toward the end of our performance, we chanted, “Turn Putin into soap!” and “The people united will never be defeated!” Then we calmly climbed down from the roof on our magical folding ladder and disappeared into the nearby streets. The officers with the video cameras had gone, apparently to buy doughnuts at the nearest store, and we quietly left.

  Heroes

  dr. martin luther king jr.

  Making your government shit its pants does not require force. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the civil rights movement starting with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955 that led to the Supreme Court ruling that racial segregation on public transport was unconstitutional, and he continued to fight peacefully for change until his assassination in 1968.

  Nina Simone sang after Dr. King was killed:

  Once upon this planet earth

  Lived a man of humble birth

  Preaching love and freedom for his fellow men

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  He was for equality

  For all people you and me

  Full of love and good will, hate was not his way

  He was not a violent man

  Tell me folks if you can

  Just why, why was he shot down the other day?

  Dr. King’s own leadership credo was detailed in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” written in 1963 when he was incarcerated for protesting in an Alabama city where segrega
tion was brutally enforced. King was responding to white clergy who criticized his actions. He was here, he wrote, because injustice was here. “I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

  The Reverend Dr. King was a man of God who actually followed what is written in the Bible. “Whoever oppresses the poor shows contempt for their Maker, but whoever is kind to the needy honors God,” says Proverbs 14:31. How many people go to church looking to make themselves feel better for doing well? To King, the worst enemy was not the KKK but white moderates who preferred order to justice. The southern church had failed to support his cause, he wrote, and sanctioned the way things were. Members of the early church had been prepared to sacrifice themselves, but he saw few around him who were prepared to support his cause.

  Campaigning for a guaranteed basic income in 1968, Dr. King named racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism as our main enemies, and argued that “reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

  In the jail letter, Dr. King described why he insisted on nonviolent direct action—it’s how you create the tension that forces the other side to negotiate. “It is a historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily,” he wrote. Making them do it nonviolently was a statement of strength, not of weakness. Dr. King was clearly tired of waiting, tired of lynchings, of hate-filled police killing black brothers and sisters, tired of 20 million African Americans living in poverty and sleeping in cars because motels wouldn’t take them.

  Dr. King was called an extremist. Was not Paul an extremist, said King in response, and Amos, and John Bunyan and Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson? Even Jesus Christ was “an extremist for love, truth and goodness.”

  From 1963, King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference participated in a whirlwind of action and success. That year, the March on Washington included Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965—could they have been passed without Dr. King? Then he attacked the Vietnam War and took on the cause of economic justice, until he was gunned down at the age of thirty-nine.

  Who knows what he might have achieved had he lived. A broad-based movement for racial, social, and economic justice led by Dr. King would have shifted mountains. Stop, wait a second. He did shift mountains. He keeps doing it after his death. Through his followers all over the earth.

  Rule № 5

  COMMIT AN ART CRIME

  * * *

  The magic of art is that it elevates your voice and amplifies it. Sometimes it happens literally, with a microphone and speakers. Art is a miracle-making machine. Art opens up alternative realities, and that’s extremely helpful when we have a crisis and multiple failures of the political imagination.

  * * *

  New meditations have proved to me that things should move ahead with the artists in the lead, followed by the scientists, and the industrialists should come after these two classes.

  HENRI DE SAINT-SIMON, LETTRES DE H. DE SAINT-SIMON À MESSIEURS LES JURES

  All innovative work is theatrical.

  ALEKSANDRA KOLLONTAI

  We have to create ourselves as a work of art.

  MICHEL FOUCAULT, ETHICS: SUBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH

  Words

  It usually stays behind the scenes when somebody is talking about Pussy Riot, but first of all we are art nerds. Moscow conceptualism and Russian actionism of the 1980s and 1990s were important influences for us.

  One of our favorite artists from the 1990s was the wildest one, Oleg Kulik, who is known for running around Moscow naked, barking and biting people like a dog. He said incredibly warm words at the time of our trial in 2012. It was very important for us to be supported by our family of Russian conceptual artists, where we basically came from.

  Kulik said righteous things about the importance of the mutual double penetration of art and politics. Kulik described how Pussy Riot resonated because they belonged to a great tradition of Russian political artists. As comparisons he mentioned Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), a photographer, graphic designer, artist, and stage designer associated with the Constructivist movement, the great painter Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), and the revolutionary architect Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953). Pussy Riot themselves referenced the artists of the 1990s when asked what they were doing, Kulik said, but art will always be art even if politics is always changing.

  Art may be an important reason Pussy Riot’s case attracted such miraculous support. Art goes beyond existing boundaries and talks about the inexplicable. You don’t need to know any Russians or details about Russian politics to understand what our punk prayer is about and to feel sympathy for some girls who live on the opposite part of the globe. Art unites. I can smell it: art, protest art in particular, can become an important driving and unifying force for the global activist movement, the human movement.

  the human as a political and artistic animal

  Is what Pussy Riot does art or politics? For us it’s one and the same—art and politics are inseparable. We try to make art political and at the same time enrich politics with developments from art.

  Try to solve any problem through art first, then with all other means at your disposal. Art is the best medicine, both for you personally and for society.

  Antigovernment punks may not have much craft. Even when our music technically sucks, we still have an insane purity of impulse. Any living being can smell it, and therefore, they will trust a punk gesture, be inspired and motivated by it. So if you’re thinking about creating a punk band or an art collective, never allow yourself to be stopped by the imperfection of your craft. Impulse, energy, drive are what’s priceless.

  * * *

  They ask Pussy Riot, “When and why did you decide to combine art and politics for the first time?” But when and why did they decide to separate art and politics? Art and activism?

  “It seems that art as art expresses a truth, an experience, a necessity which, although not in the domain of radical praxis, are nevertheless essential components of revolution.” The Aesthetic Dimension (1978) by Herbert Marcuse is a theoretical poem on the radical transformative nature of art. How can we break through the alienation of social existence, inauthenticity, and the treatment of a human being as a thing among things? How can we create a radical response to reification and oppressive social circumstances, which militate against the possibility of human self-realization?

  Art helps to create a radical subjectivity, the key element in any political transformation. Art is a realm that helps us fight forces which try to mechanize people, forces which see humans as things that need user instructions and should be placed on the shelf of a store in a shopping mall.

  I’ve never seen the point of separating art and political engagement. Perhaps because I’ve always been in love with the avant-garde. I’m a girl from the beginning of the twentieth century, a time when politics and art were organically connected.

  At that time, artists were looking for primordial, pre-Christian, pagan, organic, simple forms and means of expression, and new methods were intended not just to change dramatically the art field, they were meant to create an explosion in a social space. It was an epoch of major shifts in collective consciousness, and artists were willing to be in the avant-garde of these changes. It was not an exception, but a norm at that time: an artist who is a revolutionary rather than a decorator. “Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is, to change it.” As Marx said.

  “We were all revolutionists,” said Sergey Diaghilev, whose Russian Seasons, an explosive and exotic Russian ballet, was conquering the world in the first decades of the twentieth century. “It was only by a small chance that I escaped becoming a revolutionist with other things than color
or music.”

  If Russia is to collude with the world, it should be done by means of art, not with nuclear power, tanks, or financing Trump and Le Pen. And I believe that Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, not Putin, should be the symbol of Russia.

  * * *

  By making and experiencing art, we get our chance to revisit that feeling of raw freedom, bare courage, and naïveté that allows us to dare, along with the unrefined creativity and mischievous investigation that we used to have when we were kids. The tired, irritated, and lonely police officer gets his chance to go back to this magic playground through art. A woman who struggles, working two waitress jobs to pay her bills, gets her chance. A prisoner who’s about to serve twelve more years, who’s abandoned by relatives and friends, who’s being treated like she’s already dead—she finds her joy and hope in making art from toilet paper and bread.

  Art is that magic stick we’ve been looking for, which could help you transcend languages, borders, nations, genders, social positions, ideologies.

  Art elevates us by giving us the most valuable capital in the world: the right and the confidence to ask disturbing questions about the very core of our animal, political, social existence.

  Surprise is freedom, accident is freedom. Thus, art is freedom.

  Art allows a creature who’s involved in it to be unique, but the nature of art requires us to stay strongly connected with the world, catching ideas, symbols, emotions, tendencies, archetypes. We’re standing together, but we’re not part of a faceless crowd.

  I’ve seen that art is capable of giving hope and meaning to those who are desperate. I played in a Siberian prison rock band, and I know how precious those moments are, when art brings you back to life, art steals you from a world of apathy and obedience. “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how,” Nietzsche said.