Final month, on the event of Komar and Melamid: A Lesson in Historical past—a retrospective curated by Julia Tulovsky on the Soviet-born artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid on the Zimmerli Artwork Museum at Rutgers College—Nadya Tolokonnikova, a founding member of Pussy Riot, delivered a chat to a sold-out auditorium. Her topic was totalitarianism and dissidence, and the function Pussy Riot has performed in not solely highlighting the crimes of Vladimir Putin—the devastating warfare in Ukraine; a longstanding historical past of censorship; human rights violations; and the persecution of political opponents—but in addition in instantly combating his regime. In Russia, as we all know, talking out towards the state isn’t any benign act: Tolokonnikova herself spent two years in jail for “hooliganism” after an anti-Putin efficiency at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012.
Tolokonnikova’s lecture was organised as a testomony not solely to the legacy of Komar and Melamid’s anti-state artwork, which at all times focused the Soviet Union, but in addition to recommend how dissidence lives on within the work of artists right now who’re within the direct crosshairs of Putin’s regime. But some critics have made the declare that any concentrate on Russian artwork or artists amid the warfare in Ukraine is a distraction from Putin’s crimes. They argue that such tasks are insensitive at finest, complicit at worst. Such arguments led to the last-minute postponement in January of an exhibition at New York’s Cooper Union on the early Soviet Vkhutemas college of design.
There may be nice energy to the declare that venues that usually current (or are even particularly devoted to) Russian artwork ought to retool their programming to focus on Ukrainian artists as a stand towards Putin’s invasion. That’s why, on the outbreak of the warfare in February 2022, the Zimmerli Artwork Museum prolonged our exhibition Portray in Extra: Kyiv’s Artwork Revival, 1985-1993, a survey of Ukrainian artwork made within the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Persevering with the present past its unique time limit was our humble act of defiance.
But there may be one other aspect to those points that critics appear to overlook. Embedded within the declare that no Russian artwork ought to be on view right now wherever is the suggestion that Russians all over the place are companions in Putin’s crimes. The implication is that there isn’t a division between the actions of the state and the politics of its folks—that every one Russians, just by advantage of ethnic id or the happenstance of birthplace, consider the warfare in Ukraine is simply. For them, the state is the folks.
We all know this isn’t true; the case of Tolokonnikova is a transparent instance. So is Komar, whose portray The Chook and the Bear (2014-22) depicts a brutish Russian bear attacking a tiny hen representing Ukraine. These are two cracks within the façade that these in energy like Putin will do something to stop. Sustaining a single, top-down get together line is exactly the intention behind the cultural and political assimilation that the Russian state calls for. From its perspective, there may be solely a single, unified Russian id, which absorbs not solely Ukraine (which is solely a fiction for Putin) but in addition any trace of inside dissidence. For Putin, his critics are insufficiently “Russian”.
Energy in multiplicity
For that very cause, inside dissent is crucial to the battle towards tyranny. With out it, we concede the purpose that id—and due to this fact political positions—are without end frozen and impermeable. But neither id nor politics are so easy. Komar and Melamid, it’s true, have been born within the USSR. However they’ve spent greater than half their lives within the US. What does this make them? Russian? Soviet? American? Komar’s father was Ukrainian. What does this imply in our calculus? With every shift in place comes new political prospects, and it’s precisely that instability that Putin and his supporters need to repair in place. They consider solely in singularity. However the power of the anti-Putin place is a multiplicity that features a broad coalition of actors from throughout the political and identitarian spectrum.
Which brings me again to a broad settlement I’ve with critics of my place. They’re proper to recommend that championing artists of varied different ethnic and political backgrounds offers us a chance to stake a declare towards cultural and political imperialism. But the stark binary they recommend—Russian or non-Russian—shouldn’t be solely too easy, it additionally performs instantly into the palms of our collective enemies. As an alternative of or, we should always insist on and. We solely win once we construct bridges between each other.
- Maura Reilly is director of the Zimmerli Artwork Museum at Rutgers College in New Jersey
