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Abstract
This article shows that resistance and a critical discourse continue in the arts, especially in visual art, in Russia under the present political conditions when free speech has been seriously circumscribed. When in May 2012 Vladimir Putin was reinstalled as president with a new authoritarian conservative agenda, it was expected that the situation for culture would change. This article addresses the question of whether a critical discourse survived in the arts under the new conditions. It presents the new political context for the arts, and provides examples of various artistic strategies of resistance/protest in Russian contemporary art by applying Jacques Ranciere’s concept of dissensus. The focus is on visual art, although references are also made to the world of theater. The first section presents the new official role given to culture and the new state cultural policy as components of a reactionary backlash against the reform policies under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, and describes conflicts around art and art productions that followed from the new state policy. A second section gives examples of dissensus in art today by presenting artworks by Piotr Pavlenskii, Arsenii Zhilyaev, Stas Shuripa, and Anna Titova.
ORCiD
Lena Jonson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6151-3924
Notes
1. The categories come from Jonson (Citation2015).
2. Compare how this lack of meta-narratives was mirrored in Russian fiction of the time. See, for example, Ågren (Citation2014).
3. Boris Yeltsin had already set up a commission to work on the concept of a “national idea” for Russia. In Putin’s time, this task became much more urgent.
4. See Bracher’s overview on the European authoritarian-conservative tradition since the late nineteenth century in Citation1991. On Putin’s declaration on conservatism, see “Prezident vzial” (Citation2013).
5. Compare the German concept of “Sonderweg,” the fatal trajectory of Wilhelminian Germany to Nazi Germany.
6. One commentator said: “We hope the Valdai speech will be the first step in formulating a state ideology, without which national unity and a genuine Russian revival would be impossible.” Stepanov (Citation2013), on the patriotic news agency site Russkaia narodnaia liniia.
7. Article 13 of the Russian Constitution declares that “No ideology may be established as state or obligatory one.”
8. A meeting between Putin and the Council on Culture took place in November 2013, during which the 2014 Year of Russian Culture was announced and priority given to assisting cultural development in the regions, see http://news.kremlin.ru/transcripts/19353. See also www.mkrf.ru/proekty/list.php?SECTION_ID=47243. As a follow-up to the concept of a civilizational code, a document on the development of culture and tourism to 2020 was adopted on 27 December 2013.
9. The May draft was prepared by a group under the head of the presidential administration Sergei Ivanov and Vladimir Tolstoi, presidential adviser on cultural affairs and director. The April version was prepared by the Ministry of Culture.
10. Twenty-three members of the Russian Academy of Sciences immediately reacted first and foremost to the main proposition that “Russia is not Europe.” They argued that the document was based on the idea of a compulsory ideology, in direct violation of article 13 of the Russian Constitution which prohibits any state ideology (“Akademiki RAN raskritikovali” Citation2014).
11. Although the final version emphasized the key role of Russian Orthodoxy, it acknowledged the contributory roles of other religions and non-Russian ethnic groups on Russian territory.
12. See also the formulations at the Presidential Council on Culture and Art in December 2015, “Zasedanie Soveta pri Prezidente po kulture i isskusstvu” (Citation2015).
13. On this conflict, see Nicodemus (Citation2014).
14. See the criticism in “Minkult otorvalsia” (Citation2014). For the report, see “Gosudarstvennyi doklad” (Citation2014, 120–133).
15. See the formulation in the ministry’s report of 2013, “A promising direction of the development of contemporary art in Russia is traditional folk culture” (“Gosudarstvennyi doklad” Citation2014, 132).
16. See Marina Davydova’s analysis of the conservative criticism of innovative theater productions in Davydova (Citation2015). For the investigation by the Likhachev institute of whether theater productions deviated from the classical “norm,” see “Delo v otnoshenii” (Citation2015).
17. “Offending the feelings of believers” can be interpreted as the criminal act of instigating splits between groups of people on the basis of their religious, ethnic, or social belonging, according to article 282 of the Criminal Code which is part of the legislation against extremism. The organizers of the art exhibitions “Beware! Religion” in 2003 and “Forbidden Art” in 2007 were convicted under article 282 in 2005 and 2010, respectively. The verdict against Pussy Riot in 2012 was based on article 213 of the Criminal Code, on organized hooliganism.
18. Compare the criticism of Medinskii’s statements and unclear references in Kobrin (Citation2015).