Punk has always been about the real – real voices, real prob­lems, real lives, real people behind the stor­ies. Some­thing dif­fer­ent from what vari­ous ‘dream factor­ies’ are about. The real is not always com­fort­able. It is raw, incom­pre­hens­ible, and it is scary in its wild power. It is a chal­lenge and the chal­lenge is where the real breaks through the safe nar­rat­ive of con­ven­tional cul­ture. Punk is in con­stant danger of being absorbed into a mar­ket­able com­mod­ity. And it reg­u­larly is. Does this mean that punk is dead? Not really, it just looks for new ways to break through, not neces­sar­ily in music that much, and not neces­sar­ily in its his­tor­ical motherland.

On 29 May 2009, prob­ably the shortest and most rad­ical punk-​gig ever was held in Moscow. Its rad­ic­al­ism was expressed by the fact that it was not staged in a club, flat, squat or even on the street. It was held in the hall of the Taganskiy Dis­trict Court. The con­cert happened on the day when the court was hear­ing the case of a Rus­sian artist and cul­tural pro­moter Andrei Erofeev accused of insult­ing the reli­gious feel­ings of Rus­sian cit­izens through his ‘For­bid­den Art’ exhib­i­tion (Sakharov Centre, March 2007). The band man­aged to play about 30 seconds of a song before they were ejec­ted from the build­ing by the police. The group con­sisted of the mem­bers of the rad­ical Rus­sian art-​group ‘Voina’ [in Rus­sian mean­ing War].

This was one of the first times act­iv­ists of Voina had a run-​in with the police, but cer­tainly not the last. On 15 Novem­ber 2010 Oleg ‘Vor’ Vorot­nikov and Leonid Nikolaev aka Lenya Yob­nutyi [Yob­nutyi mean­ing ‘fucked’ in Rus­sian] were detained for three months for alleged ‘pre­med­it­ated hoo­ligan­ism com­mit­ted by a group of people’ which, accord­ing to the Rus­sian crim­inal code could lead to a sen­tence of up to eight years impris­on­ment. The arrest fol­lowed the action called ‘Palace Coup’ which in Rus­sian – Dvortsovyi Perevorot – lit­er­ally means ‘Palace Over­turn’. On 20 Septem­ber 2010 a group of about 20 people over­turned sev­eral police cars in Saint Peters­burg patrolling the area around Mikhail­ovskiy Castle. Accord­ing to Alexei Plutser-​Sarno, who claims to be the ideo­lo­gical leader of the group, this aimed at demon­strat­ing how a ‘real’ reform of Rus­sian police should take place.

It was not a big sur­prise that such a rad­ical action res­ul­ted in their arrest and pos­sible pro­sec­u­tion. What was sur­pris­ing for many of those who fol­lowed the actions of Voina is that it did not hap­pen earlier. The group became known in 2007 when they staged a ‘feast’ in a Moscow under­ground train in hon­our of Rus­sian avant-​garde poet and artist Dmitriy Prigov.

In March 2008 they came out with another pro­voc­at­ive action known as ‘Fuck for the Heir of Little Bear’, staged at the Moscow Poly­tech­nic Museum. The act­iv­ists demon­strated how mak­ing love for the mys­ter­i­ous heir of no lesser mys­ter­i­ous little bear could be done in prac­tice. All this would not have been so con­tro­ver­sial if the sur­name of the Rus­sian pres­id­ent Dmitry Med­ve­dev had not had ‘bear’ as its root [‘med­ved’ means ‘bear’ in Russian].

Fuck for the Heir of Little Bear

How­ever, Voina became really fam­ous for two of their later actions. In 2010, fol­low­ing grow­ing out­rage caused by the illegal and dan­ger­ous use of flash­ing lights and sirens by Rus­sian state offi­cials, Lenya the ‘Fucked’ put a blue bucket on his head in imit­a­tion of an official’s flash­ing light and ran across a car of the Fed­eral Secur­ity Ser­vice right in front of the Krem­lin Wall.

Bridge Erec­tion

Flash­ing Light?

And on 14 June, in Saint Peters­burg, Voina staged prob­ably one of their most pic­tur­esque actions. As you may know, Saint Peters­burg is situ­ated on the banks of the river Neva which flows from the Ladoga lake to the Baltic Sea. At night the bridges con­nect­ing the city are raised so that the cargo barges can pass through. Right before the rais­ing of the bridges, Voina act­iv­ists led by Lenya the ‘Fucked’ man­aged to paint a 65 metre long dick in the space of sev­eral minutes. When the bridge was finally up, the mas­ter­piece of speed-​painting raised itself straight towards the build­ing of the Saint Peters­burg FSB [post-​Soviet ana­logue of the KGB].

In Rus­sia opin­ions about Voina are split. Some con­sider them as brain­less hoo­ligans who have noth­ing to do but to pro­voke and attract atten­tion to them­selves. Some are clearly impressed with the cour­age and sharp­ness of Voina’s actions as they are seen as express­ing what many in the Rus­sian Fed­er­a­tion feel about the social and polit­ical real­it­ies they live in. Abroad, it seems that Voina really appealed to like-​minded art-​hooligans. The bail for Vor and Lenya the ‘Fucked’ was provided by Banksy, who auc­tioned sev­eral of his port­able mas­ter­pieces espe­cially for this purpose.

What is inter­est­ing about this new Rus­sian action­ism is, how­ever, not only the way it teeters on the edge of leg­al­ity. It also sub­verts and there­fore reveals the bound­ar­ies of art and, what is even more scary, real­ity in our era of digital reproduction.

In the age of digital repro­duc­tion […] there is no longer a clear con­cep­tual dis­tinc­tion between ori­ginal and repro­duc­tion in vir­tu­ally any medium. These two states, one pure and ori­ginal, the other imit­at­ive and impure, are now fic­tions. (Davis 381 – 86).

Is this really so? Let us have a look at the roots …

‘Art’ and ‘arti­fi­cial’ have the same root. Art has always been a prac­tice of cre­at­ing an image of real­ity. It has always been, to a greater or lesser degree, about real­ity yet, at the same time, it has always differed from it. The bor­der between real­ity and art is what defined the recog­nis­ab­il­ity and read­ab­il­ity of an artistic text. The object of real­ity always entered artistic text but only as artistic objects. They were made part of an artistic text as its integ­ral element.

A painted, sculp­ted, nar­rated, pho­to­graphed, filmed or per­formed object that exists or may exist in the real world is recog­nised and read in a work of art as an ele­ment of an artistic text of paint­ing, sculp­ture, pho­to­graph, novel, film or theatre per­form­ance. This text has clear bor­ders divid­ing it from real, non-​artistic life – the bor­ders of a paint­ing and frame, the begin­ning and the end of the novel and film, the spe­cial lim­it­a­tion of a sculp­ture, the theatre stage and tem­poral lim­it­a­tion of stage performance.

The oppos­i­tion between artistic text and non-​artistic real­ity is vital for the com­mu­nic­ab­il­ity of artistic work. Or rather, it was. Con­tem­por­ary forms of polit­ical art break this rule and throw artistic objects into the flow of real life, rad­ic­ally chan­ging the very nature of artistic work.

This is the Banksy

For example, it is of course pos­sible to enjoy Banksy from the repro­duc­tions of his work. How­ever, such a read­ing will never be as impress­ive as the dir­ect obser­va­tion of his works in their real scale, loc­a­tions, in their real envir­on­ment. A Queen’s guard piss­ing at the corner of a Shored­itch build­ing, painted in 1:1 scale, is ‘piss­ing’ in a corner where real people piss. The corner stinks and the bottles around are real, they were left there by drunk­ards the day before. The con­fu­sion, which attracts the eye of the audi­ence, is pro­duced by the col­li­sion of the artistic object of the painted guard and the real objects of the build­ing, paraphernalia of binge-​drinking, smells, sounds and every­day pop­u­la­tion of the street. Taken out of this con­text and put, for instance, on can­vas in a gal­lery, the image of the guard would not cre­ate such an effect and would not attract as much atten­tion. It would be some­thing totally dif­fer­ent from what Banksy’s art is. What is more inter­est­ing for us, how­ever, is the way the non-​artistic con­text is involved in express­ing the mes­sage of Banksy’s work. It remains non-​artistic. It is not trans­formed into an ele­ment of artistic text but keeps on func­tion­ing as real­ity. The build­ing still shel­ters occa­sional squat­ters, the piss stinks, the street is loud and full of ped­es­tri­ans dur­ing the day time and dodgy types dur­ing the night, and the graf­fiti itself gets painted over by some other artist of a much lesser tal­ent or gets removed.

The involve­ment of a real con­text in the con­struc­tion of an artistic mes­sage, without trans­form­ing it into an artistic object or simply an object, des­troys the very notion of the bor­der or artistic text. The real never ends in space, and does not have an orches­trated start and fin­ish in time. A work of art is no longer opposed to real­ity. It does not repro­duce or cre­ate an image of it. It ‘dis­solves’ in real­ity and engages the real into the inter­play of artistic message.

What kind of real gets involved in the work of art? It is the city, its people are the audi­ence look­ing at graf­fiti and often becom­ing ele­ments of the artistic work. It is the admin­is­trat­ive build­ing with all the social and polit­ical affil­i­ations of a par­tic­u­lar insti­tu­tion occupy­ing it. It is the traffic and its reac­tion to the use of the road. What kind of other real­ity can enter a work of art as real?

Des­pite the fact that Banksy prefers to remain incog­nito, and most of the Voina act­iv­ists are unknown, their author­ship is more real than a gal­lery artist sign­ing his self-​portrait. Both Banksy and the Rus­sian action­ists put at risk their real bod­ies as what they are doing is barely, if not com­pletely, illegal and once caught (like two of the Voina act­iv­ists) they most def­in­itely face a more than real trial and impris­on­ment. So not only the con­text gets involved into a work of art while keep­ing its non-​artistic prop­er­ties, but also the author starts per­form­ing as a ‘mater­ial’ human being with all the risks and dangers the human body can experience.

It is pretty obvi­ous that such types of art – art that is enga­ging rather than por­tray­ing real­ity – will be polit­ical accord­ing to most the­or­ies that regard polit­ics as a sphere or moment of human (inter-)activity rather than simply an insti­tu­tional arrange­ment. Here we might ask what kind of polit­ics this art rep­res­ents? Obvi­ously mar­ginal, a form of protest and to some extent – res­ist­ant. But what is it res­ist­ing and what can it actu­ally achieve? Well, there is at least a strong claim for the right to refuse, the right to fall out, and the Bakhtinian right not to under­stand dom­in­ant dis­course, not to fol­low the tra­ject­or­ies and val­ues of idyllic middle class exist­ence. Indeed, it is the right to laugh and to take the piss out of such an existence.

Like with any arts the power of its dir­ect impact on soci­ety is ques­tion­able. But if it is not dir­ect, then what kind of indir­ect impact does it have? There is cer­tainly an ele­ment of bas­tar­das­ing real­ity and mess­ing up the sym­bolic order of dom­in­ant dis­courses, includ­ing the one of the art itself. The audi­ence now together with the work of art is increas­ingly los­ing the iden­tity it pre­vi­ously formed in dif­fer­ence to the author and the work of art. There are no more ramps. The artist acts like the oth­ers, and he is the other him­self; they are not play­ing, in their actions they are them­selves. It is a 21^st cen­tury response to the long-​proclaimed death of the author and the end of sub­jectiv­ity. The story is not quite over yet. Artistic sub­jectiv­ity and the mod­ern­ist author may be dead, but some­thing else is com­ing instead. Amidst the choirs of state orches­tras, the enga­ging melod­ies of cor­por­ate suc­cess and invit­ing jingles of the shop­ping malls, a small per­son, like the office clerk-​cum-​anarcho-​punk-​art-​freak Leonid Nikolaev aka Lenya Yob­nutyi (the ‘fucked’), still has his own voice. And this voice is real.

Ivan Golo­lobov is Research Fel­low in the Depart­ment of Soci­ology at the Uni­ver­sity of Warwick

Ref­er­ences

Douglas Davis, The Work of Art in the Age of Digital Repro­duc­tion (An Evolving Thesis: 1991 – 1995), Leonardo, Vol. 28, No. 5, Third Annual New York Digital Salon. (1995)

More on Voina

http://​free​-voina​.org/ [multi-​language]
http://​plucer​.live​journal​.com/ [in Russian]