Review by Lucy Tamar Payne
Punk is fun but no one wants to go to a penal colony
Pussy Riot are a Russian feminist punk group founded in 2011 whose powerful protests in public places have earned them importance as both political activists and performance artists. This month the Saatchi Gallery places them centre stage in its exhibition Inside Pussy Riot.
In the Western art world artists rack their brains for shocking things to do, like toddlers wanting their parents’ attention. You could wear as many neon coloured tights and balaclavas as you like and cause a ruckus in St Paul’s and the most you’ll probably get is a fine. The power of Pussy Riot is that, following their stunt ‘A Punk Prayer‘ in the Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, when faced with a total over reaction by the authorities, they did not flee the country and avoid arrest, nor did they repent of their actions in the show trial that ensued. Furthermore, two of the group, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, endured two years in the harshest labour camps, separated from their children, eventually going on hunger strike and emerging to campaign for penal reform for their fellow inmates. They were awarded prisoner of conscience status by Amnesty International and it is this commitment to their life’s work as artists and activists that has won Pussy Riot worldwide attention and made them amongst the most influential women artists working today. Their persecution is imaginatively depicted in this immersive experience by theatre company Les Enfants Terribles in collaboration with the leading member of Pussy Riot, Nadya Tolokonnikova.
From the start there is no chance you can kid yourself this is not relevant to you; the small audience of 12 are confronted by the relevance to Western society and politics in a set built to represent the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour adorned with sanctified images of ‘our’ leaders, Trump, Farage, May, and Putin. After donning balaclavas and taking part in a staging of the demo we are put through the mill of arrest, trial and imprisonment including hard labour and solitary confinement in a series of small ingenious sets. It is a totally immersive theatre experience, and it is unsettling to find yourself meekly obeying the orders of the cast of police officers and prison guards.
The most abiding feeling is the absurdity and comedy inherent in the figures of authority portrayed, from the priest, to the police officers, the judge, and the prison warders. As everyone knows from school po-faced people barking orders are inherently ridiculous. And even though it’s clear that what the two imprisoned members of the group had to endure was far from funny, you begin to understand how total power (totalitarianism) gives rise to total comedy, absurdism…Dada. Pussy Riot and their performances are a direct descendent of Dada, the art movement founded in Zurich during the 1st World War which responded to the folly and futility of war by irreverent and absurdist imagery and performance.
The most uncomfortable moment is early on during a police station scene – no spoilers but there is a moment when you witness the potential humiliation of one of the audience members and things get a bit close to the bone, but this part is then brilliantly portrayed by the cast. There are some brilliant surreal details in the piece, from a portable tv on the guard’s desk in the prison ante room showing a loop of Barbara Streisland singing ‘Guilty’, to the judge portrayed as an unhinged ringmaster during the circus of the so called trial. The piece concludes by the viewer being put in a claustrophobic solitary confinement cell and listening to a compelling monologue by Tolokonnikova which summarises her story and makes a call to arms against political complacency. Here the shift in tone from black comedy and satire to a more contemplative tone is well judged.
As a visual artist I was struck by the strength of Pussy Riot’s iconography. They are first and foremost accomplished artists as well as activists who know what they are doing; the unsettling anonymity of the balaclavas, the neon tights, the shift dresses with heavy black boots, all of it gendered yet punk in its aesthetic. Their work has always been carefully presented in a powerful context, from the performance in the cathedral to the punk blaspheme ‘Putin Has Pissed Himself‘ with the backdrop of the minarets of Red Square. From the start the Pussy Riot collective were highly professional in the way they filmed and edited their performances, recording the sound track in a studio and laying that over their films which they then distributed globally via YouTube. They extended the reach of their message by allowing a documentary crew to cover their trial, a film which was then broadcast globally as part of the Storyville season, and after their release, with cameo performances in an episode of House of Cards.
It is not without irony that the misogynist, patriarchal system in Russia who condemned and persecuted them seem also to be fascinated by the striking looks of Nadya Tolokonnikova in particular (illustrated in a chilling scene in the Storyville film) who has become a poster girl for feminist art activism. In the supporting exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery Art Riot there are works which tell of the romanticisation of Tolokonnikova by her supporters while she was in prison, several artists made banners of her displaying them just outside the prison hospital where she was on hunger strike. It happened to Che Guevara, it happened to Lenin and you could even argue it happened to Thatcher. Nadya Tolokonnikova’s own image has been used to promote her message and that raises interesting and unsettling questions about the interplay between the media and contemporary women artists.
There is also some dissonance that the show is being held in the Saatchi Gallery, funded by the spoils of advertising in the consumerist West, as Pussy Riot are as critical of Western capitalism as they are of the patriarchal totalitarianism of Russia. Intriguingly Art Riot is sponsored by the Tsukanov Family Foundation, a husband and wife team who are former academics turned bankers, based in London and the US and hoping to use their considerable wealth to change the image of Russians and promote Post-Soviet Russian art.
In contemporary culture where is seems the most radical art being made is a neon saying ‘not another fucking neon’ we need artists like Pussy Riot as agent provocateurs. In this significant time for all women, as well as women artists, with the Patriarchy of Trump, and with Brexit threatening our access to European human rights laws, as Maria Alyokhina warned in a recent interview ‘things can be destroyed much faster than they can be built’.
Review by Lucy Tamar Payne
Lucy Payne is a television producer and director now working as a visual artist and in script development.
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