University of Groningen
Of Tricksters and Zombies
Robbe, Ksenia
Published in:
Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis
IMPORTANT NOTE: You are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's PDF) if you wish to cite from it. Please check the document version below.
Document Version
Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record
Publication date: 2020
Link to publication in University of Groningen/UMCG research database
Citation for published version (APA):
Robbe, K. (2020). Of Tricksters and Zombies: Re-imagining Outsideness in Contemporary Russian Activist Art. In E. Steinbock, B. Ieven, & M. de Valck (Eds.), Art and Activism in the Age of Systemic Crisis:
Aesthetic Resilience (1 ed., pp. 77-91). Routledge.
Copyright
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons).
Take-down policy
If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.
Downloaded from the University of Groningen/UMCG research database (Pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to 10 maximum.
6 Of Tricksters and Zombies
Re-imagining Outsideness in Contemporary
Russian Activist Art
Ksenia Robbe
This chapter enquires into the complex conditions in which critically thinking artists find themselves in contemporary Russia, and the ways in which they carve out spaces for activist aesthetics, within their local situation as well as the global environment of uncertainty—the regime of what is nowadays called “post-truth.”
The strategies and tactics employed by the younger generation1 of Russian artists seeking to maintain artistic freedom and dignity in the context of pervasive nationalism, state-supported neo-traditionalism, and an aggressive market economy recall some of the survival techniques that were used by artists who lived and worked during the late Soviet period. This recall, however, involves creative rethinking since the situation of increasing state control and isolation from the West, though reminiscent of the Soviet past, is also substantially different. Becoming part of an underground, as in Soviet times,2 ceased to be
an option as the state itself has appropriated postmodern techniques of ironic subversion, using them for cynically undermining the politics of truth.3 This has largely disabled the
non-conformist practices of ambiguity and transgression that had been developed during the late Soviet period. Beyond the changing configurations of power and mimicry on the national scale, it is necessary to consider transnational and global shifts of the political. Under the current conditions of globalized neoliberalism, “the place of modern liberal politics is dispersed,”4 which, along with pluralization of expression, involves the diffi
culty of forming solidarities. At the same time, in Jean and John Comaroff’s rethinking of the above perspective “from the South,” the contemporary “capitalist imperium … has no real exteriors, … it has many peripheries.”5 For artists from global peripheries, this constellation provides mostly nation-bound and identity-based niches, both on transna tional and national markets, thus limiting their works’ critical edge.6 My readings of
resilience practices in artworks engage the strategies of resisting these interlaced pressures of the state and the market.
Such strategies require simultaneously being in- and outside the varied and intersecting discursive fields delineated by national and global powers. It is not unexpected, then, that in devising these strategies contemporary artists tap into the practices of late Soviet art and life which perfected borderline positionality—what Alexei Yurchak,7 applying
Mikhail Bakhtin’s term vnenakhodimost, has called “inside/outside-ness” (following the English translations of Bakhtin’s term as “outsideness,”8 I use this shorter version).
Drawing on Mark Lipovetsky’s conceptualization of tricksterism9 as a central metaphor
of Soviet and post-Soviet (particularly post-2000) culture of adaptation and survival, I read Kirill Savchenkov’s installation The Horizon Community Memorial Centre as recalling and rethinking the work and life of late Soviet conceptual artists—and elabor ating new tricksterism.
As a second case, the chapter approaches a more radical engagement with the con temporary post-truth, post-apocalyptic present in Russia (and worldwide) as exemplified by the work of the collective Chto Delat (What is to Be Done) and their video Palace Square. 100 Years After, reflecting on the legacies of the October Revolution. Rather than devising ways of surviving in a conventional sense, the film declares the presence of a new revolutionary situation which can be advanced by the non-human proletariat—the zom bies. While pointing at the futility of staying resilient under post-apocalyptic conditions, the film displays a different, more fundamental sense of survival—of, in Jacques Derrida’s terms, sur-vivre or “living on,” which, by way of différance, “delays both life and death”10 and conceives of both states as mutually implicated. I read the video as elabor ating a “spectral”11 modality of outsideness, which conceives of marginalized “past
futures”12 as resilient and active.
In examining the conspicuous presence of trickster and zombie metaphors in Russian activist art, the chapter traces intersections between these tropes of imagining and invoking resilience. While traversing different paths—of performing critical accommoda tion and radical rebellion—they coincide in their search for “the common” or the inter-subjectively shared and in their elaboration of collectivities. By juxtaposing the ways in which contemporary art recalls two twentieth-century moments of radical upheaval in Russian history, the October Revolution and the perestroika, this reading identifies some similarities between their imaginations of resistance against (post-)Soviet and globalized forms of biopolitical control. To concretize the analyzed tropes of resilience, I draw on the Bakhtinian notion of outsideness and conclude by discussing how these contemporary forms of strategic liminality differ from the earlier, late Soviet forms.
Outsideness as Resilience/The Resilience of Outsideness
In the opening passage to his comprehensive study of Moscow Conceptualism, Boris Groys argues that this movement
not only made a spectacle of Soviet life but also saved its memory for a future that became different from that of the Communist vision. It is a memory of the shabbiness and austerity of the Soviet everyday life but also of the utopian energy of the Soviet culture. Through the art of Moscow conceptualism a certain period of modern history— namely, the history of realization of the Communist project—finally becomes form.13
Although the art movement virtually ended with the end of Soviet rule, “contemporary Russian art perceives itself as remaining in the tradition of Moscow conceptualism.”14
The statement reveals this tradition’s double quality: having elaborated techniques of resilience, which I conceptualize through the concept of outsideness, it also demonstrates these forms’ historical resilience. It is precisely as a set of forms embodying historical experience that younger artists are now approaching these archives and relate their own search for ways of navigating the uncertain present to the techniques of survival devel oped during the late Soviet period. An example of such engagement is the Horizon Community project by Kirill Savchenkov, a Moscow-based artist working in perfor mance, installation, video, and photography. He was one of the five artists invited to contribute to the project Towards the Source at the Garage Museum by engaging with the museum’s archives of USSR underground art and creating their own productions as a result of this work.
The non-coincidence of the constative and performative dimensions of an authoritarian discourse—i.e., the gap between the ideological enunciation and routine ways of relating to it—was, following Yurchak,15 one of the major characteristics of late Soviet culture. In
Soviet modernity, the paradox involved the objective of full liberation of society and individuals through placing them under party control, i.e., creating the conditions of fundamental unfreedom. In the post-Stalinist period, however, the incongruence of this construction was gradually exposed. During late socialism, this led to a profound trans formation of the structure of discourse—from reproduction of its referential meanings to simple adherence to form: “One voted in favour, passed Lenin examinations, filed reports … but without necessarily or usually having to pay close attention to the con stative meanings of these ritualized acts.”16
For conceptualizing these practices, Yurchak draws on Bakhtin’s outsideness, through which the latter theorized the relationship between the author and hero in novelistic narratives.17 If we read Bakhtin’s texts as an allegorical reflection of his internal exile within the Soviet order, this can be a figure of the relationship between the intellectual and the state. According to Yurchak, in the late-Soviet period, outsideness—being in- and outside a discourse at the same time—becomes the position adopted by virtually everyone who rehearsed the ideological rituals but filled them with alternative meanings, carrying out a “deterritorialization of Soviet life from within.”18 The conceptual art of this period
provided unique forms for such practices.
Today, attempts at recreating authoritative discourses by the Russian state or state-affiliated actors (often in an openly cynical manner) gain in currency. At the same time we can observe the re-invention of practices of evading monologic politics and creating alternative languages that developed during the late Soviet period and became common place toward its end.19 Just as contemporary ideology adopts and recycles old Soviet forms, neutralizing their historical content and trying to use them as vehicles of state-led modernization,20 practices of reflecting on these forms and their resilience, from the Soviet period to the present, turn out to be useful for contemporary artists and activists.21 The position taken by the authorial figures in Savchenkov’s and Chto Delat’s works can be described using the metaphor of a trickster, which has been identified as a leading trope in twentieth-century Soviet/Russian culture, embodied by popular characters of lit erature and film and, more recently, even the Pussy Riot band.22 For Lipovetsky, trick sters not only imitate but also interrupt the conformist mode of being. A trickster, he argues, “represents survival in a cynical, contradictory and inadequate world not as a necessity, but as an opportunity for creativity, play and freedom.”23 Such insider/outsider
positionality of a trickster is perfectly elusive (which is both its weakness and strength). While avoiding any open affiliation with politics, under certain conditions it can generate alternative practices of relating to the authoritative discourse that may hold political potential.24 My reading of Savchenkov’s engagement with discourses of Moscow Con ceptualism explores how this legacy becomes an important resource for developing spaces of resilience toward contemporary authoritative discourses in Russia and globally.
The Horizon Community Memorial Centre: The Trickster Metaphor
Savchenkov’s installation entitled The Horizon Community Memorial Centre was exhibited in the Moscow Garage Museum as part of the project “Towards the Source” in 2016. The installation focused on the archive of the Collective Actions/Kollektivnye deistviia (KD) group—a leader of Moscow Conceptualism during the late 1970–80s—famous for its
actions “Trips to the Countryside,” during which the participants were doing ordinary things while imbuing them with special meanings, understandable only to the group of like-minded people. These performances were very particular as an art form and, at the same time, as a form of communication and community-making in late Soviet society.25
In remembering and memorializing this form, Savchenkov turns to this intersection of art and everyday life, and draws on Yurchak’s study (which, though focusing mainly on daily practices, also examined artistic performances from the 1980s). Yurchak’s book can be consulted by visitors during their trip between the stelas covered with texts and images, mostly diagrams and schematic drawings, scattered across the museum space; references to his work on outsideness are included in the opening of the exhibition bro chure.26 Inhabiting the entire museum, the work becomes a meta-installation, imitating the process of orientation and meaning making in a space that is experienced as alien and uninhabitable while at the same time uncannily familiar. The transparent glass stelas, like tombstones commemorating people and their deeds, are a contemporary form of paying tribute to—and rethinking the legacies of—late Soviet art- and life-making strategies.
One of the main sources for the texts on the stelas are the transcripts of dialogues between Andrei Monastyrski, the KD’s leader, and Iosif Bakshtein, a prominent art critic and curator. The dialogues, which took place in 1985 and in 1988, were themselves part of the performative practice. Occurring at the time of intensive transformations during perestroika, they reflect on the sudden opening of new avenues for interaction with the
Fig. 6.1 Installation The Horizon Community Memorial Centre by Kirill Savchenkov, exhibited at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow in 2016.
Western art market along with the artists’ anxieties about the concomitant appropria tions. For Savchenkov, these self-reflections of the late Soviet artists’ and critics’ posi tionality—characteristic of the group’s auto-ethnographic discourse27 —become a springboard for thinking through his own and his generation’s search for its place and voice in contemporary contexts of local and global power relations.
Throughout the installation, Savchenkov draws upon the metaphor of the “Living-stones in Africa” which was first developed in these dialogues. The main question the dialogues engage concerns the audience that can access and appreciate the work of a conceptual artist in Soviet society in transition: until the time of the conversations, it had been a circle of 30–40 people and a few interested specialists in the West, but how is this going to change? What will be the essence of art that existed as non-official, in a (secret) society within society? Will it be appropriated by global art structures? Monastyrski suggests that their circle, and particularly Ilya Kabakov, whose success in the West they are discussing, can be considered “Livingstones” dispatched to Russia to study the Indi genous people and report back to the “Central Geographical Society”:
[Kabakov’s] exits into the local ideology, this local everyday life are exactly such journeys. He is a Livingstone, and one can sense this very well—his estrangement, and then when we come together as a Geographical Society and scrutinize his findings, new reflections of the situation. It seems that our circle is a branch of some geographical club which is based there and which serves such magazines as
28
Flash Art.
At the same time, they continue, some deep meanings of Kabakov’s works are under standable only to Soviet viewers, or rather that small circle of non-official intelligentsia involved in the same cultural situation.29
Three years later, with perestroika having gained momentum, they return to this metaphor, and Monastyrski makes an interesting twist when asking: “Who are these aboriginals? I think they are those Westerners who are participating in the diffusion of our life.”30 He continues:
[W]e were a geographical society studying aboriginals, the Western people, and the totalitarian state, but we were on an island, as it were, and did not notice them [the Soviet people] as people. They were just the elements like earth, forest and snow, and the aboriginals who gave us the materials and built huts for us—they were the Western people.31
As to the Central Geographical Society, it had never existed: it was, Monastyrski says, “our self-projection, a figure of consciousness … We ourselves were that Central Club” studying the aboriginals in “our laboratory-like, for a civilized person, conditions.”32
The Horizon Community Memorial Centre—organized as an aesthetic project (Sav chenkov’s performances include lectures, colloquia, excursions, and exhibitions)33 —
draws upon and reworks the experience of KD as a closely knit community. In particular, it engages with the centrality of discursive practices (whereby interpretation is an essen tial part of performance) for their artworks, which are also works of community forma tion.34 In staging inheritance to KD, The Horizon Community Memorial Centre explores the possibilities of aesthetic projects being a form of social action in a rapidly trans forming society (such as the late Soviet society during perestroika)—a dynamic
laboratory of collectively producing new forms of thinking and interaction that can be adopted by individuals and groups.
Savchenkov relates the practices of the Moscow Conceptualists to those of other his torical and contemporary sub- and microcultures—thus, on the stelas we see images from Soviet and Western sci-fi, from religious and self-defense guides, references to the circle of Georgy Shchedrovitsky and his “thinking-activity system” methodology that became popular among the Moscow intelligentsia of the 1970–80s and involved role games aimed at developing and projecting new ways of collective thinking and communication.35 The stelas are thus structured as spaces juxtaposing texts and images coming from different spheres of activity (art, philosophy, everyday life). As becomes clear from the exhibition prospectus and Savchenkov’s video monologue, which is part at the installation,36 these
references to the work of different communities are interrelated through their practice of sharing specific ways of resilient existence under conditions of uncertainty. These con nections are not explicitly articulated but are to be constructed by viewers themselves “navigating” the museum through the stelas that function as “interfaces between different spheres of knowledge.”37
The installation does not only memorialize practices of dislodging authoritative dis courses, but also carries the principle of deterritorialization into the present—through its constellation of scattered stelas and performance of creating communities of knowledge. An important role in this process is played by the mediators—a team of assistants who are present at each of the stelas to answer the visitors’ questions. Having participated in a series of The Horizon Community Memorial Centre workshops, they became its “agents” creating new “networks.”38 One of them, reflecting on her experience in an interview with Savchenkov, mentions that what first felt like a huge mystification, during the workshops, turned into a sense of a real community where all participants were operat ing on the same terms and understanding each other, thus producing a unique common language. Further, she recalls having been astonished by how persuasive her use of this language was occasionally in dialogues with visitors, demonstrating its ability to change perceptions, especially for younger visitors.39
Such production of a community by means of a new language that it works out is reminiscent of KD’s practices. The creation of a non-hierarchical community whose structures of communication undermine traditional notions of authorship and authority was at the core of its activities. According to Daniil Leiderman, “[i]n a purposeful reversal of the avant-garde model of the inspired artist guiding his audience to the reve lation of ultimate truth, KD wanted a misguided audience to pull the artists along into shimmering confusion.”40 The audience viewing Savchenkov’s installation, similarly,
appears as purposefully puzzled by the inscriptions on the stelas (it is not immediately clear how the different sources are related to each other); but the viewers’ dialogues with mediators create possibilities for further, more guided reflection. Moreover, The Horizon Community Memorial Centre is designed as an educational project aiming to create “networks” and “agents,” while the installation focuses on producing “interfaces of knowledge” between viewers and images/texts, which “become more important than the Subject itself.”41 Thus, borrowed from the works of KD, the centrality of mediation in
this installation is reflectively adapted to present-day challenges:
[I]n an environment characterized by inherent contradictions (post-truth), where a new technological revolution has made consciousness and the human mind the most important resources, and management and understanding of various fields the most
important skill, and even non-material areas of human activity are being privatized, such micro-cultural practices may offer a model for survival.42
Furthermore, by opening up the practice of late Soviet unofficial art to a broader audience (particularly of the younger-generation museum-goers and workshop participants), the project extends the scope of the imagined network into a public realm.43
This practice constitutes a re-invigorated position of outsideness in relation to the post-Soviet state. Beyond that, working with and around institutions in a trickster-like fashion is what Savchenkov does by creating The Horizon Community Memorial Centre in the Garage. The museum itself is an island of liberal sensibility in the heart of Gorky Park—a landmark of Stalinist architectural planning, now containing a range of nos talgically fashioned elements (including the preserved architectural elements of a 1960s restaurant which was replaced by the museum, according to Rem Koolhaas’s project). The installation, then, is an island within this island, critiquing contemporary museums’ pitfalls of framing Russian art through a Western lens. Savchenkov’s performative engagement with post-truth practices, as a post-Soviet and global phenomenon, invokes Monastyrski’s reconsideration of the Livingstones metaphor, i.e., his confronting per estroika-era artists’ dependency on Western institutions. This reversed metaphor, while remaining caught up within the paradigms of colonialism and modernity (the “self” is represented as an explorer), nevertheless performs a critique of dependency on Western art standards that entails inclusion of works by (post-)Soviet artists as essentially ethno graphic objects. In engaging this trickster trope, Savchenkov’s work performs a deterri torializing move not only in relation to the authoritative discourse of the Russian state, but also concerning the hegemony of Western art institutions and their implication in the flows of global capital, in Russia and elsewhere.
Palace Square. 100 Years After: The Zombie Metaphor
While in Savchenkov’s installation outsideness is elaborated within the topos of everyday life and specifically of (semi-)closed circles re-imagined as a network, other works of activist art in Russia seem to extend this mode of practicing resilience by engaging metaphors of the exceptional (in Agamben’s sense) and the supernatural. Indeed, ghosts and other living dead are becoming leading protagonists in public art-activist perfor mances, e.g., during the annual Monstrations and recent works of the Party of the Dead (previously the Rodina (Homeland) Collective).44
The film produced by Chto Delat is framed as a “lecture” by the narrator Oxana Timofeeva who, strolling through the Palace Square in Saint Petersburg, explores traces of the past and contemplates the possibility of new revolutionary change.45 In Soviet cultural memory, revolution was closely tied to the space of the Palace Square, which had to do with the staged performance of storming the old residence (of the tsars and, in 1917, the interim government) by the marines, commissioned by the Bolshevik govern ment in 1920. Photographs of this performance later came to stand for the real events of the revolution. Chto Delat’s revisiting of the place is, then, a re-mediation of this once imagined and mediatized event.
The Palace Square encountered by the narrator, however, does not contain any obvious traces of the revolutionary past. On the contrary, it caters to a romanticized and con sumerist imagination of the imperial grandeur, as represented by the impersonators of Peter and Catherine the Great, with whom the narrator poses for a portrait. Taking a
Fig. 6.2 Monstration participants with the slogan “We Can’t Repeat” in St Petersburg on May 1, 2018. This slogan reverses the patriotic rallying cry “We Can Repeat” referring to the Soviet victory in WWII that has become popular in recent years.
(Photobank Lori)
ride in an eighteenth-century stylized chariot, she contemplates the “emptiness” of this symbolic space. However, she continues, “even when it [the square] seems empty, it is full of ghosts of the past which has not passed, which is still with us. It is here, stomped into this ground.”46 In opening up a vision of this space as being populated by spectres of
the revolution, she also articulates her own positionality of an engaged observer in rela tion to it: “I came here to feel the history with my own body, to grow through it, to understand my place in the historical process.”47 This vision blurs conventional bound
aries between bodies and objects, the living and the dead, past and present, and recon ceives these categories in terms of their imbrication, as figures of resilience. Just like the spectral bodies of “the revolutionary masses” inhabit haunted places today, the past struggles materialize in the present by assuming new forms.
The narrator’s imagination seems to be sparked by the performance of a band (poet Roman Osminkin, a member of Chto Delat, and the “Techno Poetry” group) that she observes after she steps out of the chariot, and which gathers a group of listeners who begin humming and dancing to the band’s music. The song “Zombies in the Winter Palace” (“Zombi v Zimnem”) speaks about the Kafkaesque creatures “waking up in a body of insects, in another world, a century later;” “Communism’s dead, but they are still living” and “want[ing] to take action, here and now, with no fear of repeating old mistakes.”48 I will return to the song’s representation of the zombies, but for now it is
important to mention that it initiates the central episode of the video—the lecture-per formance by the narrator and the audience whose zombie nature, as it were, has been activated through the act of listening. I read this performative outline of zombie
transformations over historical time as a metaphor that interprets contemporary states of resilience.
Adopting an idiom of contemporary popular culture in the video’s subtitle “4 seasons of zombie,” the narrator retells the history of modernity through four stages in the evo lution of the zombie metaphor. At the beginning of the capitalist era, the notion of zombie emerged on Central American plantations to conceive of excessive labour as a result of a magician’s spell turning people into his eternal servants. In the “second season,” the zombie functions as a social metaphor referring to individuals deprived of free will—first producers, then consumers who are also producers of value. The con sumer as a zombie figure, then, becomes the character of the “third season”—the filmic apocalypse, in which he appears as a carrier of a deadly virus infecting civilization. In this version, following the narrator, the evil that previously emanated from a magician or the execution of labour, has no defined location: the virus appears from nowhere and spreads without any obvious logic. Her critique is that this version of zombie is both “terrifying” and “comic,” i.e., mediating negativity as a foundation of newness but at the same time obfuscating place and dislocating agency. In response to this depoliticized vision, the “fourth season” reframes resurrection of the living dead as a revolutionary uprising turning the dormant but resilient energies of the oppressed against social injustice.
As the narrator speaks, the audience-turned-zombies performs the four stages as a pantomime: first servants of a sorcerer, then as chickens, thus unfolding the lecturer’s use of Hegel’s metaphor which “compar[ed] the civil society ruled by money—this whole chicken coop of modern democracy—to the life of a dead body that moves by itself.”49
As dusk falls, the sequence is followed by a performance alluding to representations of infected and surviving bodies in zombie movies (each pair of actors forms still sculptural groups that change their configurations as the actors adjust to each other). When the square is completely enveloped in darkness and the narrator speaks about the uprising of the living dead, the zombies form a row and slowly move toward the palace, then stop facing the main gate and, holding matchboxes, stretch forward their arms and begin the repetitive movement of lighting matches and throwing them on the ground. In the last scene, filmed against the dawn, the zombies walk backwards, away from the gate. Some of them still hold matchboxes and matches ready to be lighted; others carry empty black banners (the black color may also be a discoloration of red in this sepia-toned scene).
Spectral Outsideness
To understand the version of subjectivity and agency put forward by the video, we should turn to the narrator’s rendering of her dream—a short intermezzo between her story of the second and third zombie seasons. In this dream, she was in an apocalypse, though “not on the side of the people who were saving mankind,” like in most popular productions, but “on the side of the zombies.”50 When hiding in a trench together with a zombie fighter who
had only legs and no arms (while she had only arms and no legs), she realized that in order to survive she had to share her body parts: “So, I took my arm and attached it to my comrade. … I woke up and realized that this is an image of maximum solidarity, the infi nitely decomposable, divisible body—this is what the zombie represents.”51
This call to imagine oneself in a zombie’s body—and imagine the bodies and sub jectivities of people and zombies as interdependent and shifting—underlies the entire performance and plot of the video. Thus, we are moved to conceive the otherness of a zombie as outsideness rather than radical alterity. And vice versa, with the act of
Fig. 6.3 Screenshot from the video Palace Square. 100 Years After by Chto Delat. (https://vimeo.com/241639647)
transformation into zombies, the audience on the Palace Square gains a collective agency that places them, in a Bakhtinian sense, outside their individual subjectivities while they still remain within their people’s bodies. This agency is represented as being contingent on one’s being able to take the other’s point of view (or, in a more material sense, exchange with the other parts of one’s body).
This vision of the relationship between people and zombies ties in with Esther Peeren’s reading of spectrality in representations of “living ghosts” through Bakhtin’s conception of outsideness.52 Compared to Derrida’s influential theorization of the spectre as a loca tion of an authoritative vision that is, however, tied to the perspective of the haunted subject, Bakhtin’s dialogism, Peeren suggests, enables “a certain reciprocity, an attempt to acknowledge the ghost’s own vision, a willingness to look at the world, and at oneself, through its eyes.”53 Indeed, Bakhtin’s concept of outsideness involves an “excess of
seeing,”54 which means that “in order to gain a coherent image of one’s own self, one needs to have access to others’ visions of one’s exterior, and vice versa. This does not entail becoming the other or doing away with its otherness …, because after looking through the other’s eyes, one always returns to one’s own centre of vision.”55
Peeren’s reading of spectrality through the concept of outsideness highlights the agency of those conceived as living ghosts (migrants, refugees, servants, and other marginalized subjects) and foregrounds the intersubjective possibilities of the spectral metaphor. A similar vision of agency in Chto Delat’s film entails the image of a resilient matter (the revolutionary past that is “stomped into the ground” of the neo-imperial square and its current inhabitants) or the resilient bodies of zombies-people portrayed as active, inter acting with the world and the living, and carrying on their igniting power even while remaining invisible and neglected. Another aspect of outsideness highlighted by the use of the spectral metaphor is the collective and intersubjective character of the zombies’ haunting presence. Significantly, the subject in Osminkin’s song switches from “they” in the first part to “we” in the second (“They wake up in the body of insects” vs. “Walking,
we ask questions”). And the narrator’s final monologue stresses the vision of the con temporary zombie as the person who “survives beyond the boundary of his own indivi dual life … to find a new form of being that we won’t understand, that won’t be very familiar”56 (my emphasis).57
A Revised Politics of Outsideness
This chapter has embarked on exploring imaginations of resilience in works of Russian activist art that are concerned with devising survival techniques in rapidly transforming societies exposed to the paradoxes of post-socialism and neoliberalism, truth-claiming and post-truth. Relating these contemporary situations to historical moments of radical upheaval—the October Revolution and perestroika—and remediating representations from that period, they recall and rethink the practices of resilience used by (artistic) communities during those times. To conceptualize these practices in Savchenkov’s and Chto Delat’s works, I drew on the Bakhtinian notion of outsideness, and its elaborations by Yurchak and Peeren, and discussed its realization in the artworks through the trickster and zombie metaphors.
While the two tropes may be seen as referencing very different figures and sensibilities (a usually lively and charming trickster vs. an uncanny zombie), their use in the two artworks—read as cultural imaginations of dealing with contemporary crises through recalling historical crisis-situations—represents similar conceptualizations of developing resilience and engaging with resilient pasts through performances of liminality. This liminality concerns not only the protagonist’s positioning of him/herself in relation to authoritative discourses and institutions. It involves a reconfiguring of relations between the “self” and “other” in terms of shifting perspectives, as suggested by Bakhtin’s out sideness. Interrelating the historical and fantastical, past and present, the artworks chart the movement from strange to close and trace transformations of an alien other into what comes to be perceived as part of one’s self.
Thus, the more familiar rendering of the “Livingstones metaphor” as outlining the positionality of a non-official artist in an alien-to-him Soviet society, through reference to its later reconsideration by Monastyrski, is recast to reflect on the “unhomeliness” of the West and to critique post-Soviet artists’ lack of perception of Russian society as part of their subjectivity. This shifting, trickster positionality enables a space of resilience in relation to the authoritative discourses of both the Soviet/Russian and Western institu tions, of a specific state and of global capital. In Savchenkov’s description of this posi tionality, “[the] subject is the object, what matters is the link, the relationship between them. … The spectator is neither where they stand nor where the new meaning is, they are in an intensive relationship. In fact, they are neither in the West, nor in the East.”58
Chto Delat’s rendering of the “4 seasons of zombie” introduces a more radical open ness to the other, through the practice of shifting and deterritorializing the self in relation to the living dead. The narrator in this video begins as a trickster playing a role provided by the neo-imperial setting of the Palace Square. But activated by the musical perfor mance of zombies that shifts the boundaries between “them” and “us,” she acts as a spokesperson for the similarly activated group of people-zombies and recalls a dream of being on the zombies’ side. This performance opens up “the possibility that one may be the ghost one moment and ghosted or haunted the next—or both at the same time.”59
What is at stake in both performances is imagining possibilities of a new collectivity at a time when earlier forms are perceived as having failed and contemporary atomisation
has become unsustainable. The positionality of outsideness—or engaged estrangement and resilience—is a starting point for these new constellations. Drawing on older prac tices of forming micro-communities and shifting affiliations or summoning the ghosts of earlier revolutions and imagining “us” as already being part of “them,” these perfor mances converge in contemplating new intersubjective relations whose politics is groun ded in an ethics of solidarity and poetics of resilience.
This poetics of resilience, grounded in practices of memory and of the everyday, is part of the larger processes in contemporary Russian art and literature which “elaborate, in one way or another, the idea of a transpersonal subjectivity (not collective but ‘shared’) that transgresses the borders of the private ‘I’.”60 Paraphrasing Carol Hanish’s slogan “the personal is political” in his reading of the “quiet art” of Daria Serenko as an example of this tendency, Ilya Kukulin argues that “the interpersonal (what happens between individuals) is the today’s political.”61 The works analyzed here fulfill a similar
function of creating a new language that involves both transgression and an ethics of care. At the same time, they radicalize imaginations of resilience as they deterritorialize the subject of history (by invoking metaphors of the trans-human and the fantastical) and re-territorialize subjectivities within the new collectivities that strategically employ out sideness to resist colonization and imagine societal change, alluded to through the memory of revolutionary crises and transformations.
Notes
1 Here “younger” refers to the artists who were born between the late 1970s and early 1990s and started producing their work during the 2000s and 2010s.
2 The borders between non-conformist communities and the rest of society, as well as societies behind the Iron Curtain, were often more flexible and porous than is commonly imagined, and the “in-between” zones of cultural activity on (trans)national scales are becoming a subject of critical inquiry. See Klavdia Smola and Mark Lipovetsky, “Introduction. The Culture of (Non) Conformity in Russia from the Late Soviet Era to the Present,” Russian Literature 96–98 (Feb ruary–May 2018): 2–3.
3 Ilya Kalinin, “Why ‘Two Russias’ are Less than ‘United Russia’. Cultural Distinctions and Poli tical Similarities: Dialectics of the Defeat,” in The Shrew Untamed: Cultural Mechanisms of Poli tical Protest in Russia, ed. Alexander Etkind, Birgit Beumers, and Olga Gurova (London: Routledge, 2018), 48–67; Ilya Kukulin, “Cultural Shifts in Russia Since 2010: Messianic Cynicism and Paradigms of Artistic Resistance,” Russian Literature 96–98 (February–May 2018): 223–233. 4 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 188. 5 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Theory from the South, Or: How Euro-America is Evol
ving Towards Africa,” Anthropological Forum 22, no. 2 (2012): 120.
6 For a discussion of the ways in which works by Soviet and early post-Soviet artists were sub jected to such search by Western institutions for an “authentic outside,” see Kate Fowle, “The New International Decade 1986–1996,” in Exhibit Russia: The New International Decade 1986– 1996, ed. Kate Fowle and Ruth Addison (Moscow: Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, 2016), 16–21.
7 Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (Princeton: Princeton Uni versity Press, 2006), 231–232.
8 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” in Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 4–256.
9 Mark Lipovetsky, Charms of the Cynical Reason: The Trickster’s Transformations in Soviet and Post-Soviet Culture (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011).
10 Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” in Deconstruction and Criticism. Harold Bloom, Paul De Man, Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J. Hillis Miller, trans. James Hulbert (New York: Continuum, 1979), 136.
11 “Spectral” here refers to Derrida’s theorization of the mutual “foldedness” of life and death, and more directly to Esther Peeren’s interpretations of the term that depart from Derridean readings and engage a Bakhtinian, dialogic approach to boundaries and intersubjectivity. I ela borate these approaches in a following section.
12 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1985).
13 Boris Groys, History Becomes Form: Moscow Conceptualism (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2010), 3.
14 Ibid., 33.
15 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 22–24. 16 Ibid., 114.
17 Bakhtin, “Author and Hero.”
18 Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 134. The use of “deterritorialization” here is explicitly Deleuzian. In defining it, he draws on the example of a symbiosis between the wasp and the orchid to elucidate how through reproduction of ideological forms, Soviet citizens were pro ducing creative meanings while the authoritative discourse itself “was ‘injected’ with elements of the new.” See Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 115.
19 Alexei Yurchak, “Trump, Monstrations and the Limits of Liberalism,” unpublished paper, American Ethnological Society Annual Meeting, Stanford University, 2017. As an example, Yurchak uses the political marches called “Monstrations,” which since 2008 have been taking place on May 1 and have spread from the original location of Novosibirsk across the country. The marches look like political rallies, but the posters carried by the participants feature absurd and ironic slogans. The strategy of ironically inverting commonplace phrases of state discourse is, in Yurchak’s reading, particularly effective since it develops “a language that comes from outside of the dominant model of two Russias and cannot be easily reduced to the liberal or nationalist positions.” Yurchak, “Trump, Monstrations and the Limits of Liberalism,” 6, my emphasis.
20 Ilya Kalinin, “Nostalgic Modernisation: The Soviet Past as a ‘Historical Horizon’,” Slavonica 17, no. 2 (2011): 156–166.
21 Kukulin, “Cultural Shifts in Russia.”
22 Lipovetsky, Charms; Mark Lipovetsky, “Pussy Riot as the Trickstrar,” Apparatus: Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 1 (2015): 41–55.
23 Lipovetsky, Charms, 53. This refers to the kynical type of trickster which Lipovetsky, drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s categories, distinguishes from the cynical. According to Sloterdijk, cyni cism is a tactic used by the powerful to demonstrate their “enlightened” realization of the untenability of an idealism that they proclaim as a foundation of their power. See Peter Slo terdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minne sota Press, 1987), 111. In contrast to that, kynicism (stemming from the Ancient Greek kynismos) undermines the authority of idealist social norms through bodily expressions which display genuine “cheekiness” and tentatively defy power structures (Sloterdijk, Critique, 101–107). Sloterdijk’s use of the latter term is, thus, close to Bakhtin’s “carnivalization.”
24 Alexei Yurchak, “Necro-Utopia. The Politics of Indistinction and the Aesthetics of the Non-Soviet,” Current Anthropology 49, no. 2 (2008): 212–215.
25 According to artist and critic Anatoly Osmolovsky, “[p]erformances consisting of almost unnoticeable and meaningless gestures provoke the viewer to aestheticize everyday life—an aestheticization that rests exclusively upon their [these performances’] internal values. Immersed in the atmosphere of tense expectation, any person has to perceive everything that happens around with increased attention, thereby activating his/her capacity for choosing and differ entiating between an artistic (or rather, organized) and incidental event. That is how a viewer becomes ‘infected’ with art. In my opinion, this experimentally proven effect is the most sig nificant within the KD’s work.” Anatoly Osmolovsky, “Politicheskie pozitsii Andreia Mon astyrskogo [The Political Positions of Andrei Monastyrski],” Khudozhestvennyi zhurnal 42 (2002), www.guelman.ru/xz/362/xx42/xx4212.htm.
26 Kirill Savchenkov, “Mental Cover and Survival Models,” 2017, 1, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ ugd/45aeea_5a29db6329b04bd0863d7842d8b66e46.pdf.
27 Oxana Moroz, “Iasyki opisaniia ‘sovetskogo’ v russkom kontseptualizme: metodologiia etno grafov i arkheologov,” Vestnik RGGU 14 (2014): 185.
28 Iosif Bakshtein, Vnutri kartiny: stat’i i dialogi o sovremennom iskusstve (Moscow: NLO, 2015), 182. 29 Ibid., 180. 30 Ibid., 360. 31 Ibid., 361. 32 Ibid.
33 See the project’s website, www.horizon-community.org/.
34 Klavdia Smola, “Community as Device: Metonymic Art in the Late Soviet Underground,” Russian Literature 96–98 (2018): 13–50.
35 Savchenkov, “Mental Cover.”
36 Ibid.; GARAGEMCA, “Kirill Savchenkov o vystavke ‘Po napravleniiu k istochniku’,” March 24, 2017, video, 14:09. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MllbOTKYYFY.
37 “Kirill Savchenkov o vystavke,” 7:15. 38 Ibid., 8:00.
39 Kirill Savchenkov, “Episode 7. Besedy o kontaktakh i vnenakhodimosti. Opyt gruppy Horizon Community Memorial Centre,” Phantom Intelligence Podcast. Podcast audio, 2017, https:// soundcloud.com/phontom-intelligence-podcast.
40 Daniil Leiderman, “The Strategy of Shimmering in Moscow Conceptualism,” Russian Litera ture 96–98 (2018): 68.
41 “Kirill Savchenkov o vystavke”, 8:44. 42 Savchenkov, “Mental Cover,” 17.
43 A similar gesture of engaging with the work of the Collective Actions and Monastyrski has been performed by young St Petersburg-based poet and founder of the Laboratory of Poetic Actionism Pavel Arseniev, together with Dina Gatina, in their video Dotted Composition, in which they write lines from one of Monastyrski’s poems on various surfaces of the city, through which they enter into a dialogue with objects, textures, and other inscriptions within these spaces. See The Laboratory of Poetic Actionism, Pavel Arseniev and Dina Gatina, “Punktirnaia kompozitsiia. Psikhogeograficheskoe issledovanie gorodskikh poverkhnostei” [Dotted Composition. A Psychogeographical Exploration of City Surfaces], February 23, 2011, video, 8:38. https://vimeo.com/20307345. For an analysis of this work listen to the lecture by Kevin M. F. Platt, delivered on the occasion of XXIV Bannye Chteniia, April 1–2, 2016, Moscow: Nlobooks, “Poeziia kak instrument mobilizatsii 3.0,” [Poetry as an Instrument of Mobilization 3.0], video, 41:48. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq4YxQoryqg.
44 See the “Revolution is Dead—Long Live the Revolution!” by the Party of the Dead, produced in 2019. Video, https://youtu.be/Mq4YxQoryqg.
45 Oxana Timofeeva is a philosopher working at the European University of Saint Petersburg and a member of Chto Delat.
46 On the reasons behind the Russian state’s hesitation in deciding whether and how to celebrate or commemorate the centenary of the revolution, see Ilya Kalinin, “Prizrak iubileia” [The Spectre of an Anniversary], Neprikosnovennyi zapas 111, no. 1 (2017): 11–20.
47 Chto Delat, Palace Square, 3:39–49. 48 Ibid., 6:30–48.
49 Ibid., 16:10. The reference is to Hegel’s account of capitalism as “a monstrous system of commu nity and mutual interdependence in a great people; a life of a dead body, that moves itself within itself, one which ebbs and flows in its motion blindly, like the elements, and which requires continual strict dominance and taming like a wild beast.” G. W. F. Hegel, “Philosophy of Spirit 1803–04,” in System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and First Philosophy of Spirit, ed. and trans. by H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979), 249.
50 Chto Delat, Palace Square, 17:16–18.
51 Ibid., 17:25–18:06. This episode refers directly to the concluding statement from Timofeeva’s “Mani festo for Zombie Communism”: “When we think about the zombie apocalypse, we tend to identify with the survivors (forgetting, for example, that in capitalism one survives at the expense of the other—isn’t this fact already absolutely unbearable?), but what if we are not among those happy survivors? What if we are already on the other side? Forget hope: revolution starts in hell” (2015).
http://chtodelat.org/b9-texts-2/timofeeva/oxana-timofeeva-manifesto-for-zombie-communism/.
52 Esther Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor: Living Ghosts and the Agency of Invisibility (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
53 Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor, 26–27. 54 Bakhtin, “Author and Hero,” 23–27. 55 Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor, 27. 56 Chto Delat, Palace Square, 23:00.
57 This vision of collectivity and political action resonates with some recent representations in zombie films and in their critical readings (Tyson E. Lewis, “Ztopia: Lessons in Post-Vital Politics in George Romero’s Zombie Films,” in Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, ed. Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz (Jefferson, NC and London: McFar land, 2011), 90–100; Jon Stratton, “Zombie Trouble: Zombie Texts, Bare Life and Displaced People,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 14, no. 3, 2011: 265–281).
58 Savchenkov, “Mental Cover,” 8. 59 Peeren, The Spectral Metaphor, 27. 60 Kukulin, “Cultural Shifts in Russia,” 243.
