Last month, on the occasion of Komar and Melamid: A History Lesson—a retrospective curated by Julia Tulovsky on Soviet-born artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University—Nadya Tolokonnikova, founding member of Pussy Riot, delivered a lecture to a sold-out auditorium. His subject was totalitarianism and dissent, and Pussy Riot’s role in not only highlighting the crimes of Vladimir Putin, the devastating war in ukraine; a long history of censorship; human rights violations; and persecution of political opponents – but also by directly fighting his regime. In Russia, as we know, speaking out against the state is not a trivial act: Tolokonnikova herself spent two years in prison for “hooliganism” after an anti-Putin performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior of Moscow in 2012.
Tolokonnikova’s lecture was organized not only to bear witness to the legacy of anti-state art by Komar and Melamid, which always targeted the Soviet Union, but also to suggest how dissent endures in the work of artists from ‘today who are in the direct crosshairs of Putin’s art. diet. Yet some critics have claimed that any focusing on Russian art or artists in the midst of the war in Ukraine is a distraction from Putin’s crimes. They argue that such projects are at best callous, at worst complicit. Such arguments have led to the last minute postponement in January of an exhibition at the Cooper Union in New York on the first Soviet design school Vkhutemas.
The claim that venues that often feature (or even are specifically dedicated to) Russian art should revamp their programming to highlight Ukrainian artists as a stance against Putin’s invasion is very powerful. Therefore, at the beginning of the war in February 2022, the Zimmerli Art Museum extended our exhibition Painting in Excess: The kyiv Art Revival, 1985-1993, a survey of Ukrainian art carried out following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Continuing the show beyond its original closing date was our humble act of defiance.
Yet there’s another side to these issues that critics seem to overlook. Embedded in the claim that no Russian art should be exhibited today everywhere is the suggestion that the Russians everywhere are partners in Putin’s crimes. The implication is that there is no division between the actions of the state and the politics of its people – that all Russians, simply by virtue of their ethnic identity or by chance where they were born , believe that the war in Ukraine is just. For them, the state is the people.
We know that is not true; the case of Tolokonnikova is a clear example. Just like Komar, whose painting The bird and the bear (2014-22) depicts a brutal Russian bear attacking a small bird representing Ukraine. These are two cracks in the facade that people in power like Putin will do anything to prevent. Maintaining a single, top-down party line is precisely the intent behind the cultural and political assimilation demanded by the Russian state. From his point of view, there is only one unified Russian identity, which absorbs not only Ukraine (which is only a fiction for Putin) but also any hint of internal dissent. For Putin, his detractors are insufficiently “Russian”.
The strength of multiplicity
For this very reason, internal dissent is essential in the fight against tyranny. Without it, we accept that identity – and therefore political positions – are forever fixed and impermeable. Yet neither identity nor politics are so simple. Komar and Melamid, it’s true, were born in the USSR. But they have spent more than half their lives in the United States. What makes them? Russian? Soviet? American? Komar’s father was Ukrainian. What does this mean in our calculation? With every shift in position comes new political possibilities, and it is exactly this instability that Putin and his supporters want to bring about. They only believe in the singularity. But the strength of the anti-Putin stance is a multiplicity that includes a broad coalition of actors across the political and identity spectrum.
Which brings me back to a broad agreement I have with critics of my position. They are right to suggest that defending artists from various other ethnic and political backgrounds gives us the opportunity to speak out against cultural and political imperialism. Yet the strict binary they suggest – Russian or non-Russian – is not only too simple, it also plays directly into the hands of our collective enemies. Instead of Orwe should insist on And. We only win when we build bridges between us.
- Maura Reilly is director of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey
