[spectre] Russian artists and curators need support

[Movement for a Socialist Future]

From: "Movement for a Socialist Future" <msf at socialistfuture.org.uk>
Subject: Russian artists and curators need support


We have put this appeal on our homepage at http://www.socialistfuture.org.uk

>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Tania Goryucheva" <tangor at xs4all.nl>
> To: "NETTTIME" <nettime-l at bbs.thing.net>; "spectre"
<spectre at mikrolisten.de>
> Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2005 4:40 PM
> Subject: [spectre] Russian artists and curators need support
>
>
> Organisers of an art exhibition "Beware religion!", Moscow, face the
> prosecution under the pressure of religious fanatics and politicians.
> Please find bellow the story and letter of support.
>
>
> More information:
> http://www.geocities.com/aakovalev/religia-en.htm
>
> Send your reactions to Anna Alchuk (participant): anna at gnosis.ru
> or visit the web-site:
> http://www.livejournal.com/community/beware_religion/656.html?thread=400
>
>
> "Orthodox Bulldozer"
>
> 26.04.2004
> Konstantin Akinsha, Artnews.Com
> http://www.gif.ru/eng/news/orthodox-bulldozer/
>
> Artists whose works deal with religious themes are reviled by the
> Russian Orthodox Church, while the vandals who destroy their works are
> hailed as martyrs
>
> In January a gang of vandals wearing camouflage gear invaded the
> S.P.A.S. Gallery in St. Petersburg and splattered paint and ink over an
> exhibition of Oleg Yanushevsky’s constructions, called "Contemporary
> Icons." Yanushevsky’s ironic message-that President George W. Bush,
> Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and other political and pop-culture
> celebrities were the modern equivalents of holy figures-was considered
> an insult to the Russian Orthodox Church and to the sensibilities of
> believers. Although the works were destroyed and the gallery seriously
> damaged, the St. Petersburg prosecutor refused even to investigate the
> vandalism.
>
> Vandals sprayed "Vermin" and "Scum, you are devils" over works by Alisa
> Zrazhevskaya and Alexander Dorokhov at the Sakharov Museum.
>
> COURTESY SAKHAROV MUSEUM AND PUBLIC CENTER, MOSCOW
>
> A similar incident in Moscow, a year earlier, had more serious
> consequences. In January 2003, a gang of Russian Orthodox activists
> destroyed an exhibition in the Sakharov Museum and Public Center called
> "Caution! Religion." Last December two Sakharov Museum officials and
> three of the exhibition organizers were charged by the state prosecutor
> with inciting religious hatred. They face prison terms of up to five
> years. The vandals, meanwhile, were hailed by church officials as heroes
> and martyrs, and all criminal charges against them were dismissed.
>
> These alarming events in the art world have taken place against a
> background of rising nationalism and Orthodox assertiveness. The Russian
> Orthodox Church has acquired enormous political clout in recent years,
> and few politicians will risk offending it. The Sakharov Museum
> exhibition was subjected to a vituperative media campaign, and the
> matter was almost immediately taken up in the Duma, where nationalist
> deputies vied with each other to denounce the sacrilegious artists and
> laud the vandals.
>
> In February 2003, the Duma passed a decree stating that the 1999
> exhibition’s purpose had been to incite religious hatred and to insult
> the feelings of believers and the Orthodox Church. The state prosecutor
> was ordered to take action against the organizers, with 265 of 267
> deputies present approving the measure. Sergei Yushenkov, leader of the
> Liberal Russia party and one of the two who voted against the measure,
> mounted the podium and stated sadly, "We are witnessing the origin of a
> totalitarian state led by the Orthodox Church." (Yushenkov was murdered
> in Moscow a few weeks later. Four men were convicted of his murder in
> March.)
>
> In April 2003, the Duma voted to toughen the law against inciting
> religious hatred by adding prison terms of up to five years for
> offenders. This was a direct reaction to the Sakharov Museum show. The
> law was invoked for the first time against Ter-Oganyan. It has never
> been used against anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi groups, which operate
> undisturbed.
>
> "It’s a tragic situation," Elena Bonner told ARTnews in a telephone
> interview from Boston, where she lives part of the time. Bonner, the
> widow of Nobel Prize-winning physicist and famous dissident Andrei
> Sakharov, is chair of the Sakharov Center, which was founded to educate
> Russians about their totalitarian past. "The events around the
> exhibition discredit the Russian Orthodox Church, just as the fatwah
> condemning Salman Rushdie to death discredited Islam," she said. Bonner
> pointed out that the vandals had come to the museum prepared to be
> offended, with axes, hammers, and cans of spray paint in their pockets.
>
> The organizers of "Caution! Religion" say that they wanted to attract
> attention to the new role of religious institutions in Russian life. In
> his speech at the show’s opening, curator Arutyun Zulumyan, who is now
> in hiding, called for a careful and respectful treatment of religion,
> but he also warned of the danger of religious fundamentalism, both
> Muslim and Russian Orthodox, and of the identification of the state with
> religion.
>
> The 40 participants included artists from the United States, Japan, and
> Cuba, as well as Russia. One of the works was Russian-born American
> artist Alexander Kosolapov’s image of Christ on a Coca-Cola
> advertisement along with the words "Coca-Cola. This is my blood." The
> face of Christ was obliterated. "As the owner of the artwork, I’m
> upset," Kosolapov told ARTnews in a phone interview. "As an artist, I’m
> proud. I think their action adds value to my art-it still provokes such
> strong feelings."
>
> The vandals were locked in the gallery by an alert custodian and
> arrested by the police. But they had influential protectors. All of them
> were members of the congregation of St. Nicholas in Pyzhi, whose
> archpriest, Alexander Shargunov, is a well-known radical fundamentalist.
> A graduate of the Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow and a former
> translator of poetry, Shargunov abandoned literature for the priesthood
> and since the early 1980s has been campaigning for the canonization of
> Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, and his family. In 1997 he established
> a movement called the Social Committee "For the Moral Revival of the
> Fatherland." In 2001 the committee’s Web site carried instructions on
> how to vandalize "immoral" billboards by splashing paint on them, and
> followers promptly destroyed 150 billboards in Moscow. Now the Social
> Committee is agitating against the ad campaign for the popular Red Devil
> Energy Drink, which Shargunov believes promotes Satanism.
>
> A Social Committee activist, Olga Lochagina, filed a complaint accusing
> the exhibition organizers of "provoking national, racial, and religious
> hostility."
>
> A group of well-known nationalist intellectuals, including film director
> Nikita Mikhalkov, artist Ilya Glazunov, and writers Valentin Rasputin
> and Vasily Belov, weighed in with a petition calling the exhibition a
> "new stage of conscious Satanism." They wrote that Russia’s enemies were
> bent on humiliating the powerless "Russian people, their objects of
> worship, and their historic values."
>
> Who, precisely, were these powerful enemies? The intellectuals didn’t
> identify them, but the fascist political party Pamyat (Memory) had no
> hesitation. The appeal posted on the party Web site called on Orthodox
> Christians to protect "our Lord Jesus Christ" from "Yid-degenerates,"
> using the most derogatory term for Jews.
>
> After all this, no one was surprised when the vandals were acquitted of
> having committed any crime. It was a victory for the mob of believers
> and priests who had surrounded the courthouse throughout the trial,
> carrying icons and waving crosses.
>
> It is the exhibition organizers who are likely to suffer. The
> investigator appointed by the prosecutor, Yuri Tsvetkov, looking for
> expert testimony that would confirm the guilt of the accused, consulted
> art historians at the State Center for Contemporary Art, but the experts
> didn’t find the artworks blasphemous. The relentless Lochagina, who had
> filed the original complaint, promptly filed another, against the art
> historians for providing what she called "false" expertise.
>
> Tsvetkov looked elsewhere. He lined up another group of art historians
> and added a psychologist, a sociologist, and an ethnographer for
> scientific reinforcement. In November they presented their
> conclusions-nearly a hundred pages of expertise.
>
> This time they provided the opinions Tsvetkov was looking for. All of
> them agreed that the exhibition had incited hatred. Natalia Markova, the
> sociologist, could hardly suppress her contempt for contemporary art,
> using such phrases in her expertise as the "sticky spiderweb of
> postmodernism."
>
> In December 2003, Sakharov Museum director Yuri Samodurov was charged
> with actions "leading to the provocation of hatred and enmity." If he is
> found guilty, he could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
> Church officials are not calling for that harsh a penalty. In March the
> Moscow Patriarchy’s External Relations Department issued a statement
> that surprised everyone. It asserted, in effect, that the Sakharov
> Museum exhibition organizers had committed an administrative rather than
> a criminal offense. The difference is that administrative offenses are
> punished, at most, by fines, not by prison terms.
>
> Samodurov denies that he intended to offend anyone’s religious feelings
> and said that his freedom of expression had been violated. "Icons have
> one meaning when they are in a church," he said in a press conference at
> the Sakharov Museum, "and a completely different meaning when they’re
> hanging in an exhibition hall."
>
> The Moscow journalist Aleksandr Averushkin titled his article on the Web
> site atheist.ru about the attack on the Sakharov Museum show "Orthodox
> Bulldozer," referring to the infamous "bulldozer exhibition" of 1974,
> when KGB thugs, with the help of bulldozers, destroyed a show of
> "unofficial" art in a Moscow park.
>
> Ironically, not long ago, during Soviet times, artists were imprisoned
> for depicting religious themes.
>
> Anna Alchuk, an artist who participated in "Caution! Religion" and was
> later charged with conspiracy, told ARTnews from Moscow that she had met
> Samodurov, with whom she was accused of conspiring, for the first time
> at the exhibition opening. She said she had read all 14 volumes of
> evidence collected by the prosecutor, and that 11 volumes consisted
> entirely of letters from "working people" expressing their outrage at
> the show and demanding that the artists be punished. Almost none of the
> writers had seen the exhibition-most had signed form letters-but they
> accused the artists of such sins as torturing Christ. "If this case
> actually goes to court," Alchuk commented, "we will see a real theater
> of the absurd."
>
>
>
> Open letter concerning the trial on the exhibition “Beware religion!”
>
> The criminal case instigated by the Office of Public Prosecution against
> the director of Sakharov Centre Ju. Samodurov, the employee of the
> Museum of the Centre L. Veselovskaia and the artist A. Alchiuk
> (Michalchiuk) concerning the exhibition “Watch out religion!”, which is
> now taking place in Moscow court, is a shocking proof that the
> fundamental statute of Russia as secular democratic state, where the
> Church is detached from the State, as it is declared in its Constitution
> is not respected. The principle of the freedom of expressing one’s views
> has been totally violated and has made the artists a victim of an
> ideological vision of religious state which some clerical circles in
> Russian Orthodoxy Church are attempting to impose on Russian society.
> The shameful fact, that instead of “pious” pogrom-makers, who destroyed
> the objects of art, we see on the dock the victims of vandalism,
> testifies that the Office of Public Prosecutor has yielded to pressure
> of certain fundamentalistic forces trying to impose their medieval ideas
> on our society and to assume the right on religious themes and symbols,
> which are the common property of human culture, whether religious or
> secular, and which has been included in universal culture Thesaurus for
> centuries-old development of European civilization. Civic freedoms are
> not created in order that they may serve one ideology. Such a state of
> affairs has, we hope, changed with the end of totalitarianism. We all
> have the right to live and function in this country and to express our
> own views freely. Every culture needs its own sphere of freedom,
> incorrectness and difference. Contemporary art is one of such sphere.
> Art is not created in order to decorate walls; it is above all a
> testimony to its own time and it expresses that which public discourse
> cannot perhaps express in any other form. Art is living and volatile
> manifestation and its boundaries cannot be regulated by the clauses of
> the penal code. This has clearly been testified to by the judgments of
> the Human Rights Tribunal in Strasbourg .
>
> Our society is not homogeneous. We can talk about majorities and
> minorities belonging to the same society. The artists participated in
> the exhibition in dealing with one of the problems which is presented in
> this society are expressing their right to be different.
>
>   We demand the respecting of the right to freedom of expression as it
> is guaranteed by the Constitution of Russian Federation.
>
> As for suggestion that the artists by their artworks have insulted the
> senses of believers and sown dissension between peoples it is nonsense
> because the exhibition took place on the territory of secular museum. It
> could be a subject of public discussion and criticism but not an object
> of court examination.
>
> ______________________________________________
> SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe
> Info, archive and help:
> http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
>