Pussy Riot is generally referred to as a punk rock band and performance art ensemble. But at least as it appears in Montreal, the group’s first museum survey does not disclose much in the way of musicality or visual sophistication—except in its brilliantly cacophonous exhibition design. Anyway, such qualities might be beside the point.
A sort of retrospective in the form of a colorful multimedia show that originated at Kling & Bang in Reykjavik before traveling to the Louisiana Museum of Art, followed by overlapping iterations in Montreal and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich and the Polygon Gallery in Vancouver, “Velvet Terrorism” doesn’t put much stock in subtlety or nuance either. More in the group’s style is a video installed near the exhibition’s entrance, showing a ski-masked Pussy Riot member pissing on a portrait of the Russian president; if that doesn’t make things clear enough, the title of one of the group’s early actions, Fuck You, Fucking Sexists and Fucking Putinists (2011), involved “musical occupations of glamorous venues in the capital” including “areas where wealthy Putinists gather: in Moscow boutiques, at fashion shows, in elite cars, and on the rooftops of Kremlin-affiliated bars.”
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Whether or not you’re prepared to enjoy Pussy Riot’s songs as music or their actions and videos as art, though, you’d be hard put to contest their right to the third category into which their work has always been slotted: activism. And yet, after immersing myself in “Velvet Terrorism,” I had to wonder whether even that is quite the right description of what they do. Activism, as I understand it, is not action for its own sake, but is undertaken to achieve some determinate social or political goal, to change the world, or at least one’s country or community.
Is that what Pussy Riot have been up to? Note that the catalog descriptions of their actions are organized into three rubrics: Location, Context, and Reaction—and that the most common entry under Reaction is “nothing serious happened.” But when something serious does happen, it has to do with legal penalties: “Everyone was detained 3 times. Beatings, harassments, surveillance, slashed tires” or “Detention, day in police station.” And note that the actions include ones imposed on the group’s members, rather than organized by them: “140 Hours of Community Service 2018-19,” “Pyotr’s Poisoning 2018,” and so on.
As MAC director John Zeppetelli writes, Pussy Riot has “used the police state’s apparatus of repression and authoritarianism as a creative partner, engaging in an uneasy ‘dance with the devil.’” This is risky stuff. Prison time adds up, not to mention fines and extrajudicial violence. It takes incredible courage to keep exposing oneself to the wrath of a brutal regime without conscience. But while Pussy Riot’s interventions may be, as the catalog says, “desperate, sudden and joyous,” that joy seems very far away from hope. Does Pussy Riot really imagine that they can change Russia? Or even just change some minds? It doesn’t look that way. These sisters are doing it for themselves: trolling the government, the church, the oligarchs, and so on is its own reward.
Is it worth the beatings, imprisonment, and exile just to get under the skin of Russia’s rulers? The answer appears to be yes. It turns out to be a way of keeping the spirit free. And that’s why Pussy Riot’s work really does belong in an art museum. It is not performance art as activism; it is, rather, something like the performance of activism in a situation where true activist intervention has been rendered impossible. For the group’s members to have persisted in their efforts over more than a decade despite their having no realistic prospect of making a measurable impact on the reality of Russia in itself constitutes a vivid emblem of the unquenchable desire for change even in the absence of any means to satisfy such a desire. That’s the artistic core of Pussy Riot’s work. They make rebelliousness an aesthetic quality in itself—one that can move us, and that is serious in its implications.
How will this rebelliousness manifest itself now that many of Pussy Riot’s members are living outside Russia? Will they rebel against their new hosts? I hope so. One action documented here is the hanging of a banner at Trump Tower in New York in 2017 in support of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director who was arrested in Crimea when Russia invaded that territory in 2014. It caused a stir, but, of course, Pussy Riot’s pro-Ukrainian anti-Putin stance is music to the ears of most of us in the West. It’s consumable at no risk. Rebelliousness is hard to maintain as it devolves into entertainment. Perhaps this problem was already inherent in Pussy Riot’s strategy of divertingly high-spirited confrontation. In a way, it mirrored too well the topsy-turvy image-world of Putin’s Russia, which maintains itself through the mere performance of law, of elections, and even (in its propaganda against Ukraine) of antifascism. Now the task should be to cultivate more deeply the inner freedom without which Pussy Riot’s opposition to Putin could not have happened, and which may be even more desperately needed in a West that is increasingly listing toward its own forms of authoritarianism.