This just in from the Institute for Collective Action:

Today (May 9, 2009), Leftist Art. Leftist Philosophy. Leftist History. Leftist Poetry, the first experimental 24-hour “seminar dormitory,” was to take place in Nizhny Novgorod. However, at approximately twelve noon, OMON troops burst into the room where the seminar was supposed to take place and stopped the proceedings. Around thirty people were present at this moment. According to one participant, the OMON officers are behaving in a very aggressive way. They have confiscated identity papers and are now loading detainees onto a bus.

The seminar dormitory was meant to bring together four disciplines and four young practicioners of these disciplines: Nikolai Oleinikov (leftist artist), Alexei Penzin (leftist philosopher), Ilya Budraitskis (leftist historian), and Kirill Medvedev (leftist poet).They planned to hold a series of seminars and lectures on art, history, and philosophy, as well as video and film screenings and poetry readings.

Nikolai and Alexei are members of the Chto Delat work group (Moscow/Petersburg), while Ilya and Kirill are correspondents on our e-mail platform and good friends and comrades. We will keep you informed of new developments in this story as they become know to us. Unfortunately, this is just the latest sign of the total collapse of the “rule of law” in Russia and the ongoing war against social and political activists. Please repost this information as widely as possible in your blogs and e-mail lists.

The telephone of the police precinct where they are being held is (+7) 831-434-02-02. Please call this number to inquire about the health and safety of our comrades. The latest information is that the police have confiscated their mobile phones and preventing them from otherwise sending us on the outside any information. They are being interrogated individually, after which they are allegedly being released one by one.

Even if you cannot speak Russian, please call: it will remind the Nizhny Novgorod police that the whole world is watching, that it is their duty to uphold human and civil rights, which are guaranteed not only by the Russian Federation Constitution, but also by all the relevant European and international treaties and conventions. The Russian Federation is a signatory to these conventions, however much it has made a complete mockery of this fact during the past several years.

UPDATE: We have just received word that all the detainees have been released and the seminar is continuing. We have learned from our sources that the OMON raid took place while the seminar participants were watching a Jean-Luc Godard film. Allegedly, the police had received information that the seminar was a gathering of “extremists,” which is the code word the Russian authorities and their apologists now use for anyone even mildly opposed to their policies or otherwise not wholly compromised by their management of “managed democracy.”

Here is part of the statement we just posted on our Russian-language LiveJournal. A more comprehensive statement will follow in the next day or so.

We categorically protest police abuse. During these May Day and Victory Day holidays the impression has arisen that martial law has been declared in Russia. There are OMON officers posted every two meters on the streets. Some of these policemen break up peaceful demonstrations. Others are intoxicated and speed around the city in their vehicles, thus endangering people’s lives. Still others stop civilians in their tracks at every turn and inform them about non-existent “laws” that supposedly require them to carry their internal passports on their persons at all times. When will this come to an end? Probably not under the current regime, which tolerates police abuse in the name of the police’s loyalty and thus every hour bears witness to its own cynicism and weakness.

The hysteria of the authorities—especially the security forces, which often act in a completely uncontrolled way—is without real foundation. In our peaceful society, which has not yet reacted strongly to the growing economic crisis, the authorities not only break up public demonstrations, but also oppositional intellectual gatherings. They ratchet up tension, which in the end will lead to a destabilization of the regime.

As we know from experience, however, public opinion can influence the situation during such power vacuums. That is why in cases like the dispersal of the anarchist/antifa May Day demonstration in Petersburg or the arrest of seminar participants in Nizhny we need a consolidated public outcry against the actions of the authorities.

Chronicles of Perestroika

This film by Dmitry Vilensky is intended to be viewed before Perestroika Songspiel (see below). Vilensky turned two hours of archive footage into sixteen minutes of video. This footage of demonstrations in Leningrad during perestroika (1987-1991) was provided by the Petersburg Documentary Film Studio. The filmmaker is especially grateful to the unknown cameramen who recorded these unique moments in history, as well as to Sergei Gelver, who has preserved this priceless archive.

The soundtrack was composed by Mikhail Krutikov.

Perestroika Songspiel (After the Victory Over the Coup)

The action of the film unfolds on August 21, 1991, after the victory over the restorationist coup. On this day of unprecedented popular uplift it seemed that democracy had won a final victory in the Soviet Union and that the people should and would be able to build a new, just society. How did our heroes see that society? This is the question we try to answer in our film.

The film is structured like an ancient tragedy: its dramatis personae are divided into a chorus and a group of five heroes. Our heroes are key types generated by the perestroika era, each of them with a particular vision of his/her role in history: a democrat, a businessman, a revolutionary, a nationalist, and a feminist. They act and they dream. They analyze their actions, their place in society, and their vision of the country’s political path. The chorus is the incarnation of public opinion. It makes moral judgments on our heroes and it foresees their futures, as if it were gazing on the proceedings from the present day.

The film analyzes the specific configuration of forces during this supremely important historical moment of contemporary history. It critiques political naïveté while also showing how difficult it is for people to realize their vision of the future together.

The screenplay is based on our reading of documents and eyewitness accounts of the perestroika period.

For more reflection on the meaning of perestroika today, see Chto Delat No. 19, What Does It Mean to Lose? The Experience of Perestroika, where you’ll also find the complete screenplay of the film.

We invite all PEOPLE who do give a fuck about the wild outburst of neo-Nazism in its most disgusting forms; PEOPLE who have noticed how the new fascists have been transformed from pimple-faced pubescents in high, thick-soled boots into quick-witted, well-read champion athletes; PEOPLE who, nevertheless, have not stopped feeling disgust when they encounter THESE fascists; PEOPLE who do give a fuck that war and hunger have come to visit and are sitting on your couch with you and drinking your last cup of green tea; PEOPLE who do give a fuck that art has been turned into a cheap inside joke; PEOPLE who are fucking tired of being made to laugh.

IT’S NOT FUNNY ANYMORE.

* * * * * * *

Bearing the declaratively uncompromising, angry title NOFUCKINFUNNY, Nikolai Oleinikov’s new show opens the season at the Paperworks Gallery. The ten gouaches and one album on display here are models of traditional, even somewhat naïve, easel art; on the other hand, they are quasi-comics whose content is one part radical politics, one part existential philosophy.

Pen and brush stroke, just like the impressive dimensions of the pieces (from 1.5 x 1.2 meters to 1.5 x 2 meters), do not operate here as attributes of “mastery” in the classical, religious sense of the word. Neither are they effects of “technique,” which in contemporary art compensates and forestalls the absence of “mastery.” Mastery, as sacred title, and technique, as its capitalized, fetishistic substitute, retreat before the texture and facticity of the artist’s labor. The word labor, which had almost been consigned to oblivion, acquires new life and recuperates its purloined honor. Oleinikov as it were solicitously dusts off Soviet agit-posters, thus reminding us of the proletarian element in art. And, although there is painterliness and polish in his images, there is also something in them that is profoundly unpleasant to bourgeois taste.

The chief unpleasantness has to do with the utterances that Oleinikov puts in the mouths of his characters. First, however, we should say something about these characters themselves. As the artist himself confesses, most of them are “handicapped” beings: animals, half-animals, children, and chimeras. The last of these remind us not only of Goya’s Caprichos, but also of the martyred monsters of mythology. Thus, for all his monstrousness and physical strength, the Minotaur is lacking in wit, and that is why the hero Theseus is able to kill it. On the contrary, a lack of cleverness—animal stubbornness—is likewise a token of another type of strength. The Minotaur can only be killed: you cannot change its mind.

The man-dog (who does not merely criticize but wholly rejects the style of worldly-wise sarcasm so popular on the art scene) and the beautiful man-bird with the face of a young man (who tells an exceedingly odd tale of self-immolation) are heroes who lack the sense of humor that enables ordinary folks to glide lightly over the surface of things. However, they can talk: as is the case with Kafka’s animals, the insolubility of painful contradictions helps them to acquire language. That is why there really is nothing “fucking funny” in their speech. If it does reserve a place for laughter, this laughter is unfunny. It is the devastating laughter that is generated from the abyss between words and things, whose depth is revealed to the animal’s gaze despite the fact that man showers it with hypocritical jokes or simple lies.

Talking animals (or half-animals) are an important motif in Oleinikov’s work. These include a bird going through passport control before boarding an airplane (the show 3 Albums, 2007); monumental, life-sized horses who discuss the pros and cons of involvement in the contemporary art system (Stall, 2008) (paradoxically, Kommersant’s reviewer failed to “notice” them); and the wolf-girls in the latest issue of Chto Delat newspaper.

Nikolai Oleinikov is an active member of the group that publishes the newspaper. The issue in question, which deals with perestroika, was “accidentally” confiscated during a police search of the printing plant. The little wolf-headed girls depicted in the newspaper personify the elemental forces of history—that is, they are the sum total of all such “accidents.” On the other hand, they remind us that history also has a subject.

Chimeras are not the only heroes in Oleinikov’s new series. Under the portrait of a second-grader (white collar, ribbons in her hair, an Octoberist’s star pinned on her school uniform) we read the following caption: “The only war that I’d go fight without a second’s thought is a war against fascists.” The directness of adult speech from the mouths of babes is a manifestation of the selfsame method that, despite the seeming laughableness of the exposition, turns the works into the antitheses of jokes.

The theme of children in Oleinikov’s work also has a history. For him, the child is a militant, a revolutionary. The child wages a secret struggle against authority and capital—like the boys in the album Battle Against the Background (2008), or the girl ballerinas from the show Phantom Brigade (2008). The child fights militarism and fascism—all those things that “adults” find it “funny” to fight. The characters in yet another album—a young woman and a young man—spend a pleasant evening drinking beer in a café and turn out to be ordinary . . . fascists. (Their conversation happened in real life: the artist overheard it and recorded it in full.)

Human speech in the body of the animal and adult speech in the body of the child remind us of the absurd, contradictory nature of subjectivity. Its emergence and maintenance doesn’t just happen; it requires superhuman effort. The secret lies in the fact that, while these characters can speak, they cannot lie. That is why their utterances are artless, crude, naïve or “improper.” And that is why they are pronounced by beings who, by virtue of their weakness, are forgiven these lapses.

“My heroes,” says Oleinikov, “can’t help admitting their weakness (they’re not idiots!), but they also can’t hold back their rage. They understand that rage is futile, but they nevertheless stand their ground to the end.” That is, they obey the ethical imperative proposed by Alain Badiou: to find “that point from which it is possible to think and act” and “to hold that point come what may.” According to Badiou, this means “forcing the human animal inside us into becoming a subject.”

—Oxana Timofeeva, philosopher