A few weeks ago, as part of our thematic cluster Disappearing, we published the first part of Anastasia Spirenkova’s reflections on the culture of silence in contemporary Russia. She has dealt with the forms, the causes, and the consequences of the extensive social silence that accompanies the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the second part of her essay, Spirenkova focuses on more and less prominent examples of recent Russian actionism. She asks to what extent the practice of artists like Pussy Riot, Piotr Pavlensky, or Darya Serenko breaks the silence but also elevates it to the status of an ethic or mode of action. How can art succeed in initiating dialogue, exchange, and dissent in a public that has been as battered and restricted as Russia’s?
During the twenty one court hearings of Pussy Riot’s “Punk prayer” case in the summer of 2012, several Russian media outlets simultaneously transmitted text broadcasts from the courtroom in Moscow. Those reports and the transcripts of the statements by the prosecution and all the witnesses it called up became a part of art history; the entire discursive environment in all its ridiculousness around “Punk Prayer” prolonged the artistic action. The more people were testifying, talking, or writing about the performance, the longer the actionist art piece continued. A candlewoman at Christ the Saviour Cathedral, giving testimony about the actions of the members of the art group, described them as “bouncing, clear, well-planned bouncing,” while another statement claimed that “Punk Prayer” “conflates in a pejorative manner for Christian believers the image of Our Lady with the ideology of feminism, negatively assessed by the Russian Orthodox Church.”
At first sight the movement of Russian actionism, or as some scholars may call it—intervention, activist art, or performance art—does not lie in the dimension of words and/or silence because their very center is the action itself. However, it seems that within actionism communicative patterns and the role of silence has been reconsidered. This prolonged process of communication marked, as Sylvia Chassaing and Pavel Mitenko pointed out, an ethical turn in the third wave of Russian actionism behind the notion of a “heroic” and solitary artist figure.
In July 2012 Piotr Pavlensky appeared in front of Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Supporting Pussy Riot before the verdict in their trial, he held up a poster with a Bible quote referring to the cleansing of the Temple. He meant to show the actual position of contemporary artists in Russia and, more specifically, “the interdiction of glastnost” (Artchronika, 2012)—the impossibility of free speech. However, art historian Sarah Wilson saw it as a religious reference and wrote that his “protest inevitably recalls Christ’s silence before his accusers” (2017). This performance, titled The Seam, became the first action for Pavlensky and was a starting point for his reflections on silence. He continued to use his body as a tool and to remain silent during and beyond his artistic actions—and also in court. Pavlensky was detained and prosecuted after each new art action, was sentenced for “vandalism” and “destruction or damage to cultural heritage” and forced to undergo several psychiatric evaluations. Pavlensky called his practice the rule of the figure of silence (figura umolchania).
If you stick to the rule of the figure of silence and don’t give a response to the authorities, there should be no interaction there.
Piotr Pavlensky
“It’s enough to mark the figure of silence. And the situation itself is constructed around this silence. Because the police, the ambulance, or just the people who would attack me or whatever—they are all part of the social body. Something happens, rejection is also an interaction. […] I talk to everybody in the same way. I talk to journalists, to psychiatrists, to investigators in the same way. There are certain rules of how it all works out. If you stick to the rule of the figure of silence and don’t give a response to the authorities, there should be no interaction there. I remain static, and the moment the action phase ends, when ‘the doors are closed,’ then I start talking, and talking to everyone in the same way. I don’t make a difference between a journalist to whom I will tell everything and, for example, an investigator,” Pavlensky explained. For him, silence became a tool to break usual communicative patterns, a way to change the narrative of power and/or society. The effect this actually had was especially visible during such bureaucratic procedures as interrogations and court hearings: “The whole court is built on regulations. I declare a rule of silence in court and it starts to work on the judge. Everything acts together: the case and the position, because it is no longer the daily conveyor belt of judicial proceedings. The anxiety forces the judge to think. The police are also forced to think during actions. They are confronted every time with situations that are atypical for their kind of authority” (Pavlensky, 2016).
At the same time, Pavlensky also tried to initiate discussions about his art during the hearings. He invited sex workers as witnesses to the trail and had them discuss and evaluate the art action “The Freedom,” in which he participated with other activists. On 23 February 2014, the national day of Defender of the Fatherland, they constructed a barricade out of car tires, metal sheets, and sticks on Maly Konyushenny Bridge with a black anarchist flag and a Ukrainian flag. They burned the pile and started banging sticks on metal sheets in order to recreate the atmosphere at the Maidan uprising that had just finished in Kyiv. During the investigation Pavlensky started a dispute on art with his interrogator Pavel Yasman. After these exchanges with Pavlensky, Yasman decided to leave his job in the Investigation Committee and became a civil rights defender/lawyer. However, Pavlensky’s attempts to give the floor to people who usually are not expected to talk and dispute about art ran contrary to his practice of the “figure of silence”—a practice he reserved for those in power.
Over the course of time and the acceptance of new repressive laws in Russia, the country’s public space shrank significantly. Not only the artistic actions between 2010 and 2012 but also the massive political protests of those years became harder and harder to imagine. The only form of political protest that didn’t require a preliminary permission from the authorities were forms of solitary, individual striking or protesting. In March 2016 the artist, poet, and feminist Darya Serenko decided to transform this form of protest and started the project “Silent Picket” (“Tikhiy Piket” — “Tikhiy” comes from “tishina”—the absence of sounds—as mentioned in Part I of this essay). It has been active for over a year and has attracted over 800 participants from 25 countries. Recently, with the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was reactivated. The principle is that participants take a hand-made poster with them and move around the city without changing their everyday routine. In other words, they start a moveable picket. Sometimes the poster is made directly by the participant during a ride on the underground or during a walk. The posters contain mainly text, sometimes small diagrams or graphics, and focus on different social issues. The text can contain poems or quotes from various authors, extracts from statistics on a particular topic or informative references. Anyone who is nearby and takes notice of the sign may become a recipient of the “silent picket.” The participants of the action then describe the various people’s reactions on social media by adding the tag #silentpicket ( #тихийпикет ).
The basic principle of the participants of #silentpicket was not to be the first to engage in conversation and not to force people to react or communicate. As Serenko explains in the book on the practice, “we were silent until we were asked or approached with a clearly questioning gesture <…> we transferred the communicative initiative to those who wanted a dialogue from us.” The addressee’s reaction could be non-verbal (laughter, gesture, silence, facial expression), physical (taking a sign in hand to see the text up close; taking a picture of the poster; redrawing the sign; trying to take the sign away, trying to destroy the sign; looking for information online after reading the sign; shaking hands; offering flowers), or verbal (from a short remark to long dialogues). During the artistic action, participants tried out different discursive formats. Sometimes the text of the sign could be changed during the artistic action after a conversation with one of the recipients. Serenko’s practice of “silent picketing” turns silence into a catalyst for communication, albeit not necessarily a verbal one. The poster “catches” a passer-by in everyday circumstances. The respondent is thus often isolated from the usual interpretative patterns triggered by reading an advertisement, a political slogan at a demonstration, where one sees an expected content in expected circumstances. With “silent picket” there is also a rare chance to see and possibly to communicate with the author of the statement. And unlike observing the protester with a poster, the environment for possible communication is calm and routine. Here the ball is always in the recipient’s court who is the only initiator of a verbal or non-verbal exchange. But what do they receive?
It’s important to underline that “silent picket” participants do not provoke a conversation and do not put any pressure on bystanders, but by being silent themselves, the participants create the conditions for communication. In a Russian society that suffers from “public numbness syndrome” (Vakhtin, Firsov 2017)—a lack of public speaking skills and an inability to talk without having a predetermined outcome of communication—there are no tools and forms for a calm discussion of social problems anymore. So when an ordinary numb citizen randomly meets a silent person, who doesn’t push them into a discussion, a new and profound form of communication may begin. Silence becomes the soil on which words and new communication can grow. Although the “silent picket” takes place in public places among other people, the action manages to establish a safe space. The situation is similar to a scene from a film in which the hero suddenly tells his companion his whole life story. If you reply to the silence of an activist with a poster in the metro train, your exchange about any social issue will stay paradoxically private.
Silence is often opposed to voicing. For Russian actionists of the last decade, voicing turned into a fundamental issue. Prisoners, ethnic minorities, domestic violence survivors, and—since the start of the Covid pandemic—delivery workers, nurses, and pharmacists, all needed to get beyond the fence of silence. Recent actions by Katrin Nenasheva – “Cargo 200,” “Quarrel with me,” by “Ugly [women]” (Urodiny), “Protest botany” – no longer state the absurdity, pain, and hopelessness of the current socio-political situation, but become a catalyst for conversation, placing different social groups in the zone of visibility, taking them out of the fog of silence.
“When the living are silent, the dead are left to talk.”
Party of the Dead
“When the living are silent, the dead are left to talk,” says one of the posters of the Party of the Dead. Back in 2017 a group of artists understood that there is a huge group deprived from speaking—the dead. Through the statements of the dead as a social group, the artists managed to point out the problems of the living. The artists chose the dead as the ones who cannot speak anymore for obvious reasons. Here again we see an example of an unexpected message from an unexpected speaker. Moreover, there is a change of roles: the dead take a burden of speaking from the living ones, while the living keep silent, remain depressed and lost.
Silence goes hand in hand with absence. If we take it to mean the absence of words, silence could be marked with different signs or just erasure. First thing that comes to mind is obviously a wide palette of censorship—absent pieces of text in published books, edited documents, and so on. However, sometimes it’s not the exact word that may be absent, but a person or a project. After mass dismissals or suspensions of numerous cultural workers who opposed the war in Ukraine, their names simply disappeared from the websites of theaters, museums, and other institutions. The Moscow Art Theater (MKhT) went even further; management decided to identify its director simply as “director” instead of giving a name. This kind of practice would be challenging for historians. As Maxim Gorky wrote in a recurring phrase through the text of his novel “The life of Klim Samgin” (1927-1931): “Was there a boy, maybe there was no boy at all?”
“Was there a boy, maybe there was no boy at all?”
Maxim Gorky
In the Stalin era a sudden absence, or, to be more precise, disappearance, was common practice. Starting from a physical one—by assassination, to the disappearance of any paper trace left by a person—faces erased from photographs, pages torn from encyclopedias and books. This illustration of the scale of terror is brilliantly described and shown in the book and exhibition “The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia” by David King.
According to Daria Apakhonichich, artist, educator, feminist, and co-founder of {rodina} (*motherland) art group, to have a “successful” artistic action you need “the physical presence in the political arena, the credibility of the audience and the risk that makes a statement real, valuable.” This may be a problem for those Russian artists who decided to leave the country at the start or during the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Technically speaking, no one mutes or deprives you abroad and your silence may seem less significant even if it is well “placed” aesthetically. And the people who need voicing are left behind in Russia, which makes it harder to establish communication and transmit the message of the deprived. However Boris Groys, in his interview for Holod, supposes that emigration gets an artist out of the confrontation “for or against,” but at the same time he admits that he doesn’t yet see anything fundamentally new, and he reminds us that “anti-war art did not emerge in the warring countries until after the war had ended”.
Silence can be used as a tool to break a usual communicative pattern, even to change communicative roles between the artist and a spectator bringing the latest Russian actionism from a dialogue with the power to horizontal and participatory art. Now Russian silence floats in space and time as its former “voices,” who are emigrating or hiding, are still figuring out what message their art could convey—assuming it would be appropriate at all—and to whom it should be addressed.
