Publications
CAT. Monstration
By Sandra Frimmel
The actions of the group CAT (Contemporary Art Terrorism) founded in Novosibersk in 2003 by Maksim Neroda, Ekaterina Drobyševa and Artem Loskutov and active until 2006) could be understood as interventions in urban space. These actions were supposed to reclaim urban space as a platform for artistic and political expression- a new and topical strategy compared to the Soviet Union where public space was reserved solely for official political propaganda and artistic actions took place either in private space or in nature.
Their art sought to be ‘timely’ (russ. CBOeBPeMeHHO), as opposed to ‘contemporary’ (russ. COBPeMeHHO)-1. “Timely art has no author. Its body is the communication between members inside the group”, as it is described in the Statement about Timely Art-2 : “Its work is the external results of this communication. Artworks of ‘timely art’ have no material value, but are made up of the information which the viewer is given about alternative functional mechanisms in society [...]. [...] ‘Timely art’ is political art. [...] ‘Timely art’ elevates claims to its presence and to its involvement in the art of shaping people’s lives.”
An example of an action which is ‘timely art’ is a humorous protest action against the introduction of student fees in 2004. A banner with the slogan “Learn, learn and keep learning,” a quote from Lenin, was placed before the base of the Lenin memorial in Novosibersk. The police removed the banner and arrested the artists on a charge of disturbing public order. When asked who was the initiator of the action, CAT replied that it was Lenin himself. They had only brought together what belonged together - the quotation and its source.
In a series of Monstrations from 2004 on, which can be understood as counterparts to the classical May Day demonstrations, individual banners with apolitical, often poetic or non-rational slogans were used: “Catch the Stallion”, “Where am I?”, “I’m for it”, “Down with the Exploitation of Siberian Wildlife in Contemporary Art”, or a simple white line on a red ground.-3 Even before the banners for the 2004 Monstration could be unfurled they were already accused of being “anti-globalist Solutions”, and in connection with the Monstration the members of CAT were arrested and sentenced to pay a fine.
In the actions of CAT there is an unmistakable echo of Joseph Beuys and his idea of social sculpture where every individual can deal creatively to contribute to the good of society and have a formative influence. But in the specific context of Russian society, where participatory democracy is a practically unknown concept, CAT repeatedly came into conflict with the law, or at least with what the authorities considered this to be. In some cases they were acquitted; in others sentenced to fines, which CAT paid, ironically, as part of an artistic action: The Penalty Has Big Eyes, 2004. The city became an exhibition space and the Russian bureaucratic structure was transformed, unwillingly, into a medium for exposing the functional incapability and absurdity of the political power structure in today’s Russia. In addition, the media, especially television, was usually on site for the actions and reported on them, providing support and even protection to CAT.
The exhibition CAT. Monstration documents actions on the borderline between art and lawbreaking, with the accompanying police and juridical documents and reports from the mass media to demonstrate under exactly which circumstance art becomes a crime.
Sandra Frimmel
For the exibition “Art and Law I: CAT. Monstration”
20.02.2009 - 29.03.2009 in Art Laboratory Berlin
1 - This pun functions in Russian through the switching of a few letters.
2 - Dekret über die rechtzeitige Kunst (A Statement about Timely Art). In: http://www.cat-group.info/dekret_deu.html.
3 - “Down with the Exploitation of Siberian Wildlife in Contemporary Art!”, refers to the boom in use of Russia clichés such as alcoholism or brutality by western curators; the white line on a red ground calls to mind the work Ideal Slogan, 1972, by the artist duo Vitalij Komar and Aleksandr Melamid.
Denke global, handle idiotisch
Alternative Kunst aus Nowosibirsk
Von Viktoria Balon
Für die jungen Aktionskünstler aus den sibirischen Metropolen ist die Stadt Bühne, Akteur und Zuschauer zugleich. Die Gruppe “Die Omi nach dem Begräbnis”, die ursprünglich “Contemporary Art Terrorism” hieß, bezieht beispielsweise einen fahrenden U-Bahn-Wagen und eine Amtsstelle der russischen Luftwaffe in ihre Performance ein.
Auch Denkmäler des Sozialismus, politische Kundgebungen und Jahrestage werden von den Künstlern gerne als Anlass und Teil ihrer Aktionen genutzt. Als die Aktionskünstler sich einer Demonstration zum 1. Mai mit der Parole “Gehirne für das Volk” anschlossen, wurden sie vorübergehend festgenommen. Durch Brüskierung und Provokation zwingen die jungen Wilden ihre meist auf Patriotismus und ökonomischen Aufstieg eingeschworenen Zuschauer, eigene Positionen zum Zustand der russischen Gesellschaft zu beziehen: “Es kann nur eine Antwort auf den unendlich vielfältigen Appetit der Macht geben: Die Zukunft gehört unserem Lachen!”
More: www.dradio.de
BU GA GA!
Junge Aktionskünstler aus Nowosibirsk
Von Viktoria Balon
„Sibirien ist JaMAIka“, „Spülen Sie, wenn Sie fertig sind!“, „Wo bin ich?“ - Parolen auf einer 1. Mai-Demo in der sibirischen Stadt Nowosibirsk. Merkwürdig? Ja, aber es ist ja auch die „Monstration“, veranstaltet von jungen russischen Aktionskünstlern, die im (normalen) Demonstrations-Zug gleich hinter Kommunisten und Patrioten aller Art marschieren. „BU GA GA!“ skandieren die „Monstranten“ dabei - im Russischen der Laut für ein rohes, wildes, durchaus furchteinflössendes Lachen. „Das Absurde der Macht kann nur mit Absurdem beantwortet werden“, meinen die Aktionskünstler der Gruppe, die sich mal CAT („Contemperary Art Terrorism“), mal „Omas nach dem Begräbnis“ nennt. Die Stadtregierung und die Ordnungshüter finden die „Monstration“ weniger lustig. Wer weiß, was die zahlreichen „Monstranten“ als nächstes tun werden. Denn die wollen der Zwei-Millionen-Stadt Nowosibirsk eine „Kunst-Injektion“ verpassen – und machen bei ihren Aktionen weder vor sozialistischen Denkmälern noch vor U-Bahn-Wagen halt.
More: www.swr.de
On the Question of Self-Organisation in the Arts
CAT-group and Dmitry Vilensky
Newspaper “What is to be done?”
No. 10 “How do politics begin?”, Part I
The CAT group was founded in Novosibirsk in 2003 by the sociologist Ekaterina Drobysheva, the artist Maxim Neroda, and the political activist Artem Loskutov. The group became known through the organization of an entire series of actions in urban space.These include “Monstration” (2004-2005), an intervention in a Mayday demonstration with absurdist slogans and posters, “Study, Study, and Study Again” (2004), a street-party in defense of free education, which took around a monument to Lenin, or “Freedom, Equality, Piracy” (2004), the blocking of advertising campaigns by circulating and destroying pirate productions.
Diagnosis
In contemporary Russia, the existent system of power seems totally incapable of formulating or realizing any consistent cultural policy, just it seems unable to formulate any coherent policy on the whole. Nevertheless, it constantly imposes the chimera of the necessity for unity with the state. In order to do so, it continuously promotes and demonizes the image of a certain outer or inner enemy, be it terrorism, orange revolution, or the aggression of U.S. foreign policy, geared toward conquering and dividing our country etc. All of this takes place against the realization – growing more and more massive – that the state is a reality of its own right, alienated from the people, more and more reminiscent of a criminal organization who bosses are interested in nothing but holding on to their present positions, since these position guarantee huge financial profits for catering to someone else’s business interests. To this state, the interests of society’s development seem like some vexatious misunderstanding, only to be taken into consideration when buying electoral votes in yet another carded election. If one directs one’s attention to the fact that a huge, constantly growing percentage of the population either votes against the representatives of power or doesn’t vote at all, it becomes completely incomprehensible in whose name this power continues to function.
The situation in culture
The mediocrity and open corruption of cultural officials, their obvious servility toward both power/capital and the new consumer-audience (based on the principle of “what would you care for?”) has had an even more disasterous effect on the collapse of cultural production that the catastrophic lack of funding, which is stolen systematically. The cult of kickbacks and the economy of “absorption and embezzlement” have become the norm: this is something that even Russia’s Minister of Culture has acknowledged in public. This atmosphere has given rise to a new official culture, a design-hybrid for public spaces and living-rooms. In fact, the opposition between the “public” and the “private” has almost been lifted completely: everything has been privatized to an equal measure, subordinate to its new owner’s interests and under guard by a huge army of cops. A privatized amusement park: this is the new name of contemporary culture, once it has been become a sphere in which weak-mindedness is not only tolerated but actually encouraged, growing fat on the oil-dollar of a self-satisfied, aggressive class of new consumers.
As not only recent experiences in Russia but also in other countries of peripheral capitalism have shown (the Moscow Biennale or the opening of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest), the sporadic intervention of the global art scene into local situations – called into being with the goal of proving (interesting question, to whom?) that everything is following “normal democratic procedures” – only serve to magnify the disorientation. The ensuing alliance between the local bureaucracy and international star-functionaries on tour is monstrous, compactly demonstrating the entire cynicism of the events as they transpire. Everyone is called upon to mobilize their forces as quickly as possible to build yet another global Potemkin’s village under the slogan “A minimum of analysis, a maximum of events”, and asked to forget that some completely other life lies elsewhere, beyond the picket fence that is being nailed together so hastily.
Times of Reaction and Hope
In this situation, the majority of artists and cultural producers find themselves cut off from the most elementary mechanisms of decision-making, destined to an existence in poverty. Their disorientation is a direct consequence of process that are taking place in real politics. At the same time, the absence of any kind of political consciousness, the high level of conformism and susceptibility to the seduction offered by “the market’s endless possibilities” have played their reactionary role. But by today, more and more people are coming to realize that we are living in a reactionary time: there is no hope that things will change for the better on their own, not for you personally, and not for society at large. Of course, there will be changes: the world that surrounds us will take on more and more monstrous forms if we aren’t able to organize our activities. In other words, the question of self-organization becomes the central question of political life and cultural production, all the more because we still have many open possibilities at our disposal.
“…The system of the commodity production encompasses all of life; anticipating each and every one of our movements, it considers all of our potential needs and desires from cradle to grave. We go to school in order to pay for our education, we fall in love because our local mobile phone company has opened up a new tariff for two. Our bodies move according to the wants and needs of our boss. Our history has already been sold off like a cut-price article. We dream of Benneton and MTS. We are monsters of commodity culture. On Mayday, we will show ourselves as what we are; we will demand the impossible.”
From the “Monstration” Manifesto
“…constant novelty – the race of armed societies based on the overproduction of goods – defines the social demand that contemporary art is meant to satisfy. A highly developed society is in need of intellectual values that confirm its reality, leading to the constant production of new package-deals, conservative reinforcements of its lifestyle. However, this reality doesn’t satisfy everyone. The avantgarde has never defined itself through the novelty of its achievements alone. We plan to create our own reality, a reality that is impossible in the system of commodity exchange.”
Maxim Neroda, “Cultural Violence”
Questions
Dmitry Vilensky: Is it possible to reclaim public spaces and the spaces of the information media? Or is the tactic with the most potential not the infiltration of existing structures, but the invention of new public spaces – fanzines, exhibition-venues, actions, and interventions into urban space and cultural institutions? And should we rest satisfied, once we have asserted the rights of limited sub-cultural zones and the seeming independence of cultural production, or does it make sense to take the offensive by constantly discrediting the projects of power, publicly demonstrating their bankruptcy and idiocy?
CAT: How is it possible to create a space for communication beyond the established rules? By capturing spaces, or to be more precise, unexpected ruptures and breaks that arise within a system of relationships whose traditions, norms and sanctions are already firmly entrenched. Today’s ban on collective action in any space that the state sees as public gives rise to a new form of subcultural logic: it is only possible to create alternative values in the framework of a certain sub-culture that is stamped off as marginal a priori, relegated to the format of a membership club. The freedom of thought and action is only granted in word, and any statement that doesn’t correspond to the course of power is declared to be untrue, fated to realization in no place other than the underground. In the framework of such prohibition, the necessity for a collective experience of reality is realized through a large variety of recreational activities, such as flash-mobs, graffitti, club-culture etc. – which are forms of escapsism, refusing any radical conceptualization of reality and representing a fictional autonomy of culture.
How can one get beyond the boundaries of self-sufficient autonomy?
By forming artistic groups capable of collaborating in producing situations in various public spaces, including those under control by power. For us, it was important to create situations that reveal the absurdity of the present order of things. Art is capable of reaching society at large, demonstrating the hidden principles through which power is implemented, creating and preparing a smart mob, i.e. an intelligent crowd.
DV: Which possibilities do we have for addressing a public that differs from the traditional audience radically in terms of its social origin or class composition?How can one mobilize this public to understand itself as a new political subject, empowering it as a co-author or an interlocutor in discussions and action undertaken in common?
CAT: Our work allots a decisive role to a social group new to Novosibirsk, namely young creative professionals. Today, a new proletariat is in the process of forming, even if this proletariat now owns its means of production (computers, video-cameras etc.) and sells the results of its labor and not its labor-force. Our work designates this constantly growing group, which includes designers, managers, radio-hosts, and journalists – people engaged in intellectual labor – as its primary political subject. For now, these people are not yet capable of gauging their own political potential or recognizing their common interests. But to us, it seems – and this is something the experience gathered in our actions confirms – that it is this group that is ready to take an active part in developing a new political language to express its interests. These people are capable of rejecting the self-sufficient systems of subcultural values and turning to forms of communication that bear a principal meaning to them.
Mobilization become possible through organization. Take, for an example, actions in public space, in which each participant becomes an active co-creator. First and foremost, these happenings actualize the sense of collective actions, provoking power into action, bringing its hidden repressive essence to the forefront.
DV: Is the self-organization of artists and cultural producers capable of becoming a model for a society that is able to formulate and realize its goals independently from power? Can it take over the functions of an alternate power, applying pressure to real power and remaining open to interaction with society at the same time?
CAT: Self-organization arises due to alienation from the results of one’s labor, which is constantly appropriated by mediators, bosses, and institutions. It is also the result of the complete impossibility of affecting political life. Our primary intention has been to explore the possibilities of communication and forming our own space outside of the framework of cultural institutions, because they embody the anti-humanist, corporate model for organizing society. Today, association beyond their dehumanizing boundaries is the only possible means of political resistance to the powers that be. However, art is not directly concerned with constructing society’s relations in practical terms; instead, it formulates the possibilities for creating a society that is radically different from what we face today. It is only possible to apply pressure to establish self-expanding communicative spaces, which are different from the closed, hierarchical space of power in principle. The goal of the communication that we have initiated leads to discussion in open urban spaces: a direct action as an answer to power’s direct pretense to the truth. It is only in this way that we can attempt to influence the balance between power and counter-power: communication through networks of groups and individuals which assume an absence of hierarchy can be understood as an experiment and an event that falls beyond the scope of the system of contemporary art, leading to its destruction in the ideal.
DV: Which role do DIY strategies play in contemporary art? What is their specificity?
CAT: Actually, the methods behind creating flash-mobs can be interpreted as a new set of DIY practices. We have worked with these practices extensively. In contrast to the traditional flash-mob, in which all roles, behaviors and gestures are defined by its organizers, our model of organizing actions was based upon the idea of allowing the participants to take a maximum of initiative. Our invitations only defined a number of basic conditions for their execution and little more, for an example: “Everyone who wants to should make a slogan that is completely meaningless”, as in “Monstration”, for an example. The entire project of politicizing the flash-mob was invented as an artistic strategy that is only possible if each participant does everything him- or herself. In this sense, the main message that we meant to convey through our actions was that each person can be perceived as an artist, but that the only kind of creativity accessible to everyone is to create their own history, instead of living it out in passivity.
“Antiglobalist slogan” or what is a political demonstration today?
By Alexei Pensin
Newspaper “What is to be done?”
No. 13 “Culture and Protest”
I wasn’t here, - we wanted to set up our demonstration here, - but it didn’t work!
There were too few of us then. But come this year! You’ll see!
M. Gorky, “Mother”
The Sormov demonstration of 1902 was one of the first political mass mayday demonstrations in pre-revolutionary Russia. On May 1st, half of all the Sormov factory’s worker went on strike. Demonstrators carried slogans like “Away with Autocracy!.” “All Hail to Political Freedom!” The police tried to break up the gathering, but met serious resistance. When troops arrived, the demonstrated began to sing “You Have Become Victims,” a revolutionary funeral march. A worker named Zalomov stepped forward to meet the soldiers, raising a red flag. He was arrested immediately. Troops and police began beating and arresting workers en masse. Six people were sentenced to life long exile in Siberia. The newspaper Iskra published the workers’ speeches with a foreword by Lenin. Maxim Gorky described the demonstration in his novel “Mother.”
The forms of protest that exist today – meetings, demonstration, walk-outs, strikes, hunger-strikes – were invented and reinvented throughout the many decades of the international movement on the left. By today, however, it has become a commonplace to note just how small and ineffective such traditional forms of protest have become. International experiments in reinventing the tactics and struggles of struggle in the wake of the “Seattle movement” have not been taking place for very long, and remain largely theoretical to Russia’s left. Obviously, recent changes in the techniques of struggle take place in parallel to the structural transformation of social production. This gives rise to the following question or difficulty: which forms of resistance do our – post-Soviet (post-Fordist) - conditions require?
In the history of the left, there are many famously piercing analyses of questions of political organization: the problem of parties, “revolutionary organizations,” soviets were discussed extensively by Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, and many others. However, a number of practices that seem so obvious, simple and attractive today, gained far less attention. At the same time, the ongoing weakening of struggle (in its massive forms) reveals the material character of how elementary political practices are organized. Let us take the wide-spread protest form of the demonstration as an example. The demonstration is a movement along the street of a capitalist cities, a kinetic embodiment of the demand for social change. However, the traditional assumption is that a demonstration is a transparent representation or expression of ideas, moods, or affects of activist groups. Their number is proportional to the weight of the phenomenon they “represent” and the effect they have on power.
Today, demonstrations are probably the dominant form of public activity that the post-Soviet left resorts to. But let us briefly look at what contemporary demonstrations actually entail. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and similar organizations – reassembled remainders of the Soviet system, which obviously are not part of the leftist movement - stage meetings that draw crowds. As a rule, these demonstrations have a ritualistic quality, reproducing the style of pompous celebrations in the summer of “triumphant socialism” as a pitiful farce. Demonstrations by some activist groups seem to present a more positive picture. However, their “chamber” quality – in all senses of the word – cannot be ignored. They have the symbolic-ritual function of minimal representation: the leftist tradition still exists here, and there are still a few people who shares its ideas under the conditions of neo-liberal, ex-Soviet regimes, with all their anti-communist reflexes and their mind-numbing propaganda. This gives rise to the assumption that this or that form of organizing protest does not only have an instrumental quality, but a meaning as such.
A small number of artists who have politicized their critical work, as well as some activist groups help us to identify the problem of the political demonstration’s meaning as such more clearly. Let us name a few examples: street parties like “Ours 2000,” held a few years ago, famous actions such as those by the Radek Community (a “demonstration” staged at a pedestrian crossing, as well as their “hunger strike without demands”), or the current popularity of the parallel Mayday “Monstration,” organized by a group of activists and artists in Novosibirsk. “Monstration.” It is enough to collect and quote the hilarious slogans on its posters and banners to convince oneself that the form of this event is different from that of its predecessors.
1. Expressions and incoherent exclamations of a singularly disoriented subjectivity: “Who’s there?,” “Where am I?,” “I broke down!,” “I want!,” “I’ve been drinking for four days!,” “Is there anyone here except for me?,” “I’m looking at myself,” “A-A-A!”, “I-i-i-ng,” “Fu,” “Cked, “ENAYB,” or “Oh well…”
2. Meta-descriptions of what could be written on posters: “Banner,” “Message of Love and Peace,” “Antiglobalist Slogan.”
3. Absurd syntagma from the world of contemporary information technologies: “404 NOT FOUND,” or “Read me.”
4. Parodies on the form of “wise judgements”: “Gentleness is the best attachment,” “Not eggs paint people, but people paint eggs!,” “Life is candy,” “Reality is the destiny of the gods,” “A magnet-girl can survive in the metro for 8 years.”
5. Tautological or meaningless calls for action: “No colonization of Mars!,” “All hail to the robots!,” “May we May!”, “Peace, Labor, MayA,” “Give the earth to the farmers and the sky to the aliens!”
6. The installation of fragments of everyday speech onto surfaces of banners and placards: “Closed for business,” “Milk?,” “Catch the stallion,” “Wash up after yourself,” “Somehow like that.”
A gathering of political monads with slogans that are either only potentiality or express nothing at all, save the fragmented universe of anonymous human speech. Is this a demonstration, not as a finite representation, but as a means of liberating movement again, searching for a clean slate or a breach in the steel decorations of fear and disgust?
Maybe we can see the ongoing potentialization of all forms of protest as more than indicators of an icy night that swallows the last sparkles of the past, washing away the figure of Zalomov the worker, stepping out into the sunny morning of May in 1902 to meet the soldiers with a red flag? Maybe they have a value of their own as situations of laughter, joy, thought, and suffering that promise something new? Potentiality is always connected with torture that it is incapable of assuaging. It could be that we can see past our swooning feeling of impotence, confusion, and despair in the face of the immense, idiotic audacity of late capitalism that meets no serious stumbling blocks anywhere, shamelessly spreading to all possible surfaces on the plant, unafraid of being caught off guard, scoffing at the specters of its former enemies, spreading silence and despair. Maybe there is some moment of new, amazingly clear form of intelligent resistance on the horizon? A new form of struggle, a powerful “no” far stronger that the polyphonously asinine “yes” of the global market’s fury?
Alexei Penzin, born 1974 in Novgorod, philosopher, political analyst,
writer, member of the workgroup “What is to be done”. Lives in Moscow
Manifesto of the school for Timely Art*
CAT-group
Schools always teach us to obey our teachers. All schools, colleges, academies, institutes, and universities that teach us to march and walk straight ahead have long since forgotten themselves; they have forgotten where knowledge is to be found. Now, they give us lessons on how to survive contemporaneity, how to outlive the end of history, how to cope with the logic of capital. At school, people learn to make money and how to satisfy their needs.
HISTORY teaches us that it is not we who make it, but YUKOS and Tampax.
GEOGRAPHY teaches us that nature consists of resources and fossil fuels.
BIOLOGY teaches us that life is nothing but a form of existence for protein chains.
PHILOSOPHY teaches us to hate thinking.
CHEMISTRY teaches us the formula of alcohol.
PHYSICS teaches us to calculate the trajectory of an artillery shell.
DRAWING teaches us that we are unable to draw.
Exhibitions are made with money, so that money is all that exhibitions show. Schools teach us to count our net profits, how to write proposals. Society talks to us through a one-way dialogue in the language of money. Schools teach us that we have no language of our own, that our language is the language of Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Mayakovsky. Pushin, Tolstoy, and Mayakovsky have long since been selling Chinese T-shirts on the fleamarket; they now teach the language of trade.
We categorically reject this kind of “dialogue.” We are opening our school for timely art to learn how to speak and to teach others how to speak. Money builds palaces of cultural and castles of content in which the human being plays a secondary role, little more than a precondition for their existence. Humanity has been acquired as money’s second nature. Culture demonstrates the damage the world of commodities has done to humanity, a loss for which there is no recompense. Culture has lost the right to produce truth and beauty. Truth is produced by television and the media; advertising is responsible for beauty. Culture leaves art in the basement.
Our school proclaims that it is time to leave the basement. The School for Timely Art claims the right to produce the truth. Our school manifests timely art that is against the culture of commodities and money. Our school is not a protest; we are not demanding anything; we are opening a new epoch of two-way dialogue. We are the forgotten in this war of coals and mandarins; we are the primordial soup in which a civilized market should develop; we, deserters from the army of culture, proclaim that we have the right to speak. When they tell us that the country needs a strong army instead of creative education, we can only answer by laughing. We won’t only laugh once. We are going to be laughing for a very long time. The future belongs to our laughter!
We will not learn your culture, the CULTURE of making war with peaceful goals, the CULTURE of making weapons of mass destruction, the CULTURE that transmits the truth live on primetime without any right to dissent.
“So what can you offer instead,” says the bureaucrat once again, bloated with cultural consumption, a volume of Pushkin in his pocket.
“Ы-ы-ы-ы-ы-ыть!”** will be the only answer. Pushkin is confined to the prisonhouse of his books, and if he were free, he would scream “ Ы-ы-ы-ы-ы-ыть!” louder than anyone else.
translator’s notes:
*This use of timely is a Russian pun on the proximity of the words sovremenoe (=contemporary) and svoevremenoe (=timely, on-time).
** The neologism Ы-ы-ы-ы-ы-ыть (Y-y-y-y-y-t’, with a soft t like in Chto delat’) is a verb that seems to mime great effort, but also sounds a little like children’s language. It rhymes with vyt’( = to howl),” and byt’ (=to be). There is no good way to translate it, unfortunately.
Decree on Timely Art
CAT-group
Timely art is the art of communities that have not been accounted for, the art of groups that have no language to express the loss that existing culture has done to them.
Timely art is both the acquisition of a language and its transformation. Unrecorded, neglected group do not acquire their language to complain about their loss or to protest.
The self-organized, self-constituting language of unrecorded groups is the claim of a neglected discourse for participation in history and the production of the truth.
Timely art has no author; its body is the communication of its participants within the group; its artwork is the result of exteriorized communication. Works of timely art have no material value; instead, it notifies the spectators of the existence of new principles for the functioning of society, which have come to consciousness through the group. Visiting an exhibition or an action, the spectator inevitably becomes a participant, since authorship spreads to everyone who has accepted its new principle.
Timely art is political art. Timely art claims the right to define truth; as art, it also negates truth as a passive, exoteric circumstance. Timely art claims the right to its global presence in life, and the right to define that life. Timely art’s political demand: “Ы-ы-ы-ы-ы-ыть”!
Timely art is radical art. Culture offers (or fails to offer) us sublime and abstract ideals, but whenever responsible decisions need to be made, culture speaks the language of money. Timely art radically keeps to its own language, which is the objectified movement of subcultures to the formulation of truth.
Timely art expresses the values and interest of intellectual workers. Workers who do not only sell their time, but their thoughts. In the past, the worker sold his labor power, alienating from his labor’s results. Today, the worker sells his ability to think and learns, thus alienating himself from his creativity.
The existence of timely art embodies creative, non-professional self-education, whose goal is not to gain professional skills, and the resulting ability to sell one’s knowledge, but the ability to gain knowledge and to pass it on to others.
Monstration: a semiotic gap
By Katherina Drobysheva and Mikhail Nemtsev
Any street action has its context of expectations and is inscribed in it. Any person lagging from bus-station to an office a person knows in advance a pertinent attitude to a scuffle, mass-mmeting, street musicians` performance or a demonstration.
1st-of-may political demonstration. This action had lost its initial meaning of solidarity-producing action a long time ago, but nas sot some other meanings and senses. The form stays while its content did disappeared. By this ritual the demonstrators convey some meanings absolutely disconnected with each other. United moving produces illusory feeling of unity. Today`s demonstration is full with nostalgia in communal feeling. It does not present a collective action being only a simulacrum of it, just supporting a semblance of a community (We speak here only about 1st-of-May demonstrations in the post-soviet Russia).
“Monstration” grows on the corpus of “ demonstration”.
What about an artistic gesture does not inscribe itself to the logics of this assembled and stable public myth? One cannot leave it aside because it too apparently claims for attention. This is a break of inner harmony, a resident but sensible threat for the convention. It is like a bug in the “Matrix”, but in the very place there traditional action assembled different myths- firstly, myth of demonstration-as-production-of-political-oppositon (with suitable banners) and, secondly, myth of demonstration-as-meeting-of-confederates. A gesture which even in its style cannot be included into these myths finally breaks that fundamental myth of unity. It explodes this place of pre-set (praestabilited) meanings by a deliberately senseless doing.
Every street action is in a sense challenge. The artistic method of “Monstration” consist in penetration into anothers’ action which generally already set ist myth and a tradition of interpretation.
To place an action in a system of pre-set senses and meanings in the most effective way of destroying is subversive potential. It is quite interesting to examine the way how one produce a meaning for a initially meaningless doing. We are interested about the ways how do estimate IT the participants, the “simply people” (strangers, contingent spectators – this sort of persons usually stays least interested in it), the Media, and the most numerous audience getting acquainted with the show via Media.
Different ways of interpretation are equal. The moment of producing of the action produce the aspects of the experiment. The participants get to know about it via Net, arrive, start simultaneous perfomings and evaluatings. They make the meanings of their doing by they own. We never can prearrange it. Of course, the TV spectator make his own meanings for what he see. It is possible to classify these meanings but that is the most interesting aspect of it – it is the process, the mechanism by which the people are forced to estimate and produce the sense and meaning to something without any.
This mechanism is absolutely ideological one. What else can serve as the source for meanings of a new and atypical public action? Thus there is a way to make the ideologies apparent.
One deals here with the process of significant/significance shift, referring to the idea of free circulation of values. This theme was primarily discussed in “semantically oversaturated” societies of the Western Europe. The question is in the ways how to organize the process of this shift in our culture? Maybe one way is to throw-in into the public sphere meaningless and senseless public action.
“Monstration” creates its own myth. It appears as a contingent combination of evaluation, explanation and knowledge of engaged persons. On can compare and see how immediate taking part in it really fill this myth with a joy and feeling of importance of it. This myth begins his own life while the action as it is eludes final estimations, and still stays an open place for fulfilling this gesture (factually gesture of nobody), with any new meaning.
This lack (shortage?) is a challenge of vulnerability in ideological landscape of contemporary city.
Katherina Drobysheva,
Mikhail Nemtsev