THE SPLENDORS AND MISERIES OF MYTHOLOGIES

“Fascism does not only silence people but also forces them to speak.” — Barthes

A man walks into the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, undresses, climbs into a 2,000 years old Roman tomb and begins rubbing himself with a soaped sponge. He washes the symbols of the ruling party “United Russia” off his body. The action is video recorded. He is detained by police, then released.

Hooliganism? A slap in the face of academic art? Actionism? Another one of those Pussy Riot style punk rituals? What is it?

According to the artists, “Unwashed Russia”, performed by Oleg Basov and Irina Dumitskaya of the art collective Blue Rider in September, 2013, symbolized the “need to wash Russia from the filth and dirt of the past.” Pretty straight forward.

Now, according to Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist, philosopher, and linguist, material objects — like a Roman tomb and sponge — become myth in the process of discourse. In Mythologies he shows how objects conveyed and replicated by any type of social discourse, such as written word, photography, film, reporting, sport, shows, publicity, lose their realness. They turn into messages. They form a system of communication. This system is used by the social system as a power tool.

In this article I look at monuments, mummies, rituals, modern sculpture installation, street activism actions, and even the artists and rulers themselves. It is breathtaking. If you watch carefully, they transform into the raw materials for the meat grinder of mythmaking.

As I have shown in my previous article on the subject, SCANDAL: INSANITY ART-LANGUAGE, the infamous “punk prayer” is a perfect example of mythical speech. Here I will use the actions and performances of the art collective BLUE RIDER, a group that was active in St. Petersburg and Moscow in 2013–2014. Due to the draconian laws and threats to artists’ safety and freedom a lot of the BLUE RIDER members had to flee Russia and now seek political asylum in Germany, USA, and elsewhere. PUSSY RIOT, VOINA, BLUE RIDERS are the product of the same epoch and system and speak the same insanity art-language.

Power, Opposition, Oppression, Resistance, National Identity, God, Faith: these concepts are reproduced in various forms and in multitude. The repetition becomes a mechanism of mythmaking critical for the survival and thriving of the existing system.

The system uses modern version of ideology, an organized social myth, to replicate signs and images that do not connect or relate to the reality (just take a good look at the images above) but rather overwhelm and govern it by the principle of confusion.

These signs cover the absence of substance. It’s their main function. In contrast with the classic Marxist ideology that distorts or masks the reality, the modern ideology, or simulacrology, creates self-referential visual and verbal clusterfuck discourse.

It is neither the world of the distorted mirrors reflecting real objects, nor Plato’s allegory of the cave. A mirror labyrinth reflects itself and shields the emptiness that is reality. A ghost paints its own shadow in the mirror. The ghost does not have a reflection. Its shadow does not exist. The mirror is nothing but a silver screen. But by faking presence, the non-being simulates its existence.

The concept is cave-old but here is the twist: driven by a sole intention to maintain its status quo, the Matrix-like world turns to simulacrology for conjuring objects, actions, emotions and interactions that never existed in the first place and gives birth to a shadowy, stillborn, mirrored web of anti-matter. A theater of absurd?

The only way out of this modern nightmare, in my opinion, is through performing the shamanic ritual of the art that creates its own model of life and breaks the myth by using its own mythology.

ROMAN TOMB IN THE HERMITAGE

Now back to our (half)naked artist in the Hermitage, in the ark of the Russian culture and a symbol of the Tsarist power and the grandeur of the Russian Empire.

He climbs into the Roman tomb in the hallway between the Egyptian Art room and Roman gallery — into the dusty symbol of death and immortality at once, and also, by association, the Pharaohs’ power. Below is the video of “UNWASHED RUSSIA” action.

He holds a sponge and a cake of soap, these simple tools of cleansing. The absent corpse lends an additional meaning to the tomb. And now — did you watch the video — the artist’s naked body adorned by the emblem of a political party becomes an object of art! It personifies Russia! It takes the place of the embalmed, everlasting body of the missing, dead ruler...

In the interview with Radio Svoboda, Irina Dumitskaya noted that the act of washing — performed with the foamed sponge — transformed the ancient work of art into an everyday object in a reverse quote of Duchamp’s urinal conversion into an art object. (This parallel highlights the fluidity of both the meaning and the form, especially instrumental in mythmaking, according to Barthes.)

Dumitskaya pointed out that the desacralization of a tomb was a pivotal concept as Blue Rider aims to demythify objects by destroying the certain pathos acquired in the process of social discourse. By debunking the mythical speech, the art returns the meaning of the object stolen from it by the myth and strips its fake form. The society is controlled by the myths, and, inevitably, artists integrate the myths, internalize them, become susceptible to mythology on an unconscious level. By performing the ritualistic cleansing in a buffoonish manner, the artist washes off the death of the meaning and thus achieves revival on many levels.

According to Barthes, “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it…, to produce an artificial myth,” and thus reconstruct the reality — or, maybe, in this case cleanse it from the dust of the history.

LENIN’S MUMMY IN MAUSOLEUM

One of the most scandalous objects of the Soviet mythology is the mummy of Lenin, stored in Mausoleum on the Red Square in front of the Kremlin, the headquarters and symbol of the Russian Federation government and state. I wrote quite a bit about this creepy phenomenon.

Technically, the meaning of the mummy had already been devalued. In 1953, upon Stalin’s death, mummies doubled in this sacral space. Stalin’s embalmed body was briefly installed and then quickly removed in 1956 on Kruschev’s order.

Now for nerds amongst us, a quote from Barthes. He refers to the Stalin myth in Mythologies by describing it as defined by “socialism itself. Stalin, as a spoken object, has exhibited for years, in their pure state, the constituent characters of mythical speech: a meaning, which was the real Stalin, that of history; a signifier, which was the ritual invocation to Stalin, and the inevitable character of the ‘natural’ epithets with which his name was surrounded; a signified, which was the intention to respect orthodoxy, discipline and unity, appropriated by the Communist parties to a definite situation; and a signification, which was a sanctified Stalin, whose historical determinants found themselves grounded in nature, sublimated under the name of Genius, that is, something irrational and inexpressible: here, depoliticization is evident, it fully reveals the presence of a myth…It is remarkable that Krushchevism presented itself not as a political change, but essentially and only as a linguistic conversion. An incomplete conversion, incidentally, for Krushchev devalued Stalin, but did not explain him — did not repoliticize him.”

Silence, the absence of open social discussion, becomes a habitual tool of creating mythical speech in modern Russian society. Unexplained and undisturbed, Lenin’s mummy, devoid of life and meaning, occupies the central place — literally — in the Russian Federation.

Until 1990, the fall of the Soviet Union, its existence and location was borderline absurd, yet justified by the ruling system’s loyalty to Leninism. After the formal collapse of the USSR, the formaldehyde-soaked corpse of a political criminal in the middle of the central square of the country took on a new, reverse, mirror meaning of no-meaning. An ideal simulacrum, it established the natural order of the world that was no more.

There is a sumalacrological logic to this seemingly inexplicable presence. The myth-consumer is fed “a natural, unquestionable order of things,” “facts”: The mummy in the coffin has always been there; it is a part of the history of the country, just as the Kremlin wall behind it, just as the Ruler in the Kremlin, a Tsar or the Party.

An ancient Egyptian perceived the pyramids and the pharaoh’s mummy and sarcophagus in a similar way, as granted and unchangeable, as a part of reality. A modern Christian perceives the bloodied, dead body of Jesus Christ nailed to the cross as the natural reality.

For a Muslim, Jewish or Aboriginal child or a pagan never exposed to the Christian symbolism or the ancient history museum, both the crucifix and the mummy are equally unnatural and terrifying. To the myth-consumers, the replication of the image makes it familiar, accepted and integrated. Such is the power of myth.

In social discourse, the mythification of the object is a continuous process. The mummy, an empty form shrouded by silence, is recycled by the new regime, with the same “intention to respect orthodoxy, discipline and unity, appropriated by the Communist parties” but with a nuance. Over the course of Putin’s reign, Russia takes course towards theocracy. The Russian Orthodox Church restores its lost power. A piously religious, God-fearing society emerges, with its own inquisition and fanatics.

The dead body of the main heretic of all times, an outdated, out-cultured object next to the token St. Basil’s Cathedral pushes the modern Russian reality into the realm of absurd. In the triumphal spiral trajectory of simulacrology, it once again becomes the sanctified symbol of nothing.

Enter Blue Rider. Mausoleum, a sacral vessel of the holy relics of communism, is the mythical object chosen by Blue Rider for its most infamous performance. Location, location, location.

As you can see in this 50 second video, artists Oleg Basov and Evgeny Avilov sprinkle holy water on the Mausoleum, shouting, “Get up and go away!” (Dumitskaya was later quoted by the AFP news agency as saying that the aim of the performance was “to demolish the myth that Lenin lives forever by attempting to resurrect him on the Epiphany holiday just as Lazarus was raised from the dead”. Orthodox Christians in Russia celebrated Epiphany that day, marking the baptism of Jesus in the Orthodox Church.) For this action, artists spent ten days in jail, in a cell for political opposition leaders. For more details and an interview with Evgeny Avilov, read my Medium article Blood and Watercolor on Paper and for more detailed analysis, an article Painting in Blood in Anthropology Now.

Here I am going to apply Barthes’s method, slightly simplified for the purposes of this article, to interpret Exorcism at the Mausoleum. It’s fun! The concept (the power of the Soviet Union, of the communist ideas) and the form (a mummy of the ruler) create a simple and obvious symbol: immortality, a magical power granted to the Ruler, a God-like nature of the Ruler of Russia.

The myth is produced and destroyed at once, due to its simplicity. Just bear with me. And brace yourself for some graphic and visceral imagery.

Strip the meaning away from the form, and the mummy is unmasked from any historical symbolism — literally. It is just dried, yellow tissue. Fake hair. Wax. The deciphering of the myth. Disgusting? Quite.

But marry meaning and form, Lenin’s dead body and the Soviet Union history, and face the ever-present, ever-recurring death and revival of the Soviet Empire. Read the myth, live the myth. And here we are, living it.

And that’s what Blue Rider’s artists did. They created more meanings and more forms through performing the ritual. In their resistance, they became the part of the metalanguage of the myth. They surrendered to the system. The myth used their very action to signify opposition, while the artists created their own myth of oppression, political struggle and victimization. So, did they just use each other and we, the audience, are also being used and abused in our innocence?

I don’t think so. In this action Blue Rider took the simple protest deeper and thus defeated the myth by mythifying it. They produced a fake myth by applying the religious ritual to pseudo-religious symbol. According to Dumitskaya, they “destroyed pathos by pathos.” Basov, in his interview to Furfur, commented: “We demythified the mausoleum as a satanic tool used for enslaving the masses.”

I can almost see the shadow of the ghost grinning in the non-existent mirror. Such is the dual — or multiple — nature of the mythology-making. We just need to check ourselves. At all times.

Slavoj Zizek in The Sublime Object of Ideology points out the sacred objects often used for creating myths: God, the Nation, the People. According to Zizek, these myth objects do not refer to any material objects or clear concepts. The political intention takes over their literal sense, obscures its real — non-existent — meaning.

Like mummies, simulacrum does not hide truth. It hides the absence of truth. The granite pyramid contains evaporated history. So does the Roman tomb in the emptied palace of the dead Tsars. The core of the matter is always vacuum, void, anti-matter.

The artists of Blue Rider used the holy water of the Russian Orthodox ritual to sanctify the Mausoleum, perform exorcism and, once again, revive Russia and themselves. The act of heretic exorcism performed on the mummified remains of the destroyer of the Church by the new generation of believers becomes an object of Putin’s Russia myth. Again, the abuser and victim are deeply involved.

THE MEAT GRINDER AND HOLY RIBBONS

On May 8th, in Moscow security services destroyed an art exhibition (read in detail here). The police and undercover security services forces broke into the gallery and confiscated the art, detained the artists and sealed the space. Among the confiscated objects was a sculpture: a meat grinder with toy soldiers falling into the opening and yellow-and-black striped ribbon, so called St. George’s ribbon, streaming out of it. Read more about the exhibition closure here.

Once again, the choice of the materials is critical here. This time the power revives a dead, empty symbol through a ritual. The black-and-orange-gold striped ribbon became extremely popular in Russian during the last seven years after the campaign St. George’s Ribbon, initiated by the state-owned news channel RIA in 2005 and funded by the state and local governments. In six years, about fifty million free ribbons were distributed throughout the world. Every year around Victory Day, the ribbon appears on lapels, belts, cars, buildings, furniture and even vodka bottles all over Russia.

This mythical object arrived with a slogan “I remember, I am proud” and instructions, lined out in a document called Code of St. George’s Ribbon. It starts with a disclaimer: the action is “non-political”. The purpose of the campaign defined as “the creation of a symbol of the Day of Victory.” St. George’s ribbon is “a symbolic ribbon, a replica.” The Code itself is a remarkable language object of the myth, with the use of emotionally heavyweight words like “respect”, “the fallen on the battlefield”, “unbroken spirit”, “the people”, “Great”, “Patriotic”, and, importantly, “sacrifice”.

According to Serguei Oushakine, an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Slavic Languages and Literatures and Director of the Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at Princeton University,

“public recollections of the Great Patriotic War were… not recollections but the emotions about the war of people who had no direct connection with the war…a form of indirect accommodation or contextualisation of oneself within the past so as to create some sort of an emotional relation with it. The popularity of the “Ribbon of Saint George” showed the strong need for the public demonstration of one’s affiliation to a certain community… People need readable symbols, but which are, strictly speaking, not legible: The ribbon has no proper history, no proper narrative. It is not a piece of history; it is a symbol of a material bond.”

The analysis of the objects chosen by the government for this campaign provides another glimpse into mythology.

The ribbon is named after St. George, one of the most prominent military saints in the Christian tradition. Its colors and pattern symbolize the death and revival of the hero: three black stripes for death; two orange-gold for resurrection.

The saint’s historical prototype, a Roman soldier, was decapitated in 303 AD, after being tortured on a wheel of swords and resuscitated three times for his refusal to give up his Christian faith in exchange for prosperity and life.

This is not an obvious association with St. George in the Russian Orthodox tradition, though. An armed rider slaying the many-headed hydra is one of the most popular subjects of the Russian Orthodox icons. The defeated beast is an allegory of paganism, Satan, and, simply, a collective Enemy. The image translates into the victory of Good over the Evil.

An individual wearing the ribbon bestows on himself its magical qualities, the heroic powers and supernatural quality. It is another transformative ritual. First empty and meaningless, the ribbon will suck on the individual’s past, memories and eventually, identity. Like a military uniform, it will then turn a person into a unit of the crowd, a faceless member of the collective, or, in other words, cannon fodder.

It is not an automatic process. The myth will draw on his or her own familial mythology, on the collective memory of older generations, the era he or she was born relative to the war, and from the gap in time that passed since that era. In other words, on personal and collective history. Eventually, the individual wearing the ribbon will become one with the myth of the ribbon. He will consume the myth and become a mythical object himself, as if by magic, a part of God, the Nation, the People narrative, drowning in sacred objects like Revival, Strong Faith, Loyalty to the Church, Self-Sacrifice, that do not refer to any clear concepts.

There is another important aspect of this myth. St. George became the symbol of faith and a war against the pagans under the Christian Emperor Constantine the Great, a founder of the Byzantine Empire, Second Rome. Upon the creation of the Russian state, St. George, depicted on the Russian coat of arms, became the symbol of Moscow as The Third Rome.

In 1858, Tsar Alexander II, introduced an imperial Russian flag, displaying colors of the Byzantine Empire:

“Black is the color of the Russian double-headed eagle, the symbol of statehood, national stability and strength, the inviolability of the borders, and of the existence of the Russian nation. Gold-yellow, the color of the Byzantine flag is a symbol of spirituality, aspiration to moral perfection and fortitude. White is the color of purity and eternity, of St. George’s selfless sacrifice for his country, for the Russian land, which has always puzzled, fascinated and frightened foreigners.”

And so more “non-political” meanings are forced into the form of the ribbon: victorious crusades against the unfaithful and the revival of Moscow the Third Rome. Suddenly, the saint becomes a “Russian occupant”.

The meat grinder confiscated by police is a perfect representation of not just a propaganda conveyer line and the fodder meat factory of war, but of the whole myth-making mechanism. “Privates”, “warriors” — meaning, breathing and living matter — are objectified, depleted of their souls, individuality and content. They are deconstructed and processed into fabric — fake, flat, empty form filled with political content — and replicated fifty million times. The choice of food-processing, cooking equipment creates a powerful association between human sacrifice and cannibalism.

No wonder the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation called it “abominable moral ugliness.” The REN-TV labeled the event as “Nazi”. Oleg Basov answered these allegations on Radio Svoboda: “St. George’s ribbon minced meat, falling out of the meat grinder is our commentary on the replication of the symbols of victory.”

The Blue Rider manifesto echoes, almost quoting Barthes: “When a heroic deed is being turned into cult and is replicated, its meaning disappears. St. George ribbon marks pro-government-minded fans of the official TV-channels. We won [the WWII], and today the outcome of this discourse is the restoration of totalitarianism with a mixture of Orthodox fundamentalism.”

CONCLUSION

Thus, power and resistance are constantly mimicking and reflecting each other by hiding meanings and seeking forms, in weaving and interweaving endless myths, engaging with each other in half-wrestling, half-erotic embrace, each adding to the modern Russia myth metalanguage and eventually becoming one.

The Kremlin is creating its myth of sacral, holy Power, Ruler, People by using materials and space of religion and history. The artists are creating their own myth by performing cleansing and revival rituals in sacral, holy physical and metaphysical spaces and using mythical objects pertaining to these rituals.

In folklore, bathing, boiling, washing or being sprayed by the magic water signifies resurrection or reinvention of the hero.

The hero is mutilated, cut in pieces, and dissected prior to the reviving ritual, Osiris-like, or reborn as in baptism. Once revival has happened, the hero often is elevated to the status of a holy person, a saint.

“Sacrifice” is another magic object of the Russian myth metalanguage. By distributing millions of St. George’s ribbons and embracing Christianity, Kremlin seeks to provoke unexplained and inexplicable love, the miraculous love of a sacred nature, a sacrificial deed of St. George. Each act of resistance or street art performance in modern Russia brings risk of physical violence, torture, or public or physical death — a sacrifice offered by the artists.

Is it possible that by sacrificing the freedom of their artistic choice and engaging in passionate discourse with the power, the artists perform the cleansing and reviving ritual for the whole society? In indigenous American tribes like Hopi and Navajo, the clowns play an important role of social doctors, using laughter and mockery along with ancient rituals to improve the social life. Blue Rider artists refer to themselves as “meta-holy fools”, “buffons”. As I have quoted, Pussy Riot Nadya Tolokonnikova noted: “We were looking for genuineness and simplicity and we found them in the holy foolishness of our punk performances. Passion, openness and naivety are superior to hypocrisy, cunning and a contrived decency that conceals crimes.”

Barthes writes that “we constantly drift between the object and its demythification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state which is still mythified…And yet, this is what we must seek: a reconciliation between reality and men, between description and explanation, between object and knowledge.”

IMPORTANT: I do not represent Pussy Riot, VOINA, BLUE RIDER or any other groups or organizations. My information is based on interviews with the artists. This is the second article of the The Arts Protest project as I find these facts relevant to the forthcoming Pussy Riot show. Read the introduction and the first article “SCANDAL: INSANITY ART-LANGUAGE” on Medium. Read second article Splendors and Myseries of Mythology and article-call for action Three Years Alone for Stand-Alone Protests. And for the closure and the show after-math read PUSSY RIOT: CLOSURE.