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Caution, Religion! Iconoclasm, Secularism, and Ways of Seeing in Post- Soviet Art Wars

Anya Bernstein

On July 12, 2010, in the midst of a heat wave sweeping across Russia, a crowd gathered outside the Taganskii court in central Moscow. Men in black army boots and fur hats wielded large crosses and moved in a sol-emn procession around the courthouse, while women in headscarves prayed quietly nearby. A man clothed in all black with a long white beard and holding a large, ornate cross in front of him gave an interview to a TV journalist: “They offended Russian Orthodoxy and Christ. We demand that they be punished.” His interview was interrupted when three security guards dragged a shaggy young man out of the building. He was being ejected from the trial for having released thousands of cock-roaches into the courtroom. As the of!cers bundled him away he screamed: “An end to obscurantism [mrakobesie]! May Russia be free!” He then added, “I did it because you all have cockroaches in the head!,” recalling the Russian expression for a person who has “issues.” As the police handcuffed the activist, the cross- bearing man performed a kind of exorcism, chanting prayers and sprinkling holy water around him, as if the young man were exhibiting demonic possession, not making a political statement. “You see,” he continued to the TV reporter as the protester was pushed into a police van, “here you have a representative of contemporary art. It is people like him who typify art in Russia today” (Grani- TV 2010) (see !g. 1).1

Public Culture 26:3 !"# 10.1215/08992363-2683621 Copyright 2014 by Duke University Press

This article bene!ted from helpful discussions with Eugene Zhuravel’ over the past few years. I am also very grateful to Bruce Grant, Serguei Oushakine, Sonja Luehrmann, Lucas Bessire, and Nica Davidov for reading and commenting on earlier drafts. A version of this article was presented at the “Global Secularisms” conference (2013) at New York University and the “Complaints: Cultures of Grievance in Eastern Europe and Eurasia” conference (2013) at Princeton University. I thank Kim Lane Scheppele for her excellent comments.

1. The activist pulled out from the courtroom was Petr Verzilov, participant of the scandalous art group Voina (War). All translations from Russian are my own.

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Inside the courthouse, the !nal hearings of an art trial that had been stirring popular debate over the previous two years were coming to a close. The exhibit that launched the complaint, Forbidden Art 2006, consisted of contemporary and late socialist Russian works that had been rejected from various other exhibitions for reasons of censorship. The artworks included an image of Christ in a McDon-ald’s advertisement, an icon of the Virgin made of black caviar, and a photograph of an army general raping a soldier, bearing the caption “Glory to Russia.” The main purpose of the exhibit, however, was not to shock but to attract attention to issues of censorship, including self- censorship. Claiming that the show offended religious and national sensibilities, the ultranationalist Orthodox group Narodnyi Sobor (People’s Assembly) !led criminal charges against the two curators, Yuri Samodurov and Andrei Erofeyev.

The trial, which started in 2008, received extensive media attention both in Russia and abroad. Much coverage focused on what were described as deep “rifts” in contemporary Russian society: between secular and religious communities, between contemporary artists and the Orthodox Church, and between rationality and “obscurantism.” Commentators warned about the return of authoritarianism to Russia, calling attention to the decline of free speech and the inappropriate

Figure 1 Taganskii court, July 2010. Reuters / Denis Sinyakov

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power that the Orthodox Church had come to exert in a supposedly secular soci-ety (Clover 2010; Garrels 2009; Kishkovsky 2010).

Much of Russian society may indeed have been polarized at the time, but not, I would contend here, in the overly familiar ways suggested by the international press. Contrary to most expectations, few members of the self- identi!ed liberal intelligentsia sprang to the aid of those under attack.2 While disturbed to poten-tially !nd themselves in the same camp as the ultraright- wing Narodnyi Sobor and yet uncomfortable about the exhibit, many of them toned down their criticism of the show in the months preceding the !nal verdict. Once the show’s organiz-ers no longer faced time in prison, the criticism became ever more vocal, and the moral integrity of the curators was increasingly questioned. Public opinion, too, seemed to bend toward the view that the exhibit was at least morally misguided, if not offensive and inappropriate.3 Although most members of the intelligentsia did not agree with the nationalist Orthodox groups that wanted the state to cen-sor offensive content, many, including artists, appeared to believe in exercising a degree of self- censorship when it came to religious or nationalist themes. Con-trary to the foreign press’s portrayal of contemporary artists as secular dissidents !ghting against the supposed clericalization of the state, the Russian artistic com-munity in fact seemed to be divided on the issue. Only a small minority whole-heartedly stood behind Forbidden Art.

Besides the intelligentsia’s relative lack of support for the exhibit, the tim-ing was also puzzling. Potentially scandalous art engaging religious themes flourished in Russia throughout the 1990s but passed completely unnoticed by the broader public. Now not only was there general disapproval, but it was often expressed through the idiom of “blasphemy” (bogokhul’stvo, koshchunstvo) — a term that appeared archaic in the former Soviet Union, just as it does in the con-temporary Euro- American world, but which now !rmly entered public discourse. When did the limits of the permissible shift? When did “blasphemy” against religion — something that was close to the of!cial ideology in the Soviet Union for most of the twentieth century — turn into a crime? How had an acceptable practice of the 1990s become taboo in the 2000s?

Rather than pause here to evaluate the merits of the artworks themselves, as

2. It has to be pointed out that what is commonly referred to as the “liberal intelligentsia” both in Russia and in the foreign press represents a wide spectrum of political ideas, from the “right- wing liberals” (pravye liberaly), whose views are a mix of neoliberalism and libertarianism, to moderates, to a very small minority of Marxist and socialist “left- wing” liberals.

3. For example, Marat Guelman (2010), Russia’s most celebrated gallery owner and curator, who supported the artists during the trial, made a much more critical assessment right after the verdict was made.

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many have done, I look to answer these questions by considering the particular scopic regimes — here broadly understood as systems of visuality and ways of see-ing mediated by political, cultural, and technological factors — that animated the passions behind Forbidden Art and related exhibits of the past decade. I suggest that issues of art, secularism, and censorship in this context are more fruitfully engaged if approached in the context of an evolving con!guration of visual signs, sacrality, and humanity that is put to political work in postsocialist Russia. All the interventions discussed above — from the attempt of the curators to test the lim-its of the permissible to the subsequent calls for (more) self- censorship — appear to be concerned less with issues of religion and secularity per se than with the competing ways of seeing and underlying notions of the human that emerged fol-lowing the Soviet collapse. I argue that current Russian art wars demonstrate how sociohistorical conditions of Soviet modernity and post- Soviet postmodernity create particular scopic regimes, which, in turn, get amalgamated with material objects and subjectivities. These art wars point to larger battles and negotiations over emergent con!gurations of visual practices and moral citizenship in post-socialist Russia, which are contingent on what various parties in these debates present as historically durable representational orders.

Contested Art

The modest exhibit that came to so stir both Russian and international audiences, titled Ostorozhno, religiia! (Caution, Religion!), opened on January 14, 2003, at the Andrei Sakharov Museum and Public Center in Moscow.4 The Sakharov Cen-ter, which occupies a small mansion in central Moscow offered rent- free by the Moscow government as a tribute to the memory of the late Soviet dissident and human rights activist, is not usually associated with the booming Moscow con-temporary arts scene. Most of its exhibits are of a documentary nature, covering a range of issues from the war in Chechnya to the plight of Central Asian migrants. Occasionally, the center also hosts small art exhibits around a speci!c theme of social importance. According to the organizers, the 2003 Caution, Religion! exhibit “communicates the distinct duality of its conception: this is both a call for a careful, delicate, and respectful treatment of religion, faith, and believers and a sign: ‘Careful, danger!’ when it comes to religious fundamentalism (no matter whether it is Muslim or Russian Orthodox), the fusion of religion with the state, and obscurantism” (Sakharov Center 2003).

4. The Sakharov Center, an organization created in 1996 in memory of Andrei Sakharov, a famous Soviet dissident, is devoted to the promotion of civil society in Russia.

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5. The photographs of the artworks after their defacement are available at the Sakharov Center’s website: www.sakharov- center.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/hall_exhibitions_religion01.htm.

6. The vandals were initially charged with hooliganism (article 213 of the Russian Criminal Code), but after many influential members of the intelligentsia (including !lmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov,

The exhibit represented about forty artists and featured works with religious themes. Among them was a collage by Alexander Kosolapov, an imitation of a Coca- Cola advertisement with a superimposed image of Christ and the words “This is my blood.” A work by Avdei Ter- Oganian consisted of eight mass- produced reproductions of icons of Christ the Savior and the Godmother attached to a large piece of cardboard superimposed with words in roman characters: “revolucia,” “vodka,” “kalashnikov,” “Russian art.” A rug by Irina Waldron represented the cloned sheep Dolly as the Lamb of God. Alina Gurevich’s installation consisted of vodka bottles with onions in the place of corks so that they resembled the domes of Orthodox churches. Alisa Zrazhevskaya’s piece, You Shall Not Make for Your-selves an Idol, consisted of a life- size cardboard icon stand with cutouts in place of the face and hands where one could insert one’s own. A camera on a tripod was placed in front of the stand, and viewers were invited to take a picture (see !g. 2).

Four days after the exhibit opened, a group of armed men stormed the Sakha-rov Center, threw buckets of black paint over the artworks, and spray painted words on them: “Damn you,” “Blasphemy,” “You hate Orthodoxy,” “Scum,” and “You are demons” (see !gs. 3 and 4).5 As many expected, a lawsuit was !led against the attackers.6 More surprisingly, soon afterward a subsequent suit was

Figure 2 Pieces by Alisa Zrazhevskaya (left) and Alexander Kosolapov (right). Photograph by Z. M. Kuzikova

Figure 3 Pieces by Zrazhevskaya (center) and Kosolapov (right) after the attack on the exhibit. Photograph by Z. M. Kuzikova

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!led against the organizers of the exhibit: Sakharov Center employee Liudmila Vasi-lovskaia, center director Samodurov, and par-ticipating artist Anna Al’chuk. This lawsuit was based on a much more serious accusation: the organizers were charged with “inciting religious hatred” under article 282 of the Rus-sian Criminal Code.

The now notorious article 282 is roughly equivalent to hate speech laws in some Euro-pean countries. The article criminalizes “actions directed to incite hatred or enmity, as well as humiliation based on gender, race, nationality, language, origin, religion, or belonging to a social group.”7 In the 1990s,

article 282 was used mostly against right- wing extremists found guilty of spread-ing xenophobic propaganda and anti- Semitism. Ultranationalists have nicknamed it “the Russian article” (russkaia stat’ia), claiming that the majority of people convicted under 282 are ethnic Russians. Some of them, including most recently the leader of the far- right Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, have demanded that article 282 be abolished. Recently, however, the tables have turned, as right- wing groups have become the plaintiffs in suits !ling “inciting religious hatred” charges against artists.

Soon enough, the message was clear: matters of religion in Russia were not to be treated lightly. Curators and organizers became extremely careful with works on religious themes, leading some to speculate about the emergence of renewed art censorship. Obscene language, nudity, and religion began tellingly to disap-pear from public art circles (Erofeyev 2007).

To highlight this problem, Erofeyev, then director of the contemporary art division of the State Tretyakov Gallery, teamed up with Sakharov Center direc-

artist Ilya Glazunov, and sculptor Vyacheslav Klykov) and the Russian Orthodox Church(including the current patriarch, Kirill, who was then head of the Church’s international relations) strongly condemned the exhibit, the charges against the perpetrators were eventually dropped.

7. Article 282, Russian Criminal Code, www.ukru.ru/code/10/282. Following the trial of the Pussy Riot participants (formally convicted for hooliganism), a new law passed in 2013 criminalizes “offending feelings of religious believers” and punishes public offenses against religion with up to three years of imprisonment.

Figure 4 Avdei Ter- Oganian’s piece after the attack. Photograph by Z. M. Kuzikova

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tor Samodurov to organize For-bidden Art 2006. The concept behind this show (which, in fact, took place in March 2007) was quite different from Caution, Religion! It was a “meta- exhibit,” an exhibit on exhibits, that show-cased works rejected for reasons of censorship. According to a press release for Forbidden Art, its goal was the “monitoring and discussion of the character and tendencies of institutional censorship in the cultural !eld” (Sakharov Center 2007). This time, the artworks were exhib-ited behind a temporary wall with peepholes mounted high up. If visitors were not tall enough to reach the peepholes, they had to climb a stepladder to take a look (see !g. 5).

Unlike Caution, Religion!, Forbidden Art included not only works by contemporary artists but also older works by Soviet- era !gures. One of the most scandalous items was an installation by Kosolapov titled Caviar Icon (Ikona- ikra; 2005) (see !g. 6). It consisted of what looked like a golden icon frame, inside of which was a silhou-ette of the Virgin Mary with baby Jesus entirely !lled with black caviar (in fact, it was a photo collage). Among the most talked- about Soviet- era works were Vag-rich Bakhchanyan’s 1985 image of the cruci!xion of Jesus superimposed with the head of Vladimir Lenin (see !g. 7) and Mikhail Roshal’- Fedorov’s Self- Portrait (1972 – 73), a stylized icon painting where, instead of Christ, a man with a beard is depicted holding a book saying, “Let us exceed the norm in coal production” (Dadim uglia sverkh plana) (see !g. 8). The only work with a religious theme that was not Christian was titled Chechen Marilyn (from the art group Sinie Nosy [Blue Noses], 2005) and depicted a female dressed in a burqa with a lifted skirt,

Figure 5 A drawing from the cover of the book Forbidden Art by Victoria Lomasko and Anton Nikolaev (St. Petersburg: Bumkniga, 2011), which contains courtroom sketches from the Forbidden Art trial by Lomasko.

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over- the- knee lingerie socks with a printed skull and cross- bones pattern, and a suicide bomber’s belt.

The exhibit was immediately attacked by the Narodnyi Sobor, the Narodnaia Zashchita (People’s Defense), and the Union of Orthodox Youth. However, this time there was no vandalism. Instead, claimants chose to !ght the exhibit by !ling a lawsuit under the same article 282. The trial started in 2008, becoming, accord-ing to some commentators, the most “important cultural and political scandal of the year” (Degot’ 2008). The plaintiffs requested up to three years of imprison-ment, but the defendants, although found guilty, were met with only stiff !nes.

Godless Youth

While the lawsuits following the two exhibits received wide coverage in Russia and abroad, it was an earlier, lesser- known trial that critically set the precedent for the use of article 282 against artists. In December 1998, the well- known Mos-cow artist Ter- Oganian participated in the exhibit Art Manezh 1998 with his per-formance piece titled Godless Youth (Iunyi bezbozhnik, referencing the Soviet youth organization of militant atheists; see !g. 9). He purchased a number of mass- produced cardboard reproductions of icons, hung them on the walls of the Manezh gallery, and distributed the following press release to the public:

Figure 7 Vagrich Bakhchanyan, Untitled, mid- 1980s

Figure 8 Mikhail Roshal’- Fedorov, Self- Portrait, 1972 – 73

Figure 6 Alexander Kosolapov, Caviar Icon, 2005

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Dear lovers of contemporary art! Here you can purchase wonderful original material for blasphemy.

Savior Not- Made- by- Hands — 200 rubles, Vladimir Godmother — 150 rubles, the Savior Pantocrator — 120 rubles. The gallery offers the fol-lowing services: the desecration of your new icon by godless youth — 50 rubles; personal icon desecration under the guidance of godless youth — 20 rubles; a consultation for the desecration of an icon at home — 10 rubles.

Thank you for shopping with us. (Rudakov and Shevchenko 1998)

In the end, only eight “desecrations” were sold. Organizers took an axe to the icons and scrawled words across them as ordered. The security of!cers at the Manezh stopped the performance after receiving complaints from the public. Soon after, a lawsuit was !led against Ter- Oganian under article 282. At the time, the charge was unprecedented, becoming the !rst criminal case where article 282 was used against an artist. Ter- Oganian did not wait until the trial but instead left Russia for the Czech Republic, where he asked for and was granted political asylum. He remains in exile today and has not visited Russia since.

Within days of the show’s shutdown, Ter- Oganian, who until then was known only to the relatively small Moscow circle of conceptual artists, critics, and con-noisseurs, acquired wide notoriety. Newspapers exploded with articles with titles

Figure 9 Avdei Ter- Oganian, performance of Godless Youth, 1998

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like “Demonic Possession [Besnovanie] in the Manezh,” “The Desecrator of Icons,” “Provocation against Believers,” “Oganians Should Be Stopped,” “The Devils,” “Icons Are Crying Silently,” and “An In!del Incites Religious Hatred.”

If the public was bewildered at how such a performance could have been pos-sible at a major public art space in the heart of Moscow, artists themselves seemed to be equally bewildered. Ter- Oganian maintained that his actions were a tongue- in- cheek parody of radical modernism with its practices of shock and scandal, in accordance with his invented persona of an artist from the Russian provinces obsessed with copying modernist paintings.8 Performances of similar shock value had been taking place throughout the 1990s but never interested anyone besides a small number of art critics and connoisseurs. The famous Moscow performance artists Alexander Brener and Oleg Kulik, for example, had often played with reli-gious themes: Kulik baptized !sh in a giant aquarium and then “preached” to the merchants at the Danilovskii market, while Brener engaged in the second “desecration” of the foundation of the Church of Christ the Savior (before it was rebuilt in 1994 – 97).9 Their work invites the question raised in the beginning of this article: When and why did the limits of the permissible shift?

Serguei Oushakine (2000) once rightly noted that in the 1990s there was a proliferation of codes that refused any easy semantic purchase or categorization, referring to this phenomenon as “post- Soviet aphasia.” But with the election of Vladimir Putin as president in 2000, the rising post- Soviet religiosity and its links to Russian nationalism, and the increasing role of the Russian Orthodox Church in creating new moral norms, we can now identify a narrowing and solidifying of popular vocabularies. While these emerging subjectivities did not become widely influential until the mid- to late 2000s, the uproar sparked by Ter- Oganian’s case in 1998 could be read as an early sign of the post- Soviet “aphasia” gradually coming to an end and being superseded by an increasingly religious nationalist rhetoric. Take, for example, the commentary by well- known archpriest Aleksandr

8. Here is how Erofeyev describes Ter- Oganian’s art in a 1995 catalog: “The signature method of Ter- Oganian is overt repetition. Unlike other artists who repeat the masterpieces of the twentieth century, Ter- Oganian places more importance on the similarity, not the difference, with the origi-nal. The epicenter of his art is an invented persona of a provincial artist, and the works created by Ter- Oganian are ascribed to this invented character. This character, according to Ter- Oganian, is a passionate admirer of modernism. Familiar with Western art only from poor- quality reproductions, he always copies the works by Mondrian, [Hans] Hartung, and even objects by [Jeff] Koons, thinking them to be paintings” (Erofeyev and Martin 1995: 264 – 65).

9. This point was raised by Erofeyev in 1999 during his role as an expert in Ter- Oganian’s lawsuit. At the time, Erofeyev (1999) most likely could not have imagined that ten years later he would also !nd himself on the defendant’s bench.

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Shargunov (1998) published shortly after Ter- Oganian’s exhibit, which became a kind of a manifesto capturing the widely felt resentment experienced by many post- Soviet subjects:

These nonhumans [neliudi] committed the crime not by their own will but by Satan’s will. They are mediumistic in their own way. What happened cannot even be compared to the communist blasphemies [koshchunstvo]: the godless of those days were just fooled and thought God did not exist. But here we have a conscious Satanism, its new stage. Here we deal with the insult of the national sacred, the Russian Orthodox faith, the Russian nation, the faith of our fathers, Russia itself.

This passage is important in that it highlights, in a very condensed form, two ideas that I consider here. First, it invokes the notion of neliudi, “nonhumans,” de!ned as those who do not express respect toward certain signs, thus making visible the links between semiotic ideologies and ideas of the human that I discuss below. Second, it problematizes the idea of agency, as the “nonhumans” are not acting by their own will — they do not possess the freedom implied in the liberal notion of a human subject.

To be sure, as in most other countries, there is no single national discourse at work in Russia today. There are still liberal commentators who compare the role of the Orthodox Church and its grassroots groups to the infamous Brezhnev- era bulldozer that leveled an unsanctioned exhibit in a Moscow park.10 Yet it is also clear that the limits of the permissible started to shift with Ter- Oganian’s law-suit in 1998, !nding their symbolic boundaries with the end of the Forbidden Art trial. Some researchers claim that these prosecutions signify that Russia is moving toward the model of “caesaropapism” (Epstein and Vasil’ev 2011), while self- proclaimed secularists warn that Russian Orthodoxy is indeed transforming itself from an embattled church recovering from Soviet repressions to an of!cial state ideology (see, e.g., Novodvorskaya 2012). Indeed, United Russia, the rul-ing party, recently issued a proposal calling for Russian Orthodoxy to become the “moral basis” for modernization (Lenta.ru 2010). Irina Papkova (2011) com-pellingly argues in her recent study of the Russian Orthodox Church that the Church, due to its own factionalism, failed to make a real difference in Rus-sian politics. She also suggests that the Russian public is very wary of any kind

10. In a key moment in the history of Soviet unof!cial art, in 1974 avant- garde artists organized an unsanctioned open- air exhibit in an urban park on the outskirts of Moscow. The exhibit was brought down using bulldozers and water cannons. The exhibit became known as the “bulldozer exhibit.”

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of powerfully public religion, a claim that goes counter to the current fears of international commentators and internal critics, who warn against “clericaliza-tion,” understood as the merging of church and state. In an attempt to break the rigid analytical divide between “secular” and “religious” rationalities, I propose to consider these conflicting social forces and political agendas in the context of scopic regimes produced by recent sociohistorical transformations in Russia and the Soviet Union, which, in turn, affect local understandings of materiality and notions of the free human subject.

Secularism and Ways of Seeing

Talal Asad, in a pair of landmark works (1993, 2003), famously traced a Protes-tant history of the “secular,” identifying it as a particularly Euro- American for-mation in which religion is not only relegated to the private sphere and state and church formally separated but the very category of religion itself is rede!ned.The Soviet Union, with its ideology of “scienti!c atheism,” presented a pecu-liar version of a secular state: it shared the Western narrative of modernity in which secularism was seen as an emancipatory project leading to moral libera-tion, but the abolition of religion did not go hand in hand with freedom of speech. The attempts to abolish religion were only partially successful, since religion in the Soviet Union was constitutionally privatized but practically “domesticated” (Dragadze 1993). Since the fall of the USSR, religion — and, most importantly, Russian Orthodoxy — has been assuming an increasingly public role, provoking concerns about clericalization.

Three recent !ndings in the studies of religion, modernity, and secularism are of interest here. The !rst is that the story of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, is often presented as a “subtraction story,” a triumphalist narrative of the progressive sloughing off of and liberation from everything that limits our knowledge and narrows our horizons.11 Second is the centrality to secularism of what Webb Keane (2007, 2009) calls a “semiotic ideology,” de!ned as assump-tions about the place of signs in the world. By “semiotics,” Keane does not mean approaches that treat social phenomena as texts to be decoded. Instead, he is interested in the perceived relationships between words, things, and subjects and especially in how these relationships have a bearing on ideas of agency and free-dom (Keane 2007: 4 – 5). In particular, Keane suggests that secularism inherited certain epistemological and ontological premises from Protestant semiotic ideol-

11. For the critique of this narrative, see Taylor 2007.

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ogy, which stripped words and images of their magical power and engaged in what Keane views as part of modernity’s “project of puri!cation.”12

The third, and perhaps most important, !nding is that the “subtraction story” of secularism has never been a neutral narrative, but has always been imbued with strong moral claims — secularism is often presented as a story of speci!cally moral liberation and redemption. This moral narrative of modernity is inextrica-bly linked to semiotic ideologies, speci!cally to the question “What beings have agency?” (Keane 2007: 4). Just as Protestant missionaries disapproved when colo-nial subjects attributed divine agency to objects or viewed some objects as exten-sions of themselves, disparaging such practices as “fetishism” (a now loaded term that presumes, among other things, an “incorrect” view of the locus of human agency), the confusing of things and representations, humans and nonhumans, words and things is considered morally misguided in contemporary secularism. Such views recently became apparent in Euro- American secularists’ moralizing tone in their responses to the so- called Danish cartoons affair of 2006, when they chided Muslims for their “premodern” reading practices and for their inability to make a proper distinction between things and representations. In other words, moral judgments have often been and still are mediated by semiotic ideologies, which are usually not transparent to their adherents and thus obscure the forces driving their actions (Keane 2007, 2009).

The Soviet atheist master narrative was certainly a version of the “subtrac-tion story,” where religion was to be superseded by science and rationality. The goal of Soviet secularization, however, went beyond the privatization of religion or the functional substitution of religious with secular forms. Instead, as Sonja Luehrmann (2011: 6 – 7) argues in her insightful study of Soviet secularism, it intended to construct a “qualitatively new society” that relied only on human agency: “Striving to eradicate attachment to superhuman powers, Soviet atheists saw the creation of an exclusively human community as the ultimate goal of secu-larization.”13 Eliminating all allegiances to nonhuman agents required restructur-ing visuality, especially the set of attitudes and beliefs about religious images that structures the experience of the sacred for religious believers. Soviet atheists deemed practices such as the Russian tradition of icon veneration to be a form of

12. Keane borrows the notion of “puri!cation” from Bruno Latour (1993), who saw puri!cation as a historical process of modernity, which attempts to create distinct ontological zones between humans and nonhumans and nature and culture, as well as to separate the material world from human fantasy.

13. On the possibility of “exclusive humanism” as a necessary precondition for secular moder-nity, see Taylor 2007.

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premodern fetishism and attempted to eradicate such worship by introducing a strictly materialist understanding of the world, in which objects could not have supernatural powers that defy scienti!c understanding. To make this point, atheist propagandists toured rural areas offering lectures that included chemical dem-onstrations of how icons could be made to weep or bleed (Luehrmann 2011: 68).

Soviet science was deployed not only to debunk the supposedly magical work-ings of icons but also to recast the icons themselves in a new way. Paradoxically, this iconoclastic, secular state took upon itself a mission to preserve what was now treated as “national heritage”: using X- ray technologies, scientists began restoring certain icons. Viewed no longer as objects of religious devotion but as a unique form of Russian art, valuable icons were to be “saved” from the “vandal-ism” of the Russian Orthodox Church, which damaged them by burning votive candles next to them, painting over them in botched restorations, and storing them improperly. In Eastern Orthodox theology, the honor is given not to the icon itself but to what is known as the “prototype” (the holy person whom it represents). By this logic, in the Church’s view, old and decrepit icons did not have any particular value. If a distressed icon no longer accurately portrayed the holy person due to deterioration, it was considered disrespectful to the prototype. In a more practical way, faded icons were seen as less ritually potent and were not to be preserved as is. Old icons, therefore, were frequently painted over to refresh the colors or, if considered too old to repaint, disposed of by various methods: they could be bur-ied in the ground, burned, or thrown into rivers (Salmond 2010). The state used these practices and beliefs as justi!cation for appropriating the icons, since it saw itself as giving them the due respect even religious believers did not.

Art, Icons, Humans

The notion of an icon as a work of art was not a result of the Russian Revolution but developed a few decades earlier, when a new concern with national heritage spurred scholars’ and collectors’ interest in ancient Russian icons. The “long twen-tieth century” radically transformed ways of looking at icons — !rst by divesting the icon of its magical potency and second by recasting icons as works of art. The Soviet period produced important scholarship on ways of “reading” icons, espe-cially by the circle of structuralist scholars known as the Moscow- Tartu Semiotic School, founded by Yuri Lotman.14 An influential work titled “The Semiotics of the Russian Icon” by Boris Uspensky, a prominent representative of this school,

14. Lotman (1922 – 93) was a prominent Soviet semiotician and literary scholar.

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argued that medieval icons possessed their own “language of art,” one of the most important elements of which was the technique of “reverse” or “inverted” perspective. Contrary to the linear perspective of Renaissance painting, where the lines converge toward a vanishing point inside the painting, making the objects in the distance appear smaller, in reverse perspective objects are smaller in the foreground, with the lines converging toward the viewer. Elaborating on earlier writings on icons by the German art historian Oskar Wulff, Russian religious philosopher, priest, and polymath Pavel Florensky, and artist and art theorist Lev Zhegin, Uspensky (1976: 36) argued that in linear perspective the viewer and the painter are both looking at the image from the outside, while in reverse perspec-tive the painter places himself inside the image, “depicting the world as if it were surrounding him, rather than at a distance from him.”

Following Wulff, Uspensky appears to imply that once viewers mentally project themselves inside the picture, they see the picture in a “normal,” linear perspective, with the lines converging in a vanishing point away from them.15 (Uspensky uses the term “internal observer” (vnutrennii nabliudatel’) for the viewer who is looking from inside the picture, distinguishing the individual from a regular viewer who is outside the pictorial space looking in.) Uspensky’s work seems strikingly contemporary in that he is concerned not only with the formal properties of the icon but also with the role of the viewer in the construction of meaning, as well as the process of vision itself. Yet what is missing from his dis-cussion are the historical dynamics of the act of looking. Are we looking at icons today in the same way as Uspensky’s hypothetical medieval “internal observer”? How does the context of viewing, such as an art gallery, an ethnographic museum, a church, or a red corner in someone’s home,16 affect the meaning of an icon?

As the secularization of religious art, which started with the collectors’ boom in the early twentieth century, continued during the Soviet period, it introduced a new, “cultured” way of looking at icons, now often seen in a museum. These inno-vations were, of course, controversial. As early as 1918, Florensky, upon whose insights Uspensky built much of his thesis, noted that icons would be viewed dif-ferently in a museum than in a church. According to Florensky, while in the right setting the icon can open up Platonic higher realities, it becomes “dead” in the “even, cold light of a museum.” “In a museum,” he wrote, “we see not icons but

15. For a critique of the notion of “reverse perspective” and a detailed discussion of Uspensky’s intellectual predecessors, see Antonova 2010: 29 – 63.

16. The “red corner” (krasnyi ugol) is where icons were kept in the traditional Russian peasant house.

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caricatures of them” (Florensky 1996: 208 – 9). By this logic, if an icon is a win-dow to another reality, it becomes shut once it is moved from its proper context, and viewers are unable to project themselves into its inner space. When executed correctly and displayed in a proper setting, the icon invites the viewer into a par-ticular scopic regime: it not only gives the viewer access to the sacred but also changes his or her subject position, erasing the distinction between the person and the object. When defaced or displaced (or both), the icon is no longer a window into another reality but is simply a painting that lacks classical perspective, which the viewer sees from a separate, nonpictorial space.

While continuing to recon!gure the contexts of icon viewing, the Soviet period also produced an entirely original visual culture that, as is often pointed out, replaced the veneration of Orthodox icons with the worship of new, “secular” icons: the red corner was now called the “little red corner” (krasnyi ugolok) but was !lled with Lenin busts and memorabilia, and the ubiquitous “trinity” of Marx- Engels- Lenin adorned new sacred spaces all over Russia. The veneration of Lenin’s body has also been compared to that of the Russian Orthodox saints’ holy relics (Bonnell 1997; Tumarkin 1997).17 Concluding his analysis of the multiple transformations of the National Museum in Lviv, which !rst housed icons, then became a Lenin museum, and now houses icons once again, historian of Ukraine John- Paul Himka (2010: 124) notes:

In 1976, I was in a department store in what was then called Leningrad. I was shocked to !nd a corner there with a statue of Lenin, adorned with flowers and inscribed with the following words: Lenin i nyne zhivee vsekh zhivykh — “Even today Lenin is more alive than anyone alive.” It seemed so incongruously religious to me. In the same year, I visited the Lenin Museum in Lviv. Portraits and posters of the Great Lenin hung on every wall. Today on those same walls one !nds Saint George, Jesus Christ, Saint Peter, and the Mother of God. Before there were scenes of the speech at the Finland Station and the storming of the winter palace; now these have been replaced by the Trans!guration and the Last Judgment. Much has changed. Or not.

It is with this “or not” question that I found myself grappling while thinking about current Russian battles over these contested art exhibits. Just how much did in fact change? During the long twentieth century, a great deal: icons began to be

17. In late 2012, Putin compared Lenin’s body to saints’ relics, causing a heated debate in the country. For the original speech, see Putin 2012. For the critique of such narratives, both popular and academic, see Yurchak 2013.

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worshipped as art, and communist symbols began to be worshipped as icons. Yet there also seems to be a striking continuity in epistemological orientation toward visual and material mediations, especially those that are considered the “national sacred,” whether it is a secularized icon placed in a museum or a portrait of Lenin placed in a red corner.

While I do not subscribe to the once influential notion that communism became a kind of “secular religion,” with its own sacred icons and rituals, what interests me here is that ontological relations between signs, things, and humans in Rus-sia seem to evince a rather different trajectory and con!guration than, to invoke Keane’s terms, the Protestant- like drive to “purify” that is also characteristic of contemporary liberal secularism. Of course, as Bruno Latour (1993: 50) noted, a puri!cation project is just that: a project, one that ultimately always fails, produc-ing “hybrids” that mix culture and nature, subjects and objects, and humans and nonhumans. What unites Orthodox and Soviet visual artifacts, then, is not so much that one functionally substitutes for the other but that both belong to a class of objects to which a kind of affective agency is attributed. Similar to Annette B. Weiner’s (1992) “inalienable possessions,” such objects cannot be destroyed, as they constitute the foundation of the person. For the same reason, they are resis-tant to purifying efforts. It is precisely the contested con!guration of signs and things and humans and nonhumans that gave the post- Soviet art wars controversy particular poignancy, often misunderstood in critical coverage as anachronistic.

The stakes in de!ning and normalizing these contested con!gurations are extremely high. The art trials constitute an attempt to privilege and, in fact, enforce particular ways of seeing, which the critics of the exhibits present as uniquely normative, historically durable, and morally appropriate. Informing these ways of seeing are judgments not merely on the content of particular shows but on the appropriate relationship between a moral human and the images sur-rounding him or her, and even on the question of who should be considered a human at all (recall the invocation of neliudi, the “nonhumans,” by the priest Shargunov in his condemnatory essay).

Consider, for example, the following statement by Ol’ga Aleksandrovna Lochagina, a woman who testi!ed in court as a civil plaintiff in the Caution, Religion! trial:

Plaintiff Lochagina: On January 18, 2003, I visited the Sakharov Center and Museum. There in a glass case I saw . . . I don’t even have the right words to describe it . . . I saw an icon of the Vladimir Godmother — this icon is very dear to me, because I bought such an icon twenty years

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ago. . . . Also, [I saw] an icon of Christ the Savior. These icons are very easily recognizable, because young couples who are getting married get these to remove obstacles. So I saw these icons were deliberately desecrated with words written across, such as “vodka,” “Kalashnikov,” “Lenin,” “Russian Art.” I want to bring it to your attention that the icons were consecrated . . . I am sorry it is dif!cult for me to speak, as just seeing these icons produces a whole array of emotions in me. . . .

Prosecutor: Can you tell me speci!cally which of your rights were violated by this artwork?

Plaintiff Lochagina: This is not an artwork, this is a crime.Prosecutor: Please tell me which of your rights were violated.Plaintiff Lochagina: I think that my rights . . . my rights as a religious

believer, a Russian Orthodox Christian, for whom icons are the most sacred symbols, were violated. You see, icons for us are not just a mere depiction of the invisible world. When we venerate an icon, we really venerate the prototype. (Lochagina 2004)

This statement makes clear that for believers icons are not merely arbitrary signs; rather, one’s relationship to them is an embodied and interactive experience that might not be uniquely visual (touch, for example, is also important, as icons are often kissed by believers). As Margaret E. Kenna (1985: 359) points out in her study of Orthodox visuality: “The relationship between icon and onlooker is . . . a reciprocal one. . . . Correct behavior toward an icon not only taps its power and keeps it flowing but even seems to call forth that power initially.” If the composi-tion of the icon is incorrect or the wrong colors are used, the link between the icon and the prototype is disrupted. The same goes for the displacement of the icon. Here Kenna, an anthropologist, makes a strikingly similar observation to that made by the priest Florensky almost a century earlier: if an icon is placed in a museum, she notes, its power eventually dries up “like water in the pipes of an abandoned house” (ibid.; on the social use of icons, see Herzfeld 1990).

Icons are thus a special class of objects. The reverse perspective endows the viewer with a peculiar subject position in which the individual becomes a part of the picture. The subject is interpellated by the picture, becoming a part of the symbolic order suggested by the image. Icons are framing devices, visual equivalents of Louis Althusser’s (1971: 174) “hailing,” in that they enframe not only the sacred but also the viewer, and in so doing create the subject. As a result, when the icon is defaced or displaced, the viewer, whose subjectivity is entwined with the icon, experiences something akin to an onto- epistemological paralysis. In this manner, when the plaintiff Lochagina was questioned by the prosecutor

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regarding the violation of her rights, she became very confused and was unable to give a clear answer. The defacement and displacement of the icon robbed her of a recognizable position from which to see herself.18

Supporters of the exhibit, including curators and the artists themselves, often discounted such sentiments, arguing that they belonged to religious fundamental-ists who mistook artworks that incorporated iconography for “real” icons and were therefore engaged in inappropriate reading practices. The reports in the Euro- American press and in some academic analyses concluded that those who were offended by “blasphemous” art belonged to a certain segment of the popula-tion: ardent religious believers with conservative social values (e.g., Clover 2010; Garrels 2009; Knox 2008). Such commentary implies that the Russian public is sharply divided into two camps based on their visual semiotics: Western- oriented secular intelligentsia, artists, and intellectuals who are able to see the signs as simply signs and who wage a moral battle to defend basic freedoms of expression, on the one hand, and conservative Russian Orthodox “masses” who stubbornly cling to their premodern relations with signs and archaic ideas of agency, on the other. By this logic, the artists and their supporters among the intelligentsia cor-rectly view all artworks as disenchanted and independent from social relations, while the Orthodox believers attribute divine agency to images and confuse sub-jects and objects, engaging with the images through nonrationalist, “magical” thinking.

In reality, the situation in Russia is far more complex. The art wars did produce a sharp divide, but not between “secular” intellectuals and “religious” fundamen-talists. What is perhaps unique to Russia today is that many intellectuals and artists, whether themselves Russian Orthodox believers or sympathizers or even atheists, and regardless of their social status and class, experienced similar moral anxiety over the exhibit. While expressing solidarity with the accused during the trials, many members of the intelligentsia across a wide political spectrum later argued that the artworks in question were misguided, offensive, and therefore rightfully censored. Consider, for example, a commentary given at the indepen-dent liberal radio station Echo of Moscow by the well- known writer and public intellectual Dmitry Bykov. While he severely criticized the prosecution’s request to imprison the organizers of Forbidden Art, his critique of the exhibit itself was equally relentless:

18. I thank Serguei Oushakine for suggesting the idea of onto- epistemological paralysis and pointing out the parallels with Althusser’s concept of “hailing.”

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I think the exhibit was a really dumb and graceless idea. I am far from being any kind of a religious fundamentalist, but if any religious symbol, whether it is Buddha, Muhammad, but especially a cruci!ed Christ, were exhibited with the Lenin medal instead of a head, my feelings would be offended. Any atheist, for example, atheist [Arthur] Grey in [Alexander] Grin’s novel Scarlet Sails, experiences physical pain upon seeing a cruci-!x. That is why Grey even ran to paint the blood on the cruci!x with blue paint. He could not even look at it. This I would understand. But to mock the painting where very bad people torture a very good one, I consider very wrong. Because it is a tragic event in world history, regardless of whether you believe in Christ or not. (Bykov 2010)

In making his case, Bykov invoked a scene from the early Soviet romantic tale Scarlet Sails, written in 1923 by Grin. Grey, the main character, is a child who dreams of becoming a sailor. At some point Grey sees a painting of the cruci!x-ion and, without prior knowledge of the context (from which Bykov apparently draws the conclusion that the child was an “atheist”), Grey becomes upset at the violence of the scene. He vandalizes the painting by covering Christ’s wounds with blue paint. While Bykov’s invocation of a child’s literalist ontology of an image might indeed suggest that he himself struggles to !nd an explanation for the moral anxiety provoked by the Forbidden Art exhibit, what he is trying to do here is to take this offense beyond its signi!cance for the circles of religious believers to reveal its universal moral implications. He also unwittingly legiti-mates those who vandalized the exhibit by spraying red and black paint over the artworks: his comparisons to a child are not derogatory; on the contrary, they suggest that this sort of reaction is universal and innate. He also quipped that “by the logic of contemporary art,” vandals should be considered performance artists engaged in an “artistic act of a destructionist genre” (quoted in Kashin 2003). “Of course, the exhibit should have been trashed, it fully deserved it,” he added when interviewed by Rossiiskaia gazeta, the Russian government’s daily newspaper, several years later. “This pogrom was purely an aesthetic act” (Bykov 2008).

This statement reflects the larger sentiment regarding the aesthetic value of the exhibits. Like Bykov, many public intellectuals who considered the shows immoral maintained that the exhibits were simply “bad art” and therefore did not deserve much sympathy. In fact, the argument that the exhibits did not have much artistic value and the notion that the participants were “false” (contemporary) artists unable to create accurate representations of reality equally contributed to the intelligentsia’s lack of support. Consider the following statement by Dmitry

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Olshansky (2003), a young literary critic, publicist, and very popular and proli!c right- of- center blogger:

For quite a few years now, there has existed in Russia so- called “contem-porary art.” It is well known that its creators do not paint (that is not fashionable) but do various kinds of “performances,” “projects,” and “actions.” . . . In the 1990s, our poor Russia was an ultraliberal state, and there was no one who could defend us from these aggressive freaks. In fact, there is still no one to defend us now — that is why the destroyer of icons Ter- Oganian managed to escape justice by hiding in the Czech Republic. Until now our authorities (and our public in general and, until recently, the Orthodox Church) remained passive toward the newest examples of art- !lth, such as the exhibit Caution, Religion! We should not forget the years when our culture was regularly spat on and kicked by people for whom even a Khrushchev bulldozer is not enough.19

Similarly, the well- known late art historian Savva Iamshchikov (2005), who was called to testify as an expert in court, noted that the Caution, Religion! exhibit had “nothing to do with art.” Even defenders of the exhibit constantly mentioned “the low artistic quality” of the works, calling on the artists to improve their skills (Ryklin 2006: 50). Ultimately, many of those who condemned the exhibit did so not only out of religious objection to the noncanonical treatment of icons but also on the grounds of “bad art,” thus intimately and conspicuously linking moral and aesthetic criteria. By this logic, the exhibits were perceived not only as an offense against individual religious believers or religion in general but also as an offense against the state, or more speci!cally against what Russians refer to as the state’s “moral” or “spiritual basis” (dukhovnye osnovy). The inappropriate use of icons in this discourse emerges not only as a breach of Orthodox piety but as a threat to the very foundations of Russian statehood, culture, and identity.

Another “expert” summoned for Ter- Oganian’s case, Vladimir Sinov’ev, a doc-tor of theology and president of the Art Commission of the Eparchial Council, stated that “since each Russian Orthodox icon, as an object of religious venera-tion, carries in it the idea of moral purity and divine aid, any attempt to discredit icons is an open call for de!ance of the morality of the Russian people” (quoted from Biblioteka Iakova Krotova 2005). While this sentiment might be unsurpris-ing coming from a religious intellectual, a statement by two well- known jour-

19. The author confuses the Brezhnev- era 1974 “bulldozer exhibit” mentioned above with another exhibit destroyed earlier by Nikita Khrushchev.

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nalists writing for the relatively liberal newspaper NG- religii, a supplement to the widely read Nezavisimaia gazeta (Independent Newspaper), is perhaps more striking: “The cowardly in!dels whose actions resulted in the sincere despair of the believers (many women, including other artists participating in Art Manezh, were simply crying when they saw icons being desecrated) did not understand that icon veneration in Russia is not a fad but one of the fundamental bases of traditional culture and may even be the most important component of the Russian archetype [russkii arkhetip]” (Rudakov and Shevchenko 1998).20

Indeed, Ter- Oganian struggled to understand the uproar around his perfor-mance, as he stated in an interview with Maxim Karakulov for Radek, a cultural political magazine:

Avdei Ter- Oganian: . . . I was mocking the classical avant- garde and not taking a heroic pose of the “desecrator.” I feel like the character from Kafka’s novel The Trial — I do not understand what I am being tried for.

Radek: But couldn’t you at least envision that your actions might pro-voke a negative reaction from believers? . . .

Avdei Ter- Oganian: Well, of course, fools can take any action seriously. When cinema was invented, the !rst viewers attacked the screen, thinking everything that was happening on the screen was reality. . . . In Russia, I imagined that we lived in a secular Western European state, and I perceive the lawsuit against me as absurd. (Quoted from Biblioteka Iakova Krotova 2005)

For cultural producers such as Ter- Oganian, secularism is inseparable from a particular semiotic ideology that assumes that objects and persons are discrete units. Objects cannot have magical properties, and humans cannot have mean-ingful relationships with objects as if they were persons. Ascribing supernatural powers to man- made objects such as icons, from Ter- Oganian’s standpoint, is pure fetishism, which entails a displaced location of human agency and is especially problematic for the idea of freedom (cf. Keane 2007, 2009). And the erasure of the gap between a person and an object is equally threatening to secularism. Ter- Oganian was likely well aware that his own views were not universally shared and that their expression might provoke attacks. But he falsely assumes that people with similar education, social status, and views of religion share his sensibilities. Speci!cally, he takes it for granted that artists and intellectuals should naturally subscribe to the same semiotic ideology as his own, while erroneous, “magical”

20. Although Nezavisimaia gazeta is a relatively liberal newspaper, Maxim Shevchenko, who was the chief editor of NG- religii at the time, is well known for his conservative views.

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thinking should be reserved for “regular people” (he uses the word obyvateli, which is technically translated from Russian as “regular” or “common” people but has distinct negative and somewhat derogatory undertones).

In the Moscow art community, many contemporary conceptual artists condemn me on the same grounds as regular people [obyvateli]. Their reasoning is that the icons were consecrated. What idiocy! I go to the store and buy something, in this case an icon, and then it turns out that this object does not quite belong to me — I need to take its being consecrated into account! It should be one way or the other: either this object is acces-sible to everyone, and we can treat it as we please, or they should intro-duce some restrictions on its purchase. For example, they do not sell drugs to everyone. So then let them equate one icon with one opium injection, sell them based on prescriptions, and then no such problems will arise. (Ter- Oganian quoted from Biblioteka Iakova Krotova 2005)

Ter- Oganian appears to be completely bewildered by the emerging post- Soviet limitations on freedom of expression, which to him are completely unacceptable in what he hoped was a secular “Western European” society. Here we might recall that patterns of speech restriction in different societies, as Asad (2009) has con-vincingly argued, are interesting to think about not only in terms of secularism versus religion and free speech versus blasphemy but also in terms of what these restrictions tell us about what constitutes a free human. A free human in Western liberal thought is one who is free to dispose of what he or she owns, including his or her body (with some restrictions, such as regarding suicide), affection, and speech, which are all considered to be forms of personal property (ibid.: 30). If ideas of the self- owning individual and of private property are central to the Euro- American liberal variety of secularism, then from the quotation above Ter- Oganian emerges as a textbook secular subject, who asserts not only the right to freely dispose of his speech but also the right to dispose of his property, which he views as his unique possession, a collection of autonomous objects independent from larger social relations.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, conservative intellectuals see the liberal model of the human as exactly the problem. They argue that it came to Russia with the Westernization introduced by Peter the Great and that it is antithetical to what they regard as authentic Russian values. An important article published during the Caution, Religion! trial compared the controversial shows to what would appear to be their exact opposite: exhibits of icons by contemporary Orthodox icon painters regularly held in galleries and museums. Yet the authors equally disapproved of both, arguing that they were “two sides of the same coin”:

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Modernity . . . it roughly starts with Descartes, a philosopher who put the human subject at the center. A human was put at the center! . . . Once a human was put at the center, everything else, including God and reli-gious objects, became simply objects to be cataloged. That’s how modern museums were created. . . . The !rst museums in Russia appeared in the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment ideas were imposed here. . . . There were no icon exhibits in Holy Russia, they appeared after Peter the Great and the introduction of secular art in Russia. Even the phrase “exhi-bition of icons” would have sounded bizarre in those times. . . . That’s how it happened: !rst, icons were destroyed due to misunderstanding [by the proponents of Enlightenment]. Then they !nally understood that an icon is a “valuable cultural artifact” and put it on a pedestal. Then one Ter- Oganian comes, with his humancentric philosophy, and sees that icons are on a pedestal, so he starts destroying them. Because the contemporary avant- garde requires the existence of guarded cultural treasures — without this “sacred” — there is no “profane.” That is why the exhibits of contem-porary icons and blasphemous performances are two sides of the same coin. They are parts of the same world — the world of anthropocentrism, of modernity, of humans who left religion, Church, God. (Kutkovoi and Gal’perina 2004)

The authors present a peculiar countermodernist polemic. An icon, they argue, should be viewed not as an aesthetic phenomenon but as the depiction of truth. There is no place for an icon in a gallery, as it would eventually produce icono-clastic desires. Ideally, there would be no galleries at all, as museums are essen-tially an imported “Western” Enlightenment institution, not rooted in the unique Russian ethos. While this might at !rst appear to be a fringe ultraconservative view, such interpretations of Russian history are part and parcel of the of!cial ide-ology of Russian exclusiveness promoted by the Kremlin, and they have impor-tant political consequences for Russia’s notions of sovereignty and its relations with the world. The supporters of the controversial shows, in their turn, warned that such views constitute an overt attack by church intellectuals against the insti-tution of a secular museum, typical of the “aggressive tendency” of the Russian Orthodox Church to “swallow up” secular institutions (Forbidden Art, n.d.).

Yet the rifts produced over these exhibits appear to be based not exclusively on one’s status as a religious believer or an atheist — some nonbelievers also con-sidered the exhibit to be transgressive, while some Orthodox claimed that God ultimately does not care about such offenses — but on conflicting interpretations of and attempts to enforce certain normative scopic regimes, such as what con-stitutes “art” or how one should relate to a visual sign. Supporters of the exhibits

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express a view of all objects and images as empty, neutral, arbitrary signs and vehicles of information, and of human sovereignty over the material world, exem-pli!ed by one’s unlimited right to possess, modify, and dispose of any object without restrictions. Their opponents, in turn, propose a different model of the human — not a sovereign liberal individual but one whose body and thoughts are not quite his or her own, with much more fluid boundaries between the person and the object. Such humans, argues Orthodox philosopher Arkadii Maler in his article “The Culturology of Blasphemy,” must be able to project themselves inside in order to understand the icon. This ability is on the decline, he warns, echoing the sentiment of Viktor Kutkovoi and Anna Gal’perina quoted above, who argue that icons are equally misunderstood by those who want to desecrate them and by those who want to worship them as works of art (Maler 2012).21 Interestingly, to make this point, Maler invokes the notion of the “reverse perspective” elaborated by Soviet semioticians, who were among those responsible for creating a frame-work for seeing icons as works of high art. The reliance on the modern notion of a “perspective” to privilege what one hopes to validate as a superior, authentically Russian pre- Enlightenment vision points to the mutual imbrication of categories. It also suggests that the debates generated by the controversial exhibits go beyond these speci!c artworks, revealing how notions of art, visuality, and models of the human are being negotiated in contemporary Russia.

Conclusion

In this essay I have argued that the recent lawsuits against artists and curators in Russia point to contested scopic regimes that emerged as a result of sociopolitical transformations in the region during the long twentieth century. The post- Soviet art wars can be considered productive in the sense that, having narrowed and solidi!ed popular vocabularies, they proved instrumental in creating a new sym-bolic !eld in which Russian subjects can operate and create new meanings. The peculiarity of the current Russian situation, and what makes it different from ostensibly related cases like the Danish cartoons affair or socialist censorship of art, is that the front line in this debate is not located squarely between the “secu-lar” elites and the “religious” masses or between free- spirited artists and prudish state censors. Instead, it cuts across traditional distinctions of class, social status,

21. Anonymous commentary on Kutkovoi and Gal’perina 2004 in Forbidden Art, n.d. Maler’s article is a critique of an exhibit that took place in the fall of 2012, dedicated to the Pussy Riot trial. This exhibit included stylized icons of Pussy Riot members wearing their signature balaclavas, which caused an uproar among their detractors. For an analysis of the Pussy Riot affair, see Bernstein 2013.

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and religious af!liation, revealing how constantly evolving and competing ways of seeing are put to political work. One would expect the Russian intelligentsia to behave similarly to their Euro- American counterparts and unanimously support the accused artists, as happened, for instance, with regard to the controversies surrounding the Brooklyn Museum’s 1999 Sensation exhibit or the Piss Christ photograph. Yet the Russian intelligentsia, both its liberal “pro- Western” and conservative “nationalist” wings, continues to be extremely conflicted about this issue, with only a small minority offering its wholehearted support to the artists.

In attempting to demonstrate why this would be the case, I considered the diverse causes of this internal conflict, which are complex and situated in shifting historical contexts and cultural assumptions. Perceptions of the exhibits were sub-ject to various kinds of processes, including long- standing and unresolved debates regarding whether icons should be treated as works of art, religious objects, or ethnographic artifacts; what kinds of art should be considered legitimate; and what the moral implications of these de!nitions would be. What I suggested here is that while Soviet atheist cultural workers labored hard to separate religion and science, banishing nonhuman agencies and introducing new, “cultured” ways of looking at icons, the domain of visual piety proved to be a contested zone that thwarted these purifying efforts. This particular con!guration of visuality, moral citizenship, and competing models of the human complicates ontological relations between humans, signs, and things, especially those considered the “national sacred” — whether religious icons or portraits of Lenin — making these relations fluid, incomplete, and subject to profound moral anxieties. A consideration of the scopic regimes that underlie the current conflict between the Orthodox Church, the rapidly transforming post- Soviet Russian state, contemporary artists, and the general public can shed light not merely on the passions behind the Russian art wars but also on what constitutes a free moral human.

References

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Anya Bernstein is an assistant professor of anthropolog$ at Harvard University. She is the author of Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (2013). Her articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Cultural Anthropolog!, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and other journals. She is also a documentary %lmmaker, director, writer, and cinematographer whose credits include In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman (2006) and Join Me in Shambhala (2002).