New York Times: "Artist Playing Cat-and-Mouse Faces Russia’s Claws"
Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times
IT has become difficult to locate Aleksei Plutser-Sarno.
As a police dragnet closed around Voina, the radical Russian art collective that he belongs to, Mr. Plutser-Sarno stopped using cellphones out of fear they would alert the police to his whereabouts, resorting to Skype and, sometimes, letters hand-delivered by intermediaries.
When pressure from the police is high, he tries not to spend two consecutive nights at the same place, and he will concoct elaborate diversions - once he gave a flurry of interviews saying he was in Estonia while simultaneously posting blog entries from Tel Aviv, another place where he was not.
Interviewing Mr. Plutser-Sarno this month required waiting at the foot of a statue of an 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher for a young woman in a blue coat, who examined passports and led a circuitous walk to his location. Though no one mentioned it at the time, the philosopher was Hryhorii Skovoroda, and his epitaph read, “The world tried to catch me, but it did not succeed.”
If it sounds like a game, there is a good reason for it. For three years, Voina, which means war, has been playing cat-and-mouse with Russian law enforcement, staging street actions that ranged from the obscure (throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers) to the monumental (a 210-foot penis painted on a St. Petersburg drawbridge, so that it rose up pointing at the offices of the F.S.B., the security service).
Last September, Voina launched its most audacious project: “Palace Revolution,” which involved running up to parked police cars and flipping them over - a commentary, the group explained, on police corruption.
Russian authorities had previously treated Voina as a nuisance; the penalty for the drawbridge action was a fine of 2,000 rubles, or $67, said Joseph Gabuniya, one of the group’s lawyers. But there are new charges aimed at shutting the group down. Two of Voina’s leaders are in pretrial detention, facing sentences of up to seven years; a third fears losing custody of her son.
That leaves Mr. Plutser-Sarno as the last of the group’s inner circle who is free to meet with reporters - something he said was safe only outside Russia’s borders. At 48, he looks less like a fugitive than a professor, the kind who stays up until dawn debating hermeneutics and drinking box wine. He spent much of his career in a spotlight of one kind or another; he is the author of a multivolume dictionary of Russian obscenities, and he hosted “The Black Square,” a televised talk show he described as “52 minutes of noisy philosophical debate, with shouting, uproar and fisticuffs.”
BUT that life has fallen by the wayside. On the day his colleagues were arrested, Mr. Plutser-Sarno went to see his mother in Moscow one last time, knowing it would be too risky to be seen at her apartment after that. He said investigators have threatened to charge him with organizing a criminal gang, which could bring a sentence of up to 20 years.
“It was pretty much clear that someone would be caught sooner or later,” he said. “Oleg - it seems that he underestimated the risks. I assessed the risks as much higher. I never spent the night in the same place twice,” he said, referring to Oleg Vorotnikov, one of the detained leaders.
When he was asked whether the lifestyle had come to weigh on him, Mr. Plutser-Sarno responded with a radiant smile. He likes it very much.
It was disgust that spawned Voina, he said. By the middle of the last decade, Moscow was flush with cash, and radical expression had all but vanished from public life. Opposition rallies were so marginal that not even Western journalists showed up anymore. Artists earned a comfortable income in galleries underwritten by government-connected billionaires.
“Who are the other left radical artists?” Mr. Plutser-Sarno asked. “These are people who constantly travel to the West, get grants, take part in conferences, read reports about revolution and Marxism and the difficult conditions of the working class in Russia. Who is the hall? The wives of oligarchs.”
It was against that backdrop that he joined forces with Mr. Vorotnikov, Voina’s founder, who had studied philosophy at Moscow State University. Voina had staged several actions but wanted more attention. Attention was Mr. Plutser-Sarno’s specialty. The group introduced its new campaign with an orgy in the State Museum of Biology, casting it as a commentary on the presidential campaign that brought Dmitri A. Medvedev to power.
The Moscow art world responded coldly, for the most part. Among the group’s critics was Anatoly Osmolovsky, one of Russia’s pioneering street artists. Mr. Osmolovsky, now celebrated for his sumptuous sculptures, wrote of Voina that “their desire to attribute some vague political context to their own gestures betrays them as extremely inexperienced and, in essence, cowardly artists.”
But Voina did not need art-world connections - YouTube, LiveJournal and Twitter gave it access to young Russians who shared the group’s sense of humor and rage at the police. Its plans got bigger, riskier. Before painting the penis on the bridge last June, the group practiced for a month before concluding that nine people could do the job in 30 seconds. As it turned out, guards barreled after them and they had only 23 seconds.
The image stood for a few hours before the authorities scrubbed it off; by then it had exploded onto the Internet. It was, Mr. Plutser-Sarno said, Voina’s most perfect act.
“It exactly accords with my conception of what art should be,” he said. “It is monumental, heroic, romantic, left-radical, an act of protest. I like it as a piece of work, not just because it is a penis.”
THERE have been no new performances since Mr. Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, another leader, were arrested. Some admirers see the arrests as a natural progression for Voina.
“An alpinist who scales the summit of a mountain, he understands that there is some chance he will fall into a crevasse,” said Andrei Bilzho, a cartoonist who dedicated a series of drawings to the group. “Alpinists get killed that way. It’s an extreme sport. What they do is an extreme form of art-action.”
But David Riff, a Moscow art critic, said the arrests permanently damaged a group of artists whose chief appeal lay in repeated, and sometimes jaw-dropping, escapes.
That game was clearly over last week, when a judge in St. Petersburg extended pre-trial detention for Mr. Vorotnikov and Mr. Nikolayev. It was exactly the kind of courtroom where Voina could have been expected to show up - to clamber up on benches for a 70-second punk-rock performance. But nothing like that happened.
As for Mr. Plutser-Sarno, he was nowhere to be found. He said later, via e-mail, that he had slipped back across the Russian border, made his way to St. Petersburg and was right around the corner from the courthouse, following the proceedings via Twitter. That is what he said. But who knows whether to believe him?
January 21, 2011
By ELLEN BARRY
KIEV, Ukraine
Source - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/world/europe/22voina.html