Russia - Art Resistance and the Conservative-Authoritarian Zeitgeist by Lena Jonson Andrei Erofeev

Author:Lena Jonson, Andrei Erofeev [Lena Jonson, Andrei Erofeev]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138733015
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 34703309
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Notes

1Andrei Erofeev conducted the interviews, and Irina Kochergina edited the material. All texts were translated from Russian by Artemis Davleev except the text by Vikentii Nilin, which was translated by James Donoher.

2Roskomnadzor is the federal supervisor of telecommunications, information technology and mass communications.

Part III

Artistic counterstrategies

9Dissensus and ‘shimmering’

Tergiversation as politics

Daniil Leiderman

This article examines several phenomena in contemporary Russian art that seem to intentionally undermine or betray the very discourses that they claim to voice. Building on Jacques Rancière’s notion of politics articulated in his book Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, I argue that these betrayals are a strategic effort towards a redistribution of the sensible, motivated by a deep scepticism about the prospects of overturning oppressive social institutions without replacing them with something equally odious. I trace this effort to the counter-ideological strategy known as ‘shimmering’ (mertsatelnost or mertsanie) in the discourse of the Moscow Conceptualists, among whom the poet and artist Dmitrii Prigov, who coined the term ‘shimmering’ in the late 1970s, was a key figure. The Moscow Conceptualists are the circle of artists and writers that consolidated within Moscow’s artistic underground during the 1970s and remain influential today. In Prigov’s understanding, shimmering consists of a disciplined strategy of oscillation between mutually exclusive ideological and/or metaphysical discourses from profound investment in the artwork to utter detachment, critical distance and merciless analysis, and then back again – a trajectory intended to prevent or pre-empt the consolidation of an authoritative artistic voice or artwork (Prigov 1999).1 I expand this definition to a broader disciplined tergiversation of alternating investment and detachment, designed to undermine the binary conflicts around art between the official discourse of Socialist Realism and the alternatives of early Nonconformism. Using this definition, I discuss the vitality of shimmering as a strategy in critical artworks of the Putin era.

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