Some works of art could be said to be perfectly timed.
“Guernica” called attention to the horrors of war as practiced by fascist Spain in awful harmony with fascist Germany. It was and is propaganda of the highest order
The Eiffel Tower, considered an ugly abomination until about five minutes after it was erected, came along at the perfect moment, the dawn of real modernism in 1889, for a big piece of metal to be understood as public art.
“Police State,” the recent performance art piece by Nadya Tolokonnikova of the genius anti-Kremlin collective Pussy Riot, is slightly overly perfectly timed.
The work had been planned for several years at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo. As I mentioned in this space a couple of weeks ago, I had a ticket to stop by the performance on June 14, the last day it was to have been open.
Reality trumped art. Thanks to, um, a police occupation of the plaza in front of the old police-car warehouse that is the giant MOCA space, “Police State” had to be postponed. It was a brilliant irony. And so a situation in which art thrives.
Most of you will remember the provocative name the artist gave her group — hard to forget — but, as a reminder: “Nadya Tolokonnikova is a conceptual performance artist, activist and the creator of Pussy Riot, a global feminist art movement. In 2012, she received a two-year prison term following the anti-Putin performance Punk Prayer, which The Guardian later named among the best artworks of the 21st century. In 2023, Tolokonnikova’s installation, Putin’s Ashes, at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, propelled her into a new criminal case and put her on Russia’s most wanted criminal list.”
Wouldn’t that be a cool list to be on? I mean, conceptually.
“Punk Prayer” was the Pussy Riot song Nadya and two of her bandmates sang in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, a gig for which they were sentenced to the penal colony for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” The former KGB agent who is the current Russian czar is of course no more religious than the current American president. But they pretend to be, for political purposes. Opening lines: “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish Putin, banish Putin, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, banish him, we pray thee!”
Here was the set-up for “Police State.” Nadya — may I call her Nadya? The Tolstoyan patronymic is too much to type — was to lock herself into a cell at the Geffen, a cell that she was not to leave for, originally, 10 days.
The actual police state and National Guard deployment messed with that. In the end, I think she was in fake jail in Los Angeles for three days.
But she is an artist who actually served her time in an actual gulag for two years, and so we cut her some slack. In a brilliantly perverse Russian form of punishment, rather than making license plates for the general public, the inmates in the remote prison in which Nadya served her time for making fun of the dictator who rules her once-grand land are forced to sew police uniforms for their unpaid jobs.
She was said to be doing some sewing here, but on my watch this past Saturday it seemed to be more a bit of drawing and puttering about her little Downtown corrugated-steel shack.
Before I walked into the large, darkened, music-filled room, I expected that the only glimpses we would get of Nadya would be through some kind of slat, from far away. But the reality was there were four or five slats, and one really unexpected situation: I went to the shack, peered through the slat that was high as my head, and as I did, she stood from her desk, walked over to me and made eye contact from just a few inches away. It was most disarming. At least I had the presence of mind to not smile, or wave, or say some ridiculous: “Hi! How ya doing in there?” She met my glance and moved on.
Pussy Riot was escorted to prison by police motorcycles. She writes: There’s “no difference between me and Putin — he gets sped through the city in his motorcade and I … in mine. The rest is mere detail.” Nadya quotes from the French philosopher Foucault, who she read in her cell: “In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.”
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.