Sacrilige as Tool for Institutional Critique

ways of seeing religious offense in post-Soviet art and culture wars

Darja Filippova, Princeton U

(Post-)Secular, Warwick  2017

Chris Burden, Trans-Fixed, 1974 

Avdei Tero-Oganian, Young Non-Believer, 1998

Maurizio Catellan,

La Nona Hora, 1999

Pussy Riot, in a  2012 performance in Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow,  sang “Holy Virgin, please chase away Putin!”

The trials of Pussy Riot, where in the closing statements the women referenced the trials of  Dostoevsky, Christ and Solzhenitsyn

"They went into a church of a religion that continues to hate women; it denies us rights over our bodies. [...] It is a feminist case and it is a humanist case."

-excerpt From Pussy Riot Solidarity Rally, Chicago, 2012

Icon of St Basil the Fool (the Blessed), 1469-1557, canonized 1588, Moscow

We are fools for Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye are honorable, but we are despised.                                         

           - Paul's 1st Letter to the Corinthians 4:10

The nude 16th century St Basil the Blessed Fool in Moscow and

Petr Pavlensky, the artist, nailing his testicles to the Red Square (with the Cathedral of St Basil in the background)   

Oleg Mavromatti, Do Not Believe Your Eyes, 2000

Oleg Mavromatti, Ally/Foe, 2010

Here is how he enters the town: he found a dead dog at the dump outside town, removed his belt cord, tied it to the dog’s paw and ran, dragging the dog behind him. He entered the city gates, near which there was a children’s school. When the children saw, they began to shout: ”Look at the stupid abba, and they chased him and beat him all over.”                                                                                                                 Hagiography of St Symeon Salos

BHG 79.19-25

Pussy Riot, "Punk Prayer," 2012

The day after his arrival in Emesa, on Sunday, he gathered nuts and went   into a church at the start of the service, throwing nuts and extinguishing  the lamps. People tried to expel him, but he leaps onto the Ambon and started throwing nuts at the women. He was ejected with great    difficulty.

Hagiography of St Symeon Salos

BHG 79.25- 80.2

Cathedral of Christ the Savior, Moscow

Opened in 1991, it is an exact replica of a 1883 Cathedral of the same name. 

In our performance we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture and that of protest culture, thus suggesting to     smart people that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch and Putin, that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.

                          – Ekaterina Samutsevich of Pussy Riot