Pussy Riot Was carefully Calibrated for protest

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/26/arts/music/pussy-riot-was-carefully-calibrated-for-protest.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120826


August 22, 2012

Pussy Riot Was Carefully Calibrated for Protest

By MELENA RYZIK

DEPENDING on your taste, punk died in 1979, or maybe 1994, or whenever studded leather cuffs became a must-have mall-girl accessory. Now, suddenly, punk has been resurrected, stitched together anew in the form of the well-accessorized Russian women who call themselves Pussy Riot.

The name helps. It’s its own form of culture jam, a savvy reference to feminist and musical history — riot grrrl and Susie Bright, as well as a wink to women’s appropriation of sexual agency and bodily power. Madonna has worn Pussy Riot’s name on her bare skin, a statement both of her support and of her own rebelliousness. (She still knows how to flaunt it.) The inevitable aesthetic judgment has found these girls, as they sometimes refer to themselves, on the right side of cool. For women identified with rock ’n’ roll — and for fans, especially in the West — Pussy Riot is expertly constructed, perfectly charged. Plus, it’s fun to say — unless you’re in American network news, which has been demurely referring to the group as an all-female punk band.

But for artists and activists around the world the recent travails of Pussy Riot, founded in 2011, have become a cause célèbre. When its members, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, were sentenced on Aug. 17 to two years each in a prison camp for staging a flash protest against President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral in February, it served as another rallying point, at a time when many are concerned with government malfeasance, economic and social equality, and, not incidentally, women’s rights. The ladies of Pussy Riot are of-the-moment renegades.



That the group is so digestible to Western audiences has been much noted. Yes, the choppy performance that got its members arrested could have just as easily taken place at an undergrad art school, where the corresponding video might’ve been mocked for its low production value (or turned up in a flashback episode of HBO’s “Girls”). Instead, when it made the rounds online, it found eager and sympathetic spectators and an instant distribution channel aided by social media. Punk was never shy about being amateur; DIY spread wide is its hallmark. And in a country where public dissent is at a neophyte stage, Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer,” a 40-second lip sync, only served to highlight the discordantly severe punishment its members received. Supporters — like the hundreds who gathered at a reading in New York on the eve of the sentencing — viewed the group members as unfairly judged, less creatively shackled musicians than oppressed symbols of heroism.



It’s been a long time since music had the whiff of danger, and longer still since it carried the beat of political change, at least in democracies. Hardly anyone would’ve expected that to come out of Russia, where both the songcraft and the messaging seem outdated, vestiges of retro power-pop and a barely concealed propaganda machine. The women of Pussy Riot took those tools and used them for their own sophisticated means. Immediately after their conviction on charges of hooliganism based on religious hatred — a more punk indictment could scarcely be invented — Pussy Riot, though only nominally a band, released its first single. Titled, in translation, “Putin Lights Up the Fires,” it’s defiance set to bracing guitars and drum kicks. You can’t seal us in a box, the women shout in a singsong as they demand more jail time. The chorus announces that the country is taking to the streets, bidding farewell to the regime, driven by a “feminist wedge.” A few acolytes, complete with balaclavas, performed it in the courthouse during the sentencing. It’s pure agitprop, and it’s incredibly catchy.



Paul McCartney, Bjork, Peter Gabriel and many other performers have expressed solidarity, as has Amnesty International; Kathleen Hanna, a founder of riot grrrl, saw in Pussy Riot the movement’s future. Although called a punk band on TV, it’s not quite right to consider Pussy Riot as musicians yet. Instead, these women belong squarely with art provocateurs and thinkers like Judith Butler (whose pioneering feminist influence they acknowledged) and Guerrilla Girls, the anonymous rabble-rousers who took on the sexist art establishment only to be welcomed into it (now part of the permanent collection in the Museum of the Modern Art). Pussy Riot’s unapologetic court statements revealed an intellectual and philosophical rigor, and its earlier efforts with the art group Voina offered even more brazen forms of dissent.



“Pussy Riot are our kind of girls: feminist activists in masks making trouble,” Kathe Kollwitz and Frida Kahlo, pseudonymous Guerrilla Girls, wrote in an e-mail. “But,” they added, “we live in a very different culture where art is not as dangerous, and we can pretty much do what we want.”



The Russian response to Ms. Alyokhina, 24; Ms. Samutsevich, 30; and Ms. Tolokonnikova, 23, has been mixed at best. Russians are generally deeply distrustful of feminism, even though Russian women are no shrinking violets.



Yet the stoicism of Ms. Samutsevich, Ms. Alyokhina and Ms. Tolokonnikova — the latter two, we are frequently reminded, the mothers of young children — has made a deep impact in both Russia and the West. Their symbolism as radicals — Ms. Tolokonnikova with her fist raised as she was led out of the courtroom — has been so successful in the West that there is now debate not about whether to support them but on what grounds: as social agitators, or broad critics of the Kremlin. For its part the group — along with an unofficial spokesman in Pyotr Verzilov, Ms. Tolokonnikova’s husband — has made its ambitions plain: revolution.



“One really inspiring thing about Pussy Riot is that they always make it clear that their actions are political and feminist,” the Guerrilla Girls wrote. “The world needs more feminist masked avengers. We urge everyone to make trouble, each in her own way.”



That message was not lost on Aug. 17, when thousands around the world protested the two-year sentences. A lawyer for the women, Nikolai Polozov, said they would appeal, though he noted they would not ask Mr. Putin for a pardon. “Literally this is what they said: ‘Let them go to hell with their pardon,’ ” he told Agence France-Presse of his clients.



Ms. Tolokonnikova and Mr. Verzilov’s 4-year-old daughter has been making plans to bust her mother out of jail. “She draws diagrams showing how we can go about doing this with bulldozers and buses, first by tearing down the prison walls and then by breaking open the cage,” he told the German publication Der Spiegel.



In New York, where, as in many other cities, people were arrested as they expressed their solidarity with Pussy Riot. Marian, a 12-year-old soon to enter eighth grade, came to the demonstration in Times Square from her home in Queens. She held a neon drawing of a balaclava, having been warned that wearing one might get her in trouble.



“It’s cruel — they’re in jail for two years, and they just spoke their minds; I’m here to support them,” said Marian, whose parents did not want her last name used. She wore a flowered dress and silver Doc Martens, explaining eagerly that she considered herself a riot grrrl. “It was a thing in the ’90s,” she offered, adding that she began to think of herself as a feminist at the age of 10, learning about it from her mother, Christine. “Mostly by example,” Christine said. Marian, the daughter of a Russian father, read about Pussy Riot online, absorbing its videos and ethos.

“The fact that they’re not apologizing for what they did is really inspiring to me,” she said. She looked around the sparsely attended protest. “I feel like if people did this more,” she said, “women would be more respected.”

2011 The New York Times Company

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs