[D66] Political Art Actions: On Chto Delat? and the Avant-Garde

[Antid Oto]

http://www.criticatac.ro/9054/arta-ca-actiune-politica-despre-%E2%80%9Cchto-delat%E2%80%9D-si-avant-garda-political-art-actions-on-chto-delat-and-the-avant-garde/

Political Art Actions: On Chto Delat? and the Avant-Garde

When the 1990s came to a close in the Eastern part of Europe and in 
Russia, it was not just the end of a chaotic decade, but the 
contemptible conclusion of a painful era of struggles, collapse and 
disappointment.  Caught in the vortex of democratic-capitalist 
re-structuring that – despite rhetorical claims to the contrary – 
nonetheless preserved marked inequalities between workers and the 
wealthy minority, few artists began responding to prescient 
socio-cultural crises. Their interventions embodied questions of 
survival, resistance and reconstruction, faced with the lasting material 
failures of socialism and the onslaught of neoliberal renovation marked 
by alienation and decay – seeping under the fresh paint of proto-capitalism.

Such is the case of Chto Delat?, a collective based in St. Petersburg 
and Moscow, Russia, who work at the nexus of art, philosophy, political 
activism and theory. The collective’s name translates to “What is to the 
done?,” the title of Nikolay Cernyshevsky’s mid 19th century novel that 
put forward an agenda of radical reform in Imperial Russia – a title 
which Lenin later took for one of his famous revolutionary pamphlets 
from 1902. Centuries apart, “What is to be done?” functions as a 
mnemonic for self-organization of the proletariat through political 
engagement.

Founded in 2003 by a group of artists, philosophers, social researchers 
and activists from St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod, Chto 
Delat?’s practice defies straightforward categorization.  Concretely, 
the platform produces newspapers and artworks – video, radio plays and 
performances – staging artistic interventions in cultural domains and 
institutions, both locally and internationally. The collective’s 
newspapers and video works are distributed free of charge at 
exhibitions, demonstrations, conferences and through their website: 
http://www.chtodelat.org.  Their political and polemical works are 
methodologically grounded in the working principles of the Russian 
avant-garde – in particular the constructivist tradition – and the 
soviets – an instrumental form of self-management initiated during the 
1917 Russian Revolution.

Chto Delat? strenuously declare their allegiance to political action, 
engaged thought and the concretization of artistic innovation,  focusing 
on urgencies in Russian contemporary society and related struggles in 
the international context. As founding members Dmitry Vilensky and David 
Riff emphasized in the November 2008 issue of their newspaper – “When 
Artists Struggle Together,”  the collective’s strategy is concerned with 
the materialization and translability of leftist theory – articulated in 
artistic practice under post-communist conditions.  Part and parcel of 
this working method is what Vilensky coined as “the actualization” of 
the radical emancipatory projects of the avant-garde, looking back to 
key-moments in Russian cultural heritage when aesthetic and political 
agendas were bound together.[1]

In  an earlier work, “The Builders,” (2005)[2] the collective 
transferred onto video one of painter Viktor Popkov’s most seminal 
works, “The Builders of Bratsk” (1961). The original painting portrays 5 
workers, 4 men and a woman thinking about the conditions of their labor 
and how it may affect the transformation of society. The video in turn 
becomes animated by the physical presence of members from the collective 
in front of the camera, engaged in a self-refective dialogue about  the 
production of their own work. Building on the interpretation of the 
painting at the time it was produced, and, I would add, on the wisdom 
that culture cannot progress except through exchanges and assimilation 
of experiences, Chto Delat? bring the faded exponents of the proletariat 
up-close to the contemporary viewer. By interrogating their own position 
and practice, they open the viewer’s imagination to construct similar 
exercises of reflection. In “Builders,” the original composition appears 
frozen in time, while the organization of the Chto Delat’s platform 
pendulates between coming together and moving across different 
directions –  a cultural cooperative connecting private subjectivities 
to transmutations in social reality.

Chto Delat?’s interventions in institutional spaces can perhaps be 
described as a prismatic process through which themes are deconstructed 
and recaptured through the common denominator of the platform. Telling 
in this regard is Chto Delat?’s seminal installation at the Van 
Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2009, where the collective engaged with 
constructivist artist Alexander Rodchenko’s 1925 project “Workers’ Club. 
” Produced for the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and 
Industrial Arts in Paris, Rodchenko’s work was a model for the 
organization of the proletariat in the former USSR: reimagining leisure 
as a collective, dynamic activity, aimed at education, the production of 
knowledge and participation in political life.

In turn, Chto Delat? designed a cinema area, complete with a study and 
discussion space – An Activists’ Club – using the museum to initiate a 
discussion forum about the position of art in society. Further, the 
collective produced and distributed a related issue of their newspaper 
entitled “What is the Use of Art?.”[3] Through this rhetorical 
provocation – deconstructed through debates, statements and visual 
interventions in the space of about a dozen pages- they emphasize the 
grounding of their practice in avant-garde projects aimed at the radical 
transformation of society through the re-imagining of inter-personal 
relationships coming from Marxist thought. Declaring that contemporary 
art should be on the side of the oppressed, they conceived  its function 
to be the elaboration of instruments of knowledge  – to discern the 
totality of contradictions governing the social domain of the economic 
and the political.

Three of the collective’s video works were shown in the Activists’ Club 
in Eindhoven: “Builders” (2004-2005), “Angry Sandwich-people or in 
Praise of Dialectics” (2006) and “Perestroika Songspiel” (2008). 
Although I am confined by the limits of this article to enter a deeper 
analysis of these videos, I want to foreground them as constructing on 
another avant-garde tradition – the Brechtian Method – which the 
collective have intertwined with the actualization of the Russian 
heritage of politically engaged practice. In this respect Chto Delat? 
seems to be in dialogue with American theorist Frederic Jameson’s case 
for the continuing relevance of Brecht’s social and political critique, 
espoused in the former’s 1998 oeuvre, “Brecht and Method.”[4] Jameson 
argues for Brechtian contemporary relevance – not only for some 
undecided or merely probable future, but right now, in the post-Cold-War 
market-rhetorical situation. Indeed, even before producing “Perestroika 
Songspiel,” the collective put Brecht on their theoretical map. In 2006 
they published an edition of their newspaper entitled “Why Brecht?”[5] 
in which they elaborated their investment in linking intellectual 
thought with action, by building on Brecht’s legacy of analyzing 
tangible historical circumstances that can lead to collective solidarity 
and social renewal in times of historical duress.

The concrete form of this engagement are a series of collective video 
works, “Songspiel Triptych,” of which “Perestroika Songspiel” (2008)[6] 
is the first drama – connecting the Brechtian songspiel,  as a form of 
politically charged social critique, with a seminal moment during the 
restructuring of the former Soviet Union. Namely, the video focuses on a 
day of unprecedented uprising and solidarity – August 21, 1991 the civil 
victory over the Soviet Coup D’État, when Communist Party hard-liners 
attempted to remove then president Mikhail Gorbachev from power and 
overturn the latter’s reforms. The work is not merely a 
re-memorialization of those historical events but a deconstruction 
structured along the lines of a an ancient tragedy. Its protagonists are 
an operatic chorus – the embodiment of the general public and five 
Petestroika- types: the democrat, the businessman, the revolutionary, 
the nationalist and the feminist. Through rhetoric and debate, the 
actors analyze their actions during these seminal events, reflecting on 
their position in society and their struggle to forge a new political 
path for their country. Based on documentary evidence and witness 
testimonies of these historical episodes, the video reveals both the 
political immaturity of the civic body and the subsequent suffocation of 
their visions.  The choir as well as the five societal representatives 
directly address the viewer through songs, commentaries and political 
slogans – a strategy that Brecht coined as “dialectical theater” – 
catalyzing the ground for a radical re-imagining of subjectivities and 
social relations.

“Perestroika Songspiel” is closely related to a recurring installation 
“Perestroika Timeline,” materialized at The Centro Andaluz de Arte 
Contemporáneo in Seville and the Istanbul Biennale in 2009. This graphic 
and video work, presented in different versions responding to specific 
spaces, is another instantiation of the afore-mentioned concept of 
“crystallization.” It merges the collective songspiels with photographic 
material transferred onto the exhibition walls by collective members 
Nikolay Oleynikov, with Thomas Campbell and Dmitry Vilenski – as a 
palimpsest of classes, generations and political actors. The Songspiel 
and the Timeline are artistic tools to re-stage political history : they 
mark a shift in the traditional understanding of Cold War artistic or 
historical archives that merely present on historical events – to 
engendering a space for reflection and activism around the social and 
political relevance of aesthetic representation of those moments and actors.

Chto Delat?’s interrogation of the production of both history and 
politics, their unity and reciprocity is not banal. Their years-long 
venture of fusing cultural positions with Marxist theory continues to 
evolve through adaptation and alteration amongst cultural practices, 
looking to concepts left undeveloped in one avant-garde, medium or 
cultural context.  Critics have oftentimes described their works as 
uneven, mixing things together that are not readily compatible. This is 
to some extent valid, but as founding member Dmitry Vilenski emphasizes 
the collective is concerned with developing methods to solve 
contradictions in real life: interweaving avant-garde form with radical 
content or finding the balance between revolutionary spontaneity and 
constructive discipline.

As such, they are guided by the visions of politically affiliated 
avant-gardes from different disciplines to provide a framework for 
rediscovery that challenges apathetic notions of form, function and 
context. Their practice  seeks to displace the subsumption of human 
relations to the so-called totality of capitalism – by freeing spaces in 
the viewer’s imagination for situations that fall outside this logic, 
and enabling him/her to seize the potential for collective political 
action. As a result, Chto Delat?’s practice is in conflict with the 
given order, may that be the prohibitive art scene in their native 
Russia, dominated by powerful institutions and corporate power-players, 
or even the Western institutional spaces which they challenge into 
politically charged acts of observation and communication with 
audiences.  For example, on the occasion of the exhibition “Ostalgia,” 
which opened at the New Museum in New York this month, the collective 
chose to go against the concept of nostalgia for the period before 1989, 
and presented a multi-media chronology that analyzes the recent 
political history of the United States in relation with Socialism as a 
global movement.

What is the conclusion of this article? One may choose to dismiss this 
relevancy of this example for the context in Romania, as bound with the 
particular circumstances of the Russian avant-garde tradition and the 
Left.  But I would like to suggest otherwise. Without reducing 
historically distinct but related contexts, I would like to propose that 
we allow for tangents in the face of common challenges relegated to the 
social sphere, embedded in the economic and political. One of the orders 
on which these struggles are manifest is culture, through which projects 
of liberating education and systematic organization can be catalyzed 
into concretization.

In Romania, the lines are oftentimes blurred between the philosophy of 
Marx, communism, and the recently deposed dictatorial apparatus of 
socialist pretense that should be rightly condemned.  Over and over 
again, the struggles revolve in a comatose cycle, putting communism on 
trial for crimes against humanity as a politically correct measure, and 
generally ostracizing the left. At the same time, no one can deny that 
the current capitalist-democratic order is far-falling from the promises 
of political probity and economic equity it set out to achieve.

As the civic body renounces political action – seen as already 
imbricated into the mechanisms of corruption (before and after 1989) – 
it can only further the dissociation of social struggles from each 
other, supporting the consolidation of inequalities between workers and 
a wealthy minority . This double bind neutralizes the possibility for a 
common resistance, of the reclaiming of political positions by workers 
and of the awareness of a world beyond imperative consumption. Similar 
conditions can be observed in contemporary Russian society, where the 
possibility for solidarity is tested by the fragmentation of groups of 
politically active workers from different domains.  One of the biggest 
challenges engaged cultural activists face is the consolidation of 
theory, art, philosophy with the efforts of local unions and mutual aid 
groups. Recognizing the difficult space between Theory and Practice, 
Chto Delat? carry on pushing the limits of this divide. As such, they 
provide a powerful example of engagement and solidarity channeled 
through culture that continues to challenge the adequately sensitive, 
passive cultural spectator into thinking and acting politically.

The author would like to thank Dmitry Vilenski for providing advice and 
materials for this article.

[1] Chto Delat?, When Artists Struggle Together, St: Petersburg, 
November 2008. All newspapers and texts are accessible online at: 
http://www.chtodelat.org/

DE ACELASI AUTOR
Ce poziţii pot ocupa femeile în arta � ..
[2] “The Builders” can be viewed online here: http://vimeo.com/6878627

[3] The newspaper issue “What is the use of Art?” can be downloaded from 
the collective’s website: http://www.chtodelat.org/

[4] See Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method (London and New York: Verso, 
1998)

[5] The newspaper issue “Why Brecht?” can be downloaded from the 
collective’s website: http://www.chtodelat.org/

[6] “Perestroika Songspiel” can  be viewed online: http://vimeo.com/6877630