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TCS0010.1177_02632764211032726Theory, Culture & SocietyRiccioni and Halley

Global Public
Public Life
Life
Theory, Culture & Society
2021, Vol. 38(7-8) 211­–231
Performance as Social © The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/02632764211032726
https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211032726
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs
Riot as a Feminist
Avant-garde
Ilaria Riccioni
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano

Jeffrey A. Halley
University of Texas at San Antonio

Abstract
This article describes the short but remarkable sociopolitical life of the Russian rock
group Pussy Riot. The group became famous in 2012 not only for the political con-
tent of its performances but for its transgressive performativity: its violation of
established public settings and its creation of disturbing anti-authoritarianism
images of today’s official Russia. The analysis aims to establish Pussy Riot as part
of an avant-garde movement and as a radicalization of the very idea of the avant-
garde against the familiarity of the public aspect of everyday life. Public ‘normalcy’
reveals itself to be complicit in that what should be criticized is instead taken for
granted, and legitimized. Pussy Riot is a new art avant-garde in terms of both how it
relates to activism, social justice, feminism, and art, and to the general public, not
only to the art world.

Keywords
activism, avant-garde art, feminism, politics, Pussy Riot

Prologue: A Description of the Pussy Riot Performance

(Cathedral Event)
On 21 February 2012, Mardi Gras, Pussy Riot enters the Cathedral of
Christ the Saviour in Moscow and begins a performance that lasts for a
minute and a half. The group is made up of five women, colorfully
dressed, three in red dresses, one in green, one in white, concealed at
first by their coats. They all wear balaclavas of yellow, dark brown, light
blue, and white over their heads. The event is being recorded by someone

Corresponding author: Ilaria Riccioni. Email: Ilaria.Riccioni@unibz.it

TCS Online Forum: https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/
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in the church with a hand-held camera, so the beginning is jerky and

taken from a distance. Suddenly there is commotion and shouting. The
camera steadies and shifts to a close-up. The women run to the ambo, the
space from which the church officials address the Russian people
(Denysenko, 2013: 1069). This is a violation of an official and gendered
space: women are excluded. One Pussy Riot member in a red dress and a
light blue balaclava unfurls a guitar. A uniformed security guard runs up
and tries to restrain the woman in the green dress, but she is able to break
free. He then moves to his right and wrestles the guitar from the woman
in the red dress before she can begin to play. As this is happening, behind
them, another Pussy Riot member in a red dress pumps her fists in the
air, jumping, and dancing. Further inside the church a nun pushes back
two female bystanders with covered heads, turning them around and
pointing the way to the back of the church, indicating that this event is
unauthorized and forbidden to be seen. Another guard confiscates the
sound equipment, but the event continues. An intensely rhythmical music
has begun; the equipment is left running. It is not turned off until a few
moments later, and the guard brings it to the right-hand side of the
church. Now the performance really begins: four members stand in a
row in front of the ambo, facing the congregation. The performers are
dancing and chanting, with their fists in the air, kicking. They pump their
fists downward and chant four times, ‘Virgin Mary, please get rid of
Putin.’ Three guards arrive and break up the performance. They take
away all but the woman in a green dress. She moves to the left side of the

Figure 1. Pussy Riot performance in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow.
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ambo. She crosses herself, then kneels, drops her head to the floor with
her arms stretched in front of her, kneels again and crosses herself and
bows two times. She tries to repeat these gestures but is interrupted by a
guard who grabs her and picks her up. She shakes herself free from his
hold and runs behind him and then past him to the right, shouting the
same chant. The group is leaving the ambo, on the right-hand side, where
they are hustled out by the guards. They break into the same chant two
more times. A video of this performance, entitled ‘Pussy Riot gig at
Christ the Saviour Cathedral’, was uploaded to YouTube on 2 July
2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼grEBLskpDWQ).

Introduction
This article presents the Russian feminist performance collective Pussy
Riot as an example of an avant-garde act that directly addresses authori-
tarianism and injustice. Our premise is that Pussy Riot is a new art avant-
garde, new in the sense of how it relates to activism, politics, and art, and
how it aims at the general public beyond what is usually thought of as a
public interested in art.
‘Avant-garde’ has long been a contested term. Our conceptualization
of the term stresses its role as an activist dialectic of politics and culture.
It differs from attempts to identify the avant-garde with ‘high modern-
ism’ (Poggioli, 1971), or to see it as a genre with its own historical devel-
opment (Bürger, 1984).
We examine how Pussy Riot actualizes feminist struggle in spectacular
and transgressive performances and we comment on some of the criti-
cisms of the political aspect of their work. Certain features of Pussy Riot
are typical of most avant-gardes, for example in their refusal to ignore or
deny ambiguity and the linking of ambiguity to the utopian idea of a
better world. But they also present a feminist demand for human rights
and religious freedom.1
This event had important consequences that represented a turn in, and
a magnification of, the relationship between art and politics. The com-
mitted art of Pussy Riot embodies, in every performance, the struggle for
democratic values, as well as the tension between established power and
the human body as a site of the absolute opposition of power and resist-
ance. It is this embodiment that gives these avant-garde performances
their transgressive quality as resistance to the status quo without respite,
thereby challenging the legitimacy as well as the concrete practices of
power. According to Marcuse, ‘Illegality is the common denominator
of Resistance action and Resistance art’ (1993: 191), and it is also a
feature of Pussy Riot activism. This raises the more general and radical
question of democracy as a basis for freedom of expression that seems to
be, in contemporary Russia, openly compromised beyond simple reform.
Marcuse highlighted the internal relation of art and politics in his
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concept of ‘resistance art’ to show how such art is irreducibly linked to

human rights and social values and is altogether external to power and
hierarchical logic (Marcuse, 2007: 173). However, the role of the avant-
garde has always been to go beyond resistance in its break with art as an
institution, and its merging of art with life (Bürger, 1984).
What, then, is the critical positioning of this relatively ‘new art’ and its
artists in the social order of contemporary Russia? This is analyzed in
two case documents: the performance of 21 December 2012, and the
subsequent video performance ‘Pussy Riot Punk Prayer’. We chose
these because Pussy Riot became known for these first two performances
and they are paradigmatic for understanding their project. These two
actions, in words, music, and energized bodies, were intentionally pro-
vocative. They were both disruptive and transgressive, involving the
breaking of religious, political, and gender rules while disseminating con-
tent which was itself shocking in the sense of going beyond normal
expectations about protest.
Avant-gardes have a number of things in common: an irreducible
relation of activism, politics, and art, a unity of elements, and uncon-
strained performativity. Their activism and its orientation to social
change puts them in jeopardy. Their work is a form of cultural politics
that lays bare ‘ultimate’ issues in the system of domination. It presents a
unity of art and life and presents this imagination and its practice as an
embedded performance of such a unity. This is the framework we use in
our examination of Pussy Riot as an instance of avant-garde art. What is
paradigmatic about them is their way of resisting through a transgression
that is both singular (a specific performance) and universal (resistance to
power). At the same time, they provide a crucial case in that they evoke
the basic features of the avant-garde that confront the social totality
(cf. Flyvbjerg, 2006).
Performativity is the key to the two events analyzed. ‘Performative
utterances’ (‘I promise’ at a wedding ceremony) constitute and do not
simply designate an act (Austin, 1975: 5); when applied more broadly,
gender is an instance of ‘performativity’ (Butler, 1990: 179). A perform-
ance is subversive if it violates normalcy by exaggeration. The Soviet
avant-garde called this ‘revealing the device’ (Shklovsky, 1965).
Performativity, then, involves doing something so that people can experi-
ence the device, and is, therefore, a violation in itself. Harold Garfinkel’s
research concerning the transexual Agnes parallels the avant-garde pro-
ject when he demonstrates how ‘practical accomplishments’ can be
undermined, threatening their taken-for-granted status (Garfinkel,
1967), producing shock. Performance art theory identifies the performa-
tive/counter-performative aspect of the avant-garde. Our analysis high-
lights the immediacy, suddenness, and shock of the encounter with the
transgressive performances of Pussy Riot.
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The Context of Russian Avant-garde Art

A number of authors have traced the history of the avant-garde in Russia
and the USSR over the last 50 years (Roberts, 2015; Groys, 2013; Esanu,
2013; Epshtein, 2012: 8–12, as cited in Imposti, 2015: 3). Pussy Riot
developed within the legacy of the Russian and Eastern European
avant-garde’s challenge to the political regimes in power. After a
period of privatization, Putin reigned in this trend with an increasing
authoritarian ‘managed democracy’ or state control, calling into question
the rule of law.
Pussy Riot follows and builds upon the work of a number of Russian
groups and individuals: Chto Delat, Voina, and Petr Pavlensky. Chto
Delat (‘what is to be done’) emerged in 2003 as a self-conscious political
avant-garde group. For them, one ‘of our most vital tasks today is
unmasking the current system of ideological control and manipulation
of people’. Echoing the earlier Soviet avant-gardists Shlovsky and
Jacobsen, they note that ‘genuine art is art that de-automates the con-
sciousness of the artist first, then that of the viewer’ (Chto Delat, 2008).
Well known in Russia for its provocative performances, the under-
ground art group Voina (war) had been active since 2007, and one Pussy
Riot member, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, with her husband Pyotr
Verzilov, were members from its formation until 2009. Pussy Riot, which
started performing publicly in 2011, followed previous ‘rebel art’ groups
connected not only to art and music but also to feminist issues, as, for
example, Guerrilla Girls and Riot grrrl, with Pussy Riot sharing part of
their names as well as using punk rock staging to assert feminist power and
to dramatize the struggle against violence toward women. Unlike Riot
grrrl, which aimed to create a world of women apart from the rest of the
world, Pussy Riot asserts human rights in extending gender rights against
patriarchal forms of dominance. Rutland (2014: 576) suggests that Pussy
Riot was in part inspired by the US Riot grrrl 1990s guerrilla rock move-
ment and notes the influence of the Anonymous hacker movement in their
wearing of balaclavas. There are also the actions and performances of the
Ukrainian group Femen, though they are not directly linked with the arts
but more with disturbing actions aimed at directing attention to specific
events and political issues. However, by the 1990s all these groups, practi-
cing provocation, whether considered artistic or not, had been connected to
the avant-garde emphasis on disturbing, delegitimizing public action.
Pussy Riot was very likely inspired to complete an action by the
Ukrainian group in the same Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in
Moscow. Some Femen members, in December 2011, assembled ‘at the
Cathedral in support of the mass protests which had engulfed the
Russian capital in the wake of the State Duma elections. The Femen
action at the cathedral . . . can be seen as a precursor of the Pussy Riot
action in February 2012 inside that same church’ (Rutland, 2014: 576).
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Voina’s avant-garde performances also influenced Pussy Riot. Their

performances were conceived of as radical and politically leftist, not ini-
tially feminist. Continuing the Soviet avant-garde’s antagonism to official
labor policies, the group rejected employment and squatted for housing.
The performance of 29 February 2008, Fuck for the heir Puppy Bear!, was
a reaction to the system of rotation of power, or ‘tandemocracy’, between
Putin and his Prime Minister Dmitrii Medvedev. The term ‘bear’ is poly-
semic, referring to Medvedev, bears, and symbols of the ruling party
(Imposti, 2015: 8). The day before the election of President Medvedev,
in the ‘bear room’ of Moscow’s Biology Museum, Tolokonnikova and
Verzilov and other couples had public sex, while one member held a sign
reading ‘Fuck for the heir, the little Bear-Medvedev’. Tolokonnikova
declared: ‘Putin said that a totally unknown politician [Medvedev]
would become our next President . . . the country had been really
fucked. In our action we showed this . . . using the traditions of contem-
porary art’ (Tolokonnikova, 2013, cited in Imposti, 2015: 7).
Petr Pavlensky is a performance artist whose work was in part a com-
mentary on Pussy Riot. In Seam, on 23 July 2012, he appeared at Kazan
Cathedral, St. Petersburg, with his mouth sewn shut, and held a banner
reacting to the trial of Pussy Riot members, stating ‘Action of Pussy Riot
was a replica of the famous action of Jesus Christ (Matthew 21:12–13)’
(Eberstadt, 2019). Tolokonnikova claimed that ‘Pavlensky is an actionist
whose work is ideally suited in our time. . . [he] is more in tune with the
times than Pussy Riot. He is grim, focused, ready for pain. Pussy Riot is
fun, vibrant, carnival, carefree, and childish, born in the rapturous time
of late 2011’ (Tolokonnikova, 2014).

Pussy Riot as a Feminist Avant-garde Movement

Femen and Pussy Riot stand for denied rights and practice a radical form
of feminism aimed at cultural delegitimization by destabilizing percep-
tion and defamiliarizing familiar and routine social roles, thereby under-
mining the reproduction of official values. This strategy informs much
avant-garde work in the 20th and 21st centuries. The feminism of Pussy
Riot differs from that of Femen. It is more subtle and reflective, given
that they have declared their intention to deliver a message, recalling the
‘parallel communication’ used by avant-gardes of the early 20th century:
on the one hand, by creating provocative new forms of art, and, on the
other, by producing manifestos. Moreover, Pussy Riot embodies the
intersectional claim of the new international feminist struggles which
go beyond the issue of gender equality to the conditions of all minorities
endangered by capitalism and its power-driven social structures. This
new feminism opposes racism, is anti-capitalist, and expresses solidarity
with LGBT issues, environmentalism, migrants, and labor rights move-
ments (Fraser, 1990; Arruzza et al., 2019). It stands for a more ‘feminine’
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order of society, in which differences are respected, opportunity is equit-

ably distributed, and society is freed from its subordination to wealth and
power. Like such avant-gardes, the artistic actions of Pussy Riot embrace
the kind of knowledge relevant to a transformative social movement
toward global change according to ‘feminist’ principles in the broadest
sense, with no rationalization as a systematic, therefore elite, project.
Such a radical project was formulated in the Manifesto of Arruzza,
Bhattacharya, and Fraser (2019), ‘Feminism for the 99%’.
The events we are discussing here have had a historical impact beyond
their actions. Tuttle notes that ‘they have become the symbols of the
disruptive power of revolutionary art in a climate of repression. . . yet
the controversy over their conviction and imprisonment overshadowed
the very message for which they were sentenced’ (2016: 67). Since art
holds its own power of symbol creation and structuring imagination, it
was possible to combine punk rock music with the physically explosive
political energy of Pussy Riot. As a result of their performance in the
cathedral, Pussy Riot members were charged with hooliganism, in vio-
lation of the Russian Federal Criminal Code. However, the feminist core
of their action – violating a sacred space forbidden to women – passed
barely unnoticed, misunderstood, or, worse, not recognized for its pri-
mary intention. The oppressive reality which Pussy Riot opposes showed
itself powerfully in the denial of the meaning of and the repressive reac-
tion to their performance. Their action and the reaction to it highlight
how a feminist claim asserted inside a sacred space is officially considered
blasphemous, aside from the idea that a ‘punk prayer’ might be per-
formed inside a church. We see here the direct imposition of a coded
social role for women, as well as a non-negotiable framework of ‘trad-
itional’ values and social conventions enforced in the name of the ‘law’.
In this sense, the performance can be seen as both political and reli-
gious not only because it criticizes ‘the overlap of church and state’
(Tuttle, 2016: 69), but also because it promotes feminism within a cul-
tural framework unacceptable under the current regime in Russia. Many
rights have been denied to Russian women, such as the right to demon-
strate, ‘which is historically and discursively monopolized by men’
(Elizarov, 2012, cited in Yusupova, 2014: 605). Pussy Riot’s struggle is
against the resurgence of misogyny, patriarchy and, as Weber noted, the
historic tendency toward caesaropapism, ‘the complete subordination of
priests to secular power’ (Weber, 1978: 1161–2). The secular administra-
tion’s power over the Church is, then, a major form of domination in
contemporary Russia. The connection of these two powers, state and
religious, each confirming strong social inequalities through the invoca-
tion of patriarchal values and the reaffirmation of traditional societal
roles, extends the feminist agenda as performed by Pussy Riot to one
of social equality:
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We belong to the third wave of feminism . . . The third wave decon-

structs the very idea of sex, so sex discrimination becomes an absurd
concept. When you talk about ‘gender segregation,’ you refer to the
initial bipolar model ‘man-woman.’ . . . There is an infinite quantity
of genders that do not align between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’
poles. (Yusupova, 2014: 607–8)

However, it has been argued that the use of the English language
makes it difficult for Russians to understand Pussy Riot’s messages
(Yusupova, 2014). They are often seen as Russian artists interacting
with Western culture rather than fighting within their own society.
This raises the question as to whether national feminist movements can
represent universal values relevant to Russia as well as beyond it, or does
too much of the Russian situation get lost in translation? How is it pos-
sible for the struggle for women’s rights and minority rights to be under-
standable if they are received differently within different normalizing
cultures? On the other hand, one might argue that the idea of acting
according to the extended values and cultures of the other movements
is a well-known and efficacious artistic and political strategy.
Appropriating elements of a foreign language to a dominant one
allows their struggle to enter the imaginary of the national public. This
is done by asserting recognizable criteria to delegitimize everyday notions
of ‘normality’ and so facilitate acceptance of new attitudes and forms of
conduct. Pussy Riot’s aim is to focus the public’s attention on how
women are kept out of the public sphere (cf. Majewska, 2019), and to
call into question how doing this is demagogically turned into a nonpo-
litical act of ‘hooliganism’, thereby denying the relevance of their insist-
ence on women’s recognition and their demand for a more equal society.
Levitt and Merry use the term ‘vernacularization’ for the global dia-
lectical movement of the idea and practice of human rights between
particular societies and the virtual global society, and the shaping of
these ideas in relatively local contexts (Levitt and Merry, 2009).
Critical social movements respond to local conditions, have their vic-
tories and defeats, and are subject to political repression. In today’s
international context, the significance of Pussy Riot as a bearer of this
dialectic becomes apparent.
‘Modern’ cultures develop their own hierarchical strategies in order to
keep power in the hands of dominant elites (typically in the form of
patriarchal power). Pussy Riot exemplifies the delegitimizing aspect of
protest and the imaginative power of feminism operating against the
marginalization of women, and what Judith Butler calls ‘sexual minori-
ties’ and their exclusion from public discourse. Indeed, some Russian
feminists have criticized or tried to qualify Pussy Riot’s use of feminist
theory and rhetoric (Sperling, 2014; Johnson, 2014; Tuttle, 2016;
Yusupova, 2014). According to Natalia Pushkareva and Maria
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Zolotukhina: ‘In today’s Russian society (including the academic com-

munity), there is little or no. . . tolerance of the actions by contemporary
so-called feminist groups such as Femen and Pussy Riot’ (2018: 80). For
example, the discourse of gender historians in contemporary Russia
remains ‘one of support for traditional gender roles. Fundamentally, it
legitimizes the role of a woman as important as but complementary to
the role of a man’ (Pushkareva and Zolotukhina, 2018: 77). On the other
hand, there is a small group of anti-essentialist historians who have been
developing a different type of feminist reflection: ‘to convince our con-
temporaries that feminism is not strictly a ‘‘Western thing’’ and that, in
fact, it is deeply rooted in the country’s past, together with a long trad-
ition of women’s social and political activism’ (Pushkareva and
Zolotukhina, 2018: 80). Given these circumstances, it is abundantly
clear how the activism of groups such as Pussy Riot can be seen contro-
versially as a prematurely radical attack on ‘the neutralization of the
critical feminist potential of gender theory’ by its friends as well as its
enemies (Pushkareva and Zolotukhina, 2018: 80).
Some such criticisms may appear well founded in regard to the
Russian context and the conservative bias of its national media. But
such quietism ignores the avant-garde roots of Pussy Riot and its main
objective as the creation of drama in place of indifference or compliance.
We will elaborate upon this link to the historic avant-garde in our ana-
lysis of the cathedral event below.

Struggles for Democracy and Values

In Russia, given the visibility of institutional constraints on elections and
the justification of coercion by an appeal to the principle of order, there
are increasing risks in expressing dissent, and it is not surprising that
those willing to take such risks will find ways of going beyond mere
deviance to socially expressive actions that raise questions about values
that radically challenge the status quo. This is consonant with activities
of earlier Dada avant-garde groups, seen as expressive politics and not
instrumental action (cf. Halley, 1991: 241–2).
Expressions of dissent in Russia are more clearly defined as oppos-
itional and subversive to the extent which they make visible the negative
consequences of challenging the authoritarian aspect of the societal order
itself, even when the challenge involves artistic expression. From the
official view, expressive avant-garde actions, resistance, subversion, and
revolution are all of a piece. Oleinik problematizes the introduction of
the market in Russia. Critiquing the old model of patrimonialism, he
finds that the Russian government uses a variety of techniques of dom-
ination, from symbolic violence, to force and to new market mechanisms
as a sanctioning power. Russia today, then, manifests both the regressive
elements of autocracy and the destabilizing market mechanisms of
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liberalism (Oleinik, 2011). With this double form of domination, the

possibility that such public expressions might influence audiences and
foment mobilization in forms of social movements is enough to warrant
the full exercise of the coercive power of government. Given the current
lack of an active base for such a movement, political risk-taking that
raises value questions will appear on the fringes of those arts that already
have a legitimate presence, within those avant-gardes on the cutting edge
of ‘the arts’. Pussy Riot is one such instance of expressive art actions
‘arraigning society’ from within (Foucault, 1988).
In 2011–12, demonstrations broke out in Russia, concentrated around
St. Petersburg and Moscow but not necessarily indicating wider support.
They had in common discontent with the situation of ‘managed’ or ‘sov-
ereign’ democracy, in which the state is, in effect, the polity. Russia
experienced a crisis after those demonstrations. The context was the
‘Orange Revolution’ which began in Ukraine in 2004 and spread to
other former Soviet countries. In reaction, on 4 February 2012, a pro-
Putin demonstration, the ‘anti-Orange protest’, took place in Moscow.
The foreign minister of South Ossetia declared that ‘‘‘Orange’’ methods
cannot be applied to our country successfully – South Ossetia is not
Georgia, let alone Ukraine’ (Kyiv Post, 2011). Moving from a strategy
of defending Russia against NATO growth close to its borders, Putin
resorted to an ostensibly inclusive ‘morality politics’, devoted to the pres-
ervation of conservative Christian values. This is relevant because it was
the basis for the trial of Pussy Riot members (Sharafutdinova, 2014: 616).
In this context, Pussy Riot can be understood as a demand for demo-
cratic and participatory forms of citizenship, when the electoral route,
qualified from above, has proven ineffective.

Avant-garde and Pussy Riot: Art in Action

Pussy Riot can be seen as part of the legacy of certain avant-garde art
practices, such as Russian Futurism and its controversial relation to
politics, as well as that of the Italian Futurist movement, whose founder
and leader, F.T. Marinetti, was well versed in the sociopolitical function
of religion (Riccioni, 2004). Pussy Riot uses the Futurist technique of
‘mysticism of art-action’ as a means to contest tradition, thereby trans-
forming art into a quasi-religion of the future through a continuous
performance of reality. The Futurists defined themselves as mystics of
action. They spoke out at a historical moment in which language itself
was being transformed into action, given that language was already
becoming adjusted to the new way of living opened up by speed, violence,
and intuition.
Both Italian and Russian Futurism connected established social con-
ditions revealed in artistic activity to those revealed in movements for
social change. Both avant-gardes aimed to produce change at the level of
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creative intentionality by deconstructing the taken-for-granted aspect of

existing structures of thought, imagination, and action, thereby restoring
the spirit of freedom embodied in creative experimentation. Flexibility of
expression, and the search for new languages, new forms of representa-
tion in order to shape a new world, can be found in later avant-gardes,
including Pussy Riot. The desire for liberation from established societal
constraints is common to all avant-gardes, in their opposition to a static
and enforced world of meanings and standards hostile to an authentic
social life and its social progress. In regard to the dialectic of the human
and the machine, the Futurists envisioned a liberating dynamic for the
evolution of sensibility in delegitimizing traditional culture, a dynamic
notably recaptured by Pussy Riot. In relation to technology, art can
speak, perform, and give life to the new language of postmodernity,
thereby communicating through new means the changed context for
the development of a liberated individual (Riccioni, 2006, 2019).
For Pussy Riot, a century after those first avant-gardes, the new tech-
nology shows itself as the primary medium for reaching global audiences,
beyond the local situations in which struggle is concrete as ‘lived experi-
ence’. In Art and Liberation, Marcuse concludes that ‘a work of art can
be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it
represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing un-free-
dom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and
petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation)’
(1978: xi).
Accordingly, Marcuse says that art is ‘really the only revolutionary
language left today’ (2007: 113). It provides the most immediate confron-
tation with dehumanization in ‘one-dimensional society’. This is why
avant-garde art, constitutionally anti-official, goes beyond mere illegit-
imacy, risking the possibility of suppression and criminal prosecution.
For any art that insists on the priority of human values, transgression
provides the only way to demonstrate publicly the threat to such values
that resides in institutional corporatism. This is why the official reaction –
arrest, prosecution, and vilification – can only succeed by invoking the
sanctity of oppressive traditions to justify the charges and prosecutions
of the crimes of hooliganism and desecration. The issues of women’s
freedom and rights within society, against a regime celebrating inequal-
ities, was officially reduced to the ‘outrageous’ practice of violating ‘a
sacred space’, emptying the act of protest of its symbolic negative mean-
ing of women demanding equality by daring to enter the sacred (public)
space where only men are allowed. In this way, the official act of repres-
sion became an instance of political art, a spectacular dramatization of
the ‘virtue’ and ‘justice’ of anti-humanism: the transcendental virtue of
the ostensibly sacred over and above human rights, of patriarchy over
democracy, and of tradition over life. The demonstrative art/politics of
this performance event supports Marcuse’s claim that it is impossible for
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a valid value-oriented art to ‘adjust itself to the requirements of sanity

and reasonableness’ (1993: 191); that is, such an art, in the context of
corporate modernity, is uniquely what Foucault called an ‘arraignment’
of a self-rationalizing authoritarian society (Foucault, 1988).

Avant-garde Practices and Techniques

Like earlier avant-garde movements (Dada, certain currents of Soviet
cinema and Russian Formalism), Pussy Riot uses transgressive tech-
niques that invoke shock to provoke reaction and generate controversy.
Avant-garde devices such as montage, defamiliarization, the carnival-
esque and shock all have the function of putting ‘objective’ reality into
question.
Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker, characterizes montage as
‘collision. By the conflict of two pieces in opposition to each other’
(Eisenstein, 1949: 37). In other words, montage is immanently critical
in its destabilization of taken-for-granted reality. Similarly, the Russian
formalists developed techniques of ostranenie, ‘making strange’, or defa-
miliarization. Victor Shklovsky (1965) develops this idea in his mani-
festo. If ideology works by accepting the taken-for-granted, Shklovsky
notes that we must break with our habits and our ‘automatization’. The
history of avant-garde practices has developed in this very direction.
Consider the avant-garde technique of shock, seen in Dada as related
to ‘the specific effects of certain performative gestures – vulgar, demon-
strative, confrontational, scatological. . . It. . . focuses on the character of
an intervention in which the receiving subjectivity is placed in crisis.’ If
this is so, then shock is essentially counter-hegemonic (Halley, 2003: 86)
and progressive.
Soviet writer Mikhail Bakhtin introduced the concept of the carnival-
esque, an anti-ritual that involves the grotesque, use of masks, and over-
turning of hierarchy. He writes that the use of the mask ‘rejects
conformity. . . The mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the vio-
lation of natural boundaries’ (Bakhtin, 1968: 39–40). Bakhtin developed
these concepts in the 1930s, and it has been argued to have been a cri-
tique of Stalinist culture (Clark and Holquist, 1984: 305). Laws, restric-
tions, and hierarchy are, in carnival, momentarily and extravagantly
suspended. Linked with this is ‘profanation: carnivalistic blasphemies. . .
carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings, etc.’ (Bakhtin, 1984:
122–3). Pussy Riot performances use these counter-hegemonic tech-
niques to challenge the contemporary Russian corporate state.

Pussy Riot in Action: Analysis of the Performance of 21

February 2012 in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour
In the 2000s, the Orthodox Church was an increasingly visible part of the
new national identity that the Putin regime was trying to forge. For
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Figure 2. Pussy Riot in action: The performance of 21 February 2012 in the Cathedral of
Christ the Saviour.

example, the Church did not speak out against the controversial Dima
Yakovlev Law of 2012, banning foreign adoptions. The Orthodox
Church was not monolithic in support of Putin. In 2005, Patriarch
Aleksii II supported pensioners protesting cuts in their benefits.
However, Patriarch Kirill rejected the protesters, declaring at a meeting
of religious leaders on 8 February 2013 that the 12 years of Putin’s rule
were ‘a miracle from God’ while the protests were ‘ear-piercing shrieks’
(Bryanski, 2012). Two weeks later, Pussy Riot positioned themselves in
front of the altar at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (Rutland, 2014:
577).
There is little doubt that Pussy Riot has contributed to a wave of
criticism of politics and cultural values, as well as to the renewal of the
ideal of human rights. Their interventions have also contributed to the
critical positioning of intellectuals and artists in regard to the current
oppressive sociopolitical order in Russia. Below, we examine Pussy
Riot’s performance in the rebuilt Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the
seat of the Moscow Patriarchate and a site of historical struggle.
Originally built in the 19th century, the Soviets destroyed it in the imple-
mentation of their 1930s plan to modernize Moscow. Rebuilt in the 1990s
as the seat of the patriarchate, it was instrumental in solidifying the new
state–church post-Soviet identity. This project was ‘embraced by the
emerging oligarch caste, whose support of such projects represented a
way to project itself as the new elite’ (Glisic, 2016: 209). It is this new
post-Soviet ‘caesaropapism’ that was the object of Pussy Riot’s interven-
tion. We have already described this event in the introduction.
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From the point of view of our account of the avant-garde, this per-
formance exemplifies an expansion of the relation of art to life and to
politics: transgression, shock, ‘message’ and risk. At its most general
level, the performance was a violation of ‘official’ gendered space through
its occupation and cooptation of that space, the ambo:

Indeed, women’s ‘second class status’ in Russian Orthodoxy begins

shortly after birth. At baptism, male infants are ‘triumphantly
borne aloft by the priest behind the iconostasis in the altar,’ whereas
baby girls are placed on the floor in front of the royal doors,’
because access to the altar space is off limits to their sex. Women
are allowed on the ambo, the raised area in front of the altar, only
for weddings, and, even then, this is at the priest’s discretion. Pussy
Riot’s members thus occupied the central space on the ambo where
baby girls were entitled to baptism but did not proceed all the way
to the altar, behind the royal doors. In taking this position, Pussy
Riot physically highlighted sex-based inequality within church prac-
tices. (Sperling, 2015: 234)

The performance itself was shocking in its confrontational style and

use of scatological language. The chant of ‘Virgin Mary, please get rid of
Putin’ articulated a Christian ethos of prayer against the state apparatus.
As such, it defamiliarized the taken-for-granted alliance of church and
state symbolized by the new cathedral. The protagonists crossed them-
selves, showing that they refused to associate the cathedral with a state-
allied religion; but, by their very conduct, they claimed it for themselves
and for all. Their clothing was provocative, as if they were bringing real
life into direct conflict with the church. Their expressive actions deflated
hierarchy, by virtue of their scandalous and carnivalesque aspects. The
performance was carried out on Mardi Gras, manifesting all the ingre-
dients of the carnivalesque: the mocking of the rulers of state and church
(Nelson, 2018: 284). The result was the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of
three group members. At that point, the event took on a life of its own
for a public constituted by the indissoluble totality of the performance
and the official reaction.

Pussy Riot-Punk Prayer

A second level of performance involved the use of new media, charac-
teristic of most avant-gardes. The live performance was recorded
and integrated into a video of under two minutes, which is labeled
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225

‘Pussy Riot-Punk Prayer.mp4’. The words of a traditional Russian

Orthodox hymn were altered, and some English expressions were
introduced:

St. Maria, Virgin, Drive away Putin

Drive away, drive away Putin.
Black robe, golden epaulettes,
All parishioners are crawling and bowing.
The ghost of freedom is in heaven.
Gay pride sent to Siberia in chains.
The head of the KGB is their chief saint,
Leads protestors to prison under escort.
In order not to offend the holy,
Women have to give birth and to love.
Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit,
Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit.
St Maria, Virgin, become a feminist,
Become a feminist, become a feminist.
Church praises the rotten dictators,
The cross-bearer procession of black limousines.
In school, you are going to meet with a teacher-preacher,
Go to class – bring him money.
Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin,
Bitch, you better believe in God.
Belt of the Virgin is no substitute for mass meetings,
In protest of our Ever-Virgin Mary!
Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit,
Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit,
St. Maria, Virgin, Drive away Putin
Drive away, drive away Putin.
Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v¼ALS92big4TY)

Here, they invoke the Virgin Mary to drive away Putin, and they ask
St. Maria to ‘become a feminist’. They mock the subservience of
Orthodox parishioners as ‘crawling and bowing’ and they condemn the
subservient position of women who ‘have to give birth and to love’. They
also call into question the veneration of the Belt of the Virgin as a sub-
stitute for political engagement with the regime. The Belt of the Virgin,
kept at the Holy Great Monastery of Vatopedi, is believed to be the only
relic of Mary’s life. ‘The Belt of the Virgin is no substitute for mass
meetings / In protest of our Ever-Virgin Mary!’ They lament the
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homophobic state policies of sexual repression: ‘gay pride sent to Siberia

in chains’. Key to their critique of the increasingly reactionary tendencies
of caesaropapism is their condemnation of the church–state apparatus:
‘Church praises the rotten dictators. . . Patriarch Gundyaev [the secular
name of Kirill (Cyril), who became Primate of the Russian Orthodox
Church on 1 February 2009] believes in Putin, Bitch, you better believe in
God. . . The head of the KGB is their chief saint.’ ‘The cross-bearer
procession of black limousines’ refers to the new oligarchs who endorse
and are endorsed by the church. This second-level performance, derived
from the original raw footage of the cathedral event, disseminated the
piece to a larger public through the internet.
The most radical element of these two performances, the original and
Pussy Riot-Punk Prayer.mp4, reveals the inescapability of their words
and images, which inevitably invoke a visceral reaction. The suddenness
and intensity of the event shocks the viewer, who is caught up in the
moment, without the relief provided by aesthetic distance. This is the
group’s immediate political effect. There is a brutality and a clarity
that effaces the line between art and life. The viewer is forced to react
as a witness, either in sadness, horror, or rage. If it can be said that Dada
works by representing and condensing a philosophical argument, the
images Pussy Riot presents are intimate and invasive without relief.
The activism of the work itself forces the audience, willingly or not, to
become part of the action. Either one supports the police, or one is drawn
to the underlying message and its implications. There is no possible
middle response.
The use of the body in transgression is also crucial. The five partici-
pants mobilize their ‘conceptual body’ (Jones, 2018). Through their
dance, gestures, and by their physical appearance in the church, they
immerse their bodies in a forbidden environment and transform its mean-
ing. They go to the ambo, where women are not allowed, and they make
their presence felt in that space through their postures, gestures, and
motions. They also mobilize both the bodies of the authorities against
them and their audiences to become more than mere witnesses.

Concluding Remarks
Pussy Riot’s actions expand and go beyond Bürger’s notion of the avant-
garde as resting solely on attacking the institutions of art (Bürger, 1984).
Their performances merge art and life against political/religious denials
of life. Their oeuvre is a direct and expansive attack on domination and
the denial of what is human. We have addressed the political context of
Pussy Riot in regard to official Russian governmental strategies of dom-
ination, the relation of church and state, feminism, and religious and
anti-religious motivation.2 It is in these respects that we understand
Pussy Riot as a total social fact (Mauss, 1990: 78–9), namely as a
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227

unity that cannot be reduced to separate actions or individualities. The

performative events of Pussy Riot constitute a direct critique of domin-
ation and, at the same time, an expression of struggle for social justice in
contemporary Russia. Pussy Riot includes but cannot be reduced to
feminism, religion, the critique of caesaropapism, or art. Some commen-
tators treat Pussy Riot reductively – as concerning either art, or religion,
or feminism. For example, one scholar writes that ‘the activities of Pussy
Riot belong to the sphere of contemporary art rather than the women’s
movement [as they] set for themselves artistic rather than advocacy
goals[s]’ (Akulova, 2013: 279–80). Others analyze them in relation to
the Russian Orthodox Church (Denysenko, 2013), and yet others with
regard to feminism (Sperling, 2014). Instead, we have focused on the
avant-garde emphasis on the unity of art and life and maintain that it
is an error to estheticize – to separate art and politics.
In their synthesis of feminist resistance and activism, Pussy Riot
dramatizes a critique of the new authoritarian form of governance that
characterizes Putin’s regime and the authoritarian impulse of the church.
From the perspective of the avant-garde as critique, we might extend the
use of the term ‘intersectionality’ to refer also to global struggles as they
appear in a specific place (Putin’s Russia) regarding the state of women,
democracy, social values, and religion, but also in the growing Eastern
European awareness of issues of human rights, radical thinking, and
forms of struggle against social and political oppression that seem to
go beyond the current crisis of democracy in Western Europe. Avant-
garde art and social activism join in a common direction against
established power, and toward radical thinking and activism against
authoritarianism and anti-humanism prevalent in many countries today.

Acknowledgements
We thank the five anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. Nanette Funk gave
us important leads concerning gender issues in Russia and Eastern Europe. Michael
Brown made cogent suggestions concerning art and politics. Franco Ferrarotti contrib-
uted with insights about arts and society. All their comments have considerably improved
the article.

ORCID iD
Ilaria Riccioni https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4175-2252

Notes
1. Many aspects of Pussy Riot’s activism (its relation to the avant-garde,
Russian politics, feminism, human rights, religion and Russian caesaropap-
ism) are dynamically interrelated. We conceptualize this relation as a constel-
lation (Adorno), as intersectional, and as a total social fact (Mauss, 1990).
However, space does not permit us to develop all these points here. Focusing
on the performance in the cathedral, we accent Pussy Riot’s embodiment of
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the avant-garde and a certain kind of feminism in their resistance to Putin’s

politics, contemporary caesaropapism, and human rights violations.
2. Space does not allow us to present the historical involvement of Pussy Riot
over time, from their imprisonment (cf. Tolokonnikova and Žižek, 2014) to
present struggles concerning Putin, Black Lives Matter, and Alexei Navalny’s
imprisonment.

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Ilaria Riccioni, PhD in Sociology from ‘La Sapienza’, Rome, is a

researcher in Sociology at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. She
is President of the ISA RC Sociology of the Arts and has been visiting
researcher at MSH, France; Universität Wien, Musiksoziologie, Austria;
and The University of Texas at San Antonio, researching social theory
and the social impact of arts. Recent books include: Teatro e Società
(Carocci, 2020) and Futurism: Anticipating Postmodernism (Mimesis
International, 2019).

Jeffrey A. Halley, PhD in Sociology from CUNY, is Professor Emeritus

of Sociology at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Past President
of the ISA RC Sociology of the Arts, he was a Fulbright Fellow and
guest professor at the universities of Ljubljana, Metz, and the École des
Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Recent publications include:
Bourdieu in Question (Brill, 2017) and ‘‘Trump’s 2016 Presidential
Campaign and Adorno’s Psychological Technique’’ (tripleC, 2019).