Artistic self-defence #1

ARTISTIC SELFDEFENSE #1 instructions for use

edited by A. Vepreva, R. Osminkin

having a broad horizon

What does it mean to be an artist today?

collaborating

developing keen senses

defamiliarizing

being open 3

violence is impotence

And what about violence?

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we are all oppressors and victims at the same time – violence is our vital necessity!

violence can be non-violent like Gandhi’s

I’m an artist. I only allow violence that I cause myself

nothing within legal boundaries is violence

get a regular job

How can an artist fight precarity?

get by on relatives' money

objectify it in one's art

become commercially successful

put up with it 5

How to preserve your autonomy and engagement in art? become conscious of your place in the division of labor

return art to life

find ballance between ethics and aesthetics

give up accumulating symbolic capital 6

preserve your critical distance

How do you exonerate yourself before posterity? keep silence

say it was half the Other Guy’s fault

say it was all the Other Guy’s fault

assure yourself that it never happened

say it happened completely differently 7

But what about art without people?

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the privilege of the human gaze must be aboloshed

but what about the Renaissance, the golden ratio, and humanism?

I have long associated with various non-human actors

until we have reached singularity it’s silly to talk about all this

any choice is authoritarian and negates other worlds

How do you make the only correct choice?

the correct choice is the choice of the correct class position

just ask Schrodinger and his cat

in the neo-Baroque epoch everything is ephemeral and inauthentic

why chose - believe in chance!

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How to defend your art from a Cossack raid?

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buy the biggest whip you can

tell the Cossacks not to touch your art

make pious art

my art already incorporates Cossack raids

What the difference between modernists and postmodernists?

postmodernists came after modernists

modernists are boring, whereas postmodernists are fun

modernists still believed in truth, whereas postmodernists collect shit in jars

there’s no difference, because Mikhail Lifshits hated both of them

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Who should the artist work for?

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for the market, because it is beyound ideology

for the state, because it has our taxes

for society, because the artist is part of it

for western foundation, because they value freedom in the West

you need to work on multiple levels of comprehensibility

Should art be comprehensible to everyone?

art doesn’t owe anything to anyone, except the customer

general enlightenment will be of help

the incomprehensibility of art is valuable in and of itself

taking pleasure in how a poem sounds is the same as understanding it

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the artist is the medium - language is sent from above

How do you find your own language in art?

you need to speak the language of the oppressed

what's important is not language but direct affect

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steal from the classics

you need to be trendy - the rest will come naturally

How do you remain an artist after the “death of the author”?

become a zombie author

take something for inspiration

engage as many people as possible in your art and say that everyone’s an artist

Foucault and Barthes made up the death of the author to make fools of us 15

try alternative ways of altering your consciousness

How can the artist avoid succumbing to alcoholism?

go to less art openings

make sobriety a theme of your art project 16

don’t drink alone or out of grief

get fanatical about being straight-edge

dialogue 1.

And protect our social rights.

So, we need to demand justice.

What do you suggest?

We need a radical struggle!

But we are artists...

Then we need a radical artistic-struggle!

But the word “struggle” is too dogmatic and brings to mind Marx and the 19th century.

Then let's call it “a radical artistic practice”!

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dialogue 2.

We need to follow the example of those who fought for human rights, labor, and against war, against the background of an ever violent and oppressive global climate.

So, what will we struggle against first?

No. Nothing straightforward.

We have to fight by ours artwork, texts, exhibitions, projects.

That is, go out and fight with the police?

And will this be radical enough to be successful?

It sure will!

It involves blurring the lines between artistic, non-artistic and political activist work.

But then how do our artistic practices differ from more simple ones?

Hmmm, that's a tricky question...

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dialogue 3.

First, we will arrange a series of nonviolent actions directed at the museum and gallery system, the art market and even at local governments

Yes, and then we'll arrange open debates with art workers within the framework of them.

To represent art workers' projects with integrity?

So that the art workers’ voices can be heard by art institutions and at the state level!

Yes! And then we pose issues related to artistic-truth, artistic-ethics, social artistic-rights, artistic-economic democracy, artistic-jurisdictions, artistic-legislatures and artistic-competences artisticRADICALLY!

And to the artistic development and artistic critique of the artisticneoliberal realities?

ARTISTIC-PRACTICE!

Yes, and finally we’ll put in a question of artisticneoliberalism and of artisticausterity artistic-regimes!

Yes, yes, artistic-practice!

Long live radical practice!

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working group: anastasia vepreva roman osminkin Cooperative of partisan artists from St-Petersburg exists since 2014.

This multidisciplinary group whose choice of a name already expresses their poetic stance: dropping the first consonants of the Russian words peredovoe khudozhestvo (advanced artistry) is a consciously infantile move, although it yields something that sounds a little like early transrational Futurist poetry.

Group working on the edge of contemporary art, poetry, video, music, performance, street art, graphics, illustration. The cooperative invent new forms of sensibility and minority practices in art. Such thinking is typical of one of the group’s founders, the Saint Petersburg poet Roman Osminkin, whose work is permeated by a spirit of subversion and over-affirmation. The collective is consists of poets, feminists, things, fruits and vegetables.

2017 spb eredovoe udozhestvo