“Elon Musk and Donald Trump are more punk than us,” Nadya Tolokonnikova said on the opening night of her residency at the Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. “I feel challenged — how do we flip it and make it cool again?”
On Saturday (January 18), the founder of the Pussy Riot collective sat down with fellow artist Shepard Fairey for a chat before leading a performance art opera in conjunction with her Punk’s Not Dead exhibit.
“My history with punk is a little embarrassing,” the 35-year-old political activist admitted to the audience, many of whom were wearing balaclavas handed to them upon entry. “I’m one of those girls who goes to Hot Topic and wears metal band t-shirts and never listens to them. I was asked yesterday if I listened to a lot of noise bands, and I was just like, ‘Well, the closest ones were Slipknot or Rammstein.’
“My entrance into punk came from low culture because I think that my primary way of interacting with the world is through visual arts; the music comes second. I look at music as something that accompanies visual aesthetics.”
Tolokonnikova continued: “As a young woman, I was learning more about the avant-garde, feminist art, and one of them was Bikini Kill and the riot grrrl movement — I was totally amazed by their punk scene. I thought it was very genius in its simplicity.
“I was a philosophy student, so I was surrounded by impossible, incomprehensible human beings who thought that you have to be very complex to communicate a message. What drove me to punk is that very complex ideas about gender, economy, and politics are communicated in a very simple, almost placard manner.”
Further elaborating on how music was almost an afterthought to Pussy Riot’s vision, she reflected on the group’s beginnings in Russia.
“We had these concepts for making music videos, but then realized that we needed music,” she said. “In order to do that, you need to write poetry, and I hated poetry — why do you need to rhyme things when you can just say them clearly without rhymes? So we were dreading it terribly.”
Regarding her craft and the circuit within which she now operates, Tolokonnikova added: “I think modern art is not that different from what humanity was doing like 10,000 years ago. I think the call comes from some sort of religious or spiritual drive, and different forms of art were helping people to realize and feel it. The correspondence to performance art would be prayer, like shamans dancing around a fire. It’s been participatory for thousands of years before we came up with this word, and now we think we’re so smart for doing participatory performances.”
In 2012, she was arrested and jailed for “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred” along with two other members of Pussy Riot in the aftermath of a demonstration in Moscow’s Cathedral Of Christ The Savior. Said protest was an in-your-face pushback against the institution’s support for Vladimir Putin during the elections at the time. Yet, Tolokonnikova continues to wear a Russian Orthodox cross around her neck at public appearances.
“Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” by Pussy Riot
“I’m a secular person,” she explained. “I think we are in an era where we need to be inventing our own religion. I mean every single person here needs to come up with their own version of spirituality or religion that does not impose from the outside but comes from within. It should evolve because obviously, your experiences evolve.
“I think it’s a good thing to think about something bigger than yourself that makes you a better person and also reduces your fear of death, because you might have some sort of belief about the afterlife. It has nothing to do with some god sitting on top of the clouds.”
Referencing Slavoj Žižek’s book Christian Atheism, she concluded: “In order to become a better atheist, you need to become Christian first. This intention itself makes a lot of sense to me because to break the rules of language, you need to learn the language.
“I’ve read the Bible inside and out many times, and the fact that Trump doesn’t even know how to hold the Bible … if I’m going to talk to him about religion and the Bible, he’ll be lying on the ground.”
The Punk’s Not Dead residency by Nadya Tolokonnikova will run till Saturday (January 25), with another performance by Pussy Riot Siberia set to take place on the closing night.
Nadya Tolokonnikova at the Opening of Night of Her Punk’s Not Dead Residency
