This article looks at recent Russian lawsuits accusing artists and curators of “inciting religious hatred.” It seeks to explain the reasons behind these controversies by considering the respective scopic regimes informing several exhibits and subsequent trials from 1998 to 2010. One might expect members of the post-Soviet Russian intelligentsia to unanimously back the accused artists and thus to adhere to semiotic ideologies similar to those of their Euro-American counterparts confronting, for example, the Brooklyn Museum’s Sensation exhibit or the controversy around Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ photograph. Yet the Russian intelligentsia, both its liberal and conservative wings, proved conflicted about this issue, with only a small minority offering its wholehearted support to the artists. This article attempts to explain why this would be the case by demonstrating how the emergent configuration of visual signs, sacrality, and humanity is put to political work in postsocialist Russia.
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Research Article|
September 01 2014
Caution, Religion! Iconoclasm, Secularism, and Ways of Seeing in Post-Soviet Art Wars
Anya Bernstein
Anya Bernstein
Anya Bernstein is an assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard University. She is the author of Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism (2013). Her articles have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Cultural Anthropology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, and other journals. She is also a documentary filmmaker, director, writer, and cinematographer whose credits include In Pursuit of the Siberian Shaman (2006) and Join Me in Shambhala (2002).
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Public Culture (2014) 26 (3 (74)): 419–448.
Citation
Anya Bernstein; Caution, Religion! Iconoclasm, Secularism, and Ways of Seeing in Post-Soviet Art Wars. Public Culture 1 September 2014; 26 (3 (74)): 419–448. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2683621
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