Friday, November 17/2017

To the Saatchi Gallery, one of our regular stops. It's been closed as they set up new exhibitions, but the wait has been worth it. There are a number of pretty shocking displays of contemporary Russian protest art, featuring Pussy Riot and also artists that we're not familiar with. 

The shock effect begins immediately in the first gallery with the work of Pyotr Pavlensky. What we see is photograph and sculpture, but his passion is clearly for performance art. And so we have Carcass, a record of the naked artist wrapped in layers of barbed wire at the seat of the St Petersburg Assembly, intended to represent the individual's position in the legal system, forced to comply as a silent animal. In the next room is the small but horrifying sculpture Fixation commemorating the occasion, on November 10, 2013, when Pavlensky, again naked, nailed his own scrotum to the pavement of Red Square, remaining until police covered him with a white sheet - and then arrested him. Thus the police became unwitting actors in the drama, proving the individual's fixation in the face of police power. 

After this, the Pussy Riot exhibit is both more familiar and, oddly enough, less shocking, featuring mainly film clips (as well as small masked matryoshka dolls behind bars. 

Then back to shock effect - and it's considerable - with Damir Muratov's group photos, highly satirical and sparing no political feelings. 

Even the less compelling works in this show would be central to a lesser exhibition. We finish with a series of wall graffiti posts above television screens showing only "snow", helpfully hand labelled "Art" on a sheet of A4 paper, featuring slogans like "the revolution belongs to you". 

And including a moral challenge from Desmond Tutu: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor". If this seems educational, or even didactic, it is, in an old-fashioned 60's way. There are even handouts labelled "homework" - suggestions for fighting injustice to be read later. 

Stop at the lower ground floor before leaving, in order to use the loo, and are intrigued by one last piece. It's the classic Uncle Sam Wants You picture, but done as a mosaic, every piece cut from an American comic, the background cut outs of words and the figure from comic book pictures. And done so cleverly that it takes a minute to realise what you are looking at!