The Art Newspaper

Russian youth organisation presents Culture Ministry with plywood phallus

Gesture was a protest against art collective Voina's award

By The Art Newspaper. Web only
Published online: 20 April 2011

Rossiya Molodaya (Young Russia) picketing Russia’s ministry of culture on 15 April

MOSCOW. Nationalist youth organisation Rossiya Molodaya (Young Russia) picketed Russia’s ministry of culture on 15 April and presented it with a 1.5m-long plywood phallus in protest over the awarding of a major contemporary art prize to controversial art collective Voina (War).

Voina won the Innovatsia prize, which the ministry co-sponsors with the National Center for Contemporary Art on 7 April . The collective was awarded Rb400,000 ($14,000) for Dick Captured by FSB!, a 65m x 27m spray painting of the outline of a penis on the bascule of a bridge opposite St Petersburg’s Federal Security Service (FSB) office.

Young Russia has demanded on its website that the ministry stop allocating state funds for the prize and “return by any lawful means funds spent on a prize for extremists and provocateurs”.

Two of Voina’s leaders, Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, were jailed after overturning police cars in another performance in St Petersburg last September. They were bailed out by Banksy, the British artist, in February.

Vorotnikov and Nikolayev, who are not allowed to leave St Petersburg while they await trial, and other members of the collective did not attend the awards ceremony at Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, at which Andrei Yerofeyev, the outspoken curator who chaired Innovatsia’s jury, prompted the audience to yell out “khui” (“dick”) when announcing the prize. Voina said it would distribute their winnings to orphans and inmates.

Nikolayev told Russian News Service radio that the prize in itself is “secondary and insignificant”.

“Our country has its own prize for artists who deal with social and political issues,” he told the radio station. “We were nominated for a state prize in the form of a criminal case that could land us up to seven years in jail.”

In response to the Young Russia protest Russia’s ministry of culture issued a statement: “It is essential to note that the ministry of culture is not an organ of censorship that forbids professional juries to express their point of view,” it said. “We would not like to repeat the tragic relations between the state and contemporary art that marked the period of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule” [the former Soviet leader was famous for lambasting contemporary art].

Sophia Kishkovsky