'Offensive' art abuses religious symbols

[Editor's note: The following is an edited excerpt from Andrei Zolotov's presentation to The Media Project's conference on religious defamation and press freedom in Jakarta. The full-text is available for download below.]

At the grass-roots level and in public opinion, the sanctity of religious symbols and beliefs has been one of Russia's hottest issues recently - particularly when those symbols come under attack in the media or in the process of artistic activity.

The sanctity-of-symbols debates also underscore an increasingly confrontational situation, in which atheists and agnostics oppose what they see as “clericalization” of Russian society, while the Church and other religious groups are increasingly vocal in condemning the “godlessness” of the modern world.

“The Orthodox Church is the main engine of this discussion in Russia, although the Muslim-related stories had been here as well,” human rights activist Alexander Verkhovsky said in an interview.

The first episodes took place in the mid-1990s. Verkhovsky recalled how a local publishing house in St. Petersburg decided to publish full works of Salman Rushdie, including the Satanic Verses. There was a press conference of several Muslim figures, who said they “cannot guarantee a correct behavior” of their flock. Ultimately the publishers published Rushdie but did not publish the Satanic Verses.

In December, 1998, contemporary artist Avdey Ter-Oganyan staged a performance entitled “Young Atheist,” in which he cut mass produced Orthodox icons with an ax. He was stopped and punched by fellow artists, who saw it as an offense to their religious feelings. Ter-Oganyan eventually emigrated from Russia under threat of a criminal case for “igniting religious hatred.”

By the late 1990s, a grass roots equivalent to a religious right movement began to form, to a large extent under the banner of combating the moral degradation of the liberal world. The self-styled Committee for Moral Revival of the Fatherland led by Archpriest Alexander Shargunov played one of the central roles in the mass demonstration outside the Ostankino television center in 1997 to protest the show of Martin Scorcese’s film “The Last Temptation of Christ.”

In this decade of the 21st century, there were prominent cases in Russia spurred by the re-printing of the Danish cartoons of Mohammed in some provincial Russian newspapers and magazines. At least one newspaper was closed, but its editor was eventually acquitted.

Two years ago, the Russian edition of Newsweek magazine printed one of the cartoons as a small icon, simply to highlight the topic of the discussion. Newsweek Editor Mikhail Fishman said in an interview that he did it entirely unintentionally, only as an illustration. But protests immediately followed from Islamic organizations, and his name and magazine were portrayed as enemies of Islam on some Muslim websites. Ultimately the magazine received an official warning from the government watchdog agency supervising the media. According to the Law on Mass Media, two such warnings can result in the court decision to shut down the publication. Fishman offered public apologies to Muslims and after a year of non-violations the warning expired.

Fishman said in an interview for this report that he considers religious issues to be “the most sensitive” and is cautious not to offend religious feelings in his publication, although he doesn’t condemn people who do it.

But most prominent cases had to do not with the media, but with the field of contemporary art.

In January 2003, Yury Samodurov, director of Andrei Sakharov Museum, which is devoted to the promotion of human rights, organized an art exhibit “Beware, Religion!”, which, according to the curator, aimed to highlight the increasingly prominent role of religion in dictating the public taste and dominating the field of ideas.

The exhibit contained objects by contemporary artists, including Ter-Oganyan, which deliberately played with religious symbols. One object, for example, showed Jesus Christ with a bottle of Coca Cola saying “This is my blood.”

Several young men from the parish of Archpriest Alexander Shargunov came to the exhibit “by accident” and were so offended by its content, that they vandalized it with paint. In this conflict, the state sided with the offended Orthodox radicals rather than with the artists or curator. The vandals were cleared of hooliganism charges. Yet with the urging of Shagunov’s Committee for the Moral Revival of the Fatherland – and accompanied by rallies and processions – prosecutors charged Samodurov with “igniting religious enmity,” for which he eventually received a suspended sentence and lost his job as the director of the Sakharov Museum.

But soon after that, together with the former head of the State Tretyakov Gallery’s modern art department Andrei Yerofeev (who lost his position as a result of a conflict with then Culture Minister Alexander Sokolov in connection with a high-profile exhibit project which was considered offending public taste), Samodurov co-organized another exhibit, called “Forbidden Art-2006.”

It took place in the Sakharov Museum in March 2007. This time around, religiously offensive art pieces (such as placement of black caviar in place of the faces of Mary and Child in an icon case, Christ on a McDonalds’ ad saying “This is my body,” etc.) were placed behind a false wall with peep holes, to underscore that the art pieces could only be seen by those who deliberately wanted to see them. Nonetheless, this exhibit also generated a scandal, which resulted in another criminal case.

Prosecutors asked for prison terms for the both curators, and a major debate in the media surrounded the court case, especially in its later phase. The court hearing ended up to be a highly theatrical enterprise, when, on the one hand, Orthodox believers sang hymns in the court lobby, according to the media reports, and an avant-garde art group set loose large cockroaches in the court building.

There was hardly a public figure in Russia who did not speak out either in defense or in condemnation of the curators in the wide debate about values in the society. Interestingly, the defenders of the freedom of expression also spoke in religious terms.

“It is simply a sacrilege to try someone for an art exhibit,” prominent cartoonist Andrei Bilzho said in a radio interview. Finally, on July 12th, the court reached a verdict, which was rumored to be consulted in high Kremlin offices.

The curators were deemed guilty of inciting religious enmity and sentenced to pay fines, but not to suffer imprisonment.

“In both Samodurov cases the prosecutor said that he profaned the sacred objects and thus incited religious and ethnic enmity,” said Verkhovsky.

“We are dealing with a substitution here. Profaning religious symbols is not described anywhere in the Russian law, except the Administrative Code."

The problem, Verkhovsky continued, is that the law does not say anything about offending religious feelings. The law says that people should be punished for using religion to incite hatred or to denigrate individuals, and nothing else.

"Offending people with an art exhibit and deliberately denigrating Christians, for example, are different sorts of actions. The pieces shown at the exhibit do not denigrate Christians. One can see denigration of the Christian faith, the Church, Christ Himself – but not of the people.”