Beware, temple of art!

Articles about the Monday decision of the Tagansky Court in the case of the organizers of the exhibition “Caution, Religion!”, held in January 2003 at the Museum and Public Center named after. Andrei Sakharov, appeared on Tuesday exclusively on the socio-political pages of daily newspapers (or even under the heading “Incidents”). In fact, the quasi-religious scandal that has occurred, connected not so much with confessional tolerance as with universal human tolerance for the unusual and unconventional, is already directly related not only to the fate of modern art. He has outgrown these limits. This is exactly what the court verdict showed.

The main, positive result is the decision to return the works from the ill-fated exhibition to their creators. The prosecutor demanded that paintings, objects and photographs be destroyed in accordance with the law on physical evidence, equating the artifacts with drugs, weapons and other socially dangerous things seized from detained criminals. So the art objects themselves have been officially rehabilitated. They turned out to be unnecessary and uninteresting to anyone. In the same way, the artist, poet and critic Anna Mikhalchuk (Alchuk), the only participant in the exhibition against whom a criminal case was brought, was fully acquitted. Only the director of the Sakharov Center, Yuri Samodurov, and his subordinate, the head of the exhibition organization group Lyudmila Vasilovskaya, were found guilty (each was fined 100 thousand rubles - a measure that is essentially “vegetarian”).

On the one hand, in the current increasingly harsh conditions one can only rejoice at the compromise decision of the court, which wished to please both the Orthodox and human rights communities. In the end, Samodurov fixed all his teeth, bought medicine and was seriously ready to go to the settlement. But there is still some logical inconsistency in the verdict - even if we reluctantly admit that in 2005, in a country that considers itself European, a trial of the organizers of an art (!) exhibition is possible.

The fact is that Samodurov and Vasilovskaya are the organizers of the project “Beware of Religion!” in the strictly technical sense of the word. The director of the museum, given the authority given to him, provided a hall for the exhibition, and a museum employee, due to her professional duties, supervised the hanging of the exhibits. And in the case when both the exhibits themselves and the author of the text of the exhibition concept, its direct participant Anna Alchuk, were “pardoned,” the punishment of the representatives of the Sakharov Center looks extremely strange. It turned out that it was not the creators of art who were condemned, but those thanks to whom it was merely publicly demonstrated. Not artists and curators, but humble museum workers.

I am not calling to immediately “turn the dial” and resume the process - God forbid! Works of art do not fall under the Criminal Procedure Code, and if an artist can be convicted for his work, it is only by his colleagues, not by prosecutors. It’s just that the initial illogic of the case regarding “Beware of religion!”, brought specifically against Samodurov, Vasilovskaya and Alchuk (also by no means the main character in the exhibition), is indicative in its own way. And we'll even explain.

Please note: the first spectators of the notorious “Rosenthal’s Children”, invested with power, in their interview remarks also attacked not the composer Desyatnikov or even the writer Sorokin, but the director of the Bolshoi Theater Iksanov. Trying their best to be liberal, they graciously agreed to the existence of avant-garde opera in potentia, but not on this sacred stage. “Walking Together”, who know no fear or reproach, are fighting directly with Sorokin as an aesthetic (or rather, anti-aesthetic) phenomenon, and officials are interested in a specific theater that warmed up the “kal-eater” and paid him the people’s money. In the same way, “Satanist” artists are cursed by demoniac crowds of believers who surrounded the courthouse. And the accusation is directed at the employees of the Sakharov Center, who spend Berezovsky’s funds on “anti-Russian” projects. And in the end, art turns out to be acquitted, and museum workers are convicted!

I would like to see an economic or political background in this dialectic. Moreover, the reform of the Bolshoi is coming, and the “pro-Chechen” museum “Peace, Progress, Human Rights” has long been behaving defiantly in relation to state policy. At least, this is how Iksanov and Samodurov themselves explain what is happening.

But there is another explanation for the undeclared war between the authorities and cultural institutions that have taken the path of contemporary art. This is archaic inertia and belief in the sacredness of museum or theater walls. And those who allowed a choir of station girls on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater or allowed the construction of an installation in the form of a temple of vodka bottles in a hall on the Garden Ring were, in the eyes of the orthodox bureaucrats, guilty much more than an odious writer or artist. After all, the director of a theater or museum - a person vested with great powers - must be of the same blood as a deputy, minister or prosecutor. And he suddenly betrayed his like-minded people, became a true heresiarch and left the bosom of his civil church!

It is even more pointless to fight against secular fanaticism of power than against religious fanaticism. So the Sakharovites actually got off easy. Long live the Tagansky Court, the fairest court in the world.