In 2009, artist Shepard Fairey was arrested on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston for tagging. He received two years of probation as punishment. Last December, Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev, of the Russian prankster art collective Voina, were arrested for overturning seven police cars. They were arrested, thrown in jail and then beaten by plainclothes policemen after being released.

It’s safe to say the stakes are higher in the world of Russian street art. In London, people chuckled slightly at Banksy’s axe-murdered phonebooth; British Telecom even jokingly offered to buy it. In St. Petersburg, Voina bum-rushed the Liteiny Bridge, dodging security guards to paint a giant phallus with white paint. The joke? It was a drawbridge and when raised it points directly at the headquarters of the Federal Security Service, formerly known as the KGB (footage below).

Voina fucks the KGB with a Giant Cock from ebitessami on Vimeo.

If that isn’t (ahem) sticking it to the man, I don’t know what is. To demonstrate how corrupt the police force is, one of the members dressed up in a policeman’s uniform, filled two grocery bags at a gourmet market and simply walked out. Nobody stopped him, which, of course, was the point. They have staged fake hangings of homosexuals in supermarkets after the former Moscow mayor called gay pride parades satanic, started a vulgar, impromptu punk concert at the trial of two Russian curators and, in perhaps one of their silliest stunts, had a member run through a busy street with a blue bucket on his head to protest the police force’s constant, flagrant abuse of their traffic privileges (a phenomenon documented well by The New Yorker’s Keith Gessen).

Russia is a strange beast, a well-educated, cultured country with a terribly oppressive government, fertile ground for artists looking to seriously stir the pot. Voina (which translates to “War”) was started by philosophy students at Lomonosov Moscow State University in 2007 as the country’s elite, flush with oil money and government contracts, turned a blind eye to the state abuses and corruption rampant in the country. Russia ranks a sad 146th out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s corruption index, hardly what the Russian people could have been hoping for when Boris Yeltsin was voted the country’s first president 20 years ago.

With a record like that, Voina members know they risk more than a slap on the wrist when heading out on a mission. Member Alexei Plutser-Sarno claimed that his two friends Vorotnikov and Nikolayev [via The Guardian] “had plastic bags placed over their heads when they were arrested and police kicked them in the head and kidneys as they lay on the floor of a vehicle.” Sometimes it feels like American and European street artists are playing a little game; yes, you can get arrested, but risk of physical harm is low and the end result, while certainly charming or clever (Yay, Space Invader!), doesn’t have much societal impact.

This, in contrast, is brash, risky pranksterism at its best, standing up to powerful, oppressive institutions that ordinary citizens don’t dare stand up to. If anyone is going to remove the quotation marks around “democracy” in Russia, a movement is going to have to start from the ground up. When the government censors the media and pays off the policemen, there aren’t really many venues to rally for reform, especially when punishments loom so large. That’s why, as crass as the group may be,Voina might be instrumental in changing the world’s ninth most populous country for the better. As the bucket-wearing “Crazy Lenya” Leonid Nikolayev said to the BBC: “Our society has lived in fear for so many decades, we are trying to wake it by kicking it … People see what we did and understand that you can live in a different way, you can be braver.”

Photo: Igor Makaarov, Wikimedia, CC

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