Costume as Truth and as a New Mythology: Dressed Performances of Perestroika

Clothes can cover, hide and clothe, but they can also denude, unveil and demonstrate. This is especially true of clothes created in protest, in negation of something, that is, of alternative fashion. A nearly global phenomenon, alternative fashion is closely connected with radical social groups and practices, including artistic ones. By opposing itself to the establishment, the conventions and rules of which it denies as false, alternative fashion has an ambition to speak on behalf of the truth. In the former Soviet Union, rock-musicians, hippies, punks and other subcultures were deeply marginal and their attire shocked the general public. Dressed performances of alternative fashion and life style became possible only in mid-1980s, when Gorbachev’s Perestroika began. They flourished in post-Soviet Russia for about a decade before transforming themselves in either popular entertainment for the rich or a new mythology.

Key words: alternative fashion, performance art, Soviet Union, carnival, Perestroika

When Vivienne Westwood came to the Soviet Union in 1989, she declared that «in the country of sickle and hammer fashion does not and cannot exist» (Alternative fashion 2011: 47). To her surprise, the punk designer saw in Moscow, at the British Fashion Week, a collection of her Russian colleague, Katya Filippova. Filippova invented a style, «tsarism» and the image of the «punk tsarina in exile». One can imagine that in the Soviet Union references to both «punks» and «the tsars» were not welcome. Yet, even in the country of sickle and hammer, actors, musicians and other performers needed to dress up for the stage. Their costumes were often improvised from what they had to hand, using Soviet-produced materials and symbols. This may be ssen as the beginning of alternative fashion. At times professional designers helped them with their outfits. Irina Afonina, for instance, worked at the state-supported All-Union Fashion House, but she also made dresses for rock-musicians and after Perestrioka produced one of the first collections of alternative fashion ironically using Soviet symbols and the Red Army uniform (Alternative fashion 2011: 14). In the USSR, alternative fashion associated itself the opposition to the stagnated regime, well-known for its lies and hypocrisy, and its ambition therefore was to be on the side of truth and to reveal the falseness of Soviet officialdom.

The Stilyagi (from stil', style) was a name for Soviet dandies (Vainshtein 2005) who challenged Soviet conventions of simple and practical dress by dressing themselves up and being always in style. In a recent film by Valery Todorovsky with the same name, there is an episode which takes place in a university lecture amphitheatre full of students all dressed in identical grey clothes. Suddenly the doors open and the principal character, a dandy, appears. The sound track for the episode is a song, «Locked by the Same Chain», by a Perestroika rock-group, Nautilus Pompilius. The song amplifies the contrast between everybody's triste unifrom and the stylish costume of the main character. Soviet Stilyagi were not alone: alternative youth fashion everywhere caused trouble and sometimes repression (Vainshtein 2005: 534). Youngsters worldwide provoked public criticism by their alternative appearance, in which they mixed high and low style and ironised clichés.The disapproval could vary from the criticism of aggressive babushkas (grannies) sitting on a bench by the entrance door of a communal appartment block, to repressive measures such as being expelled from university or drafted into the army.

«Hooligans of the 1980s», a research and publication project of Misha Buster, is about the youth subcultures in the decade just before and after Perestroika. In 2011, Buster co-curated an exhibition «Alternative Fashion Before Glossies, 1985-1995» at the Museum of Contemporary Art Garage. A former «hooligan», Buster, bore witness: alternative faishion «was wild and untamed, flaring up suddenly like a chemical reaction among the various underground creative groups who had claimed a place on the rock scene, in squats and on official stages with a lightning speed (Alternative Fashion 2011: 5). Another participant of the underground artistic movement, Georgy Litichevsky, claims that alternative fashion was larger then dress and larger than traditional fashion. He termed it «superfashion»; his essay on the subject is titled «The System of Superfashion» – obviously a play on Roland Barthes' book. In Litichevsky's view, «the alternative costume before the 1980s is non-dress, and after the 1980s it is an abundant 'superdress', oversized (in oversize clothes one looks an orhaned child in adult's attire), excentric, exotic, opposing everyday life» (Litichevsky 1996: 25).

Vivienne Westwood's words about the absence of fashion in the Soviet Union remind us of a Perestroika anecdote, when a participant in a TV talk-show claimed that «there was no sex in the Soviet Union»^ⓘ. Continuing in the same vein, one might say that in the USSR there was no performance art. The term «performance» was a neologism – it is absent in the 1984 Russian Dictionary in 4 volumes. Its appearance coincided with the first happenings and performances by conceptual artists, like the Moscow group «Kollektivnye Deistviya» («Collective Action») who organised «actions» or «countryside outings» (Masterkova 1982; Monastyrsky 1998).

The very genre of performance art emerged (in Italy, France and pre-Revolutionary Russia) in protest against traditional «bourgeois» culture of theatres and museums. The first Futurist performances were always accompanied by scandals (Goldberg 2011). Performance art is sometimes called «an ideal crime»: the performer shakes the art system from within (Gnirenko 2000). And though the aim of performance art is to critique traditional art, public opinion associates it with political protest. In performance art, there is more freedom and improvisation than in a carefully staged and rehearsed theatre play. Given the tight controlled over art and culture in the Soviet Union, performance art was therefore only possible underground, for theatre performances had to be aproved by the Communist Party, and even mass festivities were planned and staged from the top.

Imbued with chance and improvisation, performance art has always been an object of suspcion to authoritarian regimes. In Russia, the roots of performance art may exist in the folk tradition of people's jesters, skomorokhi – wandering actors, clowns and musicians. Along with court jesters, skomorokhi could speak truth of and even ridicule the authorities, lay and religious. To the official culture – serious, monological and repressive – Mikhail Bakhtin opposed the «people's culture of laughter», of clowning and carnival (Bakhtin 1968). Carnival overturns regular hierarchies, smashes traditional boundaries and norms and has a potential – Bakhtin believed – to undermine political regimes. In carnival culture, «top» becomes «bottom», «inside» is turned «outside», everything serious and official is ridiculed and falsity is exposed. Clowns and jester alone speak truth. One of the favourite «jesters» of the Soviet era, the actor and singer Vladimir Vysotsky, exposed the hypocrisy of official life in his songs, and expressed by means of art, the truth became acceptable even at the official level and Vysotsky was allowed to perform his songs at concerts in public. His songs talked directly to the hearts of people; he «performed truth». This permits us to think that «truth» is also a performance – a successful one.

In order not to be punished, the jester puts on a hat with bells, turns his clothes inside out, walks with his legs up in the air and talks in parables. In this way, the jester marks his «frame» as different from the «reality» and signaling that the habitual, everyday circumstances are suspended. The anthropologist and psychologist, Gregory Bateson, introduced the notion of frame in order to distinguish between two basic situations, «reality» and «imagination» or «as if» (Bateson 2000). The sociologist Erwing Goffman began to consider the two kinds of frames as equal meaning that the frame «imagined» can be perceived no less real that the frame «reality» (Goffman 2003). Clowning, practical jokes, or prangsterism transform the frame «reality» to the frame «imagination», where the «reality» rules are not applicable. A jester's jokes are simply laughted at and not punished. If the jester manages to frame his jokes as «imagined», not «real», he even has a chance to survive.

«Theatre» is also a frame, different from «reality»: actions in the theatre are always actions «as if», obeying laws of imagination, as opposite to reality. By contrast with what Roland Barthes termed «the effect of reality» (Barthes 1994), theatre creates «the effect of irreality», by marking the situation «as if». The elevated stage, three calls before the beginning of a performance and lifting the curtain all separate theatre action from everyday life, switching the frame from «reality» to «imagination». The audience watches the performance following these specific conventions, bearing in mind that what is going on the stage is not an «everyday reality» but a different «reality of theatre», «as if».

And what about performance art? It is yet another frame, different from both «reality» and «as if» of theatre. Performance art is able to function as a protest or a critique of both life and theatre. In the absence of traditional markers (stage, curtain, bells, etc.), performance art pretends to be taken for «reality», not for «theatre». And yet performers are usually special people – artists or actors. As a result of the ambuguity, spectators are confused about how to specify which frame they are in – «reality» or «imagination». The aim of alternative performance, especially, is to undermine both frames, «reality» and «theatre», by destroying habitual markers of the situation and blurring the boundaries.

In post-Soviet Russia, alternative fashion was a product of styob, an ironising yet creative reflection over the recent past, the official Soviet ideology. Garri Assa called this «alchemistry»: «I extracted from every culture, made my own alchemic quintessence by adding our Russian recklessness to Western fashion » (Kostrova 2011). So, what happened afterwards, when the Soviet establishment ceased to exist and people wanted to forget it as quickly as possible? In an attempt to make sense of post-Soviet alternative fashion, Litichevsky questions whether it is possible to be alternative without having an establishemnt. For instance, could mafia gangs, which came to replace the Party nomenclature, be considered as a new establishment? One thing is clear: at some point, styob over things Soviet exhausted itself – the joke grew a beard. Soc-art quickly became museum stuff and collectors' objects. It was not so hard for performers to find other objects for styob. In post-Soviet times, suitable objects were also in abundance. Al the same, negative references could be:

After the first post-Soviet years of extreme poverty, products, goods and supermarkets started to appeare: the consumer market was gradually filled out. The artist, Andrey Bartenev, comments that in the 1990s the country «was flooded by bright goods of poor quality but very desirable. One would want to consume everything» (Batenev 2012). At that time, he made a performance with various packaging, including tins of soup and cola (like Andy Warhol) and «the entire rubbish tip, up to children's tricycles». The artist Georgy (Gosha) Ostretsov chose as an object of negative reference the aggressive response of the conservative majority to the bright look of youth subcultures, which he termed «costume phobia». His own perfromances were «cheerful laugh-making»: «I did not do fashion, I did performances in the spirit of «Blue Blouse» [early Soviet propaganda theatre], and with Timur Novikov we developed the theme of hypercommunism. At that time fashion and performance were united, as in the first [sport] parades of the 1920s. In my case, the New Wave overlapped with the aesthetics of naïve art, which became popular in mid-1980s. This was a conceptual descent into childhood» (Alternative Fashion 2011: 28). In the Kindergarten Squat where he lived, Gosha created a «conceptual playground». He also turned his own wedding into a carnival: the bride and groom, in superhero costumes, registered their marriage as volleys were fired from toy machine guns.

It is not surprising that styob over Soviet ideology was replaced by a new mythology. Negative references to old values gave place to positive ones, the objects of which were new myths. A decade into Perestroika, there were several candidates for the new post-Soviet values, from religion, mystics and irrationalism (in the form of mass healers and hypnotisers) to features of the pre-Revolutionary past (especially tsarism, nobility, Russian aristocracy) and nationalism, or «Russianness». The very values which had been taboo during Soviet times were brought forward. Similarly to the «Tsarism» of Katya Filippova, other artists attempted to revive and modernise Russian costume or to make it anew. Ostretsov imbued dress with «magic powers» by decorating pieces with geometric «power lines». He claimed that the union of mind and body, or macrocosm with microcosm, is achieved in dress, and that the new Russian costume is born from the spirit of people's festivities. «The students-cum-fashionistas, Katya Ryzhikova and Irene Burmistrova, who had become jaded with the foreign clothing obtained from black marketeers… first participated in the shows as models, amd later decided to try their hand at design» (Alternative Fashion 2011: 31) In the late 1980s, they set up as a duo, «Blood and Milk», and launched their first collection, «Iron Shovel», which included shovels, forks and other agricultural tools symbolic of the Soviet past. Later the girls began working separately: inspired by the Futuristic «figurines» of Kazimir Malevich, Burmistova made fantastic constructions of plastic, cellophane and foam. She allegedly showed her «Rocket» costume on Red Square and was briefly arrested; she eventually emigrated.

Together with her husband, Aleksandr Lugin, Katya Ryzhikova set up the group, «Sever» («North»), in mid-1990s. They laid the path for the «New Archaic» movement, popular ever since among Moscow intellectuals. The name was characteristic of the new geopolicy of the time: the adepts opposed the «North», a bearer of genuine cultural values, to both the barbarian «South» and the decadent «West». The purpose of their dressed performance was to revive religious feelings and to breath new life into pagan myths. Her avant-garde collections, ironically combined ethnic elements with a pseudo-industrial style, and she went on to perfect her approach by uniting archaic forms with transculture and techno (Alternative Fashion 2011: 37). The «Sever» made neo-shamanist and neo-pagan pseudo-rituals with fire shows and an avant-garde musical accompanement. They had various projects, including «Techno-magic», «Techno-Round-Dance», «The Northrn Video», «The Northern Photo», an electronic art group «Northern Light» and even the «Shock School» with «trans-ritual psychoactive games». Katya called herself the «Magician», and she played the role of «Mother» in ritual performances. In «Mother-Earth», she «gave birth». Another performance was after a Russian fairy-tale, «Mar'ya-Morevna»: the cast included the main female character, Mar'ya-Morevna, the black magician Koshchey, and the Laborant of the Northern Wind (she wore a coat out of fake leather hand-painted with colour pens). Performances were carefully recorded by a professional photographer – their authors had an ambition to «include the photo-sign in the tradition» and to create a new icon of «Russianness». Ryzhikova compared this work with the painter Ivan Bilibin's illustrations for Russian fairy-tales. These art-nouveau illustrations were so popular that they became a model of the Russian style and even, as Ryzhikova believed, an icon of «Russinness». She and her fellow artists believed in the «Russain idea» as a «non-verbal paradigm» – primarily a visual one. In 1998, there was an exhibition of Ryzhikova's painting and photoes in Moscow on Malaya Gruzinskaya Street, at the exhibition hall famous for its alternative projects. Naturally, the adepts of the «Russian World» welcomed an artistic attempt to make performance-ritual, performance-myth. (One of the supporters of the «Sever» was Aleksandr Dugin, an ideologist of the «Russian World» [Dugin 2005].) Bartenev was also influenced – in one of his recent public talks I heard him listing the «Sever» as his favourite group.

The last decade of the past century was called the «likhie» («evil» or «dashing») 90s; it was a time both heroic and fatal. At the end of the decade, the interest in performance art faded. The performer and researcher, Yulya Gnirenko, believes that performance art has finally reached its goal – to shift and to renew artistic thinking (Gnirenko 2000). Bartenev also argues that, in search of grants, galleries re-oriented themselves towards Western models and supported artists who copied Western art (as I heard at his public talk at the «Island 91» festival in August 2016). Yet another reason could be a growing number of commercial clubs and private galleries. Not interested in sophisticated performance art, the new audiences were more likely to spend their crazy money on pure entertainment. Radical performance gave place to entertainment and glamour. In the night club «Titanic», «the Bohemians of the 1980s and the 1990s came together for the last time, boarded a fashionable ark, went straight into the twenty-first century and… drowned» (Buster 2015). Ironically, the last Assa parade, «An Agony of the Fire-Giraffe», took place in the «Titanic». «New owners of the Cherry Garden» and their lady friends, Buster comments, gradually replaced the Bohemians and expats in many seedy locations. Fashion, music and art-performance became elements of a club show for the new rich. The next decade was the decade of «oil abundance» and, as a result, of political conservatism, and alternative artists came under the banners of various political parties.

Litichevsky’s question, how alternative fashion and performance art were transformed in the absence of an establishment, can now be answered. The “alternative” artists stopped parodying the dominant ideology (which no longer existed) and invented their own mythology, for instance, neo-archaics or new dandyism. We come back to where we started. Alternative fashion and performance art are global movements. Alternative fashion weeks are regularly organised in Berlin, Maastricht, New York and London, with the participation of Russian artists (Andrey Bartenev and his students, Roman Ermakov, the author of “moving sculptures”, and Sasha Frolova, the Reigning Alternative Miss of the World). Their performances can hardly be called “radical”: they are “art” which has perfectly inscribed itself into show business. In these performances, the absurd and carnival are present in a mild form, tamed and not shocking. The other outcome of the story is the creation of new myths and new ideology, either leftist or conservative and nationalist. When one compares the two outcomes, the former one does not seem that bad at all.

The Iron Curtain fell down nearly three decades ago; the world will never be the same. It is understandable that Garri Assa could well believe that he would never compete with anybody as an alternative fashion designer. «Whom should I compete with? Gaultier? Or Galliano? God forbid. They did business, and we simply played around. I have not earned a penny, on the contrary, I spent my money and dressed everybody at my own expense. At that time everything cost trifles. Many things were given to me. Granddads–spies died, and the costumes tailored for them were left behind» (Kostrova 2011). But not only granddads died – the old system appeared dead too. Artists and performers had to find new sources, new rules and to prove their artistic competence in front of a larger audience and a wider world.