noted. 01/15/2012

• Voina Explains Why Firebombing a Police Tank Is a "Piece of Art" | Artinfo

  tags: voina

  • Asked if Voina had exceeded the boundaries of performance art with its politically-motivated actions, Plutser-Sarno responded, “If an artist follows rules, canons, norms, he is dead. An artist should be walking on the razor's edge between art and non-art, between death and life.” That territory is certainly where Voina is headed, given their multiple daring escapes from arrest and imprisonment (it is worth noting that Plutser-Sarno is currently in hiding abroad).
  • According to Voina, the difference between performance art and political activism is art’s public nature and the importance of laying claim to your work. “If an activist secretly burns a cop truck at night, it won’t be art. It will be the revenge of an activist,” Plutser-Sarno wrote. “But to burn it openly and proclaim to the entire country: ‘I am an artist. I burned down your prison, symbol of totalitarianism. This autodafe is our art action,’ then it becomes a piece of art. We made people discuss it as an artistic action.”

• Voina's New Year Gift for Police | Arts & Ideas | The Moscow Times

  tags: voina

  • The statement said the armored Ural police truck was targeted because it was a prison-on-wheels used for holding and transporting detainees.

     

    "This is our modest New Year present to political prisoners from a group of artists," Voina's Oleg Vorotnikov said in an e-mail interview this week.

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    "It's undisputable that political prisoners are forgotten by Russian society — because they remain locked up in prisons. Political prisoners have become the norm in Russia, and this norm is a despicable crime of the state and its cowardly and indifferent citizens."

     

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