Abstract
This chapter studies ‘Monstrations’, the absurdist popular protests of the last decade that appeared in 2004 and increased in 2014 and are clearly directed toward the ridicule of the political status quo through ludic and humorous tactics which on the surface are not satirical per se. It focuses specifically on the strategy of “shimmering,” the principled choice to tergiversate between opposing authoritative discourses. The chapter demonstrates how Monstrations develop shimmering by removing the author and expand the betrayal of seriousness horizontally, through parodic protest. They refuse to treat any authority as legitimate or desirable, and aim at undermining the authorities’ control over public discourse—as is readily apparent in the total failure to co-opt Monstrations via astroturfing, and their apparent current ban.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Loskutov’s entry in the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art website (Loskutov 2017).
- 2.
“On the other hand, if you like being busted by the cops, you might think of working jail into the happening. […] Work with the power around you, not against it. It makes things much easier, and you’re interested in getting things done. When you need official approval, go out for it. You can use police help, the mayor, the college dean, the chamber of commerce, the company exec, the rich, and all your neighbors. Be your own public relations man; convince them all that what you’re doing is worthwhile because it’s enjoyable to play, just the same as it’s enjoyable for them to go fishing. It’s not a snap, of course, but they’re convincible, and once on your side you can almost go to the moon” (Kaprow 1966: side 1, 7–8″).
- 3.
“Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a show. Leave the shows to the theatre people and discotheques. A happening is a game with a high, a ritual that no church would want because there’s no religion for sale. A happening is for those who happen in this world, for those who don’t want to stand off and just look. If you happen, you can’t be outside peeking in. You’ve got to be involved physically. Without an audience, you can be off on the move, using all kinds of environments, mixing in the supermarket world, never worrying about what those out there in the seats are thinking, and you can spread your action all around the globe whenever you want. Traditional art is like college education and drugs: it’s fed to people who have to sit on their butts for longer and longer amounts of time to get the point, and the point is that there’s lots of actions somewhere else, which all the smart people prefer to just think about. But happeners have a plan and go ahead and carry it out. To use an old expression, they don’t merely dig the scene, they make it” (Kaprow 1966: side 1, 11″).
- 4.
“Mertsanie”: “flickering” is used in Jackson (2010). I prefer the term “shimmering.”
- 5.
- 6.
See Lipovetsky (2019: 161).
- 7.
“Surrealism, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state […] dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason” (Breton 1924: 26).
- 8.
“When the conversation—on the day’s events or proposals of amusing or scandalous intervention in the life of the times—began to pall, we would turn to games; written games at first, contrived so that elements of language attacked each other in the most paradoxical manner possible, and so that human communication, misled from the start, was thrown into the mood most amenable to adventure. From then on no unfavourable prejudice (in fact, quite the contrary) was shown against childhood games, for which we were rediscovering the old enthusiasm, although considerably amplified. Thus, when later we came to give an account of what had sometimes seemed upsetting to us about our encounters in this domain, we had no difficulty in agreeing that the Exquisite Corpse method did not visibly differ from that of ‘consequences’. Surely nothing was easier than to transpose this method to drawing, by using the same system of folding and concealing” (“Le Cadavre Exquis” 1948: 5–7, 9–11).
- 9.
As argued, for instance, in Greenberg (1961).
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Leiderman, D. (2021). Political Games of Chance: Monstrations and Their Ludic Tactics. In: Semenenko, A. (eds) Satire and Protest in Putin’s Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76279-7_8
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