Late Socialism's Noisy Bodies

• In Event: Music and Liberation II: Pushing the Official Boundaries

Abstract

What exactly do monsters, teenage hooligans, and breakdancing have in common? As cultural restrictions in the Soviet Union began to relax during perestroika, musicians and artists began to test the limits of the human body by testing the boundary between living and dead. Underground groups in the tightly-knit Leningrad underground scene such as the Necrorealists, led by performance artist Evgeny Yufit, and Pop Mekhanika, led by musician and composer Sergei Kuryokhin, combined visual and sonic elements to assert themselves as avant-garde alternatives—though not, importantly, oppositions—to contemporary mass culture. Through their absurdist performances—which often included farm animals, bloodied mannequins, deformed orchestral instruments, and industrial soundscapes—these two groups emphasized the non-human and paralinguistic elements of late socialism.

By positioning the resonant body—and, particularly, the youthful and often deformed body—in conflict with the normalcy of the state, these two groups performed their outsider status at the twilight of the Soviet Union. They embraced identifications of “monstrous” and “noisy” as ways of delineating themselves not only from official culture, but from Soviet—and, indeed, human—culture in general. In this paper, I place these two groups in their bio- and necropolitical contexts (Foucault; Mbembe) to argue that their carnal methods of performance became a way of asserting personal sovereignty within the existing power structures of late socialism. Through their art and music, these groups named the body as a site of many identities—normal, abnormal, human, nonhuman—and reclaimed it into their own sphere of personal control."

Author

• Gabrielle Cornish, U of Wisconsin-Madison