Power of art is as plain as Putin’s drag face

Whenever I’m hit with another CBC countdown promo of its exclusive Canadian coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi that viral image of Putin in drag makeup pops into my head.

That one cheeky act packs a political wallop and reminds me that while the pen is mightier than the sword, there’s the same power in the paintbrush. And Photoshop.

That image (which I’m still searching for in the form of a legal-fundraising T-shirt) has me dreaming of an Olympics that has athletes wearing rainbow scarves on the podium. More likely it will be the very real nightmare of the military dragging away brave individuals in the stands and the streets who are demanding justice in the face of a homophobic president and its national political policy of hate.

A taste of things to come was most recently seen when Russian artist Konstantin Altunin fled to Paris to seek asylum after his painting of Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in lingerie was seized along with three other paintings in his August show. The crime is unclear. It may be promoting homosexuality to minors. Or hooliganism, which sounds funny but landed the members of Pussy Riot with two years’ hard time for performing a  “punk prayer” in Moscow’s main Orthodox cathedral last year after Putin was reinstated as president.

So ‘performance’, even if it’s a sloppy dance in homemade hoods, is mightier than the sword. The heavy hand of Putin’s policies may be winning the battle — Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova ended her nine-day hunger strike last week to protest working conditions in the women’s prison, to no avail, apparently — but the war for social justice is just beginning.

It’s unclear whether these unlikely political terrorists (the three convicted seen here pose with their verdict) see it that way.

Taking on the U.S. President or his policies through art has none of that threat of individual freedom of expression.  True, there may be a sort of White House Down going on there at the moment, in the form of a government shutdown over a glacial move toward universal health care, but you don’t go to jail for performing or painting or Photoshopping your president in a political artwork. 

You can march on Washington, carrying your homemade sign depicting your president’s head on a Pez dispenser spouting one Lie after another, or you can even tattoo his face on the sole of your foot so you can stomp on his image with every step (below) but you can’t mess with individuals. And in these parts that includes private companies, as we learned in viewing The Corporation (written by Vancouver’s own Joel Bakan, UBC law professor).

You want a taste of the kind of trouble you can bring upon yourself via the paintbrush or Photoshop or performance, take on some of those individual-companies. You might not land in the gulag but you may find yourself paying through the pocketbook in legal defence fees for violating their ‘individual’ rights.