Artist Feature: Slava Mogutin’s Sexy Underground Hooliganism
I first laid eyes on Slava Mogutin’s work through his photographs, printed in the inky pink pages of Butt Magazine. He was actually both coverboy and contributor for that queer counterculture masthead, a glimmer of those early, porny internet days when the web seemed to connect rather than distract. I recently confessed to him that I’d shoplifted my first issue and he laughed with assurance, “You know, it's funny because my books are famous for being stolen from people's homes and bookstores. A book can really engage people."
Such bad behavior has become the Siberian-born artist’s calling card. Beginning his career in journalism, literature, and poetry at the ripe age of 16, Slava’s early queer activism and political tracts caught the attention of Russian homeland officials. This instigated a succession of court cases and threats, forcing the artist to eventually flee and seek political asylum in the United States. He was the first Russian to do so on account of LGBT persecution.
One of the charges brought against him in these proceedings was “hooliganism.” While this carried real legal ramifications, I couldn’t suppress a smirk while researching this, because, in a way, the oligarchs were right! Oxford defines the term as, “violent or rowdy behavior by young troublemakers.” That youthful pang for disruption still sparkles perpetually in Slava’s piercing blue eyes. He’s puckish beyond his years. Despite past tumult and consequences, the joy of resistance has never dimmed for him.
Analog selfies by Slava Mogutin.
His photographs confront the viewer with pouting shitkickers and kinky queer youths, folks who don’t fit in mainstream society or its ideas of permissibility. Usually, they glare into Slava’s camera with looks half flirting with the photographer and half in defiance of the world. These subjects run the gamut from cross-dressing “brosephines” to NYC go-go boys, from Berlin exiles to members of Russia’s queer underground. But these snapshots go further than the magazine fodder of my first encounter. A fiercely analog auteur, I’ve witnessed these shoots sprout up at a moment’s notice, and Slava’s always ready with a 35mm camera in hand.
“One picture on the wall is more meaningful,” he said. “Nothing compares to analog grain; nothing compares to the thrill of seeing an actual photograph. I grew up in a house with more books than furniture, you know, so I was always passionate about printed matter.”
As an author, Mogutin has also penned 20 books of poetry, essays, and journalism, writing in both Russian and English. “Honestly, I've been writing consistently for as long as I remember. I identify primarily as a writer and journalist.”
He shows me his notebooks and they’re wild, brimming with sketches, journal entries, collages, and haikus. He’s currently bringing some of his publications, like Food Chain (2014), the first English-language collection of his writings, and Pictures & Words (2017), originally published by the magazine Straight To Hell, back into print to keep their ideas circulating and to quash the scarcity market. The Internet’s transformation into a corporate hellscape is a trap from which Slava’s cherish of the physical object actively divests, be it photo, zine, or book.
For queer literature, I’ve watched online booksellers like Amazon create arbitrary inflation for titles that were made to be quite attainable. Slava shakes his head at the asking price for his out-of-print titles, which start in the hundreds. But I’ve never seen an author take this system to task quite as casually. “[Food Chain] is mostly text, so I'm doing it in black and white. It's gonna cost me less than three dollars a copy. It's almost 200 pages, but…”
His biggest literary inspirations are Arthur Rimbaud and Friedrich Nietzsche: “Beyond Good and Evil is like the most poetic thing ever written in German.” Those blue eyes grow wide again. Excitably.
Hooliganism also connotes gang behavior. And I’ve witnessed the intensity with which Slava embraces his collaborators, lovers, and confidants — fellow iconoclasts like filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, author Travis Jeppesen, artist Gio Black Peter, and cultural theorist Bruce Benderson. When he speaks of his friends, his excitable tone dips into reverence and esteem. They collaborate on projects like Slava’s ongoing Gay Propaganda short film series, which LaBruce helped out on in summer 2023 in Berlin and will return to in June 2024.
I had the pleasure of joining in on the festivities then, and let’s just say it’s a real night out. Slava can party, but that seems born partly of defiance and amnesty (Slava was naturalized as a US citizen in 2011). Push him in a daytime mindset and his command of immigration and censorship laws are razor sharp. Sometimes, the most radical act of resistance can be finding joy. Like Stephin Merritt once wrote for a b-side chorus, “We are the rats in the garbage of the Western world / so let’s dance.” Or, to quote from Bruce Benderson’s introduction to Slava’s photography monograph, NYC Go-Go, “[To] completely grasp Mogutin’s approach to sexuality we must understand how it interfaces with his profound disillusionment with the two major economic systems, from the West and the East.”
I’d read that wrong when I encountered his work casually, in the Butt pages and Lower East Side galleries when I lived in New York throughout the last decade. Being misunderstood, I suppose, is part of hooligan DNA.
“It was a very serious criminal charge routinely used against dissidents back in Soviet times,” Slava recalled. “They would say, ‘Stop, this is disrupting the public order.’ You know, ‘disorderly conduct.’ And my only crime was publishing an article. So, by all means it was a case of free speech and freedom of expression, but they didn't want to call it that. They wanted to say that I'm a hooligan. I was lucky to escape the charges but, crazy enough, Pussy Riot was charged with the same thing. And we're talking like 25 years later!”
Self-portrait.
He has two new books of poetry at the printer, one written in Russian, Декларация Независимости (Declaration of Independence), and one collecting 20 years of English-language poems, called Satan’s Youth. His Russian publisher is already feeling the heat and the launch is subsequently being planned in Georgia. Then there’s a photography book, Analogue Human Studies (2023), alongside the aforementioned prose reprints. And in July 2024, a massive exhibition of his work will be mounted at SETAREH Gallery in Berlin.
Our conversation quickly veered to meeting up after that, in Athens.
Back to the nightlife.
Slava lives itinerantly, moving between New York and the larger world and his is a boho approach by design. The last time we rendezvoused he was fielding proposals, one of which included an offer to direct a Pet Shop Boys video for the song off their new record, Nonetheless (2024), titled “A New Bohemia.” The song references les Petites Bon-Bons, a Milwaukee-based group of gay activists who worked in mail art and circulated as a Glitter rock band despite never playing an actual show.
“A lot of anger expressed itself in the Bon Bons because we realized society is all just a sham," explains founding Bon-bon Bobby Lambert. "If they’re wrong about this, who knows what else they’re wrong about. And that meant all kinds of things were starting to be exposed as being false.”
And it strikes me that the Bon Bons are a great parallel for Slava himself. His restless and prolific shift between mediums makes for a sprawling career that positions himself, his gang, and their politics fiercely against legislative forces that work to contain or silence him.
None of that, please, for this sweet and tender hooligan.
Published July 1, 2024
Published in Issue XII: Cinema
