Pyotr Pavlensky

                  Petr Pavlensky: Images of conviction,

                           bureaucratic convulsion.

Pavlensky is a very brave man....the danger to which he exposes himself is incomparable to what we faced... Nazism was in the past, so really nothing threatened our lives.

                                                                             Günter Brus, Viennese actionist, 2016[i]

                We live in violent times.  Petr  Pavlensky quotes Vladimir Lenin on the State as a 'special apparatus for the systematic application of violence  and the submission of people to violence'.[ii] In contrast with previous action artists  from  the New Russia such as Oleg Kulik, Pavlensky's preoccupation is not with East-West relations or  stereotypes of the post-Soviet new creature as 'wild'.  He looks back to a longer time-frame and a shared history of art as protest:  to figures such as the dancer Nijinsky or the poet Mayakovsky, but also to Van Gogh and to twentieth-century actions.[iii] Simultaneously his work is digitally encoded in a process which collapses time, with the instant access of You Tube and its manic repetition.[iv] Yet his mute actions speak of dark secrets, like the dark web: in this case broken lives, the hidden-incarcerated of  pseudo-democracies.

 In French exile,  Pavlensky looks back to his recent past within a neo-Dostoevskian universe of crime and punishment.[v]  

            His political actions, Seam, Carcass, Fixation, Freedom, Segregation, Threat, took place in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, but are seen by global audience.. His mediatised face, lips stitched together, puts the silenced voice in dialogue with his ubiquitous  image, interrogating the limits of individual protest.  The challenge is to  a patriarchy perturbed  by his naked body and by his anarcho-feminist lifestyle —  yet Pavlensky's lineage ratifies an almost saintly masculinity. He  is  also a conceptual artist. His political work offers a strong critique  of the so-called 'total enlightenment' of Moscow Conceptualism, whose artists parodied the absurdly stagnant Soviet Union of the Brezhnev years.[vi] Moreover Pavlensky reverses Western conceptual art's so-called 'aesthetic of administration' and self-regarding institutional critiques.[vii] In his latest works the State itself becomes artist, producing  documentation, choosing and cropping photos or  editing videos relating to his own trials.  'Incriminating evidence' is thrown back at its origins: the State is accused, becomes abject, the criminal. Pavlensky  uses displacement to produce dialectically-reversed  truths.

            All Pawlenski's actions  are in fact  parables —  today, however they must function as parables within the  image-economy of social media. In the case of each action, Seam, Carcass, Fixation, Freedom, Segregation, Threat,  a narrative shape can be condensed into an iconic image: in Seam, the Christ-like staring face with lips sewn shut; in Carcass,  the naked body trapped in a roll of barbed wire; in Fixation, the crouching nude in Moscow's Red Square,  scrotum nailed to the ground, often pixelated; in Freedom,  the burning barricades of a faux-Maidan, in Segregation, the nude body sitting high on a wall, a huge knife held against the ear; in Threat the burning threshold of the FSB  official building in Lubyanka.  In each case a particular part of the body is the focus: in Seam, the mouth; in Carcass, the torso; in  Fixation the sex; in  Freedom, the fist; in Segregation, the ear. Together these  parts constitute  a 'whole body'; the  artist pitched against  the body politic.[viii] And in Threat, the burning threshold  between two worlds ­— that of the civilian and the police, the secret services —this 'whole body' is poised on the threshold of pain, possible torture, between life and  death. 

            Georges Didi-Huberman's  recent  exhibition Uprisings, in Paris, revealed the  cultural semiotics of protest across centuries  (manifestos, marches, flag-waving, barricades). [ix] Here each body part has its allegorical meaning. Seam signifies the mouth: freedom of speech and its curtailment; Carcass, the torso: freedom of action constrained;  Fixation, the sex: genital mutilation  as the ultimate political protest; ­  Freedom, the fist: group insurrection as potential liberation;  Segregation, the ear: Van Gogh's madness — the man 'suicided by society'; Threat, the whole man in silhouette: individual liberty versus State control or destruction.

 

Beyond the 'sacred'

            The State has expelled Pavlensky from the territory of its jurisdiction;  a repetition compulsion inscribed  within its  long history of exiles. Yet Pawlenski is the artist-product of a State  academy. What produced this ingratitude: the ingratitude of the pupil towards the State, of the State towards its pupil?    Schooled without art  to the age of seventeen, but keen on drawing, Pavlenski decided to become an artist and took an informal preparatory course at nineteen. He entered the august Saint Petersburg Stieglitz  Academy of Art and Design, (renamed after Vera Moukhina during  the Soviet period),  with its special focus on  training in the monumental, decorative and industrial arts.[x] He left the department of 'system design' after a year — but after a two-year break returned to the department of monumental painting, which also  involved frescos and large scale mosaics. This  was closer in its practices to the  concerns of  art history: the heritages of classicism or modernism. This monumental art explains a paradox in Pavslenski's practice: the repudiation of a so-called sacred; his dialogue, rather,  with a  sacred beyond the 'sacred'.

            While in the Academy, Pavlensky attempted to subvert the marks-based examination system  and supplemented his training with up-to-date art world information at the Pro Arte Foundation. His younger  contemporaries however,  beholden to families and professors, were being trained to produce large scale decorations for new (or refurbished) churches.  The Orthodox Church has become  a renewed strategic base for  Vladimir Putin, for  infiltration  even beyond Russia's borders, and a symbol of national pride and unity, especially after the economic crisis of 2008.[xi] The 'sacred' as a term for Pavlensky is thus sullied by both political and academic allegiances;  the instrumentalisation of the Orthodox tradition corroborates the post-Soviet sacralisation of  Putin as political leader. The  Academy's examination theme, at the end of the fourth year, 'Apocalypse',  was proof.  Pavlensky submitted a painted three-metre high vagina, forcing professors and students to take a stand. The work was ultimately exhibited. Yet the concept of 'Apocalypse' as a threshold between worlds, iconographically a confrontation with the toothed  and timeless 'jaws of hell' — or vagina dentata — feeds directly into future works such as Threat: hellfire at the door of the Lubyanka,  headquarters of the FSB:  the threshold to the inner workings of the police state, to utter darkness, death. The flaming mandorla transposed  as the lips of Christs's wound, for example,  surrounded by instruments of His punishment, plays with iconographies, that, like the vagina dentata eternally reintroduce fear as the sexual and the feminine: the dark slit of the phallic lack, opening into the pit.[xii]

            The story  of Russia itself has been  described as the 'transition from a sacred state with a penitential messiaanic theology to enlightened absolutism and empire.'[xiii] Bizarrely,  we may see the current situation as a palindromic reversal of direction: from empire back to a penitential theology. Pussy Riot's  performance was staged five years on from the  huge group show, I believe, held in the Winzavod former wine-making complex now a decade ago, where the older generation from Kulik to Dmitri Gutov participated in a  mystic and mystifying turn.[xiv]

            Pavlensky's view of truth — and his art — is predicated upon his conviction that the  Orthodox 'sacred' is a charade and that the panoply of contemporary Russian art celebrated in Moscow,  Saint Petersburg and widely abroad today is also a charade, or what he likes to call a décor.  In August,  2012, for example, in between the Pussy Riot protest at  the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour and the release of their first single, 'Putin Lights Up The Fires',  the  Moscow International   Biennale for Young Art with its theme 'Under a Tinsel Sun',  corroborated Pavlensky's opinion.[xv]   Contemporary art became a new Potemkin strategy, the performative charades of the artworld chiming with restyled and renamed facades, and kitsch, neo-Stalinist postmodernism.[xvi] The Triumph Palace skyscraper conceals the shame, bewilderment, the rejected love of Motherland of all who were left behind.[xvii] 'Tear the decoration of reality', Petr declares, advocating a quasi-Heideggerian aletheia  a darker, more sombre revelation of truth.

Seam:  the Sear of Silence

This concept indeed relates to Pavlensky's first performance Seam (also known as Stich or Suture).  The Pussy Riot  trials, following the performance in Moscow's  Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, had a catalysing effect upon his change of direction. On 23 July2012 Pavlensky sewed up his lips ­ with knotted red  thread — and stood holding a banner, reading 'Pussy Riot's action  was a remake of the famous action of Jesus Christ' (Matthew 21:12–13)':  the eviction of the moneychangers from the Temple. His act of solidarity was displaced to the steps of  the Kazan cathedral, Saint Petersburg. Pussy Riot's sullying of the Temple, their blasphemy, is reversed in his statement, while Pavlensky's protest inevitably recalls Christ's silence before his accusers.[xviii] Yet in the godless Soviet Penal Code 'blasphemy' did not exist: a new law was passed in 2013 precisely because of this action.  Pavlenski's metaphor,  what Jean-François Lyotard called the 'sear of silence', cannot tear itself away from the premises of a sacred reality. Lyotard's words in context offered twin homages to Wittgenstein and the Holocaust ('Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent'); they  also acknowledged the burning metaphor of art's eloquence. [xix]  

            Beyond the specifics of the solidarity gesture, Maxim Zmeev's photograph of Pavlensky, so often cropped to a death's head, has circulated widely, epitomising pain and protest far beyond its initial context.[xx] It is significant that while in prison,  Pussy Riot artist Nadezhda Tolokonnikova obtained a copy of  Anatoly Marchenko's My Testimony, a witness account  by an arbitrarily-imprisoned gulag survivor. The utter abjection and cruelty Marchenko experienced, including fellow-prisoners' self-mutilation, finally reached a world audience.[xxi] Was this the first encounter with gulag reality for both Pussy Riot and Pavlensky, who became adults in a time of relative prosperity?

            With stitched lips, Pavlensky offers this act of protest for one time and for all times,  in relationship to his moment and to the lives of others: protestors, refugees, artists, prisoners. One  recalls   stiched lips by the performance artist Ulay (with Marina Abramovic, Talking about Similarity, 1976— the East-West divide ); David Wojnarowicz stiched  lips in the film Silence= Death, 1990 (about AIDS); and beyond the 2012 event, refugees with stitched lips at  the Greek Macedonian border in 2015;  Calais jungle refugee hunger strikers with stitched lips  in March 2016; the stiched lips of adolescents in British prisons today. Seam consciously displaces and speaks to other protests across history and in worlds beyond Russia.

Carcass: against the Vertical of Power   

From the face to the horizontal naked body, from Seam to Carcass: Pavlensky's body appears wreathed in barbed wire, not a Christic crown of thorns but  a coil around  a trapped animal — a  prisoner reduced to what Giorgio Agamben has called  'bare life'.[xxii] Carcass  was presented on  3 May 2013 at the entrance to the legislative assembly of Saint Petersburg, home of the 'gay propaganda' law.  Pavlensky remained silent; he was ultimately released by the police, bent awkwardly over his body with their newly-bought wire-cutters. And not before many photographs and videos were taken, from above, from end on, distanced or in close up; the action dwarfed by its architectural context in Maxim Zmeev's distant view, or the abstracted close-up of the nude in the roll of wire.  As Pavlensky declared, his action was aimed at:

‘a series of laws aimed at suppressing civic activism, intimidation of the population, steadily growing number of political prisoners, the laws against NGOs, the 18+ laws, censorship laws, activity of Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, 'promotion of homosexuality' laws – all these laws aren't aimed against criminals, but against the people. And at last the Blasphemy law. That is why I organized this action. The human body is naked like a carcass, there is nothing on it except the barbed wire, which by the way was invented for protection of livestock. These laws, like the wire, keep people in individual pens: all this persecution of political activists, 'prisoners of May, 6', governmental repressions is the metaphor of the pen with the barbed wire around it. All this has been done in order to turn people into gutless and securely guarded cattle, which can only consume, work, and reproduce.[xxiii]

            Carcass' s  symbolism  is not merely that of  barbed wire around nakedness, but the obdurate horizontality of the action. A horizontality linked with animality, specifically negating what Putin himself calls the 'vertical of power'(vertikal vlasti):  his  centralised, top-down governing system run by loyal elites.[xxiv]  With this vertikal, comes the corresponding 'perpendicularisation of society',  the horizontal choreographies of military parades, viewed by generals or TV cameras from Red Square; or  formation gymnastics from Soviet Spartakiades to  the Sochi Olympics. Mounted dressage, even ballet — the  snowy white Russia of Swan Lake — evolved from these military formations, the incessant  disciplining of  the vertical body; its origins in the court ballets of Sun-King Louis XIV, who performed on stage as Apollo in 1670.[xxv] How do these State choreographies find their echo in the 'Alternative Prize for Russian Activist Art', category 'Actions implemented in Urban Space' awarded to the artist?  The prize-winner is the antithesis of the human animal, lying  horizontal and vulnerable in sleep, in despair, in death — or in a prison of barbed wire.

            Carcass's  effect is not complete without the removal of the offending body by the police force.  Indeed Pavlenski in almost Batkhinian mode is dependent   upon the moment of arrival, the burlesque carnaval of law-enforcement and arrest, the  complete choreography of public space and officials around the action, a more complex orchestration than Pussy Riot's carnival inside the church.[xxvi] Cariaval continued  in Saint Petersburg with Political Propaganda's  group show 'Ghosts of Identity' (21 September 2013) notionally displaced from the street to the inside of the State Hermitage courtyard — while Putins' Orthodox confessor enthused and blessed curators within....[xxvii]

                                      

'Fixation':  the Holy Fool?

Pavlensky finally moved to Moscow's Red Square, the symbolic seat of power. Bared in freezing winter, he transfixed his scrotum to the ground with a huge nail on 10 November 2013, 'Police Celebration Day',  nationally acknowledged as the 'reddest' day in the calendar.[xxviii]  Krasny: red. Beautiful, handsome, red as the blood of the working class, red as Communism...  prison guards with red epaulettes; prison camps divded into 'red' or 'black'.[xxix]   'Everyone in Russia has a direct link or a link via a relative to the penitential system, or political resistance to it', Pavlensky explains. In slang:  'He's red' indicates the police officers who lead actions versus civilians who themselves will suffer a 'red fate'. 'Beautiful' —as red —becomes apotropaic here, warding off evil, just as in ancient Greece the Furies, terrifying Erinyes, acquired the gracious name 'Eumenides'.

            Red Square:  Lenin's red granite mausoleum; tombs of great Stalinists; the soil saturated with the DNA of military glory and repression. Saint Basil's cathedral with its onion domes glows at one end — the very emblem of Russia. Saint Basil himself walked the streets naked in winter; so beloved for his 'miracles' that Ivan the Terrible was his pallbearer. Pavlensky here joins Russia's lineage of holy fools: iurodivye Khrista radi .... fools for the sake of Christ, like Basil (Vasily Blazhenny); all were sacred and close to the sovereign. The fool's shamanic origin, forgotten with Christianisation, reversed the values of purity and wisdom; he behaved filthily, pruriently, like Rasputin — or Pavlensky according to some. Fools evoked veneration, derision, or fear.[xxx] King Lear and his fool  played  out the trope in  Shakespeare's England, where the poor bare forked animal (Edgar) doubles up for Lear: at once  sovereign  and mortal body its most abject and destitute in the raging tempest. Lear is embroiled within the play of truth with power, power over lives and bodies , lately named 'biopower'.[xxxi] Pavlenski explains to me, with eloquent gestures,  how nailing his balls to the ground is the convicted zek's  protest signifying  ultimate despair. My  incredulity  is  later corroborated  by the 'Self-mutilation' chapter in  Marcheko's My Testimony.[xxxii] I recall  Robert Antelme's all-too-forgotten concentration camp memoirs of 1947, the  kernel of Agamben's 'bare life' concept.[xxxiii] Antelme's The Human Race was just one account of many that Europe read with horror and incomprehension, before any understanding of atrocities which extended beyond wartime, expanding endlessly in the Soviet gulag.[xxxiv]

            The holy fool is close to the sovereign but an outcast. 'Because the victim is sacred, it is criminal to kill him ­ — but the victim is sacred only because he is to be killed' ... In the final analysis then, the judicial system and the institution of sacrifice share the same function.... [xxxv]  Grand words, when one of  Maxim Zmeev's Fixation photos show the bevy of tourists who have visited the revitalised GUM store and  shopping mall opposite the great red wall of the Kremlin itself.  The banality of the contemporary, omitted in most photo-documentation, reappears with the fuss of the police evacuation on Youtube. 'A metaphor of the apathy and fatalism an indifference of Russian society'  as Pavlensky said to the  media? The protest, 'ruins the function where everyone is still a policeman to each other' he explains, echoing Michel Foucault  ('The prison everywhere', 1975).[xxxvi] Omon, the Special Purpose Police Unit with its remit against 'hooliganism' and inglorious record during peaceful political protests is Pavlensky's special target.[xxxvii]

            Yet it is surely in close-up and via the still photo or online,  rather in Red Square itself,  that the empathic projection performance traditionally requires takes place — as it has from the Crucifixion in Passion Plays to  the nailing actions of Chris Burden or Bob Flanagan's own genital mutilation. We may feel with the body in pain, but remain bewildered if no sub-plot or sub-text is apparent (Vietnam protest with Burden; 'supermasochism' with Flanagan).[xxxviii] The explanation, as complement to the image is essential. There is no pain, however, just training, Pavlensky declares, like that of the sportsman or soldier — paradoxically displacing the State discourse on body discipline (see Carcass). The rush of adrenaline, the moment of exaltation, the act with all its precision in real time indicates  a Foucauldian 'care of the self' indeed,  plus planning, coordination, meticulous filming from various angles, the protection of records. Balls versus balls?  Pavlensky refutes any discourse of masculinity traversing his act of lèse-majesté  — yet Putin's virility is likewise a much-analysed You-tube phenomenon.[xxxix]

It's not about masculinity — or a dialogue between charisma and asceticism, the artist  insists  —  'just the human condition'.[xl] One wonders. 

            Just as Pavlensky's Apocalypse inevitably invokes the vagina dentata and a Lacanian concept of 'lack'; so the militarised body has its terrifying other in the feminine, as Klaus Theweleit demonstrated so long ago.[xli]  Anonymous Nationalist, a video of 2013, the brutalised recital of a murder — demonstrates language as obscene as any of the expletive-filled pages of Oksana Shaligina's feminist journal Political Propaganda which reproduces the vile, tragic discourse of the Anonymous Methodone Prostitute  as a pendant piece.[xlii] Anonymous Nationalist reveals a scarred and tattooed masculine torso, accompanied by a voice whose inarticulate fury mirrors its (political) impotence; it’s almost decorative pathos. The Krakow retrospective, 'Anonymous Nationalist' was in preparation in early 2014, while Pavlensky  challenged himself to go further with the action Freedom.[xliii]

Freedom : the aesthetics of displacement

Burning tyres, Ukranian flags, the beat of sticks on metal— a song of freedom and revolution. Maïdan expands inexorably and penetrates the heart of Empire.

                                                                                                     Petr Pavlensky, 2014[xliv]

By late 2013, Ukraine, once part of the USSR, was split on generational lines, with uncanny echoes today as battles continue:   those looking out towards reform and rapprochement with Europe, initiators of the  'Euromaidan' ('Eurosquare') revolution, versus the aging  generation, who  look back to the glory days of the Soviet empire.[xlv]  Pavlensky visited Kiev in December 2013. The situation deteriorated. TV images relayed nightly  a word-cloud of Russian propaganda. So many young fighters were killed; a  once beautiful city centre destroyed. On 22 February 2014, the Rada (parliament) removed President Viktor Yanukovich who fled the country... 'A fascist junta has taken power', declared Russia. Pavlensky decided on an even bolder action involving friends, again photographed by Maxim Zmeev on 23 February, day of the 'Defence of the fatherland', formerly Red Army day. The burning barricades and flags of Kiev would be displaced to Saint Petersburg itself, to the Little Konyushennaya (tripartite) bridge, a site already steeped in the memory of the assassination of Alexander II, with his Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood nearby. Thus the flaming tyre barricades, the din, the waving flags (one black anarchist flag, one blue and yellow Ukrainian flag), were a celebration: indeed seen as a 'fête'  by an Ouzbek concierge in contrast to the key witness, an art restorer named Kouroutchkin, off to mass at 8am..[xlvi]

            Yaroslav Gradil and Pavlensky were charged with hooliganism, though on 25 February they were released from prison; Maria Alexandrova was also detained; with prosecution charges pending (eventually dropped) she emigrated to Ukraine. Later Pavlensky was charged with vandalism for burning tyres... 'Bureaucratic dementia': a prolonged series of investigations, involving changes of judges and other imbroglios, continued for over a year. During this time Pavlensky began secretly to record conversations with his interrogator, Pavel Jasman, that would eventually be made public. Their verbal pas de deux around law, transgression, truth and the history of art, from icon-painter Andrei Rublev to Alexander Brener, would be  ultimately be performed as a dramatised reading, then a 'shadow spectacle' of silhouettes at the Theatre-Doc, Moscow (2014),  and in the Bielorussian Free Theatre (2015) as part of a tryptich with Pussy Riot, and a piece on imprisoned film director, Oleg Sentsov.[xlvii] (Sentsov's continuing  imprisonment  provoked a new action as did  the arrest of Maria Alyokhina and Olga Borisova in Yakutsk, East Siberia, in August 2017).[xlviii]

In Russian: there is a symbolic field. Symbols, signs. Signifier and signified. Art works in this field. But at the same time, of course, in reality too. For us, just as for Malevich, truth should come before sincerity. That is, we should begin to look at the action, at the act of art from different sides, and then we can arrive at some kind of truth. What was the action aimed at: defiling social mores, or, instead, strengthening social ties? [xlix]

Pavlensky  tantalises, entangles, enchants; he was fascinating enough, finally, to effect Jasman's conversion, his exchange of the role of investigator for defence lawyer: the artist's ultimate triumph.

Segregation:   the artist suicided by society

The knife separates the body from the earlobe. The concrete wall of psychiatry separates sane society from insane patients. By returning to the use of psychiatry for political purposes, the police apparatus regains the power to determine the border between sanity and madness. Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, a bureaucrat in a white coat severs from society those elements that impede a monolithic dictate of the norm, the same for all and necessary for everyone....

                                                                                                     Petr Pavlensky, 2014[l]

Psychiatric evaluation was the essential complement to each of Pavlensky's  first three works; he received  three certifications as sane.  As the Freedom  investigations dragged on , a new judge wanted more psychiatric input.  Pavlensky said 'I took the initiative and took myself  to the Serbsky Institute' :the infamous Serbsky State Scientific Centre of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow .[li] On 19 October 2014, via a symbolic self-mutilation, the slicing off of his earlobe with a huge kitchen knife, he created an action-ricochet: the  institution itself was in question. Superbly lean, silhouetted against the sky on the high prison wall, sculpturally 'nude' rather than naked, the artist dominates an extraordinary video and still photos. For the local and global cognoscenti the reference was, ­and is, obvious: the ear-lobe slicing of 'mad genius' Vincent Van Gogh.[lii]  The history of protest against the practice of psychiatric internment is a long one. And of course Pavlensky was not mad. First among the 'non-mad mad' to reflect  with fury on the Van Gogh paradigm was Antonin Artaud, whose  concept of the artist  'suicided by society'  stands against both  diagnosis and fake diagnosis, against cruelty and incarceration. Living through Nazi occupation and the French purge period, Artaud also recognised the worst dimensions of political persuasion:  power to turn the citizenry towards a consensus of hatred.[liii]

            Otdelenie, the Russian term for Segregation, 'means “separation”, but also a department or subdivision, including a hospital ward'.[liv] There is a long Russian tradition of psychiatry, a psychiatry of the military, a practical and necessary psychiatry to care for the clinically insane — and a parallel history of the perversion of diagnosis:  a strategy for  the incarceration of dissenters.[lv] Global recognition of this strategy reached a peak in the 1970s, uncannily coinciding in the West with the practices of 'antipsychiatry' and  Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia.[lvi] Though Pavlensky's action could be seen to play again on delay, on the 'lateness' of Russia (retarded treatments),   it points to  his affirmation of a terrifying renewal of  old practices.  Zurab Kekelidze, Serbsky's director,  refuting any return to punitive psychiatry, finally conceded that Pavlensky's was a 'revolutionary activity'....[lvii]  Compare the efficiency of  Pavlensky' seconds-long video and powerful still images online with the day to day narrative of protest, in, for example, Zhores and Roy Medvedev's A Question of Madness,  How a Russian scientist was put in a Soviet mental hospital and how he got out, published in the West in 1971, with  its work of memory, writing, translating, and distribution and reprints —  or the detailed reports on abuse by the Western  psychiatric establishment in the 1970s.[lviii]  Just as in the past, within the unstable layers of post-Soviet society today, it is the letter of the law which is always at stake. The letter of the law subtends the dividing walls which structure  and separate society; it precedes the right to life or to death.

Threat: Lubyanka's burning door 

 The burning doors of Lubyanka are a gauntlet thrown down in the face of a terrorist threat. The FSB operates by means of continuous terror to maintain control over 146 million people. Fear turns free people into a sticky mass of disparate bodies.

                                                                Pavlensky, Threat video, 9  November  2015[lix]

A 'grainy video ... seemingly shot by a passer-by' appeared online, already subtitled, while Pavlensky was still in custody, the day after he set fire to a door of the notorious Lubyanka, the FSB (former KGB) headquarters —  his most challenging action. Two photojournalists, Nigina Beroeva and Vladimir Romensky accompanied him to the selected entrance; timing was meticulous. He has recounted the details: the carrying of petrol in an 'old silver gas canister'; dousing the threshold; posing for still shots clad in black, before a background of leaping flames. There were seconds, not minutes available before the police arrived. [lx]

            Again arrest;  the charge of 'vandalism motivated by ideological hatred' under article 214 of the Russian criminal code, where  on 10 November, Pavlensky declared in the Tagansky district court 'I want my action to be reclassified to terrorism' (Oleg Sentzov offered  a Ukrainian precedent).[lxi] Denounced on State television as a 'self-mutilating recidivist' he was then re-sent to the Serbsky Psychiatric Institute for evaluation.[lxii] Lucidity is Pavlensky's  badge of honour in these circumstances, yet  a childhood prank — setting cardboard on fire in his family apartment stairwell and the arrival of a policeman— certainly invites psychoanalytic deconstruction (as indeed, do loaded descriptions of his law-abiding, TV-watching parents or his free-living partner, Oksana....).[lxiii]

            Even in prison Pavlensky made waves:  he was photographed in an apparently gilded cage in November 2015; his controversial nomination for the 'Innovation' art prize for Threat in early 2016  led to the cancellation of the prize itself that year.[lxiv] An extended judicial process ensued during which he continued his 'actions' by other means:  such as inviting prostitutes as witnesses in April 2016.  On 8 June 2016, after 7 months of preventative detention including twenty one days of psychiatric investigation in Serbsky, he was fined 500, 000 roubles and 480,000  expenses (evidently unpaid), managing to avoid State prison. In July, the Vaclav Havel prize awarded from New York was withdrawn after his desire to give the money to the defenders of the 'Primorsky Partisans' (former teenage police attackers) was made public.[lxv] 'As a means of revolution, it is almost certainly a futile endeavour; but as art, there is no clearer image of Russia in 2016', declared Noah Sneider to the world audience of The Economist. In September, Burger King Russia's special Whopper homage to Pavlensky menu was reported in the UK's Daily Mail. [lxvi]

Bureaucratic convulsion and  a new economy of political art

            Komar and Melamid's newspaper Pravda-burgers , munched  for the camera in far-off 1974,  or Ilya Kabakov's  lists of chores displayed in  Communal Apartment installations also parodied  Soviet bureaucracy and 'truth' which was untruth.[lxvii] The Moscow Conceptualists of the 1970s and 1980s (including Dmitri Prigov's 'policeman' performances, important for Pussy Riot) traded on the burlesque rather than the sinister. Max Weber was the first to equate the ruler with the necessary bureaucracy of the modern state, bureaucracy as 'objectified intelligence' and an animated machine  with 'divisions of jurisdiction.... hierarchical relations of authority'.[lxviii]  An unconscious consensus with this bureaucracy is surely revealed via Western conceptual art's complicity with  a so-called 'aesthetic of administration': its display of documentation as 'art', lists, contracts, maps, and other enunciations in typescript ­— notionally  part of its anti-capitalist turn.[lxix] As Pavlensky displaces his activity from the agora  of actions (with poor materials, 'bare life' status),  to the forum of conceptual art (video installations, enlarged photographs, vitrines of documents), he  reverses the status of  so-called incriminating evidence, insisting on the work which distinguishes him from  'holy fools'.[lxx] The State, Power itself, perforce produces the documentation: the writs, the photocopies, the video footage even, in particular the heat-sensitive 24-hour video camera outside Lubyanka, flickering into colour as the flames start to lick and Threat, the action, heats up. The evidence of the Pavlenky's trials indights the accuser.   

            The punktum  of this dialectical  turn rests upon another unholy coincidence —beyond the anonymous aesthetic choices  that give Pavlensky a certain pleasure  (the symmetrical  page layout of metal petrol can images with serial numbers set against centimetre rules for example). The document  dated 13 November 2013  at 16.55 pm,  signed twice in ballpoint with a convulsively spiral twist, replicates the barbed-wire spiralling of the Carcass performance of May that year— though it opens the investigation into Fixation.[lxxi] Like the guillotine-hungry government Ministers in France whose doodles were published by the Surrealists in 1926, Lieutenant R. A.  Kapnin,  State signatory,  has no idea of his artistic posterity. [lxxii]

            Thus, the 'aesthetic of administration' is revealed as a series of State-generated ready-mades. 'Institutional critique' is performed by the institution itself. The  State becomes the conceptual artist: a Gesamtkunstwerk Putin follows the Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin. [lxxiii]  And in the era of post-truth, the names of  leaders may  become interchangeable: 'all over the globe the power of the state is producing some of the most provocative and impressive performances. How else can we understand the Assange case for example?' wrote Maria Chehonadskih (on Pussy Riot) in 2012.[lxxiv]  

            The passage from actions to conceptual art  in Pavlensky's case accompanies his production of theoretical texts: 'Art, Politics and the Organs of Power'; 'The Objectives of Art'; ' The Official Discourse of Power'; The Body of the State'; ''Schizophrenia of the Administrator' or  'The Subject confronting the Object' (focussing on the story 'Uncle Stopia the policeman').[lxxv]  'His overall 'New Economy of Political Art' is predicated upon the 'Bureaucractic Convulsion'. A 'sentimental bureaucrat' like Pavel Jassman  may  be incited to switch allegiances  — yet Pavlensky appreciates the algorhythm of reaction behind fake decors  with a cold lucidity. Ultimately definitions of 'crime' or of 'pathology'  situate the battle  as a battle for nomination: the true naming of things.[lxxvi]

            The passage from actionist to conceptual artist coincides with Pavlensky's  expulsion from Russia. He declares he is content  that  the preposterous  rape charges brought against him disconcert a Russian art establishment too keen to embrace him as a 'hero'.[lxxvii] His status has changed from artist to artist in exile. How will his dark, intensely political work metamorphose in the City of Light?  France, the birthplace of modern Revolution first yoked reform with  Revolutionary Terror:  it was the crucible, therefore  of the relationship between symbolic and systemic violence, as  analysed by Slavoj Žižek.[lxxviii]  Paris's bohemian tradition  has largely vanished; France's feminism has an entirely different lineage, stemming from Olympe de Gouges (decapitated in 1793) to the recently lamented Simone Weil. FEMEN from Ukraine have staged spectacular actions in Paris since 2012. [lxxix] Terrorism is active. Pavlensky is not alone.

             The debate between left and right is momentarily calm.  Compare Russia: 'If the system had really changed', Pavlenski says, 'Luybanka would now be like the Bastille',  an ancient site. But there is no change. Luybanka unremittingly pursues its previous objectives, still 'the highest building in Russia.'[lxxx] The military still heads the State. Silenced bodies and souls continue to languish, while espionage and attack change their techniques. Realpolitik  chenges to Virtualpolitik  (including cybercrime). The artist's actions, reciprocally, are constanly relived, rewitnessed via global media.

            At the time of writing, Pavlensky is showing Threat  in  Luther and the avant-garde, centred in Wittenberg's renovated prison.[lxxxi]  Martin Luther's notorious nailing of '95 theses' on the door of Wittenberg's All Saint's Church, protested against purgatory as a corrupt  'economy of salvation', a Church banking system psychologically powered by the threat of eternal hellfire. Luther too, abominated the corrupted currency of the  so-called 'sacred'.  One man alone had a message which spread, breaking out of Latin into vernaculars, splitting the vast empire of the Catholic Church.  Once perceived as not absolute, the Church (as alternative state, economic and political system) was no longer capable of absolutism, of commanding ubiquitous belief.

            Luther's gesture ultimately rested upon conflicting definitions of  truth. He advocated internal spiritual truth as a guiding principle for civic society at a moment of corrupting mass propaganda. His message for 2017 is clear.  Pavlensky stands in front of the Lubyanka  door like Luther,  his own protest gesture of  nailing subliminally present —  or alternatively like Savonarola:  a  dark monk in his hoodie before a bonfire of the vanities.[lxxxii]  Flames on the outside : hell on the inside. Corruption and vanity without, national heroics, Orthodoxy, décor ; corruption within. Pavlensky's self-fashioning is also liminal, poised between an iconographic and a disciplinary sublime, always running the risk of bathos, actual or virtual. The artist with his astonishing bravado, astonishing timing, contrasts with the entirely ascetic and private being, uncomfortable even with the notion of antihero.  

      'We have to be vigilant and active. Life will show who will get the final word....  

                                               The conflict is in the present'.

All unreferenced statements were made in interview by Petr Pavlensky in Paris, and translated by Natacha Milovzorova, who was present: 5 May in the studio of artist Andrey Molodkin; 6 May in the appartment of the  late Resistant and Communist artist, Boris Taslitzky; 26 July in Pavlensky's home. Thanks to Igor Tsukanov and to Evelyne Taslitzky for their support; to  Andrey Kovalev for our long friendship, to Dr. Peter J. S. Duncan (SSEES) Dr Natalia Murray, Dr. Gavin Parkinson and Denis Stolyarov, (Courtauld Institute);  to Adrien Sina and to Oksana Shalygina for Political Propaganda,  her faith and support for Petr, Alissa  and Lilia.

[1] https://lenta.ru/articles/2016/03/31/brus/; thanks to Andrey Kovalev.

[1] From Lenin's lecture  'On the State', 1919,  Pravda no. 15, 18 January, 1929 (online) quoted by Pavlensky, ibid., p. 144.

[1] I think of Nijinksy's political 'dance of the war' on a cross of black and white cloth in 1919 in St Morit,  of Mayakovksy's performed revolutionary poetry — and suicide.

[1] Pavlensky is top of the 'Ten most shocking performance artworks ever', Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 11 November 2013 (online).

[1] Michel Eltchaninoff, prefacer of Le cas Pavlenski, La Politique comme art,  Paris, Louison éditions, 2016, is the author of several books including Dostoïevski, Roman et Philosophie (Paris, PUF, 1998) and Les nouveaux dissidents (Paris, Stock, 2016) and editor of Philosophie Magazine.

[1] I refer to the implicit (if ironic) claims of Boris Groys ed. Total Enlightenment. Conceptual Art in Moscow, 1960-1990,  Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2008.

[1] See below, note 67.

[1] See Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, 1651,  and Ernst H. Kantorowicz's The King' s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology,Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957.

[1] Georges Didi-Huberman ed.,  Uprisings, Paris, Jeu de Paume,  2016.

[1] Established in 1876 as the School of Technical Drawing of Baron Alexander von Stieglitz, it became subsequently the  Leningrad Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industry for training in the monumental, decorative and industrial arts.

[1] See Lauren Gooodrich, (Senior Eurasia analyst, Stratfor) ' A Picture of Russian Patriotism', 22 March 2016)  www.stratfor.com  (online), and  Wikileaks, 133780_Foundations (unification with ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, New York and Paris the principal 'modern-day KGB listening posts').

[1] Liz Lorenz, 'Christ's Womanly Wounds', Recycled Origins, New York, Outer Room Gallery, 2014.

[1]  Victor Terras ed., 'Simeon Polotsky',  Handbook of Russian Literature, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, p. 418.

[1] Oleg Kulik ed., I Believe. A Project of Artistic Optimism, Moscow, Winzawod, 2007, (part of the second Moscow Biennale).

[1] 'Under a Tinsel Sun' curated by Katrin Becker, 10.07-10.08 2012; see http://www.biennialfoundation.org/2012/04/the-choice-for-the-main-project-under-a-tinsel-sun-and-the-inconclusive-analysis-projects-of-iii-moscow-international-biennale-for-young-art-was-made-from-2500-applications/

[1] Susan B. Glasser, 'Buildings evoking Stalin Era are all the rage in Moscow', Washington Post, 25 December,  2003,  (online).

[1] Victims of Yegor Gaidar's shock therapy reforms, the old, the weak, are the voices honoured in Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich's Second Hand Time. The Last of the Soviets, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016.

[1] Pavlensky confirms his tactic: 'the rule of silence' since his encounters with the psychiatric establishment, Le cas Pavlenski, p. 89.

[1] Jean-François Lyotard, Ruth Franken, Metz, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1991, pp. 11-36.

[1]On November 14, 2012, Reuters published its list of the 98 best photos of the year, including the photograph of Pavlensky with his mouth sutured in support of Pussy Riot.

[1] Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony, New York, Pall Mall Press 1969; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1971.

[1] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Italian 1995), Stanford, Stanford University  Press, 1998 and below, note 30.

[1] Dmitry Volchek, 'Cultural Diary: On Good Friday', Radio Liberty, May 8, 2013.

[1] See Stephen Hoffman, 'The Power Vertical and its chilling effect on  Democracy', Rights in Russia, 5 March, 2012 (online), after   Andrew Monaghan, 'The Vertikal. Power and Authority in Russia', International Affairs,  January 12, 1988, vol. 1,  2012, (Chatham House, online).

[1] Thanks to Pierre Lascoumes (CNRS), for his development of Foucault's intuition on Sade (Discipline and Punish,  French, 1975, part III) in 'La Perpendicularisation de la société. Soldats, danseurs, carrousels et  ballets de cour, in Philippe Artières ed., Michel Foucault, La Littérature et les arts,  Paris, Kimé, 2004, pp. 145-158.

[1] For Pavlensky's own lecture on Carcass, 9 September 2013, Bergen, Norway see https://alchetron.com/Petr-Pavlensky-318331-W ; the point about carnaval is first made by Jonathan Brooks Platt, 'The body politic. How Pyotr Pavlenski's performance art is breaking the mould', The Calvert Journal,  13 November 2014 (online).

[1] http://politpropaganda.com/en/2013/09/24/political-propaganda-state-hermitage-museum/

[1] See http://graniru.org/Politics/Russia/activism/m.221013.html; note the closest precursor action of 1991: Anatoly Osmolovksy and friends spelling 'Cock'   (ХУЙ) with their bodies on Red Square (see Noah Sneider, 'Body Politics', The Economist, 1843 magazine, June-July 2016 (online).

[1] Prisons were divided into the 'red' (run by prison authorities) and the 'black' (administered by inmates).

[1] See Ewa M. Thompson, The Holy Fool in Russian Culture, Labham, New York, London, University Press of America, 1987.

[1] Shakespeare's King Lear (1608) is well  loved in Russia. Michel Foucault's term 'biopower' first appeared in print in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (French,1976), Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 140.

[1] See Anastasia Kyiatos' essay, 'Penile Servitude and the Police State',  NYU Jordan Rusian Center, 20 November 2013 (online). 

[1] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998,

quotes Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine, Paris, la Cité Universelle, 1947, pp. 10 ff; (The Human Race, Marlboro, Vermont, The Marlboro Press, 1993).

[1] See also David Rousset, A World Apart , London, Secker and Warburg, 1951 (L'Univers concentrationnaire, Paris, Pavot, 1946: Neugamme and Buchenwald) ed., Le Livre blanc sur les camps de concentration soviétique, Paris, Éditions du Pavois, 1951 and further gulag publications.   

[1] See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, (French, 1972), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press (1977) 1992, p. 1; 23: the key precursor to Giorgio Agamben,

[1] Michel Foucault, ‘La Prison partout’, ('Prison everywhere'); Combat, 8335, 5 May 1971, p. 1, reprinted in Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. I, 1954–1975, ed. François Ewald and Daniel Defert, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 1061.

[1] ОМОН—Отряд мобильный особого назначения, Otryad Mobilny Osobogo Naznacheniya or Special Purpose Mobility Unit) created 1988 ; a riot police force, known for violence against protesters and political arrests.

 [1]See Elaine Scarry's classic, The Body in Pain, the Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; Bob Flanagan, supermasochist, PLACE: RE/Search Publications, 1993; Favazza, Armando A., Bodies Under Siege, Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, (1987), 1996 etc.

[1] See Helen Goscilo, ed., Putin as celebrity and cultural icon, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013

[1] Unbeknownst to the artist, his actions are always/already haunted by Amelia Jones' now classic article, 'Dis-playing the phallus. Male artists perform their masculinities', Art History, vol. 17, issue 4, December 1994, pp. 546-584.

[1] Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 1. Women. Floods. Bodies. History. 2 . Psychoanalysing the White Terror , 2 vols., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987; 1989.

[1] www.politpropaganda.com, and Political Propaganda, 2015, pp. 186-191(bilingual).

[1] KNIPSU  (Bergen, Norway) with Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAK), Krakow,  25 April - 11 May, 2014; http://knipsu.no/pavlensky/

[1] Le cas Pavlenski,  2016, p. 69. 

[1] Ibid., pp. 85-89; see also Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom,(Netflix, 2015).

[1] Ibid, p. 69 for Freedom as a birthday present for his daughter.

[1] Oleg Sentsov is serving a 20-year prison sentence for terrorism in the far-flung Sakha Republic.   His lawyer ­— as for Pussy Riot and Pavlensky ­— is Dmitri Dinze.

[1] Ben Beaumont Thomas, 'Two members of Pussy Riot detained in Russia for Oleg Sentsov protest', The Guardian, 8 August 2017 (online).

[1] See Le cas Pavlenski, 2016, part two, 'L'Instruction': three dialogues, pp. 155-220;

I quote p. 176 in Noah Sneider's concise translation (see note 55).

[1] Oksana Shalygina, Facebook page, quoted by Jonathan Brooks Platt, Calvert Journal, 2014,  (English corrected by the author).

[1] Le Cas Pavlenski, 2016, p. 93 (author's translation).

[1] Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und Van Gogh, versuch einer pathographischen analyse unter vergleichender heransiehung von Swedenborg und Hölderlin, Leipzig, Ernst Bircher Verlag, 1922: the first'pathological' analysis.

 [1]See Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh. Le suicidé de la societé, Paris, K éditeur, 1947; ( Van Gogh, he Man suicided by Society, in Susan Sontag ed., Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings, New York, Farrar, Strauss and co, 1976). Artaud described the 'massive unfurling of hatred' by 'people with swinish souls' in the postscript (Evelyn Grossman ed., Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres, Paris, Gallimard, 2004, p. 1463, author's translation).

[1] Jonathan Brooks Platt, Calvert Journal, 2014.     

[1] See Sidney Bloch, Peter Reddaway, Russia's Political Hospitals. The Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union, London, Victor Gollancz, 1977; Paul Calloway, Russian/Soviet and Western Psychiatry, A Contemporary Comparative Study, , NY, Chichester etc., John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 1993; Paul Wanke, Russian/Soviet Military Psychiatry, 1904-1945, London and New York, Frank Cass, 2005.

[1] For antipsychiatry see R.D Laing,  David Cooper,  European stimuli and reactions. See Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, The Anti Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minnestota, Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 1983 ( L’Anti-Oedipe, Paris, Minuit, 1972).

[1]Quoted in the most extensive description of Threat, Noah Sneider, 'Body Politics', 1843 magazine, The Economist, June / July, 2016 (online).

[1] Zhores and Roy Medvedev's A Question of Madness,  How a Russian scientist was put in a Soviet mental hospital and how he got out, (London, Macmillan, 1971; Penguin paperback  1974) just preceded the Aleander Solzenitzhin's revelations of the gulag 'archipelago' (1973-4) and human rights protests ; culminating in the 'Helsinki Agreement of 1975. 

[1] Noah Sneider, 'Body Politics', 1843 magazine, 2016,

[1] Ibid.

[1] Dmitry Kiselyov,'Poor Guy', on the flagship Sunday night broadcast,where he compared Pavlesnky's actions to  ISIS beheadings on line, Ibid.

[1] Anastasia' Believa's questions probe the relationship with Pavlensky's mother, father,  the stairwell fire,  and Oksana's ordeal of truth, in  Le Cas Pavlenski, 2016, pp. Ma103-109; 110-12; 114;  132-33.

[1] Hili Perlson, 'Russia cancels top art prize after  dissident artist Pyotr Pavlensky is nominated', artnet.com , February17, 2016 (online, with photo by Dmitri Serbryakov).

[1] On the Human Rights Foundation's Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent scandal, see Tom Balmforth, 'Russian Protest Artist Stripped Of  Havel Prize Over Support For Partisans',  Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 8 July 2016 (online).

[1] James Dunn, 'Will it be a Whopper? Burger King creates menu in tribute to Russian artist who nailed his scrotum to Red Square', Daily Mail online,  1 September 2016,

[1] And see the 1990 work by Ilya and Emila Kabakov of 1990: He lost his mind, undressed, ran away naked, fineartbiblio.com (online).

[1] See Max Weber, 'The Bureaucratisation of Politics and the Economy', Essays in Economic sociology ed. Richard Swedberg, Princeton,  New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1999 , pp 109-115  (quote  p. 113; Lecture of 1895,  Gesammelte Politische Schriften,  1921, Tübingen , JCB Mohr, 1988 pp. 320-23, 328-33).

[1] ' ...the state of holy fool, strangely enough, is much closer to punk culture...I have difficulty imagining a holy fool doing something and then writing texts, analysis, and working on the organization of a publishing house.' http://www.svoboda.org/a/28345410.html/a/27802409.html

[1] Pawlenski / Aktionen, (texts by Pavlensky, Anastasia Belyeva, Ilya Danishevsky, Vladimir Velminski, tr. Maria Rajer), Berlin, ciconia ciconia, 2016, illustrates many legal documents with  exact translations (Kapnin document p. 24; petrol can p. 99).

[1] Compare Louis Aragon, 'Les buvards du Conseil des ministres', La Révolution surréaliste,  no. 6, 1 March 1926, pp. 15-17.

[1] Of course I refer to Boris Groys's Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin,  (Munich, Carl Hanser, 1988; The Total  Art of Stalinism,  Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1992).

[1] Maria Chehonadskih, 'What is Pussy Riot's idea?', Radical Philosophy, 176, November-December 2012 (online).

[1] Pavlensky, 'Convulsion bureaucratique et nouvelle economie politique', comprising the essays listed (my translations), Le Cas Pavlenski, 2016, pp.  221-262.

[1] Ibid., 'Le sujet face à l'objet', pp. 260-262.

[1] Anon. 'Protest Artist Pavlensky Flles Russia Over Attempted-Rape Allegation', Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,  16 Janaury 2017 (online).

[1] Slavoj Žižek, Violence,  Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), pp.1ff .

[1]Galia Ackermann,  Femen, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2013.

[1] For the KGB museum see www.russkaya-storona.ru;  for terror and  the 'tallest building' joke (Siberia can be seen from its basement),  see 'Lubyanka Building', in Wikipedia (its main doors are never used, incidentally...).

[1] Luther und die avant-garde, Cologne, Wienand Verlag, 2017 (bilingual),  contemporary Art in Wittenberg, Berlin and Kassel; Pavlensky shows in  Wittenberg (Old Prison).

[1] See Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence. New York, Oxford University Press, 2006.

1] https://lenta.ru/articles/2016/03/31/brus/; thanks to Andrey Kovalev.

[1] From Lenin's lecture  'On the State', 1919,  Pravda no. 15, 18 January, 1929 (online) quoted by Pavlensky, ibid., p. 144.

[1] I think of Nijinksy's political 'dance of the war' on a cross of black and white cloth in 1919 in St Morit,  of Mayakovksy's performed revolutionary poetry — and suicide.

[1] Pavlensky is top of the 'Ten most shocking performance artworks ever', Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 11 November 2013 (online).

[1] Michel Eltchaninoff, prefacer of Le cas Pavlenski, La Politique comme art,  Paris, Louison éditions, 2016, is the author of several books including Dostoïevski, Roman et Philosophie (Paris, PUF, 1998) and Les nouveaux dissidents (Paris, Stock, 2016) and editor of Philosophie Magazine.

[1] I refer to the implicit (if ironic) claims of Boris Groys ed. Total Enlightenment. Conceptual Art in Moscow, 1960-1990,  Berlin, Hatje Cantz, 2008.

[1] See below, note 67.

[1] See Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, 1651,  and Ernst H. Kantorowicz's The King' s Two Bodies. A Study in Medieval Political Theology,Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1957.

[1] Georges Didi-Huberman ed.,  Uprisings, Paris, Jeu de Paume,  2016.

[1] Established in 1876 as the School of Technical Drawing of Baron Alexander von Stieglitz, it became subsequently the  Leningrad Vera Mukhina Higher School of Art and Industry for training in the monumental, decorative and industrial arts.

[1] See Lauren Gooodrich, (Senior Eurasia analyst, Stratfor) ' A Picture of Russian Patriotism', 22 March 2016)  www.stratfor.com  (online), and  Wikileaks, 133780_Foundations (unification with ROCOR, the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia, New York and Paris the principal 'modern-day KGB listening posts').

[1] Liz Lorenz, 'Christ's Womanly Wounds', Recycled Origins, New York, Outer Room Gallery, 2014.

[1]  Victor Terras ed., 'Simeon Polotsky',  Handbook of Russian Literature, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, p. 418.

[1] Oleg Kulik ed., I Believe. A Project of Artistic Optimism, Moscow, Winzawod, 2007, (part of the second Moscow Biennale).

[1] 'Under a Tinsel Sun' curated by Katrin Becker, 10.07-10.08 2012; see http://www.biennialfoundation.org/2012/04/the-choice-for-the-main-project-under-a-tinsel-sun-and-the-inconclusive-analysis-projects-of-iii-moscow-international-biennale-for-young-art-was-made-from-2500-applications/

[1] Susan B. Glasser, 'Buildings evoking Stalin Era are all the rage in Moscow', Washington Post, 25 December,  2003,  (online).

[1] Victims of Yegor Gaidar's shock therapy reforms, the old, the weak, are the voices honoured in Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievich's Second Hand Time. The Last of the Soviets, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2016.

[1] Pavlensky confirms his tactic: 'the rule of silence' since his encounters with the psychiatric establishment, Le cas Pavlenski, p. 89.

[1] Jean-François Lyotard, Ruth Franken, Metz, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1991, pp. 11-36.

[1]On November 14, 2012, Reuters published its list of the 98 best photos of the year, including the photograph of Pavlensky with his mouth sutured in support of Pussy Riot.

[1] Anatoly Marchenko, My Testimony, New York, Pall Mall Press 1969; Harmondsworth, Middlesex, Penguin Books, 1971.

[1] See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, (Italian 1995), Stanford, Stanford University  Press, 1998 and below, note 30.

[1] Dmitry Volchek, 'Cultural Diary: On Good Friday', Radio Liberty, May 8, 2013.

[1] See Stephen Hoffman, 'The Power Vertical and its chilling effect on  Democracy', Rights in Russia, 5 March, 2012 (online), after   Andrew Monaghan, 'The Vertikal. Power and Authority in Russia', International Affairs,  January 12, 1988, vol. 1,  2012, (Chatham House, online).

[1] Thanks to Pierre Lascoumes (CNRS), for his development of Foucault's intuition on Sade (Discipline and Punish,  French, 1975, part III) in 'La Perpendicularisation de la société. Soldats, danseurs, carrousels et  ballets de cour, in Philippe Artières ed., Michel Foucault, La Littérature et les arts,  Paris, Kimé, 2004, pp. 145-158.

[1] For Pavlensky's own lecture on Carcass, 9 September 2013, Bergen, Norway see https://alchetron.com/Petr-Pavlensky-318331-W ; the point about carnaval is first made by Jonathan Brooks Platt, 'The body politic. How Pyotr Pavlenski's performance art is breaking the mould', The Calvert Journal,  13 November 2014 (online).

[1] http://politpropaganda.com/en/2013/09/24/political-propaganda-state-hermitage-museum/

[1] See http://graniru.org/Politics/Russia/activism/m.221013.html; note the closest precursor action of 1991: Anatoly Osmolovksy and friends spelling 'Cock'   (ХУЙ) with their bodies on Red Square (see Noah Sneider, 'Body Politics', The Economist, 1843 magazine, June-July 2016 (online).

[1] Prisons were divided into the 'red' (run by prison authorities) and the 'black' (administered by inmates).

[1] See Ewa M. Thompson, The Holy Fool in Russian Culture, Labham, New York, London, University Press of America, 1987.

[1] Shakespeare's King Lear (1608) is well  loved in Russia. Michel Foucault's term 'biopower' first appeared in print in The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (French,1976), Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1998, p. 140.

[1] See Anastasia Kyiatos' essay, 'Penile Servitude and the Police State',  NYU Jordan Rusian Center, 20 November 2013 (online). 

[1] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998,

quotes Robert Antelme, L’Espèce humaine, Paris, la Cité Universelle, 1947, pp. 10 ff; (The Human Race, Marlboro, Vermont, The Marlboro Press, 1993).

[1] See also David Rousset, A World Apart , London, Secker and Warburg, 1951 (L'Univers concentrationnaire, Paris, Pavot, 1946: Neugamme and Buchenwald) ed., Le Livre blanc sur les camps de concentration soviétique, Paris, Éditions du Pavois, 1951 and further gulag publications.   

[1] See René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, (French, 1972), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press (1977) 1992, p. 1; 23: the key precursor to Giorgio Agamben,

[1] Michel Foucault, ‘La Prison partout’, ('Prison everywhere'); Combat, 8335, 5 May 1971, p. 1, reprinted in Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. I, 1954–1975, ed. François Ewald and Daniel Defert, Paris, Gallimard, 1994, p. 1061.

[1] ОМОН—Отряд мобильный особого назначения, Otryad Mobilny Osobogo Naznacheniya or Special Purpose Mobility Unit) created 1988 ; a riot police force, known for violence against protesters and political arrests.

 [1]See Elaine Scarry's classic, The Body in Pain, the Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; Bob Flanagan, supermasochist, PLACE: RE/Search Publications, 1993; Favazza, Armando A., Bodies Under Siege, Self-Mutilation and Body Modification in Culture and Psychiatry, Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, (1987), 1996 etc.

[1] See Helen Goscilo, ed., Putin as celebrity and cultural icon, Abingdon, Routledge, 2013

[1] Unbeknownst to the artist, his actions are always/already haunted by Amelia Jones' now classic article, 'Dis-playing the phallus. Male artists perform their masculinities', Art History, vol. 17, issue 4, December 1994, pp. 546-584.

[1] Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 1. Women. Floods. Bodies. History. 2 . Psychoanalysing the White Terror , 2 vols., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987; 1989.

[1] www.politpropaganda.com, and Political Propaganda, 2015, pp. 186-191(bilingual).

[1] KNIPSU  (Bergen, Norway) with Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCAK), Krakow,  25 April - 11 May, 2014; http://knipsu.no/pavlensky/

[1] Le cas Pavlenski,  2016, p. 69. 

[1] Ibid., pp. 85-89; see also Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom,(Netflix, 2015).

[1] Ibid, p. 69 for Freedom as a birthday present for his daughter.

[1] Oleg Sentsov is serving a 20-year prison sentence for terrorism in the far-flung Sakha Republic.   His lawyer ­— as for Pussy Riot and Pavlensky ­— is Dmitri Dinze.

[1] Ben Beaumont Thomas, 'Two members of Pussy Riot detained in Russia for Oleg Sentsov protest', The Guardian, 8 August 2017 (online).

[1] See Le cas Pavlenski, 2016, part two, 'L'Instruction': three dialogues, pp. 155-220;

I quote p. 176 in Noah Sneider's concise translation (see note 55).

[1] Oksana Shalygina, Facebook page, quoted by Jonathan Brooks Platt, Calvert Journal, 2014,  (English corrected by the author).

[1] Le Cas Pavlenski, 2016, p. 93 (author's translation).

[1] Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und Van Gogh, versuch einer pathographischen analyse unter vergleichender heransiehung von Swedenborg und Hölderlin, Leipzig, Ernst Bircher Verlag, 1922: the first'pathological' analysis.

 [1]See Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh. Le suicidé de la societé, Paris, K éditeur, 1947; ( Van Gogh, he Man suicided by Society, in Susan Sontag ed., Antonin Artaud. Selected Writings, New York, Farrar, Strauss and co, 1976). Artaud described the 'massive unfurling of hatred' by 'people with swinish souls' in the postscript (Evelyn Grossman ed., Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres, Paris, Gallimard, 2004, p. 1463, author's translation).

[1] Jonathan Brooks Platt, Calvert Journal, 2014.     

[1] See Sidney Bloch, Peter Reddaway, Russia's Political Hospitals. The Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet Union, London, Victor Gollancz, 1977; Paul Calloway, Russian/Soviet and Western Psychiatry, A Contemporary Comparative Study, , NY, Chichester etc., John Wiley and Sons, Inc, 1993; Paul Wanke, Russian/Soviet Military Psychiatry, 1904-1945, London and New York, Frank Cass, 2005.

[1] For antipsychiatry see R.D Laing,  David Cooper,  European stimuli and reactions. See Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, The Anti Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minnestota, Universtiy of Minnesota Press, 1983 ( L’Anti-Oedipe, Paris, Minuit, 1972).

[1]Quoted in the most extensive description of Threat, Noah Sneider, 'Body Politics', 1843 magazine, The Economist, June / July, 2016 (online).

[1] Zhores and Roy Medvedev's A Question of Madness,  How a Russian scientist was put in a Soviet mental hospital and how he got out, (London, Macmillan, 1971; Penguin paperback  1974) just preceded the Aleander Solzenitzhin's revelations of the gulag 'archipelago' (1973-4) and human rights protests ; culminating in the 'Helsinki Agreement of 1975. 

[1] Noah Sneider, 'Body Politics', 1843 magazine, 2016,

[1] Ibid.

[1] Dmitry Kiselyov,'Poor Guy', on the flagship Sunday night broadcast,where he compared Pavlesnky's actions to  ISIS beheadings on line, Ibid.

[1] Anastasia' Believa's questions probe the relationship with Pavlensky's mother, father,  the stairwell fire,  and Oksana's ordeal of truth, in  Le Cas Pavlenski, 2016, pp. Ma103-109; 110-12; 114;  132-33.

[1] Hili Perlson, 'Russia cancels top art prize after  dissident artist Pyotr Pavlensky is nominated', artnet.com , February17, 2016 (online, with photo by Dmitri Serbryakov).

[1] On the Human Rights Foundation's Vaclav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent scandal, see Tom Balmforth, 'Russian Protest Artist Stripped Of  Havel Prize Over Support For Partisans',  Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 8 July 2016 (online).

[1] James Dunn, 'Will it be a Whopper? Burger King creates menu in tribute to Russian artist who nailed his scrotum to Red Square', Daily Mail online,  1 September 2016,

[1] And see the 1990 work by Ilya and Emila Kabakov of 1990: He lost his mind, undressed, ran away naked, fineartbiblio.com (online).

[1] See Max Weber, 'The Bureaucratisation of Politics and the Economy', Essays in Economic sociology ed. Richard Swedberg, Princeton,  New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1999 , pp 109-115  (quote  p. 113; Lecture of 1895,  Gesammelte Politische Schriften,  1921, Tübingen , JCB Mohr, 1988 pp. 320-23, 328-33).

[1] ' ...the state of holy fool, strangely enough, is much closer to punk culture...I have difficulty imagining a holy fool doing something and then writing texts, analysis, and working on the organization of a publishing house.' http://www.svoboda.org/a/28345410.html/a/27802409.html

[1] Pawlenski / Aktionen, (texts by Pavlensky, Anastasia Belyeva, Ilya Danishevsky, Vladimir Velminski, tr. Maria Rajer), Berlin, ciconia ciconia, 2016, illustrates many legal documents with  exact translations (Kapnin document p. 24; petrol can p. 99).

[1] Compare Louis Aragon, 'Les buvards du Conseil des ministres', La Révolution surréaliste,  no. 6, 1 March 1926, pp. 15-17.

[1] Of course I refer to Boris Groys's Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin,  (Munich, Carl Hanser, 1988; The Total  Art of Stalinism,  Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1992).

[1] Maria Chehonadskih, 'What is Pussy Riot's idea?', Radical Philosophy, 176, November-December 2012 (online).

 Pavlensky, 'Convulsion bureaucratique et nouvelle economie politique', comprising the essays listed (my translations), Le Cas Pavlenski, 2016, pp.  221-262.

[1] Ibid., 'Le sujet face à l'objet', pp. 260-262.

[1] Anon. 'Protest Artist Pavlensky Flles Russia Over Attempted-Rape Allegation', Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,  16 Janaury 2017 (online).

[1] Slavoj Žižek, Violence,  Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008), pp.1ff .

[1]Galia Ackermann,  Femen, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2013.

[1] For the KGB museum see www.russkaya-storona.ru;  for terror and  the 'tallest building' joke (Siberia can be seen from its basement),  see 'Lubyanka Building', in Wikipedia (its main doors are never used, incidentally...).

[1] Luther und die avant-garde, Cologne, Wienand Verlag, 2017 (bilingual),  contemporary Art in Wittenberg, Berlin and Kassel; Pavlensky shows in  Wittenberg (Old Prison).

[1] See Lauro Martines, Fire in the City: Savonarola and the Struggle for the Soul of Renaissance Florence. New York, Oxford University Press, 2006.