The Protest Artist Who Stumps Putin - The New Yorker
First Petr Pavlensky set the wooden door of Russia's secret-police headquarters, known as the Lubyanka, on fire. Then construction workers sealed the main entrance to Moscow's most sinister building behind sheets of corrugated metal. As has happened often with Pavlensky's previous performances, the state provided the perfect coda to a piece of protest art.
Pavlensky called this performance "Threat. Lubyanka's Burning Door." Staged this past Monday, on 9/11—Russians put the day before the month when writing out dates—the act of highly targeted public arson was accompanied by the following video explication from the artist: "The Lubyanka's door on fire is the gauntlet that society is throwing down in the face of a terrorist threat. The Federal Security Service uses the method of nonstop terror to maintain power over a hundred and forty-six million people. Fear turns free individuals into a sticky mass of unconnected bodies. The threat of inevitable violence haunts everyone who exists within the range of means of external surveillance and eavesdropping and within the borders of passport control. Military courts annihilate any and all expressions of free will." In other words, it is the state, wielding anti-terrorist rhetoric as well as laws against terrorism, that inflicts terror on the Russian people.
Turning the tables, rhetorically, visually, and actually, is Pavlensky's specialty. He is probably best known in Russia for a series of performances in which he used his own body to protest Putin's political crackdown and, in particular, the imprisonment of women who were members of the protest-art group Pussy Riot. In July, 2012, Pavlensky sewed his mouth shut, compelling the police to arrest him and then take him to a hospital to have the sutures removed from his lips. Ten months later, Pavlensky placed himself, naked and wrapped in a cocoon of barbed wire, on the steps of the St. Petersburg legislature—forcing the police to liberate him in a long and delicate process involving wire cutters. Finally, in November, 2013, in a performance he called "Fixation," he nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones in Red Square—to symbolize the status and stasis of the Russian public. Once again, by effectively handing the police total power over his body, Pavlensky rendered them helpless. As they sought a means of removing the nail Pavlensky had driven through his most tender parts, the police decided to cover him with a white sheet. He sat in Russia's most central square, cross-legged, with his skinny frame, shaved head, and white cover looking like a living monument to Mahatma Gandhi.
Pavlensky's actions are generally more intellectual and more finely scripted than Pussy Riot's, but the Russian authorities may have learned a lesson, too: it seems that after the fame and international support that the Pussy Riot trial brought its defendants, the police have been reluctant to jail Pavlensky. He has had "vandalism" charges pending against him since last year, when he set a tire ablaze in homage to the Ukrainian revolution, but he has not been behind bars. Pavlensky, for his part, has transformed his interrogations into performances, private ones as they happen and then by publishing transcripts. Perhaps because Russian detectives are unaccustomed to people who are not terrified of them, Pavlensky has no trouble turning the tables here, too: he effectively asks the questions, and the police detective answers them, saying things like, "The point is not material damages but desecration. [Setting the tire on fire on a bridge] is the same thing as taking a shit on top of the [Lenin] Mausoleum."
The concept of desecration is key to the charge of vandalism under Russian law. After the Lubyanka action, Pavlensky was indicted on vandalism charges once more: the prosecution claimed that he had set the secret-police door on fire "for motives of ideological hatred." Speaking to journalists at his indictment, on Tuesday, Pavlensky complimented the precision of the prosecutors' description. Of the court, however, he demanded that he be charged with terrorism, not vandalism. He referred to the case of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director who, in August, was sentenced by a Russian military court to twenty years behind bars on terrorism charges—for setting fire to two Russian political outposts in Crimea and ostensibly plotting to blow up a Lenin monument. Pavlensky pointed out that the logic of law enforcement used in that case should dictate that he, too, now be charged with terrorism.
Pavlensky is a sort of absurdist descendant of Soviet dissidents, who demanded that the state follow its own constitution, which, on paper, guaranteed the rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Pavlensky demands that the state follow its own logic of escalation, which is precisely what the authorities are trying to avoid in his case. As though caving in, the court has finally ordered him arrested for a month. This means that his protest performance is slated to continue in December.
Tags: published, DREAMPUBLISH
November 13, 2015 at 03:56PM
Open in Evernote
Comments
Post a Comment
Tell me about your Dreams or Visions.