Petr Pavlensky: the artist who nailed his scrotum to the Red Square in protest
Art comes in all different shapes, sizes, and media, and since its qualification resides in the eye of the beholder, we can attribute the word to just about anything. For instance, the French philosopher Albert Camus would probably join Gary Lineker in deeming football a divine art form, just as Alan Titchmarsh might regard Mother Nature as the greatest artist of all. But can self-mutilation be art? Petr Pavlensky certainly thinks so.
If I took a stroll through Leicester Square one cold winter’s evening and stumbled upon a man hammering a nail through his scrotum and into the ground below, I would immediately assume insanity. I generally adhere to a “don’t judge a book by its cover” approach to life, but this seems a safe assumption. That said, if I had strolled across Moscow’s Red Square on November 10th, 2013, I might have dismissed one of the most celebrated performance artists of our age as a lunatic.
Indeed, on that freezing, snowless afternoon in the Russian capital, a 29-year-old Petr Pavlensky stripped to the flesh and squatted to the cobbles. Sitting just a stone’s throw from the Kremlin and the marble mausoleum encasing the remains of Vladimir Lenin, Pavlensky drew the attention of security officials almost immediately. As they rushed to the scene, they ordered the emaciated nude to stand up. It was soon apparent that it wasn’t just the ice that adhered the man’s gonads to the deck.
This stunt, aptly titled Fixation, was just one of Pavlensky’s intriguing art concepts designed to subvert the Russian establishment. Like the famous Russian feminist punk collective Pussy Riot, Pavlensky has nothing but contempt for President Vladimir Putin and his authoritarian dictatorship. Crucially, these artists abhor the administration’s outlook on equal rights for women and minority groups.
Fixation coincided with Russia’s annual Police Day and served as “a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society,” according to a statement from Pavlensky. Police forces, distracted from their celebrations, resorted to enshrouding the ballsy artist with a blanket. After a round of winces and a spot of blood, Pavlensky was taken to hospital for treatment.
Although he was released that evening from the hospital and police custody without charge, law enforcement officials opened a case several days later, citing “hooliganism motivated by hatred of a particular social, ethnic or religious group.” With the law hot on his trail, Pavlensky could have attempted exile. However, he decided to face the music as a duty to his protest.
At this point, Pavlensky had already garnered support with stunts like sewing his lips together and wrapping himself in barbed wire. He felt that fleeing the country would have “discredited everything” all of his prior stunts. “So I decided to take a position of strength because there is nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “You can be afraid if you feel you are guilty of something, and I don’t. Anything the authorities do against me means discrediting themselves. The more they do with me, the worse they make it for themselves.”
The Russian authorities threatened Pavlensky with a prison sentence of up to five years, but he was ultimately released following a fine. Faithful to his cause, the self-mutilating dissident returned to his “art” career. In 2014, he scaled the wall of the Serbsky Center, a psychiatric hospital in Moscow, in the nude before cutting off his own ear lobe. The following year, he found himself in another legal drama after setting fire to the entrance of the headquarters of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in Lubyanka Square.
In 2017, pressure from the Russian authorities mounted with a sexual assault allegation against Pavlensky and his partner Oksana Shalygina. The pair vehemently denied the allegations but decided that it was time to flee from Russia. “If we had stayed in Russia, Oksana and I would have been sent to a prison camp for up to ten years,” Pavlensky explained. The pair have since been granted political asylum in France.
Esteemed Russian art critic Marat Guelman was among the outspoken supporters of Fixation. Describing the stunt as “the artistic equivalent of setting yourself on fire,” he likened the freedom fighter to the ‘Burning Monk’, Thich Quang Duc. “It was a message to society,” Guelman told the Calvert Journal. “We all more or less share his position. People have been forced into a corner – the choice is between leaving, going to prison, or joining up with those in power.”
