Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky has only a few acts in his portfolio, but each is a legend.
In one
excruciatingly affecting performance, he sat naked and nailed his scrotum to
the cobblestones of Red Square in Moscow as a metaphor for Russian society’s
political apathy. Another time, he sat naked on the roof of a scandalous
psychiatric clinic and cut off his earlobe with a butcher’s knife. And during
the trial of Russian female punk group Pussy Riot, he sewed his mouth shut with
thick red thread.
But his latest
performance was the most daring yet, as it struck at a symbol of the Russian
regime’s power over its people.
On the
night of Nov. 9, 2015, Pavlensky came to the headquarters of Russia’s FSB security
service and set its door on fire. He then stood in front of the burning doorway,
a gas canister in his hands, and waited to be arrested.
The
performance, which some interpreted as showing the door to be the “gates to
hell,” cost Pavlensky seven months in detention and a $15,000 fine for damaging
a cultural monument. The status of a cultural monument was justified, according
to the Moscow court, by the fact that many artists had been questioned,
tortured, and murdered there during the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s,
when the building was the headquarters of the Soviet police.
On June 8, Pavlensky
was found guilty and released. But the seven-month detention had by then made the
artist a political prisoner, as was plain in his first public appearance after his
release – a public talk he gave in Kyiv on June 19.
Pavlensky
spoke in a hot, stuffy and overcrowded gallery in Podil district – conditions the
artist said reminded him of his detention.
The seven
months in pre-trial detention have left a haggard expression of exhaustion on
Pavlensky’s face, emphasizing his already gaunt features, even though the
artist joked that the time he spent in prison was “a vacation” and said “he had
had a good rest.”
But the
artist also had a few revelations about the Kremlin’s prisons. He said he realized
that the prisoners were controlled not through fear, as many think, but through
their needs.
“It’s not
even food or sleep. It’s a matter of having – or not having – leisure,” he said.
He said
that prisoners who don’t fully obey the Moscow prison authorities may not be
allowed to have a daily walk, or will have to wait for a long time to be
taken to the toilet, or will lose the time they are allocated for reading and watching TV.
But if
prisoners cooperate with the authorities, Pavlensky recalled, they gain small treats
like tea, or a longer walk.
“The state
makes people surrender by using their basic needs,” Pavlenskiy said. “Through these
compromises, a person gets used to doing whatever the authorities say. And
that’s how people get broken.”
“My idea is
that either a government works for society, or a society works for a
government. In Russia, of course, the government wants the society to work for
them,” Pavlensky said.
It was this
idea that made him seek the chance to hold a public event in Ukraine. After the
EuroMaidan Revolution, Pavlensky thought it was important to make a point to his
Ukrainian audience that “the people can make their government work for them.”
In fact,
this was not Pavlensky’s first visit to Ukraine: the first time he saw Kyiv was
in the heat of the EuroMaidan, in January 2014, which he said inspired him with
its “spirit of freedom.”
He said he was impressed with how many people came out onto
the streets to protest against the government.
“In Russia, the masses are either dead, or asleep, or are
driven by their needs,” Pavlensky said.
He said
that even outside of the prison, life in Russia is still “a daily jail,” and he
feels true freedom only when giving his performances, in which he protests against
the Russian state.
A crucial element
of his art is to make the authorities a part of his performance. Their
reactions, including trials and public comments by the officials, are part of
the show, he said.
He said he
was extremely proud that his latest performance was caught on the security
cameras of the FSB headquarters. He called the footage “the best recording of
my work ever made.”
“I make art
with the hands of the state,” Pavlensky said.
