I’m thrilled to say that my New York Times Magazine profile of the Russian artist Piotr Pavlensky has just gone live. (Link below.)
It’s been a long time in the making, because the NYT had to wait till Piotr got sprung from prison, so their photographer could take a picture of him—this is a man who spends a lot of his life in jail for his art!
My first encounter with Piotr’s work was electrifying.
In 2015, I was conducting a talk with Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center.
Nadya opened with a slide-show of recent Russian art. Suddenly the well-heeled Hamptons audience erupted into gasps, shrieks, groans of “Oh my God!”
On the screen, an image of a naked man sitting on the middle of Red Square. Up close, you saw that his scrotum had been nailed to the paving stone by a large crucifixion-style nail. The artist was Piotr Pavlensky. His action, he said in an accompanying text, symbolized the “the political passivity of the Russian people.”
A few months later, I read that this same artist had been imprisoned for setting ablaze the doors of the Lubyanka, the HQ of Russia’s secret police. As witnesses to the defence, Pavlensky—who was asking to be charged with terrorism--called on three Moscow sex-workers who said they found his action deplorable: artists should draw pictures of daisies, not cause a public nuisance!
I knew this was someone I needed to write about.
By the time I met Piotr and his then-partner Oksana Shalygina and their two children, they were living in France, where they’d been granted political asylum.
I was able to spend some magical days hanging out with them in Paris, before Piotr was once again was arrested—this time for an art-action that involved setting a French bank on fire.
And when he got released after almost a year in Fleury-Merogis prison, I was there waiting at the gates with Oksana, and a couple of other friends.
I find Pavlensky’s work deeply stirring, both for the purity of his gestures and for his insistence that art’s purpose is to help others free themselves from what he calls “the prison of daily life.”
Looking at the weirdly beautiful images of this lone figure meshed in a swirling helix of barbed wire outside St. Petersburg Parliament, or haloed by a blaze of fire before the Banque de France on Paris’ Place de la Bastille, I’ve found myself forced to think about different forms of resistance and self-mastery, and about the long history of individuals whose seemingly masochistic, paradoxical, or death-seeking acts have encouraged others to stand up to power.
I am not finished with Pavlensky. I am currently writing a book called “I Bite My Friends (To Cure Them)”—a book about how philosophers, saints, revolutionaries, and contemporary artists have used their bodies as a field of political action, and Pavlensky will be one of its heroes. (My essay on another hero, my late friend, performance artist Stephen Varble, recently appeared in “Granta” and “Lit Hub.”)
What do you do with an artist who believes that art’s purpose is nothing less than emancipatory rupture?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/magazine/pyotr-pavlensky-art.html