When a great artist, who, moreover,
is recognized during his lifetime,
moves from one country to another, it is
always an event in the cultural life of the world.
Considering that in the West
our Pyotr Pavlensky is considered a great artist,
we can not fail to notice this week's event.
Pavlensky has moved from Moscow to Paris.
Through the efforts of the Western press,
Pavlensky has probably become
Russia's most famous artist.
Artist Pavlensky...
"Who is it? That moron?" you will ask.
"The one who nailed his scrotum to
the pavement on the Red Square?"
Well, yes. There was an incident in which he
carefully nailed his private parts down.
He called it a fixation.
But be careful calling him a moron.
Is not this an example of "A prophet is welcomed
everywhere but in his own country?"
Maybe it is true, as they say from the West.
That we have not yet matured
enough to appreciate this sort of thing,
and, in general, that the narrowness
of our political thinking
does not allow us
to fully enjoy such an act of art.
Or even worse.
Putin, in an authoritarian manner, forbids us
to sincerely express our admiration
for the talent and courage of
the artist Pavlensky, which we suppress within ourselves.
That is, there is self-censorship here,
driven by fear.
The program News of the
Week, however, all the same showed us
Pavlensky's most remarkable and creative achievements
 - let's say we forced ourselves.
Of course, we showed how
the artist Pavlensky, stripped himself naked in the wind,
and nailed his pale scrotum to the black
basalt of the country's main square,
and how this smoothed surface, accustomed
to tanks, somehow tolerated it.
Of course, we showed this unusual setting,
when the artist made a cocoon of barbed wire
around himself and tried to assume the fetal position.
Artist Pavlensky is hard pressed to explain his art.
Whether he owes this to an incomplete education,
or, as often happens with great talents,
he can do one thing well,
but is absolutely useless for anything else.
And it turns out Pavlensky has problems
with verbalization.
Pavlensky creates a much more powerful image
when he sews his mouth
with thread soaked in iodine.
And, as any diligent artisan ought
to do, he made a knot.
This was his performance
in the name of protecting of vandalism
which he got from the girls in colorful balaclavas
in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
A quiet, but a literally flaming
image of the artist was a success,
when he set fire to the doors of
the historic building on Lubyanka Square
which is now the headquarters of the FSB.
The court ruled that Pavlensky had to pay compensation
for the property loss caused by the fire.
Artist Pavlensky refused to pay in protest.
Even officers of justice were stopped
by the power of his creative nature.
In the tradition of the Viennese Actionism,
which considered gushing blood
equivalent to a master's talent,
artist Pavlensky also loves blood, only
not in streams, but trickles or even drops.
It can be fresh or dried, but it has to be there,
Not even for the sake of the
the artistic cinnabar color,
but as a symbol of pain, pain as such.
Here artist Pavlensky cuts off a piece of his
ear, a sensitive earlobe, with a Cuban machete.
He is sitting on the fence of the Institute
of Psychiatry named after Serbsky,
where he had previously been
repeatedly sent for psychiatric examination.
He was found sane.
Artist Pavlensky does not
have a psychiatric diagnosis.
It is clear that the events in Ukraine,
which are full of fire and blood,
couldn't help but find a response
in this performance artist's soul.
Artist Pavlensky arrived in Odessa,
unlaced his mouth, and gave a lecture.
The case ended with stabbing
and even fatal results.
The project had to be suspended.
But Maidan was still beating in his heart.
On the Malokonyushenny bridge in Petersburg,
artist Pavlensky burned tires
and hammered on scrap metal
to recreate the artistic
environment of the Kiev coup.
Artist Pavlensky has an ally, Oksana Shalygina,
his life partner and mother of his two
children - girls aged six and nine.
According to Pavlensky, his children are kept
 out of the public health and education systems.
Shalygina is also a kind of performance artist.
At one of the Tsereteli's exhibitions
at the Russian Museum,
she came in a quite French-looking outfit,
wearing a little black dress.
And then suddenly she lifted the hem of her dress
and pulled out a rolled book.
A gift she was planning to give
to the organizer of the presentation.
It was, I must say, quite an empty book,
Bombastika by Alexander Brener,
which is allegedly about freedom.
But the meaning of the performance
of Oksana Shalygina was not in the book,
but in its shocking method of delivery.
Fairness requires me to say
that Shalygina is not creative.
The whole time Brener's heroine kept
taking various objects out of herself,
which she'd been storing this way.
Now a lighter. Now a bottle of red wine.
The main thing is that now
the artist Pavlensky and his companion
are beginning a new phase
of their work, a Parisian one.
Presumably, it will be fruitful,
and "the most famous Russian artist” will have
all the conditions in place for his self-expression in France.
For example, when naked Pavlensky decides
to nail his private parts to the floor at Place Vendome
near the column topped
with a statue of Napoleon.
Or when he rolls himself up in
a cocoon of barbed wire
on the steps of the wide staircase
of the Palace of Justice.
Paris authorities should assist the joint action
of artist Pavlensky and the band Pussy Riot
at Notre Dame.
A lecture at the Sorbonne, I am sure,
will also attract attention.
The artist is waiting for an invitation.
Pavlensky has already
cut off one of his ears.
To cut the second one would be less creative.
So we should expect something new
in the genre of artistic self-harm.
For example, there is
an expensive psychiatric clinic
near Paris called Chateau de Garches .
It was founded in 1930 by a student of Freud,
the Danish and Greek Princess Marie Bonaparte.
A cozy place.
Why doesn't performance artist Pavlensky
go precisely there,
take a huge butcher knife with him,
climb to the highest point,
and, in front of all those honest folk,
cut off his foreskin?
Nothing religious, just a performance
with a few drops of blood.
An expected option would
be to fill the glass pyramids
with the black smoke of burning tires
in the courtyard of the Louvre.
Metallic clatter is a must.
Why? This is also art after all.
Would they arrest the artist?
Paris City Hall should also prepare
for any creative ideas artist Pavlensky
decides to carry out in the Pantheon.
Yes, maybe that is where
his companion Oksana Shalygina,
will lift up the bottom of her dress
and take something unexpected out of her body.
For Paris, it will be new.
Yes, we should also expect
some arson from artist Pavlensky.
From an artistic point of view, it is bad
that the French secret services have moved
from historic buildings to modern ones.
The doors are not the same,
but there will surely be
a space for performance art.
In an artistic sense, the fact that
Pavlensky is moving from Moscow to Paris is interesting.
It happened due to fears of another
misunderstanding concerning the features of his art.
This time, a report of attempted rape
on Anastasia Slonina
turned out to be the main problem.
She came to the police alone with
bleeding cuts and stab wounds,
seeking protection from Pyotr
Pavlensky and Oksana Shalygina.
According to the victim, this
couple, adhering to the principles of free love,
invited her to Pavlensky’s
house and tried to rape her.
In this case, a knife was used.
We remember that bloodletting is a part
of the artistic manner of Pavlensky.
So, here we have exactly this type of misunderstanding
of the creative design,
leading right up to a threat of criminal prosecution
with a long-term sentence in Russia,
that forced Pavlensky
and Shalygina move to Paris.
It is clear that to increase
their own capitalization,
emigrants usually talk about
political persecution in their homeland.
This is how it is now.
It would have sounded plausible if
the victim of the attempted rape,
Anastasia Slonina, had not been
an actress at what is perhaps
the theatrical institution most politically
oppositional in its environment, Theater.doc.
That is, there were no political differences
between Slonina, Pavlensky, and Shalygina.
They disagreed about
their creative practices.
Meet them Paris!
