Introduction: Self/Inflicted
On November 10, 2013, a 29-year-old performance artist named Petr Pavlensky took off his clothes, sat down in the middle of Red Square, and nailed his scrotum to a cobblestone. Pavlensky had already gained a good deal of notoriety for his previous concatenations of political artistic spectacle and self-harm: the year before, he sewed his mouth shut for an action he called "Seam" in protest of the state's persecution of the feminist anarchist Pussy Riot collective. Just four months before "Fixation" (his Red Square scrotal extravaganza), he lay naked in front of the St. Petersburg legislature, wrapped in barbed wire as a statement about the increasingly repressive laws adopted by the Russian government (this action was called "Carcass"). Eventually, he would go on to cut off an earlobe while sitting on the roof of the country's most notorious psychiatric facility and set fire to the doors of the FSB headquarters, before leaving the country to continue his political art activities in Europe.
All of Pavlensky's actions were designed as political commentary, but, with the passage of time, it is "Fixation" that has proved to be the most cogent and enduring, if perhaps not entirely in keeping with the author's intent. Deliberately coinciding with a national holiday in honor of law enforcement ("Police Day"), "Fixation" was, in Pavlensky's words, "a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of contemporary Russian society. As the government turns the country into one big prison, stealing from the people and using the money to grow and enrich the police apparatus and other repressive structures, society is allowing this, and forgetting its numerical advantage, is bringing the triumph of the police state closer by its inaction.”.
Well, perhaps, but the uninitiated observer could be forgiven for having difficulties connecting the action's form to its content. The objects of Pavlensky's ire were certainly well-known social and political ills (at least in Russia's liberal, progressive, or opposition circles). The form of his critique might not be immediately obvious or legible (what, exactly, does the rise of a police state have to do with testicular piercing?), but there is a historical precedent. As Anastasia Kayiatos points out in her essay "Penile Servitude and the Police State," prisoners in the Soviet Gulag sometimes resorted to self-mutilation in response to the excesses of camp life, including nailing their scrotum to benches or planks. Self-harm becomes a violent precursor to passive resistance. In Pavlensky's case, the police confronting him were stumped. They wanted to arrest him, but they couldn't move him without either causing serious damage or having a much more intimate encounter with a noncompliant body than they ever signed on for.
My point is not that "Fixation" missed its target. Quite to the contrary, the performance of violence on the artist's own body a powerful if not uncontroversial means of highlighting the violence inherent in Russian political and governmental life. Younger Russian artists and scholars have since argued that the use of violence as a critique of violence is a dead end, and that political artistic production must escape the cycle of reinforcing discursive violence by instrumentalizing it even for the purpose of satire or protest. Their conclusion that such violence ends up implicating all involved is part of an internal debate, but it, like Pavlensky's protest, ends up turning back once again to the State and its official discourse.
This critique has only been reinforced by highly troubling accusations made against Pavlensky. In 2017, a member of the Russian Teatr.doc political art group accused Pavlensky and his partner, Oksana Shalygina, of sexual assault. They denied the charges, declared the accuser an informer, and fled to France with their children. Just three years later, Shalygina published a book called He Never Hit Me in the Face (По лицу он меня не бил), detailing years of physical and emotional abuse at Pavlensky's hand (Pavlensky denies the charges). Now Pavlensky's violent art begins to look even more self-referential than the self-harm initially suggests; Pavlensky's artistic blurring of the boundaries between the subject of violence and its object takes an an air of (unconscious) self-accusation.
Three years into Russia's brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Pavlensky's art in general, and "Fixation" in particular, start to look less like a criticism and more like a diagnosis. Outraged Ukrainians and guilt-ridden Russian liberals have been reexamining the Russian cultural legacy, including calls for the "cancellation" of Russian culture entirely. [1] Highlighting Russian artistic achievements on stage, screen, or even in print does not feel right, but nor does an outright ban, particularly of work produced by opponents to Putin's war. Within the Russian Federation, the room for dissenting political and artistic expression has dwindled to virtual nonexistence. Russian culture is stuck, fixed in place in a state of abjection.
But it is not just the opposition that has lost its room to maneuver. The expectations for a quick victory in Ukraine, fed by woefully inadequate intelligence, unrealistic assumption, and a system that does not encourage the bearing of bad news to the country's leaders, were rapidly dashed. Rather than immediately taking Kyiv and removing Zelensky, the Russian military has (at least so far) been unable to sustain a serious advance while unwilling to undertake a serious retreat, relying on a population of prisoner "volunteers" and ethnic minorities from the provinces as cannon fodder. Russia is stuck in Ukraine, and, as in the case of Pavlensky, the wound is self-inflicted.
"Fixation" was also prophetic in the choice of male genitalia as the site of pain and paralysis. Putin's presidency has been notoriously masculinist, even phallic, from the ubiquitous picture of a bare-chested Putin on horseback to his appropriation of the rhetoric of sexual violence. The opposition has turned this trait against him, with the slogan "Putin Is a Dickhead" ("Путин—хийло”) making its way from Ukrainian street protests to the Russian Internet to an episode of The Simpsons over the course of a decade. Pavlensky, however, chose to put a nail through his scrotum rather than his penis; one imagines that even he was willing to suffer only so much for his art. The scrotum and testicles are also often used as signs of masculine toughness ("Putin's got balls"), and yet they are the site of maximum masculine vulnerability ("Ukraine's got Putin by the balls").
Though it might be too great a weight to rest on Pavlensky's tortured scrotum, "Fixation" ends up standing for Putin's folly in Ukraine, a Russia trapped in a war that it can neither win nor lose, a culture with no place to go, and, for that matter, a population of men who face the prospect of mobilization and death in a senseless war by virtue of nothing but their biological, assigned sex. And whether we think of the subject as Putin himself, the Russian elites, or the broader population that has assented to Putinism through apathy and cynicism, the victim is primarily to blame.
This is not Mother Russia, calling her sons to action, but Father Russia, trapped in a humiliating, compromising position. One imagines him, exposed, suffering, and unable to move, asking himself: how did I ever get to the point where this seemed like a good idea?
Note
[1] I use the term "cancellation" reluctantly, because of the instrumentalization of "cancel culture" discourse by the right wing. Nonetheless, this term has been ubiquitous in the context of Russia's war in Ukraine.
Next: Balancing the Body Politic