the limping messenger

ARTIST WITH BALLS ON RED SQUARE:
an attempt at understanding the self-mutilation protest of
Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky
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SELF-MUTILATION as ESCAPE FROM THE NEW GULAG

Originally posted on November 11, 2013 on my Flickr site (*); reposted on October 16 2017 on my blog Limping Messengerafter I did read this Message in Le Monde today: “L’artiste russe Pavlenski arrêté à Paris pour avoir mis le feu à la Banque de France”

An attempt at understanding the artistic protest of Pyotr Pavlensky on the Red Square in Moscow, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement in front of the Mausoleum of Lenin and the Kremlin walls, yesterday. Shortly after he was cut loose and arrested for his deed. Pavlensky said his action was to “protest against the Kremlin’s crackdown on political rights.” (1)
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Self-mutilation in public has a long and varying history and a diverting set of meanings. The re-enactment of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ is performed in many places all over the world. The Islam knows the self-whipping men parading through the streets. Fakirs show their overcoming of the body by the mind by all kind of piercing actions. Piercing of body parts is of all times, often as an act of initiation or embellishments of the body. Modern art has a whole a whole score of body art, whereby some form of self-mutilation is performed, from the enactment of (self)castration by the Austrian artists Herman Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, to the suspending in space of his body through wires and hooks in his skin by the Cypriot-Australian artist Stelarc.
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All these examples differ in meaning from the action of Pyotr Pavlensky yesterday on Red Square, in front of the walls of the Kremlin and the Mausoleum of Lenin. His action points to the self-mutilation of soldiers and prisoners who try to escape from their dire situation, who are so desperate to get out of their actual situation that they re willing to hurt themselves, even badly. Soldiers that shoot themselves in the hand or leg (a common occurrence during the long lasting trench warfare of World War I), prisoners that try to poison themselves, harm their body or twist their mind and behavior in such a way, that they may be transferred to a hospital or a mad house. In the case of the long history of the Russian deportation camps from the time of the Tzars to the Stalin period and even beyond that, an attempt to escape to some form of hospital was a desperate act indeed, as the medical facilities in most of the Gulag camps were below any standard and in some cases more hellish than the actual concentration camp itself.
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Nailing down oneself with a pin through the scrotum, between the balls, has been registered by several witnesses, and such examples did appear again in recent anthology of testimonies on the Russian Gulag by Anne Applebaum, published in the year 2003:
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“A prisoner tells the story of a thief who cut off four fingers of his left hand. Instead of being sent to a field as invalid, however, did sit invalid snow and seeing others work. Forbidden to leave, afraid of being shot for attempted escape, “he soon himself and asked for a shovel, using it as a crutch, with his hand survivor, put it in the frozen ground, weeping and cursing. ” Still, many prisoners felt that the potential benefit they made was worth the risk. Some methods were rude. The criminals were particularly known for his simply cut three fingers intermediates with an ax, so that they could not cut more trees or hold a wheelbarrow in the mines. Others cut off a foot or a hand, or rubbing acid in his eyes. Others still, to leave for work, a wet cloth wrapped around the foot, at night, came back with frostbite of the third degree. The same method could be applied to the fingers.
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In 1960, Anatoly Marchenko saw a man preaching his testicles in a bank in prison. It was not the first: Valerii Frid describes a man who preached his scrotum in a tree stump.”
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[Applebaum, Anne. 2003. Gulag: a history. New York: Doubleday; pafge 445 in the eBook edition I used]; I attach a longer version of this quoatation in note
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The use of the verb ‘preached’ is odd, and hardly used in English, as far as I could ascertain. I took the quotation on line, once more from Google Books and there another rendering of this sentence is given:
“In the 1960s , Anatoly Marchenko watched a man nail his testicles to a prison bench. Nor was he the first Valery Frid describes a man who nailed his scrotum to a tree stump.” (2)
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It seems that the action of Pyotr Pavlensky did find its inspiration source right there. Or, if not so, it is a way to read his action, as it is not only the actor who determines how others perceive his performance.
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However gruesome the act – piercing a long nail through the tender skin of the scrotum straight between the most sensitive part of a man’s body, his balls onto the cold pavement of a huge square – it is still a few steps away from the public sacrifice of one’s life. Self-immolation is such a final act, being of another order. It can hardly be called an ‘artistic act’ when one drowns one’s own cloths and body in an inflammable liquid and sets it afire. Examples galore with certain strains of Buddhism and Hinduism accepting this form of self-sacrificing acts. Russia has its own horrid history with the persecution of the ‘old believers’ in the 17th century, whereby whole villages in fear of a horrid end at the hands of their persecutors preferred to burn themselves to death, in what was called their ‘fire baptism’.
~The most recent political use of self-immolations were in Bulgaria in a protest against the against the Borisov government. The protest of a Tunisian street vendor, Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, against his maltreatment in December 2010 triggered in the end the Arab Spring movement and when we move back through time we meet Tibetans, Czechs and Vietnamese monks that use this form of ultimate protest.
~Back to the action on the Red Square and the intent and effect of such actions. It was not Pavlensky ‘s first radical action. Another one was preceding it. As is explained on a Wikipedia page about this artist:
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“By suturing my mouth on the background of the Kazan Cathedral, I wanted to show the position of the artist in contemporary Russia: a ban on publicity. I am sickened by intimidation of society, mass paranoia, manifestations of which I see everywhere.” While commenting on the questionable originality of his action in one of the later interviews, Pavlensky mentioned: “Such practice has occurred among artists and prisoners, but for me it did not matter. The question of primacy and originality here for me does not exist. There was no goal to surprise anyone or come up with something unusual. Rather, I felt the necessity to make a gesture that would accurately reflects my situation.”[Wikipedia Petr Pavlensky ]”
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Does nailing your balls to the pavement of the most central and symbolic square of Russia “reflects accurately” the situation in Russia in general, or does the desperate act only reflect the state of mind of the artist? As a non-Russian it is impossible to come up with an answer, still there is no doubt that Russia of today is a society which carries it’s repressive and violent past with it, like all powerful nations do. When reading the nailing action from the perspective of the Gulag history, the artist is willing to risk – at least – parts of his body, in order to escape from what he feels to be his imprisonment within the confines of a society full of paranoia. Self-mutilation was seen as a crime within the Gulag system. It could be heavily punished. Refusal to fit as an exploitable part within the Gulag (production system), could lead to a death sentence, however paradoxical that may seem. Pavlensky has already been arrested and examined to see if he would not better fit in the infamous Russian classification system of those who are mentally ill. After his action with sewing his lips, he did get out, and was declared sane. The question is if he will be so ‘lucky’ next time.
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One may also question whether the need for dramatic acts, grandiose symbolic performances that aim at the heart of the power system, is what will change the system. Grotesque gestures seem to me – as an outsider – an expression of the bombast of power as displayed by Tzars, Party Secretaries and other ‘great leaders’, a cultural phenomenon that has been aptly named in new-speak of the last century: ‘Palast-Kult’. The artist as martyr for the great cause of the Great Russia… I see analogies with the the style of the National Bolshevik Party of Eduard Limonov and their need and ways to produce martyrdom (like the recent case of the bad luck of Alexander Dolmatov asking for political asylum in the Netherlands, that treated him so badly that he ends up committing suicide in a Dutch prison cell).
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Can the opponents of a power system be more than a reaction movement, mirroring in their actions and gestures the system they are fighting? One needs a lot of imagination to see any relationship between the ‘nailed down balls’ of the artist Pyotr Pavlensky and the ‘free roaming big balls’ of the ruler Vladimir Putin. The fragility of the male apparatus may do the trick: that is what the ruler and those who are overruled do have in common. We know that one day – at a moment least expected – the fragility of yet another ‘big ball system’ will come to the fore and what seemed most strong proves to be weak.
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Maybe there is yet another association: what seems to be omnipotent is nailed down so much to all those strata of society that try to secure their interest and extend their control with such a force that there remains no more free roaming for potent policy. ‘The potentate’ is constantly pulled from one side to the other, until his scrotum can not withstand the contradicting forces exerted on it and it tears apart… leading to a collapse of what once was the towering pride of the ruler.
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(1) There are several video versions on YouTube, comparing them I choose this (sensational kind of web site) but good version of a video registration, without initial advertisement and so on. One has to click first to agree not to be younger than 18 years. This is the caption:
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“Guy nails his scrotum to the ground as protest against police brutality Artist Peter Pavlensky nailed his testicles to a nail on the cobblestones of Red Square, the correspondent of “Fringe.”The action is timed to the Day of Police, which is celebrated on November 10. The action began at 13:00. Around 14:30 the artist was taken by ambulance to the First City Hospital. After going to the hospital to deliver him to the police station, “China Town”. In a statement about the artist’s action, called “Freeze”, it is noted that it can be regarded as a “metaphor of apathy and political indifference and fatalism of the modern Russian society.” Pavlensky known for other high-profile protests. May 3 this year, he went to the building of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg naked and wrapped with barbed wire. Campaign “Carcass” symbolized “man’s existence in a repressive legal system, where any movement causes severe reaction of the law, bites into the body of an individual.” In July last year Pavlensky held a rally in support of prisoners participating Pussy Riot. He sewed his mouth and stood at the Kazan Cathedral with a placard “Speech Pussy Riot has been famous action replay of Jesus Christ (mf.21 :12-13).”http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=777_1384084283”
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(2) Anne Applebaum cites Anatoly Marchenko’s book “MY Testimony” (trad. Michael Scammel, London, 1969). I see that the eBook edition (what a shame does have neither page numbers nor foot- or end notes, so I can not give here the right page number.) Let me give at least a link to worldcat.org, as many libraries in the world do stock this book in one of the many editions that exist.http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/16922410
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Added on 15/5/2014: I took the book from the library and had it laying around (and prolungued) for months, other things came in between, but today I phoographed, the pages from Marchenko’s book and took out the text by OCR. Here is the full passage which is relevant to this case:
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Chapter: Self-Mutilation
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“Here is one out of a number of similar stories, from which it differs only in its originality. It took place before my very own eyes in the spring of 1963. One of my cell-mates, Sergei K., who had been reduced to utter despair by the hopelessness of various protests and hunger strikes and by the sheer tyranny and injustice of it all, resolved, come what may, to maim himself. Somewhere or other he got hold of a piece of wire, fashioned a hook out of it and tied it to some home-made twine (to make which he had unravelled his socks and plaited the threads). Earlier still he had obtained two nails and hidden them in his pocket during the searches. Now he took one of the nails, the smaller of the two, and with his soup bowl started to hammer it into the food flap – very, very gently, trying not to clink and let the warders hear – after which he tied the twine with the hook to the nail. We, the rest of the cons in the cell, watched him in silence. I don’t know who was feeling what while this was going on, but to interfere, as l have already pointed out, is out of the question: every man has the right to dispose of himself and his life in any way he thinks fit.
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Sergei went to the table in the middle of the room, undressed stark naked, sat down on one of the benches at the table and swallowed his hook. Now, if the warders started to open the door or the food flap, they would drag Sergei like a pike out of a pond. But this still wasn’t enough for him: if they pulled he would willy-nilly be dragged towards the door and it would be possible to cut the twine through the aperture for the food flap. To be absolutely sure, therefore, Sergei took the second nail and began to nail his scrotum to the bench on which he was sitting. Now he hammered the nail loudly, making no attempt to keep quiet. It was clear that he had thought out the whole plan in advance and calculated and reckoned that he would have time to drive in this nail before the warder arrived. And he actually did succeed in driving it right in to the very head. At the sound of the hammering and banging the warder came, slid the shutter aside from the peephole and peered into the cell. All he realized at first, probably, was that one of the prisoners had a nail, one of the prisoners was hammering a nail! And his first impulse, evidently, was to take it away. He began to open the cell door; and then Sergei explained the situation to him. The warder was nonplussed.
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Soon a whole group of warders had gathered in the corridor by our door. They took turns at peering through the peephole and shouting at Sergei to snap the twine. Then, realizing that he had no intention of doing so, the warders demanded that one of us break the twine. We remained sitting on our bunks without moving; somebody only poured out a stream of curses from time to time in answer to their threats and demands. But now it came up to dinner time, we could hear the servers bustling up and down the corridor, from neighbouring cells came the sound of food flaps opening and the clink of food bowls. One fellow in the cell could endure it no longer – before you knew it we’d be going without our dinner – he snapped the cord by the food flap. The warders burst into the cell. They clustered around Sergei, but there was nothing they could do: the nail was driven deep into the bench and Sergei just went on sitting there in his birthday suit, nailed down by the balls. One of the warders ran to admin to find out what they should do with him. When he came back he ordered us all to gather up our things and move to another cell.
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I don’t know what happened to Sergei after that. Probably he went to the prison hospital – there were plenty of mutilated prisoners there: some with ripped open stomachs, some who had sprinkled powdered glass in their eyes and some who had swallowed assorted objects – spoons, toothbrushes, wire. Some people used to grind sugar down to dust and inhale it until they got an abscess of the lung .. . Wounds sewn up with thread, two lines of buttons stitched to the bare skin, these were such trifles that hardly anybody ever paid attention to them. The surgeon in the prison hospital was a man of rich experi- ence. His most frequent job was opening up stomachs, and if there had been a museum of objects taken out of stomachs, it would surely have been the most astonishing collection in the world.”
~[Marchenko, Anatoliĭ, and Michael Scammell. 1971. My testimony. Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books. ; p. 138-141. www.worldcat.org/oclc/562119565 ]

(2) “Even with all its flaws – even when doctors were venal, poorly equipped wards, medication low-life in the hospital or infirmary seemed so attractive to prisoners, to get it delivered to them were willing not only to hurt or threaten doctors but also to injure themselves. Soldiers trying to escape from the battlefield, the zeks also resorted to samorub (self-mutilation) and mastyrka disease (staged) in desperate attempts to save their lives. Some believed that an amnesty would end up receiving disability benefits. In Actually, there were many who believed that the Gulag at least one occasion issued a statement denying that the disabled would be released (though they were, occasionally). Most, however, was simply happy to able to avoid work. The punishment for self-harm was particularly severe: an additional award in the field. This reflected, perhaps, the fact that a disabled worker was a burden to the state and a delay to the production plan. “Self-mutilation was punished so morbid, with sabotage, “wrote Anatolii Zhigulin. A prisoner tells the story of a thief who cut off four fingers of his left hand. Instead of being sent to a field as invalid, however, did sit invalid snow and seeing others work. Forbidden to leave, afraid of being shot for attempted escape, “he soon himself and asked for a shovel, using it as a crutch, with his hand survivor, put it in the frozen ground, weeping and cursing. ” Still, many prisoners felt that the potential benefit they made was worth the risk. Some methods were rude. The criminals were particularly known for his simply cut three fingers intermediates with an ax, so that they could not cut more trees or hold a wheelbarrow in the mines. Others cut off a foot or a hand, or rubbing acid in his eyes. Others still, to leave for work, a wet cloth wrapped around the foot, at night, came back with frostbite of the third degree. The same method could be applied to the fingers. In 1960, Anatoly Marchenko saw a man preaching his testicles in a bank in prison. It was not the first: Valerii Frid describes a man who preached his scrotum in a tree stump. But there were also more subtle methods. A criminal could steal more daring a syringe and inject into your melted soap penis, ejaculation result was like a venereal disease. Another prisoner has found a way to simulate silicosis, a lung disease. First, he limava a small amount of silver powder in a silver ring to it had managed to keep among his personal belongings. He then mixed the dust silver with tobacco and smoked. Although did not feel anything, he went to the hospital coughing the way it turns the victims of silicosis coughing. X-ray that was done in Then a terrible shadow appeared in his lungs – enough to disqualify him for heavy work and to was sent to a camp because of incurable disease. Prisoners also tried to create infections, or chronic diseases. Vadim Aleksandrovich treated a patient who had infected himself with a sewing needle dirty. Gustav Herling saw a prisoner stick your arm in the fire, when thought nobody was watching, he did it once a day, every day, so keep a wound mysteriously persistent. Zhigulin purposely fell ill after drinking cold water and breathing cold air. This caused him a fever high enough so that he could be excused from work: “Oh, that ten happiest days in the hospital!”

Excerpt From: Applebaum, Anne. 2003. Gulag: a history. New York: Doubleday; page 170.

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(*) The Flickr post had 90,995 views, but as the owner of Flickr Yahoo has about two years ago decided to censor all my 700+ posts, mostly well studied tableau pictures with small essays and documented with foot notes and other references, branding them all as “adult content” I have stopped posting at Flickr, the site is still available and I will slowly transfer that huge amount of content to this blog in the coming months. And, yes of course I protested, but I did get only automated answers of Yahoo and as I failed time, money and energy to conduct a court case against Flickr (I am a paying user) I only stopped adding content. Digital censorship is often worse than being condemned by a kangaroo court.