Youth Talk

Conceptual art, even in its simplest form, tends to go over most people’s heads.  Yet I have always been a great admirer of it. In my books, the more bizarre: the better. A message should not only be heard, it should be felt, and what better way to make people feel, than to push boundaries and shock them a little.

Although this time, I feel the professed conceptual artist and political activist Petr Pavlensky may have gone a stitch or two too far.

He rose to fame, or infamy (depending on your perspective) during the trial of the Russian band ‘Pussy Riot’, where he demonstrated against proceedings by sewing his mouth shut and standing outside Kazan Cathedral, St. Petersburg. This piece of art was entitled ‘Stitch’.

His message was a coherent and valid one:  ‘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’. Of course, from such a thought one doesn’t naturally leap to sewing ones mouth shut.

However, Pavlensky rationalises this by saying ‘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 reflect my situation’. 

Meanwhile, it is his most recent demonstration that has been in the news recently. On Russia’s national police day: November 10, he sat naked in Red Square and pierced a nail through his ‘family jewels’ and consequently attached himself to the cobblestones outside Lenin’s Mausoleum.

Police later removed him from the scene and took him to hospital, where, just for the record, he was declared sane. Yet he may now be facing up to 15 days in prison for ‘hooliganism’.

He declared that ‘It’s not a bureaucratic mess that deprives society of its ability to act, but fixation on our own defeats and losses that nails us to the Kremlin’s pavement stronger and stronger, creating an army of apathetic idols out of people, patiently awaiting their fate’.

Yet again, this is a valid and powerful message. Unfortunately the extreme and abstract nature of this act overshadows that. If he truly wants to be heard, he needs to take it down a peg or two.