Madness, dissidence and transduction

Abstract

Russian dissident artist Pyotr (or Petr) Pavlensky received international attention after a video was broadcast in 2013 that depicted him sitting in Red Square in Moscow with his scrotum nailed to the cobblestones. The incident was later revealed to be part of a series of works of performance art enacted by Pavlensky, which included sewing his own mouth shut, appearing naked within a coil of barbed wire in front of the legislature, building a mock barrier of flaming tires in downtown St Petersburg in imitation of the political uprisings in Kiev, cutting off his own ear while sitting naked on the wall of the Serbsky Psychiatric Hospital, and setting fire to the wooden doors of the headquarters of the Russian Secret Service. Although the Russian authorities have attempted on several occasions to treat Pavlensky as if he were criminally insane, he continues to articulately defend his activities as works of dissident political art. This article explores the idea that Pavlensky is deliberately using transduction as a tool through which his work achieves meaning. Pavlensky consciously invokes two different fields of cultural interpretation. The first is the adherence of authorities to the Russian Criminal Code, which is used to exert despotic control over the Russian people. The second is the international discourse surrounding avant-garde art, which champions freedom of expression, including dissident works. By ensuring that there is a transduction of his work from the first field to the second, Pavlensky creates a collision of opinion in which the legitimacy of Russian state policy is challenged and delegitimized.