What Pavlensky did not take into account

The theme of the new issue of the magazine “Disagreements” is “The swollen eye. Ethics Commission. "

One of the widespread reproaches to modern art - “I can do that too” or, otherwise formulating, “I would take anything and put it anywhere - and that would be modern art.” In this not so stupid criticism there is an important flaw: to take “anything” and it is impossible to expose “anywhere”. More often, justifying contemporary art, the emphasis is on the fact that “anywhere” does not exist, that the social and institutional space is arranged according to special laws, which produce the logic of art: the logic of acceptance and rejection, visibility and invisibility, recognition and non -recognition, purchase and inconsistency. But it is also important that a person is not capable of taking “anything”: he will always betray himself in this act, will always be convicted of his desire to choose this , not that .

The incompetence of random meetings, in which traces of the unconscious are detected in retroactively, was the subject of the interest of surrealists. For example, Andre Breton used the concept of convulsive beauty, speaking of situations where a person suddenly meets a sign of his desire in the outside world. Breton himself sought to read the secret ciphers of his soul in suddenly attracted things in the flea market.

Can an unconscious desire be considered the reason that you chose this , not that ? The question is not quite correctly raised: the desire is just rooted where it comes to the reason - that is, about the gap preceding what is chosen - whether it is a walking route or a position in relation to sexuality. The desire is the effect of the gap in the inherent causality, since the reason is separated from its investigation-the desire is caused by something in this gap.

This number of "disagreements" is devoted to ethics, which does not crave reconciliation of contradictions or placement of all in their places.

We are talking about things that are not incorporeal, but, on the contrary, rooted in the body and matter. Like thoughtlessly crumpled fragments of tickets or spools of the wool that Brasai photographed: the scum that captured the intimate motor life of someone’s body and spiritualized by the desire of the photographer, which pressed the “descent” on his cell. The body of the body experiencing desire is poured with blood - an excess indicating a shortage and dissatisfaction. The swollen eye is a tired eye and at the same time an eye full of desire.

The desire has its own ethics - ethics of not universal good, but truth. In the world today, the liberal model of ethics dominates: faith in human rights, universal ways to negotiate with each other, the fight against double standards, equal representation of opinions in parliament ... It comes to conservative ethics, claiming to strictly determine each of its social role. This number of “disagreements” is devoted to other ethics, which does not crave reconciliation of contradictions or placement of all in their places, but indicating failures in general order - failures in the logic of the same “anything”. Failures in which the desire finds its place. The desire is a compass in an attempt to escape from the global supermarket of our time, which claims to present all your needs: as if it is enough to choose the right set of goods.

The approaches to this other ethics were offered by many thinkers of the 20th century - I will call three more Frenchmen, in one way or another “bruised” surrealists. A friend of the surrealists Jacques Lacan spoke about the ethics of psychoanalysis as ethics, oriented by desire and indecent obscurity of the sexual. Alain Badju tried to build ethics around fidelity to an event - that is, fidelity not recorded and recognized procedures of thinking and building social ties, but, on the contrary, breaks, coups, revolutions in these procedures. Art for him makes sense as one of the forms of such fidelity. Finally, for Jacques Ransier, contemporary art is a privileged practice that can question and suspend the established orders of power, pushing spectators with the unsolvable ambiguity of their objects.

But is it so easy to separate in the contemporary art of Status Quo from the event, the suspension of the usual distribution of power from its duplication, the ethics of the non -ethics of the unknown? Exhibitions with precisely extinct doses of institutional criticism and anti -capitalist, feminist and decolonial discourse - how often do they work as machines for the reproduction of the social status of their participants and organizers?

Or an even more problematic example: in the actions of Peter Pavlensky, which, according to the artist himself, should make people think and cause unpredictable consequences, you can also find ethics where the recorded dominates the unwritten.

On April 27, at the request of Pavlensky, who was under criminal investigation on charges of vandalism for the “Freedom” and “threat” shares, his lawyer Dmitry Dinze brought to court as witnesses to the defense of women presented by the artist as a “prostitute”. In the retelling of Dinze, Pavlensky considers prostitutes and homeless people the only free people in Russia, and therefore it is they who have the right to voice their opinion in court.

The predictability of the actions of the authorities and the media effect was the component of all the works of Pavlensky. But if earlier in the shares of Pavlensky, the author was attended by one on one with the state, then in court he subjugated the intended role of not only himself and representatives of the authorities, but also the invited women-testimonies to the court. These women (and their predictably negative opinions about modern actionism) were in the shadow of the “prostitute”, with the enthusiasm of the picked media.

The shares of Pavlensky work not as paradoxes, but as a solemn "which was required to prove."

Once again: according to Pavlensky, you can have access to freedom in modern Russian society only by being on the edge of this society, being a sex worker or homeless. In this model, the Pavlensky contours of society are clearly outlined and everyone prescribes their own role (conformist / protester, sex worker / policeman, free / not free ...). But it is precisely such an idea of ​​a social order as a system of recorded predictable roles that excludes freedom - and it was him, criticizing the Russian court, that Pavlensky himself reproduced.

The scene with “prostitutes” in court revealed in the whole art of Pavlensky ethics based on a total record of social roles. In his shares, Pavlensky always stated the impulse of the Russian political situation, it was doubled by it, re -bounding all its participants to their places, like his own body - to Red Square in the “Fixation” campaign. But thereby, he only reproduced the impossibility of ambiguity and suspension of universal accounting underlying state power. However, then that unpredictable gap cannot arise, the desire for which he proclaims in his texts. The shares of Pavlensky do not work as paradoxes, but as a solemn “which was required to prove”; Exploring from chance, they make a desire to a dead end. In other words, they are very far from surrealism. (In contrast, by the way, from Moscow Investigation of the 1990s, War and Pussy Riot .)

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So, ethics in this issue of “Disagreements” - ethics, where the law and good does not coincide (the halting of Yahweh bear traces of his eagerly in nature), and the resolution of all conflicts is a false landmark (the Messiah will never appear - even in secular guise of progress).

The release is dedicated to the Fair of the Swollen Eye , which will be held in the Moscow School of New Cinema on May 30 and will be devoted to the problems of the ethics of representation - including the representation of the oppressed. The theme of the fair will outline a number of treacherous theses that will appear on the site as the number is released and the “swollen eye” approaches. As in theses, in the poem of Martin Kippenberger and Albert Olen, “no problems” ethical are insoluble. This poem denies the existence of ethical problems, but thereby indicates them; It makes them suggest, but blocks attempts to unravel them.

Tablets of Yahweh carry traces of his eagerness.

The ethical understanding of the legislation is forced to think about prepared by Varvara Gevorgizova and Anastasia Ryabova , where the law is introduced for art producers. Here, the sphere of aesthetic, which usually seems as inalienable and free of all the territories of our world today, is permeated with power .

About the failure of faith in the liberating power of imagination and virtual spaces, where supposedly every dream can find an embodiment today, Nikolai Smirnov writes in his text.

About the deceptive nature of the desire to do good (for example, in the form of charity) and how attempts to find for all their place to ignore the fundamental fact of sexual differences and the sexuality and aggression generated by them are in a conversation between the psychoanalyst Maria Esipchuk and the teacher Maria Ivasenko .

The problem of loyalty and betrayal is in the center of the text sent by anonymous and based on personal evidence of several people. As these evidence and comments on them show, betrayal is much closer to the truth about relations with another than the comfort of fidelity.

Some materials will remain a surprise so far.

All the numbers mentioned and remaining unnamed will be released until May 31, the full version of the download number will be published on June 1.