Pavlensky, not like everyone else: choice vs. Fate

By publishing the text of Oleg Kulik, the editors of Colta.ru plans to open them a discussion about the situation that has developed around Peter Pavlensky. The actual side of the case is stated in our material “Preferring the victim” . In the near future we plan to publish other opinions about the figure of Pavlensky.

When, a year ago, Peter Pavlensky was still in prison under investigation, I asked Oksana’s friend: what would he do if the system reaches out to her and to their common little children?

“He will not even lead an eyebrow,” answered Oksana, “even if they cut us before his eyes. He is impeccable. Everything related to his fate, his affairs, it is impossible to influence him from the outside. ” And she finished with a strange phrase: Peter will never bend before fate, he made his choice ...

This recognition puzzled me, if not to say - it was crushing. It had stiffness. I thought fundamentally differently. I would not allow the hair to fall from my daughter’s head, but Oksana’s words confused me. I was somehow embarrassed for myself, for my comfort, swing ... My wife even said that it began to smell again from me like a “hipar”. Like our meeting. And on June 8, Peter is released in the courtroom. Strangely freed, unexpectedly, irritably, somehow, crumpled, as if they are shuffled. Pavlensky to the decision to release him in the courtroom reacted again unexpectedly, did not accept his “fate”, but made an unexpected choice: he calmly read out a counter claim for the FSB for fake the door created according to the project of architect Schusev. The door turned out to be false, and the real one, for which the court was, disappeared. But the judge did not pay no attention to the appeal ... Then “copper pipes” began for Peter: endless interviews, meetings, fans and fans. And the standard rumbling of our environment: this is PR, secondary, politicism, but boldly - already familiar "neither fish nor meat." It was difficult not to call up here. They even offered me to talk with Peter so that he would work for “cool” brands or make exhibitions in “cool” galleries: “He is so stylish, he looks so cool, imagine how they will look on the catwalk with his blonde friend !! This is a dream, these are millions !! We will turn the world of fashion ” - etc. I think Peter had even more these proposals. But they did not go to it! Their emphasized asceticism, attention to every little things of their life and - wider - to all human manifestations of the outside world surprised and even scared away. But all this was quite consistent with that regime, or the regulations, as Peter put it, choosing a path for achieving the goal. Oksana and Peter after the prison rebuilt their lifestyle towards maximum efficiency: everything for business !! They became even more ascetic to themselves and their environment: they refused publicity, not everyone gave interviews, even communication with friends and sympathetic was limited if it became too superficial and decorative. Peter became more and more lonely than to prison. There was a feeling that the spring was contracting. The roots of his main crime are seen in me that he did not enter into a union with anyone, with the left, nor with the right, or with the opposition, or with creative groups. In men - I saw it - he caused a sense of inferiority. There was a feeling that the choice of behavior or assessment of it is performed every second. Once, amused, I asked him how to him my new glasses. "Have you broken the old ones?" He asked in response. "No, here they are, just these, in my opinion, are younger." Petya looked at me silently so that I wanted to hide these “second” glasses away.

If they talked about art, Peter formulated his own opinion extremely specifically, as if it had been considered and recorded many times. He clearly answered the questions, never argued and never made it possible to feel with him at the same time, no panraby, never. In a society where everyone is looking for their own, Peter and Oksana did not play these games, which aroused great interest and even attraction to them. They did not hide their attitude to the Institute of Marriage and Haunsel Morality, openly enjoying their body, their attractiveness - here the consciousness changed not only among the actors of independent theaters. This is understandable. Peter passed the test for personal uniqueness, clearly reflecting his experience and developing his personal unique philosophy of life through the regulation of choice. He released several books in different languages, from which the image of the unrequitedness of life and art arose. There was a feeling that you are not communicating with a person. It began to crush me. His choice of choice for me became unbearable, inhuman. It became scary for his daughters, I was afraid to think about their future. Peter coped with a poisonous naming, attempts to put himself in the framework of external regulation. He chose the line of the cut of his life as a sculptor, without hesitation cutting off the excess. And he described the sacrifice or politicism and political struggle, that is, engagement, the puppeteous “holiness” or politicism, he described as mechanisms of power and personality manipulation. Maybe he was too categorical, defining the majority of strategies in contemporary art as executive, but he certainly never condemned these strategies. He said: it is, the main thing is that it is exactly called, not to lie. Otherwise, an adaptation arises to the external forms of coercion, that is, manipulating your choice, and ultimately - the destruction of the personality, subordination of its crowd and what he hated - to the common fate. In general, the very concept of “fate”, or “regulations of fate”, as he called it, universal indecision in choosing what you need, fear of pain, fatum and the words “such time” - he simply ignored all this as insects. And where is love, where is torment and tears, the pain of partings, I asked. Where is the despondency and depression, who fell and my friends for months, and sometimes for years? Where is the curse of a difficult fate and prayers about the nipos easier ?? In the presence of Pavlensky and Oksana, the regulations of fate was bought under the bench. Like a knight in armor, a choice mode was unfolding. He was convincingly funded by the type of creativity, rare not only in Russia, but also in a world that can be defined as the art of life. When deeds and words do not diverge into an iot. When the creative action of a person is primarily his lifestyle. As it turned out, this is a very difficult fate - the fate of the separated. Always a separate, alien inside the humble fate of the community. It is difficult to afford such a position, it is better to read about it in books. A person who denies any external coercion does not hates power: ordinary people are afraid of him, crushed by this unfair society, and especially the herald of this society, decent opposition, squeamish and extremely cowardly.

When Peter nailed himself for eggs on Red Square, everyone saw a strange tattoo on his right shoulder, preserved from childhood, an alien from the film of the same name. This is no accident. He differed from everyone not so much by his art or constitulation even as the way of life itself. With his unshakable firmness to make his choice as if he is a master not only for himself, but also on this earth. Peter is no longer for the majority: he is a stranger for all of us, waiting for their fate. And this is unforgivable. The post -Soviet society, part of which I am, can forgive, accept a lot from the outside world - someone else's success, contempt, vanity, selfishness, lies, theft, violence, betrayal, even the murder and torment of loved ones. But it will never forgive the disconnection of its member from the "common fate", a way out of the collective body. From the body of a noble universal dependent suffering. For any of our teams or for a huge mass, a crowd, an organized group, just friends and like -minded people, in general, for all variations of the Society of the performance, a self -sufficient, separated personality is absolutely unbearable. Let it be sharp, albeit with strange ideas about the falsity of traditional relations in the family and marriage, disgustingly not hypnotized by the windows of the “documentary” theater surrounding us. And it scares. After all, after all, it is unfair. What does he live for? Who pays for it? This destroys solidarity. We’ll take hands, friends! We will look for a way out together! Are we together ??! After all, everyone will be bad at a time. It threatens death and even worse - a flight from our common prison. But from it, after all (and yet they know about it!) It is impossible to escape. They follow us, but we all follow that, God forbid, no one finds a way out, does not escape.

After the story with the Haunge Prize Gavel, which is awarded for a “creative protest”, but it was monitored and the money of which Peter gave the money to others, it became clear that he would not stop. Already after this action, almost everyone who was, as it were against the inhuman system, turned away from Peter. And the system was decided on a serious self -defense force. Peter was extremely dangerous for her. He, like that spark in a haystack, is a man who absolutely mastering the shape and capable of inspiring whole masses to the process of unique forming.

The turning point in the life of Oksana and Peter was the counter action to squeeze them as an undesirable and dangerous element from the country. Nobody counted on such a level of attention. The versions of the scandal and the “proposals” appeared to plant all four, including children. Petya’s heart was not separated from his head, he did not save his reputation, although he proved several times that he was not afraid of prison or death. He saved his daughters. He is impeccable. Only this is another impeccability. The highest that rejects the choice that does not run for the ideal, but protects someone else's life, possibly breaking its own. Perhaps when a person passes through the seven -month regulations of silence in prison, irreversible changes occur with him. The regulations are changing. Some disappeared, and some have a sense of humor, the ability to laugh at their fate.

A civilized person of the 21st century is faced with an unbearable choice of two opposite regimes (regulations) of his existence - choice and fate. Each of them in its own way turns our life into torment. But in modern culture, the choice of choice wins and becomes the main one in social relations and in personal. As Polina Aronson says in the “romantic modes”, the reason for this is liberal democracy, maybe something else, but, most likely, the fact that a modern person considers affection, love, friendship, fidelity to principles, not to mention honor, much less value than a sense of freedom. To understand this triumph of the regulation of choice in human relations, it makes sense to look at the general context of the development of society from the Enlightenment, when there was a turn to the individual. In the economy, the consumer receives control over the manufacturer, in the religious sphere, the believer takes responsibility for the church, it is important that I look, and not what I look at. Even in love, the subject of adoration gradually becomes less important than the subject. Back in the XIV century, Petrarch, looking at the golden curls of Laura, calls the object of his passion divine, taking him for the most exalted evidence of the being of the Lord. And only after 600 years, the hero of Thomas Mann, blinded by some other hair, comes to the conclusion that it was he who is the cornerstone of love. That is, the lover managed to move the center of attention from a lover to himself. Now a person is interested exclusively “I” with all his injuries, idiosyncrazia, erotic dreams. Unlike the lovers of the past, who have lost themselves and supervised as small children, the new romantic hero treats his own emotions rationally, consults with a psychoanalyst, collects instructions, certificates, reads the operating manual, self -improves, trying to avoid conflicts in every possible way. He masters the language of choice, tries to use neurolinguistic programming and translates his emotions into the language of numbers, evaluating the benefits and possible losses. People are crowded with rules that are already brought to complete insanity and biologically determined. They perceive themselves not just as an object of desire, but as a very inaccessible object, almost as a god, invisible and terribly desired by everyone, but which will open only to the elect. A modern person no longer loves anyone who does not love him. He knows how to take care of himself. He begins to love his head, not his heart.

In the regulations of the choice, a neutral strip that separates us from the object of desire is a minefield, stuffed with corroding doubts, suspicions of all in all mortal sins, strange calls, hints, mails, destroyed profiles, non -lacquers. No tears, no sweaty palms, no suicides, no disorders, no disappointments, no poems, sonata, symphonies, paintings, letters, myths, sculptures. Especially sculptures as an archaic form of deification of the body of another. It’s almost impossible to sculpt yourself even from the photo. The psychological person in the regulation of the choice needs only one thing - a steady movement towards a healthy relationship between him and the cosmos, between him and society, between him and another person. The individual is absolutely autonomous as an ideal thing, polished, satisfied and ready to consume the other only after strict segregation.

As sociologists say, only Neanderthals can remain in bad relations all their lives. We have long grown out of bad heredity, set by millennia of the agricultural type of production, and we no longer need constancy anywhere, including monogamous relations. Fidelity is atavism. Now evolution forces us to look for manifestations of different partners in different areas to satisfy different needs, change work, change their place of residence, change gender, skin color, hair color and, possibly, even a view at different stages of life. We should not linger on anything, focus on anything. We must, like fast neurons, move to where it is interesting, to where we are loved, where we are well. We do not need an inert crowd, we need a flying crowd, like at the Burning Man festival, where you are absorbed into a silicone bus full of beautiful anonymous bodies, in order to “spit out” for the next transformation at the next stop. Unwanted pregnancy and vile diseases are subject to complete eradication. The fatality of fate and torment of love is in the archaic past. From now on, love and affection are no longer related to pain in any way. And for this you need to work on relationships. Work as we work on production efficiency. There can be no disasters in principle. If someone has a broken heart, he himself is to blame. He was stuck in the past, he is a savage. The problem, however, is that an electrically controlled bathtub will never replace a loving gaze or a long -awaited call. Not to mention that it is difficult to get pregnant from her. And no matter what futurologists, agents of new technologies or fashion magazines for successful and forever young, the greatest gift of love is written about this, is the recognition of your value as a person, a thing, in fact, social - this requires a significant other. Another who is not chosen, because he pierced your heart.

Having broken among all these scenarios of optimization and strategies doomed to the failure, we are faced with the greatest misfortune of the regulations of choice - self -absorption and self -sacrifice. And then Peter, manifesting itself as much as possible in the situation of the regulation of the choice, chooses the most effective way to manifest his self in this world - ruthlessness, fearlessness and uncompromising. And at that moment when he is ready to prove that he is the strongest person in the world, when he was ready to sacrifice anything for the sake of his super-ego (the fact that Lenin after Marx called the work of life or calling), he performs symbolic suicide-turns off the regulation of choice. And then the regime of fate automatically turns on. The only people on earth who are ready for the sake of his choice to pay the full price, for the sake of him to sacrifice everyone - his wife and his children - change his optics of his eyes. He refuses his choice, his reputation as an impeccable warrior, from all that was his name and subject of envy. He runs with children and a girlfriend to another country. Perhaps the regulations of fate, as in most cases, will lead him and his family to complete collapse. This regime, therefore, has lost its relevance that we are uncontrollable, unpredictable and too open to irrational impulses and hardships.

Belief in fate, covering a person at every clash with reality, causes unbearable pain. Almost everyone who has relied on her complain of irreparable losses, on melancholy and bitter loneliness. But Peter, abandoning the regulations of the choice, risks us to show how to find the courage to take unknown, take on unaccounted risks and not be afraid to be vulnerable. Show vulnerability, and not a flirty demonstration of your own weaknesses, aimed at finding out the limits of the patience of society. Existential vulnerability for the return of love, its mystery and for the restoration of its true essence. Love is an unpredictable force captivating you. Если понимание зрелости и самодостаточности в регламенте Выбора оказывается настолько пагубным для нашей жизни, то именно это понимание и следует пересмотреть. Чтобы стать по-настоящему взрослыми, мы должны понять непредсказуемость, которую приносит в нашу жизнь любовь к кому-то другому. Нам нужно вернуть себе право на любовные муки, на страдание и катастрофу самореализации и на отказ от выбора в главном — в служении близким людям. Революция взаимоотношений — это единственная революция, которая может что-то изменить в мире. В этом смысл последней акции.