Naked Russian Artist Strikes Anew, Cuts Off Earlobes To Protest Return Of Soviet-Era Policies

Pyotr Pavlensky, the Russian performance artists who caught global attention in 2013 by nailing his testicles to the Red Square's cobblestones in Moscow, is back with a vengeance and again without a stitch of clothing.

But he likely required stitching on his ears after Pavlensky cut on Sunday his earlobes while he sat naked on top of a wall at the Serbsky State Scientific Center for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. The resident of St Petersburg used a big kitchen knife to cut his right earlobe.

He said the performance, titled Separation, symbolises the use again in Russia of psychiatry to achieve political goals. The performance artist explained in a Facebook newsfeed, quoted by Mashable, "By again using psychology for political goals, the police give themselves the power to separate the sane from the insane. Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, the bureaucrat in white lab coat cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone."

However, like in his previous Moscow performance, Pavlensky was arrested by Russian police and sent to the city's Botkinskaya Hospital for treatment.

Dmitry Dinze, his lawyer, said on Monday that Pavlensky could have contracted pneumonia because of his exposure to the elements, but Dinze eventually retracted and said the artist is expected to be released from the medical facility.

He chose Serbsky as the site for his latest naked performance since the facility was notorious during the Soviet era for diagnosing dissidents as mentally ill to prevent them from their subversive activities. However, human rights groups accused the Russian government of bringing back the practice, citing the case of Bolotnaya Square protester Mikhail Kosenko who was diagnosed by Serbsky as insane and required to undergo mandatory indefinite psychiatric care.

Besides Kosenko, Moscow-backed rebels captured Nadiya Savchenko, a female military pilot in Ukraine who is running in this week's parliamentary elections and was ordered to undergo trial for her alleged role in a conspiracy that caused the death of two Russian mediamen covering the eastern Ukraine war. Since last week, Savchenko has been undergoing psychiatric tests at Serbsky.

It is the third self-inflicting pain act for Pavlensky who, in July 2012, sewed his mouth while in front of the Kazan Cathedral in Moscow to voice his opposition to the prosecution of Pussy Riot, a punk rock group in Russia.

Here is the video of his second performance.

YouTube/TomoNews US