Power for Art’s Sake / Reading Pyotr Pavlensky’s Subject–Object Art Theory

Through a dense network of references, from Baroque tenebrism to Courbet’s Salon des Refusés and the long tradition of art enlisted in service of political authority, in his latest book artist Pyotr Pavlensky maps the intellectual architecture behind his practice.

I first encountered Pyotr Pavlensky through a pixelated university Wi-Fi connection, watching him speak in a low, rapid Russian that I could not fully grasp. What reached me instead were his eyes, alert and eroded, sharpened by exile in Paris. I thought I already understood the contours of his practice, the images that had circulated endlessly online, the body as a site of political friction. But the conversation shifted the moment he revealed that his primary artistic reference has always been Caravaggio. The connection felt improbable, almost provocative, until I opened Subject-Object Art Theory, his new book published by Seagulls Books. Only then did the pairing acquire clarity.

The book is neither memoir nor manifesto but a theoretical treatise. It attempts to give a name and a structure to a practice repeatedly misread as performance. Pavlensky starts by dismantling the assumption that “everything is performance”, a claim that, in his view, neutralises artistic differences and collapses practices into a single vague category. To counter this, he proposes the term that anchors the entire essay: subject–object art. The book is arranged around pairings of historical figures, a structure that mirrors Pavlensky’s aim of breaking down binary thinking. These couples of names are not meant to illustrate fixed categories but to expose the fragility of the categories themselves.

Before defining this new artistic framework, Pavlensky returns to a question that has haunted his decade of practice. Is political art produced through political means, or is politics produced through artistic means? This distinction matters because, for him, meaning never exists in the abstract. It always serves something, whether we acknowledge it or not. Art has always been enrolled in the service of power, whether through the monumental propaganda of Napoleon or the ideological engines of Socialist Realism with Lunacharsky, Gronsky and Gorky. In all these cases, art becomes decorative, a visual arm of ideology. What matters is not the style, the quality or the content, but the fact that the artwork performs the function assigned to it by a governing system.

Pavlensky’s intervention lies in proposing a way out of this dynamic. Political art, in his definition, is not art about politics but art that forces the mechanisms of power to become unwitting collaborators. It is an art that operates inside the machinery of control, using its instruments as raw material. Decorative art serves power. Political art compels power to serve art. This reversal is what he calls a turnaround. To illustrate it, he returns to one of his most widely circulated events, Fixation, staged in 2013 in Red Square. A naked Pavlensky sits on the cold cobblestones, his scrotum nailed to the ground with a twenty-centimetre metal spike. The shock of the gesture soon gives way to a stranger image. Motionless and silent, he ceases to resemble a person and becomes almost a sculpture with human skin, an object rather than a subject. The police arrive. They shout orders, but objects do not respond. They call superiors. They wait for instructions. Their authority cannot function in the usual way. They must improvise, negotiate, escalate. In that moment, power begins to generate material for the artwork. Pavlensky insists that this is not metaphorical or symbolic. The reports filed by police officers, the paperwork produced by investigators, the legal proceedings that follow, all become the substance of the work. The institution believes it is suppressing an act. In reality, it is producing it. The focus of the investigation is no longer the artist’s guilt but the creation of new materials that the artist later selects, archives or recontextualises. Power enriches art by fulfilling its own protocols.

This is the core of the subject-object art. It does not reduce the world to a single object but identifies a very specific set of objects that emerge only when subjects of authority exercise their power. Judges, police officers, bureaucrats, media outlets, institutional bodies: they enter the artwork not by consent but by function. After the turnaround, power remains power and art remains art, but their usual hierarchy collapses. Authority works for art rather than art working for authority. One of the most striking aspects of Pavlensky’s theory is his insistence on the loss of control. Once the event begins, the artist relinquishes authorship. Consequences determine whether something becomes an artwork. If nothing happens, it dissolves. If the chain reaction unfolds, the event becomes unavoidable, transforming both the artist’s life and the lives of those drawn into its orbit. This is why these events cannot occur regularly. They produce irreversible shifts, both socially and personally.

Media occupies a specific place in this mechanism: as Pavlensky argues that representation always involves decontextualisation. Journalists isolate the fragment that best serves public opinion, amputating the rest. Far from neutral, this process restores the balance of power by aligning narrative control with the state. The work can be destroyed through this reduction, yet even that destruction becomes part of the subject-object dynamic, another example of how external forces shape the artwork far beyond the artist’s intentions. Throughout the book, Pavlensky revisits other his major events, from Carcass and Freedom to Segregation, Threat, Pornopolitics and Lightning. Each becomes a case study in how institutions behave when confronted with an act that refuses interpretation and resists absorption into traditional artistic categories. The events reveal a pattern of tension, misreading and accumulation, in which the apparatus of power produces aesthetic, legal and narrative outcomes the artist could never script in advance.

The final chapters turn inward, toward the figure of the artist. Pavlensky describes artists, poets and writers as those whose eyes have looked into human reality without flinching, eyes that have seen hell. For him, public reputation is irrelevant and often inversely correlated with authenticity. The worse the reputation, the more ungovernable the work. Prison becomes, paradoxically, the ideal environment for thinking about neoplasticism, because it forces the artist into absolute non-compromise. The conclusion offers a radical reframing of a familiar credo. Instead of art for art’s sake, Pavlensky proposes power for art’s sake. The artist does not escape power, because power is everywhere. Instead, the artist creates circumstances in which power must work on their behalf, generating forms, documents and narratives that the artist later shapes into works. It is a model that challenges both the economic conditions of artistic production and the aesthetic categories used to classify art.

Subject-Object Art Theory does not ask the reader to agree with Pavlensky, nor does it seek to justify his practice. What it offers is a framework to understand a body of work that has for years been misread or deliberately miscast. It is an invitation to reconsider what political art might look like when politics itself becomes the medium. If Pavlensky is right, then the true artwork begins only when the artist steps back and the machinery of power begins to move. And that movement, unpredictable and often violent, becomes the only guarantee of authenticity.

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Photographer: Maxime Ballesteros / @maximeballesteros

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Peter Pavlensky with a group of activists during the action “Freedom” in support of activists Kiev Maidan in central St. Petersburg.

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Photographer: Maxime Ballesteros / @maximeballesteros