Russian artist Pytr Pavlensly set fire to the floor windows of a branch of the Banque de France on the Place de la Bastille. A video showed him standing in the doorway of the fortresslike building, a black-clad figure framed by wings of flame.
The site had been carefully chosen. The Banque de France is the French equivalent of the Federal Reserve, and this particular outpost was erected where the Bastille prison, stormed by revolutionary mobs in 1789, once stood.
In the text accompanying the work, titled “Lighting,” Pavlensky declared the bank a symbol of modern-day tyranny and central bankers the new despots.
Previously, Pavlensky was arrested and convicted in Russia for nailing his scrotum to the Red Square pavement, and again in Paris for wrapping himself naked in barbed wire in a public space, presenting les gendarmes with a classic situationist dilemma: hurting him while arresting the performer and face prosecution for negligence or letting him go.
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