Protest artist cuts off earlobe, months after he nailed scrotum to Red Square

A controversial Russian artist who once nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square has been taken to hospital after cutting off his earlobe to protest at the forced psychiatric treatment of dissidents.

Pyotr Pavlensky, a St Petersburg-based performance artist, climbed naked on to the roof of the Serbsky psychiatric centre in Moscow on Sunday and cut off his right earlobe with a large kitchen knife.

Covered in blood, he was removed from the roof by police and taken to a Moscow hospital. Doctors thought he might also have contracted pneumonia, his lawyer, Dmitry Dinze, said on Monday.

But later on Monday, Dinze said Pavlensky did not have pneumonia or lasting problems from the severed earlobe and would probably be discharged from the hospital soon.

In a statement on his wife's Facebook page on Sunday, Pavlensky said that cutting off his earlobe was meant to represent the damage resulting from police "returning to the use of psychiatry for political goals".

He wrote: "Armed with psychiatric diagnoses, the bureaucrat in a white lab coat cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone."