… For Acconci, the “point beyond which art shouldn’t be pushed is when you start to make a fool of the viewer, take advantage of a viewer’s gullibility. That’s immoral.” He adds, “I don’t like art where the artist becomes all-powerful and either people are used as material or the audience is being turned into a kind of sucker.”
That’s from a long, and good article in ArtNewsOnline, How Far is Too Far? by Phoebe Hoban. I will give you a bunch of snips that I hope will get you interested, but you really need to read the piece in full to make sense of it:
… when does shock outweigh artistic value in work that is designed to be provocative? And in a global culture jaded by graphic movies, rap songs, and deliberately repulsive reality TV (think Fear Factor—famous for its “gross stunts” where sexy contestants are covered in maggots or forced to dive into sewage), is such a question even relevant?
… “Something’s being a work of art doesn’t excuse you from moral considerations,” says critic Arthur Danto. “The guy who dumps ink into one of Damien Hirst’s lambs and turns it black—that’s property damage even if it’s a performance. You can murder someone and call it a work of art, but you are still a murderer. Morality trumps esthetics. That’s my view.”
… As for Eccles’s own curatorial responsibility, he says, “It’s not about what the public should or shouldn’t be exposed to; it’s what you should or shouldn’t be complicit in.” Referring to the Sierra tattoos, he adds, “Humiliating people permanently within an artwork in public is for me the antithesis of what we hope an artwork will do.”
… The Whitney Museum’s director, Adam Weinberg, explains, “Our role has been, historically, to follow the lead of artists, and that can mean territory that is not so comfortable, even for curators and directors of institutions. But if you choose to support an artist’s work, unless it will physically endanger the health of someone coming into the building, once we commit to put something on view, then we go where it has to go.”
… Biesenbach, chief curator at P.S.1 and chief curator of media at the Museum of Modern Art, … calls this genre exploitative reality. He explains, “In general, I have made the decision not to be the enabler of new pieces, but to show pieces that already exist.”
… As to why one would employ bodily harm at all, Abramovic answers, “In order to transcend the body. The reason for doing these art actions was not just to hurt myself and see how far it could go,” she insists. “It’s all about elevating the spirit and eliminating fear. It aims very high, and the body is just a tool, and once the body is just a tool, you can go very far. A razor can be like a pencil. Sometimes you need to disturb in order to make the space for somebody to think.”
… This spring, the ante was upped significantly when German artist Gregor Schneider announced plans for a performance piece that centers on a human death. Schneider wants to enlist a moribund person to die in a gallery, or, short of that, display a very recent corpse, in an effort “to show the beauty of death.” Beauty may be nothing but the “beginning of Terror, we’re still just able to bear,” as Rainer Maria Rilke put it. But the deliberate staging of death—the ultimate taboo—still remains well beyond the scope of what is considered acceptable as art.
Read the whole article. [ link ]
-Julie
