MODERN
ART: THE SOUND OF ONE HACK CRAPPING (2007)
You’re standing in an art gallery, puzzling over an exhibit
that looks like a random pile of junk. The text on the wall
doesn’t offer much help:
“This bricolage
of
cowboy belt buckles, Mickey Mouse night-lights, power
drills, movie receipts and other found objects is used with
unsettling effect to critique the power structures of the
Western world. The playful incorporation of the artist’s
soiled panties completes this epic work from a
paradigm-busting enfant
terrible.”
You step back for another look, thinking you’re missing
something. You wonder if you’re being conned.
I’m making up the scenario, but we’ve all been there.
There’s really no mystery, though. Some varieties of
contemporary art aren’t meant for the rubes. They’re
make-work projects for curators, critics, speculators, and
institutional artists. And if the work confuses or
irritates everyone else, so much the better. To hell with
the rubes if they don’t have deconstruction decoder rings.
Let them putz around in the museum art shop, and waddle
home with their Monet calendars and Edvard Munch “Scream”
coffee cups.
Along these lines, a Vancouver-raised artist whipped up
some controversy last week at the Baltic Centre for
Contemporary Art in Gateshead, with his depiction of Christ
with an erection. The public outrage meant more free
publicity for Terence Koh, who sometimes smears his work
with his own blood and semen. (Something to do with the
high cost of art supplies, perhaps?)
According to wikipedia, the Emily Carr graduate's "diverse
work involves queer, punk, and pornographic sensibilities."
But he's hardly a marginal figure, considering his work has
been shown in the Whitney Museum of Modern Art and The
Royal Academy in London.
You could call Koh’s angle on Jesus inspired,
confrontational, edgy, manipulative, blasphemous -- or just
plain stupid. But you can't call it original. In 1989, the
US artist Andres Serrano created controversy with his "Piss
Christ," a photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged
in a glass of the artist's urine. Human waste is as old hat
as trashing religious icons. In 1961 the Italian artist
Piero Manzoni exhibited 90 tins of his own excrement as an
ironic statement on the art market. (In 2002, The Tate
Gallery paid out £22,300 for an edition of Manzoni's
masterpoo, a price that made the contents more valuable by
weight than 24-carat gold.)
Let’s not forget the Frankfurt Museum of Modern Art, which
exhibited a resin-coated 1995 canvas by the German artist
Anton Henning, called Meatballs,
Gherkins, Beetroot, Potatoes, Watermelon, Lemon Juice,
Riesling, and Large Brownie. You
can guess the medium. There have been other “artists”
working along the same lines, but I’ll spare you the
details.
Not surprisingly, taxpayers tend to be a bit tetchy about
how their money is spent on the arts. Back in the early
eighties, Canadians were outraged when the National Gallery
of Canada spent $1.75 million on painter Barnett Newman’s
“Voice of Fire,” which has been described, quite
accurately, as a big red rectangle on a blue background.
That’s pretty tame, controversy-wise. Considering the crap
the National Gallery could have purchased, it seems almost
endearing that Canadian taxpayers once went ballistic over
something resembling a racing stripe on a Sudbury
headbanger’s Camaro.
These days the public is overwhelmed with visual
information. So what’s a poor artist to do to break
through? In arts, as in comedy or theatre, the impulse to
shock usually signals desperation, a failure of the
imagination. Yet with “serious art” so peripheral to
popular culture, notoriety is one of the few ways left to
break through the noise.
Controversial artistic exhibits keep critics, curators and
artists believing that they’re engaged in important work,
and defending the ramparts of sophistication from
know-nothing philistines. The chardonnay-sipping museum
patrons gets a cheap thrill from “transgressive” exhibits,
while the rubes reading the arts section at home experience
a bracing blast of indignation. The shock-artist, who’s at
the centre of this tempest in a tempura can, gets a bump in
the international art market. Everybody wins -- except for
the majority of the public, which has never had time for
the subsidized head games and speculative frenzies of a
privileged few.
In other words, this sort of shock-and-art will always
remain peripheral to popular culture. Today, most visual
artists graduate to industrial design, video-gaming and the
film industry. Their efforts are often more challenging
than anything the gallery scene has to offer. For example,
the TV cartoon series South Park tips over more sacred
cows, with greater cleverness and for a much wider
audience, than all the sphincters of North American
installation artists combined.
Geoff Olson
