Shock
In 1917, the Cubist painter Marcel Duchamp took a factory-made urinal, turned it on its side, signed it with the name of an invented artist, “R. Mutt” (a joke, as Mott was the name of the company that mass-produced the urinals), and claimed that this “sculpture” was a great work of modern art.1
It was part of a new type of art that he called a “readymade,” the first of which was his 1914 Bottle Rack, which, as the name suggests, consisted of a rack for bottles. Duchamp, who had moved from Paris to New York in 1915, arranged to have a young woman submit Fountain to the Society of Independent Artists, a group he had cofounded as a New York–based answer to the Salon des Indépendants in Paris. It was claimed that R. Mutt was the sculptor, and Duchamp did not, at the time, reveal that he was behind it. The young woman was likely Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven, who may have been the actual originator or cooriginator of the urinal-as-sculpture concept.
The initial response of the society board of directors was that this urinal was not a work of art. They also deemed it indecent for display, as it brought the image of urination and excretion to mind, which was best left a private matter not dragged into the light. The sculpture was proposed for a society exhibition at the Grand Central Palace in New York, scheduled to open on April 10, 1917. By a narrow margin, the board decided not to include Fountain in the show. Outraged, Duchamp and another board member, collector Walter Arensberg, resigned on the spot.
This had been, in part, a test of just how democratic this new society would be. Back in 1912, one of Duchamp’s greatest works, a Cubist painting entitled Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, was accepted at the Salon des Indépendants in Paris and was featured in the catalogue. But the salon organizers grew concerned that the subject matter was too risqué. They did not have the cojones to confront Duchamp directly about this change of heart and instead asked his brothers, also artists, to ask him to voluntarily withdraw the painting prior to the opening of the show. He did this and did not make a public fuss, but it infuriated and disappointed him, and he would go on to describe this as a turning point in his life. That Cubist painting was not made to shock. It did not cause a scandal at the time because it was not shown at the salon, in the end, and Duchamp did not make a ruckus about having to withdraw it. He just burned on the inside, and determined to crash this world of art. He was no longer interested in the medium of which he was undoubtedly a master, Cubist painting, but instead shifted his interest to themes and media that were iconoclastic. He would blow down the barriers of what art could be. Shock would be his weapon of choice.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain (1917).
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALFRED STIEGLITZ, COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM NPR.
The society was enthusiastic about democratizing art exhibitions. Artists would hang or situate their own works in the gallery. The works would be displayed in alphabetic order of the artist’s surnames, so there could be no favoritism on the part of curators. Art submitted by members of the society would be shown without passing by a jury—all that was required was a $6 membership and entry fee. This meant that the decision by the board not to show Fountain went against the founding principles of the society. The board claimed they blocked its inclusion for reasons of moral decency rather than artistic merit, but it was blocked all the same. By offering up an intentionally shocking, provocative readymade, Duchamp had put the liberalism and open-mindedness of his fellow board members to the test. In his mind, they failed, though the vote to exclude the work was a narrow one.
A few days after the Grand Central Palace exhibition opened, on April 13, 1917, Duchamp retrieved Fountain from storage and brought it to be photographed by Alfred Stieglitz, the star photographer of New York at the time. A photograph was taken on April 19 (and the original Fountain was subsequently lost), and that photograph managed to shift opinions on the work. Stieglitz wrote in a letter on April 23, “The ‘Urinal’ photograph is really quite a wonder. Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful. And it’s true, it is. It has an oriental look about it. A cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman.”2
Was Duchamp laughing to himself about making a mockery of the art world? The answer is complicated. He was not trying to show that the emperor wears no clothes but instead to detonate what the public considers clothing fit for an emperor. The Dadaist magazine Duchamp cofounded, Blind Man, published an anonymous article (likely penned by Duchamp) arguing the merits of Fountain as an artwork, along with Stieglitz’s photograph. In it, we can hear Duchamp’s rationalization:
Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ shop windows. Whether Mr. Mutt, with his own hands, made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object.3
This article helped to sway some skeptics in favor of the work, as did Stieglitz’s photograph of it. An artwork (a photograph) of a found object perhaps provided a filter that made it easier to see the readymade object as art in itself. The photographic print transformed the cold, practical porcelain into something simultaneously more sculptural (because it is more abstract) and more painterly (because of the grayscale of the black-and-white photo). Duchamp’s iconoclasm was not shock just for the sake of it or just to garner publicity. It was shock designed to shake things up—shock with a positive purpose.
Duchamp was trying to make a revolutionary statement, and he succeeded. His claim was that anything an artist deems a work of art is, in fact, a work of art. The artist does not need to have created it himself. The traditional art historical criteria—that “good” art should exhibit artistic skill, that it should be interesting, and that it should be beautiful—was no longer relevant to the twentieth century, Duchamp claimed. Now an artwork only had to be interesting and provocative. Art was whatever an artist said it was.
Many people thought this ridiculous, but many others found this iconoclastic concept exhilarating. Duchamp’s action can be considered a point in history when art split in two distinct directions, never to meet again.
Much ink has been spilled in debate over the relative merits of traditional art versus conceptual art, art in which the idea is of interest but the art itself may not be anything more than a conduit for the idea. The result was that twentieth-century art split into two distinct factions, each progressing in its own direction, one no longer comparable to the other. On the one hand there was the traditional, academic avenue, in which art is linked to the history of art and follows the traditional criteria. On the other hand, there was the Duchampian avenue, from store-bought urinals up to sharks in formaldehyde tanks. Anything could be art: It need not exhibit artistic skill and it need not be beautiful.
It must, however, be interesting and provocative. Many subsequent artists, one might argue too many, interpreted provocative to mean shocking, when the two are not necessarily the same.
Aristotle and the Art Split
Before Duchamp’s Fountain, great art was meant to fulfill three criteria, as described by Aristotle in his book On Poetics: (1) Art should be good, as in well-made and skillfully executed, accomplishing what the artist set out to create; (2) art should be beautiful, a subjective conceit but implying either aesthetic or moral beauty that will inspire the viewer; and (3) art should be interesting, thought-provoking, mysterious, new, emotionally provocative.
From Fountain on, art split into two avenues. One avenue followed the traditional art historical road, in which all three characteristics were important. In this vein, newly created art was heavily influenced by past artists. There are still artists today who follow Aristotle’s ideals, of course. We might consider John Currin or Kehinde Wiley as prominent examples. Most people see these works as “real” art and are dismissive of the conceptual work of artists like Duchamp, often with the tone of “if I feel that I could make a similar work myself, then it must not be good.”
We are left with the two most important paths forward: the route that embraces the classical conception of art and the Duchampian route. This second avenue emanated out of Duchamp’s new ideas, and said that art only had to be interesting, rejecting art historical influences. Most contemporary art walks the path that Duchamp began.
Works of a conceptual nature should be considered independent of the continuum of art history, not compared with, say, a Michelangelo sculpture, but rather taken in and of themselves. In the contest of “which is a better work of art” between a Michelangelo sculpture and Duchamp’s Fountain, Michelangelo would win by a landslide. However, the two categories should not be placed in competition with each other—they require separate sets of criteria to evaluate. The key is not to compare the two styles of art directly but to consider each as its own field, each one brilliant and flawed. It is also key to understand that there is a difference between provocative and shocking.
First, the dictionary definitions: “provocative” excites appetite or passion, is a stimulant, is apt to incense or enrage, to provoke or excite;4 “shock is the emotional or physical reaction to a sudden, unexpected, and usually unpleasant event or experience . . . a feeling of being offended or upset by something you consider wrong or unacceptable” or, making a metaphor out of the verb definition, “the effect of one object violently hitting another, causing damage or a slight movement” which, in art terms, swaps out “object” for “idea.”5 Artists always relate to their present times, whether they do so consciously or not. Great art has always provoked, avoided the mundane, and created something edgy that would summon up a reaction. Provocation is striving for a reaction. It is less violent than shock and tends toward the positive: exciting passion, even if the passion is rage. Shock is about feeling upset or offended because something is wrong, going against your morals or what you understand as right. It is easier to shock than to provoke. Shock is more of a blunt instrument. And in the art world, shock comes when one idea about what art is, can be, or should be hits against another, causing damage or slight movement. The only thing that no artist wants is no reaction at all.
Cattelan, Ai Weiwei, and Art as Prison Break
The most talked-about conceptual artwork as I was writing this book was Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian.
Derivative work inspired by Maurizio Cattelan, Comedian (2019).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS BY USER JANE023.
On his way to his own exhibit at the prestigious Art Basel Miami in 2019, Cattelan stopped at a Whole Foods supermarket and bought a banana. When he got to the fair, he used duct tape to attach the banana to the wall. That was the entirety of the work. The mundane silliness of this creation story is part of Cattelan’s shtick. He loves to show that the emperor has no clothes, mocking the art world that has made him wealthy and famous. His titles bristle with irony, but they are also ingenious. He is not showing the middle finger just for the sake of it. He shows us the middle finger in brilliant ways. Consider America, his solid gold toilet displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York—in the bathroom. It is a functional toilet (the queues to use it—not just to admire it, but to use it—are long). It comments elegantly and wittily on the commodification and rampant capitalism of America which, as Cattelan knows perfectly well, are what support his lifestyle.
Comedian is an example of shock art. Cattelan is a veteran. Perhaps his best-known work before this one was 1999’s The Ninth Hour, a hyper-lifelike sculpture of Pope John Paul II having been struck by a meteorite—an “act of God” that made waves among upset Catholics and made Cattelan a household name.6 It should be noted that, while The Ninth Hour is an example of shock art, it is also Aristotelian in that it is a skillfully executed sculpture. Comedian is neither beautiful nor does it exhibit skill, so it represents the Duchampian path. The artist was so hugely confident in his place in the establishment, that he could do no wrong, that he tested the theory. Cattelan claims he spent a year considering Comedian, first thinking he would make a banana made of resin, before it occurred to him that “the banana is supposed to be a banana.”7 It echoes his 1999 work A Perfect Day, in which he duct-taped a gallerist to the wall of his gallery.8 It comments at once on the crazy prices for which art sells (there are three versions of Comedian, and each has sold to a collector for around $120,000—one wonders what happens as the banana rots), as well as the overblown prices of food, like a banana at Whole Foods (there is an Arrested Development episode that riffs off the joke that rich people don’t know how much a banana should cost, guessing about thirty cents). It pays homage to Andy Warhol’s painting of a banana, which was used for a Velvet Underground album cover. But then this work of shock art became the victim of another work of shock art, when Georgian artist David Datuna ate one of the bananas as a performance he titled The Hungry Artist.9
Cattelan’s attitude, and his status in the art world, give him complete freedom. Anything he makes will be considered art of the highest caliber and will sell accordingly. He loves to flex this muscle, as he did in a literal escape act. In A Sunday in Rivara (1991), he gave strict instructions to be left alone; no one could come into the castle art gallery until the hour of the opening, including the gallery staff.10 Not knowing what sort of installation or performance to expect, staff and visitors entered the gallery and walked from room to room. There was nothing there; it was totally empty. In the last room, they found only an open window, with a rope made of knotted bed sheets leading out of it. That was the work: the artist’s escaping from having to make a work and being celebrated for it.
But Cattelan’s “escape” is from a first-world position of privilege, wealth, and success. There are stresses accompanying it, to be sure, but it is very much relative. He might not feel like yet another big opening, but for much of the world, this is playing the world’s smallest violin. There are significant artists who made their names by being thrown into actual prisons, not the gilded cage Cattelan slipped out of, because of their artistic attempts to break free from repression.
Shocking acts involving art can be about the art or the notoriety, but they can also be attempts to shock a system, to make a political statement—what is sometimes labeled as “protest art.” Some are simple symbols of the subversion of a system. Consider Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s An Animal That Looks Like a Llama but Is Really an Alpaca (2017). Understanding it requires an exegesis to the point where one appears among the FAQs of an exhibit of his work that was held at the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, DC.11
Fair enough that what requires a roadmap for viewers outside of China is subtle, sophisticated, and clear enough to the Chinese—the wallpaper is, upon closer examination, comprised of a graphic pattern that conceals references to Ai Weiwei’s imprisonment and challenges to Chinese authority, including Twitter logos, handcuffs, and surveillance cameras. The work that propelled him to international stardom was According the What (1995), which involves brightly painted pots set before a triptych of black-and-white photographs in which Ai appears to knowingly drop and smash an antique Chinese urn. He was commenting on Mao’s movement to wipe out traditional Chinese cultural heritage (during the period of 1966–1976) and was hugely influenced by Duchamp. He would buy objects at markets in China that he considered like Duchamp’s readymades. Ai tells that he bought a pair of two-thousand-year-old Han dynasty urns that he smashed for these photos (the first one he dropped did not come out well in the photograph, so he had to smash the other). But it is not clear whether we are to believe him or whether the urns were modern replicas (he runs an architecture and design company called Fake, so he clearly enjoys the “is it or isn’t it” game). The goal was shock: that he would “sacrifice” a precious antiquity in order to make a point and that this shock would lead simultaneously to his renown as an artist and a dialogue about Mao’s cultural heritage genocide attempts.
If these examples of fighting the system through art-as-shock-as-commentary are too subtle, consider the polar opposite, sledgehammer approach of punk band Pussy Riot “performing” at Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow.12
On February 21, 2012, members of the collective, wearing homemade balaclavas, staged a guerilla performance inside the cathedral. Three members of the group were arrested and charged with “hooliganism motivated by religious hatred.” They argued that their action was a protest against the Orthodox Church’s support of Vladimir Putin. The action was filmed and went viral online. The subsequent trial was heavily covered in the media. The shock tactic of the performers, motivated by political protest, was counter-punched by the Russian authorities, arresting and imprisoning members of the collective, though the members could hardly have been surprised. If their goal was notoriety of the collective, then it certainly worked (though at a great sacrifice). However, the specific political issue was lost to most in the cacophony of press coverage. The general public understood that they were anti-Putin, but the subtleties beyond that, the objection to Orthodox leaders supporting Putin’s reelection, are recognized only by true students of their activities.
Shock leads to publicity that leads to awareness of both artist and (sometimes, and to a far lesser extent) a cause. The problem, if it is indeed a problem, is that the public tends to remember the shocking action, and probably the actor, but the rationale or cause tends to recede into oblivion, recalled only by scholars and those closest to the cause.
Schlegl and Burning for Attention
In the idyllic alpine village of Sela pri Kamniku, local artist and architect Tomaž Schlegl and the village cultural society built a hollow twenty-five-foot-tall statue, dubbed “Slovenia’s Statue of Liberty,” that looks like a sort of colossal nutcracker Donald Trump. On August 28 and 29, 2019, world media enthusiastically ran stories about the statue. Cleverly mocking Trump with an intriguing piece of conceptual art is, of course, delightful clickbait. The statue was seen to mock Trump, and as such was delightedly broadcast on the landing page of all imaginable news sites, from the BBC to the Washington Post, from Finland to Japan.
Tomaž Schlegl, Statue of Freedom (2019).
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR.
But not everyone was amused. A certain group of more conservative villagers were dismayed by the notoriety of the statue, which they feared would put their tiny village on the map for the wrong reason, making it a laughingstock or incurring the wrath of the president portrayed (whatever that might entail). There was even a call to burn the statue, or at least force it to be moved from the land on which it was temporarily displayed. Not wishing to upset the locals, the cultural society was at first resigned to losing the statue, perhaps symbolically burning it (to keep one step ahead of the grumpy group of locals, who considered doing so one moonless night). But it is a wily installation, a work of folk artistry and a wry commentary. It had already made international headlines and had already made Sela a point of pilgrimage for curious tourists. It was temporarily moved away from the village center, to the private property of a farmer farther up the mountain, giving it a far better view.13
Schlegl is careful to say that this is a kip svobode, Slovenian for a “Statue of Freedom” (or “Statue of Liberty”) and any likeness to politicians—Trump, for instance—he leaves to the interpretation of the public. Call it the Roland Barthes defense: Proper artists do not interpret their work on behalf of others, but create, present, and allow the public to interpret it as they see fit. His goal is to provoke thought and comment on contemporary politics.
With the statue a proven tourist attraction, it was just a matter of time before a bold mayor invited it to move to their hometown. It was offered domicile, as Slovenian newspapers joked, by the nearby town of Moravče. It arrived there in early January 2020. A few days later, on January 8, the statue made international headlines again when arsonists burned it to the ground in an act of vandalism.
The funny thing about it is that Schlegl was completely delighted.
The tone of the headlines that reported the burning of what has been referred to as the “Slovenian Trump statue” seems to give a sense that the arson was an act of pro-Trump protestation over a statue that clearly makes fun of its subject. The implication was that the artist should feel bad about this destruction and that he got what was coming to him for taking the piss out of a person who at least a portion of the population thinks is great (or at least not catastrophically problematic, which is saying something). But Schlegl always planned that this should be a temporary statue. The idea was to burn it ritually in a bonfire on Halloween 2019—Burning Man meets a witch trial. But the locals got nervous about burning Trump in effigy and got cold feet. Schlegl felt that the concept was not complete, the work unfinished without its flaming end.
And so, reluctantly for the artist, a new plan was hatched, to move the statue elsewhere and let it remain “alive.” The mayor of Moravče saw this as an opportunity to raise the visibility of his town and draw some tourists. So the statue was brought from Sela to Moravče, about thirteen kilometers away. There was a grand ceremony to install it. Within days, it was dramatically burned to the ground.
Was this an act of vandalism (random destruction without ideological motivations) or iconoclasm (destruction for symbolic reasons)? It’s a better media story to report that it was either pro-Trump iconoclasts who destroyed something that mocked their hero or anti-Trump iconoclasts who destroyed the statue in order to burn Trump in effigy. Schlegl is firmly in the second category—he wanted the statue to be burned to symbolize the destruction of populist, neofascist-type leaders in general.
The actual rationale for the act appears to be far more prosaic and lame. At the unveiling ceremony, several people overheard some local teenagers talking about getting gasoline in order to burn the statue. It was likely an idiotic prank undertaken by bored teens to get some attention. But they inadvertently managed to spark more than just their gasoline—they’ve sparked a debate and world headlines. And whatever the impetus of the arsonists, the artist is thrilled that his conceptual work has finally been completed.
Whether related or not, a second famously grotesque statue in Slovenia, meant to look like Trump’s wife, Slovenian model Melania Trump, which stood above her native Sevnica, was burned down on July 5, 2020. If only this were the act of an artist, it would have more resonance than the more probable culprit: more bored teenagers.14
ISIS and the Shock of the Act against the Art
If the act of arson that incinerated the “Trumpcracker” were also an act by an artist, there would be a good deal more poetic resonance to it. One should not condone attacking art as an act of art unto itself (although this has been claimed by some vandals and iconoclasts, including Tony Shafrazi, whose spray-painting of Picasso’s Guernica we discussed in the previous chapter), but it is important to understand that art has been targeted because targeting it produces shock. Sometimes it’s not about the art; the art is mere collateral damage to trigger a desired effect: shock, outrage, publicity.
Such was the case when ISIS posted videos of their smashing ancient statuary (many of which were actually modern replicas, it turned out) and the more heinous extremes of blowing up ancient monuments at Palmyra.15 They sought publicity for their cause, radical fundamentalism, and wished to provoke outrage. Their choice of target was based more on what would dismay “the West” than objection to the art itself (which predated Muhammad and therefore could not logically have adhered to Islamic principles). The intentionality is what separates two similar acts of destruction: vandalism and iconoclasm. Iconoclasm, which comes from the Greek word ikon, meaning “symbol,” is damaging or destroying something because of the target’s symbolic value. Vandalism is damaging or destroying without regard for what the target symbolizes or represents, where the act of destruction, not the object itself, is the point. If ISIS targeted ancient statuary because it was not in keeping with Islamic restrictions on what art can be (no formal images permitted, as in Judaism; therefore no visual representations of God, Muhammad, or other prophets; hence the prevalence of abstract, geometric, or floral motifs), then their actions qualify as iconoclasm. If the goal was purely destruction and the subsequent outcry and attention from the West, then it was an act of vandalism. Either way, it was a concerted effort to shock. It might not be qualified as such had the destruction taken place and been discovered after the fact and reported by outsiders. But that ISIS filmed it themselves and posted the videos online is the clearest demonstration that it was a proactive attempt to shock, a scream for attention.
Diego Velázquez, Rokeby Venus (1647–1651).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, LONDON.
While the actions of ISIS represent institutional destruction encouraged by a regime, individuals have often attacked art, and not always simply because they were mentally unsound, as was the case on March 18, 2017, when a man “with no fixed abode” slashed Thomas Gainsborough’s The Morning Walk (1785) with a screwdriver at London’s National Gallery.16 The vandal did not appear to have a rationale for attacking the art, or this rather unobtrusive and unobjectionable work in particular. It seems that he was simply unstable.
Other times art is targeted because it will shock and make headlines, and this is strategic, a smaller-scale version of ISIS’s tactic. Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus was knifed in 1914 by a suffragette who was outraged at the arrest of Emmeline Pankhurst for demonstrating in favor of women’s right to vote.
The attacker smashed the glass that covered the painting and slashed it seven times before she was grabbed by security personnel. The slash marks were carefully healed and only three pale, barely visible scars can be seen on Venus’s back. The choice of object attacked was one the attacker felt objectified women: a nude female was commissioned by a man, painted by a man, and meant to be an object of beauty and perhaps sexual inspiration for a male audience.17 It therefore might seem objectionable to a fighter for women’s rights. But the primary goal was not the destruction of the artwork but the notoriety that came from the attack and arrest, allowing a media platform to speak out about the suffragette movement and in condemnation of the treatment of fellow suffragettes.
Diego Velázquez, Rokeby Venus (1647–1651) after 1914 knife attack.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS, PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN.
A similarly impressive repair can (barely) be spotted on Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. In 1974, an Irish Republican Army activist carved the letters “IRA” into the canvas. The patching was so good that today, the ghosts of those letters can be seen only when you examine the work at a sharp angle and against slanting light. The choice of artwork appears to have been random, though the location in an English institution like Cambridge University is perhaps meaningful. The goal of the action was to shock and, in doing so, draw attention to the IRA’s cause.
People strike out at objects that symbolize an idea that they wish to damage, with the artworks acting as a stand-in. These fork into two subcategories: acts intended to shock and acts that happened to shock. American soldiers tearing down statues of Saddam Hussein were not after shock value but rather the symbolism of removing likenesses of the deposed despot. Protestant destruction of Catholic statuary was about disapproval of a religion and the desire to destroy its representations and institutions in lieu of destroying the ideology. Shock was a by-product, and there was no doubt delight on the part of Protestant rioters thinking of the dismay they would cause Catholics who worshipped at the churches they targeted, but this, too, does not fall into the focus of this chapter. The acts of the Taliban and ISIS do, however, because while there was a faith-based rationalization for their actions (a Buddha statue “should not” be present in a fundamentalist Islamic country, or pre-Islamic statuary is not Islamic and therefore should not be present and admired), the acts of iconoclasm were proactively promoted, filmed, and distributed in order to produce shock. That proactivity is what includes them in the focus of this chapter.
You may have noticed that I have been careful not to include the names of any vandals in this text. That is on purpose and is something I would recommend as a policy for all media. We cannot prevent art from moving people, very occasionally even moving them to violence against it. But we can eliminate a frequent rationale for attacking art: achieving one’s fifteen minutes of fame. Would John Hinckley Jr. have attempted to murder Ronald Reagan if he knew that his name and picture would never be “promoted” by the media (and therefore Jodie Foster would never have known of him)?18 Would the suffragette have attacked the Rokeby Venus had she known that she would not be given a platform to speak about her noble cause to the media? If the media removed the incentive of simply getting attention, by refusing to publish names or photographs of vandals or their subsequent statements, it would eliminate one of the motivations for such incidents. The shock would remain, but the notoriety and platform would not.
This might weed out such actions as the one taken by celebrity musician Brian Eno, who urinated on Duchamp’s Fountain when it was on display at MOMA in New York.19 His rationalization for this act was a feeling of outrage that the work should be considered art—shock—but in what appears to have been a blatant attempt at getting media attention, he decided to shock back and take a whiz on the artwork.
This is a reaction fairly common among people who feel they don’t “get” conceptual art, those who think art should only be what follows the Aristotelian tripartite classical definition. So Eno rigged “a couple of feet of clear plastic tubing, along with a similar length of galvanized wire,” filled the tube with urine, then slipped “the whole apparatus down my trouser-leg.” He put one end of the tube into the display case and let it rip. He dubbed this “re-commode-ification” and used it as the focus of a public talk he was giving that night.
Eno is an artist and musician, so his articulated lack of understanding of Duchamp’s concept behind Fountain is a surprise—or an act of cunning. Because Eno wound up turning his protest at what he calls the silliness of the art world into an act of performance, an artwork of his own. He shocked shock, and he did it for the shock value, sang the praises of his own action in a public talk that very night, and enthusiastically described his action in interviews, documentaries, and memoirs. Perhaps Brian Eno is more insightful than his words make him appear. But he is also just one of many artists who thought it was a fine idea to urinate in Fountain.20
The funny thing is that Duchamp might well have approved of these acts.
Ofili and the Shock of the Weird
Would you fork over a million bucks to own someone’s unmade, suspicious-liquid-stained bed? Have you ever stood in your living room thinking, “You know what this needs? A bust made of frozen blood plugged in next to the TV?” How much would you invest in a pile of elephant shit shaped into the boob of the Virgin Mary? How about a pickled goat rammed through a spare tire?
Welcome to the shock tactics of contemporary art. The Duchampian path, in which “interesting” is the only important component to a successful work of (conceptual) art, has given birth to an array of works that are readily mocked, result in head-scratching and confusion, and yet have rich markets, have books written about them, and are, indeed, proper works of art worthy of attention—though of course with the aforementioned caveat that they inhabit a parallel but distinct world of what should be considered art from the classical, Aristotelian lineage of works good, beautiful, and interesting.
On July 1, 2017, My Bed by Tracey Emin was sold at auction for £2.5 million ($3.3 million). Part found art, part sculpture, part conceptual work, part readymade, the entire installation consists of Emin’s actual unkempt bed. She looked at it after a self-destructive multiweek bender of booze, drugs, and promiscuous sex, and decided to leave it just as it was. For her, it was a snapshot of her behavior, memento of a raucous period in her life. Featuring used condoms and pregnancy tests, bottles of liquor, drug paraphernalia, and assorted nefarious stains, it has been a centerpiece of London’s Saatchi Gallery for years. Charles Saatchi bought it in 2001 for £150,000 ($250,000), so he turned quite a profit in the sale, certainly a world record for an unmade bed covered in suspect stains.
Many art historians, myself included, like (but perhaps do not admire) such works. “I’m particularly interested in works that make a point of that ‘weirdness,’” says renowned art critic Blake Gopnik. “‘Beauty’ must be the worst red herring in the entire history of art—art’s never been that much about good looks. . . . What mattered, and matters, was that the object in front of you conveyed the maker’s concepts and ideals—so all art has really been ‘weird’ and conceptual, all along.”21 Some works certainly are. But Emin and Michelangelo were after very different things. Michelangelo sought to make art that exhibited skill, was beautiful, and was interesting. Tracey Emin, Marcel Duchamp, Damien Hirst, and assorted other avant-garde conceptual artists have chosen to discard the first two requisites. All that they expect their art to be is interesting (and by interesting, this often means provocative, which is often mistaken for shocking). So in 1959 when Robert Rauschenberg bought a taxidermic goat, shoved it through a spare tire, and slapped a title on it, it became an early exemplar of this movement of art that exhibits no skill on the part of the artist (and in many cases is only designed and not actually made by the artist), is no one’s idea of beautiful, but certainly does provoke, whether thought or outrage.22 Shock was the goal, or perhaps what Duchamp would have preferred to call “provocation.”
A problem with shock art is that over time, the public is decreasingly shocked—or rather, it takes ever more weird and taboo things to shock us. “In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking,” goes the line in the Cole Porter song “Anything Goes,” and we have come a long way. Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe was enough to cause a scandal in the nineteenth century, but particularly in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond, audiences have grown immune to what used to scandalize and make our jaws drop. Blood, death, murder? It’s on the evening news and on our TV screens, so much so that we associate real footage of, say, a firefight between armies with films of fighting.23 Nudity no longer shocks, as internet access to pornography means that the naked body alone is of little interest. The public wants hardcore acts and fetishes if they are to even bother offering up their attention.
In a world in which we have access to stories, videos, and images of anything we want, anytime we want it, and against a backdrop of people inured to extreme violence and sexuality, what’s left to shock with? The answer that artists have come up with is to veer into the weird, to proactively seek boundaries to cross and trample upon. What we wind up with is some art that is more weird than good, more noteworthy than brilliant, more talking point than revolution. Sometimes it feels that artists are just trying so hard to find something that will shock that they forget they are supposed to be making interesting art.
But I can argue both for and against the merits of some of the most famous works of shock art. Take Chris Ofili’s Holy Virgin Mary, for instance.
It is a painting of a black Virgin Mary that, at first glance, appears to be a work of African religious folk art. But further inspection reveals that what look like butterflies fluttering around the Madonna are actually cutouts of lady parts from pornographic magazines. And Mary’s breast is made from lacquered elephant dung. (At least it’s lacquered.)
This work made Ofili a household name. His shock tactic worked brilliantly, choosing to stomp around the line between holy and mundane, sexual, excremental. The icing on Ofili’s dung cake was when Rudy Giuliani, then the mayor of New York, sued to stop the Brooklyn Museum of Art from exhibiting the painting because it was, in his opinion, “disgusting.” Giuliani lost and Ofili got more publicity than an army of publicists could muster, though it must be concluded that very few who were aware of the “elephant dung Virgin Mary” could later remember Ofili’s name, the actual title of the piece, or details of it beyond the Google search keywords.24 This raises the legitimate question of whether the notoriety that comes from shock art benefits the artist directly, since the people who become aware of the work through the headlines conveying dismay are likely not art lovers or art collectors or regular museumgoers. So how, exactly, does this fifteen minutes of fame in a fragmented summary of the story of the artwork actually help the artist—or, as goes the thesis of this book, the course of art in general?
Chris Ofili, Holy Virgin Mary (1996).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM SAATCHI COLLECTION.
It likely does not do so directly, but it can be argued that, indirectly, all publicity—fragmented or whole, even wholly incorrect, fake, or slanderous—can be beneficial in the long run when it comes to art. The artist gets a big boost in name recognition, which is valuable in making their name stand out in bold when listed in catalogues and exhibitions among other artists. This trickles down to more casual art lovers and less serious collectors, who are often more interested in something or someone they’ve heard of than in a work that is actually great, perhaps even one that they love, but which is unknown. So much of the pleasure in art collecting, currently and historically, has been about conspicuous consumption and showing off what one has collected among peers, and this is made far easier if the artist collected is well known. Hence the wild popularity of an artist like Banksy, whose creations are fine and fun, but who is not really doing anything special in art historical terms—yet he is a household name due to this mystery surrounding his identity, a mystery he has reveled in.
Art in general also benefits because such shocks make people talk about and engage with art. At whatever level, a passing comment by the watercooler at work or people deciding to go see an exhibit because they’ve heard of the scandalous story behind an object shown there, it is good for art when people are interested in it. Whether the interest comes from more traditional studies and aesthetics or a delicious scandal, interest is still piqued. Art shifts into the light, for otherwise it remains as it always has been—the realm of a relative few elite and wealthy collectors and patrons as well as art lovers who are generally from privileged, highly educated backgrounds and living in cities. These are generalities, but (unfortunately) they are true. Art can remain within this web of influencers. It has survived for millennia without the support of the masses. But it is a shame, because art can and should be for everyone. When art makes headlines, for whatever reason—even if it is because of scandal or shock or the “outrageous” prices for which it sells to those elite collectors and institutions—then the general public engages with art, to whatever extent that engagement may be. Art is—for that metaphorical fifteen minutes when the moment leans into fame, before inevitably and swiftly receding—a center of attention. And each time art gets mass-media attention, a small percentage of those otherwise unengaged and “uninterested” in art will become interested. And a percentage of that percentage may start to engage with art and join the fold of art lovers.
Ofili’s painting, as with much of the art that shocks at first, actually has a good deal of merit to it, and is cleverer than the headlines about the shock value alone would lead you to believe. It references Jean Fouquet’s Virgin and Child, painted in 1452, which features a far sexier Virgin Mary with a floating, gravity-defying boob that has broken free of its garment, à la Janet Jackson.
Those flying butterfly cutout lady parts in Ofili’s painting are actually an art historical inside joke. They are a pun on putti, the Italian term for little flying cherub angels that often accompany the Virgin Mary—a term that also refers to the naughty bits of ladies. As mentioned earlier, it can sometimes feel that the desire to shock overpowers and overshadows the quality of the art, but we must take care not to dismiss the art as not good just because it shocks.
Jean Fouquet, Virgin and Child (1452–1458).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS BY USER 8WEEKLY.
Semen, urine, excrement, vomit—these are not materials we have come to expect in high art, or any art, for that matter. Art is an elevated practice, sophisticated and, at least until industry allowed prices to come down, expensive. Historically, the raw materials that were used to create art, the most traditional of which were bronze and marble and imported pigments like lapis lazuli for cobalt blue (a stone that was, during the Middle Ages, the single most expensive item by weight that one could buy, as the only source of lapis lazuli were mines in what is today Afghanistan, and which therefore had to be painstakingly carried to Europe over the Silk Road) were hugely expensive.25 Even paper was an extravagance until after the Industrial Revolution. It was made with old rags, not wood pulp, and so essentially consisted of recycled clothing; its cost was therefore akin to that of secondhand clothing rather than the disposable, mass-produced paper of today that costs far less than a penny a sheet.
This means that the choice of “base” materials, associated with the hidden-away, perhaps even shameful expulsions of the human body at its most basic, stands in stark contrast to our idea of what art is and what it is made of. It is a clever subversion to make “high” art out of “low” materials. This can come in the form of found objects, which differ from readymades in that they are not bought and displayed, as Duchamp did with Bottle Rack and Fountain, but are manipulated and/or integrated into art in a more traditional sense. Consider Gabriel Orozco’s Black Kites (1997), which started with a found object (a human skull) upon which Orozco masterfully drew diamonds, or kite shapes, with graphite. Perhaps the earliest example came, as so many revolutions did, with Picasso, who experimented with adding pieces of found objects into traditional oil paintings, as in Still Life with Chair Caning (1912). There he toys with the idea of a still life and blurs the line between painting and sculpture. A still life is normally a painting of inanimate objects, but here it also features a part of an inanimate object glued on, sculpturally.
These concepts were taken to an extreme by the other great twentieth-century revolutionary, Duchamp. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that he made an abstract painting of a white circle on a black ground as a gift for his lover. It eventually turned out that the white circle was painted in his own semen.26 This story is unconfirmed (and the work, if it existed, is lost), but it sounds feasibly Duchampian. He was quoted as saying, aged seventy-two and reflecting back on his work, “Eroticism is a subject very dear to me. . . . It’s an animal thing that has many facets and is pleasing to use, as you would use a tube of paint.”27 This work—if indeed it happened at all—does not qualify for our shock category, since it was not meant for public display; it was a private tease or inside joke with his lover. But the idea of using one’s own bodily excretions as a medium made a splash (or a plop, if you like) with Piero Manzoni’s La Merda di Artista (1961).
These sculptures consisted of (as you may have guessed) the excrement of the artist, canned and sealed in what appear to be containers for shoe polish. Part of what makes shock art spread virally is the shorthand summary of the art. The ability to summarize a work in an off-the-cuff shorthand helps word of it to spread, from headlines to casual watercooler chats at the office. “Did you hear that an artist did X?” it might go, as your coworker pours himself a cup of coffee in the office kitchen; or, in this case, a headline might read, “Artist cans his own poop and sells it for a fortune.” The general public and the more tabloid-y media tend not to differentiate shock art that is clever, and sometimes even great, from that which shocks and does little more. Manzoni’s work is both clever and great in its subversiveness. It takes a raw material that no one wants, and of which there is limitless quantity, and commodifies it. He produced ninety cans, each with thirty grams of his “freshly preserved” poo (as it says on the cans) in May 1961. Each one is signed on the top of the can. He wondered what might be the least desirable thing for a collector to desire and to pay good money for. A can of shit, he thought. And so, by virtue of his position as an artist and the presentation (the limited edition, the signature)
Andres Serrano, Immersion (Piss Christ) (1987).
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND NATHALIE OBADIA GALLERY.
he transformed what many would pay not to own into something of high value, a collectible.28 There is also a bit of a game of timing with Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, which was begun in 1961, the year Manzoni created his Merda di Artista, but was finished in 1962. Making high art out of simple canned goods was clearly in the air.
Building on this idea of bodily fluids as media, one of the works that sparked the greatest outrage was Andres Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) (1987), a photograph of a small plastic crucifix (a purchased found object) immersed in a jar containing the artist’s urine. This was seen by the Catholic community as the ultimate insult to their beliefs.29
It manages to be a flashpoint for controversy and protests each time it is shown. The photograph is actually quite beautiful, and the fact that the “filter” tinting the crucifix orange is actual urine is not obvious aesthetically. But the title hammers this home, for the artist does not want his concept to go overlooked.
The work was particularly controversial because it sparked a 1989 debate in the US Congress about funding the arts and was pointed to as evidence of the wastefulness of arts funding, because works of this sort were the fruit of taxpayer investment. On Palm Sunday in 2011, when it was displayed in France, a group of fundamentalist Christians attacked the photograph. The outrage that some art can trigger is a testimony to its power, even when those who categorize themselves as “against the arts” or as uninterested in them would claim otherwise. If art can provoke, then it has succeeded. When asked about the work, Serrano prefers to resort to the Roland Barthes defense: “At the time I made Piss Christ, I wasn’t trying to get anything across.”30 In other words, “It is not for me to interpret.” But Serrano considers himself a Christian, and he does go on to interpret the work (and in doing so, makes no headway into endearing himself to Christians): “The thing about the crucifix itself is that we treat it almost like a fashion accessory. When you see it, you’re not horrified by it at all, but what it represents is the crucifixion of a man. And for Christ to have been crucified and laid on the cross for three days, where he not only bled to death, he shat himself and peed himself to death.”31 This is likely not strictly accurate historically (death by crucifixion usually came through suffocation, when the victim’s ribs collapsed), but the point is a real one. A cross was an ancient instrument of torture. It is odd indeed that it has become a fashion accessory. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights in the United States, said, “I would argue that ethics should dictate that you don’t go around gratuitously and intentionally insulting people of faith.” In 2010, he successfully campaigned to have the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, remove from display a work of video art about AIDS by David Wojnarowicz, which contains an image of Jesus on the cross being eaten by ants.32
These sorts of incidents provoke debate, particularly when conservatives, the group most likely to be offended, see them as a rationale for cutting arts funding. But there is an art historical tradition of gruesome crucifixion scenes. The crucifixion is surely the most frequently depicted scene in the history of art. There is no record of controversy when Matthias Grünewald painted the Isenheim Altarpiece (1516), which features the most grotesque of all crucifixions, including Christ’s body covered in thornlike black lesions.
Matthias Grünewald, Isenheim Altarpiece (1516).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS, PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN.
This was meant to provide a sort of cold comfort to patients treated at the monastery where the altarpiece was displayed, most of whom were suffering from Saint Anthony’s Fire, a disease that came from eating infected rye and resulted in painful lesions. The illness caused hallucinations and a chemical in the rye would later feature in LSD. Piss Christ has a point and echoes the history of art. There is some degree of choice in finding a work like this offensive. One could choose to ignore it, but its existence, particularly its success and the fame and wealth of the artist, gets on one’s nerves and feels morally “wrong.” But the genius of shock art is that acts of protest result in more media coverage, which heightens the fame of the work and, through it, the wealth of the artist. It’s an ingenious trap.
From placing a bodily expulsion into a container, as Manzoni and Serrano did, the next logical step to push the extreme is to create an artwork wholly of a bodily fluid. Self (1997) by Marc Quinn creates a cast of the artist’s head using frozen silicone and ten pints of the artist’s own blood, which he had drawn over an extended period of time and stored until he could use it to create this series of busts. Quinn’s very realistic busts have the appearance of a death mask, which also has a rich tradition, dating back at least to the bronze Mask of Agamemnon from ancient Mycenae, which is said to have been molded from the face of Agamemnon, the Greek leader of Trojan War fame. From the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century (until photography took over the role of visual memorial), death masks were taken of famous individuals or beloved family members, literally laying down plaster over the face of the subject shortly after death and preserving the mask as a final “snapshot.”33
Since Quinn is alive and well, Self technically functions as a life mask, but both the expression and the use of blood as a sculptural medium recall death masks. Quinn likewise is subversive in his use of a material we associate with liquidity as the replacement for the materials normally associated with busts: marble and bronze. We also think of busts as everlasting, and Quinn could have prepared a cocktail with his own blood that would coagulate and remain solid, such as mixing it with epoxy. Instead, he chose to freeze the blood, meaning that the work must be plugged into electricity to maintain a low enough temperature through mechanical cooling, otherwise it would melt. Quinn volunteers that he made the work at a time when he was an active alcoholic, and liked the notion of his Self requiring a constant supply of external stimuli (in the case of the work, electricity) to mirror his dependence on alcohol.34 Because the blood sculpture is in such a precarious state, fighting to remain frozen while the ambient temperature of a gallery space threatens to melt it, it normally has the appearance of “sweating,” with beads of moisture building up on its surface, making it that much more lifelike.
The work is completely ingenious, and yet its shock value is high since it can be snap-summarized at the watercooler with, “Did you see that an artist made a self-portrait out of his own blood?”
Orozco and the Memento Mori
You walk through the darkness of the crypt, with choral music playing from hidden speakers. All around you, human bones are arranged in patterns, tiling the walls, divided by bone—a flood of hip bones that look, from a distance, like a cluster of oversized mushrooms, a phalanx of femurs, and a cobble of skulls. Skeletal arms are crossed and nailed into the wall, making the symbol of the Franciscans, normally painted, out of the real thing. Even a child’s skeleton has been strapped to the ceiling like a fleshless cherub, decked out as the angel of death, scales in one clawlike hand, a scythe in the other. The holiest members of the order were reburied in the floors, in earth imported from Jerusalem, while others were partially mummified, their leathered skin clinging to their skulls and hands, still dressed in the cassocks, five-knotted rope belts around their waists, and harnessed into niches in the walls of bones, but leaning forward over the years. If you blink, you might swear that they’ve stepped away from the skull wall toward you, off to grab a cappuccino (most were Capuchins, after all).
The scariest place I have ever been that was not intended to be scary is the crypt that perches beside the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Capuccini in Rome. At the foot of Via Veneto, the church contains a Caravaggio, but you could be forgiven for overlooking it in favor of the cavalcade of beautiful horror that awaits in the adjacent vaults. There lie the bones of some thirty-seven hundred former Capuchin and Franciscan monks, a haul that began with three hundred cartloads of deceased brethren who accompanied the friars who founded this church in 1631. This initial haul was added to all the way to 1870—the dead would be buried in the earthen floor for around thirty years, without a coffin, and then exhumed to make room for the freshly deceased. What to do with this avalanche of human remains when lacking even space to rebury them? Friar Michael of Bergamo led the initial arrangement of the crypts and their occupants, “burying” the brethren in a way that at once suited the available space—the walls, ceiling, and floor of six vacant crypts alongside their church—venerating the remains and happening to also create what we retrospectively label as one of the most beautiful, moving, and haunting art installations ever made.
Detail of the ossuary crypt of the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Capuccini in Rome.
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM WELLCOME COLLECTION.
If the message of this reburial-as-artwork were not clear, it is written into the floor of the final crypt, beneath the child’s skeleton: “What You Are, We Once Were, What We Are You Will Be.” All are equal in death; gather your rosebuds while you may, for death comes to all, king and peasant, sinner and saint. Memento mori. Remembrance of death. Be a good Christian, before it’s too late.
This is an example of historical shock art, but one that was unlikely to have been considered an artwork when it was created. It was a repurposing of materials that modern art historians considered a proto-installation, conceptual in the sense that it had a single concept that was meant to be absorbed by those who saw it. Modern minds looked back upon it as artwork, as an installation through which viewers were meant to walk and absorb the idea that it hammers home. The shock was not one in search of attention, but was meant to provoke fear of inevitable death and therefore a snap out of the mundane realities of human sin and obliviousness to impending doom.
If a skull appears in a work of Western Christian art, it is as a memento mori, and there are plenty of them to be found—from grotesquely realistic ones, like the one perched above a caged skeletal torso at the back of Rome’s church of Santa Maria del Popolo, to contorted ones visible only at a sharp angle, like the hidden anamorphic skull at the bottom of Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors.
Gabriel Orozco, Black Kites (1997).
COURTESY OF MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY.
The skull is a universal symbol in every human culture, far beyond the borders of Christianity. When humans are long dead and gone, skulls remain. They are warnings of the possibility of death, flapping white on black on the Jolly Roger pirate flag, a skull and crossbones (meant to shock with fear captains of nearby vessels who would spy it through their telescopes), decorating the lapels of the SS (the SS-Totenkopf Panzer division had a smiling skull with crossed bones behind it as their logo), and on labels of poisonous materials (designed to repulse those who were not sure what a vessel contained). Even the illiterate can read a skull as a warning. But they needn’t be fearsome. Hamlet communes with the skull of Yorick, and as horror filmic as the Capuchin ossuary chapels in Rome may sound, the creepiness of moving through them is cut by a cocktail of beauty (in the careful aesthetic arrangement of this walkthrough sculpture, for which bones happen to be the medium instead of wood or marble), tenderness (the hands of the friars who placed and fastened each component), and the sublime (the sweeping knowledge that death conquers all, and that you will become one of these soulless tusks, when all is said and done, and there is nothing you can do about it). It was meant to shock you into better behavior, into seizing the day.
It would be wrong to think that skull imagery in art is a matter of the past. While we have been largely secularized in Western culture, skulls remain (after all, we all have them), death remains, and all the symbolism that skulls carried in the past reverberates even today. Take the two most recent famous skulls in art, two very different approaches: Gabriel Orozco’s Black Kites (1997) and Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God (2007).
One might assume that Orozco, who is Mexican, is referencing the Day of the Dead in this work—a real human skull he spent months holding and drawing upon in pencil, in the shapes of squares, so the skull appears covered in a graphite and bone-white chess board (though the theoretically even and consistent checkerboard pattern is contorted as the squares bend around the contours of the skull). But Orozco disagrees. This is not about Day of the Dead or a memento mori (though art historians are entitled to argue otherwise). As he says, this is “an experiment with graphite on bone. . . . The thing is a contradiction, really: a 2D grid superimposed on a 3D object. One element is precise and geometric, the other is uneven and organic. The two are not resolved.”35 It is certainly beautiful, echoing the Capuchin ossuary chapels in the communion of the artist holding the skull of someone who once was, and drawing upon it—a thoroughly intimate act.
Damien Hirst, For the Love of God (2007).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS BY USER AARON WEBER.
Symbolism and the history of art are laced into any skull that is repur-posed. Humans are human, art repeats, and the historical continuum is inescapable whether the artist objects or not. Our psychological defense mechanisms insulate us from thinking too much or too often about the fact that we all will die. The skull shocks us as a reminder of just that cold fact.
Abramović and Shock through Pain
While using one’s bodily fluids as a medium of sculpture, painting, or photography takes shock art in one direction, it is in the past tense: The artist did this, and now, long after, we see the result. This gives it a step remove that helps the viewer feel safe. Performance art is another matter. The immediacy of it is confrontational. The adrenaline of performance art, the reason some artists love it, are almost addicted to it, is their direct contact with the audience, the moment-to-moment feedback of their provocations. This is also why many art lovers do not enjoy attending performances (or situations or actions, whatever the artist likes to call them). It’s like that moment in a theater performance or magic show that a large percentage of the audience dreads: when the performers turn to the audience and interact with them, put them on the spot, ask for (or call up without asking) a volunteer. But for those audience members who enjoy the adrenaline of the spectator, this is what makes performance special. It is unpredictable. And the voyeurism of being a spectator at an artistic performance is heightened when the performer does the unexpected, the unimaginable: torture themselves.
In body art, artistic acts (usually performances) involve the artist manipulating (usually in a gruesome way) their own body, their body acting as artistic medium. Artists asked themselves how they could counter the traditional pose of someone consuming art. You know what it looks like, because you’ve done it yourself, even if you were not aware of it: The standing pose, square before a painting or sculpture, one arm folded across your stomach, the other vertical, balanced between your crossed arm and propping up your chin. That’s how art has been studied, admired, analyzed since time immemorial. How can this be changed? There are answers to this that are more immersive, like performance. Body art is as far from traditional as possible, as it often involves something that audiences feel like they don’t want to be looking at. Watching an artist injure themself live in a gallery is as far as is possible from the quiet, civilized admiration of inanimate objects, with the artist long dead or nowhere near the museum. Of the edgiest of movements in the 1970s, perhaps the most visually dramatic was Suspension by Stelarc (the artist name for Stelios Arcadiou), a series of twenty-six different performances (the last of which he did in 2012, when he was sixty-six), in which metal hooks were inserted into various parts of his body; these were attached to cables by which he was lifted, suspended in the air. This practice, called “flesh hook suspension,” is meant to test the participant’s pain threshold but not cause any lasting damage. It was inspired by an 1832 painting by American explorer George Catlin, called The Cutting Scene, which was an anthropological painting of a horrific tribal ritual the artist witnessed as the first European American to behold and depict the traditions of Plains Indians, as they were called at the time, in the American West.
The painting is one of a series of four that shows the O-kee-pa ceremony, the key religious event for the Mandan tribe.36 Young men volunteered for this rite of passage, in which wooden splints were inserted into their chest and back muscles (which did not cause long-term injury but was designed to be extremely painful) and then, as icing on the cake, were suspended from ropes that were attached to the splints. The overwhelming pain caused the participants to faint, entering a trance as their minds tried to blot out the pain, and the men believed they would receive supernatural visions or messages. Those who completed the ritual were the most respected in the tribe. Catlin was one of the few nonnatives to witness the ritual, which was banned in 1890.
George Catlin, The Cutting Scene (1832).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM GOOGLE ART PROJECT.
By turning this ritual into an artistic performance, Stelarc referenced cultural history and art history (since the Catlin painting is an anthropological relic in the form of an artwork), but it remains more stunt than masterpiece. It was not an invented action, but rather an echo of a past tradition. One might interpret it as commenting on the popularity of piercings and tattoos, historical rituals that have gone mainstream, but it lacks the resonance of other shock art actions. It was hugely popular among those who did not consider themselves art lovers, and particularly in the extreme sport world, as evidenced from the fact that Stelarc has been asked to repeat the performance twenty-six times to date. His own comment that his work deals with the idea that “the human body is obsolete” feels more relevant to his other works that have more intellectual meat on their bones and feel more resonant with contemporary cultural issues. For example, in Parasite: Event for Invaded and Involuntary Body (1997) he attached electrodes to his naked body and allowed himself to be remote-controlled via the internet, a brilliant commentary on how the internet (relatively young at that point) controls our minds, desires, and even our bodies (through, say, the stimulation of pornography or encouragement to diet)—in this case quite literally, with the human body moved as if in a video game by a remote individual. His 2007 Extra Ear Surgery involved him having doctors surgically attach an ear that had been grown through cell cultivation to his left arm. This cleverly comments on how we surgically manipulate our bodies in terms of superfluous plastic surgery, while also tackling issues surrounding laboratory-grown organs. These two works shock but also comment brilliantly, whereas, at least in my opinion, Suspension feels more like a sideshow.
The French artist ORLAN uses plastic surgery as body art. She has redesigned her face numerous times, sometimes asking surgeons to make her look like Mona Lisa, another time like Venus from the famous Botticelli painting. This is extreme and semipermanent body art—the artist cannot go back from it, but it is only permanent until the next plastic surgery appointment. The willing self-sacrifice for a concept is powerful, as is the commentary on our dissatisfaction with our own appearance and willingness to invite the knife to alter it. It is particularly chilling because ORLAN seems to suffer from this compulsion and yet comment on it at the same time.37
Serbian artist Marina Abramović first joined the self-harming movement with a 1972 performance in which she cut herself between the fingers on her left hand, one at a time, changing knives after each stab. With Rhythm 5 (1974), in the center of Belgrade, she drew a star in gasoline, lay down in its midst, and ignited it.38 She passed out when the fire sucked the oxygen out of the star’s center, but since she was lying down already, spectators did not respond. When the flames brushed against her legs and she still did not move, some of the audience rushed through the flames and carried her out. In 1975, she carved a star into her own stomach, calling the action Lips of Thomas. These two works reference the red star, the symbol of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, particularly her hometown of Belgrade (the local football team is called Red Star Belgrade). Branding herself with the red star, the symbol of her socialist homeland, was a powerful iconoclastic statement.39
Her most famous work is Rhythm O (1974), in which she stood naked in a gallery beside a table laid with seventy-two objects ranging from the innocuous (a rose) to the deadly (a loaded pistol). She permitted the audience to do anything they wanted to her over a six-hour period. She was interested in the response of the audience, which did indeed vary: Some harmed her, others protected her. This was a variation on Cut Piece by Yoko Ono (1964), in which the artist sat in a gallery, clothed and with a pair of scissors, which she invited the audience to use to cut off any piece of her clothing they liked.40
In Art Must Be Beautiful (1975), Abramović took injury back into her own hands and used a hard metal hairbrush and comb to brush her hair for so long and with such force that her head bled and hair started to come out. All the while, she repeated the phrase, like an incantation: “Art must be beautiful, artists must be beautiful.”41 This is a direct reference to Aristotle’s concept, which she saw her work as pushing against.
Abramović met the German artist Ulay in 1975 and the two began working together and became a couple. Ulay had done some early performances that involved slicing away squares of his own skin, so the two were on the same page artistically. Early works as a duo included a performance in which they took turns slapping each other, interested in the sound it made. In Expanding in Space (1977), they ran naked in a parking garage, repeatedly smashing into columns with their shoulders. The columns were unattached and had been rigged on sleds, so they would slide ever so slightly backward with each strike. But they were heavy and caused bruising nonetheless.42
Volunteering oneself for what amounts to torture, or inflicting it upon oneself, can feel meaningful, referential—or not. In the last chapter we discussed Sebastian Horseley’s voluntary crucifixion. Chris Burden is another artist who went in this direction, but instead of signing up for a formal ritual, as Horseley did, he opted to have himself nailed to a Volkswagen Beetle (Trans-Fixed, 1974). The work that made his name and was perhaps the earliest of the self-harm body art movement, was Shoot (1971) in which he arranged for a colleague to shoot him in the shoulder with a rifle. Burden’s interest in pain likely had its origins in a Motorino accident he suffered at the age of twelve while on vacation on the island of Elba. His left foot was crushed and had to be amputated, without anesthesia. Artist origin stories, when interest first shifted in one direction or another, are interesting from a voyeuristic perspective but do not always help us understand the art. When we see a Magritte painting, like The Lovers (1928), in which a man and woman kiss while wearing wet white cloths over their faces, and learn that when Magritte was fourteen, his mother ran away from home and drowned herself, and Magritte saw her body dragged from the water with her white nightgown covering her face, things click for us.43 The painting was a working-through process for that formative trauma, as any psychiatrist would say. But that does not necessarily help us with the art. It excuses but doesn’t explain. And so, when critics point to Burden’s physical formative trauma as the reason his art dealt with his own pain, that may indeed be why, psychologically, but we’re still left with the art itself, which needs more of an exegesis than a simple Psych 101 explanation.
Much has been written on the problems of art that require explanations. But, as Slovenian conceptual artist JAŠA explains, “Explanations are part of the work. When the method applied is so complex and conceptual, and it’s about the thought behind the work, usually the visual element is only the pretext for an explanation of the concept. So, the explanation is necessary to the work. But you’ll have mediocre work that over-relies on explanation, and genius work that still requires explanation and is the better for it.”44 Explanations are not inherently bad. There is a visual vocabulary of iconography that art history students must learn in order to interpret and fully enjoy Old Master works. To recognize, for example, an Annunciation scene, one must know the New Testament story, the figures in it (Mary, the Angel Gabriel), and a slew of weighted details, like the occasional presence of a parrot and a beam of light passing through a pane of glass without breaking it (both used to explain away Mary’s virgin birth). We viewers tend to complain when a contemporary work is obscure and requires explanation from an artist, curator, or critic in order for us to get it, as if the work must be self-explanatory, but in fact there are very few periods in art history that produced work that does not require any a priori knowledge, at the very least setting the historical scene, so that modern viewers do not apply today’s mentality to works of the past.
A work like Shoot, on its own, is not particularly interesting. It became so because it was the first of the self-harm body art performances. It certainly shocked (as dramatic firsts will do). It is interesting for its shifting of the body into the fore, as the canvas. Burden repeatedly sought to harm himself in his works: He tried to breathe underwater for five minutes in Velvet Water (1974). He kayaked to a deserted island in Mexico and lived there for eleven days with no food and only a supply of drinking water in B.C. Mexico (1973). He lay on the ground, covered in a sheet and with ignited road flares set up across his body, in Deadman (1972)—this continued until viewers thought he was dead and called the police, who arrested him when they realized he was still alive.
A number of Burden’s performances were in isolation, or near isolation. Sometimes he had a photographer with him, and that was it. This raises the question of whether these dramatic acts, performed without an audience, have the same shock value when they are experienced exclusively secondhand. If you only hear about an artwork, or see photographs or a video of it, doesn’t it lose most of its power?
Ulay/Abramović, Expanding in Space (1977).
SCREENSHOT FROM VIDEO COURTESY OF YOUTUBE.
Most performances have small audiences. Some of Ulay and Marina Abramović’s performances, including Expanding in Space, were actually witnessed by just a few dozen people.45
Performance art is not meant for stadium crowds, nor is it broadcast online. There are exceptions, but they tend to be dismissed by artists as selling out, providing entertainment rather than serious art. An example is the celebrity magician Criss Angel, who borrowed a note from Stelarc and did a suspension, hanging from hooks embedded in his back and flown dangling beneath a helicopter, as part of his television series Mind-freak.46 In our contemporary social media–frenzied era, in which we feel that what we do in life doesn’t count if we don’t post it online, dramatic performances that are almost unwitnessed seem a waste.
JAŠA notes that artists inevitably ask themselves the question, “How can I get the maximum amount of the public’s attention in the shortest possible time?”47 It is a fair question to ask who shock art is trying to shock. It is rarely fellow artists, critics, curators, gallerists, and collectors who are honestly shocked by an artist’s actions. They are the converted—they know all about shock tactics and they relish a good scandal, but they have seen up close what artists do, they know artists personally in many cases, and they know to expect artists to push boundaries, to push metaphorical buttons, to attempt to provoke. The ones who are shocked are the general public or the informed public—two distinct groups, for the general public is unlikely to notice anything that is not wholly mainstream, whereas the informed public, the generally more educated readers of newspapers and magazines that cover culture and have Arts and Culture pages, are far more likely to become aware of happenings in the art world. The general public’s attention is unlikely to result in any benefit to the artist. This group, the vast majority of the world’s population, might smirk or shake their heads to learn of some artist who put hooks in his flesh and hung from the ceiling or another guy who—get this!—shot himself and called it art. That audience is not likely to be converted into art lovers, nor will they be buying high-end, noteworthy art. The benefit to artists comes when the informed public takes notice of a new name for the first time. And this, in turn, tends to happen only when an artist who is not yet a household name does something so noteworthy that the Arts and Culture sections decide to cover it. Thus, even if it is at a subconscious level, artists understand this and recognize that they cannot “only” create good art; to become known, to feel relevant (which leads to better income and status within the art world), they must make themselves newsworthy.
Selling art for more money and with greater consistency follows this exposure, and with it a higher art world status. That is the single best currency for artists: wealth and appreciation within the art community. While artworks rarely shock art world stalwarts, the media coverage is admired as a currency, and the art world will certainly talk about a shocking work, even if they themselves do not feel shocked by it. Cattelan’s Comedian made international headlines but was also the talk of artists, curators, gallerists, and collectors. It hit both publics simultaneously.
JAŠA explains shock from an artist’s perspective:
Artists ask: How can we still be unpredictable? What do we mean by that and what can we achieve through that? Shock as a reality can be content already. From the unexpected, you get a slap in your face. This slap can be extremely positive. A smell can be extremely shocking, because we’re not used to the sense of smell engaged in an artwork. Imagine walking into a show with a strong stench of rotting meat. But the show is full of happy, bright, positive colors. By shocking you with the smell, I’ll elevate you to a different platform of perception. Picasso once said: “You don’t have to draw a pistol to be revolutionary. You can draw an apple in a revolutionary way.” Artists don’t just want the response to be, “Oh, I like this.” They want a reaction. Especially when the art is performative, like a concert—you want the immediate feedback of the audience, the instant flow of energy.48
JAŠA was giving a talk on art theory in Milan in 2011 to an audience of art lovers. The talk was going well, and then he began throwing empty beer bottles out into the audience. He had calculated where to throw them and how hard so he could be sure not to hit anyone, but the audience felt they were in danger and were shocked by the sudden shift in the dynamic of the situation. They had expected to attend a theoretical lecture in which they would sit, safely and quietly and in the position of power, listening to and judging the artist’s words and considering whether they agreed or not. Suddenly he was hostile, forcing the audience to participate and be active, the spotlight shone upon them. As he predicted, half the audience hated him for it and half were blown away by it.49 Sometimes an artist can even shock members of the art world, if they can be caught unawares.
Bernini and the Shock of the Body
Harming the body or using parts of (or expulsions from) the human body, which might be generally categorized as forms of violence, found a parallel in shock art with works that dealt with sex, gender shifts, and the capability of the body to endure pain. Some of Ulay’s earliest works are from a series of photographs called Renais Sense and another called S’he (both series were explored during the 1970s). In the latter, he cross-dressed, whereas in the former, he made up one half of his face, split vertically, as if he were a woman, and the other half as if he were a man.
(The Austrian performer and Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst plays a similar game by wearing a thick beard while otherwise appearing to be an attractive woman.) This messes with one’s head, quite literally, in that our definitions of human beauty, newly researched in this period, are based on symmetry—we tend to find faces more attractive if they are more symmetrical.50 It also argues that the lines of gender should be more fluid, foreshadowing the LGBTQ+ movement by many decades. This multilayered performance even references Marcel Duchamp, who invented a female alter ego named Rrose Sélavy (a pun based on “eros” and the French phrase “C’est la vie,” together meaning “erotica is life”). Renais Sense was Ulay’s hybrid-gendered alter ego in these early performances. And the name is even more relevant, since there was distinct interest in gender-bending during the late Renaissance.
Ulay, S’he (circa 1973).
PHOTO COURTESY OF ULAY FOUNDATION.
Historical artworks have dealt with gender uncertainty, including Jusepe Ribera’s Baroque painting The Bearded Woman Breastfeeding (1631), which is a portrait commissioned by a proud husband of himself, his breastfeeding infant, and his wife, Magdalena Ventura, who had a rare condition that caused hair to grow all over her body.
Sleeping Hermaphrodite (1620) is a sculpture attributed in part to Bernini (the mattress is his; the figure is ancient Roman) of a beautiful individual lying naked on their stomach on a divan. From one side, it appears to be a young woman with a voluptuous
Jusepe Ribera, The Bearded Woman Breastfeeding (1631).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM WEB GALLERY OF ART.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini and ancient Roman, Sleeping Hermaphrodite (1620).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS BY USER JASTROW.
rear end, but circling around the sculpture, viewers are surprised to see that it is a man, inevitably doing a doubletake at the sight of its penis. (If you know the name of the sculpture then it gives away the surprise, but artists did not name works regularly until centuries later and viewers of this sculpture would not necessarily know ahead of time what to expect.) This was a very early work of shock art, the reaction of the viewers, it can be inferred from the work itself, a point of delight for the artist. Bernini was already the toast of Rome and a favorite of the popes, and he loved a good joke. Among his many talents he was a playwright and set designer, and his plays were built around special effects of his own invention. The Flood of the Tiber (1638) featured real water bursting out from backstage and coursing toward the audience, with a trap door snapping up just in time to prevent the front rows from being inundated. The actual Tiber River had flooded the year before, so this was designed to tap into the genuine fresh memory and fear of what had recently occurred.51 The Fire involved—you guessed it—the illusion that the theater was on fire. The fire was actually controlled, but this did not go over well with audiences.52
Bernini was the first great shock artist. This is nowhere more evident than in a pair of his famous works, which were the subject of my MA thesis: The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–1652) and the Tomb of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1671–1674).
Both are multifaceted sculptures (involving his design of architectural space in the churches where they are installed, paintings and mosaics built around the main sculptures, and additional complementary sculptures, stucco work, control of light via hidden windows, and more). Both purport to show spiritual ecstasies of female holy figures. Both look like sculptures of women having orgasms.
Sexuality is another taboo barrier upon which artists can trample. It is perhaps the most obvious one to deal with, and examples of art depicting not only covert and subtle and implied sexuality, but the vivid sex act itself, can be found in ancient Greece and Rome. It was really the rise of Christianity, and its accompanying prudishness (so as not to lead those abstinent monks, nuns, and priests astray), that sexuality was obliged to recede into the shadows, into implications and artistic whispers. There were suggestive nudes in art, of course, but they often had to be disguised. Bronzino got away with painting an adolescent boy, his rump tilted out for maximum visibility and supposition, French kissing his mother while toying with her nipples because his Allegory of Love and Lust (1545) was ostensibly a painting of pagan gods, the boy being Eros and the girl Venus. The nudes were polished, more like marble statues of nudes than actual people. There was never any pubic hair painted; that was considered too much, which makes its appearance in Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432), a work that was not designed to shock, that much more surprising. The Carracci family pulled a similar trick in their Loves of the Gods fresco cycle in the Farnese Gallery in Rome (1597–1608), which showed various gods trying to get it on with mortals—the sexiness was acceptable because these were pagan gods and stories that were invented (as any Christian would say) and told by respected classical writers like Ovid, painted at a time when interest in ancient Greece and Rome was at its peak and anything from that era was looked upon with respect and admiration.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Tomb of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (detail, 1671–1674).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM THAIS.
“I know it when I see it,” said US Supreme Court justice Potter Stewart, referring to pornography in the landmark 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio. The film in question, The Lovers by Louis Malle (1958), did not qualify as hard-core porn in the judge’s eyes, and the obscenity conviction of the Ohio theater manager who screened the art film was reversed. But this case, with its famous statement, raises a good question: Where is the line drawn between erotic art and pornography?
Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (detail, 1647–1652).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FBY USER DNALOR 01.
The Cambridge Dictionary definition is not particularly helpful: “books, magazines, movies, etc. with no artistic value that describe or show sexual acts or naked people in a way that is intended to be sexually exciting.”53 There must be explicit display with intent to stimulate sexual excitement. Nudity, even explicit, without intent to stimulate is kosher. That means that Courbet’s 1866 Origin of the World is art, not porn (though it was certainly accused of obscenity by its contemporaries). A close-up of a woman’s lady parts was too realistic for Victorian society, even though it is decidedly unsexy. It was intended to stimulate, of course—but discussion rather than sexual excitement.
Nudity has always been acceptable in the art world, but this was largely with the unwritten requirement that the nudes be statue-like, idealized, scrubbed clean of overly realistic and close-to-home details like pubic hair. These nudes were often intended to be stimulating, however. Excusing the art because it depicted Venus rather than a real woman, gentlemen patrons sometimes kept these reclining nude paintings behind curtains for private enjoyment or to show off to male friends. Though such paintings seem lovely and tame from a sexual standpoint today, they must be considered in context. We live in a society hypersaturated with sexual images of the most graphic nature, which are available in abundance, everywhere, just by searching Google (while careful to erase one’s browsing history afterward). Back in the sixteenth century, a fellow might never have seen a naked lady before his wedding night, so sneaking a peak at Lucas Cranach’s rendition of Reclining Venus was pretty hot stuff. It was art, but it was also sexually stimulating.54
Each of these works was a one-off. But part of the distinction between art and pornography is that art is almost always unique (and its uniqueness helps drive its value), whereas pornography is almost always mass-produced, meant for wide distribution. So what of the origin of mass-produced porn? Its story further blurs the line, because the first example was created by Marcantonio Raimondi, one of the great Renaissance artists.
Raimondi was among the most famous and skillful printmakers of the sixteenth century. He was a major artist in his own right, but he was best known for having been Raphael’s official printmaker.
Raimondi created the images for the first work of printed pornography, a book called I Modi (“The Positions” or “The Ways”), also known as The Sixteen Pleasures (or, if you’re into Latin, De omnibus Veneris Schematibus).55
As indicated by its title, the book was built around engravings of sixteen sexual positions, based on a lost series of paintings by Raphael’s pupil Giulio Romano, which he had painted for Federico II Gonzaga to decorate and provide inspiration at his Palazzo Te in Mantua (destroyed in 1630 during the War of Mantuan Succession). Raimondi first published the engravings in 1524. Pope Clement VII was unimpressed and threw him into prison, ordering all copies of the engravings burned. Like Justice Stewart, Pope Clement knew porn when he saw it, and he had seen it. But here’s the catch: Giulio Romano was not punished for his original paintings, because they were never intended for public viewing—only the private enjoyment of Duke Federico Gonzaga. Raimondi was quick to “borrow” the art of others, not only of the most famous European printmaker of the Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer (Raimondi had been the subject of a 1506 lawsuit for forging Dürer prints)—it turned out that Romano had no idea about the engravings and was only informed when visited by one of the great personalities of the Renaissance, and a man with a wonderfully naughty streak himself: Pietro Aretino.
Marcantonio Raimondi, “The Paris Position” from The Sixteen Pleasures (circa 1524).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS, PHOTOGRAPHER UNKNOWN.
Aretino was perhaps the first person who was famous just for being famous, more so than for any of his actual creations: his letters, plays, or sonnets. The best friend of Titian, Aretino owned a palazzo in Venice where he hosted raucous parties. He was known as a great wit, referred to as the “scourge of princes” for his scathing repartee—something of a premodern Oscar Wilde. To get a sense of him, you need only learn how he died: The story goes that he had a stroke induced by laughing too hard at a dirty joke made at the expense of his sister. This was a man with whom you wanted to do ice luge shots.
Aretino liked the cut of Raimondi’s jib and decided to compose sixteen sexually explicit sonnets to accompany Raimondi’s engravings. He negotiated Raimondi’s release from prison, and a second edition, now with Aretino’s text, was published in 1527. This was the first time that erotic text and images were combined in print, and the first time that pornographic images (which happened to be very beautiful and by a great artist) were mass-produced for the general public. Pope Clement was still unimpressed and tried to destroy all copies of this edition too. (As far as scholars can tell, only a few fragments survive.)
I Modi is no historical footnote or oddity of artful perversion. It influenced the history of art. Agostino Carracci’s interest in it (whether artistic or corporeal or both) resulted in an adaptation of its poses to deck out the Farnese Gallery, the second most important fresco in art history after the Sistine Chapel. The great room at Palazzo Farnese in Rome was painted by the Carracci family and their students, who were the leading academic painters of the seventeenth century (they ran an academy in Bologna that trained the top painters of the post-Caravaggio era). The ceiling of that room (which was not so well known outside of art history circles, since Palazzo Farnese is the French Embassy in Rome and the room can only be seen on guided tours) is decked in paintings with a theme of gods gettin’ jiggy with mortals, making plastic the popular ancient Latin poetry of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.
Burden and Shocks That Bit Back
Chris Burden’s self-harm performances were one thing, but he pushed it even farther and endangered others who were not volunteers. In 747 (1973), he repeatedly shot with a pistol directly at a Boeing 747 passenger plane that was taking off from Los Angeles International Airport. At least, this is what we are told—the only witness was his photographer.56 If, in fact, he actually shot at a moving passenger plane, what gave him the right to endanger other lives in the name of an artistic action?
The thesis of this book has been that shock has been beneficial to artists and the course of art history, but there are, of course, counterpoints to this argument. Shock without a platform, without a thoughtful concept, can be entirely overlooked and might make no lasting impact. If taken too far and without a counterbalance of rationale and sensitivity, it can also poison the well and turn out badly for the artist.
Costa Rican artist Guillermo Habacuc Vargas tied up a stray dog at the Codice Gallery in Managua, Nicaragua, in 2008. He spelled out the Spanish words for “You Are What You Read” in dog biscuits, set 175 pieces of crack cocaine in an oversized incense burner, and played the Sandanista anthem backward as a soundtrack. The dog, it is thought, starved to death. This, the artist said, was his point. He was testing the public, putting the initiative to “save” the dog on the shoulders of the audience, predicting that they would do nothing. The director of the art gallery insisted that the dog was tied up only for a few hours at a time and that the artist fed the dog regularly and then released it.57 Whatever the case, the concept utterly failed and the artist was not just panned but became the object of overt hatred, receiving death threats. It was a total disaster in every sense, the press garnered entirely negative and of the sort more likely to promote death threats than to seal an artist’s notoriety. It is one thing to injure yourself, but to injure another, particularly a helpless animal, is a shock too far.
That same year, German artist Gregor Schneider planned to exhibit a dying man as a performance. He found a volunteer with a terminal illness who was prepared to die naturally in an art gallery. He said that he hoped to show “the beauty of death.”58 The performance was never enacted, as no gallery wanted to host it. Schneider received death threats and vast quantities of hate mail. And his artistic reputation was not enhanced. He published an article in the Guardian to explain himself, stating, “To those who call me a coward for not putting myself up for the project, I would just like to say: when my time is up, I myself would like to die in one of my rooms in the private part of a museum.”59 He remains an artist respected for his other work, but this unfulfilled performance remains a blot on his otherwise strong résumé. It was a shock that shocked back.
Shock and even death can also have a deadening effect on the public. These days we are so used to things being shocking—wars, viruses, poverty, immigration crises, terrorism, lying politicians—that we sometimes slake them off with a shrug. Shock has become the new norm.
In 2016, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated at an art gallery opening in Ankara. The murderer shouted, “Don’t forget Aleppo. Don’t forget Syria. Unless our towns are secure, you won’t enjoy security. Only death can take me from here. Everyone who is involved in this suffering will pay a price.”60 The event was captured on video. Because this took place at an art opening, many thought it was a cutting-edge performance, not an actual political murder. The gunman, who turned out to be an officer in the Ankaran riot police squad, was soon shot to death by Turkish police. JAŠA recalls the event and its video as “a cold shower for the art scene, because people thought it was a performance. And it wasn’t. When you play with reality and then reality happens, not your playtime version of it, it makes you become responsible and get introspective.”61 What would have been an ingenious performance laced with political commentary was actually a real-life horror. JAŠA continues: “Where does provocation and shock end? Do we need this anymore? Maybe embracing beauty will be the new thing to provoke. Maybe today peace is provocative? The world has gone so mad that you see an actual shooting in a gallery you think that it was a staged performance. So maybe the responsibility of the artist is to make a step backwards.”62
Jeff Koons has occasionally missed with his attempts at shock art. His Made in Heaven (1989) series of photographs explicitly show him having sex with his then-wife, Hungarian pornographic actress Cicciolina. The photographs had art historical relevance, modernizing some of the sexually implicit works by artists like Bernini and Rococo painters Fragonard and Boucher. These historical works were far more subtle, and Koons wanted to test the line between art and pornography. The series was a commercial success, with photographs selling for between $300,000 and $800,000 each, despite the fact that they look little different from the cheap photographs found in mass-produced hard-core magazines.63 But it was critically panned. A review in the Guardian called them “cheap, tone-deaf, misogynistic images,” a reaction indicative of most critics. “They don’t even revile, they merely recede.”64 Their high selling price came in the 2000s, long after they were first produced and when Koons was already one of the highest-selling artists in the world (along with Damien Hirst). Had Koons not made his name in other spheres, these photographs would likely have gone entirely unnoticed. It is actually Koons’s earliest work, his “equilibrium tanks” (circa 1985), in which he suspended basketballs in aquariums, that garnered him the greatest acclaim.65
There are other shock art attempts that draw a reaction more along the lines of “Really, is this all you could come up with?” In 2013, Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky got naked, sat in Moscow’s Red Square, and nailed his own scrotum to the ground. The idea was to use this action to speak out against Putin’s police state, but . . . really?66 He was apparently on the same page with Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama. To highlight issues in asexual rights, in 2012 he underwent surgery to remove his genitals. They stayed in his fridge at home for some time, but eventually (perhaps because he couldn’t be bothered to go to the store), he cooked them and served them to his friends. As Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones wittily noted, “But was it art? Hard to say without actually tasting them.”67 That sums up the danger of such extremes that do not feel, at first or even second glance, of artistic merit. The actions become the punchline of jokes and rolls of the eyes, even from art world experts who are supposed to “get it.” You’ve gone and nailed your nuts to the pavement, and the sum result is a collective squirm and giggle.
Even acclaimed artists have hits and misses. Vito Acconci is among the pioneers of performance art, but his 1972 Seedbed featured an audience walking over a false gallery floor under which he was lying, masturbating, his sounds amplified through speakers. But how was this different from prerecorded sounds of an enthusiastic masturbator, and how does it comment, as the artist is said to have wished, on Nixon-era paranoia? Austrian artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler made plans to cut off his own penis as a body art performance, but he did not have the, uh, balls to follow through, so he cut off a fake member instead. He never lived it down, and some believe he killed himself as a result of the shame and sense of failure. He fell from a window in 1969, and it is unclear whether it was suicide or an accident.68
Shock as a Means to an End, Not an End unto Itself
Chris Burden’s later work, when he stopped focusing on bodily harm and stopped shooting himself and nailing himself to cars, is far less shocking and far more beautiful—and, dare I say, more interesting. Urban Light (2008), installed at LACMA, consists of tight rows of antique-style lampposts, clustered so closely together that their function as streetlamps is negated. Instead they turn into a forest of metal and light, a surrealist architectural installation that does not shock but has become beloved and iconic.
It is hard to fathom that this is the same artist who had himself shot and called it a performance.
Now we come to a trend that was first brought to my attention by JAŠA—that the big-name artists, the A-listers, the household names exhibit a trend. They shock their way to the top and once they are established—once they feel locked in place in the highest echelon, when anything they make will sell—they stop. The shocks wind down and their work becomes safer, more traditional, less edgy, and often the better for it. He notes, “What is questionable is why so many artists seem to be rebellious, seem to be against the system. But the moment they’re welcomed into the system, they become good puppies, traditional and safe, shifting to paintings and sculptures, which are the easiest to sell and collect.”69
There are countless examples. Jeff Koons has settled into his bread and butter, which are oversized metallic sculptures of things like balloon animals or his gargantuan Play-Doh (1994–2014) in which Play-Doh is piled in clumps far taller than a grown man. The material and scale feel like surreal matchups between the subject matter and what we associate as the “appropriate” material for them. Koons and Hirst had a lighthearted competition to have their armies of assistants (not themselves—they have reinstated the Renaissance bottega tradition of master artists overseeing a vast studio, designing works, and supervising their completion, but assigning the lion’s share of work to staff, which in Hirst’s case at one point included 150 people, while Koons had 120 create rather straightforward paintings). Hirst opted for “spot paintings,” a supersized nod to the French Pointillism movement of the nineteenth century,70 and then “spin paintings,” where paint was applied as the canvas was in motion, the opposite to Jackson Pollock’s “splatter paintings,” in which paint was applied while the artist was in motion. It first made headlines as a pseudo scandal when it came out that Hirst employed so many people to make his artistic ideas reality. Then it made headlines when he announced that he was actually making his own paintings. Koons went in for Pop Art–style photorealistic paintings of things like lips, chocolate, hair, and corn kernels in series like Easyfun-Ethereal (2000).71 The two are well aware of their shared status as the top-grossing artists in history, and they are mutual admirers. In 2016, Hirst curated a show of Koons works from Hirst’s personal collection. This felt like a power play, the two big dogs of the art world inflating one another’s value, and the two have been called “artist-as-CEO.”72 In an article entitled “The Art of Selling Out,” Hirst was quoted as giving credit to Andy Warhol for making the monetization of an artist’s career acceptable: “Warhol really brought money into the equation. He made it acceptable for artists to think about money. In the world we live in today, money is a big issue. It’s as big as love, maybe even bigger.”73
Chris Burden, Urban Light (2008).
PHOTO COURTESY OF WIKICOMMONS FROM FLICKR USER SKINNYLAWYER.
The onetime bad-boy rebels have turned into corporate giants. Koons is careful to call his 120-strong studio a “hub” and “not a factory,” but this is splitting hairs.74 Both artist giants are open about how success in today’s art world is as much about PR as it is about the art itself. There are wonderful, ingenious artists who never garner attention or acclaim beyond the narrowest of audiences, because they do not know how to sell themselves, refuse to, or have lacked luck in doing so.
The most influential artist of the late 2010s has been Ai Weiwei. The moment he fled to the West from China, he exploded. The Western world relishes the story of rebel artists in the parts of the world that are “not free.” Gallerists and managers look to sign on artists from repressive countries and bring them to the “free” West to commodify them, because they sold so well. They were voices that the West wanted to hear.
But who is to say that the West is as free as we like to believe? We feel that such artists are more authentic because they have genuinely suffered. But the Western idea that suffering and repression is an elsewhere phenomenon shifted in 2016, with the Trump presidency. America suddenly had a repressive leadership, one that was openly against culture. The “Resist” movement was accompanied by an artistic movement that started after the election. This included a coalition called “Hands Off Our Revolution” begun by Berlin-based artist Adam Broomberg and featured in Frieze magazine in November 2016, just after the election disaster, as the resisters (and really the art world and art-conscious world as a whole) considered it.75 Hundreds of artists signed on to the movement, which was committed to mounting contemporary art exhibits that would confront right-wing politics and populism.76 The manifesto was signed by big-name artists, including Anish Kapoor, Ed Ruscha, Wolfgang Tillmans, Steve McQueen, and JAŠA.77 But some artists who eventually became involved saw this movement as just another way to be seen. What started as a fine way to protest, to rebel against the new populism that was uninterested in culture, became an echo chamber. As is so often the case, well-meaning movements, publications, talking heads, media hubs, and the like wind up preaching to the converted, only heard by like-minded people, changing no minds through their efforts and ending up with much talk, some action, and no discernible effect.
It can be difficult to distinguish rebellious energy from PR stunts, just as it can be hard to separate shock art for shock’s sake from shock art for art’s sake.
Art lovers have a good radar system. There are those who interact with art for the bling, the prestige, the bragging rights, the investment alone—they are not necessarily art lovers in the pure sense. Walter Benjamin famously wrote that great art has an “aura” about it that we cannot explain scientifically, there is a mysticism to it, and that is what makes it great.78 That “aura” is something that can be sensed, a sort of inarticulate vibe, and Benjamin thought it had to do with authenticity.79 He was writing about this in the sense of a work not being a reproduction, but it also resonates in terms of authenticity as honesty: art from the heart, not just the mind. The true revolutionary artist is creating work for a better cause, not for ladder climbing.
We art critics and historians tend to be good bullshit spotters. If our radars are set off by a work here and there by an otherwise great artist, this does not mean the artist’s entire oeuvre should be dismissed. We all, in any creative profession, have ups and downs. But we tend to judge artists by whatever we first learn of them. If our first and only introduction to poor Pyotr Pavlensky was of his nailed scrotum, then our opinion of him as an artist would be about as positive as a hammer to the testicles. Acts such as his recall the antics of the MTV series Jackass, not artistry. We will have to muster great drive to delve further, because our instinct is to dismiss. So that shocking artwork designed to summon attention must be carefully chosen by the artist, or else their big chance to make a first impression will have been squandered and will result in our thinking poorly of them. But if the first big shock is ingenious, like Damien Hirst’s shark in a tank, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of a Living Person, or Tracey Emin’s My Bed, then the shock will result in positive aftershocks and a new star pulleyed up into the constellation of artists we admire.
Once an artist is up there, a star in our night sky, then they no longer need to resort to shock to command our attention. They already have it, and we will give due consideration to everything new they offer up. This is where we can spot the trend: It feels like artists who once shocked feel a sense of relief to no longer have to play the exhausting PR game and are content with making art that would not necessarily make headlines but is often better than art that does.
When Chris Ofili established himself as a household name, made for life, he literally moved to an island, shifting from hectic London to relaxing Trinidad. Once he had made it, he no longer needed to do the rebel thing. He admits that he felt “suffocated by his images as the elephant dung YBA [Young British Artist].”80 Now he makes perfectly good, but uncontroversial, works, like his tapestry The Caged Bird’s Song (2017) and paintings like Forgive Them (2015). Artists play the provocateur until they are in the club, and then they play the good boy and shift to more straightforward works that are, dare we say it, Aristotelian.
Tracey Emin’s latest work is as a classical painter in the vein of Egon Schiele. It’s fine, well-executed, a bit edgy in that her subject is nudes with explicit naughty bits—but it is also a bit boring. It looks like an admirer of Schiele trying to do a Schiele-like original work. During my research for this book, I was browsing paintings by Emin and stopped at one I thought was truly excellent, which she stood before proudly in a photo. I clicked on it. Turns out it was by Schiele. In an exhibit of her work at the Leopold Museum in Vienna in 2015, Emin included some Schiele works from their permanent collection among her own. The juxtaposition does not flatter her, but the main point is that she is no longer trying to woo the tabloids with her art.81 After a career of progressive works, she now does paintings of the sort associated with the male Expressionist tradition. If they were exhibited without Emin’s name, they wouldn’t have anywhere near the same value and would go largely unnoticed. Still, some artists so enjoy being newsworthy that they see no reason to stop: In 2016, Emin claimed that she married a stone in a special ceremony in the south of France. Some are incorrigible.82