The other night, I went to the opening of the NSFW (“Not Safe For Work”) show at the offices of Gawker. (Full disclosure: my girlfriend co-curated the show with her sister.) Here’s a picture from the show:
photo by Nick McGlynn
Looks fun, and it was fun. Great art, ok wine, fabulous people, etc. The central concept of the show was lurid sexual imagery of the kind that is not suitable for you to check out on your computer while at work – Not Safe For Work – and the show becomes a clever recontextualization of this heretofore web-only abbreviation. You can see the artists’ work here: Steve Ellis, Emiliano Granado, Heather Morgan, Justine Lai, and Randy Polumbo. If you want to see the work in person, the show will be at Fountain Art Fair on Pier 66 in nyc as well, March 4-7.
Great work. But I wasn’t shocked. My point: I don’t know if I can be shocked by a painted/photographed/sculpted image anymore. Even photos of various desecrations, maulings, murders, annihilations, dismemberings…I feel like I’ve seen a lot of gory stuff. Even this?
Gotta be honest: not shocked.
Related digression: You late-1990s New Yorkers remember the Sensation show at the Brooklyn Museum, way back before the turn of the millennium, right? Our then-mayor called the work in the show “sick stuff,” without ever having seen the show of course, and lines to see the show were then blocks and blocks long. And the work was audacious and a little shocking to many. I don’t know if I was actually shocked, but definitely moved. I was younger, maybe shock-able? What separates me now, blogging and such, and me back in 1999, fiddling with my Star Tac antenna, besides a few grey hairs and a some battle scars from late night struggles with cynicism?
A theory: 9/11. That was the ultimate shock art event. Of course, killing 3,000 people is not traditionally an artistic act, and I, like Stockhausen, am not suggesting that whomever carried out those attacks was a great artist worth name-checking or admiring.
However, the event of 9/11 was, and remains, THE ULTIMATE EVENT. There is no more dramatic single performance than what those guys did on that day, to most living Americans at least. And that event rendered everything afterwards kind of, well, cute. Not only did it destroy thousands of lives, engender two specious and disastrous wars, and arguably drag the US into potential Roman-Empire-style decline, the World Trade Center attack destroyed the possibility of anyone making a real, paradigm-shifting event for a very long time.
So, my question is, can art shows create riots now, in the USA. Maybe if you starve a dog like that Costa Rican artist? Is anyone shocked by Lady GaGa’s outfits? Or any outfit or painting, really? What am I overlooking here? Because I’m feeling like, since 9/11, it’s kinda like whatever you know what I’m sayin. Eh?
loving it!
As tragic as the 3000 victims of 9/11, the real shocker was the rubble.
The hundreds of thousands in the tsunami and Haiti have shocked us but 9/11 stopped us. It put people in awe of the violence that man is capable of, and that is jaw-dropping shocking. People know that life and the world we live in is uncertain. Floods, earthquakes, wars, death and taxes are events we deal with because that’s life. But we trust in our structures; our buildings, our planes, our houses and cars and when they betray us we are truly shaken.
When a burglary is committed, the victims don’t so much mourn the loss of possessions but are disturbed that their security is compromised. They feel personally violated even tough they we not even present during the robbery. To come home to your opened front door is a bit shocking. That is what happened on 9/11 and that is one reason that it shocked us so. What we once looked at as a “safe” city street is no longer. Man driven violence is shocking. Always. Especially against the unsuspecting. To see a couple guys fighting in the street is disturbing but to see and innocent get a blindsided sucker punch is repulsive.
Unfortunately I don’t see and end to it. For what ever reason humanity gravitates toward violence and chaos and considers peace and serenity as boring and slow.
If you want to start a riot with art, paint some pics of Mohammad.
For an artist, life is about communicating something and contributing to this larger cultural dialog that has been going on since people started painting on cave walls and sculpting cool decorative spears. One way of contributing to the dialogue is suddenly to expand the audience’s conception of what is possible, often using shock techniques. Everyone who’s anyone, highbrow or low, has done this, from Caravaggio to Madonna. But nothing is as real and as truly shocking as 9/11. Yes, this position is US-centric. But in reality, the world is also US-centric, and the world was also shocked and awed by this event, which had such strong symbolic meaning to the entire planet.
As far as pictures of religious figures go, it seems that you can make a cartoon of just about anyone, put it in front of some fundamentalist, and create strife. But that kind of idiotic shorthand communication is just stoking a fire that is already burning strong, looking for an excuse to grow. It doesn’t really change anyone’s outlook, or make the world seem suddenly larger.
What I mean is that nothing than anyone does can be as meaningful in both real terms and in symbolic terms, as 9/11. In a way that a lot of performance and street art is made, the 9/11 attackers used stuff that was already there and destroyed it to create larger meaning. 9/11 had real meaning, the realest possible meaning, on many levels. How can one trump that gesture?
There is obviously a lot for me to study outside of my books. Thanks for the fantastic read,