Death of A Dog Art Exhibit

Yesterday my daughter asked me if I had seen a petition on Facebook about an art exhibit that featured the cruel death of a helpless dog. I had not, but I was interested in finding out what it was about.

The Internet has been all abuzz for a number of months about this art exhibit in Costa Rica that is either a hoax, or is not a hoax. There are countless emails being emailed and numerous blogs being written about this “horrendous travesty“ of art. People are anxious to actually kill or maim the artist according to blogs and forums I have seen.

I knew from experience that it was a piece of conceptual art and I thought it might be a good idea to write a little about the history and background of conceptual art in order to explain, if possible, a kind of art that seems to be anti-art and anti-human.

These very powerful reactions regarding the perceived mistreatment of an animal are an incredible indication of the kind of reaction that is provoked when the public confronts certain kinds of conceptual art. It is interesting to note that previously, conceptual art was viewed by relatively few people and not widely discussed by a general audience. The Internet has changed this and made conceptual art available for criticism from a large public as well as from the art establishment.

For the last 100 years, contemporary art has been moving in a number of different directions away from traditional forms of painting and sculpture. Starting with cubism and Pablo Picasso, new ways of artistic exploration have become important in the development of art ideas of the twentieth century.

“The consensus among the majority of present-day critics and art historians is that Pablo Picasso was the most important and influential artist of the 20th century. His invention of Cubism in 1907-08 and of collage, construction and assemblage in 1912 have irrevocably changed the nature of painting and sculpture, and,...even redefined the very nature of art itself. For any modern artist, ignoring the implications of Picasso’s work is near impossible. From the French Cubists and Italian Futurists to the German Expressionists, English and Dutch Plasticism and Russian constructivist, few modern European artists managed to escape the force and magnetic pull of Picasso’s influence.“
A Sum of Destructions: Picasso's Cultures and The Creation of Cubism. By Natasha Staller, Associate Professor of Fine Arts. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2001. 438 pp.

The most powerful ideas that are currently being expressed in contemporary art have their roots in the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Dada movement.

Marcel Duchamp‘s early work was influenced by Pablo Picasso and cubism. In 1912 he painted 'Nude Descending a Staircase, no. 2', which was shown in the New York Armory Show in 1913.

By 1915 he began to create art objects that were actually manufactured everyday objects. The idea being that the artist could decide what is or is not art. The intent of the artist had to be the source of inspiration for art expression and the materials of art could be anything that the artist decided to use. Bicycle Wheel and Bottle Rack were the first of these new and unusual art objects.

In 1915 Duchamp went to New York and became involved with a circle of painters around the 'Stieglitz' Gallery. At this time the idea of Dada solidified and a philosophy of “anti art” became the motive behind the creation of The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)], which is often regarded as his single most important piece.

He followed up by submitting a urinal titled 'Fountain' and signed "R. Mutt" to the 1917 exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, which he had co-founded. When the exhibition refused to accept it, he resigned.

Later, Duchamp created a full-color reproduction of Leonardo's Mona Lisa to which he added a beard and a mustache. He named it 'L.H.O.O.Q.'submitted it to an exhibition in Paris in 1920. He and Katherina Dreier founded the Society for the propagation of modern art in America for anti-traditional, cubist, futurist and dadaist works.

These ideas set the stage for all the art that we now know as Conceptual Art.

Since that time artists have been creating art that is made up of all kinds of materials and objects, extending into areas that are called performance art, body art and earth works. These forms have begot a sub category that has been called “death art” and mutilation art. In my opinion, this took art out of the realm of making human connections with a notion of "beauty" and replacing it by shock and horror.

Chris Burden is a contemporary artist who made a name for himself in 1971 by staging an art exhibit in which he arranged to have a friend shoot him in the arm. This was followed by a number of other similar and more dangerous exhibitions, one of which I actually witnessed in Chicago in 1975.

It is described in
The New Yorker Magazine
The Art World
Performance
Chris Burden and the limits of art.
by Peter Schjeldahl May 14, 2007

Burden’s most trenchantly significant work was “Doomed,” performed in April, 1975, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He set a clock on a wall at midnight, and lay down on the floor under a leaning sheet of glass. Viewers came and went. Burden didn’t move. Inevitably, he soiled his pants. (“It was awful,” he recalled.) Forty-five hours and ten minutes passed. Then a young museum employee named Dennis Oshea took it upon himself to place a container of water within Burden’s reach. The artist got up, smashed the clock with a hammer, and left. He never again undertook a public action that imperilled himself. It wouldn’t have made sense. “Doomed” unmasked the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility.
In Oshea's case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art works. There should be a monument to him, somewhere, which would commemorate the final calling of the bluff of art as a law unto itself. (Would Burden have lain there until he died? “Probably not,” he said.) I have in mind Robert Rauschenberg’s famous intention “to act in the gap between” art and life. There isn’t any gap. Art is notional. There is always only life and death.

The information I found regarding the conceptual art known as The Death of a Dog Art Exhibit is described as follows:

Outrage at 'starvation' of a stray dog for art
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer
Chaining up a dog and forcing it to go without food and water in the name of art is a surefire way of making yourself unpopular with animal lovers. The furore created by Damien Hirst with his pickled sheep...pales into insignificance against the international outrage Guillermo Vargas has unleashed.
The Costa Rican has been called an animal abuser, killer and worse over claims that a stray dog called Natividad died of starvation after he displayed it at an exhibition last year at the Gallery in Managua, Nicaragua. Vargas tethered the animal without food and water under the words ' Lo Que Lees' - 'You Are What You Read' - made out of dog biscuits while he played the Sandinista anthem backwards and set 175 pieces of crack cocaine alight in a massive incense burner...
Vargas, 32, said he wanted to test the reaction, and insisted none of the exhibition visitors intervened to stop the animal's suffering. He refused to say whether the animal had survived the show, but said he had received dozens of death threats.
Juanita, director of the Gallery, insisted Natividad escaped after just one day. She said: 'It was untied all the time except for the three hours the exhibition lasted and it was fed regularly with dog food he himself brought in.

The Truth according to www.TruthOrFiction.com
is as follows:

Artist Allowed a Dog to Starve To Death in the Name of Art-Disputed!

The Truth:
There is no dispute that the exhibit by Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas took place in Managua, Nicaragua in 2007...
There is also no dispute that the reports about the exhibition have sparked international outrage. Websites, blogs, and petitions were devoted to protesting the exhibit and calling for the artist to be uninvited from the Central American Biennial event in 2008.
There is not agreement, however, about whether the dog was mistreated and died as a result of Vargas exhibit.

Another provocative conceptual art piece is causing a great deal of concern at Yale University. The following is an excerpt from an article in the Wall Street Journal. The complete article is available at www.wsj.com for one week.

In the Fray
Art and (Woman at Yale

By MICHAEL J. LEWIS
April 24, 2008; Page D9

Has any work of art been more reviled than Aliza Shvartses senior project at Yale? Andres Serrano's photograph of a crucifix suspended in his own urine did not lack for articulate champions. Nor did Damien Hirst's vitrine with its doleful rotting cow's head. But Ms. Shvartses performance of "repeated self-induced miscarriages" has left even them silent. According to her project description, she inseminated herself with sperm from voluntary donors "from the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle . . . so as to insure the possibility of fertilization." Later she would induce a miscarriage by means of an herbal abortifacient. (Or so she claimed; whether she actually did any of this remains unclear.)

This article is very worthwhile reading.

In conclusion, one of the interesting things to note about conceptual art is because it is transient, the only thing left after the exhibit is the documentation. In the case of an artist like Chris Burden, these documents become valuable objects and are sold in the art market the same way as other valuable paintings and sculpture.

Contributor's Note

I once inadvertently created "conceptual art." One evening in 1978 when I was with a group of friends, we passed an art gallery where the only thing to be seen in the window was a ladder. No other art on display. I actually convinced these people that the ladder was the art because I believed it to be so. After telling them all about the concepts behind the idea of conceptual art, they believed me. The next day we returned to the gallery and there were paintings on the wall. We all had a good laugh at this.