ART CRIME

                                    “Nothing is real, everything is permissible.”
                        -Brion Gysin.

“The arts and criminality have always flourished side by side.”
            -J.G. Ballard.


             Art should be banned; all artists thrown in prison. Art should be a criminal act. It should terrify those in power. It should make their flesh crawl, and the hair on the backs of their necks stand on end. It should make their hearts palpitate and their palms sweat. It should remind them that their days are numbered.

             Art is most potent as a means of subversion. The operational definition of art I will be using is: any action with the intent of producing thought. This is a very broad definition, I know, but I feel it serves its purpose well. In these terms, art should shake the foundations of the Establishment to the core. Art, by design, should be incorruptible; artists corrupt. Art should expand the horizons of consciousness. It should constantly reignite that spark of wonder that all human beings are born with. It should keep the flames of curiosity burning and the wheels of invention turning. Art must guide us to the outer limits of our minds so that we may find out what dwells there. It must take us deep within our psyche and force us to confront things that we would rather ignore. Art should inspire. Inspiration comes from new ways of looking at things, and art should teach us how to see. As long as we are inspired, we should never be content. I fall into my own trap of “shoulds” here. Of course there is no way art SHOULD be done. “All options are open in life, and none is more meaningful or meaningless than any other.” I suppose that this is merely an agenda. I see a powerful tool with which to strike at convention, but if it is decided not to use art in this manner then only I will be upset, and life will persist. We must all realize that we are involved in pointless endeavors. Art, music, literature, television, movies, and even science are all positively nonessential to survival. They are interesting toys for us to play with. You do not need to possess any understanding at all about the human race in order to be a part of it. Just as you do not need to know anything at all about life in order to live it. But I digress. The legacy of the 20th century is a smoldering carcass of what used to be quaintly described as “art.” Rotting in it’s grave is a confused mess of aesthetics, references, technical acuity, and tired expressions that no one hears because no one is listening. If no one is interested in art anymore, it is because it is boring, and no longer speaks to anyone. It is the art that is failing, not the people.

             The visual arts are in a sad state. Wallowing in a puddle of filth, sucking hungrily at the last bits of nutrients. Trying in vain to appeal to a society that is transfixed by spectacle. The artists that are pulled out of the muck are only selected because they adequately reinforce the status quo. A certain amount of subversion is expected, because in small doses it serves to inoculate the culture against larger, more aggressive viruses of dissent. These artists are welcomed by an industry of back patting, back stabbing sycophants hell-bent on maintaining the illusion that they are, in fact, relevant. But all that is left to feast on are recycled aesthetics and well-worn avenues of self-expression. Neither of which are without merit, but both of which are incapable any longer to excite or inspire. Art was given a death sentence in the 20th century. Duchamp is the convicted murderer; Fountain (1917), the smoking gun. If art is everything then it is nothing. Less like a fatal blow and more like a cancer, this idea grew and festered within the term “art.” There are no antibodies that can protect against a thought this destructive. If we had to give the disease a name we could call it Dada, or we could simply call it nothing. All that one could do was enter the ensuing spiral of one-upmanship that led to the end. Linguistically, “art,” no longer exists. The whole of it has been subsumed into life, and therefore has become life itself. No comparison can be drawn between two objects with different names but comprised of the same components.

             The seeds were planted at the tail end of the 19th century with the emergence of the avant-garde. At the time it was still possible to shock by aesthetic means alone; something I believe to be wholly impossible in contemporary art. Manet’s Dejeuner sur L’herbe (1863), shown in the Salon des Refuses of the same year created a furor by simply playing with aesthetic conventions. To the critics, who championed the likes of Gerome, Cabanel, and Waterhouse, artists like Manet and the Impressionists must have appeared utterly vulgar. The Salon des Refuses is the first example of artists collectively rejecting the idea of the artistic academic elite as the sole authorities on art. Before this time there was no avant-garde; art was institutionalized, you either played the game, or you did not. The rift between artist and critic continued to split with groups like the Fauves. Amusingly named by critics, meaning: “wild beasts,” due to the apparently beastly and uncultured style. The avant-garde at this point was still primarily concerned with expression, and was therefore only aesthetically “cutting edge.” Rarely are their ideas very extreme.

             Dada and the Futurists of the early 20th century are the first examples of artists striking against conventions of thought. Aesthetically the futurists were relatively conservative. Balla’s Street Light (1909), rendered in an expressionist manner to capture the dynamism of technology and light is unlikely to shock many people. His stance that all museums and libraries be destroyed in order to make way for the future may however. The importance of Dada is that they brought a nominalist view of linguistics into the realm of art. They realized that words, symbols, actions, etc, possessed no innate meaning. They only have value bases insofar as we agree to the terms. The Dada artists had the idea to reject the terms in which this agreement was founded and strip everything of it’s meaning so that it may be viewed in a new light. They wanted to destroy language and the society that utilized it. With Fountain, arguably as soon as Duchamp produced the first “Ready-made” in 1913, art was as good as dead. All that remained was to try out every possibility that such a profound realization suggested. The cutting edge was blunted overnight. The Avant-garde died. It became a race to continuously prove that anything could be and, in fact, is art. It took a few decades for artists to take full advantage of this new adjustment of terminology. It must be considered that Duchamp was still primarily making a statement about art, and not society as a whole.

             Most art became self-referential. Art for artists, and appreciators of art based on rigid standards of appreciation. Abstract Expressionism being the most pronounced example of this. Clement Greenberg being positively dogmatic in his laying down of the law as to what constituted art. Any straying from his conventions was subject to derision or dismissal. This is the last point that art had any sort of unity whatsoever. After this period I feel that we must stop looking at art in the mainstream, as it has become completely irrelevant outside of it’s own channels of communication, and instead turn to subversive art. Art born of the Dada type of mindset that anything goes, so everything goes. That nothing is sacred, especially not art, and that all that is important is the destruction of convention. Art that pushes the boundaries of human thought. Art that propels us into the future. Art that destroys false assumptions. Art that operates on it’s own. Art that threatens. Art that terrorizes the psyche. Criminal Art. Degenerate Art. Outsider Art. Art that is, and by nature always will be, subversive.

             One must keep in mind that for the majority of art’s existence, its primary function was to reinforce standing power structures. Art was a means of propaganda for the Church as well as the State. It maintained order and reaffirmed control. Its original purpose was communication; a means of recording and preserving culture, almost always of a religious nature. Art and religion developed hand in hand. With the idea of the avant-garde the purpose of art was no longer to maintain the status quo, but to upset it. Constantly finding the new form, the new expression. I believe that this is when art became its most powerful. Art as a frontier; as a cultural instigator. In this sense, art should not only be subversive, it should be criminal. Art should threaten standards of decency. It should be considered dangerous by those in power because it should be a direct attack on that power. Of course, aesthetics and expression are still valid, but only as aesthetics and expression.

             The performance artists of the 1960’s and 70’s were commonly targeted by police. Herman Nitsch’s OM (Orgiastic Meditation) Performances in which he would cover himself and participants in animal blood, intestines, feces, etc, and would degenerate into a drug-induced frenzy of ecstasy and release. Paul McCarthy, who, by the mid 70’s, work had become so upsetting that it was generally only released on video. His acts consisted of dressing as a woman and reenacting birth and menstrual processes with substances like blood, catsup, feces, and various other food products. Vitto Acconic in his Following Piece (1974), would pick a passerby at random on the street and follow them until it was no longer possible to do so. The only discernable difference between this and a potentially criminal act is the intent.

             There are many other “artists,” still who are hesitant to even be referred to as artists. Pranksters like Joey Skaggs who uses the media as his canvas. Composing extraordinary elaborate hoaxes that is gobbled up and disseminated by the media. His Cathouse for Dogs (1976), where he ran ads in the paper offering the service of having you K9 sexually serviced. He appeared on talk shows professing the benefits of such an operation. There was quite and uproar, as well as quite an interest. His bogus campaign to have the gypsy moth renamed (1982). Claiming that the name supported damaging stereotypes of gypsy people. He story was picked up and championed by the New York Times.

             People like Mark Pauline who runs Survival Research Laboratories; that put on incredibly dangerous, loud, destructive, performances involving massive robots and machines that attach each other blow things up, smash cars, and dismember animals are almost always busted up by the police. I met and briefly worked with Mark this summer, his warehouse ranks among one of the most remarkable places I’ve been in my life. He demonstrated his shockwave cannon, based on WWII German technology on us; blowing off our hats and glasses. He supports these performances by selling high-end electronics to large corporations.

             It is worth pointing out that these artists are almost never supported by anyone. No one is paying them to do what they do because they operate so far out of the norm that they are completely unbankable. An example I like to give is Chris Burden’s White Light/White Heat piece (1975). Where he sat on a small platform in a gallery for 24 days not eating or moving. Not seeing anyone or being seen by anyone. He was just there; not interacting at all with the environment, but there. Or Robert Delford Brown with his Meat Show (1964), which he rented a gallery and purchased tons and tons of raw meat and animal blood and had upper class art-scene types come into this putrid, hot, rotting room, and try and appreciate it as art. He said it was just his way of saying, “Okay, it’s really all over.”

             Or Joe Coleman, who has said that if he was not making “art,” he would have been a serial killer. Some of his usual antics include going to a space, biting the heads off of live mice, pulling out a shotgun, firing it off, and then blowing himself up with explosives he has strapped to his chest. One time he went to his high school reunion claiming to be another student from his class who had died in a car accident years earlier. After making everyone uneasy all evening, wanting to ask if he was dead, but to afraid to, he walked into the middle of the him, pulled open his shirt and blew himself up. He was arrested in San Francisco for operating and “infernal machine.” You know you’re doing something really out there when they book you on some ridiculously archaic charge. In one performance after everyone had fled in terror, the lady who had hired him for the show was on the floor sobbing because of what a disaster it turned out to be. (She was fired for hiring him). He approached her with his gun, put it to her head and asked if she liked the show. She sobbed and said she did. He said, “I knew you would,” and walked away. Coleman says, “I take it as far as I can without killing somebody.” Coleman has been beat up and arrested numerous times. In my opinion he is one of the most extreme artists operating today. He is terrifying. And that’s why he works. He says he’s not going to kill you, but you believe that at any second he might, and he, in fact, might. It is chaos. It is amplified life. When ripped that far out of our comfort zones we really gain perspective as to what is important to us. So many things start to seem insignificant. If forces us into a reductive line of reasoning; dialectics, which isn’t even taught to us in schools anymore, but in my opinion is an essential survival tool.

             Artists like this are important because they exist. To ignore them would be to ignore reality. They are products of the exact same world as us. They are members of the same species. They are terrifying or humors or shocking because they make us look at ourselves with a critical eye. This is not a comfortable thing to do. The 20th century’s legacy is that of chaos. A chaos that existed before we humans imposed rules onto this Earth, and a chaos that we will someday return to; either by collective understanding, or by the obliteration of our carelessly destructive species.


             “In the East, poets are sometimes thrown in prison- a sort of compliment, since it suggests the author has done something at least as real as theft, or rape, or revoultion. Here poets are allowed to publish anything at all- a sort of punishment in effect, prison without walls, without echoes, without palpable existence. If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. At any cost, re-connect poetry to the body. Not crimes against bodies, but ideas (and ideas-in-things) which are deadly and suffocating. Not stupid libertinage, but exemplary crimes, aesthetic crimes, crimes of love.”
             -Hakim Bey. 1985.

             “If someone burgles my house, shoots the dog, and rapes the maid, my reaction isn’t to open an art gallery.” “Not your first reaction perhaps. But later, as you question events and the world around you.”
            -J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights, 1996.