Shock Art - Open Letter to Artists

In case you think of art critics having the confidence level of Great Whites, this is me chewing over an area of concern: Shock art, my tag for exhibits that can make you stagger back, chilled at the sight.

The thing is, shock art isn't always bad art. If you think that, this column is for you. And if you think shock art is always a good thing, read on. I don't know which is worse, the piety of the shock artist or the preachiness of the shocked. Remember Bob Dole wanting to overturn the assault-weapon ban, but worrying about violence in the arts? In a similar way, when shock artists tell us that their art reflects life, it's a little like saying, "The devil made me do it."

There are arguments on both sides. Those who pooh-pooh shock art say that art should be beautiful. The shock artists say that truth is beauty.

Maybe the argument is not about truth or beauty, but about control, taste control - something Hitler understood. "Art is not a realm unto itself, governed by its own laws," he said. "Art must be part of the community." Seeing himself as the protector of "the right kind of art," the Fuhrer restricted picture-making to romantic Arcadian rural settings uncontaminated by real life: "Theater, art, literature, cinema, posters and window displays must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world," he said.

I'm not about to side with Hitler, but when I see a monthly art magazine depict a female equipped with male sex organs - a double set, no less - I find myself longing for the Arcadian rural setting.

Maybe we need to define terms. What is art? I figure it's a mix of beauty and truth. Beauty has its rules (balance, rhythm, contrast, unity of line, shape, space, light, color and pattern). So does truth. Probably the truest, angriest and most beautiful picture I know is "La Grande Jatte" in which Georges Seurat painted tiny dots of equal size with machinelike precision to describe middle-class life as joyless, flat and lifeless. Empty faces and starched, separate bodies of maids and clerks - icons of the alienation and anonymity of modern life - go with Seurat's dot matrix. It was the truth as he saw it in 1886.

A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by George Seurat, 1884-86. Oil on canvas, 81.7 x 121.3"

Yet the work is so beautiful, the relation of Seurat's colors so sublime, many don't readily see the anger. Which brings up a key ingredient in the mixing of truth and beauty: metaphor. If an image doesn't imply something beyond itself, it's not truth, it's just a surface reality that omits those levels of existence within us that have no image. In the art magazine picture of the hermaphrodite, there was nothing inscrutable, nothing unknowable.

You might say that's what true art is about - secrets. The quintessential example may be the riddling expression on "Mona Lisa's" face and the shadowy landscape behind her. "Mona Lisa" is a visual metaphor for hidden meaning, for the unknowable, which is at the core of life. To make certain we make the connection, Leonardo da Vinci melted the edges of his figure so she appears as part of the rocks and the water. In-your-face art can't do that. It's too single-minded.

This is not to say that the Johnny-one-notes in the shock art crowd are the only ones who take art's name in vain. Some art critics help them do it.

Here's New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman writing about the SoHo exhibit of cow carcasses hacked up by artist Damien Hirst: "The show left me somehow, unexpectedly, smiling ... It's a sense of something vivifying beyond, or besides, his infatuation with death and dead animals, that makes Mr. Hirst's work likable, and makes his art different from the merely slick and chilling ..."

And here's art critic Kim Levin in New York's "The Village Voice." Her subject was Julian Schnabel, who is known for giant canvases where globs of paint are applied to broken pieces of crockery glued to the surface: "They regurgitate residues of feelings that no longer exist. They manage to be decadent and barbaric at the same time."

Then, as if she knew she wasn't making any sense, Levin added, "Why should everything mean something? What's wrong with a taste of true meaninglessness?"

Nothing, if that's your taste. Just don't call it art.

Photo credits: Wikipedia

— by Joan Altabe  |  October 30, 2006  |  Print Version - PDF

Print   |  

back to top