by lissaredshoes
“I’ve got a peculiar weakness for criminals and artists – neither takes life as it is. Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.” – Stanley Kubrick
What makes one person choose art and another one murder? One controversial theory suggests that artists and criminals do have something in common: They like to break the rules. Where they do differ is in their choice of weaponry and strategy of attack. Whether wielding a knife or brush, these transgressors exploit their talents (or psychopathologies) to express primal feelings of rage, love, hate, despair or passion – crawling into the darkest corners to find a treasure trove of disturbing images and thoughts.
Stanley Kubrick with his camera during his teen years
Modern art, often equated with the ‘transgressive’, pits the progressive avant-garde against the conservative academy or salon. In fact, there are many artists whose work breeds (or enacts) a remarkable continuity between murder and creation; violence and passion; and death and life.
trans·gres·sion
- 1. An act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct; an offense.
Seems criminal. Right? Well, maybe not.
In his recent book, Trangressions, prominent lawyer, Anthony Julius, sets out to explore what he terms the “offences of art” from a legal and moral, but also a social and aesthetic, point of view. Julius asks whether art still has the power to shock us, whether it serves, in the process, to enlarge our imaginative horizon or merely diminishes our sense of humanity. Is transgressive art merely folly for our depravity and lust?
“Where no law is, there is no transgression.” (Romans 4:15)
Transgression is not the same as disorder; it opens up chaos and reminds us of the necessity of order. Transgression can have both liberating effects and severe consequences. It can also be liberating to ‘break the rules’ and to find and go beyond the edges of acceptability. To do so potentially offers new ways of seeing or establishing social order and identities.
Art exists for humans to consider the real world in ways that simple objectives views simply cannot do – from the inside out. We cannot ‘Other’ characters or experiences when we see the world inside someone else’s head or through their experiences. The ‘Other’, revealed as a damaged or estranged human, can teach us something about the roots of violence or the trappings of horror. Through art, we can interrogate the atrocities in the world, the real cancers of our society. You cannot ignore a tumor (well, you can of course, but consider the consequences).
We learn about things by looking at them and then rolling them on our tongues, together. You may have heard of this process. It is sometimes involved in things like science and other forms of discourse. It is also the system of art: writing, painting or enacting something in order to get a more nuanced look. Art is how we both study and de-fang our monsters. To lock violent (or repulsive) art away, or to close our eyes to it, is to give our monsters and fears undeserved power – or fertile ground for the darker edges of humanity to grow. In fact, suppressing such things may be what provokes us into hateful acts of revenge, killing sprees or other catastrophic tragedies.
Through art, we can experience violent hatred and a desire to kill someone, without causing any harm. All this means is we have dark feelings that are worthy of our acceptance, exploration and self-expression (through art). Once given these precious gifts, art can move us into quiet moments of healing or epic transformations. Thus, it will no longer holds its charge, but can be free to evolve naturally and spontaneously into something else – something humorous, provocative, poetic or deeply profound.
SPLAT
Tom Friedman transforms mundane materials into meticulously crafted works of art that use humour to reflect more deeply on creation versus destruction. His ‘splat’ victim (possibly pushed to its death from the gallery rafters above), is born from the artist’s careful cutting and assembling of construction paper. The artist uses his material to conjure up feelings about human fragility and violent death with his evocative use of cartoon references to lighten the load.
SHOOT
Chris Burden produced a series of controversial performances in the early 1970s in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. “Shoot” was one of a number of repugnant performances in which Burden subjected himself to danger, thereby creating a double bind, for viewers, between the citizenly injunction to intervene in crises and the institutional taboo against touching art. He spent five days in a small locker, with a bottle of water above and a bottle for urine below, slithered, nearly naked, across fifty feet of broken glass. He had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen; was kicked down a flight of stairs; and, on different occasions, incurred apparent risks of burning, drowning, and electrocution. Death by art?
SLAUGHTER
The Vienna Action Group was a group of anti-commodity artists who came together to make art of transgressive action using gestures of blood, semen and meat in the 1960s. Their violent, antisocial actions of theatrical savagery put the artists constantly at odds with the Austrian law and police for taking seemingly dangerous risks. The artists served jail sentences for breaking laws of moral decency, public exposure, and degrading symbols of the state – pain, self-mutilation, guilt and exorcism were common themes in provocative performances that resembled pagan orgies or ritual sacrifices.
MYRA
In 1997, the controversial Sensation exhibition of Young British art opened at the Royal Academy. Angry visitors tossed red and blue ink and raw eggs over a portrait of Myra Hindley and issued threats: “Unless you tell me it’s withdrawn, I’m coming round to the academy and I’m going to stab the first person I see.” What provoked such violent anger? Marcus Harvey’s portrait, Myra, made from multiple copies of children’s handprints. Although such a gesture may initially seem insensitive and cruel, on closer inspection, the handprints seem to claw at Hindley’s face, obliterating her features with tiny grasping palms. It has the chill of horror we feel but can rarely express.
POISON
Since 1996, artist Janice Kerbel has submerged herself in explorations of that gray space between the real and the unreal. Much of her work has explored various modes of deception. Bank Job and her more recent installation, Kill the Workers!, are two of her best-known works, but her interest in creating fictional crimes and deceptions go back to her early days as an artist. In 1996, she made a series of jams from flowers and poisonous berries and bottled them like strawberry preserves. Accompanying the jars were descriptions of the sinister effects these concoctions would have on the human body. Her jams posed a threat, as desirable, yet potentially dangerous objects for consumption. Under the ‘authority’ of traditional fieldwork and botanical science, this series of work questioned the construction and myth of the femme fatale.
FRANKENSTEIN
Gunther von Hagen’s life reads like an archetypal scientist’s resume—distinguished by early ingenuity, scholarship, discovery, experimentation, and invention. ‘Dr. Death’ invented a ‘plastination’ process, which is the craft of preserving human bodies by replacing the natural body fluids and fats with solid plastic. His infamous Body Worlds exhibition includes 175 body parts and 25 corpses, including the bisected body of a pregnant woman with her womb cut open to reveal the fetus. Despite millions of viewers who have visited his exhibitions, others have harshly criticized his work as macabre and exploitive, referring to him as a “modern-day Frankenstein.” Besieged by controversy, this “artist-cum-scientist” has faced angry Christians and governments who are offended by his offerings to sell ‘slices’ of human remains online and for breaching laws in his handling of corpses. In 2004, von Hagen agreed to return seven corpses to China after admitting that the bodies used in his exhibitions might be executed prisoners.
BUTCHER
The Other White Meat, Mariel Clayton
Self-taught photographer Mariel Clayton is responsible for a series of hilariously staged, gruesome murder scenes featuring Mattel’s iconic blonde-bombshell. When asked why she did this to Barbie, her response was, “I intensely dislike the stereotype that the “ideal” female fits no current authentic female form. You can’t get to be Barbie without an ocean’s worth of peroxide, 27 plastic surgeries and a complete lack of intelligence, so it irritates me immensely that this is the toy of choice women give to their daughters to emulate.” Her solution? Behind the bimbo-brained, lipstick smile lurks the black heart of a true American Psycho chick flick: “Barbie does murder (not Dallas) – and lots of it.”
BLOOD
Self, 1991
Self, 2001
Back in 1991, Marc Quinn’s “blood” self-portrait caused quite a sensation, catapulting a bizarre art project into the world spotlight. Every five years, the artist casts a detailed self-portrait from his own frozen blood. Yes, they are creepily sublime, yet, beautifully outrageous. He created the Self-Series as a means of recording the changes to his facial features as he ages. Quinn said about his work that, “By some freak coincidence, the volume of my head is the volume of the circulation system of my body, about nine pints. In the years [that] I’m making a blood head I go and visit my doctor every six weeks and he takes a pint out in the same way as if I was giving blood.” The work is uncanny in how it shows the impossibility of immortality. He describes it as a work of art on life support: “If you unplug it, it turns to a pool of blood. It can only exist in a culture where looking after art is a priority,” says Quinn.
Murderous is not the same as murdering. One is an adjective, the other a verb. Art, then, is a murderous act (however, symbolic) – a way to explore the dark side of humanity. In fact, it is entirely possible that we need to get a little blood in our eyes to see the world more clearly.
“Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?” – Carl Jung
“All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“The noir hero is a knight in blood caked armor. He’s dirty and he does his best to deny the fact that he’s a hero the whole time.” – Frank Miller
“The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.” – Sylvia Plath
Click below to view lissaredshoes’ previous posts:
Blood in the Snow: Belligerent Drunk Gets Starlight Tour to Highest Power in the Land
Guilty Pleasures: Film Noir, Gay Porn and Other Forbidden Flowers
Missing on Christmas Eve: The Grisly Discovery of a Young Man’s Body
Bring in the Clowns: The Nefarious Paintings of John Wayne Gacy
Stalking Is Not a Love Song (Unless You’re Sting)
Sex Police and Other Sordid Tales: Censorship and the Criminalization of Art in Canada
The Deathly Siluetas of Ana Mendieta
lissaredshoes is a visual artist and writer living in Canada who writes about art and the criminal justice system with a special focus on wrongful convictions and the role media and arts play in contemporary culture. She runs her own blog, My Spotted Couch, a website for her visual art, and writes occasionally for Galleries West.http://spottedcouch.wordpress.com/