With three commissions, too much grad school, and tons of politics to keep up with, this blog took a hit. But I'll try to heat it back up starting now.
Bruno in Milan
Sacha Baron Cohen is one of the best performance artists of our time. Lately, as the gay Austrian, Bruno, he's been dabbling in art intervention. Just 10 days ago, Cohen managed to act as an extra in a court scene for NBC's Medium, sitting in the jury and disrupting the shoot. Earlier this fall, he crashed two fashion shows, one in Paris and the Prada show in Milan, for which he actually walked the catwalk wearing a cross between an elementary school diorama and the Derelict line from Zoolander:
Other recent Bruno escapades include a pro-Proposition 8 rally in LA and two cage-fighting matches in Arkansas. Cohen apparently lured people to the fights with promises of chicks and cheap beer, and then proceeded to strip down and kiss another man in the ring. The audience was a bit put off, and many threw chairs and beer at the young lovers.
Hopefully much of this great work will appear in his upcoming film starring Bruno, out this May.
What should we make of him? Is he just a comedian, a brilliant Neo-Dadaist like Pierre Pinoncelli, or somewhere in between? I'm inclined to think his mockery of the fashion and television industries and of homophobia in the past few months alone is more than just laughs.
Lately I've felt nauseous on account of the academy, or institutionalized art. I guess it's kind of funny that the institution where I study is paying me to try to tear down its walls. The status quo often feels like a giant bowl of jello that you'll float in for the rest of your life if you're not careful--maybe a little flexible at times, but on the whole, pretty fixed and relatively transparent (translucent, I guess). However, for some artists, it's pretty easy to smash it all to hell.
I could begin a long diatribe against the authenticity, unity, and individuality that modernism adopted from its predecessors, dating back at least to Kant. (See Richard Taruskin for a fantastic example, a book review turned testimony subtitled "Defending classical music against its devotees.") And I'd like to. But for now, let's enjoy two artists who let their work speak for itself.
Banksy could be today's most relevant artist. Check out his drawing, above, that depicts his opinion of high art and museum culture. He's daring; he's visually stimulating; he's hysterical; and he's campaigning against real (but perhaps unsolvable) problems like war, greed, etc. According to the artist, "None of the print and painting exhibitions in proper art galleries are anything to do with me, it's all stuff they bought previously. I only ever mount shows in warehouses or war zones or places full of live animals (I'm aware the pictures don't stand up on their own)." Check out his whole site, but especially the films page, where you can view the guy in action at a zoo, and in the news after having somehow designed a giant exhibition of his work on the wall that separates Palestine from Israel in the West Bank. Here's a great youtube news clip:
Pierre Pinoncelli is a neo-Dadaist and a Marcel Duchamp devotee. You might wonder why, then, he pissed into his idol's most famous work, Fountain. Oh, and he hit it with a hammer. On two different occasions. Fountain, a urinal signed by Duchamp as "R. Mutt," was given the Turner Prize, by 500 "art experts," for being the most influential work of modern art. Duchamp's piece satirizes museum art, and the museum world embraced it for just that reason, to show that it does allow self-critique. Pinoncelli argues that the institution of art has commodified the work and muffled its meaning; that's why he whipped it out in 1993 while the urinal was on display in Nimes, and why he took a hammer to it in 2006 at the Centre Pompidou: to free Duchamp's spirit from "museum bureaucracy and art establishment, with its snobbery and its cliquishness and its shiny invitations and champagne receptions and art-denying money values."
A close friend wrote a brilliant paper on Pinoncelli and the avant-garde in college, and I owe any real discussion of the man's performance art to this friend. When he publishes the paper, I'll be the first to post a link.
Another priceless excerpt from the Infoshop article: "He did, in fact, once appear as Santa Claus outside the Nice branch of the Galeries Lafayettes department store. He emptied a sack of toys on the pavement and smashed them to protest against the commercialisation of Christmas. Children burst into tears. Their parents pursued him down the street."
Do we have to risk arrest to make provocative art or truly challenge the institution? Maybe, but hopefully not. For now, I'm just glad these two dudes exist.
Bruno in Milan
