But is it art?

One man crucifies himself from a crane while a dead cow drops from the air. Another stands accused of torturing a cat on video. A third vomits over priceless paintings. KIM HONEY reports on the artists with a mission to shock

by Kim Honey, the Globe and Mail, July 21, 2001

In Berlin, a headless, skinned cow carcass stuffed with fireworks explodes on impact after it is dropped 90 metres from a helicopter into an abandoned building. In Toronto, an art student is charged with cruelty to animals after police seize a videotape that depicts the torture and murder of a cat.

In Mexico, a U.S. artist buys a female cadaver and photographs himself having sex with the corpse for an exhibit called Blind Date.

All three incidents have been met with varying degrees of disgust, a collective outrage that fuels a greater debate about the merits of provocative art.

In the Berlin performance, a 13-year-old animal lover argued in court that she would suffer a "spiritual shock" if she saw artist Wolfgang Flatz drop the dead cow from the sky. A court rejected her plea to stop the event, saying she did not have to watch. Thursday's event also featured the artist hanging, naked, from a crane above the crowd while pulsing music, punctuated by a cow's moos, played in the background. The cow was dropped from the helicopter as Flatz dangled in the air.

As extreme art goes, this is just the tip of the iceberg. And at the crux of the controversy is the question: What is the definition of art? And who decides what is art in an age when torture, necrophilia, and self-mutilation all pass for creative human endeavour? Is it up to the individual who creates the piece to declare it as art, or should society decide whether the work has any validity?

Contemporary art is particularly vulnerable to this criticism, having moved away from oil-on-canvas renderings of bowls of fruit displayed in heavy gilt frames toward monochromatic abstractions, performance art, and even auditory forms such as Forty Part Motet, the soundscape by Canadian Janet Cardiff that won a $50,000 visual-arts award for an exhibition you couldn't see. Remember Voice of Fire,the huge canvas purchased for $2-million by the National Gallery in 1990? Even the chairman of the government's culture committee couldn't grasp the importance of the new acquisition.

"Two cans of paint and two rollers," said the Manitoba farmer, adding that he could do it in 10 minutes.

The Toronto case involving the art student and the cat has become a flash point for the discussion, particularly since animal-rights activists have targeted a student-run art gallery after its co-directors refused to condemn the work of the student artist. On Thursday, someone tossed a brick through the second-floor window of Art System, a gallery supported by the student union at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD). The gallery has also received several death threats on its voice mail.

Jessie Powers, a 21-year-old OCAD student, and another man, Anthony Ryan Wenneker, 24, were charged on May 30 with cruelty to animals and mischief after police raided a downtown apartment and confiscated videotapes, a headless, skinned cat from the fridge, as well as a rodent's skeleton and several animal skulls. Powers is out on bail while Wenneker is still in custody. Police have said one video featured the prolonged torture of a cat.

The art student, who took two classes taught by performance artist Johanna Householder, is a "sensitive, thoughtful young man who thinks deeply about questions of life and death," the OCAD teacher said. "My understanding is that he is extremely concerned about the wholesale slaughter of animals for food and other purposes."

In an interview with a Toronto paper shortly after the police raid on his apartment, Powers explained that, as an artist, he was committed to exposing the cruelty to animals butchered for food.

(A request to speak to Powers this week was turned down by his defence lawyer, Andrea Tuck-Jackson, who also declined to comment on the case while it is still before the courts.)

Powers had never shown any of his animal-related work in or outside of the classroom before, although some of his previous work was shown at Art System. Daniel Borins, co-director of the gallery, said the student was known for his "fantastic Utopian drawings of self-sufficient farms he would like to live on."

So after Powers was arrested, Householder, Borins and the other Art System co-director, Jubal Brown, attended the bail hearing to show moral support.

Householder explained why: "I had just thought, 'This is not right. This is a guilty-until-proven-innocent kind of situation. I'm going to go and show my support for him. I don't want him to feel victimized by animal-rights people.' "

Brown and Borins seemed to strike a nerve when they wouldn't condemn Powers's work, antagonizing animal-rights activists who were shocked that the avant-garde gallery's representatives didn't move swiftly to denounce the young artist, even if Powers was their personal friend. They do, however, condemn the torture of a cat, as Brown told a local reporter earlier in the week. "I don't support the killing of animals for food or art," said Brown, a vegetarian who owns two cats. "But whether it is art is not for us to answer."

Brown was at the centre of a similar firestorm five years ago when, as an OCAD student, he decided to show his disdain for "stale, obedient, lifeless crusts" of art work by vomiting primary colours on art work that he considered so bourgeois that it made him physically ill.

He managed to regurgitate red on a Dufy at the Art Gallery of Ontario and blue on a Mondrian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York before he abandoned his project. For his efforts, he was banned for life from the AGO.

Brown is keeping a low profile these days, but gallery co-director Borins stepped in to try and explain why they both feel it is unfair for them to judge Powers's video.

"As curators and programmers, Jubal and I feel that it is a very difficult situation to put us in . . . and that is to define the boundaries of artistic practice," Borins said. "Because those will be broken instantaneously, and it reduces the language of art to only a game in which boundaries are broken."

The young curators are loath to make a pronouncement on what is art or what isn't art, because they feel it should be up to society to decide, said Householder.

"I kind of feel like we've been down this road so many times before -- elephant dung, naked people, vomit," she said, referring to recent controversial North American artworks. Good art, the OCAD instructor said, is something we, as a society, decide upon after reflection and consideration.

Christina Ritchie, director/curator of the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, said society has to try and make a distinction between art and spectacle. It's one thing for an artist to make a statement with his or her work, but it's completely another thing if the sole intent is to attract attention.

"We want to give attention to things that are meaningful, relevant, and have some sort of relevance within our social repertoire," she said.

Part of the artist's job is to find an appropriate way to express himself in order to engage society in discourse about a subject the artist feels is compelling. "I think it's a two-way street," said Ritchie. "Art is not simply an act of declaration."

Cathy GordonMarsh is the woman who has waged a battle to boycott Art System because she feels the OCAD gallery directors, as representatives of a cutting-edge gallery, should take a stand on the video. Although she is not a member of any animal-rights group, she called the case "terrifying."

"[Jubal Brown] is condoning this as an artistic process by not condemning it. He is allowing the possibility that this could be art," GordonMarsh said. "Like, 'Who are we to judge this?' That just completely flipped me right out."

As for the video, GordonMarsh said she feels "very strongly" that "this is not art or an artistic process that I would accept." She has no problem passing judgment, and she is encouraging groups to boycott the gallery until the directors say what she wants them to say: Jessie Powers's video is not art.

Borins argued that the language of artistic production is far more sophisticated than the language of law, with the result that they will always be at odds with each other.

GordonMarsh, on the other hand, said she has no problem defining the boundaries of art, and noted that there is already a boundary for this kind of art -- the law.

"Like what? We're going to change the laws for artists just so they can abuse animals for the sake of a greater point? There are other ways of communicating a message about that topic that doesn't involve the direct torture of an animal."

Powers's case is reminiscent of the case of Sniffy the rat, a rodent destined to become snake fodder until it was purchased by Vancouver artist Rick Gibson in 1990.

Animal-rights activists were up in arms over Gibson's plan to crush Sniffy between two canvases using a 25-kilogram concrete block, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was powerless to stop the performance because lawyers deemed that it was a humane way for Sniffy to die and the rat would not suffer.

When Gibson showed up for the alleged performance and told the crowd it was cancelled, an angry mob chased him anyway. He later said he had no intention of crushing Sniffy. Powers's idea might have been valid, Householder said, but whatever his artistic intent, the way it was expressed was way off the mark.

"If Jessie is saying that this is to bring attention to the cruelty and suffering of animals that are used for meat, that seems to me to be a fairly reasonable thing to say," she added. "Also, it does open it up to some debate. What's the difference between a cat being killed and eaten in a video to a cow being killed and eaten in a video?"

According to Borins, Powers has the right to say whatever he wants to say, even though he might not get artistic attention for it.

"That's what you might have to face as an artist. There might be a curator or a program that intervenes and says, 'This isn't such a great piece, this isn't such a great idea.' And that's why, if you're an artist, you should want an audience."