Pigs' heads and artists' brains
by Mike Crowl
| Artists, I’d guess, would claim to have antennae more sensitive
to the culture than most of us, yet they can be remarkably insensitive.
In Dunedin’s Botanic Gardens on the weekend, a display of artistic work by first- year Otago Polytechnic students included a concrete pig’s head stuck on top of the marble body of the Virgin Mary. Now, you’d think at first sight, that the ‘work of art’ was saying something about religion. Nope. It was intended to encourage debate on the genetic engineering of animals. The ‘statue’ was enclosed in a plastic coat, which represented, according to the artist, Don Hunter, ‘sweating through our labours to correct any errors’ that could be made through genetic engineering. Mr Hunter was mildly surprised when some people decapitated the statue and tossed the pig’s head into the bushes. They weren’t vandals, at least not in the generally accepted use of the word. They were people who were offended by the way something sacred to them was used so insensitively. Just as people were offended by the Tania Kovak’s Virgin in a Condom at Te Papa, or the Last Supper painting where Sam Taylor-Wood replaced Christ with a topless woman. The odd thing about those art works is that they weren’t intended to say anything about religion either. The artists had taken hold of a sacred image and used it to express something altogether different. (I’m not sure what – probably something political, in the broadest sense of that word. These days we mostly have to wait for artists to explain their work before we can make any sense of it.) Like Mr Hunter, in Dunedin, Kovaks and Taylor-Wood no doubt expressed surprise that such use upset someone. Hunter’s comment was: “If we find a marble statue sacred, where is the sacredity of our own bodies?” He’s arguing in a circle. If he thinks we ought to be concerned about our bodies because of what GE might do to their sacredness (or sacredity, if your prefer), then he must surely have to argue that even the image of the body needs to be treated with sensitivity. (Isn’t insensitivity the trouble with pornography?) He must understand that a particular image, which for millions of people around the world is regarded with great reverence, shouldn’t be subject to indignity. (That’s what Kovaks seemed unable to understand, as well.) Only a few pages over from the photo of the bemused Mr Hunter (in the Otago Daily Times) we had our former Dunedin Art Gallery curator, Peter Entwhistle, decrying the Taliban destruction of Buddhist art works in Afghanistan. He easily makes the point that there’s something horrific about nationalists, or religionists, destroying other people’s art. Apparently, however, it’s not iconoclastic, (Mr Entwhistle’s word) for someone like another artist, such as Mr Hunter, or Ms Kovaks, or Mr Taylor-Wood, to take Christian art icons and muck about with them. Or is it because the icons are Christian that artists no longer think anyone cares? Obviously people do. The icons still have enough potency for these artists to realise firstly that their very use of them draws on their potency, and secondly that if they use them they will upset someone (I don’t believe any of them are naïve enough not to think so). Of course, tomorrow we could find an artist sticking a concrete pig’s head on a carving outside a Maori marae. Or covering a tiki (already a fairly abused symbol) in a condom. |
Couldn’t we?
This column first appeared on Society and Culture section of www.soapbox.co.nz on 28th May 2001
© Mike Crowl 2001