Doorways

random insanities

Art for all - and vice versa

If you bring it in, we'll hang it, said the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, which is about to move to another space. The reaction to the initiative, called aptly Free For All, was overwhelming: dozens of people cueing up in the cold weather with their works. The only criterium of selection was having actually brought the work oneself. One may have doubts whether it was really a sign of 'support for the gallery' on the part of the people waiting in line, as one of the gallery workers suggests. After all - the fine arts are a finely guarded institution that isn't easy to break in. But it is a great and courageous initiative indeed. Chaos? Oh, please, let's not treat every single initiative so dead serious, as if it were the Great Finale of Art. I wonder how the catalogue looked. Nearly 3000 works by about 1300 artists.

Now that's what I call a great social art installation.

Challenging the world, one billboard at a time

He's been around for a while. In 2002, for instance, he made the world a better place by putting flags on high-tension electricity lines.
Or another delicious installation, called The Real Thing, where he distilled Coca-Cola to get drinkable water:
Helmut Smits is a fighter. He does not allow the idea that one cannot be heard in the contemporary world. He seems to think there is plenty of space, and plenty of ways of speaking up. If The Real Thing looks too symbolic and gallery-restricted for you, and the flags are nice, but you're afraid other might just not get it, then try Pamphlet, a simple device that allows you to share whatever thoughts or ideas you have with the world - just type it on the computer, click on 'Send', and the pamphlet will be dropped from the 10th story of a building.


Also recently, Smits decided it was time to react against the constant pollution of publicity in the city. So he dressed as a town hall worker and went out there, in front of a billboard, and planted a tree.

The idea is this:

He's had some problems before, like with this balloon-based cloud that was prohibited because of air space regulations...

I suppose this won't get him into trouble, because by the time the tree gets serious, the billboard is long gone. Which begs the question: should guerrilla art be effective? Does their effectiveness lie in the word-to-post strategy?
Okay, it's a bluff. But isn't this a great goal for activist art-making: to create a bluff that becomes reality?

(via 1 & 2)

Disposable dressing gown

ART IN HELL

I recently finished the second volume of the Encyclopedia of Russian Criminal Tattoos by Baldaev and Valsiliev. (It was a gift from my wife-- don't ask.)

For over fifty years, Baldaev worked in the Russian prison camps where he studied and recorded the tattoos of thousands of criminals.

The Encyclopedia documents a brutal world where hardened criminals, debased by Tsarist labor camps and Stalin's gulag, lived like animals. They killed and maimed each other impassively. Walking around naked, they copulated, masturbated and excreted in plain view with no shame or regard for others. As one horrified observer wrote, "only their bodies were alive."



You might not expect art to flower under these conditions. Yet, art had more of an impact on human life in the prison camp than it does in most museums. Prisoners decorated themselves with symbols and images illustrating their crimes, their personal histories, their politics and their sexual practices. These "symbolic portraits" determined the prisoner's identity, his social status, even whether he lived or died.





The Encyclopedia recounts horrific games of chance in which the loser might be required to sacrifice fingers or a limb. In one game,

instead of an arm or a leg, the winner demanded a terrible humiliation as penalty: he commanded the barrack artist to tattoo an enormous penis on the man's face, pointing at his mouth. Minutes later, the man pressed a hot poker against his face, obliterating his tattoo.

The convict preferred to destroy his face rather than live with the artwork.



Art critics often debate the importance of representational art, but prisoners in the gulag view this question from a more urgent perspective: some prisoners tattooed portraits of Lenin or Stalin on their chests as protection against execution because they believed no firing squad would dare shoot at a picture of Lenin or Stalin. The accuracy of the picture literally became a matter of life and death; if the guard was unable to recognize Lenin or Stalin, you were more likely to die. There were not many fans of abstract art in the gulag.



Aleksander Solzhenitsyn witnessed this body art and wrote in The Gulag Archipelago : "They surrendered their bronze skin to tattooing and in this way gradually satisfied their artistic, their erotic, and even their moral needs."



The Encyclopedia concludes:

The [prisoner] lives through his tattoos, he is mentally immersed in this reality, that is, he dissolves into the symbolic world of his own body. Like the Herman Hesse character who gets into the last carriage of a train and rides away-- a train that he himself drew on the wall of his prison cell.

There are lots of different ways to evaluate art, but if you want to see art that has a real impact on human life, you're more likely to find it among desperate men in the gulag than in the polite salons of Paris and Manhattan.

If you read this

If you read this you can keep it.

Octopuppy

puppy has charisma and health boosting effects while in inventory :P
-for john_o at #conceptart