Art From The Heart, Head, and Other Places

An object is just what it is, but I believe everything perceivable or imaginable can be art. It is each of our singular perceptions that give it meaning. The role of the viewer is to question the work as to why he/she is emotionally affected by it, and the artist’s job is to take risks in expressing something unique and genuine. Whatever the message, successful work does whatever it needs to do to get itself across.

Here, the use of human-derived materials makes a undeniable statement that undoubtedly attracts attention, even controversy. The artists have taken purposeful risks, in using unusual methods and materials, that might have jeopardized their credibility. I think that’s a successful work in itself.

The use of blood would seem a distasteful art medium, but for Marc Quinn, UK sculptor and member of the Young British Artists (shock-driven conceptual artists originating from the Saatchi gallery.) It has been as powerful than marble. Quinn emerged in 1991 with his signature work “Self”. This frozen sculpture of the artist's head was made from 9.5 US pints of the artist's own blood taken from his body over a period of five months. In this case, the materials are what literally convey the message- so much of what the artist is made of goes into his/her craft. The eye-widening work is almost anxiety provoking since it is as life-like as it is temperamental- it's temperature must be maintained at -12C/10F. The artist remakes “Self” every five years, but for the Tate Liverpool's exhibition he took the work in a new direction by, this time, recreating his baby son’s head.The role of the viewer is to question the work as to why he/she is emotionally affected. Successful art comes from a  perspective and unique process of the creator. 

Quinn has produced a diverse range of work, most of which is preoccupied with the changing physical states of the body, and addresses ideas about the beginnings of life, nature and death. Quinn is also known for a series of marble sculptures of people either born with limbs missing or who have had them amputated. This culminated in his most famous work, a 15 ton marble statue honoring a pregnant Allison Lapper, an artist who was born with no arms and deformed legs. It sits on a column in the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square in London.
 

Multi-thousands of individual human hairs comprise Chinese-American artist Wenda Gu's "United Nations" project, which he began in 1993. The massive installation pieces are "monuments" made from the discards collected from barbershops across the globe. He presses or weaves the hair into bricks, carpets, and curtains- as in "Kilometers" where Gu constructed a "temple" using thin, colored braids. These hair structures are often placed in conjunction with stone carvings, ink drawings and engraved metal pieces often including unintelligible text from his own imaginary, hybrid language.

"United Colors" is a braid roughly 71/2 miles long and made of hair purchased from wig factories in China and India. It rises from a coiled mass and hangs in long loops with stainless steel medallions attached to sections of the vividly dyed sculpture. Each medallion bears the name of one of 207 countries written backward. The purpose of blending hair collected from different nations is to show a metaphor for the mixture of races that he predicts will eventually unite humanity.

"The Green House"-one of his most-well known pieces- is an 80ft  X 13ft banner in the Baker-Berry Library of New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College. It runs the length of the vast foyer with its bright green lettering. The hair for this piece was collected over several months last year from over 42,000 haircuts of Dartmouth students, faculty and local residents in Hanover. This amounts to 430 pounds of human hair which was shipped to China, where workers in Gu's Shanghai studio dyed and shaped the locks into paper-thin panels held together by a film of Elmer's glue and tied together with twine. The banner spells the words "educations" and "advertises" superimposed on each other in an effort to show that education and capitalism are inseparable. Through imagination-defying works, Gu's message expresses the ideals of the Cultural Revolution in Mao-era Communist China. 

 
The notoriously controversial photograph “Piss Christ,” by Andres Serrano, is of a small crucifix submerged in a vessel of the artist's urine. Sadly, it is seen more as only the question it poses regarding artistic freedom, and not for what it actually is- an otherworldly photograph. The color filter effect of the medium and the angle of lighting lend an eerie amber translucency to one of the most prevalent images in history. It suggests many possibilities of interpretation to its viewer, not simply the commonly perceived concrete message of disrespect by an artist raised Catholic.

The piece caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1989, with opponents accusing Serrano of blasphemy and others raising this as a major issue of artistic freedom. The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition, which is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, a United States Government agency that offers support and funding for artistic projects. Since the award is technically sponsored by taxpayer dollars, this caused grounds for outrage among conservative politicians. The year of its release, Senator Al D'Amato tore a reproduction of the photograph into pieces in the US Senate. While on the other side of the issue, famous art critic and devote Catholic Sister Wendy Beckett expressed approval of "Piss Christ". She regarded the work as a statement on "what we have done to Christ" - the way contemporary society has come to regard Christ and the values he represents.

The subject matter of Serrano's other photographs are similarly complicated and include aborted fetuses, the Ku Klux Klan and post-autopsy corpses.His work has continually provoked outrage, particularly among America's Christian Right, and even led one anonymous man to attack his work with a hammer during an exhibition.
Serrano’s creative mind delves into controversial subjects and his work demonstrates this. But we are left to wonder if it the subject matter is primarily for the sake of exposure, and does its statement outweigh the actual art. The image makes us so uncomfortable that we can't help but neglect to see the photograph.