Anon & So What

A dog is tied up in a gallery, deprived of any food or water and left to die. A photographer cuts and pastes animal heads on other objects digitally, but bizarrely, only after she has killed them. Another artist records video clips of six animals being clubbed to death by sledgehammer.

This is irritating moral territory, one doesn’t want to provide artists and their sponsors publicity for work that’s of no artistic value, but if the exhibitions are ignored there is a tacit acceptance of them. Therefore it’s necessary to identify that the dog was captured, tied up and exhibited to die by Guillermo Habacuc Vargas; that the woman who finds it necessary to kill various animals before photoshopping them is Nathalia Edenmont; and that it’s Adel Abdessemed, as announced in this publication’s news last week, whose exhibit includes videos of animals being clubbed to death.

Adel Abdessemed, Don¹t Trust Me,
2008. Video still. Courtesy of the
artist and David Zwirner Gallery.

The argument has been made that these kinds of exhibit are justified if they challenge our sensibilities or confront our social, political and cultural norms. This is undoubtedly true and is sometimes valid. There is a case for shocking people so that an artist can intercede a new slant on some situation, directly or obliquely. But this can be done, and has been done, very effectively and many times, without having to kill anything anew. There is plenty of death out there to work with.

Nathalia Edenmont

What is Edenmont’s point? Her promoters have even extended the usual justifications, speciously claiming that her work advances animal rights (a nonsense calmly and thoroughly debunked by Ellie Maldonado here). It’s seems that Edenmont’s work is ultimately so weak without the sensationalized fact of her slaughtering her subjects that it otherwise doesn’t merit much attention.

Vargas, who is one of six chosen artists for the Central American Biennial in Honduras, defends himself by stating that the dog was unwanted; a nuisance around the makeshift corrugated homes in a shantytown, and that he paid some children to help capture it. So what? Is he saying that because nobody cares about the dog he should be able to prove how little that matters? Whether or not he meant to, Vargas does almost make a point about indifference – the photograph of the emaciated dog in it’s last throes being ignored by gallery goers chatting, sipping and posing around, is disturbing. Point made, but justifiable? Where can you take this line of reasoning? There are plenty of people who no one seems to care about, some people don’t care at all about Sr. Vargas. And again, the art, the rest of the exhibit, the tomatoes and fruits, are of little artistic merit.

"Natividad"
The dog starved to death by Guillermo "Habacuc" Vargas. Securing
Vargas a space representing Costa Rica in the upcoming Central
American Biennial in Honduras.

Only Abdessemed backs off the killings by saying that they ‘were to happen anyway’ and that he could not have prevented them. Hmmm, are we supposed to swallow the story that some farmer routinely slaughters an peculiarly odd mix of animals by sledgehammer? (Abdessemed ‘chose’ the six - a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat, and a doe – from a wider number of animals – is this some sadistic ark?). This is guff.

Think how many blows would it take to kill a horse or an Ox? Even a goat would need several direct smashes on the skull to kill it. Abdessemed doesn’t claim to be exposing any cruelty that might be worthy of art, instead the press release from the San Francisco Art Institute in sickly prose declares that “the multiplicity of stimuli imbue the work with an instantaneous efficiency that circumvents categorization, making typical moral and cultural constraints seem beside the point.”

Beside what point? Not ‘social, cultural, moral, [or] political implications’ the blurb states, no… because “such questions [are] now verging on irrelevance”; oh really?

Better then to quote Morrissey of The Smiths, “It’s death for no reason and death for no reason is murder”.

Looking at this critically and realising what’s wrong here doesn’t require extreme animal rights activism or vegan sensibility. It’s the selfishness.

It’s been called psychotic narcissism but that gives it too grand a gloss for these sorry exhibits by artists who may be nothing more than sadistic fools. It’s selfishness through arrogance and self-glorification. The artists should ask themselves a simple question. Why not put myself in there, in place of the animal? Too shocking? Yes, and just as stupid, but without the shock these artists wouldn’t matter, and that’ is their real fear.