6 The Remix WIP

Art as a medium of exclusion, resistance, or layered meaning

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ (1987)

"Art does not simply present and reinforce dominant ideologies or assert social models; it may contain hidden, layered, or contested messages or meanings."

"Antony Gormley installing in Londonderry, Northern Ireland in 1987, during the Troubles. He intended his work to be ‘a poultice, and a benign piece that related to the feelings of the people in that place and their situation’, he remembers the vigorous attack on the work as it was being placed in the ground. ‘They were throwing stones and sticks and then spitting on the sculpture. The sculpture came over the top dripping with saliva, the missiles kept coming.’ The work was eventually doused in petrol and set alight. Gormley continues, ‘This was excellent. This was the work as poultice throwing violence and evil onto itself that would otherwise be experienced in other ways.’"

In a similar vein, the reaction to Piss Christ is arguably as much a part of the work as the object or photograph itself. 

Exclusion:
It was removed from exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria after it was attacked, using a hammer.



Resistance:
Blasphemy: an irreverence toward something considered sacred or inviolable.

"Blasphemous and grossly sacrilegious" - The Roman Catholic Archbishop, George Pell

"There comes a point ... where there is less and less respect being shown for the sacred in whatever form the sacred comes, and you have to draw a line" - Keith Rayner, the Anglican Archbishop

"The conjunction of the sacred symbol and excrement is recognised universally as deeply insulting" - Archbishop George Pell

Layered Meaning:
"(I try) to make the images as seductive and beautiful as possible" - Serrano

There is a tension between the sensuous pleasures of the golden light, and a knowledge of its (claimed) source. People might be 'seduced' by the beauty of the material they would normally find disgusting outside of the context of the gallery

"The artist tried to represent a disembodied, immaterial reality. All suggestions of corporeality were carefully avoided; human forms are seen in geometric abstractions. At this time an anonymous monk introduced the gold background into Western painting as a device to remove the portrayed events from the temporal." - Karsten Harries

"(The work is) deceptive, (it shows) an image of radiant salvation actually fabricated from filth." - New York journalist

"Yet Serrano claims not to have intended an insult. By commenting that he was taught by Catholic Sisters 'that we worship not the crucifix but Christ', he emphasises the disconnection of a symbol and any metaphysical reality it might represent. It is the symbol that has been immersed, not the person. By insisting on this separation, Serrano actually points up the problematic features of the crucifix as an object of devotion."

Moreover, art allows ambiguity, or layers of interpretation, that facilitate multiple understandings, as explored in Robinson’s article (2013) on the significance of graffiti in Barcelona. Ambiguous or multi-layered imagery is common in the European medieval period, for instance, where images may express visual puns. An artist might playfully portray himself (or others) in mythological or Biblical scenes in a manner undetectable to those unfamiliar with his visage, giving the work both public and personal significance.

Art creates sites of activity

Just Druid, Megaliths (2022)

"Art establishes settings for action, framing architectural or open air spaces used for gatherings, public events, or collective action. Large-scale or monumental installations, such as memorials, create sites for the re-enactment of shared memories. Visual art can help to create a ritual setting by setting it apart, distinguishing ritual space from quotidian contexts; art may also help to set the scene through references to liturgical narratives."

Megaliths, part of the Communion exhibition I curated for Zero Carbon Guildford, is pair of faux stones that gave viewers the opportunity to commune around them. Displayed in separate rooms of the show their singularity flipped the assumed roles of one person in the centre of a sacred stone circle allowing multiple viewers to haphazardly, (and especially during the busy Private View) unknowingly, congregate around them. The work was particularly successful during the PV as the crowd was also unceremoniously drinking as much free wine as they deemed acceptable to drain from a charity. The inconsistency of the religious starting point of viewers didn't matter, they were all engaging - perhaps sacrilegiously - in ritual practices because of the sculptures.

"the choice of content, style and placement for such imagery whether theological and mythological, naturalistic or erotic, or geometrical  may have helped create appropriate spaces for particular activities or social relationships."

Art is participatory

Marie Sester, ACCESS (2003)

"Art often invites participation, creating a focus or medium for relational action (Fowles and Arterberry 2013). Adornment of the body through use of masks, costumes, body paintings, or tattoos transforms the body temporarily or permanently, while drawing attention."

ACCESS is an installation in which visitors to a website can track people in a public space allowing them to follow a member of the public with a spotlight and a sound beam. Sester creates a 'paradoxical communication loop' between tracker and tracked. The performer doesn't choose to step into the spotlight but is chosen to be adorned by a higher power. If etymologically Christ comes from Christos, a Greek word that means “the anointed one,” or “the chosen one,” then who in this work is playing God?

To reference my own artist statement, "Saint has a particular interest in what a 'religious experience' now looks or feels like to those who are deconstructing their faith and how the modern spiritual pick 'n' mix approach to religion bleeds into worship of fame and excess."

"Masks are quintessentially participatory art; they enrol people into temporary assemblages of people and artifice, or create composite, living moments of altered realities. Beyond specific events, the wearing of badges, insignia, or regalia in daily life also generates shared identities."

"A pilgrim badge (is) worn to display the pilgrim’s active participation in pilgrimage and his or her wider affiliation with Christianity. Such forms of dress not only allowed people to objectify and to categorise themselves; they also enmeshed others in political relations such as colonialism."

We are unsure who God is in the interaction and therefore also the pilgrim. The sound and light do not leave a stain on either participant or congregating viewers.

"Finally, some art objects... are consumed or destroyed during their intended use... The earliest clay figurines, made during the Palaeolithic of Central Europe, may have been ‘action art’ intended to

explode dramatically when placed in a fire (Farbstein 2013)."

Art creates representational models for social relations

Walead Beshty, FedEx Series (2005-2014)

Beshty shipped glass boxes to galleries and the resulting shards were reconstructed by the gallerists. Broken, empty, frustrated and pointless - I socially relate this work to how the subheading makes me feel.

Art as cultural capital

Peter Davies, The Hot One Hundred (1997)

Art also represents cultural capital concentrated, privileged access to items of value. In this sense, art can be a vocabulary for the shared habitus of members of the same social class, a tangible yet dynamic means for relating or dividing groups. This may often be simply through shared styles or ways of doing things. Farbstein (2013), for example, shows how small prehistoric communities creatively formulated different artistic representations as part of creating local networks of shared identity. In class-stratified societies or power-laden colonial relations, art has the capacity to unite, divide, or position people (Bourdieu 1984), since not all people are equally able to decode or to appreciate art and since art may be used to encode values privileging dominant groups. Herring (2013) eloquently traces the ways that Andean art has been appropriated, and misunderstood, in the unfolding discourses of Western Modernist art history. Architectural styles provide a particularly prominent way of asserting cultural capital; in recent European and American history, for example, there have been two architectures of power: the Classical and the Gothic. Both were deliberately revived and reworked to be widely used in public buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Figure 11), asserting institutional legitimacy by evoking the imagined splendours of a Classical or medieval past. Maya art is similarly well-known for evoking a world of privilege and power surrounding elites and their entourages. Evidence increasingly suggests that Maya elites were in some cases also the artisans. Inomata argues that craft production by elites during the Classic Period ‘... was at once a highly political act closely tied to power and an expression of elites ascribing to cultural and aesthetic values’ (2007, 137). He suggests that the willingness of high-status individuals to engage in demanding craft production work is evidence of their commitment to cultural ideals. Figure 12 shows a relief panel depicting a ruler in full regalia. Both the personae represented
and the creation, control and use of such objects tied high status people to a world of symbolic capital. Virtually all ancient civilisations, from the Egyptians through the Incas, engaged in a similar materialisation of the cultural capital of their rulers in large-scale or finely-worked art.