Life Imitates Performance Art

A few days ago, people at an art gallery (Art Basel) witnessed a curious incident, which involved two women. One was stabbed by the other with an X-Acto knife. The attacker has been identified and arrested. But it still remains to be clarified why was the woman attacked. Did they know each other? Was the attacker simply expressing aggression and picked a random person to attack?

 

Although such questions are interesting, what’s more compelling is the fact that the gallery patrons didn’t do anything about it. They thought that it was performance art and that the act was part of an exhibit. Similarly, when the police taped off the area of the attack, the gallery goers thought it was part of an exhibit.

 

Deconstruction and abstraction in art (which includes performance art) is a state of mind which does not allow for the order of things. Its point is always to shock and disturb. Its creators are obsessed with involving the viewer into the art experience itself, provoking them into making strange choices. The viewer ought to be left in a state of discomfort and bewilderment. The message: there is only chaos. The ideal does not exist. There is no order and you, the viewer, are a pitiful excuse for a human being.

 

Another aspect of deconstructive art is the blur between ethics and aesthetics, which is meant to either desensitize the people to any level of suffering or prove that people will remain neutral when it comes to the suffering of another. This is not entirely untrue, but the question is should this be art? The fact that the art world has not produced anything of substantial value in the last four decades is a testament to why the patrons at Art Basel reacted the way the did.

 

In 1974, Marina Abramovic (often described as the “grandmother of performance art”) staged an exhibit called Rhythm O in which she chose to present herself as an object. She spent six hours on stage at the Studio Morra in Naples, while the ongoing public made a decision to humiliate and abuse her body. They used objects that were provided by Abramovic, and in one of the photographs, she is weeping, while her naked body is covered with various objects, one of them being a thorny rose.

 

One can argue that Abramovic has proved a point by cleverly showing a triad of a relation: brutality-power-aquiesence. Fine. But once such “art” expressions enter into people’s consciousnesses and people get used to a deconstructive process of the entire world that surrounds them, the line between an ethical and an aesthetic act has disappeared. Suffering can continue indefinitely. 

 

The decision to treat the human body and mind as disordered ready-made objects that are nothing more than a, say, urinal, leads to a rejection of the order of things. And more than anything, such art is dreadfully dull. We need some fresh voices, not the recycled garbage of sustainable art.