German artist Gregor Schneider is seeking a volunteer to die while on display in a gallery. “Unfortunately today, death and the road to death are about suffering. Coming to terms with death — as I plan it — can take away the pain of dying for us,” he said in an article published by Die Welt.
Read the CBC article here.
I’m working on some initial thoughts after the jump, I’ll finalize that posting later on.
Having worked with a few artists for the past couple of years, I have to admit that this strikes me as a fairly idiotic thing. Not the fact that someone would die for art or the idea of the project itself (displays of death to make us think, etc etc). What is idiotic is thinking – as a volunteer- that dying for art itself will in some way bring a new layer of meaning or debate into the art world. Art, in my mind, has to be understood mainly in economical terms. I think very few people would still believe in art as a means for changing the world. I’m not trying to be cynic at all, nor do I have an immeasurable faith in capitalism (I don’t), but pretending to think that there is a higher purpose in this type of endeavors seems to me both naive and irresponsible at the same time. Here is where my experience with artists comes into play. I have seen their discourses or ideas for a specific project shift almost as quickly as stock does. I’m not saying either that ideas are unmovable and that they should remain static. They’re not, they elastic things that shrink, change and grow with time and events, but when the conceptual basis for projects or a body of work. And when the change happens, it is steered towards one single target: more $$.
And for the record, I’m not talking of “boulevard artists”, I’m talking based on my experience with fairly established artists which, from the outside, were indeed artists, with actual careers and, had I never collaborated with them, might still be naive enough to respect them or the art.
I’ll continue to clean up this rant later on, but I’m just going to post it
via [archinect]
Tags: art, conceptual, installation, rants, wtf