Art attacks

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/art-attacks-from-vomiting-on-mondrian-to-elbowing-a-picasso-1879312.html?action=Gallery&ino=3

http://youtu.be/Yv6u-0JYgx4

Caught short

'One of Marcel Duchamp's famous Fountain replicas was attacked while on display in Paris' Pompidou Centre in 2006. Septuagenarian performance artist Pierre Pinoncelli - who had been imprisoned previously for damaging and urinating into the same sculpture in 1993 - chipped the sculpture when he repeatedly hit it with a hammer.'

Nauseous pretension

'In 1996 a 22-year-old Toronto art student vomited over Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red and Blue which was hanging in New York's Museum of Modern Art. Despite gallery officials dismissing it as "an unfortunate incident" the student, Jubal Brown, said he intentionally defaced the painting. He later consumed red food colouring and gave a repeat performance all over a work by Raoul Dufy at the Art Gallery of Ontario.'

Smashing visit

'In 2006 a visitor to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge caused more than £500,000 worth of damage when he slipped down a stairway and smashed a set of 300-year-old Qing vases that had stood happily on a shelf for 40 years. Spokespeople for the museum said he was believed to have tripped on an untied shoelace but was unharmed by the accident.'

Drunken slash

'In 2007 drunks broke into the Musee D' Orsay in Paris and slashed Monet's 1874 Le pont d' Argenteuil. The four inch tear was completely repaired but the raucous vandals got away scot free.'

Rubbish art

'Damien Hirst's 2001 exhibition of Painting-By-Numbers was mistakenly sabotaged when the installation of empty beer-bottles, messy paint tins and overflowing ashtrays was cleared away by an enthusiastic cleaner. The work was later retrieved from the bin and Hirst said reportedly saw the funny side.'

 

Hirsts work was cleared away by a cleaner asuming this piece of 'modern art' was rubbish, rubbish made by Britain's richest living artist, with his wealth valued at £215m in the 2010 Sunday Times Rich List. Hirst can afford to see the funny side as it does not matter to him how his work is percieved, he will generate money from it regardless.

Stelarc, Street suspension,1984, gelatin silver photograph, 60.5 x 40.5cm image; 71.3 x 51.4cm sheet

http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/work/35-1986-2+street-suspension

Stelarc is an example of shock tatics in use, and Brener’s use of creating an‘exhibition of himself’, by using and extending the capabilities of his body, as medium and exhibition space.

Calling on precedent in historic ‘avant-garde’ provocations of society of the Dada’s ‘Prussian archangel’ suspended military pig as a public attack on german miliatry; in Stelarcs ‘Street Suspension’ he himself is hung naked over a street, suspended by eighteen fishhooks through his flesh.

A reaction similar to the Dadaists result in prosecution, would now more commonly be ‘that’s discussing’ and from an art perspective, it is the shock value of the work that makes it art.

Is a hanging pig anymore shocking than a hanging man, In an age where we have seen it all???????????

Professor Victoria Pitts: "Body art, despite its interest in intervening with the physical flesh and creating blood and scars and so on, actually is not a violent practice. They’re really taking a kind of libertarian or civil libertarian attitude towards their bodies. It's my body I should be able to do what I want with it." [But watch me.]’

Alexander Brener

Russian performance artist Alexander Brener - famous for defecating in front of a Vincent van Gogh painting at the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and for painting a green dollar sign on a Kazimir Malevich called Suprematisme which he was later arrested & jailed for.

‘He argued in court that the act was "a dialogue with Malevich" rather than vandalism.’

Painting a $ sign on a Malevich painting…who is quoted as saying ‘I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism’…is brener's attack on Malevich's ego and art.A sure fire contender for the winner of ‘shock’ tactics in art, but hes reacting against the ‘poor art tactics’ he feels were employed, provoking a reaction from him. I think Brener is closer to a true art as hes not looking to make money from his actions hes just trying to make a point.

Performance at the exhibition "The artist instead artwork"

He's not some one you would ordinarily want in your exhibition. If he's not defecating or defacing the paintings, he's screaming at them naked. Yes he does appear as being slightly insane but he most certainly makes u question why hes shouting, even if we do not understand hes evidently quiet angry. If hes angry at the art itself – as the video sujestes – does this mean hes at odds with modern art itself??

Hes bringing something different to the quite gallery experience- distracting from the pieces your meant to be looking at on the walls and in turn creating an ‘exhibition of himself’.

“A lot of bad artists have made a lot of money,”

Is it the case that we don’t like to highlight these artists and works as bad, as they have made a lot of money???

Money=power. It is the case that these artists and works have generated a lot of attention and in turn money. This leaves anybody that has not made as much from there work (us) unable to comment on the works without appearing to be jealous.

Hermann Nitsch,"Orgies-Mysteries-Theater".

Orgies of Mystery Theatre, by Hermann Nitsch, a display of music and dance amongst "dismembered animal corpses", at 1966's Destruction in Art Symposium.

These works stand out as shocking in an otherwise conservative gallery environment but are they shocking when we see them united as a show . or they shown for what they are, unimporatant objects employing a sense of the absurd to make them art.

Stripped of any shocking qualities when all seen together, we are in childs absurd dream not a modern art gallery.

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The Guardian – May 16, 2000

One-man show at the Robert Sandelson Gallery, London, 2000

GOTTFRIED HELNWEIN, THE MAN WHO USED HIS OWN BLOOD TO PAINT HITLER

by Kate Connolly

………………‘Kate Connolly meets Gottfried Helnwein, the Austrian who is still confronting his country's Nazi past. It could have been worse. At least he doesn't look like his self-portraits, in which bandages swathe his head, bent forks pull his mouth into a mocking smile and blood drenches his torso. Helnwein, 52, is a master of the scandalous and the art of shocking. The artist Robert Crumb once said of him: "Helnwein is a very fine artist and one sick motherf**ker." "You can get things moving in a very subtle way, you can get even the strong and powerful to slide and totter - anything, actually, if you know the weak points and tap at them ever so gently by aesthetic means."’

http://www.helnwein-archive.com/39/one-man_show_at_the_robert_sandelson_gallery_london_2000.html?section=

Helmwein painted a picture of Adolf Hitler with his own blood & In 1996 the Adoration of the Magi with Adolf Hitler as Baby Jesus, which was displayed at the State Russian Museum St. Petersburg.

Turner winner Mark Leckey attacks 'shock art'

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article5270325.ece

From The Times, December 2, 2008

Turner winner Mark Leckey attacks 'shock art'

“I kind of hate the relationship the press in Britain has towards art,” he said. “I hate the way it’s all Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin and Banksy. They expect spectacle and shock. Art is not like that. The art world I know is not like that; it’s a whole other world.”

He was asked whether the impact of the YBAs had done art a disservice. “Ultimately it has,” he said.

Leckey added that he welcomed the end of the boom. “A lot of bad artists have made a lot of money, he said.”

Spectacle and shock has come to be the ‘proto-type’ of most modern art!

'shock' works

Fountain, a urinal placed on exhibit by Marcel Duchamp, a pioneer of the form,1917

Is it 'the most influential work of modern art' or has it to blame for all the bad works coming after it?????

The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, by Damien Hirst, 1992, a dead tiger shark preserved in a glass and steel tank of formaldehyde

Commissioned in 1991 by Charles Saatchi, sold to Steven A.Cohen for an undisclosed amount reported to have been $8 million dollars.

Is it an ‘unoriginal product of "shock tactics" and not "real art"’?????

Piss Christ, 1987, Andres Serrano, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in the artist's own urine

The piece was a winner of the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art's "Awards in the Visual Arts" competition.

Is it attention Provokingly blasphemous??????

Portrait of murderer Myra Hindley, Myra, (1997), by Marcus Harvey, constructed of children's handprints

The Times newspaper's art critic, Richard Cork, wrote that:

‘Far from cynically exploiting her notoriety, Harvey's grave and monumental canvas succeeds in conveying the enormity of the crime she committed. Seen from afar, through several doorways, Hindley's face looms at us like an apparition. By the time we get close enough to realise that it is spattered with children's handprints, the sense of menace becomes overwhelming.’

The Mirror denounced the painting as a 'disgrace' it plastered it all over its front page thus projecting it into 2 million homes

Is it contrived and tabloid-provoking, resulting in childish glorification of a murderer?????

Meatballs by Marco Evaristti,work which resulted in a dinner party for his friends serving a meal of meatballs cooked in his own body fact, extracted via liposuction.

http://www.evaristti.com/index.php/gallery/category/8-polpette

Is this work a 'critical-ironic commentary on Western consumer society and the culture of eating' or an absurd and unecasary use of his body inflicted not only upon himself but to others. Who knows if he ever used his own body fat???