EE #3, 2018: Dangerous Art
EE III: Dangerous Art will be launched during the Meta.Morf 2018 opening conferance "A Beautiful Accident" @ Dokkhuset, Trondheim, Norway. March 9, 2018 @ 10:00 - 16:30.
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About EE III : Dangerous Art
The EE #3 issue researches dangerous works of art and artistic ideas, presenting some of the most dangerous contemporary artists, thinkers and actors in art.
Dangerous? What is really dangerous art? Physically threatening performances such a SRL - Survival Research Laboratories- putting the audience’s safety at stake while killer-robots re-enact a retro-futuristic gladiators fight? Leif Elggren’s visually contagious images of lethal viruses? That you are only allowed to see when moving about in the gallery with a flashlight. What about bad art such as populist, crowd pleasing spectacles like Koon’s kitsch? The meaningless art by the happy amateur? Or the mental trash represented by the shallow voids of banal IKEA style paintings? Threatening to empty Art of all its existential meaning? Or shock art such as the Chapman brother’s ultraviolent sculptures and sceneries? American abstractionism as it was politically applied, employed and sponsored by CIA? Speculative and lethal art causing the killing of animals such as Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided? Or Wim Delvoye’s tattooed pigs? That he later kills to sell their skins as pictures. How to deal with taboo breaking art such as Oleg Kulik’s life and mating with a dog? When is the dangerous also getting illegal? Criminal art such as Alexander Brener’s infamous graffiti add-on to Malevich’s paintings? Or John Duncan’s ‘Blind Date’ where he purchases a female corpse in Mexico and performs intercourse with it to punish himself for not feeling love. According to Adorno ‘every work of art is an uncommitted crime’. Then what about aesthetic thinking gone wild? Such as Hitler’s (in)famous speeches on grand arts and culture? Or Stockhausen’s naming of 911 as art? Or Schlingensief’s homage to the 911 terrorist Atta as an artist? What about the (apparently) suicidal art of Schwarzkogler, the hero of the Viennese Actionism. Gay sodomized, S&M art such as Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexualized self-portraits? Self-molesting performances such as Chris Burden shooting himself in the name of art? Bluntly offensive art of the Punk movement? What about poorly done works of art? Not necessarily Arte Povera, but works so poorly done that it offends both qualified as well as uninterested audiences? Such as Fellesskapsprosjektet’s recent monument in Kvam, Norway? Where a single work of art, a trash-like sculpture made from locally found material, divided the Kvam community into antagonistic fractions, threatening to tear the social bonds apart. What about mechanically dangerous art such as Tinguely’s auto-destructive ‘Homage to New York’? Or Serra’s super heavy metal walls threatening to fall over you at any moment? Political satire and actionism such as done by Pussy Riot? Or is the real danger in the hands of hard-core curators of transgressive art such as Jurij Krpan? If art is evil -as in better than the good- is it then not also dangerous? Or only yet again a victim of moral banality. Is the trans-species art of Maja Smrekar dangerous? Or just another typical hetero-normal approach in an age of hyped bio-technologies. When Zhu Yu appears to cook and eat a human baby, is that dangerous or just another piece from the ‘cadaver school’?
Then what about Milo Yiannopoulos (dangerous.com) who bathed in pigs blood while also splashing it on images of victims of Islamist terror. Was it ultrapopulist, pro-Trump poor art (#DaddyWillSaveUs) or simply clever exploitation of the art world’s desperate -and dangerous- need for transgressive acts?
What about James Bridle’s Drone Shadows, drawing the 1:1 shadows of real drones on the ground, as a reminder of their two primary functions: to spy or to kill. Seems we cannot be saved by technology either.
If art is about challenging and shaking our established notions of the world, are not all artists then dangerous? Are you a dangerous artist? In the end it might be your perceived sense of threat that decides what is dangerous or not. But one danger constantly hovers over us: in this age of the Selfie, the missing image is the most dangerous.
Welcome to our bla***end issue.
EE: Experimental Emerging Art Magazine is an independent art magazine edited by Stahl Stenslie (NO) and Zane Cerpina (NO / LV). The third issue “Dangerous Art” is co-edited by Espen Gangvik, co-produced and funded by TEKS, and is to be launched during the Meta.Morf Biennale 2018.
