Shock:
The transgressive spirit in
art creates shock value within the status Quo. Bird speaks of how shocking art
images were used as a means of control until the mid 18-hundreds when Edouard
Manet created a big controversy with his unconventional modern painting Dejeuner
sur l’herbe. The public were shocked yet the conversations fueled a new
direction and paved a way for the avant-garde movements to flourish.
Besides my early punk
performance, which was only sometimes mildly shocking; most of my art, since
then, has been within the rang of normal and aesthetically pleasing. I have
done a few short videos with racy content and one that may be shocking to some
conservative minded; yet I have never intentionally set out to create art for
shock value. Im not opposed to it and I will use shock if it is appropriate for
what I am trying to do. But like Bird
states, it has become… “Progressively harder to find genuinely shockable
audiences or to distinguish between shock with moral intent and the frisson of
horrified fascination.” (2012, pg. 170) I’m not into the horrified fascination but I’m all about avant-garde.
Myra: by Marcus Harvey
Myra by English artist Marcus Harvey caused outrage
in the United Kingdom in 1997 as it portrayed convicted child killer Myra
Hindley.
The paining essentially
recreated a well-publicised police photo of Hindley shortly after her arrest in
1965.
The artist used a caste of an
infant’s hand to build a mosaic of handprints that constitute the image of
Hindley.
The reaction to Harvey's
painting in London has been compared to that received by Andy Warhol's
36-feet-square mural Thirteen Most Wanted Men, which
comprised large copies of photographs from a "most wanted" booklet
published by the New York Police Department, and was
installed in the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair. After protests by sponsors,
Warhol's work was quickly painted over.[4][19] The
reaction to the potent mixture of the sacred and the profane parallels that to Andres
Serrano's prize-winning 1987 photograph Piss Christ in
Washington DC in 1989 and in Melbourne in 1997, and Chris Ofili's Turner
Prize-winning painting The Holy Virgin Mary in New York in
1999. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myra_(painting))
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