Bjarne Melgaard has an interesting show up at Greene Naftali right now. The show contains photos of dead bodies, possible underage nudity and strong racist and anti-gay language. Melgaard is an extremely talented painter (the sculptures aren’t bad either) and the show is a visual treat for the eyes. As to the content – I am personally not offended. I’m either desensitized (holding your alcohol doesn’t prove how cool you are, just how often you drink) or I’m just extremely suspicious. Too often, offensive work is only a self-promotion tool for otherwise boring work. The show got me thinking…
Art is a lot like stand-up comedy.
- There is structure and tradition, but no formula (or logic) for success.
- Many can copy, few can create.
- Even the best of the best will bomb half the time.
- The idea and the delivery are equally important.
- They can captivate and repulse an audience simultaneously.
I heard a comic once say something like “you can be racist as long as you’re funny”. There are two ways to take that. 1. Permission to be racist under certain circumstances. 2. That humor can function as a vehicle to discuss important and ugly social issues that we’d rather not acknowledge. The sentence, for example, is itself is such a joke.
- Comedy disarms with humor. Art disarms with beauty.
The difficulty is that the line between “a tool for social change, justice and equality (or using humor to talk about racism)” and “finding a stage to spread hate (or using racism to be funny)” is extremely fragile and depends entirely on context, time, audience and author. Comedians deliver jokes in a specific time, can respond to their audience throughout the performance and most importantly present THEMSELVES before the joke. An anti-feminist statement told by a female probably has a different meaning. But motives are entirely unclear when viewing a possible sexist, racist or anti-gay painting when we don’t easily know the gender, race, sexuality, history, or motivation of the artist – a loss of context can easily result in a complete misinterpretation of message.
When Sister Wendy was asked about Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” she said she didn’t like it – not because she felt it was blasphemous, but because it was easy (“comforting” in her words). An opinion was too easily formed one way or the other and it didn’t really challenge the viewer to think. Watch a clip of the interview here. My only point of disagreement is that a work is not disqualified from greatness just because it gives an extremely strong first impression. All works require the same test of time no matter how brashly they introduce themselves. If anything, “easy” art requires MORE time, both to research the intention and forget the first impression. The challenge of the offensive artist is convincing an audience to stick around that long.