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On the Arts: Musings on a gruesome little art exhibit in Brooklyn
Sunday, October 17, 1999 By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer
Are there soda machines in the Brooklyn Museum of Art?
Caroline Abels is the Post-Gazette cultural arts writer.
I wondered that two weeks ago after seeing "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection," the exhibit that's been condemned by so many and seen by even more. I'd just attended the media preview to bring some opinions back to Pittsburgh when I began musing about soda fizz rather than the state of contemporary art.
I wanted a ginger ale, a Coke, a cup of herb tea -- anything to rid me of the subtle nausea brought about by the not-so-subtle artwork involving dissected animals, deformed mannequins and chilled blood. I wasn't angry at what I'd seen or confused as to why the museum was displaying it; I simply had a physical reaction that needed to be quelled.
And it wasn't "The Holy Virgin Mary," the Madonna-with-elephant-dung portrait that has raised the ire of some Catholics and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, that brought about my reaction. It was the artwork that lurked elsewhere in the galleries -- work that makes the Mary painting seem aesthetically quaint -- that struck me in both mind and gut, and that unfortunately has been largely ignored as the swirl over the Virgin and the First Amendment continues.
At base, the "Sensation" exhibit is a place of death. Nearly every piece centers around decay or lifelessness: sliced animals in glass tanks of formaldehyde; maggots feeding on a cow's head; a silicone dead man prostrate on the floor; naked male mannequins with fake blood gushing from where their genitalia were.
The pieces that don't tackle death center on despair or dysfunction: photos of an alcoholic man living in a squalid apartment, child mannequins -- some with penises for noses -- melded together like Siamese twins. Some pieces have nothing to do with the dour aspects of human existence, but they are few and far between. Death rules on the top floors of the Brooklyn Museum.
Because I am not an art critic, I cannot offer any meaningful analysis of the exhibit in the context of art history. But as a "man on the street," I left the exhibit torn over whether so much death should take up so much space when our actual lives are much more balanced. Is the "Sensation" exhibit an accurate reflection of the human experience when, for most of us, the reality of death is countered by children, laughter, music, our own breath? Is the exhibit remiss in not addressing some of those aspects of life?
I'm not arguing that all art exhibits must be cheery and uplifting; I'd be turned off by a show that consisted solely of, say, paintings of flowers -- not the types the Impressionists did, which were full of subtlety and suggestion, but the types that hang on hospital walls. If a show of such paintings did not tackle darker themes, it would throw me off balance as much as "Sensation" did.
Some say we are uneasy with the "deathly" artwork in the show because we're living "sanitized" lives in which we do not kill the meat we eat and we touch up our dead before burial. Animal rights activists outside the museum seized a good opportunity when they told entering patrons that if they were sickened by the dead animals they saw, they should consider vegetarianism.
Perhaps the activists are correct in assuming we are distanced from death -- and this is where I found value in the exhibit. Maybe it is beneficial for museum-goers to be exposed to the intestines of animals and maggots feeding on a cow's head -- formerly facts of everyday life -- so that they can come face to face with the reality of death. Death is lent an air of acceptability when artwork that addresses it so blatantly is placed in a museum.
There might also be some value in forcing people to confront the reasons for the lifelessness in the art: sheer hatred, in the case of the bloody male mannequins (the piece is a life-size rendering of a Goya etching that depicted war atrocities) and biological warfare, in the case of the mutated children (the text card suggests the deformities were caused by a chemical mishap). It is, indeed, possible to find some meaning in the Brooklyn artwork -- as long as you read the text cards.
And yet, when you put something on a pedestal or place it in a frame, you glorify it -- if ever so slightly. Clearly, some museum-goers in Britain believed this when they physically attacked the show's portrait of a child molester, believing it to be a paean to a woman who deserved no glory. If you fail to give gore any historical context and place it in frames, on pedestals and then in a museum gallery, do you elevate the violence to a point which suggests it's acceptable -- or inevitable?
I'm sure there are some museum-goers -- people who have seen more horror movies than I -- who are leaving the Brooklyn Museum unfazed by what they saw. Maybe after the 20th, 30th, 40th exhibit of sliced animals and casts of heads filled with blood I won't be shocked anymore, either.
But what then? What will the value of that art be? I'll still be able to return again and again to my favorite Picasso and find new meaning in it every time, but will I be able to do the same with the "Sensation" art? There's reason to believe the Brooklyn Museum doesn't think so. They marketed their show around the theme of "sensation" knowing full well that sensations don't last.
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