Visual Opinions Workshop

A questionable validity of self-dignity in arts and the arts discourse.

It’s pretty logical that I can always perceive that which reflects my desires and needs as more valuable, than ‘whatever’ I don’t perveice simply because it’s out of my cognitive reach. These following links represent a small range of examples of artists, and the discourse about their works, in which one can see how much the idea of “aesthetics” here are pretty blatanly self-circling.

All that comes up is the collective pro or contra attitude towards the degree of how people can have AN impact on WHAT either is or is not of their immediate concern.

It obviously does not come to these artists minds … that whatever is out of the reach of their positive concern can vice versa also have an impact on them, philosophically, insofar as it puts them on a scale of relativity as soon as they interact with “THE OTHER” (phenomenon)!

(THE ANGRY VEGAN’S COMMENT IS: “Now anybody can say: whoopidoo, f***ing stupid animal rights a++++holes.
Nevertheless, Here are my two cents about the f***ing stupid destructive art-creating-scene and its bootlickers.”)

How remarkable “the other” is, whether dead, tortured, killed, or alive. Really, how can you unmake that what consitutes the concept of “dignity” in life? By deconstructing it? Can I deconstruct the phenomenon “love” etc. simply by not loving etc.?

FIRSTLY:

On the bottom of this linked page are two arts related entries by me regarding Jill Greenberg (USA/CANADA), and Damien Hirst (UK)

http://tierrechts.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html

SECONDLY:

‘A Self-Proclaimed Artist and an Inexplicable Act of Cruelty’ NYTimes

http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/04/27/movies/27cat.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

The Filmmaker on his site (CANADA): “http://www.roughage.org/”:http://www.roughage.org/ “Jesse Power, ex-vegetarian, was an art student when he conceived a new project. In May 2001, he enlisted two friends, Anthony Wennekers and Matthew Kaczorowski, to help him kill a cat. The intention was to make a video that protested the unthinking consumption of factory-slaughtered animals by killing, cooking and eating a cherished domestic pet – a feline posthumously named Kensington by animal-rights activists.”

THIRDLY:

Francis Upritchard (NEW ZEALAND … and, also a self-described “ex-vegetarian” – whatever this hip/top statement is supposed to imply)

“Let’s talk about some of the stuff you’ve made. I’m interested by that photo you showed me of a stuffed cat, what’s the story behind that?
‘My brother Robert got given $20 to dispose of the family cat…'”

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/francis_upritchard_articles.htm

FORTHLY:

Natalia Edenmont (SWEDEN)

I suggest anybody to take a sample about what people think not by reading the blog authors waffle, but by reading the comments he got

http://sbutler.typepad.com/main/2005/01/nathalia_edenmo.html

here is a text in German I wrote regarding Natalia Edenmont:

http://www.simorgh.de/pdf/blick.pdf

Here is No. 1 an artist who uses slaughtered lambs to indicate something. That what she is indicating might be of a political meaning to her and to the people who agree with her on a certain viewpoint. Now why does she use a dead lamb and not something else? Because the live of the specific lamb does not have any special “meaning” to her, and I assume she would not even understand why a particular life of a particular animal should have any big meaning at all. She seems to connect the oppression of the indigenous people with the conflicts that ride modern day Cuba. And it seems she believes that using the lamb as an indicated sacrifice, will rectify that what is wrong in the world today. Only: necrophilia only encourages the necrophiles.

Tania Bruguera: El Peso de la Culpa (The Burden of Guilt)

“Tania was standing before a Cuban flag which she had herself woven from human hair, a butchered lamb hung around her neck. She spent approximately 45 minutes mixing Cuban soil with water and eating it…”

http://www.universes-in-universe.de/car/havanna/szene/e_tania.htm

Here is No. 2. Temple Grandin is famous, because she models slaughterhouses and says it’s all being done with love – well she says that in some other words. Here she had been making sofa chairs that tells us about the privileges (the feeling good factor) of sitting in a chair with the slaughterhouse in the back of the mind, because her chairs she says, are modelled after some device she uses in slaughterhouse construction. Only, who needs to feel superior with his ass sat on an armchair? Bet you, she will always have the lobby of the humane slaughtering advocates behing her back.

Wendy Jacob with Temple Grandin – The Squeeze Chair Project

“A collaboration between renowned animal scientist Temple Grandin and Chicago-based artist Wendy Jacob. The effects of Grandin’s autism led her, at age 18, to develop an apparatus, based upon cattle handling chutes, which applied soothing,..”

http://www.artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/exhibitionInfo/exhibition/18631

And No. 3. There are today a lot of so called Animal Rights artists and Eco artists who undermine their self-proclaimed causes, by turning what’s top down to the bottom. Diversity comes from freedom and plurality, and these guys here for example take away the freedom bit, and stick your ass right into a test tube, to find out how much your life sucks, or they want to save you by showing everyone what a sucking looser you are in this life on this earth. Why is life used in an exemplaric way here? I guess they’s add that what they are doing is for some greater purpose.

Your life being reduced to being ai “Specimen”.

“Since then he has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in which he presents photographs and biological samples of the creatures he collects…”

http://greenmuseum.org/artist_index.php?artist_id=19 (Although I think the greenmuseum is a good idea, and I do respect their work, I think they should be more clrea about their position on the value of animal life.)

Species Reclamation Via a Non-linear Genetic Timeline; An Attempted Hymenochirus Curtipes Model Induced By Controlled Breeding, 2000
live specimens, varied housing, preserved specimens, digital photographs, Apple Powerbook; dimensions variable (detail).

http://www.genomicart.org/ballengee.htm