Bullying censors get what they want again

Post Reply New Topic

The Guggenheim Museum in New York has announced it is pulling three works from an upcoming exhibit of contemporary Chinese art owing to "explicit and repeated threats of violence."

An online petition demanding the museum remove the works garnered more than 600,000 signatures since it was posted five days ago, contending that three of them depict animal cruelty. The pressure mounted from there: Tweets show protesters gathered outside the museum on Saturday, holding signs that say "suffering animals is not art."

The works in question all involve either live animals or videos thereof.

The Guggenheim says the exhibition, "Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World," with art spanning 1989 to 2008, is the largest show on the subject ever mounted in North America.

The most controversial is called Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, and shows four pairs of American pit bulls tethered together on nonmotorized treadmills, charging at one another but unable to make contact. The Guggenheim planned to display a seven-minute video of the performance, which was staged at a Beijing museum in 2003, a video that shows not only the dogs but museumgoers watching and photographing the spectacle.

The second piece to be removed is Theater of the World, by Huang Yong Ping. In what The New York Times said was to be "the signature piece of the show," the work consists of a wood and steel structure covered in mesh and lit by warming lamps, under which insects and lizards scurry. Under the gaze of visitors, some of the inhabitants may eat each other. (And be occasionally replenished by a local pet store.)

The last, a work by Xu Bing titled A Case Study of Transference, is also a video of an earlier performance. In this case, that performance includes two pigs, stamped with Roman and Chinese characters, copulating in front of a live audience.

"Reflecting the artistic and political context of its time and place, Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other is an intentionally challenging and provocative artwork that seeks to examine and critique systems of power and control," the Guggenheim said in a statement Thursday. "We recognize that the work may be upsetting. The curators of the exhibition hope that viewers will consider why the artists produced it and what they may be saying about the social conditions of globalization and the complex nature of the world we share."

But on Monday the museum relented under the pressure and said it was pulling the three works, citing threats of violence and concern for the safety of its staff, visitors and the artists.

"Banning cruelty is not censorship" ---- PRECISELY!

That's the crux of it.

This is CRUELTY not just freedom of speech/freedom of art. Bullying is where someone is pointlessly and unfairly coercing. In this case the "bullying" was done for the greater good of stopping cruelty to animals, not just to give someone a hard time or censor them for no good reason.

I'm not quite understanding whose side AsPartOfMe is on. . . .

I am going to err on the side not banning “art”.

Reminds me of a story from some years ago, where an artist chained a dog up with a short leash, and had a sign saying "Do not feed the dog." The dog ended up starving to death.

So, no sympathy for these "artists." Cruelty to living things is not free speech, and banning cruelty is not censorship.

So, would you be fine with a museum showing snuff films and child pornography, as long as it can be rationalized as "art"?

Provided the dogs weren't on display too long, I would expect an animal welfare expert to sign off on the show. They're just doing what dogs do, and I doubt they worry too much about the confusing aspects of being on a treadmill.

I just don't see how it could do them any lasting harm. The lizards and bugs do the same thing every day all over the world. Framing it makes it unethical? Please.

Stop with the false equivalences to activities which clearly harm people, MP. Everyone agrees on that. If you make the case that the dogs are harmed, you've won the argument without sounding completely nuts.

For that matter, you could make the more difficult case that people are harmed by watching such an exhibition. Simply asserting it won't suffice.

The article that detonated the crisis, “Where the Wild Things Are: China’s Art Dreams at the Guggenheim,” a preview of a highly anticipated, art-historically important survey of Chinese art practices, “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World,” was published on September 20 in the New York Times.

One day later, the Guggenheim had received such a volume of complaints that it issued a public statement acknowledging concerns around one particular video, Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, documenting a 2003 performance-installation by Peng Yu and Sun Yuan, where pit bulls were chained to treadmills.

Five days after the initial Times story, on September 25, the museum pulled three works from the show—something that museums almost never do, as a matter of principle—citing “explicit and repeated threats of violence.”

The whole affair is unsettling on multiple levels:

The video is definitely disturbing just on its own.
The way the firestorm spread is disturbing, coming amid stories of how context-warping social media scandals are amplifying social division.
And finally, the Guggenheim’s communications failure in the face of this is disturbing itself—particularly because the institution imagined itself braced to deal with the sensitive material.
Taken together, the affair raises serious issues of how museums can function as spaces of debate for thorny material in present conditions.

How was the public meant to assess the “artistic and political context” or “consider why the artists produced it”? The entire premise of “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” is that this strain of Chinese conceptual art is not very well known in the United States, even by specialists.

Truth be told, I worry that the show was not actually equipped to make the case. In the “Theater of the World” catalogue, Sun and Peng merit a single-page entry. Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other gets a paragraph. Here is its conclusion, where the point of the work is explained:

This highly stylized scenario exposes the relational condition of the abject, illuminating its crucial role in the mediation of power and maintenance of society’s hierarchical structures. In this way, Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other reflects society at large, where through unavoidable participation, subjects are either dominating or subordinated.

That’s one for the Artspeak Hall of Fame. I mean, it is precision-tuned to sound meaningful while explaining nothing of substance.

And here’s what I am afraid of: that the vagueness throughout the Guggenheim’s communications on this is a dodge around the central fact that the show tackles an important but intensely troubling time in Chinese art, one that raises very, very difficult issues of how values move across cultures.

The whole desired effect was to create equivalence between human and animal sports, using dogs who have been bred to be savage as a prop to make a statement about human savagery. Here is Sun, in an interview with Paul Gladston (from the book Deconstructing Contemporary Chinese Art), responding to criticism of the work:

Were the dogs being abused? The answer should be no. These dogs are naturally pugnacious. We only separated them and let them run on the treadmill, which became a sport for the dogs. For those who consider this animal abuse, I don’t understand what they are protesting about. In fact, human nature and animal nature are the same. China hosted the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008. What is the goal of this type of sporting event? Actually, it is a conversion of actual fighting into regulated competition. It’s agreeable to most people because most people are supportive of the convention of the Olympic Games.
(Indeed, the Chinese dog-fighting scene may have actually learned a thing or two from Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other. According to Cheng, “the dogs’ regular coach found the machines so effective for canine training that he purchased four treadmills from the artists after the show”!)

2) Sun and Peng’s video is a historical document of an event that took place 14 years ago. And whether or not you find it repugnant, the treatment of animals in it is representative of an actual, pronounced strand of Chinese artistic practice, one that was historically important and needs to be understood.

You think Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other is shocking? Consider the artist Xu Zhen, today one of Chinese art’s biggest international stars, the head of an entire art collective-cum-corporation called MadeIn. In 1998, he purchased a cat, strangled it, then beat its lifeless body to a mangled pulp as a performance. “In order to release my frustration without violence towards the public, the cat was a substitute,” he explained.

Sun and Peng’s early works mark the same extremes. Infamously, Peng’s installation Curtain (1999) saw her go to a Chinese wholesale fresh animal market, purchasing an immense quantity of lobsters, eels, snakes, and frogs. Her 10 assistants speared them alive on metal wires to create a dense, writhing, four-by-six tapestry that thrashed out its death throes over the course of the installation.

All this seems incomprehensible, and begs the question of how we reckon with the existence of this tendency.

In another essay on the broader subject of “Animalworks in China,” Meiling Cheng suggests that this gulf in understanding stems from a “radical difference in socioeconomic conditions between China as an unevenly developed country and a typical highly developed nation such as the United States. Because of this difference, we have to be cautious in applying Euro-American values such as animal rights or eco-consciousness to China.”

In rural countries, people live close to livestock and other animals. On the one hand, there is a more direct relationship of human to animal; on the other, there is much less preciousness about these animals, since they are raised for food or as beasts of burden.

Our own particular sentimental hypersensitivity to animal rights issues is due to a combination of factors: we have been mostly urbanized for generations, so the animals we encounter on a daily basis are specifically bred as adorable companions. At the same time, we are a gluttonous, fast-food-obsessed, hyper-capitalist country. Any less-than-superficial acquaintance with the conditions of industrial food production system produces revulsion.

Notably, China’s attitudes have evolved as its urban living standards have converged with the West. Just in July, National Geographic quoted international animal-rights expert Peter Li on changing Chinese attitudes towards animals (including, specifically, the treatment of dogs):

In 1992, Li says, there was only one registered animal protection organization that attended the annual conference put on by the Humane Society and Animals Asia, another NGO. In 2006 there were a handful more. Now, according to Li, at least 200 registered organizations are advocating for animal welfare and wildlife protection—not counting the hundreds of animal shelters and rescues that have also sprung up.
In other words, ideas of animal welfare have converged with our own—but only dramatically in the recent past, and outside of the time-frame of “Theater of the World,” which spans 1989 to 2008.

Second, it bears mentioning that whatever the conception of animal rights was in China, such extreme acts were always controversial in China. That has to also be part of their context too. When the artist Zhu Yu, for instance, performed open heart surgery on a pig as a performance art piece called Happy Easter (2001), accidentally killing it, the local papers blared headlines like, “Is It Art or Is It Murder?”

This outré genre of art is generally understood as a product of a moment which also included a context of zero political freedom of expression. Critics, both inside and outside of China, have often read the nihilistic extremes of Chinese performance and performance-installation from this period as morbid symptoms of a society wrenched by stunning change combined with a lack of any sense of political control. Artists put extreme emphasis on symbolizing their command over their intimate environment, leading to all matter of shocking acts.

Indeed, so extreme was this impulse that criticism built to actual government censure. Early in the new millennium, the controversies over the “violent tendency” in Chinese art escalated to such an extent that in April 2001, China’s Department of Cultural Affairs issued a policy notice that “sternly prohibits the performance and display of bloody, violent, obscene settings or materials in the name of art.” Among those implicitly targeted, Cheng writes, was the “younger generation of the so-called ‘Beijing shockers,’ also known as the ‘cadaver school.’ Sun and Peng belong to the latter group.”

The anti-Guggenheim animal-rights campaign, in other words, echoes the Chinese Communist Party here—which is, I imagine, why an artist such as Ai Weiwei, who was himself a target of the 2001 policy notice, takes such offense at the removal of the works.

The issues raised by this video and the controversy are very intricate. They bear on how we see this time period and how we view museums themselves—are they just a place for entertainment that should only present things that are lovely or morally agreeable, or does a show like “Theater of the World” also represent a historical examination of another culture and another time? If so, how do you judge that history? Even if aspects of it are deeply troubling or repugnant, should they be presented if they were important?

What is certain is that instead of being an occasion to understand the intricacies of this period in China, the way this controversy has exploded has now projected an incendiary stereotype deep into the publics mind

Provided the dogs weren't on display too long, I would expect an animal welfare expert to sign off on the show. They're just doing what dogs do, and I doubt they worry too much about the confusing aspects of being on a treadmill.

I just don't see how it could do them any lasting harm. The lizards and bugs do the same thing every day all over the world. Framing it makes it unethical? Please.

Stop with the false equivalences to activities which clearly harm people, MP. Everyone agrees on that. If you make the case that the dogs are harmed, you've won the argument without sounding completely nuts.

For that matter, you could make the more difficult case that people are harmed by watching such an exhibition. Simply asserting it won't suffice.