Artists must also consider public fears

By Rong Xiaoqing Source:Global Times Published: 2014-8-21 21:08:01

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

Two German artists recently revealed that they committed a crime. The crime in this case involved replacing the two US flags flying over the iconic Brooklyn Bridge with two white flags one night last month. The perpetrators gave themselves up on the Internet, and solved what might be the most unnerving mystery in New York this summer.

They told The New York Times they just wanted to call people's attention to public spaces that were otherwise being overlooked, in line with their previous art.

Unfortunately, that's not what the audience in New York was thinking when people saw the work. Ordinary morning commuters were perplexed, elected officials were fuming, and law enforcement vowed to catch those who were responsible for the unscrupulous stunt.

Everyone wanted to know: In the post 9/11 environment, in a city that is very security conscious, who could do this to us and how?

This represented the gap between the artist's intention and the audience's reception, which often happens in the art world and is often something to be celebrated. The audience is encouraged to have its own interpretations, completing the work of the artists.

But in this case, whether or not that applies depends on how you define art.

Art can be defined through various concepts. There is the original Latin meaning of the word - it means "craft" and "skill." There is the Leo Tolstoy explanation that "art begins when a man, with the purpose of communicating to other people a feeling he once experienced." Then there is Elbert Hubbart's claim: "Art is not a thing - it's a way." And there are many other definitions offered by many other philosophers, writers, and artists.

In a normal world, you can choose to believe one or all of them, and you can create your own definition too.

In a normal world, art should have no boundaries, and neither should the minds of artists. Sometimes they need to be provocative and even defiant, challenging the established institutions and lead the audience to a new level of thinking.

Andy Warhol's silk prints, Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted human skull, Liu Haisu's introduction of nudity to Chinese painting and Yue Minjun's caricatures of hollow but laughing Chinese faces, all served this mission at various times.

That's just in a normal world. But we are living in a world where terrorism has become a global threat. Like it or not, everything has already been changed by this unfortunate reality.

In the case of the German artists, you can no longer climb a landmark and change something - harmless as it might be. It showed up the New York authorities - what if the climbers had fixed explosives to the bridge they ask? Most important of all, it was embarrassing for the police - showing the city's population that it isn't in much of a state of readiness after all.

It is sad but we all have to cope with it. Maybe it is the time for artists to follow suit now.

On the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Hirst told the BBC that he thought the World Trade Center attack was "kind of like an artwork in its own right." He explained it from an artist's perspective.

The worldwide tsunami of criticism that followed forced him to apologize only a few days later. "I in no way condone terrorism of any kind and I deeply regret any offense caused by the misrepresentation of my thoughts and feelings," he said.

The fact is, any apparently innocuous work, if it can trigger fear of a terrorist attack in its audience, will inevitably be "misrepresented" by the public, and certainly by the authorities.

In other words, they won't be perceived as art. Not the jacket with a wired circuit board an MIT student wore to Boston's Logan Airport in 2007. Not the black boxes with the word "Fear" on them that a student from the School of Visual Arts placed in New York's Union Square Subway Station in 2002. And certainly not the collapsing twin towers.

The German artists said they were surprised by the fuss New Yorkers made about it. But I think they know why now. Only a few days later, the Islamic State militants released a picture online with their own black flag, in a cellphone picture, flowing in front of the White House.

The thoughts behind the white flags and the black one may be different, but the images are too close to allow any artistic interpretation.

For the souls that are used to unfettered creations, the new reality may sound too hard to swallow. But it's really not. Just put yourself in the shoes of behavior artists - you may stand at the corner of the street to offer a free kiss to passers-by and call it art. But you don't do it when SARS or Ebola is rampaging through a community.

When there is real fear in the air, everything has limits.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com

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