Art Shock on Channel 4

Brief notes on the first two shows in Channel 4's Art Shock season.

Is bad art for bad people?, 13 March 2006

Jake Chapman's documentary starts with the Mutt urinal (where else? How about Olympia?), then Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley, and moves onwards to "impoverished representations of human bodies and actions" and "joyful destruction". Is shocking bad?

Brock Enright: video/performance artist who offers kidnap experiences (think of it like an S&M version of CRS in The Game. BBC: "Enright admits to concerns that the service is beginning [to] get out of hand and is becoming too violent. 'Right now I am worrying. I'm thinking about it a lot.'" Times journo: "I found myself oddly reluctant to talk about what had happened".)

Is beautiful better than poor taste? Is the appetite for aesthetic imagery merely a longing to be reassured that the positive, beautiful things in the world are permanent? Goya. More YBAs, but not this image of Hirst and head.

Then, from shock to banality (Jeff Koons, enigmatic), nihilism, pointlessness, laughter ("originality has no value whatsoever"; copying and damaging is pointless too: the damage to an object or image is "always recuperated immediately" - Chapman Bros). This obsessive-indifferent appetite for intensity/pointlessness was an in-crowd symptom at art school.

The doc asks us to think about our preferences, but is more an immersion in (rather than an argument on) the value of shocking/bad/nihilistic/banal art images. Entertaining, and that the adverts during the broadcast seemed to be more ironic and to need more consideration, suggests it succeeded somewhat.

The Hills Have Eyes film
Levis moonbathing
Nivea for men
More Than car insurance
Nokia slide handsets
The Brothers Grimm dvd
Pepsi Max Cino
D and A opticians (cartoon men being squeezed into sausage cases, a metaphor for impersonal customer service; resonated with the next night's documentary)
The Pink Panther film
Guinness
Lloyds home insurance
Think! wear a car seatbelt
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire dvd
Saab
Airwaves chewing gum
Hostel film
Ghost Recon game
28 Days Later tv
Lynx clicker
Benefit cheats
Listerine anti-plaque
No Angels tv

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Human canvas, 14 March 2006

Professor Victoria Pitts: "Body art, despite its interest in intervening with the physical flesh and creating blood and scars and so on, actually is not a violent practice. They’re really taking a kind of libertarian or civil libertarian attitude towards their bodies. It's my body I should be able to do what I want with it." [But watch me.]

But we react strongly because watching flesh piercing triggers the same neuro-chemical results as actually experiencing the piercing (might partly answer one or two of Chapman's questions from the night before)

Flesh hangers (hooks, suspension):
Samppa von Cyborg, Alison Newstead. Pain: intensity of experience ( a shortcut to unconscious? rapture?). Pain/pleasure neurochemically. History in adulthood ritual.

Body modders:
Appropriates (and ritualises/fetishises) medical tools and practices. Doctors don't like this, though note irony re support for plastic surgery. Difference?: cosmetic surgery normalises, but body-modding/scarification etc denorms.

Performers/blood:
Ron Athey, Franko B, Kira O'Reilly. Orlan: meditation on the purposes of medecine, and the control doctors wield? (Memory: at a Warwick conference in the early 1990s, no-one could concentrate on her words because of the video behind her.)

No mention of Chris Burden curiously.

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The visual (or visceral) shock factor itself seems to be a barrier to understanding the "consider what you are, what you do to yourself, what you like to look at, why you think this is good/bad" message. And banality seems self-defeating. What other strategies?

More reading: Anthony Julius' Transgressions: the Offences of Art (shock is depleted, and has collapsed from avant-garde to establishment). JG Ballard's review: "The problem facing any avant-garde out to shock us is that we have seen the concentration camp newsreels and the photographs of child victims of psychopathic killers."

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15 March: What price art? with Tracey Emin.
16 March: The Pervert's Guide to Cinema with Slavoj Zizek.

Comments

[rke]

> No mention of Chris Burden curiously.

Nor Stelarc

[rodcorp]

I saw Stelarc in the links on the Channel 4 page, so I figured that I must have nodded off whilst they'd mentioned him.

[Tom Helliwell]

I loved the first 2 episodes, particularly bad art for bad people....I would like to get a copy if possible?

[rodcorp]

Tom, you'd have to contact C4 I guess. Or look on the internet (youtube? bittorrent?) for online copies of the shows.

[piejesu]

The shows have been posted on uknova

[suzanne]

Just caught most of the is bad art for bad people repeat...has anyone got a list of the artists and pieces shown please?

[justin]

could anone email me the name off the artist and the works title of the video of the chocolate mess thing, they guy chokeing on brown fluid etc, i think it was meled chocolate, and the mad burger chef with the sauces etc, what are the titles and names of the artist please?

my email is justinr714@aol.com, any help would be apreciated.

thanks.