chapter Seeing the Value in Art - University of Phoenixmyresource.phoenix.edu/secure/resource/ART101R4/A_World_of_Art_6e_Ch03.… · Chapter 3 Seeing the Value in Art 41 If these

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Seeing the Value in Art

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At the end of Chapter 2, we brieflymentioned the explosive career of Jean-Michel Basquiat after a number of hisgraffiti-like paintings were exhibited in

the 1981 New York/New Wave exhibit at P. S. 1, analternative art gallery across the 59th Street Bridgefrom Manhattan. Henry Geldzahler, then CulturalCommissioner for New York City, saw his paintings atP. S. 1 and “just flipped out.” Alauna Heiss, founder ofP. S. 1, recalls “standing in front of Jean-Michel’s workwith a director of Philip Morris. We were paralyzed. Itwas so obvious that he was enormously talented.”

By 1982, Basquiat was earning an average of about$4,000 a week by painting. Two years later, at age 24,he became the first black artist to grace the cover of

The New York Times Magazine. At the time of hisdeath, four months before his 28th birthday, the victim,according to the medical examiner’s report, of “acutemixed drug intoxication (opiates–cocaine),” his paint-ings were selling for about $30,000 each (normally adealer keeps 50 to 60 percent of the sale price). Soonafter his death, the auction house Christie’s sold a1981 canvas for $110,000. Now, 20 years since hisdeath, the current auction record for a Basquiat is$14.6 million for Untitled, a painting featuring a figurewith large hands. It sold at Sotheby’s in 2007. As anobituary ironically entitled “Banking on Basquiat,”put it, “There’s no artist like a dead artist, some dealersare fond of saying.”

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Fig. 44 Sylvie Fleury, Serie ELA 75/K (Plumpity . . . Plump), 2000.Gold-plated shopping cart, plexiglas handle with vinyl text, rotating pedestal (mirror,aluminum, motor). 323/4 � 37 3/4 � 215/8 in. Pedestal 121/4 � 393/8 in.Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich, Switzerland.

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A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter 3 Seeing the Value in Art 41

If these numbers seem staggering, it is worthremembering that the monetary value of works of artis closely tied to the business of art, and, from a busi-ness point of view, art works are commodities to bebought and sold like any others, ideally for profit.Sylvie Fleury’s Serie ELA 75/K (Plumpity . . . Plump)(Fig. 44) is a wry commentary on this fact. Here theart work is literally a shopping cart, placed on arevolving pedestal and plated in 24K gold. Art, Fleury’swork implies, is literally shopping.

And very high-end shopping, at that. The artmarket depends on the participation of wealthy clientsthrough their investment, ownership, and patronage.It is no accident, then, that the major financial cen-ters of the world also support the most prestigious artgalleries, auction houses, and museums of modern andcontemporary art. Art galleries bring artists and col-lectors together. They usually sign exclusive contractswith artists whose works they believe they can sell.Collectors may purchase work as an investment but,because the value of a given work depends largely

upon the artist’s reputation, and artists’ reputations arefinicky at best, the practice is very risky. As a result,what motivates most collectors is the pleasure of own-ing art and the prestige it confers upon them (the latteris especially important to corporate collectors).

It is at auction that the monetary value of works ofart is most clearly established. But auction houses are,after all, publicly owned corporations legally obligatedto maximize their profits, and prices at auction areoften inflated. The business of art informs the prac-tices of museums as well, which market their exhibi-tions as “events” in every way comparable to a rockconcert or major motion picture. In fact, in order tofinance their work, museums have increasingly reliedon corporate sponsorship. Consider, for instance, theGuggenheim Museum’s 2000–01 exhibition dedicatedto the fashion design of Giorgio Armani (Fig. 45),whose company, not coincidentally, had entered intoa $15 million sponsorship agreement with the museum.It is no accident, either, that the exhibition took placeover the Christmas shopping season.

Fig. 45 Installation view of Giorgio Armani exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October, 20, 2000–January, 17, 2001.Photo: Ellen Labenski © SRGF, NY.

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42 Part 1 The Visual World

But the value of art is notall about money. Art has intrin-sic value as well, and that valueis often the subject of intensedebate. A case in point is thecontroversy surrounding theexhibition Sensation: YoungBritish Artists from the SaatchiCollection, which appeared atthe Brooklyn Museum of ArtOctober 2, 1999 throughJanuary 9, 2000. At the centerof the storm was a paintingcalled The Holy Virgin Mary(Fig. 46) by Chris Ofili, aBritish-born artist who wasraised a Catholic by parentsborn in Lagos, Nigeria. Thework’s background gleams withglitter and dabs of yellow resin,a shimmering mosaic evokingmedieval icons that contrastwith the soft, petal-like textureof the Virgin’s blue-gray robes.What appears to be black-and-white beadwork turns out to bepushpins. Small cutouts deco-rate the space—bare bottoms from porn magazinesmeant to evoke putti, the baby angels popular inRenaissance art. But most controversial of all is theincorporation of elephant dung, acquired from theLondon Zoo, into the work. Two balls of resin-covereddung, with pins stuck in them spelling out the words“Virgin” and “Mary,” support the painting, andanother ball of dung defines one of the Virgin’sbreasts.

Cardinal John O’Connor called the show anattack on religion itself. The Catholic League forReligious and Civil Rights said people should picketthe museum. New York mayor Rudolph W. Giulianithreatened to cut off the museum’s city subsidy andremove its board if the exhibition was not canceled,calling Ofili’s work, along with the work of severalother artists, “sick stuff.” (Taken to court, the mayorwas forced to back down.) Finally, Dennis Heiner, a

72-year-old Christian who was incensed by Ofili’spainting, eluded guards and smeared white paintacross the work. For Ofili, the discomfort his workgenerates is part of the point: His paintings, he says,“are very delicate abstractions, and I wanted to bringtheir beauty and decorativeness together with theugliness of shit and make them exist in a twilightzone—you know they’re there together, but you can’treally ever feel comfortable about it.” Ofili exists inthis same twilight zone, caught between his Africanheritage and his Catholic upbringing.

The Ofili example demonstrates the many com-plex factors that go into a judgment of art’s value. Inthe rest of this chapter, we will explore the publicnature of art in order to reach some conclusions abouthow our culture comes to value it above and beyondits monetary worth.

Fig. 46 Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary.1996.Paper collage, oil paint, glitter, polyester,resin, map pins, and elephant dung on linen.8 � 6 ft. The Saatchi Gallery, London.Photo: Diane Bondareff / AP World Wide Photos

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ART AND ITS RECEPTION

The artist’s relation to the public, it should be clear,depends on the public’s understanding of what theartist is trying to say. But the history of the public’sreception of art abounds with instances of the public’smisunderstanding. In 1863, for example, EdouardManet submitted his painting Luncheon on the Grass,more commonly known by its French name, Déjeunersur l’herbe (Fig. 47), to the conservative jury thatpicked paintings for the annual Salon exhibition inParis. It was rejected along with many other paintingsconsidered “modern,” and the resulting outcry forcedNapoleon III to create a Salon des Refusés, an exhibi-tion of works refused by the Salon proper, to let thepublic judge for itself the individual merits of therejected works. Even at the Salon des Refusés, however,Manet’s painting created a scandal. Some years later, inhis novel The Masterpiece, Manet’s friend Emile Zola

wrote a barely fictionalized account of the painting’sreception:

It was one long-drawn-out explosion of laughter, risingin intensity to hysteria. . . . A group of young men onthe opposite side of the room were writhing as if theirribs were being tickled. One woman had col-lapsed on to a bench, her knees pressed tightlytogether, gasping, struggling to regain herbreath. . . . The ones who did not laugh lost their tem-pers. . . . It was an outrage and should be stopped,according to elderly gentlemen who brandished theirwalking sticks in indignation. One very serious indi-vidual, as he stalked away in anger, was heardannouncing to his wife that he had no use for badjokes. . . . It was beginning to look like a riot . . . andas the heat grew more intense faces grew more andmore purple.

Fig. 47 Edouard Manet, Luncheon on the Grass (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe), 1863.Oil on canvas, 7 ft. � 8 ft. 10 in. (2.13 � 2.6 m). Musée d’Orsay, Paris.RMN Reunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, NY. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


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Though it was not widely recognized at the time,Manet had, in this painting, by no means abandonedtradition completely to depict everyday life in all its

sordid detail. Déjeuner sur l’herbe was based ona composition by Raphael that Manet knewthrough an engraving, The Judgment of Paris,

copied from the original by one of Raphael’s students,Marcantonio Raimondi (Fig. 48). The pose of thethree main figures in Manet’s painting directly copiesthe pose of the three figures in the lower right cornerof the engraving. However, if Manet’s sources wereclassical, his treatment was anything but. In fact, whatmost irritated both critics and the public was theapparently “slipshod” nature of Manet’s painting tech-nique. He painted in broad visible strokes. The bodyof the seated nude in Déjeuner was flat. The painting’ssense of space was distorted, and the bather in the back-ground and the stream she stands in both seemedabout to spill forward into the picnic.

Manet’s rejection of traditional painting tech-niques was intentional. He was drawing attention tohis very modernity, to the fact that he was breakingwith the past. His manipulation of his traditionalsources supported the same intentions. In the words ofhis contemporary, Karl Marx, Manet was looking

“with open eyes upon his conditions of life and truesocial relations.” Raphael had depicted the classicaljudgment of Paris, the mythological contest in whichParis chose Venus as the most beautiful of the god-desses, a choice that led to the Trojan War. In hisdepiction of a decadent picnic in the Bois de Bologne,Manet passed judgment upon a different Paris, themodern city in which he lived. His world hadchanged. It was less heroic, its ideals less grand.

The public tends to receive innovative artworkwith reservation because it usually has little context,historical or otherwise, in which to view it. It is noteasy to appreciate, let alone value, what is not under-stood. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited his NudeDescending a Staircase (Fig. 49) at the Armory Showin New York City in 1913, it was a scandalous success,parodied and ridiculed in the newspapers. FormerPresident Teddy Roosevelt told the papers, to theirdelight, that the painting reminded him of a Navajoblanket. Others called it “an explosion in a shinglefactory,” or “a staircase descending a nude.” TheAmerican Art News held a contest to find the “nude”in the painting. The winning entry declared, “It isn’t alady but only a man.”

Fig. 48 Marcantonio Raimondi, The Judgment of Paris (detail), c. 1488–1530.Engraving, after Raphael. Clipped impression, Plate line 115⁄8 � 171⁄4 in.The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Rogers Fund, 1919 (19.74.1).

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The Armory Show was most Americans’ firstexposure to modern art, and more than 70,000 peoplesaw it during its New York run. By the time it closed,after also traveling to Boston and Chicago, nearly300,000 people had seen it. If not many understoodthe Nude then, today it is easier for us to see whatDuchamp was representing. He had read, we know, abook called Movement, published in Paris in 1894, atreatise on human and animal locomotion written byEtienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist who hadlong been fascinated with the possibility of breakingdown the flow of movement into isolated data thatcould be analyzed. Marey began to photograph modelsdressed in black suits with white points and stripes,which allowed him to study, in images created out of arapid succession of photographs, the flow of theirmotion. These images, called “chronophotographs,”literally “photographs of time” (Fig. 50), are startlinglylike Duchamp’s painting. “In one of Marey’s books,”Duchamp later explained, “I saw an illustration of howhe indicated [movement] . . . with a system of dotsdelimiting the different movements. . . . That’s whatgave me the idea for the execution of [the] Nude.”

Marey and Duchamp had embarked, we can nowsee, on the same path, a path that led to the invention ofthe motion picture. On December 28, 1895, atthe Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines inParis, the Lumière brothers, who knew Marey and hiswork well, projected motion pictures of a baby being fedits dinner, a gardener being doused by a hose, and a trainracing directly at the viewers, causing them to jumpfrom their seats. Duchamp’s vision had already beenconfirmed, but the public had not yet learned to see it.

Fig. 50 Etienne-Jules Marey, Man Walking in Black Suit with White Stripe Down Sides, 1883.Collection Musée Marey, Beaune, France.Photo: Jean-Claude Couval.

Fig. 49 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912.Oil on canvas, 58 � 35 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art: The Louise andWalter Arensberg Collection.Photo: Graydon Wood, 1994. © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


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A more recent example of the same phenomenon,of a public first rejecting and then coming to under-stand and accept a work of art, is Maya Lin’s VietnamMemorial in Washington, D.C. (Fig. 51). Lin’s work wasselected from a group of more than 1,400 entries in anational competition. At the time her proposal wasselected, Lin was 22 years old, a recent graduate of YaleUniversity, where she had majored in architecture.

Many people at first viewed the monument as aninsult to the memory of the very soldiers whom itwas supposed to honor. Rather than rise in majesty anddignity above the Washington Mall, like the Wash-ington Monument or the Jefferson Memorial, itdescends below earth level in a giant V, more than200 feet long on each side. It represents nothing in par-ticular, unlike the monument to the planting of the flagon the hill at Iwo Jima, which stands in ArlingtonNational Cemetery, directly across the river. If Lin’smemorial commemorates the war dead, it does so onlyabstractly.

And yet this anti-monumental monument hasbecome the most visited site in Washington. In part,people recognize that it symbolizes the history of the

Vietnam War itself, which began barely perceptibly,like the gentle slope that leads down into the V, thendeepened and deepened into crisis, to end in the rivet-ing drama of the American withdrawal from Saigon.Though technically over, the war raged on for years inthe nation’s psyche, while at the same time a slow andat times almost imperceptible healing process began.To walk up the gentle slope out of the V symbolizes formany this process of healing. The names of the 58,000men and women who died in Vietnam are chiseledinto the wall in the order in which they were killed.You find the name of a loved one or a friend by look-ing it up in a register. As you descend into the space tofind that name, or simply to stare in humility at all thenames, the polished black granite reflects your ownimage back at you, as if to say that your life is whatthese names fought for.

Like Manet’s Déjeuner and Duchamp’s Nude, Lin’spiece was misunderstood by the public. But unlikeeither, it was designed for public space. As we haveseen, the public as a whole is a fickle audience, andthe fate of art in public places can teach us muchabout how and why we, as a culture, value art.

Fig. 51 Maya Ying Lin, Vietnam Memorial, Washington, D.C., 1982.Polished black granite, length 492 ft.Woodfin Camp & Associates.

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ART, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC SPACE

A certain segment of the public has always sought outart in galleries and museums. But as a general rule(except for statues of local heroes mounted on horse-back in the public square—of interest mainly topigeons), the public could ignore art if it wished.In 1967, when Congress first funded the NationalEndowment for the Arts (NEA), that changed. AnArts in Public Places Program was initiated, quicklyfollowed by state and local programs nationwide thatusually required 1 percent of the cost of new publicbuildings to be dedicated to purchasing art to enhancetheir public spaces. Where artists had before assumedan interested, self-selected audience, now everyonewas potentially their audience. And, like it or not,artists were thrust into activist roles—their job, as theNEA defined it, to educate the general public aboutthe value of art.

The Endowment’s plan was to expose the nation’scommunities to “advanced” art, and the Arts in Public

Places Program was conceived as a mass-audience artappreciation course. Time and again, throughout itshistory, it commissioned pieces that the public ini-tially resisted but learned to love. Alexander Calder’sLa Grand Vitesse (Fig. 52) in Grand Rapids, Michigan,was the first piece commissioned by the Program. Theselection committee was a group of four well-knownoutsiders, including New York painter Adolph Gottlieband Gordon Smith, director of the Albright-Knox ArtGallery in Buffalo, New York, and three local repre-sentatives, giving the edge to the outside experts, whowere, it was assumed, more knowledgeable about artmatters than their local counterparts. In the case ofLa Grand Vitesse, the public initially reacted nega-tively to the long organic curves of Calder’s prayingmantis–like forms but soon adopted the sculpture as acivic symbol and a source of civic pride. The NEA andits artists were succeeding in teaching the public tovalue art for art’s sake.

Fig. 52 Alexander Calder, La Grand Vitesse, 1969.Painted steel plate, 43 � 55 ft. Calder Plaza, Vandenberg Center, Grand Rapids, Michigan.© John Corriveau, all rights reserved. © 2007 Estate of Alexander Calder / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


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Public SculptureTo value art for art’s sake is to value it as an aestheticobject, to value the beauty of its forms rather than itsfunctional practicality or its impact on social life. TheNEA assumed, however, that teaching people toappreciate art would enhance the social life of thenation. Public art, the Endowment believed, wouldmake everyone’s lives better by making the places inwhich we live more beautiful, or at least more interest-ing. The public sculpture considered in this sectiontests this hypothesis.

Richard Serra’s controversial Tilted Arc (Fig. 53)received an entirely different reception. When it wasoriginally installed in 1981 in Federal Plaza in LowerManhattan, there was only a minor flurry of negativereaction. However, beginning in March 1985, WilliamDiamond, newly appointed Regional Administratorof the General Services Administration, which hadoriginally commissioned the piece, began an activecampaign to have it removed. At the time, nearlyeveryone believed that the vast majority of people

working in the Federal Plaza complex despised thework. In fact, of the approximately 12,000 employeesin the complex, only 3,791 signed the petition to haveit removed, while nearly as many—3,763—signed apetition to save it. Yet the public perception was thatthe piece was “a scar on the plaza” and “an arrogant,nose-thumbing gesture,” in the words of one observer.During the night of March 15, 1989, against theartist’s vehement protests and after he had filed a law-suit to block its removal, the sculpture was dismantledand its parts stored in a Brooklyn warehouse. It has sub-sequently been destroyed.

From Serra’s point of view, Tilted Arc was destroyedwhen it was removed from Federal Plaza. He had cre-ated it specifically for the site, and once removed, itlost its reason for being. In Serra’s words: “Site-specificworks primarily engender a dialogue with theirsurroundings. . . . It is necessary to work in oppositionto the constraints of the context, so that the work can-not be read as an affirmation of questionable ideologiesand political power.” Serra intended his work to be

confrontational. It was political. That is, he feltthat Americans were divided from their gov-ernment, and the arc divided the plaza in thesame way. Its tilt was ominous—it seemed readyto topple over at any instant. Serra succeededin questioning political power probably moredramatically than he ever intended, but he lostthe resulting battle. He made his intentionsknown and understood, and the work wasjudged as fulfilling those intentions. But thosein power judged his intentions negatively,which is hardly surprising, considering that Serrawas challenging their very position and author-ity.

One of the reasons that the public has haddifficulty, at least initially, accepting so many ofthe public art projects that have been funded byboth the NEA and percent-for-art programs isthat they have not found them to be aestheti-cally pleasing. The negative reactions to Serra’sarc are typical. If art must be beautiful, thenSerra’s work was evidently not a work of art, atleast not in the eyes of the likes of WilliamDiamond. And yet, as the public learned whatthe piece meant, many came to value the work,not for its beauty but for its insight, for what itrevealed about the place they were in. Serra’swork teaches us a further lesson about the valueof art. Once public art becomes activist, pro-moting a specific political or social agenda,there are bound to be segments of the publicthat disagree with its point of view.

Fig. 53 Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981.Cor-Ten steel, 12 ft. � 120 ft. � 21/2 in. Installed, Federal Plaza, NewYork City. Destroyed by the U.S. Government March 15, 1989.© 2007 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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the plaza where public political meetingstook place on a raised platform called thearringhiera (from which the English word“harangue” derives). Its political con-text, in other words, was clear. It repre-sented David’s triumph over the tyrantGoliath and was meant to symbolizeRepublican Florence—the city’s freedomfrom foreign and papal domination, andfrom the rule of the Medici family aswell.

The David was, as everyone in thecity knew, a sculptural triumph in its ownright. It was carved from a giant 16-foot-high block of marble that had been quar-ried 40 years earlier. Not only was theblock riddled with cracks, forcingMichelangelo to bring all his skills tobear, but earlier sculptors, includingLeonardo da Vinci, had been offered theproblem stone and refused.

When the David was finished, in1504, it was moved out of the Opera delDuomo at eight in the evening. It took40 men four days to move it the600 yards to the Piazza della Signoria. Itrequired another 20 days to raise it ontothe arringhiera. The entire time, its poli-tics hounded it. Each night, stones werehurled at it by supporters of the Medici,and guards had to be hired to keep watchover it. Inevitably, a second group of cit-izens objected to its nudity, and before itsinstallation a skirt of copper leaves wasprepared to spare the general public anypossible offense. Today, the skirt is longgone. By the time the Medici returned to

power in 1512, the David was a revered public shrine,and it remained in place until 1873, when it wasreplaced by a copy (as reproduced here in orderto give the reader a sense of its original context)and moved for protection from a far greater enemythan the Medici—the natural elements themselves.Michelangelo’s David suggests another lesson aboutthe value of art. Today, we no longer value the sculp-ture for its politics but rather for its sheer aestheticbeauty and accomplishment. It teaches us how impor-tant aesthetic issues remain, even in the public arena.

Fig. 54 Michelangelo, David, 1501–1504.Copy of the original as it stands in the Piazza dellaSignoria, Florence. Original in the Galleria dell’Accademia,Florence. Marble, height 13 ft. 5 in.© Bill Ross / Corbis. All rights reserved.

A classic example is Michelangelo’s David (Fig. 54).Today, it is one of the world’s most famous sculptures,considered a masterpiece of Renaissance art. But it didnot meet with universal approval when it was first dis-played in Florence, Italy, in 1504. The sculpture wascommissioned three years earlier, when Michelangelowas 26 years old, by the Opera del Duomo (“Works ofthe Cathedral”), a group founded in the thirteenthcentury to look after the Florence cathedral and tomaintain works of art. It was to be a public piece,designed for outdoor display in the Piazza della Signoria,


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The “Other” Public ArtPublic art has been associated particularly with sculp-tural works. Whatever social issues or civic pride theymay symbolize, there are kinds of public art that aredesigned to have direct impact on our lives. For exam-ple, in their 1994 piece The Cruci-fiction Project(Fig. 55), performance artists Guillermo Gómez-Peñaand Roberto Sifuentes crucified themselves for threehours on 16-foot-high crosses at Rodeo Beach, in frontof San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge (for discussionof two other pieces by Gómez-Peña, see Works inProgress, pp. 52–53). “The piece was designed for themedia,” Gómez-Peña explains, “as a symbolic protestagainst the xenophobic immigration politics ofCalifornia’s governor Pete Wilson.” The artists identifiedthemselves as modern-day versions of Dimas and Gestas,the two small-time thieves who were crucified along withJesus Christ, and they dressed as Mexican stereotypes: “Iwas an ‘undocumented bandido,’ crucified by the INS[Immigration and Naturalization Service],” Gómez-Peñarecalls, “and Roberto was a generic ‘gang member,’ cruci-fied by the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department].”

Gómez-Peña describes what happened at the perfor-mance:

Our audience of over 300 people each received a hand-out, asking them to “free us from our martyrdom as agesture of political commitment.” However, we hadmiscalculated their response. Paralyzed by the melancho-lia of the image, it took them over three hours to figureout how to get us down. By then, my right shoulder hadbecome dislocated and Roberto had passed out. We werecarried to a nearby bonfire and nurtured back to reality,while some people in the crowd rebuked those who weretrying to help us, saying, “Let them die!”

Photographs of the event were quickly picked upby the media, and the piece became internationalnews. The image appeared in, among other publica-tions, Der Spiegel (Germany), Cambio 16(Spain), Reforma and La Jornada (Mexico), andvarious U.S. newspapers. The photos have sincereappeared in major news media and art publicationsas the debates on immigration and arts funding con-tinue to be the focus of the political right.

The Cruci-fiction Project was designed to drawpublic attention to immigration issues in Califor-nia. Similarly, when Thai artist Sakarin Krue-On wasinvited to participate in an exhibition of contempo-rary Thai art at Tang Contemporary Art in Beijing,China, he took the opportunity to draw the attentionof the Chinese public to the fact that the city ofXuchang in Henan province had become one of thelargest centers of human hair distribution in the world.Across China, common people trade hair that hasoften taken years to grow for whatever money theycan get in return (in some cases, just enough to buy apair of pants). In Xuchang today, there are 112 hair-product manufacturing companies. The irony is that itwas in Henan province, in 1958, that the then-Communist government of Mao Zedong establishedits first commune, designed to abolish private owner-ship and maximize the effectiveness of the riceharvest—hence the title of Krue-On’s work, Since1958, spelled out on the gallery wall and composed of10,000 locks of human hair, which Krue-On pur-chased from a Bangkok wholesaler who had in turnordered it from China (Fig. 56). “From rice harvest tohuman-hair harvest,” Krue-On says.

Fig. 55 Guillermo Gómez-Peña and RobertoSifuentes, The Cruci-fiction Project, 1994.Site-specific performance, Marin headlands, California.Photo: Victor Zaballa. Courtesy Headlands Center for the Arts.

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A final example of this activist direc-tion in art is artist Krzysztof Wodiczko’sHomeless Vehicle (Figs. 57 and 58), a shop-ping cart representing the very opposite ofSylvie Fleury’s (see Fig. 44), which openedthis chapter. Wodiczko, who had fledPoland in 1984 and had lived in theUnited States for only four years, wasappalled during the winter of 1987–88 thatan estimated 70,000 people were homelessin New York City alone. While he feltthat “the fact that people are compelled tolive on the streets is unacceptable,” he alsoproposed to do something about it. Giventhe failure of the city’s shelter system, heasked himself, “What can we do for indi-viduals struggling for self-sufficiency onthe streets today?” His solution was a vehi-cle for the homeless. As ingenious as thevehicle itself is, providing a level of safetyand some creature comforts on the streets,Wodiczko’s project is also motivated bymore traditional issues. He draws atten-tion to what the viewer has failed, orrefused, to see, and thus attempts “to cre-ate a bridge of empathy between homelessindividuals and observers.”

Fig. 56 Sakarin Krue-On, Since 1958, 2007.10,000 locks of human hair on gallery wall, 4 ft. 1 in.� 30 ft. 6 in. Installation view and inset detail. TangContemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2007.Artwork © Sakarin Krue-On.


Fig. 57 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle, 1988.Preliminary drawing showing vehicle in washing, sleeping, and restingposition (day). Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Lelong, New York.

Fig. 58 Krzysztof Wodiczko, Homeless Vehicle in New York City,1988–1989.Color photograph. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Lelong, New York.

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In his work, Mexican artist and activist GuillermoGómez-Peña has chosen to address what he consid-ers to be the major political question facing NorthAmerica—relations between the United States and

Mexico. For him, the entire problem is embodied inthe idea of the “border.” As the border runs from theGulf of Mexico up the Rio Grande, it has a certaingeographical reality, but as it extends west from Texas,across the bottom of New Mexico, Arizona, andCalifornia, its arbitrary nature becomes more andmore apparent until, when it reaches the PacificOcean between San Diego and Tijuana, it begins toseem patently absurd. Gómez-Peña’s work dramatizeshow the geographical pseudo-“reality” of the borderallows us, in the United States, to keep out what wedo not want to see. The “border” is a metaphor for thedivision between ourselves and our neighbors, just asthe difference in our national languages, English and

Spanish, bars us from understanding one another.Gómez-Peña’s work is an ongoing series of what hecalls “border crossings,” purposeful transgressions ofthis barrier.

Gómez-Peña asks his audience in the UnitedStates to examine its own sense of cultural superiority.He laces all his performances with Spanish in order tounderscore to his largely English-speaking audiencemembers that he, the Mexican, is bilingual, and theyare not. In one of his most famous pieces, TwoUndiscovered Amerindians (Fig. 59), a collaborationwith Coco Fusco, he and Fusco dressed as recentlydiscovered, wholly uncivilized “natives” of the ficti-tious island of Guatinaui in the middle of the Gulf ofMexico. At places such as the Walker Art Center inMinneapolis, Columbus Plaza in Madrid, Spain, andin London, England, they performed, in their ownwords, “authentic and traditional tasks, such as writing


Fig. 59 Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco, Two Undiscovered Amerindians Visit London, May 1992.Site-specific performance, London, England.Photo: Peter Barker.

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on a laptop computer, watchingtelevision, sewing voodoo dolls,and doing exercise.” Audiencemembers could pay for “authen-tic” dances or for Polaroid snap-shots. To the artists’ astonish-ment, nearly half of the audiencemembers assumed that they werereal, and huge numbers of peopledidn’t find the idea of supposednatives locked in a cage as part ofan “art” or “anthropological”exhibit objectionable or evenunusual. The project pointed outjust how barbaric the assump-tions of Western culture can be.

Another ongoing perfor-mance and installation work istitled The Temple of Confes-sions (Fig. 60). Gómez-Peña andRoberto Sifuentes exhibit them-selves, for five to seven hours aday, inside Plexiglas booths.Sifuentes’s arms and face arepainted with tattoos, his bloodyT-shirt is riddled with bulletholes. He shares his booth with50 cockroaches, a four-footiguana, and what appear to be real weapons and drugparaphernalia. In his own booth, Gómez-Peña sits ona toilet (or wheelchair), dressed as what he calls a“curio shop shaman.” Hundreds of souvenirs hangfrom his chest and waist. He shares his box with livecrickets, stuffed animals, tribal musical instruments,and a giant ghetto blaster. A violet neon light framesthe entire altar, and a highly “techno” soundtrackplays constantly.

In front of each booth, there is a church kneelerwith a microphone to allow audience members to con-fess their “intercultural fears and desires.” At least athird of all visitors eventually do so. Gómez-Peñadescribes the effect: “Emotions begin to pour forthfrom both sides. Some people cry, and in doing so,

they make me cry. Some express their sexual desire forme. Others spell their hatred, their contempt, andtheir fear. . . . The range goes from confessions ofextreme violence and racism toward Mexicans andother people of color, to expressions of incommensu-rable tenderness and solidarity with us. Some confes-sions are filled with guilt, or with fear of invasion, vio-lence, rape, and disease. Others are fantasies aboutwanting to be Mexican or Indian, or vice versa:Mexicans and Latinos suffused in self-hatred wantingto be Anglo, Spanish, or ‘blond.’” At night, after eachperformance, Sifuentes and Gómez-Peña listen totapes of all the confessions of the day. The mostrevealing ones are edited and incorporated into theinstallation soundtrack.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Temple of Confessions


Fig. 60 Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, The Temple of Confessions, 1994.Site-specific performance, Detroit Institute of the Arts, 1994.Photo: Dirk Bakker.

Watch Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes as they create and present The Temple ofConfessions at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery in the Works in Progress video series.

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THE CRITICAL PROCESS Thinking about the Value of Art

In December 1977, outside the Los Angeles CityHall, Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz staged acollaborative performance piece entitled InMourning and in Rage to protest violence against

women in America’s cities. To ensure media coverage,the performance was timed to coincide with a LosAngeles city council meeting. Ten women steppedfrom a hearse wearing veils draped over structuresthat, headdress-like, made each figure seven feet tall.Representing the ten victims of the Hillside Strangler,a serial killer then on the loose in Los Angeles, each ofthe figures, in turn, addressed the media. They linkedthe so-called Strangler’s crimes to a national climateof violence against women and the sensationalizedmedia coverage that supports it. As Lacy and Labowitzhave explained: “The art is in making it compelling;the politics is in making it clear. . . . In Mourningand in Rage took this culture’s trivialized images ofmourners as old, powerless women and transformedthem into commanding seven-foot-tall figures angrilydemanding an end to violence against women.” To

maximize the educational and emotional impact ofthe event, the performance itself was followed up bya number of talk show appearances and activitiesorganized in conjunction with a local rape hot line.

Since then, Lacy has continued to pursue thiskind of art. One of the most visually spectacular of herworks is Whisper, the Waves, the Wind (Fig. 61), a per-formance tableau in which 154 women over the ageof 65 proceeded through an audience of 1,000 anddown steep stairs to two beach coves situated back-to-back in La Jolla, California, to sit around whitecloth-covered tables and talk about their lives, theirrelationships, their hopes, and their fears. In the mid-dle of the performance, the audience was invited ontothe beach to listen close at hand. The piece wasmotivated by several salient facts: By the year 2020,one of every five people in the United States will beover 65; this population will be predominantly femaleand single; and today women account for nearly75 percent of the aged poor. For Lacy, the performancereinforced the strong spiritual and physical beauty of

older women. Lacy says, “Theyreminded me of the place where theocean meets shoreline. Their bodieswere growing older, wrinkled. Butwhat I saw was the rock in them; solid,with the presence of the years washingover them.” The monetary value ofthis piece is obviously minimal, butwhat other values does it possess?Judging from the photograph of theperformance, what aesthetic qualitiesof the work reinforce Lacy’s commenton its symbolic nature?

Fig. 61 Suzanne Lacy, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 1993–1994.Still photograph of a performance in the Whisper Projects.Courtesy Suzanne Lacy.

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chapter Seeing the Value in Art - University of Phoenixmyresource.phoenix.edu/secure/resource/ART101R4/A_World_of_Art_6e_Ch03.… · Chapter 3 Seeing the Value in Art 41 If these