"The 200-foot funnel-like sculpture (official name: “Dirty Corner”) [at the Palace of Versailles, near Paris] was defaced with white spray-painted hate words including, 'At Versailles Christ is King,' and 'the second rape of the nation by deviant Jewish activism.'"
The words were gilded over in gold leaf, under the artist’s direction, after local officials rejected his desire that they stay uncovered on the steel-and-rock piece as evidence of “the scars of the renewed attack.”
“We lost, can you believe it?” Kapoor told artnet News in Moscow, where he launched a new exhibit Monday. “Some very racist, in my view, deputy from parliament took me to court. We were forced to hide the graffiti. It’s a terrible, sad thing. You want me to pretend it didn’t happen?... It happened.”
ADDED: My first reaction was that of course the graffiti must be removed. My second was a memory of Jackie Kennedy:
Returning to the rear compartment, Jackie sat down in one of the two remaining seats, across the aisle from the coffin. In a moment, Lyndon, having collected Lady Bird from the stateroom, came back to see her. “It was a very, very hard thing to do,” Lady Bird Johnson was to recall. “Mrs. Kennedy’s dress was stained with blood. One leg was almost entirely covered with it and her right glove was caked— that immaculate woman— it was caked with blood, her husband’s blood. She always wore gloves like she was used to them; I never could. Somehow that was one of the most poignant sights … [Mrs. Kennedy] exquisitely dressed, and caked in blood.” Shocked though she was at Jackie’s appearance, Lady Bird found the right things to say: “Dear God, it’s come to this …,” and Jackie responded, making “it as easy as possible. She said things like ‘Oh, Lady Bird … we’ve always liked the two of you so much.’ She said … ‘Oh, what if I had not been there. Oh, I’m so glad I was there.’ ” Only once did Jackie’s voice change: when Lady Bird asked her if she wanted to change clothes. Not right then, Jackie said. “And then … if with a person that gentle, that dignified, you can say had an element of fierceness, she said, ‘I want them to see what they have done to Jack.’ ”
From Robert A. Caro,
"The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson IV."
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26 comments:
I'm sympathetic to the artist's position on the matter but I also think it's nifty that some people have taken it upon themselves to breed monarch butterflies.
Le vagin de la reine est sur la table.
Why doesn't the artist view the government action in the same way as that of the vandal. The cover-up is an additional graffiti. Should the artist pretend that it did not happen?
Didn't Jessie Jackson smear his shirt with MLK's blood at the murder scene?
Like Mattress Girl carrying the mattress around or making that home made porn movie.
Didn't proto-Commie and general loon Oswald assassinate Kennedy, or Oswald with a little help from the mob?
And doesn't the French state generally have and exercise more rigid control over this type of expression?
And doesn't Europe more generally have fascistic, ethnically pure, nationalistic elements across the political spectrum?
Would a John Lennon's final scenes graphic novel help illustrate the matter further?
Don't know if I find such a viscerally deployed analogy apt.
Also, artists: Few people give two shits about your concept art if you can't work with the material, which usually takes years. This is making me rethink the Bean in Chicago.
Scrap the social/political commentary and make something beautiful enough everyone is drawn to it.
And hey, it's the French.
"Would a John Lennon's final scenes graphic novel help illustrate the matter further?"
Only if it included Yoko's giddy maniacal laughter at the scene as she slapped her hands together in glee.
"You dead now John, not me! You dead now John!"
I am Laslo.
One of the problems in Europe is that too many of the people left defending freedom/individual liberties/artistic expression are fascistic, or often unknowingly in league with dead end, post Enlightenment ideologies with fascistic elements in them, wich helps to form huge unwieldy bureaucracies and a bien pensant class of timid Statists.
The pendulum keeps swinging.
Such a fragile place to maintain practical freedoms, solve basic problems, and even mildly competent governance.
But some great art traditions, to which I'm sure 'Dirty Corner' tips its hat.
“To attack the work of artists is to attack the universal values of culture - that is freedom and human dignity,” French Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin said in a statement to reporters. “This is an act that simply shows a fascist vision of culture.”
She's talking about god-leafing over the graffiti, right? I mean, you can't talk about the universal values of culture and then go gettin' all exclusionary about the fascist vision of culture, can you? Those values can hardly be "universal" if they don't include fascist expression!
Mme Pellerin has form (NSFW) in promoting all manner of (tax-payer funded) expressions of "freedom and human dignity", and so I have to conclude that her objection to the graffiti is merely concern about the property rights of artists, and not the content of the graffiti or the visions of the artists - who are you to call them vandals? - whose "freedom to create" she would surely champion.
Laslo: I find your mildly racist transgressions, even couched in humor, only convey the ignorance of the oppressor, as he mocks the bodies of the oppressed. That is no intersection I want to cross.
This calls for a new piece: A megaphone woven from Yoko Ono's hair, to amplify the absurdity of voices in the modern celebrity echo-chamber as they float along Capitalist currents and Patriarchal trade-routes, devoid of empathy and purpose.
****I'll settle for a new Brooklyn Hipster pie shop serving $12 slices of 'Lennon meringue pie' properly honoring John's legacy on music and world peace, and one world commuitarianism.
It's been my experience that nothing goes better with a slice of Lennon meringue pie than a single plum, floating in perfume, served in a man's hat.
Graffiti's authors seem to be the only ones to give a rats-ass about Kapoor's pseudo-art, so it's not that surprising that he wanted to keep a memory of it.
There are two phases in life: Life before Paris, and life after Paris.
Before Paris, everything is good, life is worth living, and flowers have fragrance.
After Paris, you return home and hope to someday wash the images of a failed society from your mind. The absolute filth of a people who think a can of spray paint will save their ass from the Germans next invasion.
If you can make the city completely ugly, then maybe the Germans won't gas them all.
After Paris, you return home and hope to someday wash the images of a failed society from your mind. The absolute filth of a people who think a can of spray paint will save their ass from the Germans next invasion.
Ho hum. Another "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" idiot.
Hate to break it to you, but whatever disease you discerned infecting France is infecting the entire Western world. Paris has its serious problems, like every other great metropolis in the West. But if you went to live in Paris and saw nothing but filth and failure, there's a hell of a lot more lacking in you than has ever been lacking in Paris.
At Angeline's link (regarding the artist's depictions of young girls receiving cunnilinus from dogs and barnyard animals and several forms of penetration) the artist said:
"Cet article a été censuré sur l’une de nos pages Facebook pour pédophilie! Et l’ensemble des pages de Délit d’images et nos pages personnelles ont été bloquées… Faites le donc circuler au plus vite voire par mail."
but was she outraged that Facebook took it down, or pleased? Methinks she is at the very least of two minds about it.
But if your art involves children having sex with animals, should you not expect that in some forums your art would not be welcome? And perhaps you might conclude that the only rights in the world are not just your own.
This sounds like Christian anti-semitism. As such it should be roundly condemned. One must approach Islamic anti-semitism with more nuance and balance. You certainly wouldn't want to gild Islamic graffiti. That smacks of mockery and the worst kind of Orientalism.
I agree with the artist, at least in theory. It's his piece-- he should have his say in the matter.
The reality, though, is instructive in what happens at the intersection of art and government funding. No artist who wishes to preserve his independence should ever take a dime from the government. This is the huge conundrum inherent in organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts. Artists agitate for this kind of public funding and never seem to apprehend that is constitutes a kind of indenture.
Art is not supposed to be artistic anymore; the art part is supposed to be the reaction to it of the hoi polloi. You have to watch the audience to get it. I guess it kind of works in a post modern sort of way. I wonder what the post humans will think of it.
The connection between JO's reaction to JFK's assassination and this defacement of "art" is bizarre beyond belief. Ridiculous=sublime...
It is shock art all the way down, I don't know what Kapoor is complaining about.
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on,
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
The most powerful force in the universe...the cunt! http://youtu.be/f1uW6ywOGGM
It makes me feel...emotionally ... erect! http://youtu.be/g031x5y4JmA
We could get Richard Serra to fence the southern border.
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