"Why the Guggenheim’s Controversial Dog Video Is Even More Disturbing Than You Think."

I've already blogged about the video of the Chinese performance art "Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other," first, in "The most fatuous art-talk I've ever heard" and second, in "'Out of concern for the safety of its staff, visitors, and participating artists, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has decided against showing the art works....'"

Now, at ArtNet News, Ben Davis gives us some important additional information. He quotes the Guggenheim catalogue:

“Finding themselves on unstable ground, the dogs instinctively panicked and began to run, which led to a scene in which each pit bull appeared to be running to attack the dog in front of it.”

Of course, it's cruel to scare dogs into running. They were chained onto an upwardly inclined mechanical treadmill, which would have them forced them to run frantically to keep from slipping backward. But:

This sentence’s implication that the aggression was just an appearance is wrong. In an essay on Sun and Peng’s “animalworks” (of which there are many), based on interviews with the artists, scholar Meiling Cheng writes that the dogs were sourced from “a provincial breeding and training institute for fighting dogs.” The animals were grandly transported to the site in eight separate limousines, with human trainers to keep them apart, because they were “so territorial and violent toward each other.”...

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”!

Remember that the Guggenheim — before it abruptly withdrew the artwork from its show — urged us to think about it in context, but part of the context is, Davis tells us, the treatment of animals in other Chinese artwork:

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....

Read all of what Davis has to say, but here's how he ends it:

Early in the new millennium, the controversies over the “violent tendency” in Chinese art escalated to such an extent that in April 2001, the 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.”

Our animal-rights activists, in other words, are currently retracing the path of the Chinese Communist Party. What that means, about this art or about our own political situation, is well worth sorting out.