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Iconography in Contemporary Art: Hirst’s Shark

By guest correspondent Monica Westin

At a time when cultural production is characterized by vast range and enormous volume, it might be difficult to imagine a single image functioning as a paragon for contemporary art.  And yet if I had to name an artist who stands in for contemporary art, it would be Damien Hirst.  His work sells for astronomical sums, making headlines at a time when market value has become an aesthetic quality of its own.  Hirst also articulates institutional critiques that both joke about the art market and take advantage of it—the logical conclusion of the postmodern artist.  While Hirst’s recent diamond-covered skull has made the most headlines for its sheer cost, the image that continues to circulate the most is Hirst’s 1992 work involving a formaldehyde-preserved tiger shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

The piece itself takes up and comments on contemporary art’s arguably strongest trend: to use found instances of natural or social life, and then to frame that life and repackage it as an aesthetic piece or performance. (Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, seemingly the current bible of museum curators, is the touch point).  In this case, an embalmed shark is art because it has been framed.  Thus, Hirst frames both the shark and contemporary art, a subtle critique that is all the more entertaining because the shark is disintegrating.

Hirst’s earlier embalmed sheep had more or less single-handedly brought him stardom, but that work has stopped being circulated.  So, embalming alone won’t do it, and one can ask, what has made this particular piece iconic?  There’s an undeniable element of humor to the piece—how seriously can it really take itself?—that contributes in large part to its staying power, but lots of artworks are a bit humorous.  We could analyze the piece formally: it involves an animal that, unlike a sheep, never stops moving, and so the freezing of it is a stronger framing tied to guaranteed death, making it a suspended vision of both life and death and thus a commentary on art-making.  There’s the threat (of art itself?) in the open mouth of the shark, and then there’s the pop culture reference to Jaws that’s become part of collective memory.  My favorite explanation is that there’s a possible allusion to cultural “sharks,” dealers in the art world, whom Hirst recently attempted to sidestep by becoming the first contemporary artist to sell his work directly at auction–which was deemed a “game changer” by anxious art insiders.

Whatever the reason, the framed shark continues to be circulated as a symbol of the current and instantaneous despite now being now almost twenty years old.  Examples of this iconic status include its place on the covers of contemporary art books, from Terry Smith’s 2009 What is Contemporary Art, an ambitious and critically acclaimed attempt to catalog current movements, to The $12 Million Stuffed Shark, economist Don Thompson’s 2008 freakonomics-esque attempt to explain the art market.

Thompson’s cover doesn’t even need to reproduce a photograph of the piece, only reference it with the animal and bands of blankness where the tank’s frame would be.

Because Hirst’s shark stands in for contemporary art, it’s been appropriated and reappropriated (as has much of his work) for years in art-pop culture, as well as by other artists commenting on contemporary art.  My personal favorite, from Small Artists John Cake and Darren Neave, makes a witty comment about class, democracy, and the lack thereof in the contemporary art world: Note how the scruffy janitor Lego man is scowling in front of Hirst’s multimillion-dollar half-joke, not finding it very funny.

Maybe he knows something we don’t.

Monica Westin is a Chicago-based theater and visual arts critic and editor, as well as a Ph.D. student in rhetoric at the University of Illinois at Chicago.  She can be contacted at monica.e.westin@gmail.com.

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“For Whom the Bell Tolls …”

Few things seem to bring the American people together as one as the shared heartache that follows upon the violent tragedies of the sort that unfolded in Tucson this past week.  Columbine, Oklahoma City, 9/11, Ft. Hood, Blacksburg,… the list goes on. And it is as it should be, for as the poet put it, “any man’s death diminishes me.”  And indeed, there is something comforting about the photographic record that models a public culture of sorrow and grief as a fundamental (or perhaps transcendent) sense of care and community.  In everything from images of the makeshift memorials comprised of an anonymous outpouring of flowers, prayer cards, and stuffed animals to candlelight vigils and to collective moments of silence, as in the photograph above of congressional staff members standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, we are given the opportunity to see who and what we are (or who we can become).  No matter differences divide us on other matters, the photograph implies, there is nothing that will stand in the way of our common humanity.

That said, there is also something just a little bit dispiriting about such formulaic visual displays, for they imply in their own way that we can only overcome our differences to recognize that common humanity as ritualistic responses to violence and tragedy.  And when the cameras go away, and when the media turns its attention to other matters, in a week or two or three, that sense of commonality will survive as only a distant and fading memory, replaced by selfish interest.  Until the next time, of course—and it will come.

The problem here is not that we should avoid disagreement or difference, or that we should strive to live in that ideal world where “everyone can just get along.”   A productive democratic culture thrives on, indeed requires, a vital sense of difference, as well as robust debate and dissent, lest it become socially and culturally rigid and self-satisfied. Rather, the problem is the sense in which our normative notion of community is too often visualized as a unified, ceremonial response to occasional violence—think here of what animated the so-called “Greatest Generation”—rather than as a mechanism for negotiating the relationship between commonality and difference in a humane way on a daily basis.  The question is, how might one envision community without such rigid unity?

Credit:  Charles Dharapak/Associated Press.

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Who Shot Gabrielle Giffords?

The short answer is easy: Gabrielle Giffords was shot by Jared Lee Loughner, a resident of Tucson, Arizona.  The forensic investigation will rightly be focused on him and on determining whether anyone else was directly involved in planning the attack.  That is as far as causal analysis can go, and the law should go no farther.  But that is not the end of the story, and any political assassination attempt raises the question of whether there might have other, perhaps unwitting accomplices.  Sarah Palin, for example.

Palin’s lock and load rhetoric and use of this map at her website to target Giffords was a source of concern well before the attack and an obvious example subsequently of the how political rhetoric might be encouraging actual violence.  Of course, it took no more than a day for the right to denounce any such interpretation as left-wing politicizing of the tragedy.  The hypocrisy is stunning, and it is disgraceful to pretend that politics had nothing to go with the shooting.  Unfortunately, the carnage in Tucson is a political tragedy and needs to be confronted directly on those terms.

Hundreds of commentators and thousands of other citizens are discussing the relationship between violent words and violent acts, and what level of civility is possible in a political culture that thrives on a volatile combination of free speech and intense competition.  This discussion is necessarily political and inevitably politicized.  I’m still too distraught by the shooting to say much, but a few things about the debate as it already is developing need to be noted.

First, the false equivalencies created by our professional journalists are a disservice to the republic.  Over the course of history, extremism may be distributed equally across the political spectrum, but in the US–right now, right here–the violence is coming largely from the right.   The threats and actual acts of violence time and again are attacks against “targets” selected because of their progressive beliefs.  Although I am truly grateful that elected officials, like most of those they represent, are now standing together in sincere condemnations of violence, one side-effect of that show of unity is to whitewash the actual problem.   As the press does the same, it helps to perpetuate the problem.  Right wing domestic terrorism needs to be identified for what it is, and those who provide it comfort or cover need to reconsider what they are doing.  What are otherwise acceptable habits of partisan advocacy and balanced reporting can collude inadvertently to normalize violence and put democracy itself at unnecessary risk.

Likewise, in rightly worrying about the incendiary effects of political rhetoric, it is easy to spread the blame too widely.  We may all be partisan, and electoral campaigns push everyone toward hyperbole, but not all political slogans are equally inflammatory.  In the health care debate, there is a difference between saying “rising deficit” and “death panels”: wouldn’t you consider violence to protect yourself against a government bent on killing?  In promoting political change, there is a difference between “change now” and calling for a “Second Amendment solution”: only the latter specifies the use of firearms.  The left had its flirtation with violence in the sixties, and it lead to actual killing in Madison, Wisconsin–an accidental death that brought many on the left to pull back from the edge.  Today, the right side of the political spectrum is awash with fantasies of violence–look at the web sites–and political candidates have been running ads that glamorize bearing arms and even insurrection, while right wing celebrities have been warning of government takeovers, vilifying their political opponents as traitors, and generally selling visions of an Armageddon where all personal accountability can be thrown away while defending the righteous cause.

One reason such extremism can persist is that much of the time it seems harmless.  Human beings are not slaves to political rhetoric, and society is much too complex for any one message to directly cause much of anything.  In fact, ordinary people can hold crazy beliefs because they don’t really have to live them: Don’t believe in evolution?  Fine, as long as you still see your doctor and take your medicine.  Think that Obama is plotting to place America under Sharia law?  Fine, as long as you still stop at red lights.  Get a kick out of Sarah’s map?  No problem, as long as you don’t go around killing people.

But, of course, not everyone is wired the same way.  Even so, in a different political climate Jared Loughner might have simply killed himself–a terrible thing, but not an assault on all of us.  Indeed, I can’t help but think that in a society with a better health care system he might have gotten the help he needed before more deadly alternatives became possible.  He is but the symptom, however, and his mental illness is not the malady that most needs to be treated.  No one but Jared Loughner pulled the trigger, but his paranoia and rage will have been stoked by those who have demonized American government and endangered public officials with cheap rhetorical ploys that carry insinuations of violence.

Let me close by suggesting that the cross hairs in Sarah’s map might not be the only problem.  The map itself, like the political rhetoric it was channeling, absolutely depends on maintaining a certain sense of ideological abstraction.  Politics is to have only one face–that of the charismatic leader–while everything else has to be seen in terms of stock ideas (“big government”), broad generalizations (“the liberal media”), mythical places (“the real America”), ritual symbols (the Constitution), and messianic outcomes.  That kind of thinking turns everything into simple formulas–which invite simple solutions.  It also is profoundly anti-democratic, in this sense: democratic politics is supposed to be about ordinary people governing themselves, which they can do by recognizing each other as individuals, treating one another with the respect due to political equals, paying attention to each others’ actual experiences, acknowledging the value of compromise, and working together for a more perfect (though still fallible) union.

Those were the ideals that animated Gabrielle Giffords.  And that is why, if we are to appreciate the true violence in what has happened, we need to see not a map, but her picture.

The photograph is from Reuters.  The map that was at Sarah Palin’s web site has been removed; on Palin’s response to the tragedy, you might read Tina Dupuy.  If you want to sign a MoveOn.org petition against overt and implied appeals to violence, click here.

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