PAGAN FIRE - ART

Perhaps you've seen it in the news or maybe you read it in one of those offensively coarse emails. The images of this piece of news include a gallery of art and man's best friend (a dog, in case there were doubts) tied to the corner of the gallery. Presumably a signboard titled the work as “You are what you read” and contained the iron-fisted instruction of not feeding or loosen the dog. The purpose of this living sculpture was that the dog died of hunger, something that happened a day after.

It seriously concerns me that Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, a Costa Rican artist has decided to exhibit a dying dog as an artistic piece. It seems to me morally reprehensible, cruel and beyond words, stupid.

But it is art.

The complaints that I have heard of friends, acquaintances and other people is that this fucking idiot is an “artist”, like that, with quotation marks, when in truth the guy is an artist, indeed. Guillermo Habacuc Vargas is so much an artist as Dante, Picasso and Scorsese, only that whe's an artist with bad taste, perhaps not very brilliant and without the great talent of those I mentioned.

The characteristics that make of someone an artist or of something a work of art could fill and have filled volumes. And those volumes I have not read, so I cannot speak much about it, but something I know: Art is not a clean and sacred refuge which only pretty and good people can enter. Art is also that ugly corner where all the things produced by the human animal have a place. And when I say everything I mean everything.

I am in favor those who want t prevent this artist from killing more animals, but this grudgingly. My more sincere question is: if they were so against the cruel installation of Habacuc why the hell didn't the persons at the gallery loosen the dog and took him home?

Without a doubt it is easier to sign an online request than going to the streets to take care of stray dogs or to adopt a puppy from one of the various municipal concentration camps of our cities.

But let's go back to art: If you want something to be art, it is art, that is the unique aesthetic imperative of our times. We can blame the Avant Garde or post-structuralism, but that's what it is. If I start pissing the sidewalks in Downtown Hermosillo and call that performance, that's art.

I don't defend Habacuc nor his act of artistic impetus devoid of compassion. I defend the artists who want that a booger stuck in a canvas is considered art, because it really is art. This absolute freedom in the realm of the artistic can give us (and it has given us) works of immense intensity and beauty (or deep, terrible, sublimes ugliness). Let me give y'all some examples horrid art that the world can be thankful for. The hypersensitivity of this Sunday supplement prevents my text from being accompanied with images, so come with me in a trip throug imagination and Internet searches.

The photographic piece “The Kiss” by Gringo Joel-Peter Witkin consists of the two cut heads of two senior citizens captured in a deep kiss. The two heads, apparently those of two aged twin brothers, were collected by the artist in a morgue only to be immortalized in a sensual geriatrical kiss.


“Piss Christ” by Andrés Serrano is a sample of object-art in which we see Christian crucifix (modeled in the fat of the artist) floating in a vatful of urine, also of the artist. We must remember that on the cover of Metallica's album Load we see nothing less and nothing more than Andres Serrano's love juice.


And lastly, with the disadvantages of censorship, we see "Red Butt", by Jeff Koons, part of his controversial series "Made in Heaven", which is practically a pornographic photo session. Jeff Koons passed the images through a delicate process of silkscreen printing, which turns the resulting images into a product that no longer is pornographic, but art identical to porn. In a web search without restrictions you will be able to find the delicious original.


What turns these works into art is their undeniable references to the fantasies and fears in all of us. If these works did not have a relation with our thoughts or feelings they would not have any impact. Imagine that I make a sculpture from a piñata in which Jesus Christ fights a piñata crocodile to the death. Haven't we all dreamt of a muscular and manly Christ fighting an enormous reptile? Is it only me?

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