Gregor Schneider – Fartist
This Gregor Schneider ‘piece’ is the first post in a new category about Fartists – Feeble artists (a complement to our FEBL media category).
Here is how it is described in copycat white-wall gallery speak:
“Gregor Schneider’s art expresses the concerns and anxieties of today’s world. Bondi Beach, his latest work, brings into question the values that we associate with the sun, surf and sand image of the Australian beach and asks us to consider the fundamental openness of Australian society and the freedoms and liberties we enjoy as citizens.”
What this means is that he has taken the idea that Australian’s are prisoners of the fashion of sun bathing – and built a sunbathing prison. A brazenly literal interpretation of an already waning fashion, a cliched metaphor so hilariously unimaginative that it makes pretty good satire – except its serious.
Schneider’s latest planned piece is to recruit a dying person and have him or her die in an art gallery. The idea is, of course, couched in dignified reverence, but it sells itself all the more on its potential shock value.
If you are going to do something this dramatic there should be depth and subtlety, something that this lacks – on the scale of a wet curry fart in an elevator. When Duchamp put a piss pot in a gallery, I am sure he though he had closed the door on this, instead it has only encouraged people like Schneider – who are ultimately so old-fashioned and Bourgeois, that they still miss the point after nearly a century.
Schneider does Duchamp in the way that Musak do Beethoven. Trying to be a rebel without breaking free of the traditions and places where people buy and sell paintings isn’t being much of a rebel – the artist equivalent of being into Death Metal in an Ohio suburb. Talented creative people these days work elsewhere and the traditional gallery no longer remains supreme rather like the most prestigious art form of ancient Greece – Lyre playing.
Who plays the Lyre these days?