When visiting my friend Jason in Portland recently, he informed me about Snopes, which seemed quite interesting. Admittedly, I've never seen the show Mythbusters, but it sounds like something that would interest me immensely.
I get a group invitation on Facebook, a chain email from a concerned friend, or at least hear about some grave cause day-to-day. Being an overly concerned citizen, one with direct ties to, say, Human Rights Watch, Save Darfur, and even groups like the ACLU and Planned Parenthood, with much smaller, more ephemeral, and partisan goals, I start to wonder at which point I should consider sleep, after a full day of rocking chair-internet-hucksterism and American-intention-divorced-from-action-but-
fulfilled-through-donation/charity activism...
Today, I awoke, unable to sleep, and logged into facebook, only to find a petition to sign about Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, an artist who supposedly chained a starving dog to a tether, and starved it to death in the name of art. I'm all for avant-garde art, as long as it makes entrenched Republicans and other idiots uneasy, don't get me wrong, but I'm also a vegetarian, and despite being so mainly for social reasons (horrible US slaughterhouses, their shitty correlate laws -how grossly meat is subsidized in the US, how eat too much meat is linked to health problems, and how taxpayers are ultimately being fucked for it - and the gross amount we, as Americans, eat), I would like to consider myself a fairly aware citizen. I think fur is disgusting, and I frown upon undue pain, from prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, down to assisted suicide and medical marijuana.
So, who is Habacuc, what's the deal, and does this petition really mean anything? Let's start here. Undetermined, says Snopes. Nobody seems to know if the dog really died, it is undetermined whether it was mistreated while it was an exhibit, and esssentially, the facts seem blurred on both sides.
Truthorfiction.com has this to say:
"There is also no dispute that the reports about the exhibition have sparked international outrage. Websites, blogs, and petitions were devoted to protesting the exhibit and calling for the artist to be uninvited from the Central American Biennial event in 2008.
There is not agreement, however, about whether the dog was mistreated and died as a result of Vargas exhibit."
The argument doesn't seem over. Did the dog actually die of starvation? Did it escape after a day and its three hours of being tethered to the exhibit, and find a similar or even worse fate in the streets of Nicaragua? Was it fed well while being used by the artist as an example of the horrible conditions of stray dogs?
I'm a little confused, because the artist also exhibited a sign above the dog, saying "Eres lo que lees": You are what you read, while also burning 175 crack rocks in a nearby censer. Were they all part of the same artistic installment? What is the combined aesthetic here? Does it make sense, and is it even the artist's job to make sense?
This blog is setup to monitor the artist, and continue circulating a sort of e-novena with the purpose of remembering Natividad, the dog that the artist used for his exhibit. Here is a tacky youtube video, replete with terribly sentimental (read: pointlessly emotional) music, which doesn't get any closer to the issue at hand.
This blog says x and y about this artist, yet doesn't provide great sources. It states that his myspace has him admitting he killed the dog, but doesn't provide a link to his myspace. So where is the proof? It says that its sole purpose is to act against further disinformation, but at what point does it become anything other than that simply because it won't credit its source.
Leave it to deviantart to provide some interesting thought on the matter.
My thoughts on the matter are as follows. Aesthetically, artists should be free to do whatever they want, just like other humans, as long as they aren't harming someone. I guess I call this the John Stuart Mill aesthetic, getting the idea directly from his "On Liberty," my personally favorite work on political philosophy. In this case, how do you define that? Say the dog was fed well, or escaped, and the artist didn't kill it. It's still.. retarded. Do you really need to show the dog starving below a sign saying, "you are what you read"? You are what you read? Hmm. You're also what you exhibit, which in this case is effete schlock which isn't really going to change anybody's callous heart anytime soon. Can people change, sure, but should something innocent suffer, even for three hours, to affect that change? No. It's just dumb and brutal, and essentially shows that the artist is no better than the dregs of society that he's supposed to be changing. It's sophomoric, aesthetically displeasing, and vacuous. Again, I'm about as liberal as they come. I don't care if people piss or shit on religious icons, let alone use manure to show how fertile the blessed virgin is. At the end of the day, whether through religion or science, we're all related. An icon is just an icon, but flesh and blood are flesh and blood. Shock my senses, break up my mouldered and staid worldview, but don't hurt something to make me more sensitive; it's pointless.
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