Clik here to view.
Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle reviews my latest exhibition, Torture, posing some interesting questions. I have received a lot of praise and a lot of criticism related to this show, but art critic Kenneth Baker frames the debate amazingly well, and asks some critical questions.
"Encountering them in an art gallery provokes tangled responses: outrage that someone would advance his own ambitions through the degradations the Abu Ghraib photos record; perverse temptation by the opportunity to study the mise-en-scene of the original pictures, safe in the knowledge of seeing simulations; despair that history has again diverted the resources of art away from pleasure and contemplation to bleak and urgent critical functions; and, finally, the recognition that, after all the barriers between art and life come down, nothing insulates our enjoyment of the arts against toxic pollution from our knowledge of real events.
How far should simulation in art go? Will we next have to ponder a re-enactment of, say, Saddam Hussein's execution, or even Daniel Pearl's, merely because these images can be found on the Internet, and because they symbolize the degeneration of American foreign policy?"
Clik here to view.
