28 Apr Terrorism as Performance Art
On Wednesday the city of London faced one of the most bizarre terrorist threats in its history: terrorist nail bombs as works of art. As reported here, a 36-year-old woman thought it would be an act of artistic expression to distribute various parcels throughout the city that had the look and feel of a terrorist package, such as the one pictured at right. Scotland Yard described the woman’s actions as “reckless, selfish, and stupid” and are demanding that she be jailed as a public nuisance.
The artist described herself as a “performance artist.” What exactly is that? Here is one definition: “Performance has been a way of appealing directly to a large public, as well as shocking audiences into reassessing their own notions of art and its relation to culture. Conversely, public interest in the medium … stems from an apparent desire of that public to gain access to the art world, to be a spectator of its ritual and its distinct community, and to be surprised by the unexpected, always unorthodox presentations that the artists devise.” But perhaps this definition by a self-described performance artist fits even better: “I liken what I do sometimes to a life game, as an adventure in absurdity, an adult fairytale in which I engage people emotionally and intellectually. The audience gets involved and has to decide for itself what’s going on and what’s to be learned from the experience.”
I guess we learned from this woman’s performance art that some artists are reckless, selfish, and stupid.
Indeed, Roger. While I’ve always fancied myself as rather firmly ensconsed on the Left, politically speaking, it’s rather easy to become conservative and Confucian when it comes to nonsense like this. So as to sublimate any anger arising as a result of such recklessness, selfishness, and stupidity, and by way of both an antidote and tonic, I turned to the late Iris Murdoch this morning: Her discussions of Plato and Freud on art in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) is not to be missed. As she notes, apart from his genuflection toward art in general, and with good reason, ‘Freud finds…many damaging things to say about art. His thesis, variously expressed, is that art is the fantasy life of the artist stimulating the fantasy life of the client, with the factitious “work of art” lying “overlooked” between them as a sort of disguised bribe. Art is a magic which excites the magical propensities of those who enjoy it: a case of what Freud called in Totem and Taboo “the omnipotence of thought,” an illusion characteristic of all neurotics. (We may all be supposed to be partly neurotic, or neurotic sometimes.) As he explains elsewhere…we would normally be repelled… Read more »
There’s another, closer precedent in the US – Michael Hernandez de Luna’s *Anthrax Stamp* stunt in 2001. Here’s an interesting article that refers to the incident, and how it fits (or doesn’t) in the law, basic civic morals and free speech.
For the charge which the original post said the artist would now face (creating a public nuisance), see the recent decision of the House of Lords in R v. Rimmington.
The definition would appear to run something like this: a public nuisance is any act or omission causing an injury or damage affecting materially the reasonable comfort and convenience of life of a class of Her Majesty’s subjects, where the perpetrator knew or ought to have known (in the sense that the means of knowledge were available to him or her), that such consequences would occur.
Rimmington would seem to establish, with some relevance to this particular case, that the injurious consequences must have been foreseeable.
The hope expressed by Scotland Yard does not appear to be unreasonable, to say the least.
But there may well be more specialised statutory charges, which their Lordships’ House held would have precedence over a charge of creating a public nuisance.
Ironically, Burden recently resigned his teaching post over an incident in which a student faked suicide as a work of performance art.