Limes with Orange

I'm about to post about something I can barely bring myself to think about, but I believe it needs to be discussed. There's this "artist" that was brought to my attention through Facebook. I had so hoped would turn out to be another Facebook hoax, but I have yet to be able to debunk it:

In 2007, Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, a so called artist, took an abandoned dog from the streets, tied him to a very short rope to a wall in an art gallery, and left a kettle of food on the other side of the room, beyond his reach, and left him there to slowly die of hunger and thirst.

The gallery exhibition was real. That much I have been able to confirm. The details vary widely from site to site. Some claim that the dog was only tied up for the three hours a day and that it escaped back to the streets after a few days. Others claim even worse details than those stated in the Facebook group. One blog claims to have a statement from the artist:

The purpose of the work was not to cause any type of infliction on the poor, innocent creature, but rather to illustrate a point. In my home city of San Jose, Costa Rica, tens of thousands of stray dogs starve and die of illness each year in the streets and no one pays them a second thought.

Now, if you publicly display one of these starving creatures, such as the case with Nativity, it creates a backlash that brings out a big of hypocrisy in all of us. Nativity was a very sick creature and would have died in the streets anyway.

Is that actually the artist's statement? I don't know. Is there more to the statement that describes that actual exhibit? I don't know. Some bloggers have read the article in the Guardian and been placated. I, personally, would feel better about that stance if there were more legitimate news stories to back it up. Other bloggers say that PETA is already aware of it, but I find no mention of it on their blog. Snopes, the site that I usually look to for debunking, has the status of this rumour as Undetermined. So I really don't know what to believe.

Now I don't usually post about something when I don't have all the facts but this is just so disturbing and, unfortunately, too easy to believe. So assuming this to be true, here's my rant…

If the "artist" REALLY cared about the plight of these dogs there is no way on this earth that he would have killed one so slowly and so cruelly. What could he have done if his intention was REALLY altruistic? Let's see… record the dogs on the street with video, film or photographs, pretend to be the dog yourself in the gallery, hire an actor to be the dog, use paint, sculpture or cuts of meat from a butcher to create a symbolic dog, combine any or all of the above with other images or installations to allow the viewer to make connections that weren't apparent before. By God man, there are infinite humane ways to shed light on this issue. If this "artist" was REALLY trying to do as he claims, he was--in the words of Joan of Arcadia--suffering from a failure of imagination. So what kind of "artist" does that make him? A fraud and a hack. And what kind of a person does that make him? Well, let's just say that I believe this man deserves to experience everything that he forced that dog to experience. Everything.

And if it turns out that the Guardian article is true and the dog was actually fed during the run of the exhibit? Well (a) if you look at pictures of the dog (I couldn't stand to post them here, but just Google and you'll see), that dog should have been at the vet's not on display at a gallery and (b) it still ain't art. Art requires imagination. And for my comments about the imagination of this "artist", see above rant.

Labels: animals, art and photography, rant