Don't Kill Me, I'm With Stupid

”The pathological and cyclical nature of violent behaviour”.  Little one-eyed bunnies with kalishnikovs and other weapons of group destruction attempting to liquidate each other, vigilante style. Unhinged citizens, mad as hell and taking it out on each other,a gang that couldn’t shoot straight. ”The 21 st Century Bunny Series” uses rabbits as a symbol of hunter and prey,  violence spilling into a cauldron of anxiety and fear. The individual’s comportment increasingly mediated by state security apparatus,  the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, Homeland Security, and other compelling Orwellian doublespeak; antiseptic, computer generated catch phrases, about orange alerts on  a chromatic color wheel of anxiety. A form of operant conditioning conceived to validate the feeling of horrible.

Novak, Competition

”21st Century Bunny” seems to capture the paranoid spirit of our times. He is an archetype of fear .The extended ears and the peripheral vision of rabbits reflect a permanent state of alertness. “21c Bunny” is so terrified of being preyed upon that he has armed himself and turned himself into a predator. In this sense, his story is a perfect allegory for America, post-9/11. But it’s also, more broadly, a cautionary tale about the endlessly destructive cycle of violence. “Bunny” is born as a fluffy warm-blooded innocent that means no harm to anyone, it’s only the state of fear that causes his destructive behavior. The character’s aesthetic sensibilities are entirely influenced by vinyl toy collectibles, and I’ve intentionally imbued the narrative with the simplicity of a children’s fable.” ( Justin Novak )

Maurizio Cattelan, 2004

A jarring and bleak vision of violent ridden future. Ceramic sculptures acting as ambassadors for the aesthetic of violence. Like Anthony Burgess’s ”A Clockwork Orange”, where a murderous, Beethoven-loving teen-age gang leader operates in a complacent and conformist society. Roving bands of delinquents fight, steal and rape to assert their freedom against the conformity of a clockwork society.

The experimentation of style, form and language used by Burgess is reflected in the narrative artifices and uninhibited structural tinkering of Justin Novak and others such as Maurizio Cattelan, in their visual art, resulting in their particular brand of inventive social satire and the practice of subtle forms of artistic terrorism. These representations are humorous, yet pervasively disturbing, and as subtext, arouse fears of being robbed or denied of choice, perhaps a precursor to an even greater evil.

It is an aestheticization of violence. Artistic depictions of murder and death as ultimate aesthetic expressions of the sublime. ”…if murder can be experienced aesthetically, the murderer can in turn be regarded as a kind of artist — a performance artist or anti-artist whose specialty is not creation but destruction.” Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange and the general oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino represent a coalescence between art and violence where moral outrage transforms and assumes the mantle of aesthetic beauty.”… he presents violence as a form of expressive art…[in which the]…violence is so physically graceful, visually dazzling and meticulously executed that our instinctual, emotional responses undermine any rational objections we may have.( Xavier Morales )

Amercian ceramic artist Justin Novak and his ceramic ”disfigurines”  uses ceramic techniques that appropriate the gestural and lyrical conventions of classic  porcelain yet radically transform the narrative; almost a ”bait and switch” manouver from Rococo period to contemporary context in which the psychological and social impose  a thematic of fear, tenderness and vulnerability within a  a traditional, realistic medium, extending into a hyper-realistic juxtaposition between the tasteful and grotesque, and variations on the degrees of tension between seduction and repulsion, ecstasy and pain and how one cannot exist mutually exclusive to the other. It also acts as an inquiry into the nature of culturally inherited values, codes of conduct, and retrieval of personal identity.

Novak, 21 st Century Bunny Series, 2006

Traditional figurines of the 19 th century captured bucolic and idyllic moments and served as a vehicle for romantic ideals and status quo bourgeois ideology. Novak takes this historical genre and subverts its content and message while celebrating its form and stylistic vocabulary. His  series of disfigurines, “ironic anti-figurines” exceed expectations of perfection and nostalgia by replacing the smooth white glazed body of the traditional porcelain figurine, idealized and ultimately sterile, with the puckered  and weathered surface of treated, fired ceramic,where the surface is now textural, reflecting ruptures by flesh wounds and lacerations. 

”The ceramic figurine has  historically embodied a mainstream, bourgeois ideology, and for this reason, I have employed it in the presentation of an alternative vision, an ironic anti-figurine, or ‘disfigurine’. In the disfigurine series, physical wounds such as bruises and lacerations serve as metaphors for psychological harm. Whereas the figurine has historically  represented  the dominant culture’s norms and ideals, the disfigurines speak of the damage inflicted by those very same expectations” ( Justin Novak )

Justin Novak

  Novak’s pieces are ostensibly  simple forms that hold great psychological complexity. The idea of sharp instruments creating incisions in the epidermis , trespassing  the barrier between the internal language and the external perception, bridging a division between public metaphor and private anguish.Also, a comment on the thin and fragile membrane wedged between vibrant life and the muffled beat of a chronically weak pulse.Near death and other body experiences. The grotesqueness of some of the more morbid pieces can be  unsettling,yet there is offset from the contemplative, almost meditative body language of the figures. The figures nudity somehow creates a space within which the viewer and the figure exist, creating this  intimacy both distancing, yet beckoning, and highly sensory because the elements that repel are so elegant and refined.  

Maurizio Cattelan, Ohne Titel, 2007

German avant garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s statement about 911 WTC tragedy exemplifies the aesthetic of violence in its extreme form where an act of mass murder is referred to as ”art”: ”It also exemplifies the cycles of revelation, destruction, remorse and rebirth that characterize patriarchal transcendental idealism. After Stockhausen described the WTC bombing as “the greatest work of art ever” a journalist asked him if he equated art and crime. He answered:

“It is a crime because the people were not agreed. They didn’t go to the ‘concert.’ That is clear. And no one gave them notice that they might pass away [draufgehen]. What happened there spiritually, this jump out of security, out of the everyday, out of life, that happens sometimes poco a poco in art. Otherwise it is nothing.”[1]

Again we see an artist-prophet’s transcendentalist view that art must be a revelation, a process of spiritual death, remorse and rebirth, or it is valueless. It is interesting in history how often artist-prophets have confused human life itself with the material of their “creations.” I think this form of transcendental idealism that objectifies human life has played a large, but unacknowledged, role in the development of western art music.” ( William Osborne )

(From Julia Spinola,Monstrous Art ) :”Asked at a press conference on Monday for his view of the events, Stockhausen answered that the attacks were “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” According to a tape transcript from public broadcaster Norddeutscher Rundfunk, he went on: “Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for 10 years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched to the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world.” 

Asked by a journalist whether he equated art and crime, Stockhausen replied: “It’s a crime because those involved didn’t consent. They didn’t come to the ‘concert.’ That’s obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing.”