The reaction to the Cowen portraits is even more revealing than the pictures themselves, writes FIONA MCCANN
ART, according to the Encarta Essential English Dictionary, is "the creation of beautiful or thought-provoking things".
While the portraits of the Taoiseach that created such a furore this week may not necessarily fall into this category, they generatedplenty of debate on blogs, in newspapers, on the airwaves and at water coolers across the country.
They also spawned t-shirts (since withdrawn from sale for “infringing the personal rights” of the Taoiseach) and a postcard campaign of naked drawings of Brian Cowen currently being collected for exhibition by a Limerick-based blogger.
As the debate rages over possible offences caused, rules broken, taste, decency, and the artistic merit of the original works, satire has been cited as both motivation and defence.
Some critics of the Conor Casby paintings have argued that the images are lacking in any specific political punch, and that the lack of humour undercuts any purported satirical purpose. However cartoonist and blogger Allan Cavanagh disagrees.
“They’re not very sophisticated images, but they do represent someone’s disgust at not necessarily Brian Cowen, but Brian Cowen as a figurehead of the Government,” he says. “And the thing about satire is, it’s not supposed to be funny. Ultimately, it’s a catharsis . . . Satire is necessary for the mental health of a society.”
Satire has a long and celebrated history as a means of expressing political dissent, but the paintings, and their positioning, also owe a debt to the kind of anti-art theories expounded by the Dadaists just after the first World War, which went on to influence Situationist International in the 1950s and 1960s, and Viennese Actionism, a forerunner of performance art.
Art and activism are clearly not new bedfellows, though their connection has only given rise to the portmanteau “artivism” in recent years.
Will St Leger, a self-described artivist, has himself been known to combine the two, even at the expense of a sitting taoiseach. Just under a year ago, he placed bundles of fake banknotes stamped with Bertie Ahern’s image in the basket of Dublin’s Molly Malone statue during the Mahon tribunal hearings. Definitely political, but is this art?
“For me it has always been about motivating people,” says St Leger. “I’ve never been interested in creating pretty pictures. It’s been about making art that changes the person’s perspectives.”
As St Leger points out, art intervention – where an artist interacts with a pre-existing artwork or art space – is nothing new. Acclaimed British graffiti artist Banksy has placed his own work, unauthorised, in art galleries in London and New York, as well as hanging a fake prehistoric rock depicting a caveman with a shopping trolley on the walls of the British Museum.
He has gone so far as to paint his politics directly on to what some would call a political subject itself, employing the West Bank wall as a giant canvas to focus debate on its existence.
Call it art intervention, art terrorism, guerrilla art or law breaking, the point is that the works are more than the created art object alone, as Cavanagh explains.
“There’s also an element of performance and installation to it,” he says of the insertion of the Cowen portraits into two of Ireland’s most respected art galleries. “The action of installing is an important part of the work, and it does work on a satirical level when you include it. It has gone into what some might consider a staid institution and mixed the whole thing up.”
Subverting perceived notions of art is one thing, but is this necessarily the motivation behind painting a portrait of the Taoiseach on the toilet? “I think even coming up with a definitive notion of the point of these actions is a part of that discussion and will never be resolved,” says Cavanagh. “The way this took off was never envisaged by the artist originally . . . [But] it has stimulated very healthy debate at a time when a lot of people were feeling that their voices weren’t being heard.”
Since an apology was issued by RTÉ for its report on the incident, Cavanagh is one of many artists who have responded by creating their own Cowen caricatures. His own portrait, which first appeared on the blog culch.ie, briefly appeared on T-shirts under the caption “Censor This!” before their German manufacturers declined to print them.
“I did a fully nude [portrait] as opposed to the ones that Conor [Casby] did that were discreet enough to cut him at the waist, and I did it in protest at the RTÉ apology and the Government press office strong-arming that apology from them,” he says.
“Art doesn’t have to be subversive at all, but it is a tool that can be used when there are powers that are trying to suppress that art,” he explains. “This story . . . has gone global, and that’s the power of the visual.”
St Leger boils it down to a simple question of representation. “It’s taking somebody who we see in one light and presenting them in another light,” he says. “In some ways I’m glad this has happened, and I take my hat off to Conor [Casby] because he has proved something: that art has still the power to be a political tool.”
As artists, artivists, Photoshoppers and hordes of creative bloggers galvanise in reaction to the handling of Casby’s case, the question of whether art can – or even should – be political has, at least as Cavanagh sees it, been answered. “If the very least thing that art does is stimulate debate and discussion, then it’s doing a very necessary job.”
Playing at the gallery: activism or satire?
1914:A militant suffragette called Mary Richardson used a famous painting by Diego Velázquez,
The Rokeby Venus, to make her own political statement, slashing the canvas with a meat cleaver, explaining it as a protest against the English government for arresting fellow suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst.
1996: A 22-year-old "multimedia" artist called Jubal Brown vomited on
Composition in Red, White and Blueby Piet Mondrian at New York's Museum of Modern Art. He claimed it was an artistic statement about "oppressively trite and painfully banal" art, and revealed that he had also vomited on a work by Raoul Dufy at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
2003:Jake and Dinos Chapman, known as the Chapman Brothers, caused a storm of controversy when they added cartoon faces to a a series of etchings by Goya which they had purchased. They called the series Insult to Injury.
2005:A fake prehistoric rock adorned with the image of a caveman with a shopping trolley hung on the walls of the British Museum for two days. A sign explained the cave art depicted "early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds" and added it was by Banksymus Maximus, aka Bristol-born artivist Banksy.
2006/2007:In what some saw as the ultimate art intervention on interventionist art, a number of works of street art in New York were "splashed" with blobs of paint. The perpetrator became known as
The Splasher, his/her identity remaining a mystery, though a group of individuals claimed to be behind the work, producing a manifesto that condemned the commercialisation of art.