Back in November in a café in Berkeley a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle caught my eye: “‘Art and China’ at SFMOMA: defanged, but icky still.” “Well, they haven’t fired Mr. Magoo yet,” I thought, referring to the newspaper’s art critic Charles Desmarais. I knew the show to be the last of the three installments of the Guggenheim’s show Art and China: Theater of the World. Immediately prior to its initial opening in New York City, a controversy erupted about the show’s inclusion of three works that on the face of it constitutively involved animal abuse, and in its iteration their the works were altered so that there would be no exhibition of animals being abused. Video screens simply noted the titles and artists of two of the works, and the central work, Huang Yong Ping’s ‘Theater of the World’, a wooden and fenestrated polygon that was to have been initially stocked with insects, lizards, toads, and snakes, was shown empty. My understanding that the works were shown as initially intended in its next installment at Bilbao in Spain, but that in San Francisco the works would be shown as they had been in New York City. A number of short pieces had been published on the issues raised (my brief reflections are here: https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2014/08/25/animal-abuses-in-art-by-john-rapko/), but, to my knowledge, nothing since an initial flurry. Has anything been learned?
Certainly not by Desmarais, who characteristically does not address any substantive issues. Insofar as anything has suffered on account of the art, it is only the poor Guggenheim itself: “After enduring protest marches and untold emails, phone calls and letters, as well as an online petition that eventually garnered more than 800,000 signatures, the Guggenheim decided not to show the work [sic; link to a New York Times article deleted] in its original form. SFMOMA has chosen to follow suit.” One senses that the exhibition in San Francisco offers nothing by way of clarifying the issues around the questions of whether the controversial works are indeed instances of animal abuse, and, if so, whether that rightly disqualifies them from being shown; and the local art critic of record can’t be bothered to discuss the issues. Another review, this one from the Bay Area’s most consistently perceptive art critic Mark Van Proyen in the on-line journal Squarecylinder, supports this suspicion: “Clearly, the animal abuse controversy that overwhelmed the initial reception of Art and China: Theater of the World now lies in a moot state of “deactivation,” and I for one am glad for it. The three offending works that initially prompted activist consternation when the exhibition opened at the Guggenheim late last year are still represented in the current, slightly smaller incarnation of the show that is now snugly ensconced in the seventh floor gallery at SFMOMA, but they are inert relics of their prior incarnations, no longer featuring signs of distressed living creatures “performing” as components of works of art. In other words, they have been officially neutralized, as has the controversy between proponents of artistic freedom and defenders of the humane treatment of non-human sentient creatures.” Van Proyen goes on to analyze the show under the interpretive frame that there is an air of sadomasochism about much of the art, but the alleged abuse of animals in some of the works is not further discussed.
One would think that at least the curators would have addressed the issues—But no. In the sole instance I have been able to find where the curators have been directly questioned on the topic, they have quite explicitly refused to respond. This occurred in a podcast from October 12, 2017 (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-guggenheim-curators-controversy-surrounding-new from 21:15 to 22:59). Alexandra Munroe and Philip Tinari, two of the three curators, were asked about the allegations of animal cruelty:
Isaac Kaplan: “We’ve spoken a lot about the context of the works, and I think you’ve both done a good job of kind of situating them within the show and within the history of China. But there’s obviously the phrase that has come to define this whole debate, and which you haven’t really mentioned, and that’s ‘animal cruelty’. And I’m wondering, and I mean I just want to put it to both of you, how you think about that subject, that allegation in relationship to the works that you put on view, because, you know, it would be remiss if we didn’t directly address what I think is the animating kind of cry of those who find the work objectionable.
Alexandra Munroe: “I’m not going to comment on that . . .though, though I will say one thing: Ah um, we fully respect obviously because we, um, listened to the petition and we took action because of the petition, and the violence and the threats that were elicited by that petition. The Guggenheim is absolutely committed, and we’re already in discussion with our museum colleagues across the city and beyond, and we’re in discussion with the National Center Against Censorship, and we’re in discussion with PEN America, to use this opportunity for a very needed debate. And we are looking forward to weeks and months and possibly years of internal discussion, as well as public programming, to address the very issues that we’re raising today and that you’re wishing to raise.”
So, when directly asked to comment on whether the controversial works involve ‘animal cruelty’, Tinari is silent and Munroe refuses to comment, and then immediately shifts to the question of censorship. Her statement that there would be public programming addressing the issue of animal cruelty is, as far as I can tell, false; in San Francisco there has been no public event other than an initial presentation of the exhibition by Munroe and Tinari. In the podcast Munroe repeatedly makes the point that the Guggenheim’s responses to the petition and changes to the exhibition were done in consultation with and the approval of the artists. What then do the artists say? The exhibition in San Francisco contains an addition to the piece Theater of the World in the form of writing in English and Chinese by Huang on an air-sickness bag. Huang asks: “It is said that more than 700,000 people are opposed to this work that involves living animals; but how many of those people have really looked at and understood this work?” He goes on to suggest that the work is “a “miniature landscape” of a civilized nation, in contrast to natural savagery, as described by Hobbes.” And then he notes that Spinoza (according to Gilles Deleuze) enjoyed staging fights between spiders. One is seemingly urged to think that because a 17th-century lens grinder enjoyed setting spiders upon each other, the spectacle of a mixture of insects and snakes and reptiles should be currently unproblematic.
I have little more to say on the issues after three dispiriting trips to the exhibition. Huang does raise a challenge: How can one think that one is ‘opposed’ to an artwork that one has not seen? He surely insinuates that one could only legitimately oppose a work that one has seen, considered, and come to understand. Huang’s question calls to mind a topic in the philosophy of art, the so-called ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, which has been the topic of a dozen or two prominently published papers in the past quarter of a century. The philosopher Kendall Walton has argued that ‘the’ puzzle is really four puzzles, one of which is perhaps relevant to the question of animal abuse in art. What Walton calls ‘the aesthetic puzzle’ is this: “If a work of art is objectionable on moral grounds, does this diminish or destroy its aesthetic value?” (Walton in Marvelous Images (2008), p. 48). This question suggests one way, though only one way, of making the exhibition’s issue more precise, in something like the following ways: (a) Is any use of animals in artworks morally objectionable? Are some uses morally objectionable? Are all uses objectionable? (b) If a use is morally objectionable, does that thereby ‘diminish or destroy’ its aesthetic value? (c) However one answers (b), if a work of art is morally objectionable, is there thereby a prima facie reason for ‘censoring’ a work? And ‘censoring’ in what contexts? (d) If a work is morally objectionable, but should nonetheless not be thereby subject to censorship, but also if its aesthetic value is thereby diminished or destroyed, is there then reason for it not to be shown?—Perhaps if these questions were asked explicitly for each of the three controversial works, we might have a more reasoned and nuanced public understanding of such dicta as ‘Free Expression for Artists!’ or ‘Animal Abuse is not art!’
My own view is that only the pieces by Huang should not be shown, precisely because their very exhibition in the manner originally intended constitutively involves the abuse of animals.
If nothing else, seeing the works in person has motivated me to make my own art. Inspired by a series of works of Ai Weiwei, I have photographed a kind of gestural response to the pieces that constitutively involve animal abuse:
