Our friend in the forest, Charlotte Aberg from Sweden sent us this message today...
In the 2007, the 'artist' Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, took a dog from the street, he tied him to a rope in an art gallery, starving him to death.
For several days, the 'artist' and the visitors of the exhibition watched emotionless the 'masterpiece' , conceptually based upon based on the dog's agony, until eventually he died from starvation and dehydration.
But this is not all... The prestigious Visual Arts Biennial of the Central American decided that the 'installation' was actually art, so that Guillermo Vargas Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel action for the biennial of 2008. Let's STOP HIM!!!!!
Click on the following link http://www.petitiononline.com/ea6gk/petition.html or just copy it in your browser to sign a petion to stop him to do it again.
Please Please do it. It's free of charge and it will only take 1 minute to save the life of an innocent creature. Please also send this e-mail to as many contact as you can... Let's stop him!!!
Unfortunately this is all true…Try 'googling' the name of the artist if you want to be sure….Charlotte
I just saw that, it's extremely shocking!!! So I tried to look for explanations and to understand:
ReplyDeleteIn a way, the message and the metaphor are very strong and clear, but we can and have to say we don't want that to happen.
Did Guillermo Vargas Habacuc killed the dog or did the people let him die?
Did the dog really died? Did the museum let this animal suffer. Are we sure of it?
Because, it's not the same story according to everybody. The gallerist said the animal was fed and didn't die. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Guillermo_Vargas). So I don't know about that, but our reaction has to be the same, anyway.
I'm not defending this action at all if the animal really died, I am thinking "why"and also we've got too few informations about this exhibition.
Also the artist wrote this with dogfood in the same room as the dog (just above): "Eres lo que lees"="you are what you read".
So, I think the artist himself expect visitors to have a reaction.
Why no visitor gave him some of the food just above?
Why nobody just cut the leash and let him escape?
Why everybody was just standing there, doing nothing? Watching...
What were they afraid of? It wasn't a lion or a dangerous beast. Were they afraid to be kicked out of the museum? Waaooow...Scary!
I don't know if this action was an hoax just to get people talk about it or not. But the question I'm asking myself is who is obviously crazy and criminal? The visitors, right?
What the artist (who is also a terrorist) probably wants to yell at us is we are Watchers!
Are we not watching life and all what is happening, like we are watching TV? And are we thinking then? Are we doing something to change that?
Here is what is shocking me, now...
So maybe we could suggest to this guy to tie up Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (Nestlé's boss), instead of a dog in his next exhibition.
Have a look to a part of the documentary "We feed the World", if you want to understand a bit more:
http://www.dailymotion.com/
relevance/search/feed%2Bthe%2Bworld
/video/x4yb97_documentaire-we-feed
-the-world-le-m_news
So there is a lot to think about, I guess, and that is not only about a dog.
Well...That's a pretty long and unexpected comment, I suppose. I don't want to offend or make anyone angry. I thought that'd be interesting to develop this other point of view. I love animals too, and I don't want the dog to die, of course. Nobody wants.
I hope some readers will understand what I tried to explain.
Some more info from Snopes:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/vargas.asp
This is just a typical case of an artist manipulating people's emotions and actions in order to make a point. I'll bet the artist is going to make a statement soon saying that the "actual" artwork wasn't the dog (which did not actually starve), but the amount of people who signed that petition which you linked to.
ReplyDeleteEstablishment artists today are just practical jokers, the main difference being that they take themselves more seriously and use fancy words.
Yes, this seems quite absurd. The whole point of art is that you convey your opinions or feelings in a way that doesn't directly hurt anything; through painting or film or music or whatever. This seems needlessly cruel.
ReplyDeleteHiya, I signed the petition, and scanned a bit the internet afterwords. I found a site saying that this second exhibition is a hoax...
ReplyDeleteLuckely.
http://thepetextraordinarium.blogspot.com/2008/03/starving-dog-exhibit-reported-as-hoax.html
They say the first exhib was a stunt and the dog did not die. But is still seems very wrong to me.
Joke (Belgian Brendan-crew)