I just finished watching Bravo’s new reality show, Work of Art, in which contestants were asked to create something shocking. Frankly, I had trouble getting past this week’s mentor, shock artist Andres Serrano, whose touted works in (for example) his own excrement made me gag.
That (well) aside, I, who cannot draw a believable orange or copy something as simple as a pop can, wondered what I would do were I asked to create a work of shocking art.
Sex is easy and overdone, as is sexuality, and suicide and homelessness seem no longer shocking to anyone. War and accidents are numbingly pervasive, and disease is analyzed by and known to all. Religion is over-rated and cliched, and understood as such, and movies have taken the hysteria out of set-backs and (even dire) misfortune.
The one lingering thought I had was this, exemplified below in someone else’s hand:
Saudi Arabia shares some of the social plagues that affect other developing countries, in this case, child-trafficking. Particularly in the Hijaz area, which encompasses Jeddah, Mecca, and Medinah, African gangs bring in small children, mutilate them, and set them on the streets begging. This article in Asharq Alawsat notes that even given this atrocious mistreatment, the children see it as a way to live a life better in some regards than that which they left. http://xrdarabia.org/?s=amputate
The first time I heard of such atrocities was from a woman who had recently returned from Egypt where, she claimed, limbless children gathered in crippling numbers, holding out cans and begging for money. As she spoke I pictured little shadowed frames standing like microscopic insects in front of monolithic pyramids, Coca Cola signs dotting the tawny-coloured sweep of sand that stretched endlessly behind them.
I am not an artist, or at least not the kind that can depict the delineated, visual sorts of searing images so easily rendered by others. Well…I ought not to so quickly say “easily rendered” because nothing on tonight’s show shocked me much in any way (which takes me to the digression of Tennessee Williams, who said something to the effect that he knew his life was over when it had lost its ability to shock him).
But I can imagine that, were I artistic in these ways, I would render an oil painting large and vividly imbued with images of tiny helpless children, alone and half-standing, their only hope of survival resting on what my mother use to call the kindness of strangers, their phantom pain a priceless reminder of life’s sullied, sorry ironies. I look quickly away from their dark eyes and thinning unwashed hair, silently marvelling at the awkward clumps of bony overgrowth accumulating at the site of amputation.
I think now of my granddaughter, caught the other day in a moment of three-year-old brattiness, batting her long lashes at me with surprising contempt and telling me at the end of another long exhalation, “No thank you, grammie. I don’t want you to read to me.” I see her shining there in her princess dress, her hair pulled back in butterfly barrettes, her feet sturdy and bare, her toenails painted a delicate shade of pink.
Such a world of contradictions we live in. Such a shocking world, in fact. Artists who cannot create. Writers who cannot express themselves. Children who must lop off limbs in order to survive. Princesses who do not understand, or even know, that halfway around the world one-legged, one-armed toddlers are begging for a meal.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 303–312
