It is important as this engages people in topics. We need both the pleasant and the disturbing and the inability to draw a definite border between can be employed in making people notice things in order to ask themselves "what am I looking at?" I have been drawn to the idea of using the disturbing as pointing to more universal political environmental economical or ethical topics. And yet, some artists tend to embrace the scandalous just for the sake of it. Wafaa Bilal addressed that in his speech, the use of the unsettling for a specific agenda versus the unsettling for just gaining audience.
Artists won't make a mistake (at least in drawing attention) if they evoke the very universal fears of: mortality, pain, loss, the unknown and rejection form society.
And yet how effective is having disturbing and engaging imagery about a greater political topic? Will it change anything? Can it be something more than imagery?
Quotes
1) "My very first project was a documentary of street people in Berkeley – Dorothea Lange or Bruce Davidson type documentary – when I was 22 years old. That’s when I first realized there was a major discrepancy between my good intentions and how the images actually functioned in the world. I had a coffee table book (Telegraph 3 am) of poor people on the street, with a show at ICP. I was very young and it raised all those problems... But does it really change the world? What really is the out come of all that?" Richard Misrach
http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/misrach.php
2) "Richard Misrach I take a lot of political license and I’ve been criticized roundly for that. And that’s fine. But the point is that without it then it becomes something else, it becomes a study of just the beauty of death and there’s a certain amount of that there but I definitely want to put my spin on it. People will come to it and take from it what they want. but I definitely had an agenda when I did it and I hold onto the agenda as much as I can.
John Paul Caponigro And the agenda was what?
Richard Misrach To politicize it. To basically put it into a political context as opposed to putting dead carcasses in peoples faces for fun."
http://www.johnpaulcaponigro.com/lib/artists/misrach.php
Interview of Richard Misrach by John Paul Caponigro
Works
Richard Misrach, the Pit (1988)
Patricia Piccinini
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