This Embrace leaves me cold
FEELINGS of philistine inadequacy wash over me every time I drive past the giant steel effigy to lung cancer standing sentinel over Munro Martin Parklands.
Is it just me? Does this sculpture seem a terrible blight on the horizon because I am too artistically dull-witted to appreciate its inherent beauty? Should I give up now and start wearing a dribble bib?
Similar emotions must have rattled through the reptilian putty at our Cairns Regional Councillors’ brain stems when tasked with choosing whether this graven figure of a barramundi dissection experiment warranted funding.
I can picture them now, straddled around a boardroom table with the scaled-down model of a diseased prawn at the centre, secretly thinking "this looks a bit rough" while nodding with faux appreciation through allknowing squints.
“Spectacular,” they would have agreed as the itch of creative inferiority crept up their necks.
“So we all concur. This thing looks very spiff indeed.”
The statue and its companion piece at James Cook University received $165,000 funding and are presumably there to stay.
I get that art is subjective and is not always supposed to look nice.
In 2010, my brother and I met Spanish political artist Santiago Sierra as he was being kicked out of a pub in Brisbane’s West End for smoking indoors.
He was in Australia for a weeklong exhibition at GOMA, and had no idea what he had done wrong.
Dishevelled, unshaven and sporting a faded cap, he was stunned when we explained Queensland’s laws, and angrily trundled off with us to continue getting on the slops at a friend’s house. Sierra explained that he had to spend time out of his home country because he was an anarchist who despised the concept of royalty and had turned down the Prince of Asturias Award for that year – basically the highest honour in the Spanish art world.
Prince Felipe, now the King of Spain, presided over the awards ceremony, and to tell him to bugger off was a tremendous slap in the face.
Fearing repercussions, Sierra needed to wait for things to cool off in his home country.
Mind you, at this stage we still thought he was a friendly but halfmad drunk with tall tales and a ripper Spanish accent.
It wasn’t until the next day that we googled his name, saw his photo and realised, yep, this itinerant looking bloke was the real deal. Then we looked at his art. In one of his most famous works, Sierra paid the price of a heroin fix to female junkies he found on the street to sit shirtless, facing a wall, while he tattooed a single black line across their backs.
He once rigged up pipes from a car exhaust into a disused synagogue in Germany and let the gasmask-wearing public enter the building.
Authorities ultimately shut it down for trivialising the Holocaust, despite a statement from the artist saying he aimed to fight a growing sense of complacency about Nazi death camps.
Once he sprayed the backs of 10 hired Iraqi immigrants with quicksetting polyurethane foam, told them to step out just before it set and titled the remaining freestanding sculptures Almost.
He even held an exhibition consisting of 21 monolithic slabs of human excrement collected in New Delhi and Jaipur.
You and I may not get it, but all of this is art by one of the most respected – and, admittedly, reviled – artists in the world.
But just because Santiago Sierra makes political statements by creating walls of human dung does not, in my view, mean ratepayers’ money should have been spent on something that looks like a rotten banana.
Or does it? Maybe it is just me. Perhaps I am just too obtuse to understand modern art, and the towering carbuncle outside Munro Martin Park is doing exactly what was intended – creating discussion and eliciting emotion.
I just don’t much like it.