LEE Seungho

What is allowed, and what is not?

I met Teemu Mäki at Design Factory in September 2009 while he was running a seminar on the topic “What are we allowed to do in the name of art and why?”. As also a part of his doctoral dissertation, the subject strives to discuss on the function of art, the reason being they need to be analyzed in societies where art and artists are supported by the tax payers one way or the other.

He categorized the function of art into some eight categories, one of those I now remember is escapism: such as block-buster movies that offer distraction and relief from unpleasant realities or engaging in fantasy. Art can also help us be more empathic to others by emotionally training us with stories of others or of fiction. The most interesting of the few he argued to me was to ask (good and/or right) questions.

‘Person in a ditch measuring 300 x 500 x 300 cm’, Image courtesy: www.santiago-sierra.com

Mäki presented us a piece of Santiago Sierra in which Sierra put a homeless person in a ditch between Kiasma contemporary art museum and the Finnish parliament. A homeless person was to stay for two weeks, for four hours a day, being paid 50 Finnish marks, some € 4 per hour. We were asked to discuss in groups and present what kind of questions the artist wanted ask.

While we were discussing in our group, I have learned from a teammate that he is the killing-cat-artist, who videotaped himself killing a cat and then masturbating on the dead animal, and he is not the only one who killed an animal in the name of art. There was even a Costa Rican artist who captured and then exhibited an underfed street dog for a gallery project, in which the dog was chained to the wall until its death of starvation in captivity. During the Q & A session, I asked Mäki about his project: how he felt killing the cat, and whether he had any legal issues. If I don’t remember wrong, he said ‘I did not like the feeling, but I thought it was right to do it.’, and that he was convicted of breaking the law and fined the Euro-equivalent of roughly few hundred for failing to kill the cat professionally meaning in certain seconds.

I thought both works certainly asked difficult questions: why Sierra chose to dig a ditch between the art museum and parliament not elsewhere, why he chose to put the homeless person in it not others; why would a homeless person volunteer to sit in the deep ditch being exposed to the visitors; why the homeless person has become homeless; why we were sitting there listening to Mäki about these stuff; why we are conducting further studies in masters level; why we are angry to Mäki for killing a cat; why it is okay to kill a cat or any animal if one does it professionally; why he chose to kill a ‘cat’, not a dog; why we are not angry to ourselves eating beef, and pork, which cause someone else kill millions of cows and pigs everyday; why we deliberately call beef beef not cow-meat, and named pork pork not pig-meat; why we are more angry to those artists than to people who abandon animals; whether cows and pigs are lesser animals than cats.

These questions are coming back to me every once in a while urging me to think what I am allowed to do and what is not as a person and a designer, which is all but painful, however obviously so worth thinking about. I am deeply grateful to Mäki, and the organizer of the seminar. If you’re too shocked or are not with me, here’s a well written post about Mäki, his work, and the likes, before you make comments on a poor post as mine.