“Is it a hoax?” Why is it that some variation of this anxious
question accompanies so much of our experience of contemporary
art? Why is it, to speak bluntly, that so much of what we are
called upon to admire as art has the smirking, rebarbative
quality of a bad joke?

These are not, alas, new questions. They are an integral part of
cultural life in the aftermath of the avant-garde. From one point
of view, such questions are a sign of decadence, for they
underscore the extent to which we have lost our bearings in the
cultural landscape. How odd, after all, that we must frequently
ask ourselves: Is it art? Is it a hoax? Is it both art and a
hoax?

From another point of view, however, the prevalence of such
confusion is a sign of health, for it suggests that we are still
alive to essential distinctions between art and non-art. In this
sense, the nagging questions that insinuate themselves into much
of our experience of contemporary art are signs of vitality:
they speak of an immune system robust enough to recognize and
challenge nonsense. At a moment when the violation of the
boundary between art and life figures so prominently in the
practice of art, any hesitation, any qualm, any pause or
rejoinder provides a welcome opportunity for reappraisal. As
long as one can meet absurdity with the tonic skepticism of
disbelief—“Is this some sort of hoax?”—all is not lost.

It was with such modified consolation that we greeted the December
5 headline from Reuters: “Suicide Mistaken for Art Performance.”
So much for violating the boundary between art and life, we
thought: someone has gone further and decided to violate the
boundary between art and death.

Well, not exactly. As the wire story explained, visitors to an
“off-beat Berlin arts center”—it would be a German
establishment—mistook a dead woman on the ground for a
performance art act. It transpired that a twenty-four-year-old
woman who had discussed suicide on videotape with a group of
artists at the gallery decided to underscore her words with
action: she returned later that day and leapt from a window to
her death.

The ultimate transgressive gesture? Or a horrible, pathetic waste
of human life? The grotesque side of this episode cannot efface
its farcical aspects. Nor can its farcical elements redeem
the obscene fact that a suicide might be mistaken for an instance
of “performance art.” In one sense, of course, the issue is old
hat, a relic of Dada, Surrealism, and the counterculture of
the Sixties and Seventies. Think of Chris Burden, who, in 1974, had
himself nailed to a Volkswagen. Think of the many contemporary
“body artists” whose performances consist of ritual
scarification, body piercing, and mutilation. Remember Ron
Athey? Back in 1994, this poor fellow made headlines with an act
at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. As the Minneapolis-St.
Paul Star Tribune reported at the time, an HIV-positive man
“sliced an abstract design into the flesh of another man, mopped
up his blood with towels and sent them winging above the audience
on revolving clotheslines.” How’s that for a cutting-edge
performance?

A line can be drawn from Duchamp and Dali through figures like
Chris Burden and Ron Athey to news stories reminding us that
we’ve come to a pass where suicide might be mistaken for a work
of art. It was about a year ago that we ran an essay reporting on
this headline from the BBC: “Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation.”
Under that promising rubric was the delicious story of the enterprising
janitor at a London gallery who had
“cleared away an installation by
artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel
Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and
overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm
Gallery.”
Stout work! We are in general adamantly opposed to the
practice of cloning, but we might be willing to make an exception
in the case of Mr. Asare. A few hundred critics of his
thoroughness could help prevent headlines like “Suicide Mistaken
for Art Performance” from occurring with such dismaying frequency.