Dog lovers beg for cruel artist to be banned (Starved a stray dog to death in the name of "art")!

I heard that he actually removed the dogs legs with a hacksaw and glued them back on in the wrong order

I think the title is the most telling bit "You are what you read".... Go and take another look at this with your sensible hats on - not your psudo-save the sea monkeys hat.

Originally posted by Koka

Mine neither, but it's clear the whole story is not being depicted and still isn't.

As with just about everything in this sensationalist world, nothing ever is as it seems. With this I agree.

We are a cruel self-centred race, something the artist was, I believe, trying to convey.

A good friend and fellow artist once put some dead fish on sand inside of an enclosed glass case like a fish tank and removed the air to create a vacuum. The exhibit was to enlighten viewers about the contamination of the worlds fresh water.

The show was not well received by the public during a time in which they were fully aware of the situation in the Great Lakes of North America.

The reason it flopped was because people were disgusted by the scene.

My explanation is that it would be far better to have shown live rainbow trout in all their beauty, but somehow stating the potential threat of fresh water contamination. The public would have marvelled at the colours of the fish, it's sleek form and graceful movements.

The exhibit would have garnered a much more positive response.

Not that I need to see people viewing a starving dog as an art exhibit to know or understand as much.

Nor I.

Some people need to be shocked to react, but most don't even bother to react.

Truly... and the proof of that would be the coverage of the horrors commited during the Viet Nam war. The images of film and photographs which came into living rooms and magazines did much to bring awareness to the public.

However, do we need to chain a freshly wounded soldier to a wall (just out of reach of a morphine dose to bring the public to awareness or is it enough to just see the images? Obviously, today news crews are not even allowed to freely distribute such material and the public has gone to sleeep as a result. The 'Highway of Death' was the last really graphic film I can remember.

I don't believe people just 'don't bother' to react, though. I'm sure instinct and the sense of morality can never be fully deadened o the point where everyone is sociopathic.

On the exhibit in this case, the message is lost in the revulsion it brings out. No-one cares about the message, good normal people will only care about the dog and its obvious distress.

Originally posted by masqua
On the exhibit in this case, the message is lost in the revulsion it brings out.

Agreed

No-one cares about the message, good normal people will only care about the dog and its obvious distress.

Then good normal people need to open there minds to the greater ills that exist around them.

What do you see as good and normal?

Normal to me translates to acceptance and conformity.

Good is subjective.

The point of the exhibition was to demonstrate the in-action of those who viewed the dog as "art", the viewers were as much the art as the starving dog.

Had he starved himself, no, I don't believe that would have invoked the same reaction, maybe if he had gone on to allow himself to die it may have had a greater impact.

Maybe if this guy, Gregor Schneider, gets to do his exhibition we may view this exhibition differently.

[edit on 25-4-2008 by Koka]

Originally posted by Koka

What do you see as good and normal?

Normal to me translates to acceptance and conformity.

Normal to me is not always acceptance and conformity, it is also rejection. I've already pointed that out in the reaction to the images which came out of the Viet Nam war.

You seem to have this notion that all good people are sheep. Not so.

Good is subjective.

Wrong. Good is innate morality. We all have it in spades.

The point of the exhibition was to demonstrate the in-action of those who viewed the dog as "art", the viewers were as much the art as the starving dog.

The point, supposedly, was to showcase a society which ignored the misery of feral dogs living in the area. If this is the case, then why not organize a program to do something about it? Why make an exhibit to rub the puiblic's nose in it?

There are feral cats all over... is there anything to be done about creatures which, though wild, forage in dumps and the less prosperous areas of cities? No. So why exhibit the situation? The only recourse is to round the animals up and put them into shelters.

Had he starved himself, no, I don't believe that would have invoked the same reaction, maybe if he had gone on to allow himself to die it may have had a greater impact.

The first diversion from the topic at hand

Maybe if this guy, Gregor Schneider, gets to do his exhibition we may view this exhibition differently.

The second

Now, on to critical acclaim by googling.

We see how he is changing his statement, depending on how the public reactions are - first statement was "the dog would have died anyway" - second statement was "I cannot say if the dog died or not" - third statement was "I wanted to do it to remember Mr.Natividad Canda" [the burglar killed by guard dogs] - fourth statement was "I did the exhibition to show the terrible situation of street dogs".... etc...

guillermohabacucvargas.blogspot.com...

While I do not believe in censorship, I do believe that a line must be drawn when it involves taking an unwilling model and using them against their wishes. Maybe it is not very humane of me, but I strongly believe that people who use and abuse animals, or people for that matter, for any reason, deserve to have the same thing happen to them. It may be an old cliché that many artists suffer in various ways for their work, but causing another being to suffer is another story.

pluginamp.com...

The prestigious Central American Biennial exhibition incomprehensibly decided to consider this barbarous act as art, and Habacuc has been invited to repeat his cruel action at the Biennial of 2008 in Honduras.

In his defence, the artist has claimed that what he was attempting to prove was that those who saw the suffering of the dog just walked on by and that if it had been left on the street to die, no-one would have even known of its existence.

It has also been reported that the dog did not die but escaped, and that it had been fed by Vargas and was only tied up during the gallery opening times. It has not been possible to confirm this.

The Managua exhibition attracted worldwide attention and many people believe it to have been an act of cruelty rather than art. A petition has been started in an attempt to prevent Habacuc’s involvement in the 2008 Biennial and from repeating the spectacle.

news.deviantart.com...

As you can see, the reaction is less than positive, just like my friend with the dead fish in the vacuum tank. I did not cherry pick as using the artists name will verify. There are lots of other sites which were in a foreign language which I did not attemt to translate.

Extolling the benefit of dogs to humanity while actively attempting to do something about their sad feral state rummaging in garbage dumps, etc., would be much more effective than this repulsive show.

reply to post by moxer


I see a dogs life as having the same value as that of a human. I know others won't agree. There was a time I would have not said this, but I've matured in that regard.

If he were to tie up a starving human from a impoverished nation as an art exhibit would your opinion be the same? It would be the same, would it not? If not, how is it different?

I think the real answer is this is not art. I highly doubt this person cares about dogs in the least. Have you read his ever-changing answers? You made a case for him he can't even seem to make for himself.

I've been an artist all my life. Won a full scholarship in fact. I have for years considered these things artists jokes by people who have no talent. I watched a city once spend $80,000 on some discarded granite block ends, joined together with metal pegs in no particular form. They oooohed and awwwwed as I chuckled quietly to myself. I knew full well this major artist, who I will not name here, missed a deadline on a pre-paid piece and stuck these chunks together and got away with it. This happens every day and good little art groupies fall for it.

Originally posted by masqua
You seem to have this notion that all good people are sheep.

Not so.

Wrong. Good is innate morality. We all have it in spades.

Yet so many of us seem to ignore it.

I'm not going to go deeper into what is subjective versus your innate morality statement, both exist.

The point, supposedly, was to showcase a society which ignored the misery of feral dogs living in the area. If this is the case, then why not organize a program to do something about it?......

Because he is an artist and this is his chosen form of expression and maybe believed this would have a greater impact, maybe he wanted to invoke reaction and threads to discuss the moral decay of society.

The first diversion from the topic at hand.......
........The second

Me thinks you are being a touch disrespectful toward me.

I don't think this thread is restricted solely to this exhibition, do you not feel the work of Gregor Scheinder bares any kind of relevance to what is being discussed here?

[edit on 25-4-2008 by Koka]

Originally posted by Koka
Because he is an artist and this is his chosen form of expression and maybe believed this would have a greater impact, maybe he wanted to invoke reaction and threads to discuss the moral decay of society.

I am also an artist and I reject this representation as art. I also (previously in this thread) backed that up with the statement that it would never fly in my circle of artistic friends. Not only that, but I provided some negative reaction from the artistic community. I could not find any which reacted positively.

Me thinks you are being a touch disrespectful toward me.

If you feel this way, it is regrettable. I only pointed out that you were diverging from the topic. I can't help how you react to that information. It is, however, my opinion that it was off topic.

I don't think this thread is restricted solely to this exhibition, do you not feel the work of Gregor Scheinder bares any kind of relevance to what is being discussed here?

I don't think it does. Unless the external examples provide a direct connection, like my friend with the dead fish in the vacuum tank or the image of a wounded soldier chained to a wall just out of reach of a vial of morphine to ease his suffering, I think it is wrong to go too far afield with exhibits of dying men.

I do think there are some vague similarities, but don't forget that Schneider asked for a volunteer while the dog itself was 'captured'.

Bottom line is that I basically just do not appreciate such exhibitions as doing anything positive. One may as well hang cattle entrails all over a gallery to bring public attention to the horrors of slaughterhouses, slosh buckets of animal eyeballs over tiled floors to focus on blindness or scatter teeth collected from dentists to make us aware of the dangers of too much sugar.

It's not art... it's just gross sensationalism.

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[edit on 25-4-2008 by GAOTU789]

Originally posted by LockwithnoKey
WTF!!!

This person deserves death! This is not art, this is torture pure and simple.
I want to know where this SOB lives so i can go visit myself...

Surely you do not hold the life of a dog in higher regard than a persons. The punishment should fit the crime. Jailtime will do. We humans do much worse things to each other and most of the time it doesent even get jailtime. What happened to the animal was cruel but the artist has already won by getting so much attention from the enraged public.

Children in Africa are starving to death lets start a petition for that. I love animals, especially dogs. I found a stray on the street and took him in until he died of old age. I'm not trying to be insencitive.

[edit on 4/25/2008 by 3vilscript]

Hasnt this been proven wrong? Didnt he say he faked the death of a dog to see how people would react over 1 dog dieing while 1000s of other humans/animals die every day unoticed?

EXHIBITION IS TAKING PLACE AT:

Gallery Website

Email Address:
[email protected]

Location:
Centro Nacional de la Cultura
Antigua Fábrica Nacional de Licores.
Avenida 3, calle 15/17. San José, Costa Rica.
Teléfono: (506) 257 7202 / 257 9370
Fax: (506) 257 8702

Sample Letter to Send the Gallery
I am writing regarding the horrifying actions of Guillermo Habacuc Vargas,who paid local children to catch a dog on the street and then confined,starved and publicly displayed the dog as an “art” exhibit until the innocent animal died of starvation.

I along with many people world wide am outraged t hat Guillermo habacuc Vargas has been selected to represent Costa Rica in “Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008″,This man is by no definition of the word an artist he is a criminally insane sadist and enjoys inflicting prolonged suffering upon his innocent victims.he is a danger to all of society as it is well documented that those with the capacity to intentionally cause harm to an animal have the same capacity to harm humans.

To state that this animal would have died eventually of natural causes is unjustifiable and beyond logical,rational thinking.



ANOTHER GALLERY SHOWING HIS WORK
This is the email addy to a gallery which currently holds some of vargas’ work for display and for sale if anyone would like to ask the gallery to drop him from their list of artists their email address is below.
EMail: [email protected]

INFORMATION ABOUT EXHIBIT
What he says on his blog (translated) Located HereAccording to I knew the dog died on the following day by lack of food. During the inauguration I knew that the dog was persecuted in the evening between the houses of aluminum and cardboard of a dis trict of Managua with santo name who Habacuc that could not need at the moment. 5 children of whom they helped in the capture received 10 bonds of córdobas by their collaboration. During the exhibition some people requested the freedom of the small dog, to which he artist rehuso. The name of the dog was (it was) Natividad, and I let myself to him die of at sight hunger of all, as if the death of a poor dog was a shameless mediatic show in which nobody does nothing else that to applaud or to watch disturbed. Definitively we are what leimos: pure croquetas. In the place that the dog was exposed single it has left a metal cable and a cord. The dog was extremely ill, renqueaba and it did not want to eat anyway, so in natural surroundings it had died anyway; but thus they are all the poor dogs: sooner or later they die or they die them.

"Each and every person who knew of and witnessed the suffering of this innocent dog is equally as guilty of causing it’s uncalled [for]death."

www.care2.com...


[edit on 26-4-2008 by Master_Wii]

There are many things which are to be considered art that are usually not. The making of incense is an art, sex is an art...but starving a dog is not.

Suffering is not an art, it is a horrendous tragedy. This artist calling this 'art' is no different than the divorced man killing his ex-wife's new husband 'for her own good'

Maybe I'm just not sophisticated enough to see the "art" value in this exhibit.
I'll admit that.

But in this case I would like to see this person's next project to be titled
"Starving artist", I would like it to be a self portrait. And I would be willing to chip-in to commission the piece.

I'll even buy the rope.

OMG I read this in the news the other day and didn't want to think about it.

This is just so cruel. I love my animals. I don't have a dog anymore but I could not embrace the mentality of this artist.

Poor dog. Heartbreaking. It is just barbaric... and the artist is sick and twisted imo, has deep psycho issues. Studies show serial killers 'practice' on animals.

This isn't art, this is a crime.

EDIT: This is someone who found a vulnerable soul and abused it. My Daughter found a starved kitten (hours from death) and we saved it and found it a good home.

What this so called artist has done is just appalling!

[edit on 26-4-2008 by Thurisaz]