The art world is full of controversial artists, artists who create work that shocks the world. These could be, performance artists, photographers, painters, sculptors etc. Some artists have even made a living from only creating controversial works of art. In 1917 a work of art was created by Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) this consisted of a urinal laid on it’s back and presented as a work of art this was named Fountain. This work of art opened up many discussions to determine what constitutes artwork and by consequence an artist.
Producing a piece of work that immediately causes controversy is still very prominent in today’s art world with many artists still producing work that challenges a topic. This bring the idea of controversy into 2016 and questioning: Does controversial contemporary artwork become more widely known due to media responses? Now obviously due to the popularity of Facebook and Twitter a piece of artwork can end up being a trending topic or being shared hundreds of thousand times. A video I remember turning up on my news feed was a performance art piece entitled PlopEgg Painting Performance – a Birth of a Picture by artist Milo Moire, in which she created a piece of work by squeezing paint-filled eggs out of her vagina which would land and then burst onto a canvas. Much has been written about this particular piece of work with many articles in apparent disgust at the video that surfaced online. Living in the 21st century means that we are subjected to an abundance of posts on online social media meaning we are slowly becoming desensitised to shocking, graphic and sexually explicit images. Many photographers, however, produce images that are deemed controversial such as; Terry Richardson and his less than PC portraits, Larry Clark’s drug abusing images, Sally Mann and her Immediate Family project and Nobuyoshi Araki’s sexually fueled images of women.
The one photographer I am going to look at for the purpose of this post is Diane Arbus, Arbus (1923-1971) formed a strong lasting relationship with the people (freaks) she photographed. However, she often came under fire for photographing these certain individuals as people felt she was perhaps taking advantage of them. I believe Arbus felt a connection with them and was merely making a record of the people she encountered.
Personally, I feel as though there is space within the art world for these types of work, even if the artist did not intentionally mean for it to be considered this way. As somebody who actively looks at these works and similar works of art, the idea of dividing a demographic and generating a discussion, I feel only adds to the works feel and aura.
Image credit American Suburb X
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