The Wykehamist Kenneth Clark
Helena & El Pescador l’ art pour l’ art? or maybe not...
Many congratulations to Imogen Millar for winning the Kenneth Clark prize. With her permission, we’ ve included her speech below for your reading. The standard overall was very high – well done to Rupert Balmain( K, 2020-), Dominik Clarke( H, 2020-), Felix Edmonson( Coll:, 2020-), Vincent Gueguen( H, 2020-), Imogen Millar( F, 2023-), and Edward Thomson( Coll:, 2020) who all made it to the final.
An artist, a vet, and a blender manufacturer testify in court about the deaths of two goldfish. The artist in question, Marco Evaristti, arranged ten blenders, each containing a goldfish, at the Trapholt museum in Denmark. Each blender had a yellow button. When pressed, it would blend the goldfish swimming inside. There was nothing indicating to the viewer that the button should be pressed – only an intense anxiety filling the room. After an hour, someone cracked. Two fish were liquidised. Immediate outrage ensued. Animal rights groups were up in arms. The police stormed the Trapholt museum and demanded the blenders be unplugged. The gallery director, Peter Meyers, refused, stating that it would be a breach of artistic freedom.“ It’ s a question of principle,” he told the court,“ an artist has the right to create works which defy our concept of what is right and what is wrong.” This is Helena & El Pescador.
Helena may seem shocking, but using animals as art materials is far from new. Cavemen used the blood and fat of hunted animals to bind the pigments of their painting. Medieval painters would burnish gold leaf with the tooth of a dog or a wolf. Cennini promotes the use of“ the teeth of dogs, lions, wolves, cats, leopards, and of all clean fleshfeeding animals” for this purpose in‘ The Book of Art’. Insects, like this cochineal bug, have been used to make vibrant reds. From the hogs-hair brushes and quills to the egg tempera being applied, animal materials have permeated the history of art. Evaristti inverts this legacy with a live animal instead, whose mortality creates the tension of the artwork. Three years after Helena, the question of using animals in art emerged again as the
Guggenheim planned to stage Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other- an installation by Sun Yuan and Pen Yu. Two American Pitt Bull Terriers run on non-motorised treadmills facing each other, exhausting themselves in the process. Despite these dogs being well cared for, the Guggenheim received significant backlash. When faced with repeated threats of violence, they dropped the installation from exhibition, weakly stating“ freedom of expression has always been and will remain a paramount value of the Guggenheim.”
But what place does“ freedom of expression” have when your art materials are a goldfish or a dog? What happens when“ artistic rights” meet“ animal rights”? What happens when one individual’ s liberty is at the expense of another’ s?
Evaristti took the rounded walls of the clear goldfish bowl, a symbol of childlike innocence and captivity and exchanged them for the blender, specifically, the Moulinex Optiblend 2000. A dormant device that, unlike the bowl, is suffused with jeopardy, efficiency and above all, the possibility for transformation – of the art materials and the viewer. This doesn’ t look like what we would call a work of art. In fact, 72 % of people on a CNN poll said that it was not one. Evaristti did not hand sculpt the Moulinex Optiblend 2000, nor meticulously construct the goldfish. So, why could Helena be called a work of art? To answer that question, we have to go back to 1917 when Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal- what he described as a‘ readymade’
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