Poem for Venice, by Steven Shearer, on the facade of the Canada Pavilion at the 2011 Venice BiennaleShearer, an amiable man in his early forties, has made a habit of messing with convention. His work is peopled by working-class men, hippie haired like him, who appear in rough collages, or in punch-drunk paintings that vibrate with the colours of Edvard Munch. Shearer is a sculptor, a painter, a text artist, a collagist, and any other artistic type that enables him to capture his theme: a cultural underclass. It would be easy to look at the guitars and shirtless, drunken teens and assume his work is about death metal, a violent sub-genre of metal music with a decidedly nasty reputation, but his focus is actually on the fans, not the music itself. He has a deep and affecting sympathy for those frustrated souls. One of his best collages shows row on row of tool sheds, the modest containers in which boys with guitars who will never be stars play out their enormous dreams.
He has written more than a hundred poems inspired by death metal’s scatological, obscene, and violent lyrics. For the Biennale, he rendered the aforementioned Poem for Venice 9.2 metres high. The letters, cut from man-made Corian stone, are forty centimetres tall and form six-metre lines of text. The resulting epic mural, a black and white page magnified to the size of a three-storey building, makes a confrontational and weighty riposte to any lingering notions of Canada as a please-and-thank-you country. The huge poem serves as a false front on the exterior of our squat octagonal pavilion, an unfriendly giant that rubs elbows with the fascist architecture of the German pavilion on one side, and the colonial-style British pavilion on the other.
When I visited him at his Vancouver studio before the Biennale launched, I asked Shearer, who is disarming and gentle in person, whether he thought his work would offend. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I think of it as more an affirmation, you know? The text is egalitarian, in that it condemns everyone.” Still, there are those, beyond the permissive Biennale set, who won’t be subdued by the knowledge that the piece’s offence is universal. I refer to the “Is it art?” crowd. And their opinion counts.
Under Stephen Harper’s government, funding for the arts has been massively curtailed. The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has ceased to fund the Canadian pavilion in Venice. Sixty percent of this year’s $1.2-million budget has been covered by the private sector, along with the BC Arts Council; another 20 percent comes from merchandise sales; while the remainder was provided by the Canada Council for the Arts. Justifying “offensive art” to various funders, then, is as important as it is difficult. Reid Shier, the director of Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery and one of the adjudicators who selected Shearer, feels that mounting Poem for Venice was “quite brave.”
As for my own abused sensibilities, I came to realize that there was nothing in Shearer’s text that explicitly offended me. We get signals from words like “fucked,” “erection,” and “vomit,” but no race, no creed, no religion is attacked. Actual death metal music is not so ambiguous. The lyrics often glorify violence, denigrate religion, and degrade women. Its cousin, black metal, which Shearer also draws from, is populated by bands that have been linked to murders and church burnings. What interests the artist, though, is the medium more than the message; he subverts the genre by denuding it of its content and offering pure style instead. You see the effect in all his text pieces. When he showed some of his poems, rendered in charcoal lettering on rag paper, at the Power Plant gallery in Toronto in 2007, they displayed a spree of undirected, almost comical lust and rage, with phrases like “suck my unholy vomit,” “infernal discharge,” and “ablaze in viral flames.”
I presented the text of his latest work to several artists and received, to a person, the same response: everyone felt others would be offended by it, even while insisting that they themselves were not. Despite the nervous air surrounding Shearer’s work, it points out that some of us have lost the knack for taking umbrage.
Perhaps the best-known contemporary attempt at profanity in art is the 1987 photograph Piss Christ, which depicts a plastic figurine of Jesus on the Cross submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine. Andres Serrano’s work inspired red-faced condemnation from the political and religious establishments. United States senator Jesse Helms used it as a moral bludgeon in his crusade against the National Endowment for the Arts. “[Serrano] is not an artist,” Helms said. “He is a jerk.” That Helms insisted one person couldn’t be both tells us something about how many artists he had actually met.
Twenty years later in New York, Cosimo Cavallaro created a life-sized nude sculpture of Jesus, cast in ninety kilograms of dark chocolate. What I love about My Sweet Lord isn’t the work itself, but the global and inflamed reaction it inspired. Catholic groups effected the cancellation of its original display at Manhattan’s Lab Gallery; and Cavallaro, who received death threats, reputedly snuck the piece around town in a refrigerated truck. Could he have asked for any better publicity? The work had succeeded before anyone even saw it.
It’s easy for an atheist like me to enjoy work that “goes there” when “there” is the place I hang my hat. A real challenge presented itself with Guillermo Vargas’s infamous 2007 show Exposición No. 1. Vargas paid two Nicaraguan children to catch a street dog for him, then tied the animal to a gallery wall and let it starve to death, or so said the countless bloggers who erupted in protest (the gallery owner insists the dog escaped after one day of imprisonment, and indeed the work may have been an elaborate hoax). More than 1.5 million people—the vast majority of whom never saw the piece—signed an online petition to condemn Vargas’s work. His career was made.
