The Rape Tunnel: Art Too Far?

Art world controversy alert here.  A few weeks ago, the magazine Artlurker published an interview with artist Richard Whitehurst, who was supposedly working on a piece called The Rape Tunnel.  It was to be a plywood tunnel that constricted as it ran on, forcing anyone in the tunnel into a crawling position.  At the end of the tunnel, there would have been a room where Whitehurst would try “to the best of [his] ability” to rape anyone exiting.

There were questions, there was furor.  Is it rape, if you willingly enter what is quite plainly labeled “The Rape Tunnel”?  What if the police come and make it a Right To Remain Silent Tunnel?  What happens if like five linebackers enter the tunnel one after the other?  IS IT ART?  Only a very special episode of Law and Order: SVU can say for sure, but Whitehurst claimed that The Rape Tunnel was the only way to go after his Punch-You-in-the-Face Tunnel saw such stunning (get it?) success.  However…  

It was all a lark!  Artlurker issued a statement:

By publishing The Rape Tunnel our intention was to spark conversation on the state of art for a few hours with coverage of an entirely fake art project…

We cannot say what the intentions of the author were, but ours were simple: to generate conversation on the state of contemporary art based on the fact that an event like this is not so unrealistic today.

That may sound absurd, but it’s not: look to the Oklahoma Gun Incident or Chris Burden’s infamous Shoot. Artists are way crazy.  Anyway, here’s perhaps the best-crafted part of the fake interview:

It was called THE PUNCH-YOU-IN-THE-FACE TUNNEL. It was the same set-up as THE RAPE TUNNEL except at the end of the tunnel I’d punch the subject in the face instead of raping him or her. The impetus was completely reactionary to the current state of art, and motivated by pure frustration.

As it turns out, I ended up breaking the nose of the third person to crawl through the tunnel, an aspiring model. She went to the hospital and eventually sued me. Her modeling career was put on hold. The civil case was long and drawn out and the matter still hasn’t been resolved. To this day she still has unpaid medical bills. The point of this long aside is that all this took place two years ago, and I’m still having an impact on this young lady’s life, something not many other artists could claim about their work.

Rape seemed like the next logical step.

Had this been real, though, the artist is really the one in the most compromised position.  When you debut something as easily reviled as this, people are going to approach it hostilely, thinking of how best to destroy it.  What happens when someone brings a gun into the Rape Tunnel, or an AIDS patient crawls through?  The actuality of such an installation ever existing, while not absurd, is very unlikely because few people ever die for their art.  The art impulse, if there is such a thing, seems to lose out to the not-dying impulse (definitely such a thing), no matter how extreme the artist.  Plenty of artists kill themselves, but who has done it for purely “artistic” reasons?  Likewise, plenty of artists endanger themselves, but who has so aggressively provoked others into harming him?  (“Shoot” was essentially an injury controlled by Burden.)  All that, plus museums tend to frown on art that rapes or kills artists and museumgoers.  Huge liability.

The only arguable counterexample I’ve been able to think of in the death-as-art realm (outside mythology) is the suicide of a Swedish black metal singer who called himself “Dead” and was known to starve himself to the point of injury and wear shirts advertising his own funeral.  GG Allin also promised to kill himself onstage, but heroin got him first.

Via Kottke.