How could she? Many of us in the U.K. recall all too well the various nailbombings over the years. And the bombings last year; some people I know lost someone in that one.
[Sarcasm alert]
You know I’ve got this really great idea for a piece of performance art: I’ll put fake bombs all over London - and labelled as such - but they’ll really be real bombs and as people are admiring them, I’ll detonate them. I’ll call it something like The Impermanence of Flesh or Ars Longa, Vita Brevis.
That would really show the Royal Academy, wouldn’t it?
I hope there’s a way they could charge her for all the security she caused to be called into action.
Isn’t this like screaming “Fire” in a crowded theater? (In the US, anyway.) And, legally, what happens here if someone does shout “fire” and the theater has to be emptied and the firemen have to clear things? Is there jail time attached? Fine?
I’m not seeing anything in the linked article that suggests the woman intended any of her installations to be mistaken for bombs. I see one picture of a sculpture consisting of a jar and some nails, and another picture of a glass-and-styrofoam assemblage decorated with little scrolls and flowers. If all the sculptures looked like little squat unlabeled nail-studded cylindrical objects, then I would suspect that mischief was intended, but so far as I can see the mistake was an entirely innocent one. My guess is that someone thought the installations looked suspiciously out-of-place, and drew the wrong conclusion. It happens.
Some years ago a pair of miniature portraits of George and Martha Washington by Gilbert Stuart mistakenly turned up in Sarasota, FL, inside an unlabeled parcel. The local HAZMAT team mistook the package for a mail bomb and destroyed it unopened. Not that I’m comparing the artist in the BBC article to Gilbert Stuart, but at least she’s in good company.
Modern art is all about challenging one’s preconceptions, and this art really does challenge one’s preconceptions about what a “total fucking moron” is, doesn’t it?
During the IRA London bombing campaign of the 1970s, my great aunt had a bag of cabbages she carelessly left lying around blown up in a controlled detonation by the bomb squad.
London has been bombed extensively over the years, often with nails. We’re used to this sort of shit. You just don’t leave stuff lying around like that. Maybe she didn’t intend them to look like bombs, but if it’s an package of any sort, or even an ice bucket with amateur bomb components obviously displayed on it, then it’s a cause for suspicion.
I personally would like to unveil my latest creation, a clever juxtaposition of the medieval and the modern, revealing the neanderthal impulse behind the membrane of the inner dialectic of the postmodern, which involves a bucket of rotten fruit, the “artist”, and some stocks.
Yummers! Coleslaw *a la * Scotland Yard! And if your great aunt’s family is anything like mine, they probably dragged out that story at every opportunity, didn’t they? “Oh heck, Auntie’s making corned beef tonight! Gerry Adams must be coming for supper!”
Well, I’m not necessarily arguing that it wasn’t a foolish or careless thing to do; only that the woman likely wasn’t being intentionally malicious, as some appear to have assumed. I don’t see any hint that she was deliberately creating “fake bombs.” I expect that the possibility that her pieces would be mistaken for such never even occurred to her; she was merely trying to gift the neighborhood with the artistic equivalent of a sack of cabbages.
Just to be clear here… by the “artist,” are you referring to the woman in the OP, or to yourself?
Yeah, that seems pretty likely to me too. Unless more info comes to light, I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume it was stupid, and not malicious.
Depending on how twitchy officialdom is, they’ll blow the whistle for pretty much anything. Back in the nineties (while the IRA were blowing shit up all the time) one of my fellow students left his satchel of books on the platform at the Barbican tube station. By the time he’d realised and headed back there (about 25 mins) they’d shut down the railway as well as the Hammersmith & City, Metropolitan and Circle tube lines, cordoned off a hundred yards or so around the station, and were waiting for EOD to show up and carry out a controlled explosion. He was Not Popular, and probably cost several thousand people an hour or more out of their day. That sort of thing would happen at least once or twice a week at the time.
Deliberately leaving anything ambiguous lying around in central London makes you A Total Fuckwit. We just don’t need that kind of crap.
At worst she was guilty of poor judgment–but then, the vanity of many so-called artists has a rather adverse effect on their judgment.
I am rather annoyed that she presumed to litter public places with such trash. Back in my younger days when I wrote reams of bad poetry, I was not so inconsiderate as to paste copies of my fourth rate verse all over the city (though I was rude enough to inflict it on friends from time to time).
