Whatever happened to the chair with a gun pointing at it?

Cafe Society
21

I mean, bungie jumping isn’t a thing that exists in nature with inherent risk (like, say, swimming). It’s a process created by people to be risky and scary. You could absolutely reduce the risk of the activity of bungie jumping: Instead of having people jump off of high places attached to big rubber bands, just take them up to the top of the high place and let them enjoy the view. Similarly, you could reduce the risk of this art exhibit by just making it a living room without a gun. I expect both activities would be about as interesting. The thing that makes both activities desirable is the risky part of it. It is inherent to the experience and was designed into it.

Agree. I merely intend to counter the claim that the waiver was obviously worthless. I’m not sure. It might have some weight.

22

thanks to everyone’s input … located a video regarding the exhibit:
“Still Live” … 1974 … Ed and Nancy Reddin Keinholtz
“Ed Kienholz’ “Still Live” Channel 4 Broadcast”

not sure if this is the 1982 spotlight referenced above or not.

23

veritably … there’s other cites … if one wishes to investigate further … i used the following filter:
https://www.google.com/search?&q=Ed+and+Nancy+Reddin+Keinholtz+created+Still+Live+(1974)

24

And if someone is killed in bungee jumping, while the waiver may let them off the hook for direct legal costs associated with that death, there will still be an investigation, and at the very very least, some mandatory recommendations to increase safety in the future.

25

Yeah, a waiver isn’t a get-out-of-liability free card. There are definitely things that you can’t waive. But a big part of liability is whether someone knowingly took a risk. A normal person would assume that sitting in an armchair in an art gallery was a safe activity, but if you have a signed legal document saying that they knew it wasn’t, well, then the legal argument has to change.

26

Even if you signed a waiver for it, I don’t think that you could have a bungee jumping company that advertises, “One out of every 100 cables is cut, just to add to the excitement!” No matter what kind of waiver they ask you to sign.

27

This is a solid point. On the other hand, the risk of the gun seems intrinsic to the nature of the art exhibit in a way that a chance of a deliberately damaged cable is not. No one would go to an art exhibit that was just an armchair.

28
29

Cute, but I don’t think it disproves my point. The exhibit in question is about the nature of risk and contemplating our own mortality. It arguably doesn’t work without the gun, even though other exhibits about armchairs might exist.

30

It doesn’t even need a gun. Just a black box that the artist says contains a gun and a timing mechanism.

31

That is an interesting argument but I don’t think I buy it.

32

Okay, so could the bungee company get away with it if the said, “One out of every 100 cables is cut, therefore, it is art!”? (Though I think that a 1% chance of failure is just a bit too high for most people to accept.)

Now, that said, it is an interesting thing to contemplate. Like I said upthread, you probably have a much higher chance of dying in a car accident on your way to or from the exhibit (wherever and whenever it may be located), than you do from the exhibit itself.

I personally consider risk in relation to car accidents deaths, as that is a risk that we as society seem to have decided to be an acceptable tradeoff for all the benefits that cars give us.

So, if you were in charge of approving this roulette chair, what odds would you find to be unacceptable? I did not see that there were any actual numbers given by the artist as to the risk, so lets put some together.

Lets say it goes off once every 10 years, and the chair is occupied 10% of the time that your gallery is open, which is 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. We now have a ~2% chance that someone is sitting in the chair when it goes off, so around a 0.2% chance that you kill someone with this art piece in any given year.

Would those be acceptable odds, were you a gallery owner, an insurance underwriter, or a legislator?

If you spend 5 minutes sitting in the chair, that gives you about a one in a million chance of being the “lucky” one. That’s far safer than being on the interstate. Would you sit in the chair? And if so, would you buy lottery tickets after?

33

But that’s what it was. All you ever saw was a gun barrel.

34

I, personally, would not put this artwork in a gallery I owned. Nor would I sit in the chair. Nor, for that matter, would I operate a bungie jumping business.

But if I were a legislator, I’m not sure what the right thing to do is. I think that plausibly the right thing to do for legislating risks is to determine what an acceptable risk of death per hour is for nonessential activities, and then make the ones that are more dangerous than that illegal. If the expected loss of life due to 10 hours of sitting in that armchair with a gun pointed at you is lower than that of bungie jumping, then we let it be.

There are art forms where we expect artists to lie to us, and those where we expect them to tell the truth. If you went to see a magician do a bullet catch, of course they shouldn’t use a real gun and bullet. The whole point of a magic show is that it’s an illusion. You expect them to lie to you. However, if you went to an art museum, it’s not acceptable for the museum to lie about who painted the pictures. It would not be acceptable, for example, for the Louvre to display a fake Mona Lisa and tell you it was real.

I think you can make a reasonable argument on either side of this particular work, but I think that most artists would feel pretty strongly that lying to their audience would cheapen or lessen their work. For all we know the actual artist in this case didn’t think the gun was important and did make an empty box. But if he put a real gun in it, that kinda points to the fact that he thought it was essential.

35

But, not knowing, would that change your experience in the chair?

36

What makes you think that isn’t exactly what it was?

As others have pointed out, the art exhibit REQUIRES the risk of death, because the whole point is that it is meant to make you reflect on your own mortality. Of course, ACTUAL risk isn’t required, just the perception of risk. By far the smarter thing to do would be to tell everybody that there’s a loaded gun on a timer, but never actually load the gun (or maybe come in secretly one night and fire the gun into the empty chair). ACTUALLY risking life is not necessary so long as the experience of legitimately feeling that you are at risk of death is preserved.

Precisely for this reason, I think a court examining the matter would have to reject any argument that the risk of death is actually necessary for artistic expression here and should therefore be protected legally; since it is possible to get the same artistic effect by fooling your audience, the risk of death is not necessary for the art and would not be protected.

But I am not a lawyer so I could be totally off on this.

37

I do think that’s exactly what it was.

38

Same question about a fake Mona Lisa?

39

or a $2,000 bottle of wine?

If you don’t know, then you don’t know. I’d get the same experience looking at a fake Mona Lisa as the real one if I didn’t know.

I’d get the same experience staring down the barrel of a gun if I didn’t know that it wasn’t loaded.

40

Are you upset that the Mona Lisa is an arrangement of pigments on canvass, rather than a real live person?

There’s nothing fake about an art installation that makes you feel a certain way by presenting you with sights, sounds, etc that imply you are in danger in order to illicit a specific emotional response; it sounds quite interesting.

On the other hand, an art installation that ACTUALLY puts you at risk of death is highly irresponsible and foolish.