Jackass and Context

I saw Jackass 3D last night and laughed so hard that my stomach muscles hurt this morning!

Jackass has been art appreciation curriculum for me for a long time. When attempting to explain contemporary art to non-artists, I usually start with (a better version of) this clip of Dave England shitting in a display toilet in a hardware store. I do this because it grounds us in the abject, crappy world of contemporary art, and because Dave England shitting in public is really easy to have an opinion about. The biggest hurdle non-artists face when looking at art is the culture of head-nodding that pervades art and blocks intelligent discussion. Non-artists see more clearly than artists that there's something scammy about galleries. You can put just about anything in a cavernous, empty white room and guard it with a cadre of serious-looking white girls in pointy shoes who look right through you, and when you do that you make that thing into something that everyone has to find very important, even if it's actually stupider than Dave England shitting in a display toilet in a hardware store. The fact that Jackass is an MTV product and not a Gagosian product has, if you'll permit the pun, a laxative effect on discussion. Students are compelled by the act itself to ask why? The second question is usually how, and whether or not they personally could usually follows that, and imagining what it must have been like to be the store owner or a patron follows and suddenly all the defensive "I could do that" walls that kids in a mandatory art appreciation class throw up are tumbling down and everyone in the room is experiencing something intense. It's either revulsion or admiration, but it springs out of empathy for the artiste and is at the same time relentlessly focused on whether or not the gesture works.

Once that orientation of empathy has been dialed in, all these other performance art videos become relevant, and they become a foundation upon which it is possible to head out into the galleries and actually talk about a lot of different kinds of art, from the perspective of empathizing with the individual artist and his or her quest, and whether or not that quest works for the students:

But it's interesting that if you try to show Shoot first, or Vito Acconci spitting into his hands, or even Bill Wegman's early work, you'll get blank stares. It's a function of context, but I don't think that this is simply about Jackass being a known quantity. Johnny Knoxville begs for empathy in a way that Abramovic, Burden or Acconci simply assume, and that a contemporary example like Ryan Trecartin simply demands.

I don't know whether begging for empathy is about MTV needing a different product than Mary Boone because it serves a different market or if it's about a humility that is inherent to the Jackass crew. I'm assuming that the pressures of one context are simply different than the pressures of another, and that this difference demands different mindsets. And I have no idea whether this makes Jackass better or worse as art. But it's a consistently useful lever.

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