Bombs and Wet Firecrackers

Mathieu Laca, Self-portrait, 2005

Sometimes I would like to be some kind of fly and be able to check in artists’ closets. I believe I would find tons of unshown pieces of art. Unshown because it’s too sexually explicit, too violent, too sacrilegious, too outrageous, too gruesome; simply because it’s a portrait of mommy and she looks too fat; a portrait of daddy and he looks too drunk. There are thousands of good reasons for not showing a piece of art. But the main reason is very often the lack of courage.

Anyway, what’s an unshown piece of art? An unshown piece of art is not a piece of art at all. It’s simply some kind of weird curiosity about which we like to build fables, good yummy crunchy stories we tell our friends and relatives. Good juicy stories that we hope will bring us a bit of publicity. An unshown piece of art might as well not exist; it’s nothing else but a waste of material.

Right here, we must distinguish between bombs and wet firecrackers. Every artist fears censorship like hell. Censorship is a plague that can kill any artist. We must fight censorship with all the weapons we can imagine. But, before taking out the submachine guns, let’s be sure that there’s censorship at all.

And remember that what we call self-censorship is almost always a lack of courage because the artist knows perfectly well someone will swear at what he shows. Artists need desperately to be loved! Also, let’s be sure that what we call self-censorship, moreover when it is widely publicized, is not a way of pointing fingers at other artists that have a courage we don’t have.

Every visual artist must decide: either he shows cute and cuddly flowers in golden pots or he shows what he really believe he must show to shake the visitor’s mind and then, he must fear censorship. Why would a real artist exist if not to shake the visitors at a gallery? For everything else, there are interior decorators!

There are very few artists with “The Guts to Kill”. Aren’t they the only true artists?

Comeau