The art of exposing hypocrisy
7:33am Wednesday 30th April 2008
IN 2007, artist Guillermo Vargas starved an animal to death in the name of art.
He found a sickly looking dog on the streets of Nicaragua and tied it to a short leash in the corner of a gallery.
Across the room was a tray of food, made inaccessible to the pooch and above it was the sign "you are what you read" which was spelled out in dog food.
When it slowly died of hunger and thirst in front of hundreds of onlookers, Vargas was chosen to represent Costa Rica in a prestigious art competition which is due to be held later this year.
Distasteful? Yes.
Disgusting? Perhaps.
A display of animal cruelty? Most definitely.
It's provoked such massive outrage on a global scale that more than a million people have signed a petition to try and prevent another dog being starved to death in a repeat of the exhibit.
But while we've been busy signing petitions and sending death threats to Guillermo, he's had the last laugh - and not because he's a supposedly deranged human being.
Firstly, no dog was starved to death.
Instead, he merely staged the whole event in order to prove a point that he was itching to make - that we're nothing more than a group of hypocritical sheep.
And it's a good, if not totally uncomfortable, point.
Why, he argued, do we all get onto our soap boxes to shout about a dog that is supposedly being made to starve to death in front of us when this sort of thing happens around us all of the time and we don't say a word?
The artist, who lives in the city of San Jose, Costa Rica, argues that he sees tens of thousands of stray dogs die of illnesses each year and no one pays them the slightest bit of attention.
However, if you publicly display one of these starving creatures, he says, it creates a backlash that brings out the hypocrisy in all of us.
And he's not just talking about dogs.
There are endless things that go on for which we do nothing about.
For example, we're all well aware that there are starving people in the world, the adverts tell us so.
In between Coronation Street, a starving child is shown on the screen who only needs a few pounds so that his whole village can get a fresh water supply.
But we rarely give, or speak up, about this starvation.
I don't think I've ever had an email that has protested about the poor conditions people both here and in the third world countries have to live in.
But, according to Guillermo, if he would have tied up an already starving child in an art gallery and made them go without food or water, we would all have something to say about it.
The artist states that the problem with society is that we're quite happy to block things out of our view and to only react to things when we are made to see them.
He said that in order to make his work valid, he and the workers at the art gallery had to give the impression that the dog was genuinely starving to death and that it actually died.
However, Juanita Bermundez, the director of the gallery, said that the dog ate and drank at regular intervals and was allowed to return to the streets from which it was taken once the study was over.
It was interesting to see how people's reactions changed when they found out it was a hoax.
I for one was totally taken in.
Anything is possible in the art world I thought, and it's not the first time an artist has used an animal for his work.
We've had Damien Hirst who made his name sawing cows, pickling sheep and suspending sharks in tanks of formaldehyde, explaining that his work was a stark mediation of life and death.
But this plummeted into the insignificant when compared with the starving dog.
So, when I got endless amounts of emails asking me to sign the petition against Guillermo, I did and I wasn't the only one.
Most of my friends had the same opinion; that Guillermo isn't quite all there and that his "piece of art" was a gross display of animal abuse.
But when it was revealed that it was all a hoax, there was an uncomfortable silence.
Guillermo has hit the nail on the head and has exposed most of us for what we really are.
Each year we tune into Comic Relief and watch celebrities bathe in beans and strip down to their novelty pants and for one night, we're moved to tears by poverty.
We'll dig deep into our pockets because for a short time, like the case of the starving dog, we're faced with some horrible images that make us feel uncomfortable.
But for the rest of the year, we're happy to forget until the red noses come out and we're forced to remember again.
I consider my lesson learnt.
Sarah Harvey is a journalism student at the University of Hertfordshire