000ooo000ooo 1/25

In reading the 11 "emergent rules" of postmodernism and postmodern classicism two of these rules struck me as relevant to a recent art display in Costa Rica. I think this display (while explosively controversial) is a very good example of postmodern art. In the display the artist, Guillermo Vargas, caught a stray dog on the streets of Costa Rica. He then proceeded to bring it into the art museum and chain it to the wall. On the other side of the room from the dog lay a bowl of water. Above the dog, written in dog food, read "You are what you read." Vargas left the dog alone on the leash for a week or so until the dog starved to death.
Many people were outraged by the fact that Vargas had allowed the dog to die, saying he had killed it. However, Vargas was attempting to create an important allegory of the state of our country and the world as a whole. In doing this he was emplowing divergent signification. That is, there were many different ways to read the piece. Some people thought the purpose of the piece was to show suffering. People who read the piece this way were outraged that somebody felt that had to personally create suffering and that it was okay to choose an innocent dog as the victim. Other people saw the piece as allegorical either in its representation of our world or its representation of the human psyche and its prioritizing of following the rules over acting morally. In this reading one finds another of Jencks rules, double coding, which uses "irony, ambiguity, and contradiction" (288).
While there was the literal image of a starving dog in front of museum patrons, there was also the image of the room as a whole. People milling around looking at the dog, yet not helping. There was food on the wall which they could have fed the dog, and water across the room which could have been brought to quench the dog's thirst. Yet, all of these people watched the dog die. They all could have helped and they did not and this questions there morals at least partially as much as Vargas' morals. The irony here is that many of the same people who later called Vargas a murderer also personally neglected to feed the starving dog. Their actions are extremely contradictory. It is also ironic that a dog died in a room full of the very resources it required for survival.
The double code of this piece is that it can also be a metaphor for our world; many people in third-world countries starve to death while being surrounded by nutrients. Much of this is a result of globalization exporting food around the world. In any case, the situation is similar, people dying because others won't give them access to the things they need, regardless of how close these resources are. Vargas' piece (though it probably wasn't worth the dog's life) is an example of a postmodern critique of our society.