Exhibition
DIRTY KUNST - Seventeen
Life is a four-letter word. So is art when pushed past polite boundaries. You don't have to be Lenny Bruce to know that the first commandment of comedy is 'leave half the audience laughing and the other half horrified.' Rude art, like rude words, straightens spines and unbuckles straitened belts. Filth frightens, provokes, angers and just plain disgusts. Sometimes it proves outright liberating. Reason and good sense often blanch when faced with graffiti on the bathroom wall.
Dirty Kunst is a show with Tourette's. An exhibition of artists committed to what George Orwell called significant 'mental rebellions,' it lives and breathes according to the idea that there is no such thing as dirty art, just dirty minds. A rough version of the hippie mandate to 'speak truth to power,' the spirit behind this batch of 'dirty kunst' is one that seeks out extreme responses. Cruelty, venality, lubriciousness, perversity, black humour, misanthropy - all of these count as genuine paths to artistic expression and - why not - a certain twisted redemption.
