X Marks the Spot

Shady character: Istvan Kantor and his latest daring coif. Courtesy Istvan Kantor.

Last August, media artist and tireless provocateur Istvan Kantor held a press conference at the Drake Hotel in downtown Toronto to announce his newest project, Invisible Gift. His plan was to mix his own blood into the concrete the Art Gallery of Ontario is using to construct its new $200-million facility. Kantor says that Invisible Gift would become an integrated part of the walls, an “invisible monument” within architect Frank Gehry’s visible one.

And the point? Kantor wanted to condemn museums worldwide for thriving off the blood of artists. It was the same general theme that inspired Blood X, his notorious blood campaign, a series of clandestine performances where Kantor would draw giant blood Xs on museum walls, his outpourings often positioned between a Rembrandt or two.

Since 1985, Kantor has spurted blood onto many influential walls, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Each performance is followed by the inevitable swarm of security guards, Kantor’s swift arrest and a lifelong ban from the site. In doing so, Kantor says he is censuring museums for establishing the value of art and making money buying, selling and exhibiting artists’ work while the artists themselves are left to eke out a living, navigating the unforgiving grant system if they wanted to continue producing their art. This, Kantor feels, is wrong. Invisible Gift would represent all artists; the AGO’s walls, all museums.

When David Moos, curator of contemporary art at the AGO, received the press release announcing the Invisible Gift project, he called Kantor to relay his interest and to request a formal proposal.

“I met with him,” Moos said recently. “We chatted like an artist and a curator chat. … I’m planning on visiting him in his studio.” Moos explained his mission: “What I have to figure out is whether this is a significant, interesting figure, or if this is someone who is a media star dilettante.” But how?

Kantor’s work causes extreme and diverse reactions in the art world. He has been called everything from a leader of the avant-garde to an egocentric media strategist, from bold revolutionary to laughable entertainer. In 2004, he won a Governor General’s Award — the highest possible honour for a visual artist in Canada — and yet has been banned from many museums worldwide, including, at one point, our own National Gallery in Ottawa.

When word of Invisible Gift hit, the visual arts community was predictably divided. A well-known art critic called him “the dreaded Istvan Kantor”; a fellow artist, who requested anonymity, burst out laughing; video artist Jubal Brown, once a Kantor fan and follower, called him “desperate for attention” and likened him to a child.

Splatter punk: Kantor at work between two Picassos in New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1988. Courtesy Istvan Kantor.

For 20 years now, Kantor has been fighting to get his message heard, barely stopping to consider the long trail of contradictions left behind him. He’ll kick and scream and bleed and fight a museum one day, and the next invite a museum representative over for a studio visit. He’ll accept a Governor General’s Award and then later snarl about the ineffectuality of that “institution.” It’s this absurd paradox that makes Kantor and his art worthwhile.

A lot of the debate on the worth of Kantor’s art is obscured by the fact that it’s gory, shocking and violent. In one performance in the ’80s, Kantor was suspended, upside down and naked, with a vial of blood stuck in his anus, the red stream flowing to his mouth through a plastic tube. Other performances were variations on this theme, taking place everywhere from shallow graves to downtown curbsides, including on Queen Street West in Toronto in 2002.

In 2004, Kantor squeezed a capsule of blood at Jeff Koons’s sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988, which was part of the already controversial Flick exhibit at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. “I am protesting the loss of independence in art,” Kantor reportedly shouted as guards dragged him off to charge him with property damage and disruption of the peace.

While gore, shock and violence make for a good news story, they are no strangers to the canon of art. Dadaism, which grew out of a reeling, post-First World War Europe, thrived on shock; in one raucous opera bouffe, an artist actually pulled a revolver on the audience. The point was to celebrate society’s underbelly and explore its potentially gruesome unconscious. Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali made this an almost daily activity; they were known to dress up like priests, dress their girlfriends up like prostitutes and publicly “molest” them on a bus. The performances of Viennese artist Hermann Nitsch have combined fake crucifixion with the mutilation and sacrificing of lambs and other animals.

Kantor’s extremism is not unlike a lot of performance art from the ’60s and ’70s. Chris Burden, for example, had himself shot in the arm; Vito Acconci masturbated in a gallery for hours at a stretch; Gina Pane spent years hacking and slicing her own flesh in the name of art. In all these cases, the art rebelled against the market, minimizing the value of the final product, obscuring the line between art and life.

Within this context, Kantor’s bloodletting starts to make a little more sense. The gore guarantees him significant fanfare. “I am a media artist,” he explains. “I work with different types of media, but I also like to create work through the media.” For Kantor, the benefits of exposure and international attention to his message outweigh a potential loss of credibility. In the end, he gets us thinking and talking about subjects that might otherwise go untreated.

“My most important statement is that without the blood of artists, there wouldn’t be museums,” says Kantor. “It’s a romantic idea.” He pauses. “Blood turns to gold turns to blood. There is a constant circle of blood in society. It’s my commentary on how capitalism functions.”

Many see Invisible Gift as yet another way for Kantor to gain international media attention, nothing more. For the artist, however, it is an exciting progression in his trajectory of bloodletting. Not only is he forging new territory — the recurring arrests were getting a wee bit predictable — he is poised to make blood art that can’t be scrubbed away.

At the moment, the Art Gallery of Ontario is still considering Kantor’s Gift. Moos, the curator set with the task of steering its future, will spend the next couple of weeks deciding what to do with Kantor and his bloody contradictions. Let’s hope for Kantor’s sake — and ours — that Moos is feeling sanguine.

Julia Dault is a Toronto writer.

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