Sagittarians do it with a quiver
The art student who left a fake bomb at the Royal Ontario Museum last week, which halted an AIDS fundraiser after the building was evacuated, has told the Icelandic media that he remains ‘proud’ of his art.
‘I stand behind my artwork and I am proud of it,’ Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson, a student at the Ontario College of Art and Design, told an Icelandic Web site.
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OCAD president Sara Diamond, who suspended Mr. Jonsson and the faculty involved pending an internal investigation, met today with foundation officials to discuss ways the college could support CANFAR.
‘We want to repair any perceived damage,’ she said. ‘We feel that any actions that threaten violence or incite fear in the larger community are absolutely inappropriate. His actions do not fit within artistic ethics or even activist art.’
The ROM would not comment today on whether Mr. Jonsson’s fake bomb can be considered art.
‘The definition of art is very flexible,’ said Francisco Alvarez, director of communications. ‘It’s in the hands of the courts.’
Several thousand years of æsthetics, and it’s all going to end soon in a Toronto courtroom. I wonder if the Judge will call the president of OCAD as an expert witness? Maybe they can ask her what does fit within activist art? What are the boundaries from within which you can push at the boundaries of society?
That said, I’m not really sure about the art project. If the “sculpture” in question was recontextualized by being in a museum setting—that is, newly perceived as a bomb—what exactly what was it before?
Attached to the bomb was a note that read “This is not a bomb.” Jonsson thought that the note meant he wasn’t breaking the law: he had been advised by an OCAD Student Union lawyer before installing the piece, he says, against spreading false news, and told that he should not attempt to deceive people about the bomb’s legitimacy.
Moral is, if the assault with a weapon charge you’re prosecuting gets thrown out, you may have a back-up so long as it was carried out with an unloaded gun. “Spreading false news”, it’s like the “tax evasion” of 21st-Century crime-fighting.