Habacuc and the dog – in favor of reflection

I’ve decided to post this entrance since I’ve found sooo much information against this artist, most of it critising it and condemning him, and little of it seems well informed of the situation, and above all of the Artistic process involved in his work. Hence, I did some research and found this which I considered worth publishing, in order to have both sides of the argument and defend Mr. Habacuc as an artist:

Hello everyone. My name is Guillermo Habacuc Vargas. I am 50 years old and an artist. Recently, I have been critisized for my work titled “Eres lo que lees”, which features a dog named Nativity. The purpose of the work was not to cause any type of infliction on the poor, innocent creature, but rather to illustrate a point. In my home city of San Jose, Costa Rica, tens of thousands of stray dogs starve and die of illness each year in the streets and no one pays them a second thought.

Now, if you publicly display one of these starving creatures, such as the case with Nativity, it creates a backlash that brings out a big of hypocrisy in all of us. Nativity was a very sick creature and would have died in the streets anyway.

The dog died the next day in the exhibition, according to the editor of La Nacion’s cultural section editor, Marta Leonor González, in Nicaragua.

The exhibition also included the frase “Eres lo que lees” (you are what you read) written with dog food, as well as a Sandinist Himn playing backwards on a loop. Habacuc said his work was a homage to Natividad Canda, a Nicaraguan who died after being attacked by two rottweiler dogs in a workshop in Cartago.

“What’s important for me is the hypocrisy of people: an animal like that becomes the center of attention only when I put him in a white cube where people go to see art, but no one cared when it was as stray dog roaming the streets starving. The same happened to Natividad Canda, people were concerned only after the dogs had killed him.”

“No one came to free the dog, or give him food or water or called the police. No one in the exhibition did anything.”

The point of publishing this post in my blog is to defend Habacuc as an artist, given that no one has taken the time to thoroughly and reasonably analyze his intentions in this work.
Even though the act of killing a dog is cruel, the conditions and intentions of doing it should be taken into account. The dog was VERY ill, and as a street dog (who no one looks after or cares about) it would have died VERY soon anyway. Unless you’re an animal rights activist, it is very hypocritical that people get so alarmed and overreact over what happened to this dog, when thousands of dogs die on the streets with no love, care or attention.
Why are people acting so shocked when they can see worse things on TV that have no real intention or point towards nothing, and thus create no real reflection??

~ by artepuente on April 8, 2008.