As in any crime, my first position is to pursue the motive-gag. The recent spate, thru' '98-'99, of concept-muggings pretty much had me pulling breath for an art-murder. It was a crime whose time was now. The precedents were all there. It had probably its beginnings in the '70s with the Viennese castrationists and the blood-rituals of Nitsch. Public revulsion put the lid on that episode, but you can't keep a good down. Spurred on by Chris Burden's having himself shot by his collaborator in a gallery, tied up in a bag, thrown on a highway and then crucified upon the top of a Volkswagen, stories circulated thru' the nasty-neon of N.Y. night that a young Korean artist was the self-declared patient of wee-hours surgery in cut and run operations at not-so-secret locations in the city. If you found out about it, you could go and watch this guy having bits and pieces removed under anaesthetic. A finger-joint one night, a limb another. By the dawning of the '80s, rumour had it that he was down to a torso and one arm. He'd asked to be left in a cave in the Catskills, fed every so often by his acolytes. He didn't do much after that. I guess he read a lot. Maybe wrote a whole bunch. I suppose you can never tell what an artist will do once he's peaked. Round this same time, Bowie the singer remarked on a copula goons who frequented the Berlin bars wearing full surgery regalia; caps, aprons, rubber gloves and masks. The cutting edge. Then came Damien Hirst with the Shark-Cow-Sheep thing. No humans, palatable ritual for the world-wide public. The acceptable face of gore. Meanwhile in the US, 1994, I was in town on the night of the Athey sacrifactions.
