ok I take back what I’ve said about contemporary art. This is amazing.
THIS is what art is about. I bitch about modern art a lot but the problem I have is that most of it (and I've worked in a museum and been an art student) is bullshitting. It is only sometimes you get shit like this, that is 0% bullshit and 100% raw screaming emotion that is demanding you LISTEN and FEEL and CONFRONT. This is art. This is what art is about. Are you mad? Are you horrified? Are you uncomfortable? GOOD.
[Image description: a photo of the exhibit and the description.
The exhibit shows a plugged in white box fan enclosed in a clear box.
It is by John Boskovich (1956-2006) and titled “Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers); Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate, 1997.” It is made from an electric fan encased in Plexiglas with vinyl faux etching and Plexiglas base with casters. It was a gift of the artist in memory of Stephen Earabino, 2000.12. The description says “Soon after the death of his lover Stephen Earabino from AIDS, Los Angeles conceptual artist Boskovich discovered that Earabino’s family had completely cleared out his apartment, including the artist’s possessions, save for the electric box fan in this work. An entire person, existence, and relationship had been erased, like so many were during the AIDS crisis. Boskovich encased the fan in Plexiglas as a kind of evidence and added cutouts to allow its circulated air to escape and be felt by the viewer, almost like an exhalation. In a sense restoring Earabino’s breath, at least as a facsimile in memoriam, Boskovich makes a tender and brokenhearted gesture toward some form of eternal life.”
End image description]
Not to nitpick, but I feel like I need to clarify something here:
Modern art refers to art created between the 1860s and the 1970s, roughly. It's not a type of art; it's a era of art.
Contemporary art is any art being made in the current era (roughly 1970 to today). It's also an era, not a type or style.
Conceptual art is a type of art where the idea is more important than the aesthetic. That's the type of art a lot of people dislike, or struggle with, because it doesn't make sense out of context.
So the installation here is both conceptual and contemporary, but not modern art (though conceptual art does span both eras, so not all conceptual art is contemporary).
A lot of AIDS related art falls into the category of conceptual art, because that was a big trend in the art world at the same time as the AIDS epidemic in America.
But conceptual art isn't supposed to be nice to look at, because if it is, it fails as conceptual art. It's supposed to be a statement, or pose a question (usually about current society). So even the stuff that seems like bullshit, really isn't, because if someone can purposely bullshit an art piece, and have it installed in a museum or sell it for a huge amount of money, it definitely raises questions and/or says something about society, so it still serves its purpose in the end.
I think a lot of people would appreciate art more if they realized that it's almost never meant to be pretty. It's a visual language, and to understand it, you just need to know something about it. With conceptual art, it's usually accompanied by a statement, like this one, that gives you the context. You can't really look at conceptual art out of context and "get" it.
But if you ignore the statement, it's just a fan, and you might think, "that's stupid. Art makes no sense." Or you can read the statement, glance at the fan, and keep walking. But if you read it, and and stop to experience the fan, that's when you gain insight. Most of us didn't experience the AIDS epidemic in that way, but most of us know what it's like to lose someone, and we can all understand what would have been meant by the family getting rid of everything... you have the context that he was a gay man who died of AIDS in a very conservative era, so you can imagine the family was probably ashamed, and wanted to erase his existence. And you can imagine the absolute devastation his lover felt when he discovered everything that meant anything to the person he loved was now gone. Most people have the experience of wanting to keep something after someone dies, to hold on to that connection and keep their memory fresh, so we can imagine how devastating it would be to have that taken away, and be left with nothing but a worthless box fan.
And you can stand there, and stare at a box fan, and feel the air blowing on you, and be hit with the absolute gravity of the devastation of the AIDS epidemic. And if you're queer, it will hit you 10 times as hard, because that could have been you, or someone you loved. You could have been erased from existence, save for one meaningless, generic item that says nothing about you, in any other setting.
When you take an object out of its environment, and place it in a museum, you are attributing meaning to it, and that's the fundamental basis of conceptual art. That fan could have just as easily ended up in a garbage dump, and no one would have known or cared. But it didn't. It ended up in a museum, and that alone imparts a specific meaning onto it that no other box fan in existence has.
This man's family didn't see any point in removing this fan from the apartment, but now this post alone has 82k notes, and who knows how many more people have experienced this installation in person, and felt something about the death of a person they never knew. How many people sat with it and thought about the AIDS epidemic, and left with a new insight into the very real, devastating impact it had on people? How many people are still seeing this and thinking about this in 2021, 24 years after the man who owned the fan died, and 15 years after the artist who installed it died? He could have drawn a portrait of his deceased lover, and unless he was very famous, it would be long forgotten by now. But this installation is still here, because the concept behind it still matters.
And that's the point of conceptual art.
Here’s another example:
