Human Cruelty

http://www.theearthchild.co.za/performance-artist-stood-still-for-6-hours-to-let-people-do-what-they-wanted-to-her-body/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTBkbseXfOQ

The video is basically the summary of the article on the Earth Child. It's about a Performance Art piece where the artist asked the audience to use her as a canvas. In the article you see that she witnessed intense human cruelty during the 6 hour experiment. I'm curious on your thoughts of the whole piece. How do you feel a Jedi in the midst of all of this should respond to the situation?

For sure I believe it. There are heaps of freaky people, the trick is getting along with the freakishness - not opening up completely to it. I think she was being very naive, to put it bluntly, in regards to the pistol and am thankful they had security. And I don't mean freaky in a good way, where it would be used as a dark form of fun... .well perhaps its is still fun, just a psychopathic, uncompassionate, zero empathy, selfish fun. But yea, you know she asked for it and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger :S

Apparently these days psychology has gone in the direction of a threshold in mental health diagnosis being if it impacts a persons capacity for self care and social integration/interaction. So if one considers civility to be the effort on one to be of society, and insanity as the inability to be civil, then sanity can be seen as an illusion created by the advent of society. I don't think we are civil creatures born into wilderness, but wild creatures born into civility. I just happen to think it's more fair and productive to be civil. I guess that is a big risk in advanced civilized societies, getting too soft and detached from realities bubbling under the surface. Cue that K. Perry song about living in utopia and fat mouse gorging itself. I guess it's how I see the modern version of Buddha's Middle Way.. mediation founded on empathy to develop trust to allow concentrated focused effort to maximize positive change - instead of psychopathic selfishness or suicidal selflessness.

Maria Abramovic is an amazing artist. If you haven't already, I urge you to check out some of her other work.

The comment this peice makes on human nature is, I think, skewed by the performance angle, the nature of conceptual art in general and the "suggestion" of the objects she provided.

If you want to know what humans are like when left to their own devices... see the world at large. Yes, lots of wars and cruelty. And also lots of love and compassion. It's not all as bleak as this video suggests.

Maybe I'm just not very receptive to this sort of art but here is what I don't get. Why can we draw any conclusions about human nature from this at all? Here we have a person who is by no means anonymous and who attracts a specific kind of people who tend to be rather emotional, being interested in eccentric and unusual kinds of art in the first place, and so she puts herself in the middle of that crowd to create a maximally unnatural situation where that crowd gets to treat a living human body as they please without either restrictions or consequences... And the result is that people end up doing stuff they would never otherwise do? I mean, what a shock, who could ever have predicted that!

I don't think this means much of anything, really. The sample of people involved is highly unlikely to be representative, it was definitely not controlled to be representative of even so much as a specific subculture, and the situation they were placed in is one they probably neither ever experienced before nor will ever experience again. The observation made here tells us nothing we can generalize to any degree. There is no conclusion we can draw from it that is of any use outside of the historic record of the event. I appreciate that art is about expression first, and that we are each individually and collectively free to interpret it for our purposes as we please. I'm just urging us to recognize this as an artistic expression and our interpretations of it as just that. Let's not make it out to be any sort of social experiment with profoundly meaningful results that can inform us about fundamentals of human nature...

I do not think this shows us very much about human nature at all. Most people, when faced with the ability to do violence, have trouble doing it randomly. Lt Col. David Grossman did a great study on the effects of combat on the soldier and what it takes to get people to pull the trigger. The results were something around 90 or 96 percent of people will suffer some form of PTSD due to combat-related violence. Further the results of his study showed that it takes a fair amount of training to get a person to shoot at someone else.
So how does that impact this situation? Well, in this case, the gallery is giving the tools and suggestion that the subject is OK with it. They already dehumanize her by her being a piece of art ( which btw dehumanizing is a key to getting people to shoot the enemy) they then give permission for anything to be done. And has been mentioned they are doing this to a particular type of crowd that is drawn to such odd events. In short, it says something about the nature of those that attend when confronted with a scenario that allows them to turn a person into an object mentality.

What should I as a Jedi do about such a situation? Well, not go. Or if I got brought to it by a friend not participate. But as far as stopping such an event? No. Not unless the gun was reached for. Short of me being sure that a life is in danger, I would not seek to stop the harm. The lady doing this is a grown woman who knows and willingly took on the risks for her own reasons. It is not my place to stop her free will. People should be free ( if an adult and sane) to make bad choices if they wish. If I knew her it might be my place to advise against it. I would tell those I know not to go or participate. But that's about it unless again if a life is at clear risk of death or if at any point she says stop and the crowd refused to stop.

Heh,

In the BDSM world we just go with "Safe, Sane and Consensual"

As long as those rules are followed, (and maybe a bit of "aftercare") the world of human cruelty is open for exploration :woohoo: :whistle: