Cruel art

Many BARk readers have probably received requests to sign a petition against Costa Rican artist Guillermo Habacuc Vargas in the past few months. Last year, Vargas captured a starving street dog (or paid some children to) and displayed the animal as part of a "work of art" in Managua, Nicaragua. Reportedly, the dog subsequently died of starvation. (I say, “reportedly” because I have fallen into a sort of blogosphere-vortex of incomplete posts, conflicting stories, and Spanish-language reports--which I can't translate--and so have not distilled a definitive version of events. This blog comment from March provides one summary. I’d love to hear an update from someone close to the issue.)

In response, animal rights activists have petitioned for legal action against Vargas for cruelty (so far unsuccessfully), or at the very least, that he be excluded from the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008 (also unsuccessfully). The summary linked above confirms that Vargas will participate in the biennial but not with an animal.

Images from the exhibition--warning: these are hard to look at--leave me wondering: While petitions circulate madly, why during the show did no one take action to save an obviously suffering dog? It reminds me of the Milgram experiment, which revealed that people were frequently willing to inflict pain on others when directed by an authority figure to do so. Was the authority of "art" and the context of a gallery so compelling they overrode compassion?

I hope that the belated concern for this one dog moves beyond merely targeting Vargas and galvanizes  larger, productive action on behalf of the thousands of neglected street dogs in Managua.

Lisa Wogan