What is art? Are we art? Is “art” art?

- Lisa Turtle, Saved By The Bell

Things are kinda crazy in Ohio.  Richard Whitehouse, an “artist” is making a wonderful, interactive art piece known as The Rape Tunnel.  What is it? Its a tunnel…you walk through it, and then the guy tries to rape you at the end.  Um…pretty artistic stuff.  More from I Heart Chaos,

This is a follow up to his “Punch You in the Face Tunnel”, where predictably, you would get punched in the face at the end. He’s still getting sued over that one.

At ArtLurker, Whitehouse explains the motivation behind this work, that has both feminists and law enforcement a little nervous:

(Why rape?) Because as an artistic gesture, it’s one of the most impactful I can think of. For the past ten years Ohio’s art scene has been largely centered around a string of alternative spaces in Akron’s warehouse district, where people had been putting on art shows. At the beginning I happily participated along with everyone else but then I started to feel like it wasn’t going anywhere. It dawned on me that if the work we created had never existed the world would be no different than if it had. None of it mattered to anyone outside of our small and insignificant circle of peers. I wanted something that would have more impact.

I started to think differently about my work. In 2007 at the Seward Projects Space in Columbus, I had my first breakthrough with an installation that was to be the prototype for this current one. It was called THE PUNCH-YOU-IN-THE-FACE TUNNEL. It was the same set-up as THE RAPE TUNNEL except at the end of the tunnel I’d punch the subject in the face instead of raping him or her. The impetus was completely reactionary to the current state of art, and motivated by pure frustration.

As it turns out, I ended up breaking the nose of the third person to crawl through the tunnel, an aspiring model. She went to the hospital and eventually sued me. Her modeling career was put on hold. The civil case was long and drawn out and the matter still hasn’t been resolved. To this day she still has unpaid medical bills. The point of this long aside is that all this took place two years ago, and I’m still having an impact on this young lady’s life, something not many other artists could claim about their work.

Rape seemed like the next logical step.

So…who’s dumber.  The guy who is so overly artistic that he made a rape tunnel, or the people dumb enough to walk through “THE RAPE TUNNEL” only to be raped by the artist.

Random Question:  So…if a bunch of people walk through at once…is that dude just seriously getting his rape on? Does he make people stop and wait in line to get raped?  Yeah…

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