By Andrew Bay, UK
Shock Art is a form of extreme realism which initially came to prominence in the 1960s, with notable performance pieces by artists such as Hermann Nitsch, Piero Manzoni and Chris Burden. "Shock" in these works, is produced by the incredibly realistic degree of "representability" which the artists seek to produce, leaving the audience exposed to a feeling of inescapability: when confronted with "Shock Art," there isn’t anywhere further to go. Although it has encountered, through the years, considerable opposition from critics and the public, Shock Art has touched a raw nerve in our society. It brings to the fore a new kind of anxiety, which isn’t existential by nature. The neurotic apprehension captured in these incredibly realistic artworks, is the anxiety of continuous recursion and repetition which defines the modern world. Reality is now irreversibly interchangeable with publicity, indistinguishable from advertising and hype, where all sense, meanings and interpretations are merged into one. In the end, "Shock Art" simply mirrors the Information Age: disturbing and intensely brutal, as inescapably mysterious as a digital black hole
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