Meta-interventionism?

Interesting piece - albeit with a horrific misspelling of "surreptitious" - at the Telegraph about the Interventionists, performance artists who physically intervene in existing works of art and have been very busy recently. Because everything eats itself in the end, there have now been interventions into interventionist works which, as the Telegraph article notes, presents some interesting and ironic twists to the philosophy.

It would appear that the art world has gone intervention crazy. You could blame it on Guy Debord and the Situationist International with their fondness for challenging the gallery environment with dynamic interventions. But that's too obvious. As usual, I blame Brian Eno.

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Hopefully the as-yet unnamed 36-year-old from Notting Hill (note to self: doesn't Eno live in Notting Hill? How old is he?) who intervened into Cornelia Parker's The Distance: A Kiss With Added String will find the artist as broad-minded as Tracey Emin. Parker's piece, according to the artist "a comment on the claustrophobic nature of relationships," is nothing more than Rodin's sculpture The Kiss wrapped in a length of twine. The unnamed man, on bail pending further police inquiries, simply cut the rope.

To this humble observer, this intervention is the most eloquent of all those considered here and seems to advance the original piece, bringing to it a sense of completion. Parker's "comment" is at its best obvious and at its worst reductive. It surely invites intervention. If indeed the artist finds relationships claustrophobic, shouldn't she find the cutting of her string, metaphorically at least, a liberation? By freeing The Kiss from its bindings the unnamed Notting Hillian has offered a ray of hope to the artist. There seems little doubt that they should get together for dinner. I'd suggest a bowl of spaghetti.

The most famous/infamous Interventionist work is probably Jake and Dinos Chapman's "rectification" of a set of original prints of Goya's Disasters of War. The brothers purchased the set and then went "very systematically through the entire 80 etchings and changed all the visible victims' heads to clowns' heads and puppies' heads." This, unsurprisingly, prompted an angry Spaniard to stage his own intervention.

Nicola Hunter, an art history teacher from Oxford who was in the audience, said: "Chapman is a provocative speaker and he was engaging in dialogue with various members of the audience. Suddenly this oddly-dressed man in a red beret and long dark hair sprang up in front of Jake Chapman. He gave a short speech, saying he was Spanish and that Spanish people loved Goya. He then produced a large pot of red gloss paint and threw it over Jake Chapman. Everybody froze. It was a direct hit. It hit him in the face and splattered across the wall and, I think, two of their etchings. You could see Jake was furious."