You are What You Read: Participation and Emancipation Problematized in Habacuc's 'Exposición #1'

摘要

Conceptualized by Costa Rican artist Guillermo Vargas Jimenez (known as Habacuc), Exposicion #1 [Exposition #1](or its more infamous moniker "starving dog art")(2007) operates as a multifarious transgressive work of art. A main point of contention within the artwork is the rumored starvation of a dog during the course of artwork's exhibition. This thesis analyzes Habacuc's proposition within contemporaneous debates around participatory practices and Internet art. This examination is provided in order to present an alternative interpretation of the work relative to the divisive practices of the artist. Similar to other artists working with the period known as postinternet, Habacuc engages in a form of art that is counter-cultural, utilizing misinformation as a catalyst for his viral proposition. While Habacuc employs a strategy of critique throughout his varied oeuvre, Exposicion #1, arguably his most complex work to date, wholly demonstrates his approach to the Internet as an intrinsically hybridized, political, and oppositional medium. Within the following chapters I focus on the types of participatory relations being produced within Exposicion #1 and Habacuc's authorial intent to challenge the principles of emancipation promised in the discourses around participation in art and the Internet as "global village."