No audience? No worries. Tattooed human artwork walks out of Mona
If art happens, and nobody sees it, does it exist?
“Art,” said Edgar Degas, is “not what you see but what you make others see.” But how does that maxim hold up when art galleries around the globe are closed and the world’s most famous works are either in storage or, like Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles at the National Gallery of Australia, wrapped conspicuously in black plastic. Those existential ponderings are not, of course, exclusive to the visual arts. What is an actor without an audience; a band without a festival; a singer without a microphone; a comic without a laugh; a dancer without a stage? What is the value of art if it goes unseen? There is only one man in the country who can accurately answer that question. His name is Tim Steiner, and he doesn’t particularly like talking on the public record. Which is a shame because Steiner is the only registered, saleable work of art, that I know of at least, with a functioning larynx. In 2006 the former tattoo-parlour owner’s back was tattooed with an artwork by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye. The piece, entitled TIM and which encompasses his entire back, was purchased for €150,000 in 2008, and Steiner has displayed it in more than nine galleries around the world. But TIM’s longest stint has been in Tasmania. Steiner had sat on display for 3500 hours in the main gallery at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art, David Walsh’s private art museum on the banks of the Derwent. Human flesh perched, still, on a plinth, admired and ogled by art lovers for five hours a day, six days a week. That’s a lot of sitting. When the COVID crisis struck Tasmania early and Walsh closed MONA’s doors, the Swiss-born Steiner decided to stay on. After all, the gallery’s other works weren’t being taken off display. MONA live-streamed Steiner, from behind, the colourful fleshy fresco of a madonna and halo — signed, naturally, by Delvoye — that consumes his back undulating silently in rhythm with his breathing. It was a mesmerising sight. But a fortnight ago, Steiner stood up and walked away. He took himself off display. He will be back later this year, MONA says. But perhaps there is something in the idea that an artwork with a pair of working legs might decide to use them. If art happens, and nobody sees it, does it exist? For today’s cover story, arts editor Ashleigh Wilson interrogates the philosophical dimensions of the cultural world and finds a sector grappling with very real questions of identity.