Careful What You Wish For

Monkey Business by Luc Tuymans | Photo courtesy of DavidZwirner.com.

The opinions reflected in this OpEd are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of staff, faculty and students of The King's College.

How does a work of art make you feel? 

It’s a simple question. 

The rationale behind your feelings may be murky and the reason your emotions have become inspired may not be clear, but after lengthy interaction with a piece of art, an identifiable feeling will almost certainly arise within you. The increasingly abstract modern art scene is dominated by emotional response. Pieces are designed to make you feel a certain way, and those feelings are supposed to be engineered to make you think. 

For Luc Tuymans’ acrylic/animated piece Monkey Business, this is especially true. Since the piece is a murky interpretation of an earlier performance piece in Tuymans’ career, it would be foolish to analyze it through purely logical analysis. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the writer of this critique is autistic and does not experience emotional response to visual stimuli so we will be doing exactly that.

Luc Tuymans’ Monkey Business is an experiment in self-plagiarism in an age where Mark Rothko paints three squares and auctions it off for $87 million dollars. Monkey Business consists of six still acrylic paintings chained together to create an animation. The subject of the piece is the famously terrifying Jolly Chimp toy— specifically one Mr. Tuymans set on fire in the early 1980s in an act of creative desperation. The intended emotional response of Monkey Business is lost on me, so we will instead analyze the composition.

Tuymans’ piece is primarily made up of fiercely competing blacks and reds and, when strung together in animated form, they flicker in a convincing impression of fire. The bottom right of the piece features a Jolly Chimp spectating the inferno. Whether it is a different individual or the same Chimp being burned is unclear. An interesting facet of this piece is the skill involved—unlike other abstract modernists such as Mondrian, Tuymans exhibits some degree of skill in the execution of his paintings. The black and grey backdrop for the flaming chimp is textured with swirled brushstrokes evoking billowing images of smoke, and the shifting expression of the spectating chimp is fluid enough to provide years of nightmares even after the initial trauma of the piece wears off. The intelligent realization of this piece is good- too good for a modernist. 

It is the opinion of this would-be critic that Tuymans’ Monkey Business is a self-aware satire similar in nature to Duchamp’s infamously stupid Fountain piece. The central thesis behind Fountain was simple- to create a piece so explicitly pointless that there is no possible deeper interpretation within the art itself. This forced the observer to reconsider the piece’s relationship to art, leading to an evaluation of what art is and an exploration of those borders. 

Monkey Business seems to have a similar goal but attempts a more flippant approach. By showcasing Tuymans’ impressive capabilities in such a bizarre manner, the viewer is forced to consider how the modern avant-garde undermines the skills of modern artists. The fact that Monkey Business consists of six paintings combined into an animation further develops this—clearly, an immense amount of time was sunk into this project. The motion and story of this sideshow were exquisitely done—and yet to no apparent end. As the viewers, we are forced to evaluate our role in this monstrosity. Much like the Jolly Chimp, we are experiencing complex emotions as we continue to enjoy the burning spectacle of the death of art that has been occurring for the past century and a half. Is the spectacle worth it?