Why Do We Walk Past Those in Need of Our Help?
Some provocative art about looking the other way
A story appeared in the art press this week about an incident in which police in London were called to a gallery to assist a woman who was seen sitting at a table slumped over with her head down on the surface. She hadn’t moved for two hours, a concerned passer-by told the police when they arrived. The officers took the locked door off its hinges to get inside and assist the woman, but found that she was actually a life-sized sculpture. It was a work by the American artist Mark Jenkins.
Jenkins’ art has been called ‘provocative’. It’s certainly eye-catching, although I’m not sure he is deliberately trying to provoke. If anything I would describe it as quietly disturbing rather than provocative, particularly his street art installations. Some of his work is amusing and surreal, and easy to identify as art.
But other pieces are more troubling, and so lifelike that you wouldn’t be able to tell at first that the figures represented are not real humans. You never see faces in his work, everything is communicated through the pose of the body and the context in which it is placed.
Jenkins films the responses of people who walk past his installations, and this is when the work becomes even more interesting for me. This is a piece called The Sitter from 2006. It looks like a homeless young man sitting on a pavement begging:
And here’s a short video of the responses to it:
It made me reflect on the invisibility of the homeless, and it made me wonder about the psychology behind why most people walk past those who are clearly in need of our help. Why some people stop and others don’t.
Here is Jenkins back in 2019 talking more about the philosophy behind his work:
Do you think his work is interesting? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
I so appreciate the way that this artist forces us to reckon with things that are uncomfortable and which most people would prefer to avoid. Thank you for sharing his work with us.
The invisible homeless thing makes me think of a New York charity project from years ago when they set up family members to pretend they were homeless and filmed their relatives walking past them on the street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQgmA8vshUg