Probing the Pickled Penis by Pieter Kos Recently within this pluralist academy, Mark Prent, a current visiting artist/instructor, showed slides of his work and so prompts the following polemic. His work is of tormented bound and suffering figures and body parts (heads, jar of penises cum pickles), frighteningly real with flesh tones. His brief comment on the nature of the work implies acceptance of the formalist orthodoxy of ''art'', and his creations demonstrate to what absurd lengths that orthodoxy can be exploited to support a personal fetishization in the name of art. Formalism maintains philosophically that pure aesthetic values dominate in responding to art. It is felt that it is no longer important to believe or even have knowledge of the myths and visions out of which the work of art is created. Thus we ad- mire, and are moved in a similar fashion by any art object whether it be a fresco of Christ, an African or Indian mask, or a Noland painting. In opposing this aestheticism it is pertinent to note that the notion of ‘art object' only arrived in the human mind with the loss of western catholic (universal) mystic belief. Since the Renaissance the art experience of deepening human connection with cosmos/life/God was substituted with the purely aesthetic experience. Even the paintigs of Modern Men such as Kandinsky and Rothko are admired from the formal point of reference rather than from reference to the spiritual and transcendental values they were expressing. Heart warming is the fact that the modernist school of formalists have been under attack in recent times for its insularity and lack of substantive meaning as it deteriorates artistically into mere deeration, self-indulgent expression, and/or fetishization of materials and marks. On this last note, Mark Prent seems to have left himself open for criticism. Duringthe discussion he side-stepped questions re- garding the nature and intent of his products by calling, rather, for more attention to the formal qualities of form, texture, colour. Prent offered no explanations for his subject matter other than that it was the subject of his own personal intrigue and enthusiasm. This seems questionable as something seems missing in the face of work so high in shock value, which resides in the halls of art galleries, but seems more appropriately placed in a Theatre of Horror.