Performance art can be a real force!

Marina Abramovic can provoke people! Want a proof? The following thread, which I've sampled for you from artblog.net (in our list of art blogs), shows how viscerally individuals can react to performance art. It all sort of begins when the blog's moderator takes a passage from my Sunpost article:

For The Lips of St. Thomas (1975), Abramovic sat at a table, eating a kilo of honey and a liter of wine, then proceeded to cut a five-point star into her stomach (with a razor blade) and whip herself until her body felt totally numb.

Franklin: Supergirl commented, I know guys in the Air Force who would do that for a dollar. Well said, my love.

As people start posting comments, there is this comment (referring to Abramovic), from an art teacher at one of our local institutions!

Opie: With all that wine and honey she didn't need a star, she needed a drain.

Or this one from a participant -whose job is described by another commenter as "snide and dismissive in tone:"

Jack: Well, you get the idea. Any connection, real or imagined, to the Abramovic stunt, I mean, performance, is purely coincidental. Far be it from me to impugn such an extravagant exhibition of pretentious, pointless posturing.

Believe it or not, they make no distinction between performance art and stunts. So, I try to explain performance art from a historic point of view:

AT: Performance art has a historic context: the civil struggles of the 1960’s in the USA and Europe, the Vietnam War, the Cold War. For these and other reasons (that we can argue some other time) the body became a locus for artistic experimentation… I don’t think that artists like Burden, Ono, de Maria, Schneeman, Beuys, Acconci, Nauman, Nitsch, Pane, Rossler, Mendieta and many more, were doing just stunts. On the contrary, I’d say that they lived at a time when the exploration (of the possibilities of the body as art) became an imperative: The body as (simultaneously) object and subject; body as transgression (the Viennese Actionists), as sex prop (Schneeman, Ono), as caricature (Nauman), as ritual (Abramovic), as political satire (Rossler), etc, etc. After Existentialism and Humanism (and the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam, and Pol Pot), all these artists explored valid questions: Is the body essential component of the self? What’s gender? What’s a female? Is the body more than representation?

This is the response I get from the same art teacher:

Opie: Justifying the elevation of such activities to the status of art by cooking up long lists of names, events and philosophies liberally spiced with current artspeak trend terms and unnamed "experts" is not intellectually responsible, no matter how many others are doing the same thing. In my opinion, anyone who buys this nonsense has lost the ability for self-determined judgement of art.

It did not matter that I produced a long list of texts by scholars on performance art (later, my comment inexplicably disappeared from the thread... coincidence?). It seems more like an empty exercise in derision and contempt, than a substantial reasoning of why they hate -or for that matter- write off performance art altogether as a legitimate art movement. I particularly single out this comment (for a person who even has the candidness of admitting she/he hasn’t seen Marina’s performance):

KQ: I haven't seen 'Lips of St.Thomas', but watching a sniper's process of executing his target 2 kilometers away with 1 shot is a performance I'd spend $$ to see...

Later, the moderator of the blog retorts:

Franklin: However, if some guy in the privacy of his home decided to carve a star in his stomach for expressive purposes, we might fairly advocate some mental health care for him.

Even after I left the thread (the discussion had already moved from the original topic to a rummaging of sorts; ad hominem platitudes, etc. Some Marc County adds:

Marc County: That's funny, I suppose, but... what argument does AT believe he is referring to? I mean, Deleuze and Guattari themselves could show up here, and I bet it STILL wouldn't amount to a real argument, any more than AT's pugnacious comments do. Seriously, these fundamentalists all sound the same to me, so sorry, it's all just more fodder for ridicule, like this... the true-believers refuse to let their dream die, truth be damned.

Frankly, I didn't know I was a fundamentalist! (which is why I have artblog.net in our page?)

The last in the thread is from (none other than a) composer of new music and a performer himself (whom I've seen, shirtless and donning a cowboy hat, riding an amplifier as if it was a horse, while making a noise piece), one whom you'd guess can understand what performance art is all about (he misses no opportunity to take a stab at our Art Issue class):

Rene Barge: Here is Pomo at its finest, perhaps those who teach “issues” can include this in the curriculum.

Poor guy, cannot even understand that some of the music or the art he makes has the stamp of a time and place written all over it.

My Conclusion? Performance art is a real force!

Pornography vs. Erotic art

Pornography refers to representation of erotic behavior (in books, pictures, statues, movies, etc.) intended to cause sexual excitement. The word comes from the Greek porni (prostitute) and graphein (to write). Since the term has a very specific legal and social function behind it, we must make a distinction between "pornography" and "erotica" (i.e. artworks in which the portrayal of the so-called sexually arousing material holds or aspires to artistic or historical merit). The problem is that what is considered "artistic" today, may have been yesterday's pornography. According to our definition above, there's evidence of pornography in Roman culture (in Pompeii, where erotic paintings dating from the 1st century AD cover walls sacred to bacchanalian orgies). A classic book on pornography is Ovid's Ars amatoria (Art of Love), a treatise on the art of seduction, intrigue, and sensual arousal. With Modernity, in 18th-Century Europe, a business production (designed solely to arouse sexual excitement) begins with a small underground traffic and such works became the basis of a separate publishing and bookselling business in England (a classic of this period is Fanny Hill or The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749) by John Cleland). At about this time erotic graphic art began to be widely produced in Paris, eventually coming to be known as "French postcards." Pornography flourished in the Victorian era despite, or perhaps because of, the prevailing taboos on sexual topics. The development of photography and later of motion pictures contributed greatly to the proliferation of pornographic materials. Since the 1960's, written pornography has been largely superseded by explicit visual representations of erotic behavior that are considered lacking in redeeming artistic or social values. Pornography has long been the target of moral and legal sanction in the belief that it may tend to deprave and corrupt minors and adults and cause the commission of sexual crimes.

William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (First Edition). Naked Lunch is considered Burroughs' seminal work, and one of the landmark publications in the history ofAmerican literature. Extremely controversial in both its subject matter and its use of often obscene language, something Burroughs recognized and intended, the book was banned in many regions of the United States, and was one of the last American books to actually be put on trial for obscenity. The book was banned by Boston courts in 1962 due to obscenity (notably child murder in pedophilic acts), but that decision was reversed in a landmark 1966 opinion by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Naked Mr. America burning frantic with self-bone love screams out: "My asshole confounds the Louvre!... My cock spurt soft diamonds in the morning sunlight!" He plummets from the eyeless lighthouse, kissing and jacking off in the face of the black mirror, glides oblique down with cryptic condoms and mosaic of a thousand newspapers through a drowned city of red brick to settle in black mud with tin cans and beer bottles, gangsters in concrete, pistols pounded flat and meaningless to avoid short-term inspection of prurient ballistic experts. He waits the slow striptease of erosion with fossil loins.-- W.B.

Tom of Finland's Untitled (c. 1986). Pornography was, then, a category of material created, invented, and produced as a means to regulate and target the moral behavior of certain populations. The seizure of and legislation against so-called pornographic work provided a means of increasing the surveillance of working-class people and all women. For pornography to exist, "a public which might be corrupted by obscene publications had to exist." —Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality.

Jean Cocteau's erotic drawings for Le Livre Blanc (1930's). Cocteau produced eighteen explicit drawings in 1930 for the anonymously published erotic story Le livre blanc (the first edition appeared in 1928, copyrighted by Maurice Sachs and Jacques Bonjean in Paris). Pascal Pia, the author of a bibliography of the erotic collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, wrote that the editors received the book without its creator’s name or address and concluded that the book was published by Cocteau himself. True; the poet may have written Le livre blanc in 1927 in Chablis, where he was staying with Jean Desbordes. Cocteau's drawings have been described as "obscenely pious." They are established by quick, flowing lines, partially erotic and often sultry, featuring classical elements such as busts and centaurs. Erotic images were popular articles in France, where they were sold under the counter; people were extra careful about homosexual erotica. Cocteau described his first sexual experiences in Le livre blanc: his excitement upon seeing a naked peasant boy on horseback and two naked young gypsies on his father's estate. He also wrote about his father, in whom he recognized a homosexual inclination. Some scenes in Le livre blanc refer to Cocteau's love for Desbordes, others to the adventures of Maurice Sachs. Neither man was to survive World War II: Desbordes was tortured to death by the Gestapo, while Maurice Sachs played an enigmatic double role during the war, and subsequently disappeared.

In On Pornography: Literature, Sexuality, and Obscenity Law (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), Ian Hunter, David Saunders, and Dugald Williamson argue, after Foucault, that pornography is not produced by the repression of true, real, or healthy sexuality. Rather it is a sexual practice produced within the context of what they call "a perpetually shifting and multiple pornographic field." The divide between aesthetics and pornography is the effect of a complex set of overlapping disciplinary apparatuses: the law, the police, literary standards, and so forth (the "pornographic field")—whose form and content necessarily changes over time. Although the unspeakable pleasure or subversive power associated with pornography paradoxically extends the tentacles of regulatory power, the boundary between the aesthetic and the pornographic also marks what Abigail Solomon-Godeau refers to as "the failure of a discursive cordon sanitaire" the attempt at segregating the licit from the illicit that constantly fails.

"For men the right to abuse women is elemental, the first principle, with no beginning . . . and with no end plausibly in sight. . . . pornography is the holy corpus of men who would rather die than change. Dachau brought into the bedroom and celebrated. . . . pornography reveals that male pleasure is inextricably tied to victimizing, hurting, exploiting; that sexual fun and sexual passion in the privacy of the male imagination are inseparable from the brutality of male history."-- Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women.

Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971). "Straw Dogs was wildly controversial on its release and has remained so to this day. Most of the controversy revolved around the long and highly explicit rape scene which is the centerpiece of the film. Critics, especially feminist critics, accused Peckinpah of glamorizing rape and engaging in misogynistic sadism. They were particularly disturbed by the seeming ambiguity of the rape scene, in which Amy appears at certain points to be asking for and enjoying the abuse she is subjected to. Peckinpah's defenders claimed that the scene was unambiguously horrifying and that Amy's trauma was truthfully portrayed in the film. Peckinpah's detractors continue to cite this scene as proof of Peckinpah's chauvinism and misogyny. "-- Wikipedia, "Straw Dogs" entry.

Russ Meyer is best known as the director of "exploitation films," i.e. instead of Hollywood's traditional adherence to narrative, exploitation films include descriptive passages of violence, sexual intercourse, and other activities considered taboo by mainstream cinema. In the case of Beyond the Valley of Dolls, there was Fox's financial situation during the late 1960s, and Meyer's reputation among film critics, which influenced Fox executives to collaborate in the film's production. The result was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a hybrid of exploitation and Hollywood modes of production and narration.

What's "obscene?"

If something is obscene, we must understand why it is so. These are some of the five most important criteria used in America before today's Miller Test (the paragraph that follows is taken from the Wikipedia): 1- The Hicklin Test: The effect of isolated passages upon the most susceptible persons. (British common law, cited in Regina v. Hicklin, (1868) -- Overturned when Michigan tried to outlaw all printed matter that would 'corrupt the morals of youth' in Butler v. State of Michigan (1957). 2- Wepplo: If material has a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt its readers by inciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desires. (People v. Wepplo). 3- Roth Standard: Whether to the average person applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest. 4- Roth v. United States 354 U.S. 476 (1957) - overturned by Miller. 5- Roth-Jacobellis: Community standards applicable to an obscenity are national, not local standards. Material is "utterly without redeeming social importance". Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) - famous quote: I shall not today attempt further to define [hardcore pornography] ...But I know it when I see it. Roth-Jacobellis Memoirs Test: Adds that the material possesses "not a modicum of social value". (A Book Named John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure v. Attorney General of Massachusetts, (1966). 7- Under FCC rules and federal law, radio stations and over-the-air television channels cannot air obscene material at any time and cannot air indecnet material between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m.: Language or material that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory organs or activities (indecency is less intense in degree than obscenity).

Robert Mapplethorpe's Man in Polyester Suit (1980's). Robert found "god" in a gay bar called Sneakers one drizzly September evening in 1980 after leaving Keller's [a former S& M bar that was now a gathering place for men interested in biracial sex]." Robert saw Milton Moore pacing up and down West Street, and was instantly transfixed by his beautiful face and forlorn stare. Mapplethorpe invited Moore to his apartment. Upon learning of his ambition to become a model, Mapplethorpe agreed to create a portfolio.-- Patricia Morrisoe, "Man in Polyester Suit."

D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (1959 first uncensored edition): "In fact, the most notorious censored works had been books like D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which contained neither photographs nor depictions of unusual sexual acts. (An obscenity ruling against Radclyffe Hall's lesbian classic, The Well of Loneliness, had made it unavailable to the public until 1948.) In particular, Lady Chatterley's Lover had been 'offensive' because of values that no longer held in society: the once scandalous suggestion of a sexual relationship between a working-class man and a woman of higher status. But attempts to revive the book later met with other objections — the explicit sexual language was considered by some to be unacceptable (particularly if seen by 'your' wife or servants). Nevertheless, it was generally felt that the inclusion of explicit sexual descriptions was not by itself sufficient reason to ban a book that had other literary merit, and this exception was written into the 1959 Act, although that otherwise strengthened the law and made seizures by the police much easier." –Carol Avedon and Lee Kennedy, Nudes and Prudes: Pornography and Censorship.

Gustav Coubert's The Origin of the World (1866). Towards the end of the 1860's, Courbet painted a series of increasingly erotic works, culminating in L'Origin du monde, depicting female genitalia and The Sleepers (1866), featuring two women in bed. While banned from public display, the works only served to increase Coubert's notoriety.-- From Wikipedia on Gustav Coubert

Peter Fendi (1796-1842) Fendi became a respectable artist of the old Viennese school; however, behind his aristocratic mask, Fendi produced some of the crudest erotic imagery of the 19th century. As befits Europe's capital of the skin trade, Amsterdam has two competing sex museums. This one, on Damrak, the divey strip between the station and Dam Square, is the best. Has copies of Indian temple sculpture, pulsating Aubrey Beardsley penises, fun eighteenth-century engravings by Austrian 'orgy artist' Peter Fendi and flickery nineteenth-century films, alongside historical ethno-smut such as ivory dildos and Maori copulation carvings. Opened in 1985, this is the original sex museum. Bizarre touch: a life-size moving sculpture of a flasher. -- A 2000 Dutch travel-agency flyer

Anonymous engravings accompanying the 1797 Dutch edition of Marquis de Sade's The Story of Juliette. The work of the Marquis de Sade, like that of Nietzsche, constitutes the intransigent critique of practical reason... Justine, the virtuous sister, is a martyr for the moral law. Juliette draws the conclusion that the bourgeosie wanted to ignore: she demonizes Catholicism as the most-up-to-date mythology, and with it civilization as a whole...In all of this Juliette is by no means fanatical....her procedures are enlightened and efficient as she goes about her work of sacrilege. Julitte embodies... the pleasures of attacking civilization with its own weapons. She favours system and consequence. She is a proficient manipulator of the organ of rational thought.-- Mark Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightment.

Aubrey Beardsley's Lysistrata (1890's). Even in the last year of his life Beardsley wrote to a friend, "Do you want any erotic drawings?" According to Katherine Lyon Mix in her book A Study in Yellow, "though Beardsley hated evil, he was fascinated by it. A friend declared: 'It was always an enigma to me how and where he acquired all the knowledge of the dark side of life which his work seemed to indicate.'" This is what John Reed has to say about Beardsley's art: "He employed a highly artificial style on subjects that were intensely literary, often of course because they were book illustrations. His designs tease and tantalize, offering no rest for the eye; they often require an illumination of their details before the compositions can be mentally reordered. Living creatures become elements imprisoned within designs that promise no freedom from their empty destinies. Beardsley looked upon the world and found it ugly, but this judgment did not prevent him from converting that ugliness into a painful beauty."--John Reed, The Decadent Style.

François Boucher's Naked Girl (1703-1770). Boucher was a French painter, noted for his pastoral and mythological scenes, whose work embodies the frivolity and sensuousness of the rococo style: "Boucher's patrons lived the lives ordinary people fantasize about: lives of luxury, power, sensual indulgence, elegance, distraction, leisure and wit. What they fantasized about was a distant innocence: the carefree existence of living dolls frolicking with happy animals through feathery groves, by clear waters, under blue silk skies with clouds as soft and white as toy sheep, in sweet landscapes punctuated by the romantic melancholies of classical ruins--picturesque reminders of the transience of worldly power. There is not even much eroticism in these Arcadias, but an almost virginal sensuality: a ballet of indolent flirtation in a setting of curls and flowers. "-- Arthur Danto, On François Boucher, The Nation.

Francisco Goya's Maja Desnuda (1805). In 1813, the Spanish Inquisition confiscated both Goya's Naked and Dressed Maja paintings as "obscene works". He was called before the Inquisition to explain this painting, one of the few nudes in Spanish art at that time. They were confined in San Fernando Academy of Fine Arts for many years and finally entered the Prado in September 1901.

The Western world is obsessed with sex. It is used as a marketing tool, as a weapon in political struggle, as the mainstay of modern journalism and as the daily fodder of soap operas and afternoon shows. In the process, its currency has been debased. Sex has become mechanical — to the point where modern sex education concentrates on biology, contraception, social responsibility and the prevention of disease. In contrast, the ancient instructional tracts discuss the aesthetic aspects of sex, its joys and its delights. The humanist writing of the Renaissance and the erotic memoirs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries speak of its robust pleasures. Artists and painters have also struggled to depict the human sexual experience. For in sex we are most truly human — at once both animal and god-like.-- Nigel Cawthorne, The Secrets of Love: The Erotic Arts Through the Ages.