Art and Obscenity

Kerstin Mey

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9780857732781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Théorie et critique de l'art

Explicit material is more widely available in the internet age than ever before, yet the concept of 'obscenity' remains as difficult to pin down as it is to approach without bias: notions of what is 'obscene' shift with societies' shifting mores, and our responses to explicit or disturbing material can be highly subjective. In this intelligent and sensitive book, Kerstin Mey grapples with the work of twentieth-century artists practising at the edges of acceptability, from Hans Bellmer through to Nobuyoshi Araki, from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Sprinkle, and from Hermann Nitsch to Paul McCarthy. Mey refuses sweeping statements and 'knee-jerk' responses, arguing with dexterity that some works, regardless of their 'high art' context, remain deeply problematic, whilst others are both groundbreaking and liberating.

Chapter 1

‘I Know It When I See It’

On the definition and history of the category of the obscene

After having immured themselves with everything that was best able to satisfy the senses through lust ... the plan was to have described to them, in the greatest detail and in due order, every one of debauchery’s extravagances, all its divagations, all its ramifications, all its contingencies ... There is simply no conceiving degree to which man varies them when his imagination grows inflamed.

Marquise de Sade¹

Let’s begin with the question: what is obscene? Generally speaking, obscene signifies something that offends or outrages, because it defies accepted standards of decency, civility or modesty. Obscenity is connected to feelings of repulsion and disgust. Within the context of the law, it is regarded as something that has the tendency to morally corrupt or deprave.

The obscene has often been used synonymously with the pornographic and in close alignment with indecency. Yet, crucially, there are significant differences between obscenity and pornography. ‘Obscenity’ covers a far broader area than sexually explicit and alluring representations seeking to gratify the desires of the flesh that come under the term of pornography. ‘It is also applied to the unacceptable horrors of everyday life: the obscenity of war, poverty, wealth, racism, murder ... obscenity most often connotes excess, violence and transgression.’²

There is an important link between obscenity and taboo. Anchored in the prevalent historical notion of public morality and cultural customs, every society places certain areas of human practice and modes of conduct off-limits, marking them as forbidden and guarding them vigilantly as taboos. Enforced social prohibition applies particularly but not exclusively to matters of sexual engagement: incest, i.e. the sexual intercourse between very close relatives such as brother and sister; paedophilia, the sexual abuse of children; necrophilia, the sexual interaction with dead bodies. Transgressions of such taboos, which also include cannibalism, are considered obscene in the sense of abhorrent, repugnant and objectionable.

The term ‘obscene’ has been linked to the Greek term ob skene (‘off stage’), as violent acts in Greek theatre were committed away from the eyes of the audience: offstage, behind the scenes. Descending into the Latin obscensus in the sixteenth century, this sense was kept alive, coming to mean that something should be kept ‘out of public view’.³ Then, it was mainly used in a legal context to describe expressions that deviate from prevalent norms especially of ‘sexual morality’; and it was applied as a characteristic particularly when obscene representations were employed as a means to criticise religious and/or political authority, for instance, in the context of carnival and caricature. Only in 1857 did the term enter the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary.

Definitions, connotations and pragmatic applications of the term have differed over time and still vary in and between cultures, communities and amongst individuals. The varying use of the term obscenity and the criteria for its definition in the history of western culture reveal important aspects of the changing concept(s) and attitudes beneath it. As a value category its common associations with the ‘off-the-scene’, with social norms, manners and customs, with official culture or art and jurisdiction prove equally significant.

In relation to the offstage, or off-the-scene, obscenity came to cover those aspects of cultural (life) practices and processes that should remain hidden from public view like sexual intercourse, urination and defecation. Expressing an aesthetic aversion – the horrible and repulsive – its concept is inextricably linked to the gradual emergence of a private-public dichotomy as a feature of a developing bourgeois society and the onset of modernity in the fifteenth century. It is interwoven with the establishment of a historically dynamic, socially and culturally defined faceted sense of shame and modesty related to bodily functions and sexual matters. Those evolving norms of social conduct and their display were highly inflected by hegemonic gender and racial relations and informed by the morals of the time.⁴ There is an ‘aesthetic alliance of the culturally and historically defined sense of shame with the ideal of beauty – the uninhibited representation offends the shame and soils the beautiful’, as Georges Bataille, the French writer, anthropologist and philosopher, has argued with regard to the transgressiveness of the erotic act.⁵ The exclusion of sexuality from aesthetics is anchored in the Cartesian split between body and mind that has been confounding for western thought for centuries. It is undeniable that the Church had an intensely formative and long-lasting influence on this constellation in the Judaeo-Christian societies in and beyond Western Europe. For the emerging and established bourgeois culture there, ‘just-sublimation’ and aestheticisation gained primacy, at least officially, rather than an unqualified permission of sensual pleasures and carnal lust. But then, capitalist culture, as the German philosopher Marx so aptly analysed, is fundamentally defined by double standards.

Walter Kendrick, an American specialist in English Literature, observes that obscenity as a cultural phenomenon and discursive category concurs with the emergence of the ‘secret museum’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, i.e. those hidden archives of material barred from free public access, be it indexes of restricted material or ‘uncatalogued holdings’ or locked rooms. It lies at the centre of the regulation of cultural consumption on socially defined moral and legal grounds. The British Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, proclaimed in 1868:

I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.⁶

In terms of its performative dimension, i.e. in the way it ‘works’ in the use of language, the obscene does not only denote act(ion)s or objects that ‘inspire disgust’ and moral depravation. The term does not merely signify that something is shifted beyond the accepted social and cultural norms for the articulations of carnal desires, and libidinal drives – those psychic and emotional energies that are associated with instinctual biological energies. The term obscenity is itself constituted through the performance of public/legal/cultural discourse around those objects and actions in tandem with gradually emerging and expanding, and increasingly sophisticated, mass-communication and information networks: print media, broadcasting, and the Internet.

The obscene in the context of official jurisdiction is located in the field of cultural representation, be it text, visual, audiovisual or multimedia material. More precisely, it is situated at the interface of the domains of the aesthetic, the legal and the moral, and it is constructed through the public debates and mediations of these value systems. In other words, nothing is obscene per se. Like the aesthetic, the moral and the legal, the obscene essentially is a value judgement and a cultural category produced through processes of reification. In such a process, an abstract value-inflected idea becomes attached to or embodied in a concrete object/act/event, which, in turn, functions as a precedent, benchmark or test case for the application of the concept to other objects/acts/events.

Throughout its history, however, attempts to establish a clear, watertight and consensual definition of the obscene and what it entails have constantly encountered immense difficulties. The popular statement ‘I know it when I see it’ conveys a standard attitude in this regard. As received opinion, it has verbally informed judgments in legal cases, where the charge of obscenity has been levelled at objects or acts (and its initiators, producers or exhibitors); and, with that charge, demands for the enforcement or challenge of official censorship measures have been raised. Yet, only in 1964 was it set down in writing for the first time, when US Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart included this sentiment in his ‘concurrence’ on a particular disputed motion picture film in a censorship court case, admitting, ‘“Hard-core pornography” was hard to define, but ... “I know it when I see it”.’⁷ This brief remark, on the basis of which the film in question was acquitted, summarises aptly the contested territory and dynamics that are the hallmark of the obscene.

The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, has demonstrated that the process of categorisation is inextricably linked to power and control. It works in the interest of those who impose distinctions and the values these promote and affirm. In the first volume of his unfinished project The History of Sexuality, he describes the processes through which sexuality has entered public speech from the Enlightenment period onward:

There was a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex – specific discourses, different from one another both by their form and by their object: a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.⁸

Foucault emphasises that licit as well as illicit discourses were on the increase at that time. Whilst the ‘tightening up of the rules of decorum likely did produce, as a countereffect, a valorization and intensification of indecent speech’, its is important to note that the ‘discourses concerning sex in the field of exercise of power itself’ multiplied:

an institutional incitement to speak about it [sex], and to do so more and more; a determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear it spoken about, and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.⁹

In Foucault’s view, such an incitement was provided through the Catholic ‘confessions of the flesh’. In the twentieth century, other forms of discourse and knowledge production, such as psychoanalysis, fuelled this development. Whilst the language for those kinds of reporting on sexual desires and behaviour became increasingly refined and veiled, the scope of depiction expanded significantly too. What the Church had begun was continued by the sciences – psychology, biology, medicine and economics too. Sexuality became not only more and more regulated and controlled through public discourse(s), it also became pathologised – all that in order to impose a form of sexuality in support of a functioning social system.¹⁰ In other words, the category of the obscene is not at all innocent or neutral. It has been subject to political interests and instrumentalisation for the purpose of maintaining or contesting social power and control by social (and religious) group(s), prompting and justifying the device and application of censorship measures. These measures are administered to monitor and suppress cultural practices, expressions and discourses deemed deviant, perverse and pathological, and therefore morally corrupting and potentially socially dangerous or destabilising.

For western society, Foucault attests a gradual substitution of discourses and knowledge produced on sexuality based on elements of erotic arts. Ars erotica, that is the self-reflective, autotelic art to induce pleasure ‘understood as a practice and accumulated by experience’, was superseded by a scientia sexualis, a science of sexuality.¹¹ The latter can be understood as ‘procedures for telling the truth of sex which are geared to a form of knowledge-power strictly opposed to the art of initiations and the masterful secret’.¹² In a civilisation that did not endow itself with a developed, if any, ars erotica – unlike other cultures such as China or India – sex(uality) became increasingly exposed to interrogation, interpretation and medicalisation. This included an implantation of sexual perversions for practices outside the accepted heterosexual norm, and varied forms of repression anchored in the establishment of truth(s) values, rather than emotional and physical excitement and fulfilment.¹³

Definitions of the obscene are informed by an assessment of its projected damaging effects on the recipients of actions or objects. The German writer and philosopher Ludwig Marcuse, who concentrates his discussion of the obscene on the pornographic, pronounces that those effects are not just detrimental physiological stimulations, but also ‘unhealthy’ incentives to the imagination.¹⁴ Such an approach, however, raises the question of who is making that judgement for whom here. Certain social groups where considered to be morally vulnerable and in need of legal protection from the smutty and excessive through the obscenity laws that emerged during the mid nineteenth century across Europe, followed by the USA towards the end of that century. They came from those social sections that were in the process of gaining wider access to and participation in cultural consumption (and production) due to a democratisation of culture: women and the lower classes.¹⁵ The democratisation of culture was founded on advances in industrial production and, in particular, on the new means. Moving on from the fifteenth-century Gutenberg press and forms of manual reproductions such as the wood, engraving or etching to photography and lithography in the nineteenth century enabled a more labour- and cost-efficient mechanical mass reproduction of texts and images, and thus fuelled their broader and ‘promiscuous’ circulation and accessibility. As Kendrick observes: ‘There has never been a society – until our own – in which all representations were available equally to any observer at any time.’¹⁶ This situation produced a greater need for the regulation and control of all representations through a number of interrelated mechanism, including censorship, policies for the funding of art and culture, interventions into the market, etc.

The democratisation of culture has been bound up with an amplification of the cultural divide between high art and popular/folk culture, with the gulf between cultural elitism and mass production/consumption. The modern concept of obscenity is intertwined with the advances in mass reproduction, information and communication. It has assumed a divisive role as a separating force between different areas of culture. It also functions as a gauging support for the polarisations between erotic arts and pornography, high and popular culture, cultural industry and autonomous, elitist art. This dividing function has remained intact despite the growing fluidity and mobility of visual images and objects between different cultural domains such as fine arts and graphic design or advertising, video art and video games, mainstream and independent or art-house film, for example.

When discerning what might be obscene by considering the potential effect of an object/action/event, the context that informs and is informed by its pragmatic dimension and the intentions of its producer(s) with regard to the object/action/event’s desired effect play a crucial role. This might be even more applicable for the closely connected category of the pornographic, insofar as the arousal of carnal desires depends on the situation of its incitement. For instance, the explicit representation of sexual organs in the context of sex education and health promotion campaigns relating for instance to sexually transmitted diseases, or the depiction of violence in campaigns against drink-driving as well as the gruesome details of anatomic displays are usually not considered obscene on the basis of their enlightening function. They are seen to predominantly appeal to the intellect rather then to the flesh.

The same may hold true for homoerotic depictions in the context of gay rights publicity that are directed at public enlightenment and advocacy. On the other hand, the showing of lesbian love scenes in magazines for men or in the tabloid press is openly and above all directed at the sensual stimulation of the male readership. In this sense, the pornographic is more aligned with leisure and hedonism rather than with education and enlightenment. For Marcuse, amongst others, the intention of the producer plays a decisive role for the perceived effect of the work, i.e. whether a textual (audiovisual) or multimedia representation was made with the direct intention to arouse or deprave.¹⁷ Yet moving along such a slippery slope immediately raises – by inference – questions regarding the status of the producer and it points to those valorising institutional frameworks, groups and individuals, who have the power to confer such status.

In the educational context, however, ‘innocent’ intentions or the context of art do not always provide a safeguard against the perceived powerful effects the display of explicit sexuality (and violence) as the example of the Venus of Willendorf (30,000–18,000 BC) demonstrates. Although the small limestone artefact would not have been labelled obscene in the context of her or...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ‘I Know It When I See It’: On the definition and history of the category of the obscene
• Chapter 2 Transgressive Rituals
• Chapter 3 Abjection and Dis-ease
• Chapter 4 Violent Images: Aesthetic Simulations
• Chapter 5 ‘Playing with the Dead’: The cadaver as fascinosum
• Chapter 6 Anti-Normative Acts: Radical liberation?
• Chapter 7 Obscenity and the Documentary Tradition
• Chapter 8 Recycled Fantasies: Obscenity between kitsch, convention and innovation
• Chapter 9 ‘Know Thyself’?
• Chapter 10 Digital (Counter-)Currents
• Chapter 11 Cyber-(ob)scene
• Notes
• Bibliography