letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
the
web, porn, paris and art
This
is part one, part two is here, part three is found
here.
Want
big internet exposure? How about all those Amazon.com type sites, surely they
get huge traffic and dollars? No. All of the online purchase sites together account
for around 15% of internet dollars. Business to business activity, now that's
pretty big you might think. Well yes, that heavy weight comes in at around 35-40%
of internet dollars. And the 45% left? - that is the domain of the porn site...
Paris
is historically noted for its cabarets, whores, & sex shops and has cultivated
a commercial side of soft and hard porn. Money, photography and the Internet made
pornography a staple, and gave it a business model. As for art, sex has been embedded
in French art, and world art for centuries. In the contemporary art world, artists
have moved specifically into sex and porn as a thematic region. Sex and art are
certainly well out of the closet in 2001. You are forewarned that the following
articles in this series contains links, discusses material and has art images
of an adult nature. Images with a red border are links to larger views.
dirty
pictures
Dirty
pictures are a true fascination, aren't they? Actually any pictures are fascinating,
for a while, at least. But "dirty" or pornographic images fascinate because in
their graphic directness they strike a primordial chord and vibrate physically
as they echo about the groin. Like pictures of car accidents. They are effective
communication. They hook.
Pornography
in its hardest core form doesn't necessarily stoke the erotic imagination, but
with the advent of snapshot cameras, scanners, and an internet connection, writhing
images of naked men and women do get seen. And by a lot of people. Loud and persistent,
real dirty pictures blatantly cry out: Look at me!
Did
art ever do that? Yes, certainly. Goya's saturn devouring one of his children
(1821-1823) [1] has a potent and fascinating effect on most everyone who witnesses
it. Horror. It is clearly shocking, and you might actually hide it from the children.
And not because the Spaniard was considered to be by some the father of modern
art.
Picasso's
les demoiselles d'avignon (1907) [2], a line up of prostitutes shocked
a public at the time, but its "salle caractere" has long worn off and the "masterpiece"
has become a critical piece of cubism.
Before
photography of course, paintings (and to an extent, sculpture) were the main ingredients
in the average human's diet of images. Whether religious, instructional or inspirational
in their depiction of nature or culture, the painted image was one always filtered
by the human hand, and never depicted "reality." But rather, imagination.
American
painter Frederick Church charged a nickel at the time before photography to see
his panoramic views of the West. Hundreds lined up to see the curtains pulled
back and wow. But the subject and the response wasn't sexually charged. And that's
really what we want, isn't it? Even from "abstract" work.
Perhaps
"French postcards," [3] which came into vogue with the advent of the camera in
the late 19th Century, and showed robust and enticing nude women displayed the
first signs that photography could and would effectively lift the curtain on the
human body for a mass audience. So long Cézanne! A private --even secret--viewing,
this kind of peek under the sheets proved satisfying to a hungry public.
The
French were among the first to dabble in the aesthetics of pornography in the
20th Century, seeking not only to demystify the most banal of physical functions
and desire but to capitalize on them as well. Frenchman Marcel Duchamp's Pissoir
(1917) signed R. Mutt didn't achieve erotic status, but many thought it was "pornographic"
at the time, a success story; his
last work, etant donnés (1966) could be about pornographic voyeurism
but ends up now, as a cliché.
The
Americans soon took over. Jeff Koons documented his short marriage with Italian
porn start Ciccolina with revealing photos, melding art and pornography into a
single oeuvre. Photographer Larry Clark's book of adolescents copulating also
checks in with the same electric charge.
Mapplethorpe's
[4] explicit sexual photographs were both erotic and pornographic, depending upon
which side of the curtain you were on. Politics and religion knocked angrily on
the door slipping search warrants through to the other side, making a household
name of the late and now taboo artist.
Contemporary
photographers Sally Mann and Jock Sturges have faced ample complaints about their
portraits of naked young children, some judging them pornographic, others "very
beautiful." Some success was achieved in the work's ambiguity, but the real success
- and that is in the diffusion of images - arrived with the celebrity of the artist
who dared. Art's secret not-really-secret weapon was always sex, explicit or implied.
french roots?
While not exclusively a French phenomenon (most cultures evolved a pornographic
sensibility), pornography does find some deep roots in France. In literature,
for example, with the writings of the Marquis de Sade. Jailed in the Bastille
for his blatant sexual descriptions of libertine domination of innocence, that
is methodically sodomizing youth, de Sade generated a reaction that was pretty
direct: arousal or disgust. And this regardless of his artistic intention.
These
days, however, pornography offers no such exclusive aim, even though the lighting
might be spectacular. Cheap to produce, it is no wonder digital images of fornicating
naked men and women have flourished in the flowerbed of the Internet. Computers
now permit more than 400 million people accessing the global network to be not
only journalists and publishers of "hot" digital files, but collectors as well.
Paris, historically
noted for its cabarets, whores, and sex shops has cultivated a commercial side
of soft and hard porn. Women are routinely shown naked in showers in advertisements,
showing off a new kind of shampoo for instance, or body cream. Sex sells. Still.
A poster for black socks (from Bleuforêt), for example, currently adorns Paris
Metro stops. Shown is a model in a revealing black bikini underwear. "Yeah, but
what do you think of my socks?" she asks. But that's not pornography, that's advertising.
It's selling something else.
Photography
and the Internet made pornography a staple, and gave it a business model. With
a good deal of current porn free of charge, pictures of "movie stars"
and "the girl next door" circulate like the common cold. You pay if you want more,
and the categories for viewing are staggering with every possible activity and
potential subject up for sale from pregnant women lesbians to aged amputees.
So
what's new about it? Not a lot, except that there's a lot more of it and surfers
seem more interested in Debbie than da Vinci. Downloads for Frenchman Daniel Buren's
stripe screen savers pale in comparison to the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. One
reason is the ease of which scanned amateur snap shots, a web site host combined
with links tossed out in chat rooms and e-mail, is how pornography often finds
its "market." In the process, dirty pictures are residing on hard drives world
wide.
So where's
the art?
German
artist Thomas Ruff's recent exhibit at Galerie Nelson in Paris, tinkered with
the omnipresence of web pornography, peeling off images he found and modifying
some to the extent that, well, very little changed; the images are fuzzy. One
is still "looking at hard core" images. And yes, in their new "art" form, they've
been tossed back into the web [5]. There appears to be little or no significant
difference once the titles and the explanation are removed. Maybe there is little
difference between an artist showing images of people having sex and an Internet
site promoting the same thing.
This
article has been serialise into three parts, part two can
be found here. Part 2 looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery
and film, and reviews the response from officialdom. "The film [Baise-moi]
has been politicized for its hard core sex and its artistic intentions, and while
it in fact features several porn stars, the Baise-moi has become the bastard French
poster child for the freedom of artistic expression."
Back
to top
Matthew
Rose is a Paris-based artist and writer. He is currently writing an online novel,
small time losers. His e-mail is: mistahrose@yahoo.com.
Notes
1. Source: http://www.imageone.com/goya/saturn.html
2. Source: http://hipernet.ufsc.br/wm/paint/auth/picasso/people/avignon/index.html
3. Source: http://www.3rd-4th.com/erotic.htm
4. Source: http://cmp1.ucr.edu/exhibitions/w_m/wm1.html
Image - Robert Mapplethorpe, thomas, 1986; Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation,
© 1986, Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe. Used by permission
5. Source: http://www.galerie-nelson.com/pages/artists/ruff.html
affiliates
