letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
the
web, porn, paris and art: dirty
pictures part three
Part 1 is here; click this
link for Part 2. Images with a red border are links to a larger view.
cultural sexual
satisfaction?
The
Pompidou Center which has a history of the high-low culture dialog, mounted some
years ago the blockbuster "Feminimasculin: Le sexe de l'art" (24 Oct 1995 - 12
February 1996) in an attempt to bring the relationship out in the open. Its opening
gambit was the Gustave Courbet's 1866 l'orgine du monde, an oil on canvas
image of a woman's vagina.
What
followed was a catalog of hundreds of artworks featuring the sex act and sex parts,
gender benders and transvestite images, such as Zoe Leonard's Marilyn Monroe-esque
jennifer miller pin up # 1, 1995. Compelling in its breadth and academic
whirlwind, the Parisian public flocked to see it before the widespread dissemination
of Netscape plugins and the browser wars. Would they now?
A
more recent Pompidou exhibition, Let's
Entertain (Au dela la spectacle) which can also be seen at the Walker
Art Center touches upon similar although much less academic themes. This wasn't
a catalog raisoné of a tendency, but a night club act. American imports like Paul
McCarthy, whose bunkhouse involves a mad dog mannequin seemingly getting
a blowjob from a woman. All done up in Disney plastic, a view from another window
shows an extremely violent act: The dog is mechanically slamming a steel rod (instead
of penis) not into the mouth of the man we discover, but into his eye. The little
red house moved on a grid to what effect I could not discern. I casually asked
several French female visitors what they thought. "Disgusting," said one, laughing.
"That's pornographic," said another, clearly fascinated.
In
the same show, a fiberglass and resin sculpture, my lonesome cowboy by
Takashi Murakami, puts the cream in the sauce - a human-sized Japanimation character
with a lifesized penis stands all pink and excited - masturbating, his jism rises
in the air like an comet around him. Very pretty, very childish but keeping the
kitsch in the kitchen of contemporary artmaking. A female English artist seeing
it commented: "Well it could be erotic." A guard at the exhibit, also female,
thought it was just plain "stupid." Different strokes for different folks no doubt.
But porn images
are like the French fry: however raw and uncooked or oily or salty they are, we
just consume more of them. And in more and more varieties. Internet dating clubs
have formed to cater to the range of proclivities. If there is a key to attracting
new members, it's usually visuals, not some fancy ad copy. The web site http://www.bme.freeq.com/
has found its audience of hard core piercing enthusiasts. Its gridwork of samples
from members has a post modern feel to it, doesn't it? Realdolls offers another
view: synthetic blowup sex toys that could be a cousin of Jake and Dino Chapman
(http://www.sym.net/cabot/text.html). Pornography makes the case for art in a
weird round about way, if only as a business model. The essential premise, again,
is: "Look at me."
Tanja
Ostojic, a Serbian artist, has produced a work of art that offers a hook of this
kind but with a twist: tre une princess had Otojic in The Chateau Beaumanoir
wearing 19th century clothes and underwear (from The Chateau) in the bedroom,
the bathroom, dining room and the garden. One photo shows the artist as a young
man, and the work she says "deals with French history, my own identity and the
dreams of every little girl." Eleven photographs were taken and show in The Chateau's
Pink Salon.
But
the artist is more well known for a nude performance and it is no surprise that
she found in France a receptive audience--it helped her earn a residency in the
Cité Internationale des Arts. Performed in nearby Luxembourg (Manifesta 1998),
"Personal Space" had Ostojic completely shaved of all body hair, naked and standing
motionless for an hour. A living statue covered in a half a kilo of white marble
dust.. She took the public's excuse to oogle her to say something about looking
and seeing, and being. Tanja wasn't trying to jerk the public off but rather open
them up to her nearly political idea of purity. The same is true of her husband
project. Here, she is nude and shaved again, without the marble dust, "advertising"
for a husband with an EU passport. Political and shocking in a way that advertisements
sometimes can be, Ostojic's idea was to examine again how closely mass communications
(internet) and mass consumption (sex) wake up together every day (politics). She
is typical of some of the better artists using the media as art medium--like paint
on canvas--and nakedness as a way to perhaps talk about sex without having it.
Artists are to
an extent employing the character of pornography to attract attention and certainly
museums are following along. It's a hook, no doubt, that sinks its barb into an
ever hungry culture for exotic libidinally engorged images.
Problems
have continued to emerge however in the public sphere. Moral outrage is generally
the call to arms, like in the Brooklyn Museum's sensation show of Brit
artists. While that served to divide the camps (and inflame a public into thronging
the gates!), some people in Bordeaux think many of these contemporary artists
should be brought to trial for their indiscrete creativity. A recently filed lawsuit
by French activist group The Gull, against the Bordeaux exhibit presumés innocents
is making this point: the group show at Bordeaux's CAPC Musée was ostensibly about
childhood but The Gull's suit alleges it was more about child pornography and
violence. The organization wants the artists not only to explain what their message
is to a judge, but is demanding that the work of Christian Boltanski, Paul McCarthy,
Nan Goldin, Mike Kelley, Annette Messager, Tony Oursler among others be destroyed.
Part of the issue,
oddly enough, is globalization of everything from the international signs for
toilets to fashion catalogs. The excuse for the latter is still celebrity: Maximal,
a French magazine for men touts Yamila on the cover in its January 01 issue: Yamila,
the star of Victoria Secret catalogs! Hot Online a new French "internet" magazine
is more exacting: The world's best porn sites, how porn images are made and how
to tell the fake ones from the real ones. Well, that's a bit besides the point,
the message is received and the excuse is made. Richardsonmag.com (which also
offers a print version with text) clearly attempts to be "aesthetic" but without
hesitation promotes vivid porn--hot eye candy. Question: Does anyone read the
text? It's a good question. Probably only the captions if there are any.
In
the end, pornography is ultimately about the self and the other, so it doesn't
need an excuse to exist.
Some
years ago when Netscape first made its browser available for download, I introduced
my then girlfriend to the Internet. (I had actually suggested a movie that night,
but she cried on the phone "you promised to show me the Internet!") "Okay,
okay. What shall we search for?" I asked. Not Poussin, not Picasso… oh no. "Pussy!"
she commanded. We soon enough ran across the rudest bunch of photos. Men and women
eating shit. Women fucking horses. Men fucking cats. Now of course we have KittyPorn
and Stop
Kitty Porn.
Some years later, my cousin who is a retired (and not very wired) psychologist
came to Paris still under the impression this was and is a gleeful city of sin.
"Let's go out and see a show!" What kind of show? "You know, uh, girls..."
I
was glad he didn't want to visit the whores in St. Denis although that experience
might have lasted with us longer. We checked into Crazy Horse, an elegant little
cabaret where nude beauties with electrician's tape over their pubic parts strutted
about to taped favorites from Edith Piaf, while my cousin and I had drinks with
about 100 Japanese tourists. I was a bit bored and clapped unenthusiastically
at the end. Maybe I would have preferred the Internet version.
If
the French still have anything to say about dirty pictures it's that they are
a bit like Dr. Seus. "They like them on the net, they like them hot and wet. They
like them funny they like them mean, they like to get down and dirty with Mr.
Clean!" To prove it, the French have transformed our most famous cleaner-upper
into a transvestite: http://www.monsieurpropre.com/.
He even made it to the cover of the French Culture Pub advertising magazine with
the tagline: L'homo qui lave plus blanc.
Matthew
Rose is a Paris-based artist and writer. His e-mail is: mistahrose@yahoo.com.
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