Art
From Seenoevil
It is not clear how the honestly held but subjective opinion of a potential defendant as to the boundary between art and Pornography will be reconciled with the potentially different opinions of an investigating police officer, the Crown Prosecution Service and ultimately a jury.
The book The Tears of Eros by Georges Bataille provides a useful survey of erotic and obscene artwork from prehistoric times to the 20th century, accompanied by a challenging philosophic commentary. It features realistic images of necrophilia, bestiality and sexual violence by such controversial artists as Carpaccio, Dürer, Correggio, Titian , Tintoretto, Vemeer, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Fuseli, Goya, Ingres, Delacroix, Manet, Cezanne, Degas, Picasso, Magritte, Bellmer, and Bacon, and was banned by the French government in 1961.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the book is Bataille's contention that in medieval Christian artwork, the only way in which nudity and sexuality could be represented without fear of censorship was by linking them with images of suffering, death and decay.
Contents |
Christian Iconography and Violent Sexual Imagery
An important question, with relation to Christian iconography is the one of canonicity.
There is no denying that various realistic images of sexual violence are now accepted within Christian art as aesthetically and spiritually valuable. It is unlikely that these images will be reevaluated under the new law.
However, under the proposed law, it may be that:
- it would be legally dangerous to create new art works which challenged societies values in a similar way, and
- the public would be deprived of their right to possess such new works and assess them themselves without fear of having to justify this possession in a court of law.
The effect: the law will deter artists and the public from challenging the boundaries of tradition and will lead to self-censorship and stagnation of the canon.
Christian Erotic Art
Various commentators have raised the possibility that Christian images of crucifixion and martyrdom can be perversely interpreted and given a sexual interpretation. It is unlikely that these images would be reassessed under the category of the new law.
But there is a more ambiguous current in Christian iconography which is openly erotic, indeed sexual. This can be traced back to the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible (shared by Jewish and Christian tradition).
“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.” [King James’ Bible]
“Although the book never mentions God by name, an allegorical interpretation justified its inclusion in the Biblical canon.”cf Wikipedia article on the Song of Solomon
This tradition is recognised by the most established of authorities:
“How might love be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise? Here we can find a first, important indication in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament book well known to the mystics. According to the interpretation generally held today, the poems contained in this book were originally love-songs, perhaps intended for a Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt conjugal love.”
“The Prophets, particularly Hosea and Ezekiel, described God's passion for his people using boldly erotic images. God's relationship with Israel is described using the metaphors of betrothal and marriage; idolatry is thus adultery and prostitution.”
From the current Pope's first Encyclical
The Song of Solomon, a text which is openly erotic, accommodated into the Christian tradition by drawing out the spiritual overtones of the imagery.
The idea of the relationship between God and humanity being allegorically parallel to (or even on a continuum with) sexual relationships, has empowered certain Christians to describe their spiritual experiences in sexual terms.
The relationship between God and humanity always implies a consideration of power, involving many profound paradoxes. So, necessarily, this religious sexual imagery is sometimes violently sexual, and more problematically still it raises questions of will, consent, agency and passion which are difficult, if not impossible to resolve.
Leda and the Swan
In the National Gallery there is at least one image of bestiality: Michaelangelo is just one of many artists who have interpretted this myth.
The poet W.B. Yeats emphasised the element of sexual violence in the myth, in his sonnet:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By his dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers pushThe feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
How can anybody, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins, engenders thereThe broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
The myth of Leda and the Swan, is one of a God, Zeus, taking on incarnate form and impregnating a human being. It is an image of divine power manifesting itself, terrifyingly, on earth.
For a scholarly analysis of Yeat's poem in the context of debates about censorship and pornography, see this article.
The story of Leda and the Swan provides a brilliant metaphor and counterpoint for the story of the Annunciation. This is not a perverse interpretation – the parallels and differences are a fruitful way of understanding what makes Christianity continuous with the classical world, and how it breaks from it; what makes it unique. See this article for one preacher's close reading of the texts.
The image and the poem are calculated to shock and offend; they are obscene and this gives them their power as spurs to thought. By refracting the biblical story through an image of perverse sexuality, it can be approached afresh when it had perhaps lost its sense of awe and strangeness through overfamiliarity.
Michaelangelo's image, as a canonised artwork, would be safe from the proposed law.
But would a contemporary artist, wishing to raise similar questions by shocking our sensibilities, also be obliged to defend his or her aesthetic decisions in court?
The law would go further than this – it would oblige a contemporary artist's viewing public to do the same.
St Teresa of Avila
Consider this iconic image. It is a realistic representation, made by a man, of a woman's vision.
“I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God. The pain is not bodily, but spiritual; though the body has its share in it. It is a caressing of love so sweet which now takes place between the soul and God, that I pray God of His goodness to make him experience it who may think that I am lying.”
Chapter XXIX; Part 17, Teresa's Autobiography Taken from wikipedia
In her own time St Teresa was persecuted:
“The "Calced" Carmelites—those who did not buy into Teresa’s reforms and fancied that the Discalced looked down on them—were already her mortal enemies. They and some disgruntled Discalced nuns reported to the Inquisition in 1576 that she and Gracián were lovers who led the nuns in orgiastic rituals. The inquisitors ruled that the charges were absurd (Teresa was sixty–one by then and her nuns were indisputably pious), but another Calced conspiracy resulted in Teresa’s being excommunicated and ordered to get out of Andalusia and spend the rest of her days behind the walls of a convent in Castile.” [1]
In modern times, Teresa has been dismissed as a “patron saint of hysteria” by Joseph Breuer, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan stated: "You only have to go and look at Bernini’s statue of her in Rome to understand immediately that she’s coming"
But various feminists (and proto-feminists) have celebrated St Teresa: George Eliot, Vita Sackville–West, Simone de Beauvoir. (these examples are given in the journal First Things).
It may be fairly argued that St Teresa is now canonised, both as a saint, and in the work of art representing her, and therefore would be exempt from the proposed law.
But:
- If St Teresa were alive today, how would one judge whether her experiences were sexual or spiritual, or both? How would one judge a new work of art representing the images described in her autobiography?
It is not wise to leave the definition of spirituality versus carnality, and of the erotic versus the pornographic, to established institutions.
It seems questionable if people are so enlightened today that we we could be sure of being right about a modern-day equivalent to Saint Teresa, when in her own time fellow Roman Catholics were unable to form a sympathetic interpretation of her visions.
The law could be a useful tool for misunderstanding and persecution, by denying the spiritual dimension to an internal experience that expresses itself in the imagery of sexual violence.
