ARTS V- Entertainment
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ARTS V- entertainment Titian Schlummernde Venus” (1510) Erotica? Pornography? Who Sees What? rt and the erotic and/or pornographic image have maintained a long and in cestuous alliance. Indeed, perhaps the first known work of sculpture recovered, the Paleolithic “ Venus of Wildendorf” reflects in a size somewhat larger than a person’s thumb a avoluptuous fem ale form radiating with sexual potency. The representation of woman as sexual goddess has continued to preoccupy virtually every cultural epoch. Our own age is no ex ception. In fact, images of women in a sexual context have become so alarmingly com monplace that one is coerced into endorsing it. And that is precisely why the accelerated ex ploitation of these images through the media is so insidious. A naked woman lying suggestively upon a bed is a scene celebrated and culturally legitamatized by Titian, Rembrandt, Goya, Watteau, Manet and just about every other greater or lesser talent that has applied paint to a surface. This particular kind of image has become so ingrained in us that we accept and even pay homage to it as part of our history. In both a high and low art form people of both sexes continue to help foster and encourage it. The men who buy Playboy and the women who buy Cosmopolitan are, in truth, purchasing one and the same image. In fact, we have become so saturated with these images that they tend to cancel one another out, leaving us benumbed to their subtle manipulation. This is commonplace, a fam iliar aspect of everyday life. We are continually, through the various media, assaulted with seductive images, images which are often dangerously por nographic. It’s all so inescapable. But what about art? What has its role become? Shouldn’t art be a refuge from the vulgar? Shouldn’t it ennoble and enlighten? Must art also propagate the spiritual, cultural, political and economic enslavement of a society through this coarse stereotype? It is naive idealism to believe that art and por nography are antithetical to one another. Art, like life, is not exempt from sleaze. The history of art has bequeathed to us too many exasperating examples of hard and soft-core images to trumpet its Olympian moral stature. Sue Coe; (1983) When Gustave Courbet, one of the great vir- “ W o m a n Walks into a Bar, Is Raped by Four Men on a Pool Table, While 20 Watch" (See EROTICA, p.3A) 2A Thursday, May 15,1966 Daily Nexus EXTRA VA GANZA '86 ^ f t V j u r N o Bottles or Kegs 7 * I FREE FREE FREE FREE FREE M A Y 17 • SATURDAY HARDER STADIUM Lone Justice Bring UCSB Student I.D. The Busboys Babylon Warriors 9 Ä o S £ d ^ Fishbone I.V. Allstars * 1 7 SPONSORS: ■WOODSTOCK'S TTZZA CTOLDS CTYM A.S. N otetaking & Publications Services • UCen Bookstore • Swatch • Espresso Roma • Woodstock's Pizza • Pizza Bob's • Subway • Sir Speedy Pizza • The Ultimate Clothing Co. • The Rental Network • The Graduate • Sam's To Go • Ocean Pacific Sunwear • Daily Nexus Thursday, May 15,1966 3A UCen Gallery Last Week's Show EROTICA... Seven large canvases draped the ceiling, walls, and floor of a dimly lit (Continued from front page) (for personal collections not necessariy intended for UCen Gallery. Covered with tones of white, black, grey and an acidic yellow, tuoso painters of the 19th century, depicts the public display). Today, many contemporary artists, some are abstract, allowing the viewer to roam through ambiguity. Others salaciously exposed sex of a woman, art history Salle not the least among them, use pornography in are representational, conveying a sense of real forms. Still others, a shuffles its feet and pretends not to look. Or, far the name of art to captivate their widespread disembodied figure for instance, are abstractions rooted in the physical worse, when the darling of 19th century French audience. They claim the auspices of past artists, that world. Amidst the canvases a group of sculptured busts, all alike, spiral in a academic painting, Bougereau, represents a peasant they are continuing and building on erotic tradition in hierarchical procession toward the ceiling. Hollowed out, they sit atop girl near a well with a broken jug and remorseful look, art. It is, however, one thing to use art in the name of gauze-covered columns of various sizes that taper downward. Sounds of it is treated with a bland superciliousness by the same eroticism, and quite another to perpetuate por muffled voices, footsteps, and closing doors contribute to the overall effect. art history. Both images gain strength through this nography in the name of art. For those who took the opportunity to experience the untitled installation tacit refusal to address the issue of why these artists Another dilemma in drawing the vague line between by art studio senior Bryan Burkhart in the UCen Gallery from May 5-10, the have chosen (Courbet, at least, in a more honest way) art and pornography is the problem of intention and venture was an insightful and enjoyable break from the pressing concerns of to perpetuate a dangerously demeaning image of perception. Sue Coe’s 1983 work Woman Walks into a the day. women for the titillation of male patrons. Bar, Is Raped by Four Men on a Pool Table While 20 Burkhart’s formal undertaking was an ambitious one: to transform a Contemporary art has appropriated Courbet’s Watch is based on a brutal incident, originally incited white-walled rectangular room into a more complex space. A ceiling canvas, graphic vulgarity. Art, after all, is voyeurism; the by a Penthouse article. The painting is a horrific, depicting a team of masked surgeons whose hanging garb reinforces their artist acts as the transmitter of images to the violently graphic commentary against the imposing scale, peer down at the participant (view er), who in turn looks patronvoyeur. Television has continued to escalate this glamorization of rape. Yet who’s to stop some twisted down upon a floor canvas of figures standing around a trampoline. The effect voyeuristic tendency in our culture. Contemporary mind from interpreting this as arousing, and thus of the canvases creates enlarged vertical space in both directions, placing television has claimed Bourgereau’s “ tee-hee-hee, unintentionally furthers existing violence against the participant on middle ground. The physical position of the participant hubba hubba” approach of its own. (One need only women? The artist’s intention helps to determine the produces tension, as he/she is seemingly under the control of the figures watch reruns of Three’s Company to see the fruition of statement of the art, but ultimately it is up to the above, and in control of the situation below. Burkhart achieves these effects Bourgereau’s watered-down lust through innuendo.) At spectator, the individual, on how s/he wants to in with excellent draughtsmanship and handling of line. the present time when values in art and television terpret the work. In the end, the power of artistic He refrained from titling the installation, preferring for the participant to appear frighteningly similar it is useful to remember commentary and persuasion is limited by how the interact with the expressiveness of the work in his or her own way. The that art and Courbet can still brutally shock us while audience choses to percieve it. images mirror in some way the experience of the artist. television and Bourgereau cannot. Though the artist still has the power to shock, that Ultimately, Burkhart is concerned with conveying the same ideas and Today, Wesselman presents faceless, pop visions of power has been drastically reduced. The artist has feelings on various levels, and from different perspectives. Control and lack women as human as wallpaper; Robert Longo offers been engulfed by the media’s increasing flood of of control, along with the feelings that accompany this situation, are at the us an intimate yet strangely alienating view of images and is restricted within the same psychological heart of the work. This situation and feeling permeate not only the images copulation, and rather more disturbing, David Salle confines as the society that patronizes her/him. Artists presented, but also the process of integrating those images, and the ex layers his painted tableaux with patently degrading and their calling, like everything else in life, can fall perience of interacting with those images. In this sense, artist and par images of women. Is this pornography, or merely prey to corruption. It could be that painters like David ticipant are aligned, the artwork between the two. eroticism? Or is it something else? Salle have sacrificed themselves to the revulsion we — Paul Scolari Many past masters have used their artistic abilities all share. Perhaps it is just these images of revulsion for erotic, perhaps even pornographic reasons. Bon in the context of a r t-----an inescapably serious forum nard obsessively painted his wife in the bathtub, and -----that will ultimately incite the communal cry of Baroque artists such as Boucher and Fragonard often “ we’ve had enough", the magic phase out of which the painted their client’s mistresses in suggestive poses truly marvelous is engendered. — Shirley Tatum Shankar Comes to Campbell Arts & Lectures presents master luring the last 20 years, largely due ballet. His poignant score for film sitar player Ravi Shankar in ;o Shankar’s influence on con- director Satyajit Ray’s celebrated Campbell Hall on Friday, May 16 at om n/ipom r U/ocfom m nci/nanc ciii'h Apu trilogy raised film music to a 8 p.m. Tickets are on sale now. new standard of excellence.