Transgression used to be an artistic tactic. Now it belongs to the far right By Fintan O’Toole: Have shock tactics had their day? THE IRISH TIMES: Sat, Jun 17, 2017 https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/transgression-used-to-be-an-artistic-tactic-now-it-belongs-to-the- far-right-1.3115697 For a long time the hippest word in art criticism was “transgressive”. One of the things that defined a work as modern was the breaking of taboos. And there were so many taboos to break: depictions of sex, obscene language, descriptions of bodily functions, blasphemy. Modernity in art was intertwined with a sense of liberation: the artist was the one who dared to say the unsayable, to reveal what was hidden, to make normal what had been shamefully secret. But here’s the problem: in western culture transgression doesn’t feel liberating any more. Its energy has passed to the far right, and in this transition we have a paradox: transgression is being allied to repression. Modern art defined itself in opposition to mass culture, but also in opposition to the limits imposed by church and state. It represented not just “the shock of the new” but, more obviously, the shock of the shocking. It is impossible for us to appreciate how vile something like Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts, which turns on hereditary syphilis, seemed to quite intelligent and cultured critics. Ibsen’s translator William Archer compiled a lexicon of terms used to describe it in the mainstream English press, among them “abominable, disgusting, bestial, fetid, loathsome, putrid, crapulous, offensive, scandalous, repulsive, revolting, blasphemous, abhorrent, degrading, unwholesome, sordid, foul, filthy, malodorous, noisome.” Virginia Woolf couldn’t bring herself to finish Ulysses, so we don’t know how she would have coped when it gets really filthy, with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy It’s easy, in retrospect, to laugh at these reactions and to write them off as mere reactionary idiocy. But even people who were themselves at the cutting edge of new artistic forms could feel almost physically sick in the presence of work that described the ordinary realities of the human body. Virginia Woolf found Ulysses to be the work of “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples” and “ultimately nauseating”. She couldn’t bring herself to finish it, so we don’t know how she would have coped when it gets really filthy, with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. Language itself was a field of transgression. Well into the 1960s the official stage censor in England, the office of the lord chamberlain, demanded the removal of words we would now consider pretty mild. Joe Orton’s Entertaining Mister Sloane, for example, lost “prat”, “fart”, “shit” and “arse”. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot was shorn of “arses”, “balls” and “I’d like to pee.” It’s easy, too, to forget that western public discourse placed severe limits not just around sex and the body but also around God. Beckett had a terrible time with, as he called him, the lord chamberpot over the very funny prayer sequence in Endgame, which concludes with Hamm’s declaration: “The bastard! He doesn’t exist.” (As Beckett rather reasonably pointed out, this is hardly less offensive to the deity than Jesus’s cry “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) The controversy around Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a 1987 photograph of a plastic statue of Jesus immersed in the artist’s urine, rumbled on for decades in the United States. Censorship is no fun, but the transgression of these boundaries gave the avant-garde much of its energy, from Dada to punk, from surrealism to the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe or Tracey Emin’s installation of her unmade bed and stained sheets. Transgression raised the stakes. It gave an edge of danger and courage even to work that was otherwise mediocre. It made audiences and readers feel that they were involved with the artists in an act of rebellion against bourgeois piety and institutional repression. But this energy declined as the boundaries widened. Capitalist culture turned out to be very good at absorbing the transgressive. The Rolling Stones logo of a tongue sticking out is just another corporate emblem. Sex scenes that would have been scarcely possible in the most outre cinema are standard fare in TV blockbusters like Game of Thrones. The first lesbian kiss in a British television soap opera was in 1994. God (or at least the Christian God) is mocked – regularly. In Fr Jack’s ejaculations, “Feck! Arse!” is no more shocking than “Drink! Girls!” These days transgression doesn’t belong to the progressive avant-garde. It belongs to the neofascists. The self- styled alt-right is fuelled by the thrill of transgression. In the guise of a war on political correctness it revels in insult, abuse, shock tactics and the outrageous. It gets its thrills by breaching the taboos erected by progressive culture against homophobia, racism, misogyny and xenophobia. What Seán O’Casey called “throwing stones at stained-glass windows” now appeals mostly to the frat-boy fascists of the internet. But they are no longer marginal: Donald Trump is a walking (or more likely golf-carting) embodiment of transgression. The provocative assault on accepted norms of decency is itself the new normal. This new form of cultural provocation is not the same as what we must now call the old artistic one. The modernist strategy of transgression was aimed mostly at liberating people from shame about their bodies and their thoughts. It was about expanding the space for human freedom and legitimising groups – homosexual people, for example – who had been placed beyond the pale. The postmodernist alt-right culture of provocation has precisely opposite aims: it uses shame and threat to close down the space for expression and to exclude whole groups from it by delegitimising them. But it poses a very difficult question for contemporary art: in the age of repressive transgression have shock tactics had their day? A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art Tracy Fahey- Media Culture Journal. Vol 17, No 1 (2014) http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/781 Years have come and gone and Bob is still around He’s tied up by his ankles and he’s hanging upside down A lifetime of infection and his lungs all filled with phlegm The CF would’ve killed him if it weren’t for S&M Supermasochistic BoB has Cystic FiBrosis by Bob Flanagan. Soundtrack from 1997 documentary, Sick: The Life & Death of BoB Flanagan In the 1997 film, Sick: The Life & Death of BoB Flanagan, Supermasochist, artist Bob Flanagan quite literally lays himself bare to the viewer. This is a wrenching documentary which charts the dying Flanagan’s battles with cystic fibrosis (CF), and also explores the impact of this on his art and life. Sick also explores to an explicit degree the sadomasochist practices that permeated Flanagan’s private life and performance art practice, and which he used as a means of asserting control of the chronic pain and infirmity of his medical condition. Sick is not an easy watch. The film evokes feelings of fear, empathy, and horror. It challenges notions of taste and bad taste. It subjects the viewer to witness the vulnerability of the repeatedly tortured and invaded body of the artist, and of his eventual confrontation with death. As performance pieces go, this is an extreme example of body-based art. Where does this extraordinary piece stem from? From which traditions in art does it draw? To answer these questions, it is necessary to examine the framework of disability art, transgressive art, and also the tradition of medical Gothic, or the history of the Gothic body as a site of art—art that involves reading the body as carnivalesque, as degenerate, as ab-human, as abject entity. The Gothic Body as Site of Art The body has long been a site of exploration in medical practice and in artistic practice. The body has been displayed and examined in various forms, as subject, object, or abject entity through ossories, medical collections, museums of pathology, and freak shows. Paintings of crucifixions and martyrdoms, and practices of flagellation have glorified the tortured body of Christians as physical reminders of extreme piety. The abnormal or monstrous body has been a trope in art since the medieval period, often identified with ideas of evil or sin. Anatomical bodies have been referenced and explored by artists since the Renaissance. With the popular explosion of performance art in the 1960’s, bodily practices have been incorporated into site specific art. Artists’ bodies are offered for our gaze, and sometimes for interaction with, all within the context of performance. Although performance art originates in the early 20th century, it was exponents of the 1960’s that firmly aligned this practice with the site of the artist’s body. At this time, the body became a new focus of culture, with the rise in sexual freedom and the accepted use of nudity in performances and happenings. This resulted in the performance of body-based pieces such as Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964) and Interior Scroll (1975), Hermann Nitsch and the Viennese Actionists and their Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries (1962), and Vito Acconci’s Seedbed (1971). This legacy of sexual, violent, or abject performances results in the creation of provocative and disturbing contemporary pieces such as Sick that confront the spectator with the vulnerabilities and limits of the living body. Today, contemporary culture is suffused with images of the body, both the idealised bodies of advertising and music videos, and the grotesque and transfigured bodies of contemporary art.