Shock Me if You Can
Clockwise from left,
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris — Succession Marcel
Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Agence France-Presse; Lawrence
Irvine/Fine Line Features; Kino International.
Clockwise from left, Duchamp’s
“Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)," still from "A Clockwork Orange,"
Divine in the John Waters film “Pink Flamingos,” Buñuel and Dalí's 1928
short film "Un Chien Andalou" and the cover from Ice-T's metal album
"Body Count."
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER
Published: September 14, 2012
THE morning of “The Rite of Spring” premiere, on May 29, 1913, at the
Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, Le Figaro predicted that ballet
would deliver “a new thrill which will surely raise passionate
discussion” and “leave all true artists with an unforgettable
impression.” That turned out to be one of the greatest understatements
of the new artistic century. The passionate discussion began during the
first few bars of the music, as derisive laughter rose from the seats,
and soon grew into an uproar that sent Stravinsky fleeing the hall in
disgust.
O.O.P.S.
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris — Succession Marcel Duchamp, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2).”
Dona Ann McAdams
Karen Finley in 1990, when her performances fed debates over public support for art.
Lawrence Irvine/Fine Line Features
The performer Divine in the John Waters film “Pink Flamingos.”
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He and his collaborators didn’t intend to start a riot. But together with the brouhaha over the Armory Show
a few months earlier in New York (where outrages like Duchamp’s “Nude
Descending a Staircase” prompted Theodore Roosevelt to declare, “That’s
not art”), the premiere helped write a modern cultural script. Artists
have been trying to provoke audiences ever since, elevating shock to an
artistic value, a sign that they are fighting the good fight against
oppressive tradition and bourgeois morality.
Shock long ago went mainstream, raising a question: Can art still shock
today? Nudity and raw language are no longer scandalous, and decades of
Modernist assaults on formal constraints have dissolved the boundary
between art and not-art, high and low. The outcry over “Lady
Chatterley’s Lover” and “Tropic of Cancer” seems downright quaint at a
moment when millions of suburban mothers are devouring the
sadomasochistic fantasy “50 Shades of Grey.”
The raw, homoerotic images in the 1989 Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition,
which sparked a national debate over public support for “obscene” art,
would surely not get the same rise in today’s culture, where
homosexuality is broadly accepted and hard-core pornography is available
at the click of a mouse. And in the pop realm, where avant-garde
aesthetics have penetrated advertising and debates over gangsta rap (to
say nothing of Elvis’s swiveling hips) seem a distant memory, the
potential to shock seems close to vanishing altogether.
Today shock can seem indistinguishable from scandal, less a side effect
of artistic innovation than a ploy ginned up by self-promoting artists
and public scolds. But many artists say that generating shock remains
the duty of anyone who aims to reflect the real world back at itself.
Audiences may be more sophisticated, and jaded, but it is still possible
to show them something they may not want to see. “Conditions in society
are shocking, and art really does become a mirror to society in that
way,” said the performance artist Karen Finley,
who became a national symbol for shock art during the early 1990s
battles over public funds for controversial art. And sometimes that
mirror turns into a magnifying glass. The furor over her politically
charged work — which included smearing her body with chocolate and
stuffing orifices with yams, to illustrate society’s degradation of
women — had less to do with the work itself, she said, than the culture
warriors who seized on it to advance their own agenda.
“You can’t just say, ‘I’m going to go out and try to shock people,’ ”
she said. “It’s usually a much more subtle matter of time and place.”
The filmmaker John Waters
began his 1981 autobiography, “Shock Value,” with the declaration that
having someone vomit while watching one of his movies was “like getting a
standing ovation.” But mere shock for shock’s sake, he said recently,
is “deathly.”
“If you’re shocking by subject matter alone, it’s not enough, and it
never was enough,” he said. “It’s easy to shock, but it’s much harder to
surprise with wit.”
To him the most shocking thing about “Pink Flamingos,” his 1972
exploitation classic that depicted the drag queen Divine gleefully
eating dog feces, was the fact that people laughed. “It was a commentary
on censorship,” he said. “It was about what was left once ‘Deep Throat’
became legal.”
To ask if art can still shock is quickly to invite another question:
Shock whom, and where? Connoisseurs of the highbrow jolts delivered,
say, by European movie directors like Lars von Trier and Gaspar Noé (whose “Irreversible”
assaulted audiences with a nine-minute rape scene) might find
themselves shocked at the guilt-free pleasure taken by fans of the
torture-porn “Saw” franchise. And violence that might seem humdrum at
the multiplex might seem shocking in a live theater, to say nothing of
an opera house.
“There are a thousand different audiences,” said Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of Performance Space 122
in the East Village. “At ‘The Book of Mormon’ the shock is all part of
the fun. But it’s much harder to shock a downtown theatergoing
audience.”
A “Rite of Spring”-style riot, Mr. Gantner added wryly, is “every
presenter’s dream.” But if such melees are rare, plenty of artists
succeed in causing deep discomfort today.
When the playwright Thomas Bradshaw’s satire “Mary,”
about a contemporary Southern white couple who keep a slave, was staged
at the Goodman Theater in Chicago last year, it prompted a storm of
criticism, including a review in The Chicago Sun-Times wondering if it
wasn’t “a complete and total hoax designed to see just how much hokum
and bunkum today’s theater audiences might be willing to tolerate before
rebelling.”
Mr. Bradshaw’s plays, which include “Burning”
and “Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist,” have prompted their share of
walkouts. But he insisted that at the performances of “Mary” he saw, a
good part of the mostly white audience was laughing at the liberal use
of racial epithets and comically genial “slave owners” — at least once
they looked around the theater to make sure someone else was laughing
too.
“My work puts people in the position of questioning their own
reactions,” Mr. Bradshaw said. “Modern audiences expect that if people
are engaged in actions that are considered politically incorrect, they
should be demonized and punished in the work. And that’s not very
interesting to me.”
At a recent New York performance of “Job,” his new play based on the
biblical story, the audience had a similarly uncertain reaction to the
graphic (and, given the intimacy of the 40-seat Flea Theater, truly in
your face) violence, which included incestuous rape, necrophilia, sodomy
with a broken stick, and an anatomically vivid castration that tipped
the crowd into anxious titters.
That kind of ultra-realistic violence has become more common on the
stage, even if the context tends to be less comic. When Sarah Kane’s
“Blasted” had its premiere in London in 1995, one critic, in a typical
reaction, compared its scenes of rape, cannibalism and serial
mutilations to “having your whole head held down in a bucket of offal.”
(Many of the same critics now consider the play a contemporary classic, and its New York premiere in 2008 drew rave reviews.) And the work of the New York playwright Adam Rapp, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Red Light Winter,” has been both hailed and reviled for fleshing out its emotional realism with drenchings of blood, vomit, diarrhea and pus.
Such visceral shocks “shake us out of things we take for granted,” Mr.
Rapp said. “I love putting dangerous moments onstage. It raises the
stakes and brings out the nervous system in an actor. The audience’s
nervous system will change too.”
But Mr. Rapp, whose “Through the Yellow Hour” opens this month in New
York, said that people who focus on his plays’ sensational aspects fail
to appreciate the deeper shock of seeing life as it really is.
Especially in a media-saturated age, he said, “it can be incredibly
powerful to see something real, to have things feel like they are really
happening.”
But the feeling remains that perhaps some experiences should not be
fodder for art, especially when the vulnerabilities on display are not
just hyper-realistic, but real. Peter Eleey, the chief curator at MoMA
PS1 in Queens, recalled the discomfort that ran through the audience at
this year’s Documenta art fair during a performance of “Disabled Theater,” a piece by the French choreographer Jérôme Bel featuring mentally handicapped adults.
“He essentially choreographed your own emotional reaction to the people
you were watching: the question of their exploitation, their complicity,
their free will, their happiness,” Mr. Eleey said. “Some people gasped
or cried. You were really whipsawed around in a way that felt very close
to shock.”
In putting together “September 11,”
a group show mounted last fall at PS1 to commemorate the 10th
anniversary of the attacks, Mr. Eleey avoided work that directly
depicted the events themselves, which for some viewers is still taboo.
But artists have not shied from shocking depictions of the further
violence the attacks set in motion. Mr. Eleey cited the Swiss artist
Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Superficial Engagement,”
a 2006 installation at the Gladstone Gallery in New York that featured
gruesome photos of exploded bodies of Afghan and Iraqi war victims —
bodies, as Mr. Hirschhorn put it, that had suffered “abstraction” by
violence.
“Those images are indelibly shocking to people in the West who aren’t
used to seeing them in the media,” Mr. Eleey said. “But the way they
shock goes beyond the horrific images and gets into a broader way of
implicating us abstractly in a much larger system of violence.”
Such work may seem to stretch art’s immunity plea — its argument that
“we are only reflecting the brutality of the world, and your complicity
in it” — past the breaking point, conveniently projecting its own
exploitive tendencies onto the viewer. In “The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning”
(2011), the critic Maggie Nelson questioned the lingering hold of what
she called Modernism’s “shock doctrine,” summed up for her in the
Austrian film director Michael Haneke’s stated desire to “rape the audience into independence.”
Not that Ms. Nelson, who teaches at California Institute of the Arts,
dismisses the value of confrontation. Art still needs to “say things the
culture can’t allow itself to hear,” she said. “But all shock is not
created equal,” she continued. “Once the original ‘ugh’ is gone, you’ve
got to look at what the next emotion is.”
That next emotion may be nothing more than a hunger for the next, deeper
shock. And some of the canniest shock artists say that, these days,
refusing to deliver it in the expected ways may be the most shocking
move of all.
Mr. Waters, whose most recent movie, “A Dirty Shame,”
featured semen shooting out of a man’s head (and hitting the camera),
suggested a homework assignment to a hypothetical young filmmaker out to
make a mark.
“If you could think of something that would get an NC-17 rating with no
sex or violence,” he said, “you would have the most radical movie of the
year.”
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