The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 19, 1996 | by Eric Gibson

What does a person do when confronted with art and an artistic climate that challenge every value he or she holds dear? That person has three choices: Attack it, embrace it or circumvent it.

Wendy Steiner, chairwoman of the English department at the University of Pennsylvania, chooses the latter course in The Scandal of Pleasure (University of Chicago, 251 pp). Steiner makes a heroic effort to understand the cultural upheavals of the past five or six years - the book's subtitle, Art in an Age of Fundamentalism, gives some idea of the scope of her subject - but in the end she falls short of the task she sets for herself.

Steiner opens the book with the Robert Mapplethorpe episode, using the Cincinnati obscenity trial as the lens through which to reveal what she sees as the central paradox of art in our time. On the one hand, it is patently laughable to praise, as did some witnesses for the defense, some of the photographer's raunchier offerings as wonderful exercises in light and shade, line and pattern, as if there were nothing more to them than that. On the other hand, hair-raising as many of those photographs were, they nonetheless did possess some of the formal, aesthetic qualities their defenders saw in them. Steiner may be troubled by Mapplethorpe's work, but she is equally troubled by the public reaction to it. Hers is a kind of caked-eat-it-too philosophy. She wants to find a way for art to remain "challenging" yet still be accepted by the public.

Another problem with the book, however, is more fundamental. Steiner advocates an aesthetic approach to the criticism and interpretation of art. In other words, she wants to derive the meaning of a work from its ap-pearance, from the way the artist has chosen to arrange whatever shapes and colors he has used. Such an approach was possible from about 1850 to 1915. Whether it was an Impressionist landscape or a Cubist still life, what you saw was in a sense what you got.

Once Marcel Duchamp installed his famous urinal in the art gallery, however, all that changed. The appearance of a work of art ceased to be the most important factor in its meaning; the ideas behind its creation became paramount. A urinal is a urinal is a urinal. Looking at one, whether in a men's room or an art gallery, isn't of itself going to convey insight other than that gleaned from the design of men's public conveniences. What's important is why Duchamp put the urinal in the art gallery in the first place, and the answer to that becomes the raison d'etre for the artwork.

The conceptual as it is called) approach to art has been on the ascendant. Indeed, its insurgency has been so successful that artists make almost no other art. Case in point: Last month, a young artist named Damien Hirst won the Turner Prize, awarded each year by London's Tate Gallery to the most important contemporary artist; Hirst's modus operandi is to display dead animals (sheep, sharks, cows' heads) in giant tanks of formaldehyde. Last summer in New York, his dealer had to cancel an exhibition that would have featured decomposing animal carcasses.

There is simply no avoiding the kind of in-your-face art that has been fashionable for a decade or more and hows little or no sign of losing its appeal. However much Steiner might wish to stem the tide of antiaesthetic, conceptual art, the waves of reality keep washing over her. She wants to reconcile the irreconcilable. She wants people to like and accept art created to e unacceptable, art that deliberately violates every social norm and taboo people have been taught to take for

She is right in thinking that the public has to find some way of coming to terms with all this. But her solution is to wish it away. Understandable as that might be, it is hardly the kind of guidance one expects from historians and scholarly critics.

Eric Gibson is executive editor of ARTnews.