Art. I'm an artist. Perhaps I did not mention that fact in previous posts. Now you know.
(Warning: Although I usually avoid profanity, I may slip a bit here. Just a bit.)
Any young person learning to draw encounters a huge problem: People love to watch artists at work. Unfortunately, most of those onlookers are annoying idiots -- especially if a young would-be craftsman is trying to teach himself the basics of human anatomy.
The moronic kids at school who watched me sketch all held to one basic theory of art: If you draw it, that means you want to fuck it.
If you draw a picture of a woman (even a clothed woman), you are considered guilty of creating a dirty picture. If you draw a man, you are guilty of creating a gay picture.
If you draw it, you must want to fuck it. Every school-aged moron in the world makes that presumption.
I shudder to think of how those morons must have tormented Audubon.
Of course, every young artist ought to spend at least one hour each and every day drawing naked people of both sexes. This practice has nothing to do with heterosexuality or homosexuality. You must draw lots and lots of naked people. Lean people. Muscular people. Also fat, blobby people. Short people. Tall people. Beautiful people. Ugly people. Parts of people. Heads. Feet. Breasts. Hands.
Why? Because that is how you learn.
If you want to be a great pianist, you have to spend many a youthful hour practicing scales. Same principle.
But the young artist -- unlike, say, the young baseball player -- soon learns that he must never allow anyone to watch him practice. The young artist learns that art, like masturbation, is something one has to do in secret. Drawing becomes a covert operation because the world is filled with jelly-headed morons who "know" only one thing about art: If you draw it, you must want to fuck it.
Alas, although those jelly-headed morons in school have all grown up by now, they refuse to progress beyond moron-hood. Some of these adult morons call themselves fundamentalists. Some consider themselves feminists. They're really just morons.
If I recall my art history, the earliest nude sculpture of the Renaissance was Donatello's David, created in the 1430s. Before that time, the morons of the Middle Ages equated nudity with sexuality. Before Donatello, the last time anyone had dared to display nudity in art was when the Roman empire still ruled.
I am sorry to report that we've returned to the bad old days of the Middle Ages.
This is true even in the rarified world of "high art." Paint a naked human male in any context, in any style, and I guarantee you -- I GUARANTEE you -- any art critic who describes the piece will include the word "homoerotic" in the first paragraph.
If you draw or paint a nude female, take care not to do so realistically. And make sure she is unattractive. Otherwise, moron critics will make dismissive references to your "Playboy mentality," and feminists will blather on about the objectification of women and how sad it is that little girls must grow up with unrealistic standards of feminine beauty. And so on. You know the drill.
That sort of moronic critique was not heard in the so-called "Victorian" age. But it is now inescapable.
All such critics are morons, even if they have degrees in Art History. Anyone who insists on viewing a nude figure purely in sexual terms is just a grown-up version of those annoying jelly-headed pseudo-humanoids who made my life in school hellish while I was trying to practice my craft.
Today, I read an infuriating, just INFURIATING article in the Los Angeles Times about an artistic brouhaha in Venice, California -- an L.A. beachside suburb known as a home for artists and avant-garde thinkers. This is also the home of "Muscle Beach." When I was young, this city was where you would find California's most famous nude beach.
I was astonished to learn that such a community could house a sufficient number nasally-blue morons to endanger the installation of a new public sculpture. The work, by Robert Graham, is a stainless steel female torso.
A publicly-displayed nude sculpture wouldn't bother Europeans, of course -- just look at the fountains in Italy and France. And there are plenty of nudes adorning various temples in India. Hell, the Sun Temple of Konark in Orissa is famous for is sculptures of people (or divinities) fucking. Fortunately, the creators of those lovely, large-breasted goddesses did not have to deal with feminists, or with art critics who make snide references to Hugh Hefner.
But Americans are not so civilized:
Regina Weller, Venice Foursquare Church administrator and the pastor's wife, complained that from the office window of the church on Riviera Avenue "we would see her backside. I work with women in recovery, and no matter what, it's a naked torso of a woman."Dig it: The bluenoses are using the argot of "recovery" to justify mindless puritanism.
Oh, but it gets worse:
The objectors are not the first to charge Graham with degrading women. In 1994, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker was awarded a Graham-designed statuette of a nude female torso for being a California "state treasure."YARRRGH!
Walker, who had just completed a book and a film about female genital mutilation, was outraged. "Imagine my horror when...I was presented with a decapitated, armless, legless woman on which my name hung from a chain," she told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Robert Graham is an extremely gifted artist. (From a web page devoted to his work: "Robert Graham is known for his sculptures of women, which convey not only physical strength and beauty but also individuality, intelligence, and grace.") This fine talent creates a female torso -- a traditional subject for art -- and Walker, instead of being gratified, moronically wonders where the arms are.
My god. Does she really think that if an artist chooses not to sculpt the arms or feet, that those limbs have been cut off?
Are some people SO FUCKING STUPID that they believe the traditional bust to be a depiction of a decapitated head?
(Flashback to sixth grade: The jelly-headed moron looking over my shoulder while I'm trying to draw asks -- as I KNOW he will ask -- "Where're the legs?" I answer, as I always do: "I haven't drawn them yet." If I had started with the legs, the same moron would have asked where the torso and head were. I'm tempted to shoot back: "What if I don't draw the legs at all? Do I have to draw a complete figure every damn time? Who made that rule?")
Question for Alice Walker: Your novel "The Color Purple" is set in the 1930s. Why don't you talk about Adolf Hitler in that book? Why doesn't your novel describe the rise of Mao? Why no chapters devoted to the Spanish civil war? Huh? Why'd you cut all that important stuff out? Why the censorship?
The answer is obvious: The artist must be free to narrow his or her focus. Otherwise, the only acceptable sculpture would be a full-scale duplicate of planet Earth.
I once visited the studio of a wood sculptor in Big Sur. A genius. He happens to be gay. His works included a large statue of an erect penis. Would Alice Walker consider this piece a "dismemberment"? I fear she would!
I don't care how many awards that woman has won. She's just another moron.
So there we have it. I like to draw nudes, particularly female nudes. I often paint realistically. I think it would be fun to paint a female torso.
But how can anyone create work of that sort in an age when everyone -- EVERYONE -- highbrow and lowbrow -- defines the nude purely in terms of sexuality? How can we escape the tyranny of the presumption that "If you draw it, you must want to fuck it"?
Here's a little test for you. On this page, you will be able to click on a couple of colored drawings. One of them depicts a large-breasted female being taken anally. Another depicts her bound and giving head. These drawings are by a brilliant Italian draftsman named Paolo Serpieri.
If you look at these pictures and see them only in terms of pornography, please go away and never visit my site again. I do not wish to speak to you.
On the other hand: If you recognize that Serpieri (and never mind his subject matter) has a talent akin to Leonardo's...if you can appreciate the work of a rare individual who knows how to draw the way Placido Domingo knows how to sing -- then you are my brother, you are my sister, you are my friend, you are welcome.
26 comments:
Sounds like Regina Weller need sto friggin relax. Let's point her to one of the head shops along the beach and get her a friggin' bong.
There is nothing more pure for an artist than rendering the figure of a live human nude model.
My first day of class, 35 yrs ago, teacher walked by and said "You have done life-drawing before." I said no. He said "Yes, you have!" I said, no, I had not. He said, "Well, either you have, or you are AWFULLY DAMNED OBSERVANT!!". (Uh, ohhhhkay.)
Of the 30 or so nude models I have had the privelege to draw, there was one I wanted to fuck, and I did.
Sometime around 1990, I was living in the Poconos when a local artist hung a nude painting -- a rather good one -- in a local artists show in the public halls of the Monroe County Court House (Stroudsburg, PA.) A judge ordered it removed. A protest with picket signs followed, and the local Senior Citizen's housing complex (yup!) asked all local artists to bring a nude painting each for a show in their public hall. I'm not an artist, but I helped to hang the show. It was very fine -- and I assure you it was satisfying to take a small part in it!
Judy Down Maine
I have to agree with Peg, above, regarding Serpieri. Artistically they show a degree of technical merit, but are otherwise just reasonably talented juevenalia, pandering repetitions on the same tired themes. No Leonardo he, nor even Albrecht Durer, whose work he (stylistically, not thematically) reminds me of.
As to their content... in a sane world, nobody would really care. Yes, they can easily be considered offensive, but one of the great truths of life is that you can't please everyone. From a really conservative Art standpoint, it could be said that these pieces are abject failures; they speak to me of nothing more than the sad and pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasies of a man imagining the equivelant of a twenty-course banquet, yet who has never (to keep the culinary metaphor going) eaten anything better than an institutional cafeteria lunch...
-Nemo
Well, I tried to make an account, but Blogger seems to want me to do this anonymously.
Joseph, it seems like you're saying that an artist's subject doesn't matter, and it baffles me that you, as an artist, can say that. I can only compare to poetry, since that's what I'm familiar wath. (And, incidentally, if you ever want people to really make assumptions about your sexuality, mention that you write poetry--you don't even have to talk about naked people.) Almost every good poet learns early on the difference between verse and poetry--one is a writing form, and one is an art form. The usual example is Dr. Seuss. He can versify like there's no tomorrow, but he's not a poet.
It's funny how you mix a very liberal view of pornography as art with a somewhat conservative view that artistic nudity can be separated from sexuality. I would argue that nudes are such popular subjects--both to draw or paint and to display--because of the inherent sexuality. Don't get me wrong; the people looking over your shoulder and assuming you want to screw whatever you're drawing are still morons. Practice is practice, after all. But, in my experience, male artists tend to draw a lot more female nudes than male nudes, and I don't think it's because all those curves are easier (except, perhaps, on the eyes). Unfortunately, I haven't known enough female artists to know if the opposite is true, but I suspect it is. Male artists also tend to draw very attractive women--and usually women of a body type that is particularly attractive to the artist. The morons may say that this is objectification of women, but sexual desire as an artistic expression is surely as old as mankind itself. Thus, it would be my contention that it is our universal sexuality that makes nudes appealing. While artists can, of course, produce nudes which are not sexually attractive, virtually any nude will evoke a sexual reaction, however slight. At least, that's been my experience. I think that's the main reason that the prudish are so opposed to nudity as a blanket concept: they don't like having their sexuality (however suppressed it may be) tapped into to pique their interest. Imagine Ashcroft, for a reason he doesn't understand, fixated on Marge's nude painting of Mr. Burns.
Where I think you really run into trouble, though, Joseph, is with Serpieri. Like a couple of the previous commenters, I wasn't impressed with him--I think your comparison to Leonardo is, at the very best, extremely generous. His skill aside, you overlooking his subject matter is boggling. I detest it not because it is pornographic, but because it is vulgar. By the time you get to anal sex and bondage and whatever else, you've moved well beyond our common sexuality (the kind that makes us like nudes) and into the realm of deviant fetish. This really is demeaning to women (and, in turn, to men), because it has reduced sex from an intimate act to a mechanical one of dominance and subservience. (As you may be able to guess, I don't like much porn--not out of prudishness, but because most porn is obsessively [if subtly] violent.)
I suppose I'm getting too preachy. The point is, one of the defining factors of art is universality, and Serpieri's work doesn't have it. Now, to get back to the distinction between verse and poetry. . . .
During lectures in medical school, John Keats, instead of taking notes, would write little bits of doggerel on other students' syllabi. He may have gone on to become an exceptional poet (even among exceptional poets), but you'll (almost) never find this in his collected works:
Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out "hold, enough!"
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection;
For, bless my beard, they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.
One summary bit of devilish advocacy on my part: can it be art if it's not artistic?
- Jon C.
Joseph, while drawers and sculptors may have
it bad, writers have it worse. People think
everything is autobiographical--or they use
the work as a Rorschach from which to
free-associate in wild speculations about
the writer's psychological makeup.
Your post raises many questions, but it's a slow Sunday, so here goes:
I think we can say that American society is prurient, rather than puritanical: sexual imagery is widely and eagerly consumed in public and private but, as we're fundamentally immature (rather than "religious" or "moral"), expressions of shame or embarrassment attend that consumption. This leads, of course, to surpassing hypocrisy. "Morality", in the political sphere, has come to mean little more than an expression of shame or disapproval about sex or bare body parts, which suits the ruling classes just fine, for obvious reasons.
How we "read" images of bare flesh today is another question. The mechanical reproduction and mass distribution of art changed everything. I don't know whether the Church Fathers secretly got off on Michelangelo's "David" but, if so, the question would have remained a private one. Today that's impossible. Certainly the sketch of a male model in a drawing class or in a private collection is anything but "homoerotic", but the public exhibition of same is inevitably so, in large part because of the "success" of the gay rights movement: a male nude has become a political icon. This is not entirely the public's fault, and the fact that a work of art will never get a fair and knowledgeable reading in the mass-market is nothing new.
As you point out, female nudes in the public sphere haven't done all that well either. It's simply not possible to display a naked body in this country without sexual innuendo. When John Ascroft covered the breasts of that statue, he was conceding that he could not see the work as "art" (even as bad art); for him, an image of breasts in public can only signify sex, and his response embarrassed him. This is hardly unusual: the true "market" for fine art has always been tiny. Most people don't understand art with or without its clothes on. Take the clothes off in public, and all they see are dongs and tits. As for art with pornographic content -- well, forget it. Even admitting that we're remarkably immature for an industrialized nation, that our "leaders" are generally innocent of 2000 years of Western culture, and that anti-intellectualism is a virtue in this country, these issues arose principally because images which were once private became public. And, when seen through the public lens, they mean only one thing: sex.
Serpieri handles subtle yet assertive color nicely, and I enjoyed his facility with the medium. But his massive tits and ass owe more to Crumb's images of Honeybunch Kominski rather than Leonardo.
Readers should know that if you open up the link to Serpieri, you'll be plagued by pop-ups. I don't find photos of a cock about to go into a woman's ass scary, but I do find it obnoxious to have it shoved in my face when I haven't chosen to be bombarded with pop-ups.
I believe that our entire purpose in this life is to learn about ourselves, and we usually do that best through noting our reactions to the ever-changing environment we find ourselves in.
We are greatly attracted to people, places and things that reflect our inner selves, and are repulsed by people, places and things that also reflect our inner selves. We react only to that which is within us...the intensity of that reaction shows how much of our inner self is being revealed.
It is not within my abilities to categorize things as art or not art. I simply look at things as pleasant or not pleasant. Words and/or images will move me according to my ability to relate to them. They are only tools presented by those who create them. What we make of them is entirely dependent on we who view them.
If it gives me pleasure to view, touch, taste, smell or hear something...then to me it is art, and it is wonderful.
Serpieri's images give me great pleasure, and I thank you for posting the link.
People who travel in certain circles should try striding out in a straight line once in a while.
I think it's kind of silly and beside the point to compare artists with Leonardo. And I don't care much for Romantic opera and so Placido Domingo is underappreciated by me. That's none of an artist's business.
I suppose Alice Walker might complain that "Equus" has no horses in it, because there is no horse shit on the stage. To be fair, though, Ms. Walker is under no obligation to _like_ a piece of art. Maybe she just hates the piece so much she has to speak out. Maybe she sees the piece as a torso with extremities chopped off because she thinks it _sucks_.
It's like that scene in Seinfeld, where Elaine explains why she doesn't like "The English Patient"; the reason, she says, is that the movie _sucks_. And IMO she's right. Of course my poison may be your nourishment, but I think Alice Walker can think a torso sucks, while I thought "The Color Purple" sucked when I tried to watch the movie, but think Robert Mapplethorpe was simply a great photographer.
Joseph,
Thanks for the interesting reading, and those of the commenters. I would have to agree with those who weren't impressed by Serpieri. And I would point you (and others reading) to a NY Times article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/arts/design/17kino.htmo?ex+1113883200&en=96f9be034838b/dc&ei=5070
I like the drawings of the nude by the two artists in this article better than Serpieri's work, which seems a bit cartoonish, if you'll forgive me. (Also agree with Jon C.'s paragraph beginning, "Where I think you really run into trouble...")
Hope you don't mind this free exchange and won't kick us all off your site. :-) Not like some conservative sites we all know and hate...
Oops, here's the correct URL for the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/17/arts/design/17kino.html?ex+1113883200&en=96f9be034838b/dc&ei=5070
Anonymous says: "I think we can say that American society is prurient, rather than puritanical: sexual imagery is widely and eagerly consumed in public and private but, as we're fundamentally immature (rather than 'religious' or 'moral'), expressions of shame or embarrassment attend that consumption."
I would like to point out something that actually is pretty obvious, which is that belief in fairy tales and fear of the bogeyman are immature, things we are presumed to outgrow. Thus religiousness is a manifestation of immaturity. A person's religion is none of my business; it's also none of my business if a grown-up believes in the tooth fairy; but maybe it _is_ the business of a psychiatrist.
And so, personally, I don't see how to classify American culture as "prurient," which the dictionary defines as _inordinately_ sexual, as opposed to "puritanical," or religiously strict. Just what's so bad about our interest in sex? Don't our sexual troubles mostly follow not from our interest in sex but rather our silly, immature superstitions? Are the teenagers engaged in hazardous sex after "abstinence only" education too interested in sex, or are they victims of a cartoonish "morality" attributed to invisible superbeings?
The problems Joseph Cannon is losing patience over seem to come exactly along with a rise in the vociferousness of superstitious, childish religious people. This is not a mere accident.
I didn't consult the dictionary for the meaning of "prurient", but (for me at least) it means a preoccupation with sex accompanied by shame and sniggers, the sense that sex is "dirty" and to be exploited for commercial gain.
This is typified by Fox sitcom's, which are far "worse" than outright pornography, since the material is grounded in infantile shame and embarrassment, and exploitation of the audience's immaturity.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for sexuality, including a sense of mystery, and of the forbidden, without which sex can be merely mechanical. But it's the underlying belief that sex is dirty and unseemly which seems to animate American life.
Well Mr. Cannon..you have certainly touched a nerve with your fans with the art essay..which I thought brilliant..but..I too had a problem with the example you chose to demonstrate your distinction between art that offends and art that offends because...
The pop ups..which you may have overlooked in your haste to exemplify the artist (which I also viewed with erotic satisfaction)..the popups interrupt his websites focus..unfortunately. And your perhaps hasty comparison that he is as "great like Leonardo or Michelangelo, " does fall shot of that mantle and distinction of honor and praise.
I, being a very very, extremely very, broad minded soul, have no problem with sexual and erotic art, and I do encourage it in artopea.com, as well as publicly, as an art lover and art evangelist, whenever possible, but we all know that there has never been a time in the "quest for truth" in the Western World, that erotic art has had its respect and public display that it deserves. Picassos erotic art had to be displayed in the dark back rooms ofr the most prominent galleries and salons of Europe like a childhood.".under the blankets" experience
We have not yet reached the Paradise of Heironymus Bosch and his "Garden of Earthly delights" where everybody and everything is peckers and vaginas throughout our earthly sojourn, but, that is our final destination, when the" pair of dice" finally roll snake eyes.
You switch one day from politics to art and look at all the comments you get. Is it the art or the sex or the art and sex together thats getting everyone excited?
What ever, I'm just interested having folks over to check out my blog and share my posted art with the rest of the world. As one artist to another and a regular bookmarked vister to your blog I hope you don't mind the "shameless plug" for my less visited blog.
These bedfellows are not only strange, but dangerous. Extremism reigns in Venice? Christ, .... San Jose? ....
People deserve to get sheared. Bah.. the LATimes needs to make the link available with out registering. Dummies.
I don't know which Fox sitcoms are the ones "worse" than pornography, but I was quite fond of "Married With Children." I make no excuses for it. It doesn't have to have to be like Leonardo. I can think Serpieri has a talent akin to the painting elephant's without that making me a danger to artists and their works.
Here's a way to look at it. When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I got put in a loonie bin under a completely bogus diagnosis. I'm loonie but not it the way I was supposed to be, and in a much less ominous way, so what I got was a very raw deal. After I got out of the hospital I spent the next decade being very sensitive about it; didn't like jokes about crazy people, for instance. So I understand stuff like "I work with women in recovery, and no matter what, it's a naked torso of a woman." A lot of people have their nervous systems oversensitized; they aren't morons, they are just crazy, and frankly I think it's an improvement that now you can use craziness as an excuse; it means we no longer shun crazy people as much. They're hard to live with, aren't they! :)
This reminds of when Katie Couric was going to cover some sexual topic, I don't remember what, and a friend appealed to me, among others, to complain about the "smut." I wrote back that I was the wrong person to ask, because if it were up to me they'd replace Dan Rather with Ruth Westheimer and she could finish each newscast by answering a sex question sent in by a viewer. You would be wrong, though, to conclude I was comfortable with sex; it's just that I'm crazy and know that is the source of my discomfort.
"the sad and pathetic wish-fulfillment fantasies of a man imagining the equivelant of a twenty-course banquet, yet who has never (to keep the culinary metaphor going) eaten anything better than an institutional cafeteria lunch..."
Sad, pathetic, but a true emotion that many men feel. the lens you looked at it through is far deeper than simple pornography, doesn't that make it art?
Drove me crazy when Ashcroft veiled the nude lady at Justice.
THAT is truly immoral. And it is also truly sick. Pretty crazy, huh, when our society cannot accept either human bodies, nor the means whereby we perpetuate the species?
But then, as we can see, they're out to kill off the species as far as they possibly can, so maybe that makes sense to their Christ-warped minds.
I'm startled by some of the prudish replies you've gotten. "Johnny One-n=Note?" "Tired theme?"
Where does it say you can't hew to one obsessive line? That's made us some of the world's great art.
Sexuality is crying out for honest, talented artists who can investigate it to its fullest. Not that Serpieri does that necessarily, but anyone who has read his Druuna series knows, or ought to know, that it is sexual art.
Call it pornography? Sure, but only if you allow pornography full license as a form of art. Otherwise you're just screening off artistic investigation of a whole world of human experience.
Anyway if Mapplethorpe can photograph fisting, Serpieri can certainly follow the somewhat harried Druuna through her world of delusion and sexual hazard without being insulted by prudes and academicians.
Truly, I thought at least some of the human race had progressed farther than those narrow-minded answers. Joseph, your commentary, I thought, was great-souled and perceptive, and you should be proud of it.
Yes---
Anyone who thinks sex is a "tired theme" or that an artist can exhaust it, even a narrow view of it, hasn't had sex in too long.
Or, even supposing you had sex five minutes ago, if you think even the most bent, possessed, eye-bulging view of sex is a "tired theme," you really haven't managed to have real sex yet.
Thank goodness sex, and the representation of it, will both survive those who seek to dismiss it and its treatment in art of all kinds from comix to the Louvre.
I couldn't agree with you more. People are so thick headed and think that things need to be drawn fully, or anything involving a nude human is pronography. If you've seen the cover of Head Bangers Ball 2(a C.D.) you know the picture I'm going to talk about... anyway: I drew that cover, and it's just a shirtless drawing of a man head banging to rock music. Beautifully defined muscles and shape, a little exagerated, but well done- anyway, I drew it, and I put up with the "you drew it so you must want to fuck it." How can people be like that?
If you would like, you can e-mail me at Stephanie 7752@comcast.net
Just get rid of the space between "Stephanie: and "7752...."
-Stephanie
sex offenders killing little girls, women being raped, violence out of control....WTF? a nude body on display and anyone against it is a prude, and attacked here. The object is "pure art"?, my ass.
The problem is that our men are complete DICK HEADS and could not handle a nude body of a woman without it causing them to get a woody and go commit some sex crime. Yeah, Europe has it...they can handle it, they have not taken the woman's body and made it into an object that should be raped & killed, they were raised adoring it and honoring it (of, course there are exceptions and they have a few dick-heads) ....America can't handle it, not in this town...They see a belly button walking down the street and crash their car, the problem is that they forget that there is a person attached to it and it is not a thing for them to have just because they want it. Men say woman shouldn't flaunt, I say we should not place a statue of one in the center of town....sheeshhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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