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PARTISAN REVIEW
is actually being stifled; the only questions have been about whether or
not such artistic speech is entitled to funding and sponsorship, not
whether or not it can be freely created and exhibited. The democratic
drapery is a cloak. The ideal is used as camouflage for the cynical.
There is yet another kind of disingenuous defense: that the critics and
public don't understand the work, that it is not deliberately provocative
at all, that they are just being philistine and, indeed, anti-democratic.
Andres Serrano's now overly famous photograph of a crucifix dipped in
his own urine, its advocates have explained, was not really a denigra–
tion of the Christian symbol, but a statement about the relationship
between the physical and the spiritual, redemption arising out of the
wastes of the body. Similarly, the British-born artist Chris OfiIi, who
caused a miniature scandal in
1999
with his painting
The Holy Virgin
Mary
at the Brooklyn Museum of Art by punctuating his Madonna with
mounds of elephant dung and photos of vaginas, supposedly meant no
slur: he was using elephant dung as a African symbol of regeneration.
But how can a serious religious meaning be the main point of
Piss
Christ,
when at the same time Serrano was also dunking varied other
sculptural images into his urine: a "fashion model"
(Piss Elegance),
a
"discus thrower"
(Piss Discus)
and the Pope
(Piss Pope)?
Piss was part
of a polemic. As for Ofiii, he regularly used elephant dung to mean
something other than mystical regeneration. In England he placed dung
in a paper bag for an art installation called
Bag of Shit.
In
1993,
he also
theatrically and playfully staged a
Shit Sale
of the same product. There
is Dada in this, not just dung. There may be some transcendental and
idealist intention in these works, but it strains credulity to assert that
that was their main point. Yet it was almost impossible to find any of
this out at the time these works were being attacked and defended. In
these examples, attitudes of opposition and advocacy, assertions of egal–
itarianism and self-congratulatory superiority, swirl in some undifferen–
tiated goopy stew.
There is yet another turn to these dizzying effects of the democratic
impulse. Philip Roth once said of the literature of Eastern Europe when
it was under the thumb of the Soviets: "Over there nothing goes and
everything matters; over here everything goes and nothing matters.
When everything is free and nothing is at risk, when all is blandly equal,
who cares?" "Mass culture," Dwight Macdonald wrote in
1953,
"is
very, very democratic: it absolutely refuses to discriminate against, or
between, anything, or anybody." And what was once true only of mass
culture, has now become true of democratic culture in general.
