Original Sin of the Month
Breaking the Safe on the Arts
Performance artist Karen Finley appears clad only in chocolate and a feather boa, perches on the stage, and talks about orifices. Artist Andres Serrano submerged a Christ figurine in a tepid flagon of his own piss. British shockmeister Damien Hirst exhibited dead fetuses, won himself some jail time and a whole new celebrity. Writer D.H. Lawrence let his blood lust rise in Lady Chatterley's Lover. Painter Edouard Manet stripped his figures of their clothes and didn't pretend that they were cherubs or classical figures when he showed them picnicking on the grass.Any or all of the above may disgust you. It is just as much your right to be disgusted as it is the artist's to disgust. The arts should shock, provoke, nudge, prod, and upset your imagination. What you find to be vile may be the next person's cup . . . if not tea, then at least of piss. Americans do not live in an "Up With People" biosphere of jolly good times, sweet smells, and happy feelings; life is not Disneyland, thank goodness. And most of the inhabitants on this planet don't smug out such an existence, concerned as they are about food and shelter. But American legislators, and now our judges, are determined to use our tax money to try to make it so. Witness the recent Supreme Court ruling that makes National Endowment for the Arts grants dependent upon the nebulous term "decency and respect" as coined in the opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Fortunately, there are still some sane voices out there. Writing in June 26, 1998's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle ("High Court's Art Ruling Is Indecent"), staff writer Steven Winn calls this "a deathblow to a meaningful NEA." He further states that keeping to Justice O'Connor's vaguely-termed ethic means that the NEA "cannot possibly fulfill its true and only appropriate mission: to support the country's best art and artists. . . . Excellence," he wisely argues, "is the only yardstick." We say awoman to the Goddess on that, and hope that a country that can support a grossly dysfunctional Central Intelligence Agency, can pay greedy homage to the deathmasters who engineered the massacre at Tiannamen Square, and that gladly supports an ailing Pentagon while the nation sways under the moral weight of the homeless, the ill, and the undereducated, can look beyond the obvious headline-stealing hijinks of Finley's lean female body and Serrano's "Piss Christ," and truly find honor, not fear, in the greatest of endeavours--freedom of the human spirit through the arts.
Is your cud curdled? Are you angrier than a mess of rattlers kicked by a hobnail boot from the sweetest dip in the road? Tell us your original sin in an essay, a rant, a prophesy, a tonic--on any topic except the sex act. Sorry, it's already been done.
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