Made in heaven? when art and pornography share a bed

This Art History thesis investigates the relationship between the categories of pornography and art primarily through a visual and textual analysis of American artist Jeff Koon's series Made in Heaven. This analysis is furthered by a comparison of Koons's work to that of contemporary artists Marilyn Minter, Ghada Amer and Thomas Ruff. I note that existing scholarship and critical response to the series downplays Koons's engagement with pornography, arguing instead for the works' "non-pornographic" contextual qualities and fixating on Koons's celebrity, marriage and self-representation. I argue conversely for the centrality of pornography to the works, suggesting that Koons's appropriation of pornography posits new understandings of the relationship between high art and popular visual culture. I study the peculiar lack of discussion of "the pornographic" in relation to representations of low-status yet highly-desired commodities that have been widely studied in Koons's oeuvre. Reading contemporary art by Koons and other artists which engages visual forms of pornography and the critical discourse that has shaped perceptions of this work, through Cécile Whiting's 1992 analysis of Roy Lichtenstein reveals historical similarities in public receptions of art that engages "non-art" imagery. Reception of Koons's Made in Heaven echoes many of the same modernist notions put forward in the public and critical discourse around Roy Lichtenstein's comic book paintings. In both cases, critics responding to the works demonstrated a strong investment in concepts of stylistic originality and authorship while ignoring the critical effect of the artist's practice of appropriation of pop cultural imagery. This thesis argues that the upholding of the belief in the incompatibility of art and pornography is not an effective means of interpreting art.

ABSTRACT This Art History thesis investigates the relationship between the categories of pornography and art primarily through a visual and textual analysis of American artist Jeff Koon’s series Made in Heaven. This analysis is furthered by a comparison of Koons’s work to that of contemporary artists Marilyn Minter, Ghada Amer and Thomas Ruff. I note that existing scholarship and critical response to the series downplays Koons’s engagement with pornography, arguing instead for the works’ “non-pornographic” contextual qualities and fixating on Koons’s celebrity, marriage and self-representation. I argue conversely for the centrality of pornography to the works, suggesting that Koons’s appropriation of pornography posits new understandings of the relationship between high art and popular visual culture. I study the peculiar lack of discussion of “the pornographic” in relation to representations of low-status yet highly-desired commodities that have been widely studied in Koons’s oeuvre. Reading contemporary art by Koons and other artists which engages visual forms of pornography and the critical discourse that has shaped perceptions of this work, through Cécile Whiting’s 1992 analysis of Roy Lichtenstein reveals historical similarities in public receptions of art that engages “non-art” imagery. Reception of Koons’s Made in Heaven echoes many of the same modernist notions put forward in the public and critical discourse around Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book paintings. In both cases, critics responding to the works demonstrated a strong investment in concepts of stylistic originality and authorship while ignoring the critical effect of the artist’s practice of appropriation of pop cultural imagery. This thesis argues that the upholding of the belief in the incompatibility of art and pornography is not an effective means of interpreting art. ii 1 A male figure is positioned on his back as a female figure mounts him, straddling his hips. The man, shown completely nude, lifts his neck and shoulders and gazes toward the woman’s face as his hands grip each of her buttocks. The couple is posed on a rocky surface in front of a darkened forest backdrop. Their bodies glow under bright artificial lighting. Spotlit, the woman is adorned in white stockings, a pair of white stilettos, lacy white gloves, a pearly crown and a matching beaded brassiere. Her back is to the camera, and she cranes her neck around to gaze back at the viewer. With narrow eyes, she sneers to reveal a row of white teeth between her scarlet-painted lips. Her legs apart, knees bent and back arched, the woman’s buttocks and vulva press into the luminous foreground. Beneath her, the man’s flaccid penis rests between his thighs. His grasp spreads her buttocks, exposing her rectum and vulva, the rosy hues of which contrast the cool tones of their bodies, seeming to invite the viewer’s gaze into these orifices. The above is not a description of a thumbnail image on Pornhub.com but of contemporary artist Jeff Koons’s 1990 photograph, Manet, Soft (Figure 1) from his series Made in Heaven. The series featured photographic images printed with oil-based ink onto canvases in addition to several wood and glass sculptures. The multi-media artworks, which the renowned American artist debuted at the 1990 Venice Biennale, depict Koons himself and his wife at the time, Ilona Staller, a famous porn actress known by the name “Cicciolina” and elected Deputy to the Italian Parliament, engaged in various intimate poses and sexual mechanics: fondling, genital touching, oral sex, intercourse, ejaculation, etc. The highly-stylized images feature the couple posed in the same fantastical sets recognizable from Staller’s successful career in pornography, and Staller modeled with 2 Koons wearing her signature flower crown and lacey costumes.1 Koons commissioned Staller’s career manager and photographer to photograph four sessions of pictures which later produced the canvases and source material for the series’ sculptures, and the two fell in love and married shortly after beginning work on the series.2 Due to the pervasiveness of pornography in contemporary culture, it is more than likely that the average internet-user would be quicker to identify an image of pornography than they would an artwork by Jeff Koons, despite his fame in the art world. Koons’s choice of subject matter and iconography has always extended beyond subjects familiar to the art world and into the world of mass western culture, of which pornography constitutes a significant, if largely undiscussed, portion. Pornhub.com, which streams uploaded, largely pirated, video content to its millions of daily visitors, receives more daily traffic than news sites like CNN, less only than platforms such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.3 I argue not that the series differentiates art from pornography, but rather that Made in Heaven challenges conceptions of artistic value which have worked to enforce distinctions between art practices from other forms of visual culture—in this case, pornography. Since Made in Heaven’s premiere, art critics, scholars and museums have continuously neglected to explore the ways in which Koons and other contemporary artists have engaged with pornographic conventions to critical effect. Analyses of both the visual qualities and critical receptions of later works by artists Marilyn Minter, Ghada Amer and Thomas Ruff further evidence inadequate 1 DeLand, Lauren. “A Fig Leaf for Jeff Koons: Pornography, Privacy, and “Made in Heaven”.” Criticism 60, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 296. 2 Scott Rothkopf, “No Limits,” in Jeff Koons: A Retrospective, ed. Scott Rothkopf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014): 25. 3 Katrina Forrester, “Making Sense of Modern Pornography,” New Yorker, September 26, 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/09/26/making-sense-of-modern-pornography 3 attentiveness on the part of critics to artists’ visual manipulations of pornography and to artistic practices of appropriation—which were pioneered by Pop artists in the 1960s— and reveals a prolonged defense of the idea that art and pornography are incompatible. Technological advancements in the mid-nineteenth through the twentieth century resulted in new media with unprecedented capacities to produce and proliferate pornographic texts. While the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century permitted pornographic texts (both visual and textual) to be produced and distributed among male aristocratic libertines, the invention of photography in the early nineteenth century made sexual materials available at affordable rates to all social classes.4 With the increased accessibility of pornography to middle and lower socioeconomic populations, classist concerns arose over the social implications of this democratization of sexually explicit materials. Brian McNair explains how lesser-educated, lower-status populations—especially women and children, who it was believed, were unable to regulate and control their own morality and behavior —were seen as “at risk” from pornography’s immoral temptations.5 The increased circulation of pornography in the nineteenth century prompted state censorship initiatives in an effort to police access to these materials, resulting in the establishment of the distinguished cultural category of ‘pornography.’6 Pornography was condemned as a corrupting influence, one inciting 4 Brian McNair, Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire (New York: Routledge, 2002), 38-39. 5 Ibid., 51. 6 The OED traces the origins of the use of the term ‘pornography’ to 1842 and offers the definition: the explicit description or exhibition of sexual subjects or activity in literature, painting, films, etc., in a manner intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic feelings; printed or visual material containing this. Interestingly, the OED’s definition includes a variety of artistic and humanistic mediums which may describe ‘pornography.’ Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. 4 deviance—in the form of behaviors such as pre-marital sex, fellatio and masturbation— from the hegemonic Judeo-Christian order of reproductive sex conducted in wedlock.7 The twentieth century advents of film and the internet that bookend the twentieth century proceeded to revolutionize both the accessibility and variety of pornography.8 While the universal accessibility of internet pornography is unique to the modern digital age, debates regarding the relationship between the practices of art and forms of pornography have been contested by artists, spectators, and institutions for centuries. Art historian Lynda Nead explains how “at any particular moment [in history] there is no one unified category of the pornographic but rather a struggle between several competing definitions of decency and indecency.”9 The notion that a cultural product that depicts sexual imagery cannot achieve artistic merit is a limitation placed on pornographic representation and does not apply to other representations and artistic practices which developed throughout the twentieth century. Pornography may have the prescription of displaying sexually explicit imagery, but an artist engaging with any particular content still makes artistic choices regarding representation, in the case of pornographic art, how to represent sexual iconographies. Philosopher Matthew Kieran notes that a craftsman can produce a religious icon with the primary intent of evoking religious devotion and can also strive to create an object of artistic worth through considerate aesthetics. 10 While it is plausible that most pornographic representations possess little to no artistic intent or 7 McNair, Striptease Culture, 51-52. Paasonen, Susanna, Kaarina Nikunen, and Laura Saarenmaa, "Pornification and the Education of Desire," In Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture. 1st ed. (New York: Berg, 2007): 2. 9 Lynda Nead, "The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality," Signs 15, no. 2 (Winter, 1990): 323-35. 10 Matthew Kieran, "Pornographic Art." Philosophy and Literature 25, no. 1 (April 2001): 31-45. 8 5 unique aesthetics, the same is true for the majority of representational forms. Most novels, soap operas, studio films, or landscape paintings offer limited opportunity for artistic consideration; we do not take this as evidence that these genres cannot possess artistic intent or merit. Alongside the realm of popular culture, the history of art is saturated with both eroticized images of nude bodies. These images exist alongside and as a subset of representations of desirable, yet commonplace, consumer goods.11 However, in our current internet age, art audiences among the general public rarely acknowledge the possibility of a cultural product that can function in the realms of both art and pornography. In a sociological study on how representations of nude bodies are considered and understood in visual culture, Dr. Beth Eck found exhibition context to be the most significant framework which shapes perceptions of an image of a nude body as art or pornography. 12 Across the board, participants in her study considered images of women in magazines such as Hustler and Playboy to be pornographic, but unequivocally accepted paintings of nude females as art.13 The sociologist observed that viewers frequently accept images of the nude as ‘art’ if the naked figure does not reflect precisely the contemporary sexual ideal of the female body. Eck also noted a dominant belief in the exclusivity between the two categories among her forty-five participants. When asked about the possibility of a painting or sculpture being pornography, many participants 11 Examples of this artistic tradition include representations of ready-made grocery store goods by American Pop artists such as Tom Wesselmann and Andy Warhol and the widely-renowned still life paintings by Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. 12 Beth A. Eck, "Nudity and Framing: Classifying Art, Pornography, Information, and Ambiguity," Sociological Forum 16, no. 4 (December 2001): 603-32. 13 The primary figure exemplified was Titian’s Venice of Urbino (1532-4). 6 were puzzled, admitting that it may be possible but added that they have never seen art that is also pornography. Dr. Eck’s study, though limited in sample size, makes a compelling argument about the presumed dichotomous and incompatible relationship between art and pornography, a dichotomy which is supported by scholars and art critics with surprising frequency. Such views rely on the belief that pornography is something far removed from other forms of visual culture, that it is not art, and, thus, is not of cultural or scholarly interest. Philosopher of art and aesthetics, Christy Uidhir, has been influential in his argument that art and pornography pursue two radically different goals and that these goals cannot be pursued simultaneously in a single image or object, a belief that is has been repeatedly upheld by art critics and curators but, as I argue, is essentially that which Jeff Koons radically challenges with the Made in Heaven series.14 Uidhir theorizes that sexual arousal is the primary goal of pornography and that it matters not how the producer ignites that arousal, stating that, “if something is pornography, then that something has the purpose of sexual arousal and that purpose is manner inspecific.”15 He compares porn to visual advertising, which similarly pursues a singular aim of enticing consumers to purchase product. For both pornography and advertisement, the means or “manner” are not of importance; what matters are the end results. The philosopher distinguishes this theory of pornography from his theory of art, postulating that “if something is art, then if that something has a purpose, then that purpose is manner specific.”16 He cites Jerry Fodor’s claim that “the artist intends the 14 Christy Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” Philosophy and Literature 33, no. 1 (April 2009): 193-203 15 Ibid., 194. 16 Ibid. 7 audience to see the work as intended to have a certain interpretation or, minimally, to see the work as intended to be the sort of thing that has an interpretation.”17 The prescription of discernable intentionality Uidhir places on his qualifications for art was radically challenged by numerous developments in art and the humanities throughout the twentieth century. Seminal essays in the Humanities such as Michel Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (1969) and Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1967) suggested that artist’s intentions can never be fully known, and further, that the author functions as a mechanism of limitation, even repression, of meaning. Later in the twentieth century, postmodern theorist Amy Adler disputed the notion that art could possibly be defined by considering the artist’s intentions—here, for the purpose of segregating art from pornography formally. Adler suggests that inquiries into the artist’s sincerity are futile “because postmodernism ridicules the notion of sincerity and rejects the possibility that a viewer can ever discover an artist’s true intentions.”18 Since its dominance in the 1980s, postmodernism has challenged singular, objective interpretations of art and acknowledged the subjective knowledge, experiences and desires that audiences bring to an artwork upon considering it. To illustrate his theory regarding the incompatibility of art and porn, Uidhir presents the real-world case of Koons’s Made in Heaven series—one example of which I described at the beginning of this paper. As art historian Kirstin Strom has examined, the series’ (porno)graphic representations of sex in an esteemed exhibition venue seemed to 17 Jerry Fodor, “Déjà vu all over again: How Danto’s Aesthetics Recapitulates the Philosophy of Mind,” In Danto and his Critics, ed. Mark Rollins (Malden: Blackwell, 2012): 55-68. As cited in: Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art”, 199. 18 Amy M. Adler, "Post-Modern Art and the Death of Obscenity Law," The Yale Law Journal 99, no. 6 (1990): 1359-378. 8 press critics and spectators for responses to the question: is this art?19 The majority of critics took hasty positions on the issue after the Venice Biennale, arguing that Koons’s works qualify as art and do not constitute pornography.20 This response contends a mutual exclusivity between the two fields—that an image cannot be both a work of art and a work of pornography—while neglecting to explore the ways in which the works engage pornography’s conventions to efficacious ends. The reasoning put forward by critics in support of this view of Koons’s series as non-pornographic relies on a multitude of invalid arguments which are unsupported by the visual qualities of the artworks themselves. To support his contention that a visual text cannot operate using both artistic pornographic techniques, Uidhir argues that while the subjects in Koons’s Made in Heaven resembles those which one might find in a pornographic magazine like Penthouse, the series is not pornography because its “purpose” as art would not be fulfilled if the audience were to miss a key element: Part and parcel of understanding [the series] is recognizing that it depicts a sexual act involving Jeff Koons and Cicciolina, his famously attractive and libidinous then-wife. Failure to do so precludes satisfaction of the purpose of the work.21 This argument supposes that Koon’s explicit imagery qualifies as art because—and only if—the audience recognizes who is represented: the artist himself and his wife. A similar contention was previously put forward by art critic David Littlejohn who, after viewing 19 Kirsten Strom, ""Made in Heaven": Politics, Art and Pornography." Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies (1998): 54-56. 20 Notably, art critic Peter Schjeldahl has remained neutral on the question. In his review of the 2008 Jeff Koons retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, he admitted, “I’ve never known what to do with the Made in Heaven works, other than to gawk at them in vague alarm.” See: Peter Schjeldahl, “Funhouse: A Jeff Koons Retrospective,” New Yorker, June 2, 2008. 21 Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” 198. 9 the Made In Heaven works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1992, insisted that “these images are not pornographic because they do not invite the participation of the viewer . . . and because they show real, identifiable, nonfantasy people who are married.”22 Uidhir and Littlejohn’s prescriptions of recognizing the figures as “Mr. and Mrs. Koons” as vital to a viewer’s understanding of the works as ‘art’ rests on a number of faulty assumptions about the viewing experiences of both art and pornography, and about the creation of the works themselves and what they represent. First, it posits that images of sex between married couples cannot constitute pornography, a notion which subscribes to an archaic view of marital sex being more virtuous or valid than sex out of wedlock. It also assumes that when viewing pornographic material, the relationship between the figures can always be known, which it cannot. To support his view that only anonymous erotic figures can construct pornography, curator John Caldwell paraphrased Susan Sontag’s influential essay on pornography, writing “the characters in a pornographic novel must be fairly generic figures in order for us to project our erotic desires onto them.”23 The developments of the internet, however, do not support the presumption that only viewing generic and unknown subjects can stimulate sexual arousal, given the digital-age cultural fascination with celebrity sex tapes and the commonality of intimate couples video recording their personal sexual activities and 22 David Littlejohn, “Who is Jeff Koons and why are people saying such terrible things about him?” ARTnews, April 1993. Critic and contributing writer for the New Yorker Adam Gopnik also declared that, in the Made in Heaven works, “The issue of pornography could not have been less to the point—this was just sex between a married people. Real eroticism depends on transgression.” See: Adam Gopnik, “Lust for Life,” New Yorker, May 18, 1992. 23 John Caldwell, “Jeff Koons: The Way We Live Now,” In Jeff Koons (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992): 14. As cited in: Kirsten Strom, "Made in Heaven,” 55. See also: Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” In Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967). 10 distributing them to audiences online.. We now know that one can identify the figures in pornography and still experience arousal, and such identification often heightens the titillation. Critics’ interpretations of Made in Heaven frequently rely on Koons’s celebrity status and the couple’s highly publicized marriage which followed their artistic collaboration. In contrasting the notion of “real figures” with the descriptor of “pornographic,” critic David Littlejohn attaches a high level of significance to the identities of the subjects represented: Jeff Koons and Ilana Staller.24 Their subjectivity alone is posed as a source of meaning of the works as well as the thing which qualifies them as art, and not as pornography. Not only do these critics endorse the existence of a singular and objective interpretation of artworks, a semiotic stability which has been radically interrogated by postmodern discourses, but the investment of meaning in the status of the artist and in the identity of subjects depicted in figurative representations subscribes to outdated modernist notions of artistic authority and inherent meaning supposedly revealed through form. In Body Art / Performing the Subject, art historian Amelia Jones posits ‘subjectivity’ as being the central issue of postmodernism in her refutation of modernist notions of art spectatorship and criticism which presuppose the feasibility of an objective, singular way of interpreting art. Jones argues that body art and its permutations, including photography depicting bodies, radically reveals that the bodysubject can never be entirely knowable as a unique and coherent whole that exists outside of the symbolic order.25 The individual body—widely believed by both Cartesian western 24 Littlejohn, “Who is Jeff Koons.” Amelia Jones, Body art / performing the subject (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998): 33. 25 11 metaphysics and early scholars of feminist performance art in the 1970s such as Rosemary Mayer and Catherine Elwes to contain the unique human subject—will always be seen and understood within a linguistic structure of cultural codes. Thus, meaning conveyed by expressions, gestures and bodily markers such as race, class, sex and gender, always exist outside of the body, in society and culture. According to Jones’s reasoning, restricted significance can be drawn from the figures of Koons and Staller themselves, and thus, their seemingly unique identities do not inform substantial meaning to the artworks. Uidhir’s argument that, in order to properly interpret these works, one must recognize Jeff Koons and his famously attractive wife and Littlejohn’s reasoning that Koons’s works are not pornographic because “they show real, identifiable, nonfantasy people who are married” both contend meaning that is derived from Koons’s status and authority as a famous artist.26 Jones further explains how coded associations with an artist’s identity predetermine our viewing of the body-subject, seen either through photographic representations or via the proximate spectatorship of the live body art event: The “unique” body of the artist in the body art work only has meaning by virtue of its contextualization within the codes of identity that accrue to the artist’s name/body. Thus, this body is not self-contained in its meaningfulness; it is a body/self, relying not only on an authorial context of “signature” but also on a receptive context in which the interpreter or viewer may interact with it.27 Here, Jones also notes the significance of exhibition context in shaping viewers’ experiences and interpretations of objects. Ultimately, the dominant critical response to Made in Heaven which claims its status as ‘art’ (and not ‘porn’) rests on the notion that because Koons is a famous artist, not a pornographer, his images are considered art. In 26 27 Littlejohn, “Who is Jeff Koons.” Jones, Body art, 34. 12 attempting to secure Koons’s artistic authority and originality, critics and scholars almost always overlook Staller’s artistic and professional contributions to Made in Heaven. John Caldwell, curator of the 1992 Jeff Koons retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, claimed in his catalogue essay that works in the Made in Heaven series were the artist’s first and only works in his career which did not rely on methods of appropriation, describing the works as missing the “direct connection with the mother lode of media-derived experiences that Koons’s work always had in the past.”28 As I explained at the beginning of this paper, the sets, costumes, photographer, and performative know-how were all borrowed from Cicciolina’s widely-recognized career in pornography, which Koons appropriated in its entirety.29 In fixating on Koons’s status as a famous, married artist, museums and critics repeatedly, and quite conveniently, neglect to address Staller’s prolific career in pornography and how she might, by the same logic, inform interpretative meaning to the images. Acknowledgment of the ways in which her celebrity status in pornography shapes the meanings elicited by Made in Heaven would severely contradict these claims that the works are not pornographic. In support of the interpretation of Koons’s works as exempt from categorization as pornography, critics have also failed to account for the role of exhibition context in informing viewers’ subjective spectatorship. Although unaddressed in the existing art historical literature on Koons’s series, as Dr. Eck’s scholarship demonstrates, exhibition context is one of, if not, the most significant factor(s) shaping viewers’ interpretations of art objects. In his catalogue essay for the Koons retrospective at San Francisco MoMA, 28 John Caldwell, “Jeff Koons: The Way We Live Now,” 13-14. Jan Avgikos, “All That Heaven Allows: Love, Honor, and Koonst,” Flash Art 26, no. 171 (1993): 80-82. As cited in: Lauren DeLand, “A Fig Leaf for Jeff Koons: Pornography, Privacy, and ‘Made in Heaven’,” Criticism 60, no. 3 (Summer 2018): 300-301. 29 13 critic Jim Lewis wrote that Koons’s works are “not pornographic. . . because an art work becomes prurient only when it ceases to be a representation of desire and instead becomes the impetus for it. These works would be very much diminished if they provided occasions for arousal, [but] they don’t.”30 The notion put forward by Lewis that viewers’ physical responses to images can be predicted and singularized subscribes to what Amelia Jones describes as the modernist myth of the “disinterested”, “objective eye” of the spectator. In opposition to the disempowered spectator, Jones argues that, in reality, spectatorship is active. When viewing art, particularly figurative and body art, spectators are in a position of mediation with their “particular desires” (sexual and otherwise) and the social standards of behavior in a given “social and political context of reception,” in this case, the museum exhibition.31 The settings of the Venice Biennale or an internationally-renowned art museum like San Francisco MoMA—where artists and spectators are invited to question cultural norms and taboos and push boundaries—do not necessarily promote genital arousal or masturbation. Whether or not a work “provide[s] occasion for arousal” is, however, a highly subjective question that relies upon the individual viewer’s inclinations and willingness to engage in an eroticized viewing in public. Perhaps if the same works were presented elsewhere, say in a private collection or on an internet site such as Pornhub, critics like Jim Lewis might consider the art’s “impetus” for desire differently. Viewer response to sexual imagery is in no way universal; an image has the potential to titillate one viewer and repulse, or even bore, another. There is also the potential for a single 30 Jim Lewis, “A Modest Proposal,” In Jeff Koons (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1992): 16. 31 Jones, Body art, 25. 14 work of art to both titillate and repulse the same viewer. Curators and art critics also distance Koons’s works from pornography by attesting to its perceived “realness.” In his catalogue essay for the Koons retrospective at the San Francisco MoMA, curator John Caldwell wrote, “a curious aspect of Koons’s new paintings is that they are not pornographic. . . probably the reason for this is that they are too real.”32 Beyond the artificial aesthetics, costuming and sets, the figures’ expressions do not appear earnestly sentimental. The interpretation of realness by these critics is, indeed, peculiar, given that contemporary internet pornography, like most other forms of entertainment, is quite determined in its trafficking of the “real.” Consideration of Made in Heaven’s aesthetic qualities does not support interpretations of the artist’s representations of “real” sex, but rather, reveals the ways in which the artist exploits pornography’s artifices. Art historian Kirsten Strom perceives an essence of artifice and performance encapsulating these objects.33 In many of the images, Koons smirks directly toward the viewer’s perspective, disrupting the illusion of candid “reality” and obstructing any possibility of uninterrupted voyeuristic viewing pleasure, as is offered by pornography. The facial expressions of both Koons and Staller resemble the overly-exaggerated emotions found in pornography. Koons’s tender gaze towards his wife appears more smug than sincere, while Staller displays the same shut-eyed, ecstatic facial expression in nearly every image from the series. It would be foolish to interpret these works as “real” windows into the private sexual life of the couple. While the series depicts the couples engaged in a variety of sexual acts, they are shown kissing in just two images, and only a small handful the 32 33 Caldwell, “Jeff Koons: The Way We Live Now,” 14. Strom, "Made in Heaven", 55. 15 works depict intercourse and penetration. The vast majority of the works depict an immense variety of non-penetrative poses and foreplay moments: dramatic poses of embrace, oral sex, touching, fondling, etc. In works such as Manet, Soft and Fingers Between Legs, Koons and Cicciolina are not engaged in any act of personal sexual gratification, via the mouth or genitals. The gazing back toward the viewer, a reoccurring construct in the series, implicates the viewer in the scene of the figures and suggests that the pleasure experienced by the couple is being offered to the spectator in the act of viewing. These kinds of poses lend themselves less to an illusion of natural, unmediated sex, but rather, to the performative quality of both pornography and commercial advertisements, both forms of the commodification of sex. The photograph Fingers Between Legs features the couple brightly-lit, laying on stone in front of a wispy backdrop which simulates fluffy clouds or crashing waves (Figure 2). Koons grips underneath Staller’s thigh, hoisting her legs up as she caresses her vulva. His penis lays limp and nonthreatening beside Staller’s buttocks. She is adorned with a flower crown and lacy lingerie. Koons has explained that his own nudity and Staller’s lack thereof as an expression of his desire not to be exploitative of her and her body.34 However, his nudity and her ornamentation are perhaps more paradigmatic of the tradition of representing male sexuality as primal and natural and female sexuality as something constructed or performed for an audience of one. The synthetic backdrops behind the subjects collapse the perception of spatial depth, bringing the dramaticallyilluminated figures to the forefront of the image field—a technique common in the field of commercial advertisements. The sweet, sensual portrait of the married couple also 34 Ibid., 60. 16 resembles luscious covers of popular romance novels, which are marketed primarily to women as a source of erotic titillation. The amalgamation of flowery, typically femalegendered romantic aesthetics with constructions of pornographic imagery, a male-centric commodity, brings together these two forms of sensual media which are distinguished and marketed in accordance with binary gender lines. Rather than enforcing a strict dichotomy between the categories of art and pornography, Made in Heaven situates hardcore pornographic imagery within other, less controversial forms of mainstream erotic media. In describing this series, Koons famously proclaimed himself and Cicciolina as the contemporary Adam and Eve.35 In works like Jeff and Ilona (Figure 3), one might interpret the figures’ nudity, the flowery scenery, and the large serpent form as iconography of the Garden of Eden. The fundamental biblical story conceives of lust as a source of sin and evil. Whereas Adam and Eve’s nakedness signified their innocence and unawareness of themselves as sexual beings, Cicciolina’s decorated body suggests an aware and deliberate exhibitionism of her sexuality, as is characteristic of pornographic performance. Her lacey costume also places the couple not in the Garden, but in the contemporary moment. The Adam and Eve narrative in Genesis teaches that indulging in sensual temptation resulted in the fall of man. But by installing large-scale and unapologetic erotic figures in a public space and encouraging gallery visitors to experience them from a variety of bodily perspectives, Koons refuses to perpetuate Judeo-Christian attributions of guilt and shame to sex and the viewing of its representations. 35 Rothkopf, “No Limits,” 25. 17 Jeff Koons is one in a long line of male artists in the modern period grappling with the implications of sex work under the conditions of capitalism. At the same time that pornographic photographs began circulating in unprecedented quantities during the nineteenth century, a growing number of women in booming urban cities turned to sex work as a means of employment. Throughout the modern period of rapid industrialization and urbanization, sex work proliferated in the West simultaneous with the rise of capitalism. French impressionist paintings have been widely studied in their representations of sex workers as evidence of the growing commodification of the female body in this period. Koons makes reference to artists such as Édouard Manet in works such as Manet, Soft. Susan Buck-Morss has explained how during the nineteenth century, human sexuality became increasingly commodified within the workings of capitalism, stating that “to desire the fashionable, purchasable woman-as-thing is to desire exchange-value itself, that is, the very essence of capitalism.”36 If prostitution is the narrowing of sex to the essence of capitalism, then sex enacted outside of financial exchange might be seen as polymorphic, with a variety of aims in a society (i.e. reproduction, pleasure, intimacy.) On the contrary, in the capitalist system, sex and its representations become constrained into a narrow exchange of purchasable commodities, estranged from matters of intimacy and reproduction. Buck-Morss discusses Walter Benjamin’s influential theories of how normative Judeo-Christian sexuality, with its strict emphasis on marriage and reproduction, was diverted during modernization. Benjamin explained how “sexuality which formerly was made mobile by the fantasy of the future of productive powers [i.e., 36 Susan Buck-Morss, “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering”, New German Critique no. 39, Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn, 1986): 99-140. 18 having children] is now only made so by the [fantasy] of the power of capital.”37 The universal accessibility of internet pornography can be understood as another stage in the growing commodification of sex. The purchase of pornography—or as has become more common, the streaming of free content—online enables individuals to experience sexual gratification not with a partner or spouse, but with images presented on their computers and cell phones. In the same way in which virtually every aspect of social interaction has become digitalized and commodified by the internet, sex circulates online as a product for consumption. As opposed to allowing museum goers a rare glimpse into his private sex life with his wife, Koons updates the modernist tradition in western art of exploring the current state of the commodification of sex through erotic nude images. The title “Made in Heaven” invokes language of mass production and global circulation of goods, where products are stamped with the name of the country in which they are produced. Jeff Koons’s oeuvre contains a plethora of works which monumentalize low-status (yet highly desired) mass-produced artifacts of popular culture with seemingly little aesthetic or cultural value but whose ubiquity attests to their desirability and beloved status as commodities. In American capitalist society, Koons’s works command macroeconomic introspection by mirroring to the upper and middle socioeconomic classes their fetishistic tastes for consumer goods. Strom argues that Made In Heaven is an extension of Koons’s instruction to stare into our collective desire for sex and appetite for sexual imagery unabashedly, an interpretation that is in tandem with Koons’s longstanding visual and 37 Walter Benjamin, “vol. V: Passagen-Werk” in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Schweppenhäuser Hermann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972): 436. As cited in: BuckMorss, “The Politics of Loitering,” 121. 19 conceptual practices.38 As opposed to functioning within a strict binary between art and pornography as critics commonly proclaim, I argue that in synthesizing hardcore porn with less threatening forms of cultural erotica, monumentalizing the scale of pornographic forms, and subverting the shameful and taboo nature of sexual representation, Made in Heaven prompts viewers to contemplate their personal and cultural understanding of sexual imagery. In this series, Koons engages with pornographic forms through a flamboyant display of intimacy to refute the repressive condensation of sexuality into narrow images of desire and their strictly-delegated circulation within pornography’s internet economies. American artist Marilyn Minter also investigates the positions of human sexuality and sexual representations within a culture of consumerism. To create Porn Grid (Figure 4), Minter applied several layers of high-gloss enamel onto metal, producing a vibrant and glossy surface that seduces the eye even before the sexually explicit forms have a chance to titillate—or repulse—spectators. Ellisa Auther describes Minter’s stylistic “application of scale distortions to isolated body parts, from dizzying foreshortening to nauseatingly extreme close-ups that repel the gaze as much as they invite it.”39 Minter once proclaimed, “I try to seduce people with my paintings. I want you to get sucked in by their lusciousness.”40 Porn Grid depicts fragmented body parts such as penises, open mouths and breasts. Whereas Koons’s custom sculptures feature himself and his wife engaging in sex, Minter creates her figures by borrowing from generic representational strategies used frequently in pornography. The incoherent yet familiar and nature of these 38 Strom, “Made in Heaven”, 59. Elissa Auther, "Marilyn Minter's Politically Incorrect Pleasures," In Marilyn Minter: Pretty/Dirty (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Company, 2016): 22. 40 Ibid. 39 20 porn figures suggests the ways in which the dominant visual forms present in pornography create a coded language which increasingly shapes our perception of naked bodies. The diversity of these forms is becoming condensed as the profitability of porn is challenged by pirating and the provision of free material by sites such as Pornhub, which receives an average of 80 million visitors daily.41 Minter escapes merely replicating widely-accessible pornography in a number of ways; a spectator of Minter’s work who has encountered a handful or more pornographic images in their lifetime would likely find the work trite and disappointing as a pornographic representation. The artist exaggerates the intense close-up perspective used in pornography which isolates people’s sexual organs in-action from their full figures— what is often referred to in porn as the “money shot.” Minter’s careful omission of the subjects’ eyes exaggerates pornography’s separation of fleshy sexual mechanics from the real human subjects in front of and behind the camera. Typically, a viewer would focus in on one pornographic document at a time to maximize fantasy and pleasure. Pornography’s perspectives often gaze upon female subjects from the perceivable position of the male in the scene, but by presenting four explicit sexual graphics, Minter overwhelms the viewer with too much porn. Like decapitated ‘talking heads’ on the television, Porn Grid’s four ‘ejaculating penises’ complicate the indulgent viewing offered by pornography by leaving the masculine viewer without a singular and concise position to imagine himself within the scene. The multitude of sexual acts in Porn Grid conveys the enormity of pornography consumption in our culture. The subjects’ bright red, gaping lips, and glowing, contoured 41 Curtis Silver, "Pornhub 2017 Year in Review: Insights Report Reveals Statistical Proof We Love Porn," Forbes, January 09, 2018. 21 cheeks rearticulate familiar fetishistic fragmentations of the body that oversaturate our broader visual culture—in pornography as well as in advertisements of food, cosmetics and other goods. Auther describes how these depictions of paradigmatic pornographic acts onto bold, glossy, magazine-like surfaces “creat[es] a further push and pull between the immediacy offered by photography and the distance of the mass-produced magazine.”42 Both of these industries recycle zoomed-in, partial views of the human body to titillate viewers and arouse their impulses. In this work, Minter paints a comparison between representations of sex in pornography and representations of physical beauty in broader systems of commercialism and mass-marketing. The act of borrowing and translating imagery from mass consumer culture into the practices and institutions of “high art” was pioneered by Pop artists in the midtwentieth century, a period characterized by America’s booming, post-war industry which produced a culture saturated with mass-produced consumer goods and advertisements. Comparing contemporary art that engages with forms of pornography to American Pop art of the 1960s reveals historical similarities in the public reception of art that engages “non-art” imagery and suggests ways in which postmodernist developments have allowed the acknowledgment of greater complexity of meaning from viewers, notably, in the form of irony. In “Borrowed Spots: The Gendering of Comic Books, Lichtenstein’s Paintings, and Dishwasher Detergent,” Cécile Whiting explains how American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein appropriated imagery from popular comic books and exaggerated, to the point of absurdity, post-war American gender roles which comic books reinforced 42 Auther, “Marilyn Minter's Politically Incorrect Pleasures,” 24. 22 through their representations.43 In war comics marketed to young male audiences, men courageously fight and win wars. All of Lichtenstein’s war paintings depict soldiers and pilots confronting and defeating the enemy.44 In popular romance comics, women fall in love and marry, but these love narratives are frequently interrupted by close-up views of distressed female faces. Lichtenstein’s romance paintings abandon the scenes of resolution in which men offer kisses, engagement rings and other promises of commitment—accentuating, instead, the anxious, devastated female alone. In a frame from the story “Run for Love,” a male figure clings onto an overturned boat as a shoreline is visible in the distance (Figure 5). Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl focuses in on the isolated woman encompassed by waves (Figure 6). With tears streaming down her face, she appears to drown as much from her sorrow as from the tumultuous sea. Lichtenstein, Whiting explains, selected climactic moments in comic narratives where these gender constructs were at their most extreme and exaggerated these gender differences with even greater explicitness. By thickening the black lines and enlarging Ben Day dots of their source, Lichtenstein’s comic paintings emphasizes the role of the representational medium itself in formulating notions of gender through artifice. Whiting illustrates how the pleasure provided by popular comic books to mass (largely teenage) culture was derived from their predictability. These books relied on formulaic narrative structures which move from disaster to resolution, heroic characters, and clearly articulated constructs of gender—such was all part of their appeal.45 It is worth noting that all of these same elements construct contemporary pornography. A 43 Cécile Whiting, "Borrowed Spots: The Gendering of Comic Books, Lichtenstein’s Paintings, and Dishwasher Detergent," American Art 6, no. 2 (1992): 9-35. 44 Ibid., 12. 45 Ibid., 11. 23 standardized sequence of events unfolds in most heteronormative pornography: undressing, foreplay including oral sex, intercourse, to ejaculation. The hero figure—the male—achieves his goal of ejaculating. Sexual difference between characters is performed through sex, an anatomical presentation of sex distinction, but also through more nuanced and inherent performative gender constructions. The predictable nature of internet pornography is, perhaps, even more severe than in 1950s comics. When watching video porn, viewers can fast forward to their favorite sex acts because it is predictable what typically transpires. When Pop artists inducted various images from 1960s consumer culture into museums, concerns arose regarding issues of artistic authority and cultural boundaries, similar to those levied by critics of Koons in claiming that Made in Heaven does not appropriate Cicciolina’s productions (nor pornography broadly) and is a unique contribution by the “real, famous” artist.46 Cécile Whiting details the two dominant reactions to Lichtenstein’s works by art critics: one saw the comic paintings as a radical anti-modernist copying of comic books, while the other secured the artist within mainstream modernism by obsessing over Lichtenstein’s formalist qualities. The antimodern camp, which included writer Max Kozloff, perceived Lichtenstein’s paintings as a breakdown of the boundaries between culture and art and an abandoning of the expressionism in abstraction and action painting. Kozloff wrote of the artist’s process of copying: “Behind the borrowing propensities of such new American painting as Lichtenstein's lies a rejection of the deepest values of modern art."47 46 Caldwell, “Jeff Koons: The Way We Live Now,” 14; Littlejohn, “Who is Jeff Koons”; Uidhir, “Why Pornography Can’t Be Art,” 198. 47 Max Kozloff, "Art," The Nation 197 (2 November, 1963): 284- 286. As cited in: Cécile Whiting, “Borrowed Spots,” 21. 24 On the other hand, the formalist camp of critics defended Lichtenstein’s comic paintings as modernist art by addressing the works’ unique formal qualities, insisting upon Lichtenstein’s unique style which he applied to the comic book forms, primarily, in the form of the Ben Day dot. In her 1966 article justifying Lichtenstein’s stylistic formalism, Ellen Johnson claimed that, “the subject of Lichtenstein's painting is not so much the subject of the selected comic or advertisement as it is the style in which those images are presented.”48 The perceptions of the formalist camp are those which have come to dominate our art historical account of Lichtenstein’s comic book paintings.49 Whiting explains how “both factions not only maintained that a difference must and did exist between high art and mass culture, but both also granted priority to the former by establishing an opposition between an autographic style and copying.”50 This supposed binary between artistic style and appropriation was upheld by Made in Heaven critics who gave voice to the “real, non-fantasy” quality of the images and fixating on Koons’s self-representation while refusing to consider the artist’s overt engagement with pornography. Neither camp of Lichtenstein’s critics saw his source material as vital to the meaning of the works, in the same way that critics of Koons do not address the potential significance of Made in Heaven’s pornographic aesthetics. The reception of Egyptian contemporary artist Ghada Amer’s pornographic embroideries echo the discourse around Lichtenstein’s 60s comic paintings as well as that which framed Made in Heaven. Like Lichtenstein, Amer appropriates images from 48 Ellen Johnson, "The Image Duplicators—Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg and Warhol," Canadian Art 23 (1966): 13-18. As cited in: Cécile Whiting, “Borrowed Spots,” 18. 49 See: Margot Lovejoy, "The Machine Age and Modernism," In Postmodern Currents: Art and Artists in the Age of Electronic Media (Upper Sable River: Prentice Hall, 1996), 63. 50 Whiting, “Borrowed Spots”, 21. 25 popular culture. She sketches female figures from pornographic magazines before embroidering them onto canvas to produce dizzying images of nude women the size of traditional painting. Discussions similar to those instigated by Lichtenstein’s paintings weigh the extent to which Amer stylistically transforms the pornographic sources she accesses. In tandem with the critics of Koons, Candice Breitz insists that the works are not pornographic, arguing that “despite the proliferation of vulvae and labia in Amer's work, it is in vain that we attempt to focus on these sites of desire.”51 To Breitz, the artist obliterates the original erotic and pleasurable capacities of pornography, instead, posing a critique of pornography’s conventions. Art historian Laura Auricchio, on the other hand, acknowledges the potential of subjective spectatorship to allow for an erotic viewing experience by positing that, in copying pornography, Amer intertwines the experiences of looking aesthetically and looking for sexual titillation.52 In the 1970s, John Berger reexamined the Western tradition of the female nude— long regarded as the visual culmination of Renaissance idealism, “high art” and humanism—and emphasized its pornographic functions in their production and consumption by male spectators.53 By employing repeating, near-identical forms, Amer satirizes the western canon’s abundance of female nudes by depicting up to twelve nude female figures on one canvas, which she often finishes with acrylic paint (Figures 7 and 8). In addition to rhythmically repeating similar female bodies, she portrays a multitude of body parts which are impossible to unite into a cohesive subject. In Grey Lines (Figure 51 Candice Breitz, "Ghada Amer: The Modelling of Desire," Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 5 (November 1, 1996): 14-16. 52 Laura Auricchio, "Works in Translation: Ghada Amer’s Hybrid Pleasures," Art Journal 60, no. 4 (2001): 24-37. 53 John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting, 1972). 26 8), the arch of the central-left figure’s back dissolves into something delectable for the large head of the left-most figure to lick. In Knotty but Nice (Figure 9), it is impossible to picture the full bodies of the five pronounced faces at the top of the canvas. By engaging the cubist technique of illustrating a multitude of incongruent perspectives, Amer’s thread paintings exacerbate video pornography’s paradigmatic fragmentation of body parts in action. Amer’s elusive and disparate nude figures cannot be consumed in a singular gaze. Breitz describes the effects of this dizzying illusionism as a reclamation of female sexuality and its representations: It is as if these masturbating women, at first obscured by a morass of overhanging cotton, disappear at the very moment in which they emerge. In place of the optical illusion which fluctuates between rabbit and duck, Amer presents us with canvases which seem to pulse between a desire which we have usually understood as “male” and a still barely discernible desire which might be described as “female;” yet, in the process, she dismantles each of these binarily-configured desires to an extent, suggesting that the rabbit and the duck are not as distinct or separable as we might like to think…The open-legged temptresses are inclined to once again wriggle loose from the gaze, to insist on their own desire, thus to jeer slyly at the myth of the autonomous and individualistic male artist as their bodies appear and disappear on the surface of the works.54 Amer exaggerates pornography’s regurgitation of few stock images and perspectives of women’s bodies. Thread, a material foundational to clothing and to the so-called “feminine arts,” both composes and complicates the perceivable female body. Amer’s works are saturated with pornography’s graphics and are equally rich with critique of its conventions, particularly in its consumption. Amer’s embroidered canvases break down the boundary between art and pornography much as feminist artists have used embroidery to challenge cultural boundaries separating art from craft, public from private, and masculine from feminine 54 Candice Breitz, "The Modelling of Desire," 15. 27 cultural domains.55 In The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine, Rozsika Parker traces female embroidery practices from the Middle Ages to today and explains how “embroidery has provided a source of pleasure and power for women, while being indissolubly linked to their powerlessness. . . paradoxically, [it] was employed to inculcate femininity in women, it also enabled them to negotiate the constraints of femininity.”56 Since the 1970s, feminist artists working in embroidery have explored this historical paradox. Artists like Judy Chicago and Faith Ringgold have used the traditionally-female medium to dismantle archaic notions of gender and articulate new concepts of femininity, all the while affirming the status of embroidery as “high art.” Pornography and sex work broadly have been contended as a violent industry of exploitation of women’s bodies. Feminism in the 1970s interrogated pornography and its inherent objectification and subjugation of women, but contemporary discourse has further theorized about sex work’s capacity for a reclamation of women’s sexuality as well as opportunity for financial gain. Feminists have since debated the feasibility of a pornography which promotes gender equality in sexual performance, and artists have explored imagery depicting healthy and equality-promoting heterosexual pleasure.57 In the way that female embroidery artists have navigated this paradox of power and powerlessness related to the medium of embroidery historically, Amer’s embroidery practice renegotiates the positions of “powerlessness” into which women are constrained as objects of the male gaze in pornography. Amer’s depictions of pornographic imagery 55 Auricchio, “Works in Translation,” 27. Roziska Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1994): 11. As cited in: Auricchio, “Works in Translation,” 27. 57 See: Richard Meyer, "Hard Targets: Male Bodies, Feminist Art and the Force of Censorship in the 1970s," In Wack!: art and the feminist revolution (Los Angeles, CA: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), 362-83. 56 28 presents a striking dissonance between the delicacy of the medium and the crudeness of the subject matter. Embroidery is a meticulous process which requires careful control and fine-motor skills. Embroidered pieces are tactile, custom and original, whereas pornography is mass-produced and can be accessed online everywhere, at any time. Noting the absence of male figures, multiple critics and art historians perceive a model of female-centric pleasure in Amer’s images of women engaged in same-sex or autoerotic play.58 Amer challenges gender constructs perpetuated by pornography in ways similar to Lichtenstein’s comic paintings, but the criticism on her works seem to claim a high degree to which these works seditiously convolute the systems of representation that constitute their source material. Amer’s female figures engage in sexual play with themselves or with one another, however, much of internet porn portrays women having sex with women for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer; two women having sex alone with each other not necessarily constitute non-masculinist pornography. Critical responses to Amer’s employment of pornographic conventions parallel the critical reception of Koons’s Made in Heaven series which worked to downplay Koons’s engagement with pornography. In Amer’s case, critics seeks to distance the artworks from the category of porn, not by centralizing the artist’s celebrity and professional status, but by subjecting the works to a feminist critique that is unsubstituted by the works’ formal elements. Returning to the case of Roy Lichtenstein, several contemporaneous critics 58 Orna Guralnik. “Love Has No End: Ghada Amer.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 11, no. 2 (2010): 107-108; Candice Breitz, "The Modelling of Desire," 15; Auricchio, “Works in Translation,” 34. 29 mentioned—yet deemphasized—the artist’s ironic, mocking, or critical attitude toward his source material, still, placing greater emphasis on style and matters of formalism. In the pages of Vogue, Aline Saarinen suggested that Lichtenstein moved past the intermediate space of parody to achieve “high art:” “when he is at his best, he transforms the comic strips and mindless clichés of American-girl images a step beyond supercaricature or satire into concentrated works of art.”59 In an article for Life, Dorothy Seiberling gave voice to the modernist notion of parody being inartistic and without significance: “he leaves the viewer wondering if his paintings are only parodies, ironic gestures, or if they will outlast their shock and give a new shape to art.”60 Cécile Whiting attributes this resistance to reading Lichtenstein in parodic terms to the threats posed by satire “to the seriousness of modern art.”61 As American action painting was coming down from its heyday, the question emerged in the art world as to what would succeed the eminence of abstract expressionism. Comparably, ‘the pornographic’ can be understood as a threat to the “seriousness of art” in contemporary culture. Both satire and pornography seek to elicit physical responses from audiences, whether laughter or sexual arousal, and, as I have shown, the endorsement of intellectual, objective, and disembodied viewership is pronounced in modernist criticisms on both Lichtenstein and Koons. However, any effective critical analysis of art that uses the imagery and conventions of pornography must take into account the question of the subjective and embodied engagement of the spectator. 59 Aline Saarinen, "Explosion of Pop Art: A New Kind of Fine Art Imposing Poetic Order on the Mass-Produced World," Vogue, April 1963. As cited in: Whiting, “Borrowed Spots,” 19. 60 Dorothy Seiberling, "Is He the Worst Artist in the U.S.?" Life, January, 31 1964. As cited in: Whiting, “Borrowed Spots,” 19. 61 Whiting, “Borrowed Spots,” 19. 30 ‘Pornography’ is a pejorative term, associated with an array of distasteful connotations and passionate moralistic concerns. Dr. Beth Eck’s study demonstrated that an intersection between art and pornography is confusing and inconceivable to the general public.62 Given the moralistic associations with the term, an art critic describing an artwork as “pornographic” would be likely be perceived either as evidence of the critic’s prudishness or as an indication that the work being discussed possess little to no artistic merit. Moreover, describing art as pornographic threatens to open the institutions of art to the functions of pornography. Few artists have raised internet pornography to the status of “high art” as radically as German photographer Thomas Ruff. In Ruff’s ongoing Nudes series, the artist selects thumbnail images from online pornography, alters their digital pixilation slightly via Photoshop technology, then enlarges the images onto large canvases comparable to the scale of traditional western portraiture (Figures 10, 11, 12 and 13). The artist does not create the original images; he appropriates them from online sources. Unlike Amer’s embroideries, Ruff’s photographs often portray male figures engaging in both heterosexual and homosexual intercourse. Similar to the way Lichtenstein deliberately selected comics crafted for both gendered audiences (war and romance) equally, Thomas Ruff intentionally represents a variety of sexualities in his Nudes in attempt to evolve beyond the paradigm of exhibition for the straight male gaze in the tradition of the female nude.63 The thumbnail source images appropriated by Ruff—like Lichtenstein’s comic paintings—capture a partial moment from a sequence (in one case a comic book, in the 62 63 Eck, “Nudity and Framing,” 616. "Thomas Ruff’s Heavenly Bodies," Phaidon, 2012. 31 other, video.) The works lack an artist’s unique stylistic signature, such as that pronounced in Amer’s spindly embroidered figures and the Ben Day dots beloved by contemporaneous viewers of Lichtenstein. If considered in the terms put in place by the dominant critics of Lichtenstein, Ruff’s practice would then be easily read as a process of copying and would thus be understood as dissolving the boundary between “high art” and the cultural products of pornography. On the other side of the Lichtenstein dichotomy, critics like Jerry Saltz have described Ruff’s process as an image transformation which critiques its source material: This enlargement process is key to the transformation of what is considered to be a “real” photographic image into a form of imposing physical presence that reveals the original as a fantasy or fiction of sorts.64 The finished products are unfocused, dream-like images in which the artist has destroyed the perception of spatial depth that constructs internet porn. Like Lichtenstein, Ruff draws attention to the artifice of his source imagery. Saltz draws a historical connection between Ruff’s series and the aesthetics of impressionism. Pointillist techniques in impressionist painterly abstraction were used by artists such as Claude Monet to draw attention to surface detail and artistic construction of pictorial representation.65 In the Nudes, as in pointillist painting, colors separate, and pictorial space is distorted. Whereas pornography seeks to convincingly convey sex performed by three-dimensional bodies, Ruff’s images collapse that illusion of three-dimensionality onto a fuzzy surface, revealing how the material reality of pornography is not of supple flesh and lubricated genitals. Ruff’s practice makes apparent that, in actuality, when watching digital internet pornography, we masturbate to numerical files streaming at ever-increasing speeds. 64 65 Jerry Saltz, "Ruff Trade," Village Voice, May 23, 2000. Ibid. 32 In addition to deconstructing the illusion of pornographic realness, the pixilated transformation of pornography on Ruff’s canvases also evokes issues of censorship and the historical expurgation of erotic art. Although pornographic materials are accessible online with a mere search word and a couple of clicks from any internet-capable device, pornography is banished from mainstream media outlets such as network television and internet platforms such as Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr. In “Neither/Nor: Unfaithful Images in Photography and Preservation” Sarah Blankenbaker and Erin Besler interpret Ruff’s distortions as an act of self-censorship through pixilation: The pixilation of the Nudes does not concern itself with any particular area of smut but rather imposes itself everywhere. The size of Ruff’s digital images are increased and the photographic prints take on the mark of the pixel grid. The pixels, fixed to a measure once regulated by a computer screen, break down in a blur over the printed medium. Rather than gaining clarity through enlargement, the Nudes obscure and censor themselves in decreased resolution, gaining instead the mark, the evidence of what has been lost.66 It is as if the artist anticipates the censorship of his sexual art, as is a predictable consequence for pornographic imagery that is shown in a public space. Exceptions are most often made within the intellectual setting of the art gallery, but even then, the case of Made in Heaven demonstrates that critics are often the first to extinguish discussion of the pornographic. Ruff’s Nudes force viewers to consider the dialectic systems of pornography’s circulation—its constant immediate availability and the regulating forces which seek to forbid it from public exhibition. Ruff’s pixilation radically abates lurid details of highly-explicit pornography, and a coherent perception of the blurry Nudes is contingent upon the accessing of the 66 Sarah Blankenbaker and Erin Besler, "Neither/Nor: Unfaithful Images in Photography and Preservation," Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation, History, Theory, and Criticism 11, no. 1 (Summer 2014): 5. 33 viewer’s own mental library of pornography. In this embodied form of spectatorship, we instinctively—and involuntarily—read the unfocused images because we have seen them before, or material that is similar enough. Ruff explains that seeing his Nudes is more like seeing your own imagination depicted before you: You need a fantasy to look at these images. . . they are all mirrors, so if you look at these, you look at yourself—if you have a dirty fantasy you see a lot, if you have a nice fantasy, I don’t know what you see.67 The viewer—perhaps unwillingly—participates in completing or restoring the image through erotic fantasy, via what Saltz calls “unquantifiable and unique sociological associations” with pornography that loom in the subconscious of people living in the internet age, obscene associations that are never too far from cognitive reach.68 Ruff demonstrates how porn in the internet age has become so ubiquitous that is no longer contained within the realm of cyberspace. Pornography has come to exist in our minds, in our personal and cultural consciousness. Cultural discourse regarding the distinction between art and pornography made national headlines just one year prior to Made in Heaven’s debut. In 1989, republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina engaged in a crude form of amateur art criticism in his legislative crusade against the work of artist Robert Mapplethorpe, which, in addition to a variety of other subject matter, explored themes of homoerotism and BDSM in photographs depicting nude or partially clad male figures. In an interview with The New York Times, Helms mentioned a Mapplethorpe photograph depicting “two males of different races [in an erotic pose] on a marble-top table,” a description which has been demonstrated to be a fantastical fabrication comprised of Helms’ own mental images of 67 68 "Thomas Ruff’s Heavenly Bodies," Phaidon. Saltz, “Ruff Trade”. 34 gay pornography—since no such photograph by Mapplethorpe actually exists.69 Helms’s statements on Mapplethorpe’s art illustrate the processes of fantasy and involuntary accessing of personal pornography archives like those initiated by Thomas Ruff’s Nudes. As a means of imposing content restrictions on federally funded art, Sen. Helms distributed photocopies of Robert Mapplethorpe’s artworks on the floor of the US Senate to convince representatives of the “pornographic and sick” nature of the images by the “perverse” artist. Helms frequently mentioned the artist’s recent loss of life to AIDS in order to conflate the perceived cultural threats posed by Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic imagery with threats to the purity of bodies in society.70 Jesse Helms made the question of art vs. pornography a legal one and established a precedent of censorship of sexually graphic art.71 The cultural shockwaves of these congressional hearings moved the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. to cancel their showing of The Perfect Moment, a Mapplethorpe retrospective exhibition, sparking large protests outside the museum’s walls the night before the exhibition was scheduled to have opened. The legacy of Helms’s congressional hearings on Mapplethorpe shows how labeling art as 69 Maureen Dowd, "Unruffled Helms Basks in Eye of Arts Storm," New York Times, July 28, 1989, p. B6. As cited in Richard Meyer, "The Jesse Helms Theory of Art," October 104 (2003): 131-48. 70 Meyer, “Jesse Helms Theory of Art,” 137-138. 71 Upon opening in Cincinnati at the Contemporary Art Center, The Perfect Moment show, a retrospective of Mapplethorpe’s works which had received partial funding from a $30,000 NEA grant, resulted in indictments for the art center and its director on charges of pandering obscenity and child pornography, marking the first trial in US history where a museum was prosecuted as a result of the art it displayed. After a ten-day trial, the jury acquitted the museum of all charges. However, this was not the end of the Mapplethorpe case for Jesse Helms. He continued his efforts to remove Mapplethorpe’s photographs from the public consciousness. Richard Meyer has argued that Helms’s censorship effort was ultimately unsuccessful, given the tendency of expurgation to produce powerful ways of responding to the silencing and oppression of art, resulting in the circulation of the exact images that the oppressor sought to censor. 35 pornography poses the threat of censorship, and with it the removal of funding, to artists, museums, and publications. Art historian Lauren DeLand has argued that Mapplethorpe’s artworks were no more pornographic than Koons’s from just one year later.72 But unlike Koons, the relationships of the figures Mapplethorpe pictured were not assumed to be romantic or committed. In 1989, gay couples were not given the right to marry, as Koons and Staller were. Instead, Mapplethorpe’s erotic subjects were believed to encourage dangerous and morally-perverse sexual behavior, and as such, his art was treated criminally and seen as a threat to public health and safety.73 DeLand emphasized the different artistic fates of Robert Mapplethorpe and Jeff Koons, explaining how “unlike the highly publicized controversies inspired by the works of Robert Mapplethorpe, Made in Heaven generated no cultural, political or legal opposition whatsoever.”74 Although Koons and Staller were unmarried at the onset of the project and divorced three years after its exhibition, as I have shown, art institutions continually distance Koons’s work from consideration as pornography by indicating the couple’s married status. Just as the institution of marriage and the right to privacy have historically protected the sexual discretion of heterosexual individuals from forms of legal prosecution, Koons’s art has avoided designation as pornography and the threats of criminality and censorship that come with that label. I am not declaring Koons’s art as pornography, at least not in the sense that porn is dominantly understood today. Nor am I claiming that the pornography industry, in its current state, is readily capable of producing art. Rather, I am arguing that adherence to 72 DeLand, “A Fig Leaf for Jeff Koons,” 295-314. Ibid., 303. 74 Ibid., 297. 73 36 the belief in the incompatibility of art and pornography has greatly hindered our critical understanding of art that engages pornographic convention. Comparing the case of Robert Mapplethorpe to Jeff Koons reveals how attempts to establish definitive guidelines for what qualifies an image as ‘art’ or ‘pornography’ are typically motivated by cultural persuasion or the politics of individuals. In her discussion of the rarelyconsidered artistic qualities of Cicciolina’s career productions and performances in relation to her involvement in the Made in Heaven project, art critic Jan Avigikos interrogates the cultural authority placed upon objects when they are placed in museums, authority which protects nude images from the degradation often suffered by images condemned as “pornography.” She writes: “Fine art” is what we see in museums, which in turn, sanction, value, and protect “artistic” production and display; “pornography,” because of different systems of distribution and contextualization, is marginalized and receives no such sanction or protection. Even though at face value such images may be completely interchangeable, the discourses which pertain to each are radically different.75 In her analysis of the differing visual and conceptual treatment granted to Koons’s artworks but rarely to Cicciolina’s productions, Avigikos points toward the arbitrary and subjective nature of all qualifying demarcations between art and pornography, demonstrating that the upholding of this binary is not an objective or productive means to critically engage with works of art. Theorist Amy Alder also challenges the notion that art can be standardized or rigidly defined in a way that differentiates the practice of art from pornography, arguing that no qualifications of what art is or is not will ever be sustainable and that art, by its nature, will call into question any definition that is ascribed to it.76 75 76 Avgikos, “All That Heaven Allows,” 81. Alder, “Post-Modern Art,” 1378. 37 The artists I have discussed are only a few examples of the interrogative possibilities and critical understandings provided by contemporary art that engages with pornography. In the 1960s, Marshal McLuhan explained the “indispensable” role of artists and their awareness of new media technologies’ radical effects on culture and society: In the history of human culture there is no example of a conscious adjustment of the various factors of personal and social life to new extensions except in the puny and peripheral efforts of artists. The artist picks up the message of cultural and technological challenge decades before its transforming impact occurs.77 Practical and diverse research in a variety of fields is needed to analyze the ways pornography shapes human understanding and perceptions of sex and bodies. Artists offer insights indispensable to this important research, research which requires unbiased consideration from viewers, scholars and museums. 77 Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media, 1st edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964): 64-65. 38 APPENDIX Figure 1: Jeff Koons, Manet, Soft, 1990 Figure 2: Jeff Koons, Fingers Between Legs, 1990, 96 x 144 in. 39 Figure 3: Jeff Koons, Jeff and Ilona, 1990, 66 x 114 x 64 in. Figure 4: Marilyn Minter, Porn Grid (#1-4), 1989, 94 x 120 in. 40 Figure 6: Roy Lichtenstein, Drowning Girl, 1963, 68 x 68 in. Figure 5: Tony Abruzzo, panel from “Run for Love!”, Secret Hearts 83, D.C. Comics, November 1962 41 Figure 7: Ghada Amer, Landscape with Black-RFGA, 2017, 45 x 45 in. Figure 8: Ghada Amer, Grey Lines, 2004 Figure 9: Ghada Amer, Knotty but Nice, 2005, 108 x 144 in. 42 Figure 10: Thomas Ruff, Nudes mn12, 1999, 54 x 35 in. Figure 11: Thomas Ruff, Nudes ni20, 2000, 44 x 62 in. BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, Amy M. "Post-Modern Art and the Death of Obscenity Law." 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