File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 1095


Date: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 11:29:25 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re:  M-TH: Art and Pornography


Leo wrote:

> Maybe the way to approach this question fruitfully is not to start with
> attempting to draw a distinction between art and pornography, but by examining
> the visual organization, the visual economy, of pornography, in order to
> understand its functioning better. Consider this example: in mainstream
> heterosexual pornography, you almost never see an erect penis, even though it
> is an obvious requirement for heterosexual intercourse. So in a discourse
> which is predicated on the revelation of the hidden, the 'rending of the
> veil', the liberation of the repressed, a major component remains unexposed.
> Why is this the case, and what does it tell us about pornography? Could it be
> that a regime based on the power of the phallus must maintain a certain
> mystery -- an ordinary penis is not all that impressive? Could it be that the
> exposure of an erect penis might introduce a homoerotic element which would
> disturb the heterosexual economy of pornography? Other ideas?

I definitely don't want to draw a distinction between art and pornography, because
to me art can be just as pornographic as the next thing, and moreover I don't 
think that that there is any intrinsic distinction between art and non-art:
the distinction is in the presentation and the use.  In other words, the same
image can appear in a porno mag and in a gallery, and be either non-art or art.
In each case, it partakes of and/or produces different cultural relationships.

I was thinking of your observation above in connection with the "Jewish monument"
in Vienna that I described some time ago.  I was imagining a monumnent in which,
in place of the crouching Jew, one would have the gigantic figure of a crazed 
Nazi holding a gun in one hand and with the other offering his cock to be sucked.
Orpheus and Euridice, Charon waiting for the dead, and this Nazi.  This would have 
been a very different monument.  The two figures, of the Jew and of the Nazi, 
play very different representational roles.  To me, the Jew is pornographic and
the Nazi is definitely not.

One is very close here to the temptation of following Mulvey's path of 
deploying concepts like "scopophilia" and "the gaze", but in my opinion those
buy us nothing.  First of all, I think of psychoanalysis as profoundly
patriarchal and mostly wrong, and secondly, I have yet to see it employed 
in any analysis that I would perceive as materialistic.


-m


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