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In 2005, music writer Dorian
Lynskey reported about “the cockiest man in rap” for The Guardian.
The article featured rapper-producer titan, Kanye West, on the eve of
the release of his upcoming album, Late Registration. The interview included
interesting anecdotes as Kanye The Producer (a forever “tinkerer,”
promising one kind of album to MTV, and delivering another), Kanye The
Mouthpiece (his storming onstage on the loss of the “Best New Artist”
to country singer Gretchen Wilson in 2005) and Kanye The Politician (on
the blinging of African Americans, and the cruel conditions of mining
Diamonds From Sierra Leone.) The article also described Kanye’s
career path in the music industry (Jay-Z or a janitor; any opinion, from
anyone, is game), and childhood days of yore, where among family and friends,
early evidence clearly confirmed that Kanye was “born to stunt.”
However, it was what the article didn’t say–Lynskey’s
observations of the “short-attention-spanned” hip-hop Hero,
rather than say–not the Q&A, that provided the most insight
on Kanye, as well as society’s current attitude towards sex and
sexuality as a whole.
During the course of the interview, Lynskey resisted the urge to “slam
the laptop shut” on Kanye’s fingers. Kanye had been “double-checking
his own album artwork” while viewing the tit-heavy, finger-pleasuring
female subjects of American painter, John Currin. Rendered in fleshy-toned
oils, the Artist’s works range from the baroque to the Betty–as
in Archie’s Betty and Veronica– frequently including representations
of sexual imagery from Playboy, Cosmo, and fashion monthlies. The paintings,
typically kitsch, are not anything one would expect to be aroused by.
But their graphic nature encourages voyeurism, and as New York Times critic
Michael Kimmelman considers are “wholesome and evil at the same
time” making Currin’s paintings elicit a feel-good-feel-bad
reaction from his audience, bred-in-the-bone.
When questioned about his porn consumption, Kanye (who is a self-professed
sex addict) admits to Lynskey that he “spends a lot of time watching
porn and praying about it afterwards.” It’s an interesting
comment from someone who uses porn as white noise to get through his day,
or even assist with his creative process. Whereas Currin entered a “porn
phase” in the 1990s as a statement against the political correctness
of the times, Kanye must continually leave it in order to write the socially-conscious
raps that have set Him apart from His hip-hop competition. With the amount
of sex on display and pornography available in the world today it’s
no wonder why Kanye may need to dropout to assume a little creative control.
***
At the turn of the twenty-first century, sex, and sexual imagery, is everywhere;
commonplace, and in your face. It is literal, graphic and explicit. Unabashed,
obvious and at times, obligatory even.
In print advertising, it no longer relies on the subtext, but the context.
Increasingly prevalent in the fashion world, sexual imagery is considered
“porn chic” (a term initially used to describe 1970s cult
films like Deep Throat, and Boys in the Sand, now used to describe an
aesthetic, like heroine chic in the 1990s) and boasts several artists
at the helm of what was a movement, now mainstay. These artists include
American photographer Terry Richardson, whose over-sexualized Tom Ford
perfume ad campaign included glistening female torsos with bottles of
fragrance wedged between their thighs, or their clasped breasts, red lipstick,
opened-mouth, with red-painted fingernails. Another is German fashion
photographer Juergen Teller whose ongoing campaign with fashion designer
Marc Jacobs toys with the many facets of sexuality including objectification–the
Victoria Beckham photographs where the Posh Spice Girl is tucked-in an
oversized Marc Jacobs shopping bag, with only shoes (a fetish!) worn from
her bare, dangling legs–or cross-dressing–the fall 2008 advertisements
including male model Cole Mohr, photographed wearing Marc Jacobs cocktail
dresses, at times with large handbag covering his crotch; legs, wide open.
Richardson’s and Teller’s themes are not the only ones exhibited
in porn chic (lost innocence, women dressed to look like children, suggestion
of foreplay, for example) but they do remark on a trend that even Currin
adopted from early on: artists using sex as a thematic device in their
works.
By pairing artists with sexual content there begets a blurring with what
is seen as art and what is seen as pornographic. Under the context of
art, one can see the sexually-charged images as breaking taboo, instilling
a kind of controversy. However, in porn, it sometimes can be incredibly
difficult to see the “art.” Why? Perhaps because it’s
easier to work your way from neutral to shock, than from shock to neutral–porn
usually starting from shock. Another reason for this, as suggested by
author and doctor Judith Mackay in The Penguin Atlas of Human Sexual Behavior,
is “there is no universally accepted definition of porn” meaning
both Richardson and, for example, alt-porn film director, Eon McKai–one
of the early contributors to Internet, softcore, 1950s-pin-up-like, Suicide
Girls photography–are relying on the viewer to decide whether their
works should be contentious or creative; but more importantly, consumed
regardless on your point of view. Although one can argue, that over time,
the significance of taboo will continue to dramatically decrease–and
as Mackay suggests, “the global trend is to liberate censorship”–in
actuality, it is the taboo that is necessary to make the sex and sexuality
potent; and in some cases, to allow the art to repeatedly make a statement,
and a sale.
***
Currin’s works are reportedly estimated to run in the six-figures.
Not bad for someone who relies on some of the old or classical ordinances
of poses, symbols, symbolism and style of the Renaissance and baroque
to reinvent the nude archetype as referenced from more popular, trendy,
and pornographic, works. Many of Currin’s standing female nudes
mimic the delicate pelvic twist of Italian Renaissance painter, Sandro
Botticelli’s, The Birth of Venus, which has been used as a resource
in countless figure drawings and artworks, for many artists, internationally.
Even at the time of its creation, where religious imagery was paramount
and anything less was considered pagan, Botticelli’s Venus not only
depicted life–the opened clam shell– but lust, with mythological
goddess of the seasons, Horae, hastening, and yet frozen in time, to clothe
Her nude body. Somehow, however, although controversial, Botticelli’s
masterpiece avoided sexist tautology and destruction (secured by one of
His multi-figured clients, The Medicis) where Currin’s nod to the
old masters, does not; a sentiment Currin is stricken by and is quick
to explain.
In an interview with Magdalene Perez for Artinfo.com, Currin admits that
“When people say these are sexist pictures, I say, ‘yeah they
are.’” He also said “he identified very strongly with
them” and “at that time he didn't feel like a man and he didn't
feel like a woman.” Currin’s position on his art, as non-sexual,
or asexual is a curious one to take, considering the content and bold
execution of his works. Like the gender-bending, almost-androgynous photography
of Juergen Teller, Currin’s approach can be seen as a gateway to
culture’s constant disconnect in creating, viewing and distributing
sexual images; propping, styling, Photoshopping, parts and pieces to reflect
personal tastes where men are not men, women are not women, and sex and
sexuality is stock imagery for a select audience. Sometimes still suspect
to detect in print, the breakdown of the traditional hetero-male model
for the majority of sexual imagery to date can be identified easily, and
explicitly, in television.
***
Television programming in the late 90s saw a reaction to the acceptance
of gay couples and marriages with the advent of groundbreaking shows such
as Will & Grace, and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. These shows profiled
gay men as charming, witty, clever, accessible, and in the case of Queer
Eye, schooled in the many social graces and manners completely foreign
to hetero males. When the feminized male was firmly established and politically
neutralized in the television world, networks started to explore the masculine
female as the new alternative. The show which was at once the transitional
device from breaking away from, while embracing, the previously, gay,
political taboo, as well as the foundation to many copycat and female-lead
casting, was Sex and the City.
“Do women really talk like that?” was the common reaction
among men who had watched the show for the very first time. Four women,
four archetypes: the romantic, the realist, the Holly Golightly, and the
gay man–who also played the Mother Hen regardless of her unwomanly
behaviour–whose stories about sex, relationships, and love attracted
the attention of women everywhere that heterosexual men couldn’t
ignore the significance of the enduring phenomena. Gay men identified
with the sexual exploits and attitudes expressed, women felt empowered
as their needs and desires were openly broadcasted, and men learned to
appreciate a new ideal of sexiness that was strong, confident, middle-aged
and natural; not Botoxed, not inflated (or inflatable!) and not pinned-up.
However, not without a fight.
No one could have guessed that the biggest challenge for Sex and the City
was to get hetero men to see protagonist’s Sarah Jessica Parker,
as the bombshell women deemed her to be. Especially after Brit lad mag,
Maxim’s, endorsement of the star as the “Unsexiest Women Alive”
in 2007. As Sadie Stein, journalist for Jezebel.com clarifies, men view
SJP as ugly because she is “the actress who has shown women can
be attractive without being conventionally ‘pretty,’”
where “to men, this distinction doesn’t exist.” Stein
also says that “if we disagree about what is fundamentally sexy,
this becomes threatening, because the subtext of all sexiness is male
attraction. And that’s tragic. And it’s not going to change.”
Stein may be correct in her hypothesis about the male ideal forever dominating
culture’s and society’s attitudes towards sex, sexuality and
sexual imagery, but it may not always be generated from a hetero male
perspective. And for now, for women at least, that’s a start.
Lipstick Jungle, Sex and the City’s more male, eye-candy-friendly
spin-off, deals with sex with a new middle-aged foursome of professional
working gals. Gossip Girls, based on the popular book series of the same
name, starts sex and sisterhood in the teen years with the all the adolescent
pretence imaginable to create drama where none is necessary. The Hills
is the reality-TV equivalent of Gossip Girls with an added twist. Love,
sex, and relationships are the crisis in the plot, used to influence roommates
turned frenemies turned opportunists turned celebrities; the unknown starlets
becoming television’s version of the high-priced “artist”
almost overnight.
It is clear that television is making an effort to multiply the female
voice. But it’s best attempt has to be programming like The L Word,
which is about the lives of lesbian, bisexual and transgendered women
living in West Hollywood. Taboo is resurrected. The audience is taunted
and titalated, and above all, exposed to a demographic who has never really
had the opportunity to express themselves on such scale. Aside from the
drama, The L Word educates, just like The Secret Diary of a Call Girl
describes a female worker’s day in the life in the sex industry,
as based on the real accounts of an anonymous professional based in the
UK, on the ever-popular blog, Belle de Jour.
***
The Internet has made possible what no other medium of communication in
the past can do. It can turn a former sex worker’s blog into a pilot,
like The Secret Diary of a Call Girl; a bisexual curious female’s
MySpace page into a celebrity, like Tila Tequila; elevate the social status
of a hotel heiress through an undisclosed personal sex video, like Paris
Hilton; and expose Kanye to the works of John Currin in the midst of a
vexed reporter, trying to conduct an interview. Basically, the Internet
can multiply an image from anonymity to popularity, and it doesn’t
need the original to convey it’s message. A replica will suffice.
For cyber sex and sexuality content, it is the edited point that matters.
Narrative and pixel noise are marginal. A webcam, a Paypal account, and
a little self-confidence, is all it takes for today’s everyman to
be tomorrow’s entrepreneur of the Fortune 500 variety. If that weren’t
enough, the Internet can fuel this viral exchange, simultaneously, globally,
at an incredible speed, in the privacy of one’s home, thanks to
technology developed by the adult industry.
In a 2008 press release for Business Wire, Paul Fishbein, co-founder of
Adult Video News, announced, “Porn power has had an enormous impact
on the technologies everyone takes for granted today. The adult industry
has been the undisputed leader in popularizing technologies such as VHS,
DVD, VOD and others. We also have helped bring down the prices.”
As reported by Jon Swartz, for USA Today, some of the Internet-specific
technology the adult industry has been a forerunner of includes, “video-streaming,
fee-based subscriptions, pop-up ads and electronic billing.” Swartz
continues to add new technologies in development are “digital-rights
management software, video-on demand billing, wireless services and geo-location
software.” In the world of porn, that sounds like a lot of cybersex
available any where, any place, any time. It also implies that sex and
technology are in the rat race together, and that any advance in application
or gadgetry is going to effect the production and representation of sex
and sexuality in form and content.
Sex and tech sharing the same Information Age model. Is that a surprise?
Search engines like Google allow people from all over the world to access
data in a sophisticated game of hide and seek. Where some searches lead
to specific sources, other “hits”–based on popularity–require
meandering, further exploration, and just general peaked interest to decipher.
This constant close-but-no-cigar sourcing is a window to other information
normally of inconsequence, but fascinating in its own right. In fact,
it is many of these generalized searches, near hits, and bridging bites
that have made society culture-curious, sex and sexuality informed, voracious,
and inspired.
The business of sex is nothing new. “Sex sells” is a fact
of everyday life. Now that sex sells on the Internet however, that scale
has entered a worldwide marketplace, an international economy. Sex is
the product, service, and currency in globalization.
Playboy is published in at least twelve different languages, including
Greek, German, Russian, French and Polish. Certain aspects of prostitution
are decriminalized in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Australia and many
more countries. Sexual tourism offers escape and fantasy with a never-kiss-and-tell
companion traveling, for example, from the US to Indonesia, Western Europe
to Africa, and Japan to Cambodia. Tuvalu, a tiny island the size of a
pinhead located in the Central Pacific Ocean, 1,000 kilometres north of
Fiji, is where all the 1-900 numbers of the UK, US, Japan and New Zealand
are rerouted for your sexual pleasure; contributing to a chunk of the
country’s annual revenue. In some ways, the virtual world of the
Internet is really just a platform for the reality of exercising personal
fantasies, fetishes and fancy, covertly, with the option now to fulfil
ones desire on the farthest corners of the earth. The ultimate seek and
hide. Feel-bad-feel-good. Drop in, drop out.
***
In a profile with The Independent, John Currin told interviewer David
Usborne that he had entered his porn phase by accident. For amusement,
a friend had given Currin a cartoon from a “crumpled page of a magazine.”
After turning the page over, Currin noticed the photographed pornography
on the other side. It wasn’t long before Currin, in a true pairing
of the vastly different entities of the old masters and the fashion photographers,
began to create images of fantasy and frivolity.
Dangerously toying with the idea of the high arts of the baroque, and
the disposable arts of the monthlies, Currin himself sits on the edge
of where he stands with his works. Currin the Ego feels His paintings
deal with the issue of “liberation,” from “ill-advised
and bad ideas” He is inexplicably attracted to– “stupidity
being a theme in His paintings.” Currin the Politician views His
works as a statement about “socio-political indignation,”
where He “imagines the illustrations as Europe’s example-making
of the insecurity of the godless libertine West and Its lack of piety–
the twilight of secular socialist democracy.” Currin the Man craves
to create “beautiful paintings” where men are men, women are
women, and the male subtext of sexiness dominates. And Currin the Marketer
is relying on taboo to stir a reaction from his audience, open-up the
ages-old debate of “art or pornography,” perhaps normalize
any excitement about sex and sexuality by His obvious explicit depiction,
and make a generous sale too. All points being many reasons for why Lynskey
should remain even-tempered during a Kanye-interview.
Kanye’s entry to the world of Currin’s works on the Internet,
is like Currin’s stumbling upon his own personal Renaissance. The
modern-day clamshell of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus is the common
laptop. The destructive bonfires of Botticelli canvases staged by Italian
priest Girolao Savonarola are now the scathing opinions and controversial
remarks on blogs. And the tautology? Edited to a tut-tutting only.
Kanye must know all this, which is why he needs to be aroused long enough
to close his Internet browser window and pray in order for “God
to talk through him” so He can wax poetic. It’s a rather tricky
process to constantly liberate oneself from the guilt, provided–as
Dr. Judith Mackay would argue–“society’s attitudes towards
sex and sexuality are constantly changing and levels of tolerance are
never permanent.” For Kanye, it might be the (pleasurable!) price
to pay for stirring up his creative bend to making content that is current
and relevant, entertaining, and holds society’s interest in an era
of excess, front and centre.
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