Why We Need Obscenity
Here in New York City, the one-time arts capital of the world, it’s aim, aim, aim for the middle.
It started out as a free summer show in Bryant Park, families putting out food and blankets to watch the New York City Opera stage what had been billed as entertainment, but was, in fact, a naked attempt at fundraising.
What we ended up with were opera singers belting — in full vibrato — Broadway show tunes, particularly ones written in bombastic major keys. Song choices were crushingly banal: Send in the Clowns, Born Free. It wasn’t just my ears that were bleeding. It was my soul.
Anyone could see what was going on. Like all directors of dead cultural institutions, the beleaguered director of New York City Opera needed money. That’s what the whole event was about. And he knew which attendees had the deepest pockets: rich Boomers. They were the generation that grew up listening to Send in the Clowns. Unlike the rest of us, rich Boomers wouldn’t find these song stylings repellent and cheesy. They might even be moved, if by “moved,” you mean moved to write a check.
This level of shameless toadyism was hard to watch. Every few minutes, the director, a harried little man in a bespoke tux, got on the mic and tried to roll us for pocket change. “Even five dollars,” he’d say, beads of sweat clustering on his upper lip. “That’s less than a cup of coffee.”
As annoying as he was — and as banal and disappointing the material — I felt his pain. Doing business in New York City is like raking together a big pile of money and then setting it on fire. You have to fight just to have a performance space, then you have to pay crew, performers, costumes, set designers, stage managers, publicists, utilities — the list feels endless. The days of cheap, grungy, basement performances are over. For one, there are no grungy basements anymore. They’ve all been converted into luxury apartments. Two, the handful that are left cost a ton of money, just like everything else in this city.
These are the economic realities of being a creative in New York, once the arts capital of the world. The real casualty? No one can afford to do art anymore. It’s all devolved into entertainment. Worse, the sheer volume of entertainment, delivered to us by screens, great and small, means we are drowning in a sea of irrelevance. Every meaningful experience is packaged in as inoffensive and palatable a way as possible, aimed straight for the middle. It’s all Netflix second-screen and Disney-plus these days, where “edgy” is Ariel as a Black mermaid or fat girls given center stage instead of being relegated to sexless sidekicks.
That isn’t edgy. At least it shouldn’t be. And boy, does it fail to inspire.
Don’t get me wrong — there is some exceptional talent here, a lot of it coming out of places like LaGuardia High School. Some of those kids have world-class musical- and performance- chops. But who’s innovating? Who’s forging ahead? Who’s doing things that haven’t been done before?
No one I’ve come across so far, and believe me, I’ve been looking.
Even a newsletter I subscribe to called “Nonsense NYC,” which reports on what’s daring and cool in the New York City arts scene, manages to come up with nothing more subversive than “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” drag shows, interactive foodie workshops for hipster Millennials, and the occasional student film festival.
Know what’s missing?
Obscenity.
It’s a slippery and subjective word, obscenity. The American judicial system has been attempting to define it for hundreds of years. Obscenity is more than a controversial and confounding area of First Amendment law. Justice Potter Stewart found himself unequal to the task of defining obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964), but he did coin the phrase: “I know it when I see it.”
The dictionary defines obscenity as follows: “Extremely offensive in word or expression.” For me, this is the crucible where all ideas are born: good, bad, sacred, and profane. One of the reasons obscenity is important is that each generation defines it differently.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp’s work, Fountain, featuring a lone urinal, is now regarded as a major landmark of 20th century art. At the time, however, Fountain was snubbed by critics and reviled by the public. To dismiss Duchamp’s contribution to modern art would require turning a blind eye to subsequent works by most Pop Artists, including Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Peter Blake, and other pretenders to the throne, such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. This proves that where we draw the line between art and obscenity is never an “ever-fixèd mark.” It moves, it breathes, and it forces us to confront ourselves.
A truly brilliant work of obscenity defies our ability to understand what we’re seeing. We actually can’t make sense of it. Sometimes, we can’t believe we’re actually seeing it. Why is obscenity important? Because the whole point of art is to get us to view ordinary life in an new and extraordinary way.
Every major art movement, from Impressionism, to Surrealism, to Abstract Expressionism, turned convention on its head. When the advent of the camera rendered photorealistic painting unnecessary, artists started playing with reality in ways that had never been seen before. Clocks melted. Men in bowler hats and overcoats stood with green leafy apples in front of their faces. Disturbing portraits of popes screamed inside imaginary cubes. These images weren’t made to comfort you. They were created to make you question everything you believed in, including the nature of reality itself.
Seen anything in any medium doing that lately?
Yeah, I didn’t think so.
The talent’s there. At least, I think it is. Most of what I’ve seen in New York so far is absurdly talented young people regurgitating some version of the past. But have I come across anyone with the power to completely redefine our era? No.
I believe at least part of that’s because no one can afford to. Not in a city where the average cost of a small one-bedroom apartment is in excess of five thousand dollars a month.
But it’s more than that. God help us, it’s more than that. We are terrified of offending people. In a culture of toxic fragility, trigger warnings, and rampant virtue signaling, giving offense means a loss of revenue and, potentially, a loss of livelihood. We’re all so busy trying not to get canceled on social media, we create nothing of any real value. Things of beauty, sure. Things requiring skill, absolutely. But nothing that’s going to upset anybody’s world view or comfortable sense of “identity.”
And that’s a problem.
I’d like to illustrate my point with some real-world examples of artists who specialized in obscene. You may take exception with my choices. I hope you do. But even their most ardent detractors can’t deny the power and influence they had on future generations, and for that reason alone, they are worth looking at, especially in the anemic light of our present-day arts scene.
GG Allin (August 29, 1956-June 28, 1993) was a punk rock singer who cross-dressed, sparked riots, and mutilated himself on stage. Eyewitnesses say he promised to commit suicide in front of his fans on Halloween night, 1991, but wasn’t able to go through with it due to yet another stint in jail. The discography of his band, GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, includes Freaks, Faggots, Drunks, and Junkies (1988), Eat my Fuc [sic] (1984), and Sing Along Love Songs (1985), all of which sound like ear-bleeders to those who may not feel as disenfranchised from society as Allin did, but he spoke for a lot of angry, angry people.
Born Jesus Christ Allin, GG grew up in a log cabin in rural New Hampshire without heat, electricity, or running water. His father was a mentally ill religious fanatic named Merle who dug graves under the house and threatened to kill the whole family. This is where a rage-filled, drug-addled GG Allin drew from for inspiration. In every sense of the word, he ripped out his insides and put them on display, sometimes flinging his own offal at audience members or stuffing it inside his mouth. He died at age 36 of a heroin overdose, but what he stood for — a rejection of consumerism and commercialism, anything that made people feel comfortable, and the wholesale embrace of obscenity as a founding principle of punk and rock ’n’ roll — well, you can’t argue with it. GG Allin spared himself nothing to deliver the message. No one since has committed himself or herself, body and soul, to the cause like GG Allin did, and that’s worth noting.
John Cage (September 5, 1912 — August 12, 1992) was an American composer renowned for his non-standard use of musical instruments. For him, everything was music: the skronk of car horns, the hiss and crackle of a transistor radio, plops of rain on a window, a wooden duck call. But in August of 1952, Woodstock, New York, Cage brought the music world to its knees at the premiere of new work, performed by collaborator David Tudor, of what would later be known as 4’33” or just “433,” a four minute, thirty-three second, three movement composition where no instruments were played for the duration of the piece.
At the time, 433 was seen as an insult in the same way that obscenity is seen as an insult. People thought it was a joke; they felt as though Cage were making fools of them. At a post-concert roundtable, one artist angrily declaimed, “Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town.”
But like many others, he missed the point. Cage had flipped the script, making ambient noises created by the audience (breathing, shifting, tapping their fingers with impatience) his “music.” I continue to believe it was one of the boldest and most moving events in music history. Artists from ambient musician Brian Eno to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company have drunk from John Cage’s still and beautiful waters, and I, for one, cannot listen to 433 dry-eyed, such is my gratitude to Cage for not imposing more sounds upon me. I strongly feel that I hear what he intended me to hear, which isn’t just silence alone, but everything.
Other “obscene” provocateurs:
Lenny Bruce
Ornette Coleman
Édouard Manet
Marina Abramović
William S. Burroughs
Richard Mapplethorpe
Alejandro Jodorowsky
Ai Weiwei
Tracy Emin
Toni Morrison
In 1987, when transgressive photo-artist Andres Serrano, a native of New York and self-professed Christian, first plunged a crucifix into a glass of his own urine and photographed it, he was unaware of the backlash his work would cause. Later, Serrano would say the photo was a protest against the “billion dollar Christ-for-profit industry.” But at the time, he was merely making a personal statement.
“The thing about the crucifix itself is that we treat it almost like a fashion accessory,” Serrano said. “When you see it, you’re not horrified by it at all, but what it represents is the crucifixion of a man. And for Christ to have been crucified and laid on the cross for three days where he not only bled to death, he shat himself and he peed himself to death.
“So if Piss Christ upsets you, maybe it’s a good thing to think about what happened on the cross.”
On Palm Sunday of that year, the photograph was defaced with a claw hammer by French Catholic Fundamentalists who decried the work as “blasphemous.” This vandalism led to some critical soul searching, and once again raised the question, How do we define the obscene?
As observers, we often perceive this kind of art as attention seeking or puerile. Sometimes it is. Shock value can have real value in terms of dollars and cents, and there are those who pursue money as their primary objective. All too often, the purveyors of “obscenity” are white males from previous generations who brought their white male perspective to the table. I have no problem with that.
But more women, more people of color, more LGBTQ, and yes, more men need to start bashing sacred cows in the skull. Because in our fear of giving offense, of possibly being rejected by our real life and online communities, we are not doing the work of the artist, which is to challenge the status quo and, in the most violent terms possible, refuse to accept the unacceptable.
Yes, we risk being reviled. We risk being misunderstood. To swim against the tide can be a lonely, thankless business. But what is the alternative? Instagrammable “art” installations like the New York City Balloon Museum? More jazz retrospectives, Broadway revivials, and Marvel comic franchises? CGI bomb-a-paloozas with an explosion every five minutes?
Cold feet take us nowhere. And nowhere is exactly where we’re at.
Like it or not, art reflects the society it draws from. Art is the mirror that shows us to ourselves. That’s why it matters. And if the architect of our artistic soul is social media and the approval or disapproval of others, we are wasting our lives. We are contributing nothing. And we will die knowing that in giving offense to no one, we left no trace of ourselves amid the fathomless data of history.
The irony? It’s the inclusionist zeal of political lefties (a group I clearly belong to) that is partly to blame. We are empaths, we lefties. The reason most artists lean left is because they find it so easy to imagine themselves in other people’s shoes. But we can’t let concern for the feelings of others dictate the manner in which we create art. For starters, we are responsible for our own feelings. If we are gravely offended, we remove ourselves from the source of that offense; what we don’t do is try to remove the source of the offense itself. By doing so, we become no different, and certainly no better, than wild-eyed religious fundamentalists who take a claw hammer to an offensive photo.
I hope we stop this slow, horrible, cultural devolution before it’s too late. If we continue to let the Silicon Valley tech broletariat, entertainment conglomerates’ profit-and-loss statements, illegal publishing mergers, the misdirected torch-and-pitchfork fury of social media, and the possible disapproval of our own friends and family keep us from saying the quiet part outloud, we deserve what will follow: entertainment, not art. Reduxes, not revolutions. And more summer days in Bryant Park listening to a man in a tux hustle us for pocket change.
Copyright © 2023 Stacey Eskelin
