Sex and Art

I started work on Monday, so vacation is over. Well, at least until the middle of July, and then it picks up till the end of August. I am teaching a summer class in art appreciation. Art appreciation is one of those nebulous titles like comptroller that seems to mean everything and nothing. What does it mean to teach an appreciation of a thing?

I am given free reign in what I can teach and after some trial and error I have settled on a format that includes a few weeks of art theory and basic terminology, followed by a series of lectures that blend my own mix of philosophy, humanities, and personal insights into the history of (western) art.

I really like the job and I take it very seriously. I try to come up with lecture points I think will be both informative and amusing, and am always modifying my approach in hopes o finding the right “fit” for each class. Some are talkers and require little prompting, while others need more of a “prod” now and again. (See my sister-in-laws blog for an excellent example of the frustrations of teaching)

I “borrow” much of my teaching style from former art professors, and try to incorporate the best from their teaching styles into my own. I remember with great clarity one such professor taking about Manet’s Olympia in very open and sincere terms, and at one point overheard him say jokingly, “Now I am going to lose my job.” Manet’s Olympia, for the uninitiated, is a frank and candid depiction of a prostitute displaying her “wears.” The painting itself caused a sensation when it was first exhibited in 1865 and was quickly condemned as "immoral" and "vulgar."

My professor raised an interesting dilemma, one that I take to heart. Conversations in art often deal with works, which are, at their core, controversial. Many works of art protest social injustices, question political and religious institutions and acknowledge the existence of (gasp) sex. While it is perhaps silly, talking, even casually, about a sexually provocative work can be a bit tricky, and while I try to be forthright, open, and honest about the material, I have found myself very self-conscious talking about sex and art, perhaps for fear of some Janet Jackson-esque mishap reprisal.

Still, if art truly reflects life, then it needs to acknowledge the fact that we're humans, and that sex is just a part of human life. At the same time there seems to be an endless supply of examples of the controversial nature of sex in art, and while in Manet’s time painting was the preferred medium, in today’s society we see a new generation of art forms coming under attack, in movies, music, video games, and on television.

Those critical of sex and violence in these mediums often decry the tendency in art to be more about the sex and violence than about real life situations, or the human condition. At the same time many of these critiques ignore the fact that many characters on TV or in games are just as often desexualized or are completely asexual, especially animated characters, The problem being that this somehow implies that those characters are normal. Stereotypes abound for both the asexual and hyper sexualized characters, the Asian man portrayed as an asexual, unromantic martial arts masters, Viet Cong guerrilla, man-servants, or geek, or Black men portrayed as sexually aggressive gang bangers. Rap musicians and drug addicts. This split between the hyper-sexualized and the desexualized characters seems to suggest a kind of denial about how we address issues of human sexuality and violence, (not to mention racism). It is as if there is a kind of psychological split in the portrayal of human sexuality in the arts.

Author Camille Paglia in her book Sexual Personae notes that Western culture is a very complex combination of two traditions, the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman. These two traditions manifest as a struggle between paganism and Christianity, and notes that paganism was never defeated by Christianity but merely pushed underground only to emerge at specific moments throughout art history.

In her book Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Elaine Pagels explores a similar theme noting that early Christian sexuality is a formulation of Jewish and Roman sexual practices. These Christians eschewed polygamy and divorce, which Jewish tradition allowed and repudiated extramarital sexual practices commonly accepted by pagan contemporaries, including prostitution, homosexuality and non-procreative sex acts.

Artists have had to skate the changing attitudes of this social schizophrenia throughout human history, navigating the tides of social change and the creative impulse, an impulse that informs and that can profoundly affect society, and perhaps even heal this psychic scar. Freud believed that the greatest achievements in civilization were due to the effective sublimation of our sexual and aggressive urges, one that rechannels these urges into creativity and production. Indeed there is a profound connection between sexuality and art, one that seems to both mock the symptoms of our social psychosis, even as it tries to heal the rift.

The poet Rilke sums it up something like this: “Artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight.” Sex and art are intimately bound. I suppose I want to say that in rechannelling our desires, art strives towards greater human achievement, and in the process heal societies ills. However it is just as likely that the interconnection of sex and art merely suggests a sort of bubbling over of the psychosis of our collective unconscious into the mainstream, and, rather than acting as a healing agent, art is merely a symptom our imperfections. Either way talking about it is sure to incite debate, and so I steer a middle course neither dumbing down its existence, nor focusing on it to the exclusion of all else.