In his article on Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio and the controversy that ensued because of its pornographic imagery, art critic Dave Hickey noted that the efficacy of Mapplethorpe’s art was in enfranchising “…ultimately, that senator from North Carolina [Senator Jesse Helms] and insist[ing] upon his response.” In Hickey’s opinion, if you “deal in transgression,” the response and respect of a hipsterish art cognoscenti has no value. The only response that really matters is the outrage of the senator, ‘only the senator, the Master of Laws, the Father…”
Robert Mapplethorpe was not the first and certainly will not be the last child who managed to outrage the father. Criticism of religious and social order is not really a modern phenomenon and, however tempting, cannot be attributed to deconstructive neo-Marxists tendencies in American art.
Child’s perpetual desire to dethrone father is usually matched by father’s not so subtle urge to devour his offspring. Some fathers need to be enraged, rebelled against, and dethroned. One could only wish that Saddam Hussein’s sons would’ve inspired a national rebellion against their father’s authority instead of becoming his instruments of torture and pillage.
Director Ingmar Bergman, on the other hand, rebelled against the patriarchal religious order of rigid Scandinavian Protestantism. He upset many fathers, including his own pastor dad who did not approve of his son’s obsession with theater and the lantern’s ability to project images on a wall.
But the efficacy of Bergman’s rebellion was in his ability to outrage the father, not as a juvenile, but as a child coming into his own. His rebellion was sincere, his criticism of authority genuine and threatening.
It was also self-aware. As a true thinker and artist who could travel in time, Bergman knew that every child is just an intercourse away from becoming a father. Not surprisingly, one can find more religious insight and earnest attempt to understand the mystery of God in Bergman than in many of the more pious currents of his time.
Luis Buñuel’s “Viridiana” was described by L’Osservator Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican, as “blasphemous.” Buñuel later said, “I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am.”
“Viridiana,” however challenging, was not deliberately offensive, because Buñuel the child was criticizing the father as an adult: with argument, by pointing out inconsistencies, by acknowledging his own inability to understand the mystery of the father and by examining his own fear of becoming a father one day himself.
This is why no serious religious thinker or person of faith is, or should be, offended by artists’ sincere critique of religion or patriarchal institutions. Such critique is part of a dramatic conversation between generations–a renewing debate where sons transform into fathers and fathers ally with their sons’ children against their own children.
Bunuel’s first film “An Andalusian Dog,” a collaboration with Salvador Dali, was a criticism of everything including surrealism. “An Andalusian Dog” abounds with disturbing images–most memorably, eyes being sliced with a razor and hands crawling with ants.
Ants, of course, have quite a history of disturbance. The ants crawling on the Crucifix in the four-minute video clip “A Fire in My Belly” by late artist David Wojnarowicz – recently upset a whole bunch of fathers. One of them, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, called Wojnarowicz’s video “hate speech” meant to denigrate Christianity. His anger was automatic, but the real anger should’ve come from the child. The video did not denigrate Christianity. It denigrated surrealism.
Ants on the Crucifix offends not because it mocks a religious symbol but because it is a second-rate art, a trite plagiarism, a primitivism. It imitates an avant-garde now on the rear end of 80 years. Sadly, this is the case with most postmodernism: whether it is a Crucifix in a jar urine or Mother Mary covered in elephant dung or, by an extension of the same logic, Michael Moore mocking corporations while getting his paycheck from one.
These novice tricks substitute real criticism and rebellion against fathers for a juvenile contrarianism–the spoiled brat’s desire to offend a parent, just for the sake of self-assertion through offending. The father’s furious reaction owes not to challenge or scrutiny but merely to his child’s monumental inability to mature.
Do these show-offs really think that dipping a Crucifix in urine exposes real shortcomings in the established religious order? Does the Supersize Me guy really think that people will stop eating fast food if they see his marketing campaign masquerading as a documentary film?
All this only turns more people to the father, sometimes even an evil one who deserves to be dethroned. People sympathize with the father for having such an imbecile of a child, a brat who kicks and screams in public but cannot survive a day without a parent’s support and care.
So, as someone who still finds himself in the children’s camp, I urge my fellow artists not to make it so easy for fathers to dismiss us. Let’s stick it to “the man,” but with respect, so the rebellion can gain support and not devolve into a dog and pony show for vegetarians only. I understand that Karl Marx urged many artists to use art as a weapon, but I’m sure even that wooly bastard did not believe it should be aimed at one’s own foot.
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